Four Corners Botany

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Home, you hand paint me, powder, you act proud.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
I feel like the growthing really helps. It does help
set the mode verbal colonic.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
You my girl, and I'm your fella. Dressing yellow.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I just confused someone from the last podcast. It's really
they didn't understand what's going on. I was talking over something.
They didn't understand it. I feel like I threw them off.
I don't know if they were old or what. No
offense to the cheriatrice. That's really ages. Actually say that

(00:48):
you be dapping? I bellowed. How many arsonists did this
song inspire? You need somebody, somebody into Chicago area of
forest reserves needs to set the woods on fire over there.
We're gonna do that. We're gonna have a volunteer fire
day where a fire just accidentally get out of control

(01:10):
and burned all the buckthorn, all the invasives in the understory.
Because those forests, you know a lot of these forest
reserves in Chicago, they look like shit right there, and
they're masticating now, they're chewing up all the underbrush. But
that doesn't recreate fire. It's not the same thing, right,
and it doesn't do anything for the ticks and the
ticks are bad in the Chicago area forest reserves. So

(01:31):
this song should be about bringing fire back to eastern
North America, everywhere east of the hundredth meridian. You gotta
set the woods on fire, Set the woods on fire,
set the grasslands on fire. Do it at the right
time of year. Maybe get some pointers from Kyle from
Native Habitat Project. What is this? This is? We're having

(01:54):
glitches with the fucking recording is a pain in the ass. Okay,
we'll turn this down. Welcome to another episode of the
Crime Pace A Bonding Doesn't Podcast. It's been two weeks
since I record. I'm sorry. I've been busy as hell.
There's never enough time for anything. I just got back
home yesterday. I didn't sleep the night before. I got
maybe four hours of sleep, and then I was too frazzled,

(02:18):
too frazzled to do anything so to do like record,
so I didn't get it done. But I just got
back from three weeks in the Colorado Plateau, and god fuck,
we had a great time, man. There was so much
good stuff there, the Colorado Plateau, the crustal uplift. What
caused it? Huh, Well, I'll tell you what it started.

(02:40):
Roughly six million years ago. It's when a lot of
it really happened. But that same uplift thought to have
been caused by you know, mantle buoyancy. All right, it's brilliant,
it's it's solid, solid rock, but it's uh, it's less dense,
it's a little ductile. Its swelled upward due to thermal

(03:01):
expansion lifting the overlying crust. At least that's the comm
that's the theory right now. I don't know. Now, I'm
sure there's people. This is all just a theory, so
there might be you know, there might be other reasons too.
I don't know. Everything gets blamed on the Farolne plate,
but it seems it's a little late. There's a little
recent for the Ferrollon plate. That flat slab subduction, you know,

(03:21):
subducting a subducting plate at a shallow angle, like a
shovel going in at a horizontal angle to kill a lawn,
to uproot a lawn. That would be an example of
flat slab subduction versus if it was diving deep, like
if you're trying to dig a hole in someone's lawn
to plant something or to take a shit. If you're
at a golf course, right, you're trying to tear up

(03:42):
the green to take a dump in it, for instance.
Not that I've ever done that, or I would, I would.
I'm I'm not advocating that entirely, at least not legally,
at least not on the record. But if you were
digging a hole to like shit on a golf course,
that would be you would dig a deep that would
be a normal subduction zone. That shovel would be going
in an angle similar to a normal subduction zone. But

(04:05):
if you're uprooting the lawn, it would be more akin
to the angle of flat slab subduction, which I really
suggest you should google that, all right. You should use
the AI actually to use deep Seek, the Chinese one
that pissed every off, all the Americans. I got some
friends that are really anti AI, And again, I can't
stand it. It's like, man, you're not it's pissing in

(04:26):
the ocean and using AI to teach yourself stuff versus
like create you know, photos of dogs and fucking you
know army uniforms parachuting out of planes. That's uh, that's
a different use of AI. That's frivolous. Well, I guess
I could see the point in that too. But using
AI to search things quickly and you know, read research

(04:48):
papers and get you information that would take you forty
five minutes to get yourself had you been, you know,
just doing a search on Google scholar, it's not so
bad to shut up. When everybody settled down. Everyone likes
to shame. I had people shaming me for picking saguaro
fruits online. I knit that in a button. Of course.
It was always the Caucasians, no offense, but lecturing progressive Caucasians.

(05:08):
I don't take that stuff anymore.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Man.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
That's part of the reason I left California. I can't
handle that shit. It's part of the reason we have
Trump in office now too. And you know, the center
Republicans are not going to sell all your public lands.
So you know, the the duping of the working class
was entirely possible. How by how fucking obnoxious the American
left got. And I'll stick to my guns on that one,
you know, figuratively and literally. It was really, really bad.

(05:33):
It was a bat I'm actually a no, no, no,
I'm not doing that. Shut up. I thought I filtered
you guys out right. It's just the cacophony of stupidity
from both sides, speaking of which I hope everyone's excited
about World War three. We'll just go and get the
positive stuff out of the way first, the philosophical ranting.
So I ran in Israel, not in Yahoo like a

(05:55):
rabbit dog wants to start World War three. Uh, this
is all just the repeat of Iraq. This is all
just a repeat of the mass weapons of mass destruction
that aren't there. I feel bad, especially for people in
Iran too, because they know they got a shitty government,
they know it sucks, and now they got to deal
with Israeli bombs, you know, lighting stuff up. It's just

(06:17):
this is, you know, for the whole the human condition
right now. It's the semi conscious species of bipedal primate
that thinks it's so much more advanced than it is.
It's so sad, you know, here we are though. Uh,
it doesn't need to be like this, but of course,
you know, I guess it's gonna be. Let's hope we're

(06:42):
still around in a few years. I don't know. That's said.
Let's get back to talking about the Colorado Plateau. So
you got this uplift and the fact that there's been
this buoyancy. This this lifting of the crust, the crusty crust,
that's why you got all this cool erosion happening. That's
why you have all these abuse. That's why you have

(07:02):
Monument Valley. That's why you've got ship Rock, New Mexico.
Intense erosion as it lifts up in weathers very easily.
And boy, I'll tell you it are some really interesting
plants there, the same way that the Edwards Plateau of
Texas has so many endemic plants, so many plants that
only grow on the Edwards Plateau, right, because you go

(07:24):
too far. You go to the west, you got Chihuahua desert.
It's dry as hell. You go to the right, you
go to the east. Excuse me, right, like I'm looking
at them map. You go to the right, you go
to the east, and it gets more humid, more music.
And the adaptations that allow something to thrive on the
thin soil limestone of the Edwards Plateau, those are not
adaptations that are going to be beneficial in a black
land prairie or further east where it's more humid. And

(07:48):
so got a lot of interesting stuff, Vernonia, lindheimra Uh,
you know, the Madrones, northern expansion of the Madrones went
to Guadalupe Mountains Park. We just went in the visitors center.
I had to use the bathroom, and then my kid
demanded that I buy her something, which I'm saying, no,
no more of this shit. I say, no, no more.

(08:09):
But I bought her a ring a little ring tail plushy.
You know that she'll lose in six months. But all
this on the Colorado Play, to all this uplift is
what has created this wonderful geology, these really cool geologic features.
And boy, I'll tell you man once that hot air
when it's dry is nothing compared to hot air when

(08:32):
it's humid. I was. We came down through Tucson, stayed
with Leo for a little while. I swam with Sonoran
desert toads and his chlorinated swimming pool, which really confused me.
I didn't know amphibians could take chlorine. I guess they
can if it's low dose and it's not that long.
There were red spotted toads in Sonoran desert toads, and
I guess they lay tadpoles in there, but you know,

(08:54):
and he goes in and rescues the tadpoles and put
them in an actual thing of water afterwards, you know,
of non chlorinated water. But they're swimming in this fucking pool.
I said, I didn't know they could do that. That
was something else, you know. It's nice. And they go
deep down too. They could swim like eight feet down.
So I was swimming with the toads and then I
picked one up and it fucking hated it, And then

(09:16):
I felt bad. I just wanted to look at it.
You know, they freak out, so I said. And then
I let him chill on my shoulder for a while
because I think he tired himself out. And I was
just treading water and there was a little sonor and
as it went out, literally he was the size of
a fucking grapefruit hanging out on my shoulder. And then
I let him go. He climbed back up, climbed out
of the pool. There's like a waterfall feature there. It's

(09:37):
not Leo's house. This is a little luxury. This is
a little plush, you know, for but the waterfall has
since falling into disrepair. But it's a great habitat for
red spotted toads and Sonoran toads. So if I lived there, man,
I would be digging ponds and trying to create as
much habitat as possible for those little fuckers, because they
make a nice sound at night. It's a nice little

(09:59):
wave machine sound. Doesn't sound like waves, it sounds like frogs,
but it's still thinking. You know, you're going for the ambiance.
And then the fucking toads are incredible, you know, the
lovely toads. Such beauty. They're beautiful animals too. They are
like there's wisdom in those eyes when you look at them.
That's the one that people harvest for d MT. They

(10:20):
get a little they don't kill it toad, they get,
They hit the little gland, the venom gland. Then they
smoke the d MT stuff. They go into a vortex
for five minutes, lose their mind. Maybe die doesn't sound
like my cup of tea, but that's what they do.
That the chemicals produced and the plenty of toads produce
really you know, nasty stuff, man, You know they got

(10:41):
nasty stuff in those skins. But uh, I just like
him because they're they're cool animals. Saw a little baby
rattlesnake in his yard to a really feisty little fucker.
I felt bad for him. You know, he was scared,
but I almost stepped on him. He was sprawled out
at dusk when I was picking soarow fruits. Anyway, that
was the thing that drove me. Worrow fruit is some
of the most delicious fruit I've ever tasted. And it's

(11:08):
crazy and it's it's really good when it's dry. The
fruit split open on the cac this right about and
not right about in June, and then they fry in
the sun and they it's like a raspberry fig It's
what it tastes like. It's incredible. And of course these
are sacred plants to the autumn that I always I
feel like I always mispronounced it, even though I got
friends in the tribe by the fucking head of the

(11:30):
uh the president of the reservation, wonderful man that I know,
who's got massive colonies of payotes in his yard. They
do great in Tucson, Arizona, by the way, They've been
there for thirty years, these ones he planted. Wonderful man,
really nice guy. But I always pronounced it. Is it
autumn autum? I don't I don't know. I always fuck

(11:51):
it up. I feel bad.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
It's like when people miss. You know, they mispronounced santaur.
They say santori. I just say, okay, whatever, that's fine,
that works joey'soni anyway. Uh So, So that was a
fucking wonderful experience was to taste these these fruits. I
had no idea they tasted that good, because all cactus
fruits edible, not necessarily palatable. It's not necessarily you know,

(12:16):
gonna taste like a lot or be enjoyable. Barrel cactus
fruit tastes like a juicy styrofoam with like a plastic
foam with seeds in it. You know, some of that
kind of serious produced good, good tasting fruit. But I'm
all on this eth no body thing now now because

(12:37):
I care so much because I think it's the easiest waste,
the easiest recruiting tool, and if that's what gets people
in the door initially, the power to be because this
is honestly what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to
get more people into this, like it's a fucking cult,
because I'm there's enough cults out there already that are
pushing people in the wrong direction. The cult of shiny
Shit is a cult. The cult that gets people worshiping

(12:58):
money and wanting shit that don't need and trying to
buy it with money they don't have. Also, they can
impress their fellow bipedal primates. You know, got a nice
Gucci handbag, Maybe someone's gonna think you're hot. Shit, you know,
immediate red flag to me if I see that and someone, Oh,
I'm judging you. I see you with a muscle car,
I see with a fucking Gucci handbag, I'm judging you.

(13:19):
You know. Peace be to you, Peace be with you.
Everyone's got you know, everyone is just doing them. So
do it? Do you do you? But I'm gonna stay
the fuck away. I'm gonna definitely. It shows me where
your values are at. I'll treat you with respect, to
be friendly to you, of course, but you know, I'm
gonna pray to God I never get trapped at an
elevator with you, or have to sit next to you

(13:40):
on a long road trip or whatever. You know, you
are the company you keep. This person's misled. They're misled.
That's what I tell me. They're misled right now, best
best of them. But I don't I don't need that. Yeah,
I just spill the fucking fizzy water all over my guy. God,
damn it. Pain in the air. It's constant frustration. I
feel like I've and everything. Man, I'm so behind that everything.

(14:02):
I got so much stuff to do, videos to edit,
shit to write. I just canceled my book contract. Thank god.
Now for the first one, the first one's done. It's
coming out in April. I'm excited about that. That's got
substance to it. The second book, I was working with
Abram's Press. They were just a fucking nightmare to work with. Man,
no one there knew what they were doing. They hadn't
even read the manuscript yet they're publishing. They're trying to

(14:25):
publish way too much. I guess there's the word on
the street. They're trying to publish way too much, and
they're you know, they're just getting them in, getting them out.
They got this, you know, meant, I don't know what
they There was no one I could work with there.
I'd email the person I work with, she'd get back
to me a week or two later. I couldn't. And
then the real thing came when I was like the man.
I submitted the manuscript, they never read it. And then

(14:48):
I submitted photos. I submitted all the shit, it was
ready to go. I said, the person who's doing the
layout is going to have to figure it out. I
want the layout done this way. I want to you know,
it's got to be shots of habitat, insets of photos,
all this stuff. We're trying to pack a lot of
info here, you know. And the layout they sent it
back to me. The layout looked like a fucking pharmaceutical brochure,

(15:08):
just super basic, unenthralling. I then taught myself in design,
showed them a sample of what I wanted. Looked fucking great,
and they said, well, well, we're still gonna do the layout,
but we'll take we'll definitely take your your points into consideration.
Don't give me that. Don't get you. Don't getting to
take any into consideration. Don't give me. Don't talk to

(15:29):
me like I'm a fucking customer at the bank. Don't
do this. This is bullshit. This is that phony. Yeah, God,
it was fucking on. So I was just like, man,
this isn't gonna work. This is fucking miserable. It's taken
two years already. This is not working on a project
with someone. This is they just want me to do everything.
They're not paying me enough and you know, on top

(15:50):
of it, which is fine if they're working with me,
but then they're not working with me. It's just I
was like, why the fuck am I even doing this?
So I'm you know, and I've been hit up by
two other publish since then, so fuck them. I'm going
to take this, you know, sell the book to someone else.
And it's nice, but it's you know, if it's plant photos,
it's it's Uh. It's like a coffee table book of
photos of plants from all over the world, with descriptions

(16:12):
of their habitat and what makes them evolution evolutionarily unique
and why the fuck that I choose to put them
in a book anyway? What aspects about them? Okay, anyway,
so what But anyway, I picked a bunch of sarrow
fruits and uh, and I'm drying. I'm saved some because
you know, for friends, dried them out, save some for
friends to eat because the seeds added the texture too.

(16:34):
It's like a fig but uh. And then I'm taking
a bunch of the seeds because they'll grow. In South Texas,
there's a couple of soorrows that are like fifteen twenty
feet tall already probably fifty years old. Uh, down here
in South Texas. So I'm gonna start a bunch of
seedlings and get them out. But anyway, that was really
that was really lovely to see. And then you know,
spending time with Leo was always always so pleasant and mellow.

(16:57):
You know, Louis Louis got to see a coyote running
through his backyard, little scraggly coyote. You know, she gets
along with the coyotes. It's happened many times she's met
the coyotes. They exchanged glass glances. You could see her
doing the dog thing when they put their nose in
the air when they can sniff somethings nearby. But uh,
it was it was rough to see because you know,

(17:19):
West Texas has gotten a lot of rain recently, like
crazy afternoon monsoons. I was in when I was in
West Texas, every every day I was there, we get
an afternoon monsoon. It's like what you used to hear.
West Texas used to be like, you know, in the
nineteen eighties and nineties, but now it's uh, you know,
recently it's just been so dry. But goddamn, it just
got it got dosed with rain. Everything was green, massive

(17:42):
hailstorm rolls in. You know, thirty minutes later, the clouds
are gone, it's sunny again. It was wonderful. But southern
Arizona isn't a bad drought. God, going through Phoenix always
feels so dirty, you know, it really does. The death
cult is strong there. I feel like many of the
big cities, the death cult is strong. People are just
turned up. You could tell people are just fucking miserable.

(18:05):
It's it's awful, you know, it's I think that's a
lot of too. You know, just you vote for these
people that don't give a fuck about you, and they've
convinced you that they do. And then even when they're
blatantly going against everything they said they were going to
do for you, and shit hasn't gotten better, you still

(18:26):
believe that they're on your team. And I just I
don't get it. It's a fucking I think this happens
all over the world. I'm sure it does, but in
so called democracies. But the US case is really it's wild.
It's just it's nuts. I mean, now they're doing this
public land sell off. This is insane. They've been doing this.

(18:47):
Mike Lee, a senator, is he a senator or a congressman, know,
some pig from Utah. Of course it's from Utah because
Sagebrush rebellion. That's where the big public land sell off
first started. The idea is for it. They're horny for it.
They don't want the public. They only want to tell
them what they what they could do. They don't want
rules and restrictions. Of course there's rules and restrictions on
public land.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
And so they there was this big, you know, push
to sell off federal lands to have and put them
in private ownership. And it's fucking insane, it's nuts, it's
it's goes against everything that America supposedly stands for. But
uh yeah, this is they're trying to sneak this into
this bill, the big beautiful bill, which you know, defunds Medicaid,

(19:31):
sells public land, gives tax cut the billionaires, and yet
the work a lot of working class people vote for this.
But it boggles the mind. I look at them and
I'm just like, God, what a mark, no offense to
these poor morons. But you gotta have a you gotta
have some stupid people that in order for this ship
to go through, you gotta people that are duped. You
know a lot of people I think their churches tell

(19:52):
them to vote for you know, this party. Uh but
you know, I gotta be honest, so too Again, like
I said, the left, the American left, got taken over
by rich college kids who pushed all the identitarian shit
so hard and you know, fixation on gender this, and
it's just fucking you know, it's one thing to stand
up for someone's rights, it's nothing to make that like

(20:14):
a central pennant of the party or just even you know,
put it out there to the extent that it was,
and of course it was captured. You just you lost
a lot of people. You focus on fucking health care,
You focus on education, you focus on hooking up the
working class and the middle class, and you know, you
stick with that, stick with that, make that central part

(20:38):
of your platform. But of course, you know, the Democrats,
a lot of them are owned by the same oligarchs
that own the right. So it's you know, neither party
is working. For you to think that they are is insane.
But here we are, and it's not gonna don't think
it's gonna get any better. There's no one that's that's
providing any alternative but let's hope we don't have a

(20:59):
public land cell because goddamn that would be that's horrible.
Once that land is sold and it's in private hands,
it's never coming back either. Now you have to have someone,
you'd have to have like a left wing version of
Trump who's just like, fuck it, I don't care. I'm
gonna do this anyway. We're gonna eminent domain this shit,
take it away from these fucking crooks who bought it.

(21:20):
And that's not gonna happen too. That's not gonna happen.
So anyway, Okay, well we're talking about Colorado. Plateau started
off southern New Mexico Albuquerque Natural History actually in Albuquerque's
northern New Mexico, but it's not that far north. It's
like central Northern. Started off southern New Mexico, went through
all the cool gyps and habitats, and then we visited

(21:43):
the Albuquerque Natural History Museum afterwards, which is a great
natural history natural history museum. I highly recommend it, and
they do the reciprocal admissions thing too, which is nice
because they took the membership. I head to another museum
and go to a lot of fucking museums. You know
it's important to bring your kids to the museums. Uh.
But they have that life sized dinosaur and that makes

(22:03):
the roar every half hour. Uh, and they didn't on
the hour, and they didn't. My daughter didn't like that.
She didnt appreciate it. She was really freaked out. She
was like, it was its plastic, honey, it's not real.
She did she just she didn't. She didn't believe me,
you know, which is good. Don't believe what they tell you.
Don't believe what any authority figure tells you. Trust your

(22:24):
own intuition.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Anyway, but before that, yeah, we've been through the gypsum
really cool gypsum flats, undulating gypsum hills near the Texas
New Mexico border east of Carlsbad. Got to see Nama
carnosa again. Really cool gypsum endemic endemic. Nama. It's got
a weird It's got these these you know, erect upward

(22:48):
facing linear leaves covered in the hisspit hairs, those stiff
hairs with the these little white flowers. Lots of moth pollination,
I tell you. Moth pollination and gypsum in the Chihuahua
Desert go hand in hand moth and hummingbird because Annulo
callisly salinas was there too. Another gypsum endemic the habitat

(23:10):
here as well. It's just these barren you know, gypsum
flats with the consistency of bad concrete, like crusty concrete
that hurts the kneel on crusty, jagged concrete, and then
when it's wet it gets all spongy, and there's there's
a ton of endemics there. There's a ton of endemics
that only grow on the gypsum. A kind of cactus

(23:31):
horizontalonius was there too. There was Escobaria viviparo, which is
pretty widespread throughout western North America. Other pink flowered cactus.
Lots of good stuff. And I hadn't I hadn't been
to this specific habitat in a while, so it was
cool to see. Shout out the Cacama velvada too, the

(23:52):
what is it, the little misquit mosquito. What's the common name, Oh,
that's it, the cactus dodger is the common name. And
they were ever I guess they're and what are they eating?
Cacta roots of Opuntia's I think, I think you know,
choyas and prickly pair of roots. These things are eating,
which is good because those are two very common species
of cacti. They need to get checked a little bit.

(24:13):
But cacamo of Alvada really fucking loud cicada beautiful black
and white, and they're everywhere, and they're juicy as hell,
and they won't let you get close to them. They
alway they were flying off. They were a bunch near
Guadalupe Mountains at the base of that peak right there,
and it was you know, we encountered them. They're pretty widespread.
I think they go on to Arizona too. But uh,

(24:35):
I was so proud of my daughter too. We stopped
at this little like picnic area. Texas has these picnic
areas and near Guadaloupe Mountains, and she just started climbing
up this sketchy limestone hillside on her own. And I
was like, oh shit, okay, you know, if your kid's
doing something dangerous but they're doing it cautiously, let them
do it, just you know, watch them. So I went

(24:56):
up behind her and let her climb up that thing,
and she was all excited it. It was pretty cool
to see. So yeah, so we stopped and lurked at this,
you know, roadside little gypsum spot where you get I
think it's just blm land. You can drive in there
grazing leases probably, but you could drive in there and

(25:17):
see all these cool gypsum endemics. Really great to see.
And uh, it's just a it's so weird. It's such
a weird habitat. There's so much to think about when
you get to these places. You know, how does this
grow here? Why did this evolve like this? Why are
these leaves like this? You know, what are the other
stresses that plants have to cope with here that ends
up selecting for them? Because remember, the environment breeds the plant.

(25:40):
The environment, which is a combination of the elevation, the climate,
the climate and weather patterns, the iridity or lack thereof,
the presence of a certain insect or herbivore, the fungi,
all this stuff. It's all part of this equation that
breeds the plants and has done so over millions of years,
just the same way a human might select different kinds

(26:02):
of tomatoes that may or may not tolerate heat better
than the other phenotypes, et cetera. So so yeah, so
this is. You know, this was a fucking These gypsum
areas are so cool and they go all the way
up through through New Mexico into Arizona. You can always
tell because you start seeing selenite crystals. It's got like
a white rocket, looks like limestone, but a different, slightly

(26:26):
different consistency, and the selenite crystals really give it away.
So so that was a really cool thing because I
hadn't been there in a while, and there's so many
cool gypsum endemic plants, especially in New Mexico. I mean,
this band of gypsum goes all the way down into
Nuevo Leone and into Wahaca, Mexico, and all the way
north to you know, Albuquerque area. Even southwestern Utah has

(26:48):
a bunch of gypsum. There's a I was looking for,
what is that Cyclodinia jonesy I it's a member of
apostan ac I know, I know the genus Cyclodenia from
from northern California. It's really cool plant with long tube flowers,
pink tube flowers. But there's a gypsum subspecies, a gypsum
endemic subspecies that I encountered, or that that grows in

(27:11):
southwestern Utah. But I guess it was a shitty year
for it. It was kind of dry. Yeah, there's southwest
you know, it's getting hammered. Man not New Mexico where
we're it's southwest of their. Utah looked rough. There was.
There's a bunch of Ariogonum that are endemic to gypsum
there to shep Herdia, which is basically a native version

(27:34):
of the Russian olive. Stupid common name. It's not in
the olive family at all. Eleagnus is the genus highly
invasive from you know that air base in Brooklyn all
the way to fucking New Mexico. There's like two different
ely Agnus species that are really invasive and really problematic,
really invasive in North America, and they suck it. They've

(27:56):
got nitrogen fixing bacterian there leaves. But Shepherd like Shepherd
is the native genius. It's in the same family and
has those really cool scale like tricombes that give the
leaves this arid dozence and this weird texture. And Shepherdiero
tundafolia was in Utah at on the gypsum and then

(28:17):
shepherdy At canadensis was at higher elevations, like in the
Bristol Combe Pine forest at Cedar Breaks National Monument. You know,
I told some guy to fuck off there. This old
man was walking his dog and I and Louis went
up to go like sniff the dog, and they got along.
They got on. Well, it wasn't a big issue. And
I'm sitting there with my daughter on this two thousand

(28:40):
year old Bristol Combe Pine on the dead part of it.
We weren't trying to crush. We weren't trying to cramp
it style. Get on the vascular system, you know, sit
on the living part. Because these trees are magnificent. They're
old as hell. They're not as old as the ones
in California or in the Great Basin. It's some of
the higher elevations, but it's Bristol Comb Pine. It's still
the oldest you know, non living clonal organism uh in

(29:04):
the world. And this guy, I don't know what his
deal was, but he goes he all of a sudden,
I hear him call me a stupid asshole, and I
look and it's my dog is just sniffing his dog's
But they're doing they weren't fighting, and he goes it's
supposed to be out a leash, And I said, what
the hell's your problem? Man? You're going to die old
and alone. You know. I started going off. I'm like,

(29:24):
take your meds, old man, you need therapy. I just
went off because I had I got it, you know,
I got some some anger built up, you know, and
I just couldn't. I couldn't believe it. I was like, yo,
what is your what's your issue? Like? What do you
You've probably had an easy ass life too. He looked
like a well to do. It's like, why are you
talking to me like that? You don't need to talk
to people like this. You could say, can you please,

(29:46):
you know, get your dog away or something like that,
to which I would respond, oh, dang, I'm sorry. I didn't.
I wasn't even looking. I didn't even notice, and uh
and then I just you know, and then he was
walking away, and I just was shouting him the whole time,
with my daughter on my shoulders. I wasn't cursed very much.
And then of course I have to explain to her.
You know, he's upset. He's not a happy person. He's upset.

(30:06):
That's why he's being mean to other people. So, but
I couldn't believe it. I was like, what the fuck?
Where did the fuck these people come from? Take your
fucking mets, Go find a therapist. You're eighty, How old
are you? Seventy? Maybe he was seventy five, I don't know.
But you got an issue like that, you tell you,
like what, there's a deeper It's not about me pale,
all right, And I'm old enough to know that there's

(30:27):
you got other issues in your life. Deal with those,
all right, Deal with those, because happy, fucking well adjusted
people don't act like this, right wild. And I you know,
I'm never one to shy away from confrontations unless I
can tell the person is stupid or insane, and then
I'm just kind of like, ah, right, you just do
your thing. I'm not going to get involved. But uh,

(30:49):
with this, it was Yeah, it was weird. It was
a fucking weird issue. So hopefully that guy doesn't kill
himself the next year. Hopefully he gets Hopefully he gets
some I think I told me, told me he was
gonna die old and alone. I really let into him
a little bit. But you know that's what happens. You
press the wrong button, you just get you get the dump,
the garbage shoot opens, all the shit comes out. So

(31:12):
but anyway, so we were going through checked out the
gypsum areas in southern Arizona or southern New Mexico, and
then kept going north. Stopped at the Albuquerque Natural History
Museum wonderful spot highly recommend five out of five stars.
Saw the San Miguelia fossil, which is that curious fossil
from the Triassic that looks like a palm leaf. It's

(31:32):
got the plycate leaf like a fan palm. But uh,
and I think I guess I didn't know the reproductive
structures had been found, because you need reproductive structures for
a good solid idea of what it might be related to.
But I guess they had. Someone sent me a paper
later on and the thing had been there was I
guess there are fossils of it, but this fossil is

(31:53):
pretty widespread throughout the southwest. San Miguelia named I think
it was named after San miguel County, New Mexico, and
I got to see more fossils of it when we
went to the Dinosaur Discovery Site in Saint George, which
is a really cool area built on the site like
they incorporated the naked rock into the floor of the museum,

(32:18):
Like they just built this basically huge shed around this
fossil site where there's all kinds of dinosaur tracks and
ample plant fossils, and you know, Saint George has gone
through a spurt of obscene development in the last ten years.
You know, the death cult is strong there, just you know,
garbage driving, commercial cesspool. You know, strip malls, parking lots,

(32:42):
drive everywhere, not set up for walking at all, kind
of like many parts of Texas, you know. So you
got an unhealthy populace and they're probably miserable because they're
trapped in their cars all the time and they're just
being farmed as consumers, which is just the modern American condition.
No healthcare, uneducated you know as well. So that kind
of gives you an idea of what the dominant culture

(33:04):
is like there. But there's a lot of wonderful things
around there, including that arctomic on humorless, that bear poppy
and other gypsum endemic. Highly recommend should you get a
chance to see it on the gyps and flats where
it grows. I think there's a mountain bike trail nearby
hopefully the Mountain bikers know what they're riding over and
don't go off trail and respect the plants. But you know,

(33:25):
I don't give anybody too much credit, but lots of cool,
lots of cool stuff around Saint George, lots of cool stuff.
Lots of lawns too, which is insane. I mean, they're
acting like there's no issue with water or that they
don't live in a desert. The lawn thing is weird.
You tall loves lawns. I don't get it. It's some
weird Mormon shit. God bless the Mormons, right, God bless them,

(33:49):
Bless their hearts. I've got a lot of cool friends
that are Mormon. I have a lot of gay friends
that grew up Mormon. Funny how that happens, You know,
you grow up in this repressed environment and then uh,
you know, I don't know what I don't know what
it is. But yeah, a lot of a lot of
gay friends that with Mormon backgrounds who got the fuck

(34:09):
out as soon as they could, you know, Shout out
to my friend Joe, Shout out to Vanessa, shout out
to uh, how many? How many? How many gay people
do I know that grew up in Utah, and you know,
in the in the depths of the Mormon church. I
saw some. I saw some who was it someone in
my neighborhood, especially I live in a relatively low income

(34:32):
Hispanic neighborhood. And so you get the Jehovah's witnesses preying
on people here because that's their whole gimmick, right, that's
their deal. They prey on people who are having a
hard up, hard up time and may not know any better.
So it got so bad because I had to hang
a sign in Spanish it says, no Jehovah's Witnesses, no
religious soliciting, please go away, thank you. And so I've

(34:53):
got one of those stickers on my door. But you
should do that too, if you suffer from the same problem.
I just I I can't stand it. They're pedaling ideology.
It's almost worse than pedaling. They're pedaling bunk ideology that
prays on the desperate. It's almost worse than you know,
people who are running Ponzi schemes, praying on desperate people,
you know, like doing lottery, lottery scams or something, you know.

(35:18):
But anyway, but I was I think it was Jehovah's
witnesses or Mormons. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (35:22):
They're all.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
They're all, you know, goofy bastards hanging out my neighborhood.
They're on the little bikes whatever. And I was I
was biking with my daughter and I said they they
started to approach me while I was moving. I said, no,
go away, like really loud screaming, you know, as if
they were like horseflies, you know, biting horse flies. And

(35:43):
the one guy goes wow, and I go, yeah, that's right,
stay away from me, Go away, sir, thank you. But
it was funny he was. I don't think anyone because
people are polite where I lived to you know, and
I was not polite, so I think he wasn't used
to the treatment that blew his mind anyway. But uh,

(36:03):
but yeah, so that these gypsum flats and Utah, Holy hell,
there's a bunch of cool stuff. And then of course
that red sandstone and these are all the fossils that
are at the Dinosaur Discovery site are all Triassic, and
I was impressed to see. I was grateful. An anonymous
donor purchased the brick, and my friend Brian, who did
the mural, in the Dinosaur Discovery site told me about this.

(36:25):
He said, someone actually purchased the brick and you could
put your name on a brick, and they put instead
of their name, they put crime pace with botany doesn't
And I guess I I guess it's been there for
a year or two. I was like, Oh, it's really sweet,
that's really nice. So uh anyway, so yeah, and then uh,
Andrew Milner, who's a paleo paleontologist there, excuse me, a

(36:47):
paleontoloigence it was a paleobotanist, took us in the back
and showed us some cool plant fossils. Saw a bunch
of San Miguelia, all these weird ferns. They need Italians,
you know, the psychad looking things that went extinct. I
don't think they made it one of the benit Italians
go out. I think that. I don't think they made
it through the k T boundy. I don't think they
made it out of the Cretaceous. But you should look
them up if you get a chance. They're a really

(37:08):
cool clade of plants. The benited Italians, they look like
pych heads, Benitta titty Titalians. How do you spell that
b E n n it T you spell it. It's
b e n n E T T I T A
l e s. We're an extinct group of seed plants
that flourished story in the Misazoic Eara roughly two and

(37:29):
fifty two to sixty six million years ago. They are
notable for their pychhead like appearance. So these things popped
up after the permean extinction two fifty two million years ago,
and they are notable for their psychhead like appearance and
for some features that led to theories about their relationship
to modern flowering plants. Will not directly ancestral to angiosperms,
they share some features that make them an interesting group

(37:52):
to study in a context of plant evolution. So we're
gonna be selling merch. It says I'm horny for Benita
Italians or Hank if you're horny for Benita Tillans. But
I think that sounds good. Honk if you're horny, because
you don't necessarily own it yet, just saying, you know,
if the enthusiasm's out there for you like it is
for me, Honk, you know, if you're horny, Honk. There

(38:13):
was a cool spot. I think it was in central
New Mexico. I hadn't been there in a while, but
there was a huge lava flow. And it's again it's
public lands, so you could just roll right up there
and walk out on the lava flow. I was first
there five years ago maybe, and uh god, it's fucking
it's so cool. I figet what is the name valley

(38:34):
of what is it called? Value of the Valley of
Fires Recreation. Here, they got a little boardwalk you could
walk out on these lava flows where there's these massive
cracks in the basalt. Fucking lava caves everywhere. I think
the elevation is like five thousand feet. Forget it. It's
kind of high up sodall prickly pair, it's kind of serious.
I forget what species was there, but it's a fucking

(38:56):
wonderful plant community. It's a really old gnarl junipers, probably
osteosperma or Mono sperma. I don't fucking they all look
the same, but they're beautiful. They got these twisted old
tra man. New Mexico is so nice. It's the best
thing about Texas is that it's close to New Mexico.
You could just go over there. Vibes a little bit
more mellow, but also there's a lot more drug use

(39:18):
and fucking it's brutal. That sucks to see. Like Albuquerque
Channel five, Andrew Kelligan just did a bit on on
the fennail problem in Albuquerque. And you know, when we
were staying with my friend Spooner for a night on
the res north of Santa Fe, and we went out

(39:39):
the next day, and going out the next day, there's
like narcan just discarded on like a parking area in
the side of the road. There's fucking needles everywhere. It's brutal. Man,
it's just the you know, it's genocide of the youth.
All part of the death cult though, all that, you know,
the heroine, the fucking alcohol especially, it's all part of
the death cult. You need people to be numb alcohol,
especially because it's legal. Of course it's legal, right, and

(40:02):
I think it's all this stuff should be legal because
if you can't, I mean, damned, if you do, damn
if you don't, you make it illegal, then you're just
creating a black market for it. Whatever. But the booze especially,
I mean, god, it's Alcohol's fucking terrible. There's a reason
every major you know, world religion has had some central
tenet discouraging alcohol use, cause it is it is poison.

(40:24):
You gotta be numb to how you feel. That's what
enables the death cult to function so well and to
keep people down. And so that's you know, it's the purpose.
But uh, but the Fennyl shit especially, it's God, it's
fucking needles everywhere. It's and I wonder, like what would
it take to get people off that or to show
them something else? Right? Those are all symptoms just like

(40:45):
the rat Park experiment, the famous rat Park experiment. Should
look it up. You know, there's nothing to fill that void.
And life sucks in this society, and so that you
fill it with this poison, right, or with fucking gambling
or with you know, chasing shiny shit whatever. It's all
part of the death cult too, not knowing the living
world is there. Instead, you can embrace the living world

(41:08):
and learn about it and it doesn't you know, just
look closer, learn closer, you know, get some education. That's
the thing too, is like people don't know how to
look at They have to be shown, they have to
be taught, and so how do you how do you
do that in a society that's so defunded education where
the schools are taught to just where this the whole

(41:28):
point of schools. You're taught to just memorize stuff, not
really understand it. And it's just like this supposed to
be a gateway to a career, right, obedience a gateway
to learning how to be obedient and subordinate and have
a career. That's a brutal fucking that's not education. So uh,
you know, I don't know, Man's that's the education is

(41:50):
key to lifting people up, Showing people how to think critically,
not what to think, but how to think, how to
digest things, how to look at things, how to take
them apartmentally, how to ask questions, how to how to
envision things in their mind so that they can foresee
what might happen if this or that behavior is applied,

(42:11):
or if you know, even just practical things like if
you're setting something up or building something, what could go wrong,
how to correct for that. Teaching people how to think,
how to exist in this world. And that's not what's taught.
It's memorization and obedience are what's thought. It's tragic, and
of course you know, the world sucks. It's the human
world that we've created sucks. Doesn't need to, but it does.

(42:34):
It's look at who's in power, look at who's running things,
look at who's conditioning everyone else. And the values that
are being put out there, they're poison. So anyway that
it was sad to see. I mean, it's all over
in New Mexico. It's all over depending on where you are.
You know, people looking for and escape, people looking for
something to fill the void, not knowing what's right in

(42:57):
front of them. Just disconnected from the land, disconnected the
life on it, disconnected from the living machine. Really sand
to watch. That said. Going north of New Mexico, we
were in Santa Fe for a while too, which is
a weird town, very expensive, lots of expensive stuff everywhere,
you know. But going north from Santa Fe and then

(43:23):
heading towards the Four Corners region was a trip. There's
a man, there's so much beautiful stuff, so much beautiful
Asclepius Involue, crowd of this little dwarf milkweed, tiny little milkweed.
There were tons of them there. This was six thousand
foot elevation. It was on sand and a lot of
those same plants, including poliomitta in Cana that El Paso

(43:46):
bush mint that you see on the dunes east of
El Paso and also does very good in cultivation. James
Piece is growing a ton of them, grown a ton
of those plants. He fell in love with it. He
pushed it on me. I had never seen it before.
I said, okay, I'll plant this. I guess I like white, thin,
fuzzy leaves. Sure smells fucking good, smells minty. I put
that in the ground. It's doing great in South Texas,

(44:07):
it's doing great in West Texas. It's built for the heat,
it needs full sun. It was a really cool It's
a fucking great plant, and it was growing here. A
lot of the plants were that I encountered in Alpasso
were growing here, even though it was, you know, four
hundred miles north and it's six thousand feet elevation in
northern New Mexico. It was like a juniper these juniper hills,

(44:30):
a juniper woodland looked like parts of the Great Basin
almost and a sclepias. Involucrada there was aflon, which is
in the paintbrush family. It's a parasitic plant, doesn't have
any chlorophyll. I think it was was it ludovicy ainum.
I forget which one I think that was it. It
was parasitizing Artemisia philifolia, which is a filifolia philiferous leaves,

(44:52):
thin leaves. It was a sage it's a sagebrush, Artemisias.
They all smell good, sagebrush, wormwood, they're all all Artemesia.
Artemesia vulgaris is the invasive one. Like in New York City,
there's Artimia vulgarris everywhere. European arrival fucking super common smells. Okay,
doesn't smell as nice as sage brush. It's got kind

(45:13):
of a it's fragrant, but it's kind of unpleasant. Of course,
all those things prevent them from being eaten. Uh, you know,
you got to have a certain gut bactery to be
able to eat sage brush. I'm sure there's stuff that
does it. I've noticed that deer state they stay away
from a lot of the mints too, Those things that
smell good about plants in the mint family deer evidently
don't like. But that that spot was amazing. A Bronia

(45:38):
fray grants was there too, A really fragrant moth pollinated
member of the boogin Fia family Nictageneci. It's got these
white globular inforescent influorescences, spherical inflorescences with little white tube flowers.
So many members of Nictageneti are moth pollinated, especially A. Klaisantes.
A lot of nice A klaisanthes out there. Longe Folia

(46:00):
is a weed in West Texas. It's got, you know,
the leaves or maybe an inch long. The flowers are
six inches long and tubular. Blessed to have these kinds
of weeds around. It's a native plant that takes over
you know what. Speaking of weeds. The book that I
got coming out in April, which is I think it's
like one hundred and fifty pages. I was thinking about

(46:21):
maybe doing a reading of a chapter of it. We're
part of a chapter for the Patreon maybe I'll do that.
And then I got a whole other manuscript I wrote
for this book I canceled with Abrams, so I might
do a bit of that too. They just make it
patreon only. I hate doing patreon only because I like
more people to be able to hear it and have
access to it and for it to be public. But

(46:42):
that's you know, that's it's I feel like I got
to give the Patreon people something because that's really what
sustains me, you know. So this spot that the Spooner
took us to, where the Sclepias Involucrata was, was really
curious because there it's six thousand feet elevation. But there
were all these beautiful fucking cobbles, like two or three
pound heavy cobbles that had been rounded, like beautifully rounded

(47:09):
by a river at some point in the distant past
or not too distant past. You know, four million years
is not distant in the long spans of geologic time,
in the winds of time of which humanity is only
but a fart so. But these these rocks were just
fucking great, I mean, you know, and they were like
metamorphosed nice g n ei s s. There were streaks

(47:34):
in them. You could tell they started off as something
else than they've been cooked. That's what metamorphic rocks are,
the rocks that have been cooked by depth or pressure
or whatever the fuck, exposure to a body of magma
nearby that heats them up. And uh, I was trying
to take a lot of them home because they're so beautiful.
But the fact that they were so heavy and so
rounded implied that they had been carried by a very

(47:57):
swift moving, high energy river at some point. It must
have been a big fucking river too, because these were
these were large rocks. These were not pebbles, So uh,
I don't you know, can only guess what that might
have been, what it might have looked like. Now. It
was these kind of steep hills of sand. It was
hot as fucked. It was like ninety degrees maybe ninety five.

(48:19):
That's not hot, but when it's humid, it's hot. And
that man, the aridity ninety five degrees when it's arid
is nothing. It's I'll take that, And I could have
walked ten miles in that shit easy. You gotta be
careful that it's the good where I live. This humidity
is so bad ninety five will kill you. It just
it's brutal. It feels horrible to experience. But it was

(48:40):
cool because you get at this spot that you get
elements of like the plains still a little bit. There
was Trediscontia there, Trediscontia occidentalis with the purple flowers coma
lines Monocott family obvious. Obviously you get Trediscantia Ohiensis and
the prairies of the Midwest setting the woods on fire.
Remember that that Hank Williamsung wants, I'm going to go

(49:00):
start a fire. Be like Jerry Wilhelm who sets his
prairie home Companion on Fire's He lives in glenn Ellen, Illinois.
He sets his yard on fire every fall. I said, hey, path,
more people were doing this, you know the world will
be in a lot better shape, at least the Midwest.
You know. Shit. Some guy wrote me asking for help

(49:21):
with an hoa problem, fucking with him for a native
plant guard, and I just couldn't get back to him.
I have no fucking time. I have no time to
do anything. God it kills me. The native Speaking of which,
the native plant nursery list is up on the Crime
Pays website. It's got a state by state listing of

(49:42):
native plant nurseries. So if you have anything to contribute,
you could send it to me. A Crime Pays a
bot and he doesn't at Gmail. Keep it short, please,
I don't read long emails. I see I open long
emails and I just I know. Sorry, But if you
wanted to. You know, you got a list at you
know city first city or town first address, very brief

(50:04):
description of what they sell and how much is native,
and then I can put it in there, make it
easy as fuck for me to copy and paste and
put into the native plant directory, Native plant nursery directory.
So this, this spot in New Mexico was Yeah, it
was just so rich. It was and I guess they'd
gotten good rains. A lot of stuff was going off.

(50:25):
It was so nice to walk there. You just you know,
botanist paste ten feet at a time, stopping crouching down
looking and stuff. Made a lot of herbarium collections. That's
another thing I've got. I still have so many labels
to create for all the collections I've made, and I
feel like this is really important to do, especially plants.
You know. The reason I collect or barium specimens is

(50:46):
so that someone who's studying a genus, or someone who's
just fascinated by a genus can see different variations on it,
different species in the genus from disparate localities, far away localities,
and see and be able to compare those species with
ones they already made. Love and no, that's the wonder
of studying this shit. You could see how different environments

(51:07):
and different elevations in different places have selected for different
variations on a theme. That wonder. That imagination is what
makes studying life so fun and so fucking lovely. Shout
out to the Kantos Cephala TOMASI. I want to give
a shout out to the agave bugs. They're scary looking bugs.
They have a really weird sound they make when they

(51:27):
fly by you. They're about almost an inch and a
half long. In some cases, they're big fucking black bugs
that hit the agaves. I think probably other related monocots too,
So I'd like to give a shout out to them.
Bring them to your attention so that you know that
they're out there. Someone should draw one that make a
nice mascot for something. When I was in Tucson, and
I'll just take a little break before we get back

(51:49):
into talking about four corners Bonni, I went to visit
my friend Beto Robert Anthony Villa, who if you live
in Tucson, you probably know who. If you're into natural issue,
you probably know who he is. Wonderful man. We didn't
talk for a few years. We had a falling in.
Now we're sensual with each other again, sensual, not sexual.
You know, I wouldn't suck him off, but I would

(52:09):
probably give him like a nice massage or something. Right,
Just got to put that out there, and also, you know,
use the opportunity say of the words suck him off
out loud in case you're listening to this at work.
So it makes people uncomfortable. Who might be, you know,
in the might be happened to be a route, you know,
if it's loud, if you got me out a speaker.
So hopefully you don't. I pray that you don't. But

(52:30):
I got to see him. He's got a reptile handler permit.
He's got a hel a monster that can't be released
because it was acclimated of people. It's fifty years old,
called Pancho Hia. But I think it's I think it's
a sheet. Maybe it's a non binary helo monds, maybe
it's a they them. I don't know, but in any case,
it was great to see him again and his little

(52:52):
apartment in this old adobe building in Tucson. I love
going to vish. He's got all the plants outside. And
you got to have friends that have libraries of books,
good shit to look at where you were. Like you,
even if they weren't there, you'd still go into their
house if it was unlocked and just look around. You
just want to see what they got. My friend Benny
used to do that to me all the time. He

(53:13):
used to be I want to go to Joey's house,
just look around, see what he's got. You know, he
wouldn't take anything. I think one time he fucking took something. Actually,
the motherfucker'll I need to hit him over the head
and get it back. But most of the time he
didn't take anything. He just want to go look around.
He just wanted to go see. It was like he
was in a museum or he was perusing a thrift store.
And I wasn't offended by it because I did the

(53:35):
same thing with him. You know. Sometimes I took some
his shit too. Maybe it took a marker so I
forget what anyway, or some art that he made that
he didn't like and wasn't caring about. I would take that,
you know, that's the kind of friendship we had. But
I would go I would never do that to Beato,
But anyway, I went to go visit Beto, he's got
you blacktail rattlesnakes, same thing that was you know, can't

(53:55):
be released. He's got that and it's just in his library,
you know. And you shout out to the heel of Monsters,
Fertio Zepic for all the American fat He's it's good,
thank you. You know the connection between ozempic and and
the Helo monsters. Anyway, I digress. Hanging out with Beto
is wonderful because he knows his shit really well. He's

(54:17):
got a scientific mind. He's involved in all kinds of projects.
I think he's going back to school. I'm not sure
if he's going for herpetology whatever. He came to Botany
by way of herpetology and a sincere love and respect
for the Sonoran desert. And so we got to go
to what's it called Tukumak Hill or Tuckham Curry, what's
the hill down there? And Phoenix in Tucson. It's a

(54:37):
hill by the university where they got a research center
up top and some cool plants planting. And it's cute
because Tucson's so fucking hot that, you know, but at
night people come out of their shells there. You gotta
be crepuscular in that heat. And they hike up Tucumcock Hill.
What's it called Tuma Mack Hill. God, I'm fucking this
is like Mount Yaki all over again. I'm just butchering.

(54:59):
I'm gonna be so fun as an old man. If
I make it that long, I'll be doing malapropisms everywhere.
May the Late Mayor Daily, the pig Mayor Daily was.
He had his shortcomings. I'm sure there were good things
about him. Maybe if he got him drunk, he could
mention the lightest farts on fire back in the day.
Anyone who's not willing to light their farts on fire
at some point in their life. Anyone who hasn't done acid,

(55:20):
Anyone who hasn't been to jail or the army, I
can't talk to. I don't have any respect for. That's
when of Leo told me that. Leo told me his
old peote teacher in the Native American church told him,
don't trust anybody who's never been to jail or the army.
I would add a couple other stipulations in there, or

(55:41):
of people not who are not to trust, But you
get the idea anyway, So I see in Betho was great.
We went up to the hill, the house on the hill,
beautiful old building on Tucumcock Hill, Tumamak Hill, uh tinsil
Cock Hill, well on Tensail, I'll just call it that.

(56:01):
We went up to the building on tinsel Cock Hill,
wonderful library up there. Got to touch fifty thousand year
old ground sloth shit and they were eating a lot
of spheralcia and e fedra I guess which is very interesting.
So the ground sloths really loved spheralcia and efedra. It's
groundsloth ethnobotany for you. And there was a mast it

(56:25):
on tooth. You know, the Sonoran Desert twenty thousand years ago,
thirty thousand years ago, it was a much different place,
let me tell you, right. And this is the same
spot where Thomas van Devender did all his work with
the pack rat middens. We got to hold a chunk
of encrusted pack rat urine plant material encrusted with packrat urine.
It was a nice chunk. It was like cinderblock sized,

(56:47):
and that of course was instrumental and informing modern day
ecologists and bodanist what the plant community would have been
like thirty thousand years ago in the Sonoran Desert, because
the pack rats pack all this stuff into their little
middens deep in a cave. You know, they use their
piss to encrust. I don't know why do they do that? Why?
Let's ask deep seek Why did the pack rats encrust

(57:09):
everything in piss? Okay, I asked it, and it says
pack rats also known as wood rats dusky footed wood
rats in northern California. Shout out to them, too, used
to see their little stick, their massive stick tpiece everywhere.
Pack Rats in a Sonoran desert encrust plant material in
their middens using a substance often referred to as urine,
but it's more accurately a thick, viscous fluid. Ooh, that

(57:32):
is a combination of urine and other secretions. Jesus Christ,
this is nasty. This behavior serves several important functions preservation
of plant material the pack rats. Urine crystallizes over time
due to its high urea and mineral content. These guys
gotta drink more water forming I tell my daughter that
all the time too. You know, you want your piss
to be clear. You don't want this yellow piss, it's

(57:54):
not good, be easy on your kidneys, forming a hard
amber like coating called amber rat amber at Really, this
coding helps protect the plant material from decay, insects and
fungal growth woo. So they're gonna use it again, effectively
mummifying it for long term storage. So if you find
a pack rab min and it's got a bunch of
juniperis and pinion pine and all this shit that doesn't

(58:17):
grow in the Sonoraan desert, especially at these elevations anymore,
then you know how much things have changed. It's a
different world now. You know, I'm gonna start hoarding shit
from Dollar General all this, you know, plastic stuff that
comes over from China and encrusting it and piss. That's
an old Italian man thing. That's another thing is these
old Italian guys saving their piss so they could water

(58:38):
their tomato plants with it, which is good, you know,
as long as you mix it eight to one, right,
As long as you mix it eight to one, water
to piss, that's good. You know the real problem you
gotta worry about is when these guys get into shit composting.
When these old wops discover shit composting. It's a whole
other world. Next they're shitting in cardboard in their backyard,
shitting on a piece of cardboard, you know, putting it

(59:00):
in a compost tumbler with you know, ten parts pine
shavings you could purchase from tractor supply for eight dollars.
I've never done this before. That's not why I know
so much about this. You know, you put it in
the tumbler. And of course, if it's hot you live
in a hot climate, you can't use earthworms. You got
to use soldier fly larvae. Uh, and they go to
town on it. Soldier fly larvae are instrumental in a

(59:22):
hot climate for composting, especially for shit composting. And again
I wouldn't know anything about this because I've never done it.
I do not do this. I don't actively do it,
and I wasn't doing it four hours ago in my backyard, naked,
looking like a fucking maniac, shitting on a piece of
cardboard and putting it in a comp I did not
do that, nor do I recommend it. But I will

(59:43):
say soldier fly larvae are really cool and they're good
to feed to you know what a little critters and
stuff you know, I think they're the mosquitofish I have
in my stock tank pond. They require. I don't know
what those fuckers are eating. Honestly, I don't think they're
it's too small to eat soldier fly larva. But I'm
sure if you had a tortoise, they would eat soldier

(01:00:05):
fly larva. And Betho has a tortoise. He's got a
desert tortoise, so impossibly cute, so IMPI have you ever
seen one of the mojave desert tortoise gopher Us agasazii,
right the genus gopher Us. You got Gophers berlandii, gopher
Us morathki, gopher Us agasazii, each speciating having speciated over

(01:00:26):
the last nine or ten million years. According to different
environments throughout the arid west of North America, Gophers berlandier
is probably the most common. I've seen all of them
in situ, but go first, Berlandier R. The Texas tortoise
is probably the rarest. And uh god, they're so fucking cute,
and I'm guessing they're going to be endangered at some point.

(01:00:47):
I think they're probably more abundant because the climate here
in the thorn scrub of South Texas is more more
a measic it gets, it's higher rainfall, so it's an
easier environment. They have an easier time, say with those
box turtles that I saw in northern Alabama. That's of
box turtles up up to Virginia. But no, you know,
we need more people appreciating tortoises. That's another thing. Don't

(01:01:10):
trust anybody who doesn't appreciate tortoises or turtles. You can't
trust them. You can't fucking try. They don't have any
respect for tortoises or turtles. Don't have any respect for them.
All right, James Peace appreciates turtles and tortoises. Our nursery
is supposed to be called Limestone Tortoise. I'd like to
design a logo for it. It's some point, but added

(01:01:32):
to the list of shit that I have to do.
But anyway, so Beatos got all these cool herbs, and
I took my daughter over there to see it because
they're so they're so fucking cool. And he's got the
wonderful library, and it's just you know, the time to
go visiting would be ideally when it's not hot as
balls in the Sonoran desert. But I got people in Tucson.
I got my friend Marca, Marco in Mesa shut out

(01:01:55):
to Republica and Panada over there in Meysare's will go
visit Marco. Wonderful man. But anyway I got, I got
my people over there. New Southern Arizona's nice. I would
move there if I wasn't trying to leave the United
States eventually all together. And I just want to get
away from the car slump, that's all I want. I
want to live in a nice, walkable fucking place where

(01:02:16):
I can have a yard. No one's gonna fuck with
me for it. My yard in West Texas. I just
had to kill an Africanized honeybee colony. I don't care.
I don't want any shit for it. They're they're vicious,
they're aggressive, they were living in the tool shit. I
went in there late at night, sprayed them with permethrins,
which degrade somewhat readily in the environment and aren't going

(01:02:40):
to poison everything else. That didn't work, you know, because
I couldn't get into the nest. I have to crack
the thing open and get into the nest. But then
I'm afraid to do that because you're letting all of
them out. So then I went and I got this
stuff that's made for carpenter bees. It's like a gel.
It's like an expanding gel foam with emata cloprit a,
systemic neo and the cotton in. It's the stuff that

(01:03:00):
killing the bees, but it's killing the bees when it's
applied wholesale to crops and to horticultural atrocity landscape plants
that you buy a home depot. If you're using in
a closed greenhouse, it's not that bad. And definitely you
need that. For a lot of cacti, you need systemics
because they get mites, and they get spider mites, and
they get root meals really bad because this is stuff

(01:03:20):
that they have no prior controls for or adaptation to,
since they never encounter it in the dry desert environment.
And I believe the reason that mites are so bad
in greenhouses is because the predatory mites that keep these
in check are not there, whereas in sit to it
might be a little easier. There's more predatory insects, all
kinds of little stuff you'll never see unless you get

(01:03:42):
a microscope that keeps this stuff in check. So uh,
you know, at least that's my theory. And a greenhouse
is just too plush, it's too easy for them. So
you gotta use some of the uh, you got to
use some of the systemics, which it's not ideal, but whatever.
But anyway, I went in to the I found the

(01:04:04):
hole where these Africanized bees and there I think they're
all Africanized in Texas. You see a feral honeybee County,
it's going to be the Africanized one. It's going to
be those hybrids that were released, I think originally in Brazil,
because that's just what is best suited to the environment here.
You know, I think the ones that are too friendly,
those European ones die out. I don't know, but every
beekeeper I've talked to says, you see a feral honeybee County,

(01:04:26):
it's Africanized. God. There was one at this property in
Presidio County that I used to go through surveys that
they were fucking horrible. They'd come at you. You're walking
down a limestone talis hill, trying not to break your
ass getting, you know, having bees swarm around you. Oh
and then once they sting you, you're marked. So then
the rest come at you anyway. So I took this
amatic cloprid can. It's like an aerosol can with a

(01:04:48):
six inch plastic tube on it, and you stick it
in the hole and you just foam the fuckers out.
Hopefully that will kill them, because I'd be going back there.
I couldn't go in my backyard. You get to you
get thirty feet close to the nest, and they start
coming out, you dix so, and I also fucked the
honey bees anyway. You know, we want the native bees.
We want Diadasia. We want Diadasia anthophila. We want the

(01:05:12):
Xyla copa. Don't forget the Xyla copas. We want mega Kylie.
Is that what it is? Mega Kylie? Or mega Chili?
We want mega chili. We want ash Metiella. Right, we
don't want these. We don't want the APIs malifra complex,
Lasio glossom pilosum. What is that? That's a sweat bee? Yeah,

(01:05:33):
the Xyla copas, I put the little uh. I get
the agave poles or dasilerion poles or yucca poles, the
inflorescent stocks. I put them out. I stack them up,
you know, vertically, put them next to each other, lean
him against the door in the corner of a We
got a corner to the front of my house, and
I let the do that just for the bees so

(01:05:55):
they can go in there. And they they You could
tell they're going in there because you see the wood
shavings on the ground from where they cut a little
hole in there. And then you know, even sometimes you
see their little their little face poking out from there.
It's sucking cute. The zila copas are big. They could sting.
I got one of my house once. I tried to
wrap it up in his shirt to get it out.
It was trying to go go through the window, up
against the glass, so I tried to put it using

(01:06:18):
a shirt, you know, to wrap it and take it out,
and it fucking stung me through the shirt. Hurt really bad,
like almost like a numbing pain. I was impressed. Probably
somewhat similar to tarantula hawks, which they kind of look like.
They look like a fatter tarantula hawk that like bluish,
iridescent black. But anyway, you know, they're not gonna sting,

(01:06:43):
you know, they just want to. They're gonna sing unless
you try to do what I did. Which is catch
one so you could take it outside. So anyway, yeah,
I got to see beato. That was wonderful. And then
the thing with the suaro fruits, we could just go
back to that for a second. You know, I understand this,
this lecturing. This is like definitely a Caucasian California thing,
Caucasian progressive. You know, you're not supposed to harvest the

(01:07:04):
suaro fruits. But this is on private land. I was trespassing.
It was on the side of the road, it was
on like luxury home developments. But it was just it
was so fucking you know, I knew this was gonna come.
It was well intentioned, but it made me realize that
getting people to know something edible might approach and make
them approach it in a different way and be interested.

(01:07:24):
And I've seen this thought process work so many hundreds
of times in people. Whereas if that's the thing that
gets them into looking at the living world or looking
closer or maybe trying to grow siguarrows, that is what
gives me hope. And I think that's the point we're
at in human history now where people just got to
start growing shit, right. This is the stewardship that's needed.

(01:07:46):
This is the cultivation of the living world. If you
love something, grow it. If you fuck up and you
gotta brown thumb, you just got to start thinking more
about what you're doing. Why did this not survive? What
happened to it? Look at the roots, look at the soil.
Start actively thinking and ask questions. You can teach yourself
this stuff by actively observing things and asking questions, how
does water move through a medium? How does temperature affect

(01:08:08):
plant metabolism? How does why is this thing not growing?
I mean it's the same thing when everyone gets into botany.
They're trying to grow shit that just based on how
it looks, right. Like I talked to my friend Lily today.
She was really into Sylpium albaflorum, the white flowered sylphium
that grows on these then limestone limestone deserts around Dallas

(01:08:29):
Fort Worth, Austin. Lots of populations have been destroyed lately,
especially with the development that's you know, growing like a
tombor around the Austin area. And she lives in Florida
where it's very high rainfall, very human, you know. She
I was talking to her todays like I was so
obsessed with that. I finally got to see it. She
came out here to give a presentation at San Antonio
Backgarden on carnivorous plants, of which there are many in

(01:08:49):
Florida and Tallahassee area, where she lives. She says, I
was so obsessed with Sylphium albafloram. I wanted to try
and grow it in Florida. And I said, there's no
way it would have grown there. She's like, I know,
it would have done thing where it grows now, you know,
in these blazing hot, thin soiled limestone areas. I realized
it would have rotted in Florida and the humid, high

(01:09:10):
rainfall every afternoon thunderstorm area of North Florida. But that's okay.
I mean people, you know, you get obsessed with something
you want to grow. When I was first trying to grow,
before I understood the importance of natives and how every
region has its own native plants, I was trying to
grow things that just I found whimsically interesting or that
I thought looked cool, with no understanding that, like man

(01:09:33):
keeping it alive here is going to be an uphill battle.
Go for something that plays, you know, a role as
a cog in the living machine. That might be, but
I learned that later. But initially I was trying to
grow all kinds of schefs, trying to grow don redwoods
in fucking Oakland, California. They'll grow there, but they need irrigation.
They're not going to thrive. You can't illegally plant them.
They need to be in like a protected area that

(01:09:53):
gets a little bit higher humidity and more rainfall bottom
of an wash or something in a yard irrigated, you know,
that kind of thing. But that's what gets people interested.
And so if people are initially getting interested, the people
who live in some of the retail car suburban slums
of the Tucson Phoenix area. Yeah, Phoenix is a fucking

(01:10:13):
heat island. Man, It's just a giant all that pavement,
It's just a giant heat battery that heats up and
then cooks throughout the night so that the knight's never
cool off, leading to more and more accumulative heat throughout
the hot season. Terrible, But you know, more people get
into growing this, maybe there'll be someone who's growing a
bunch of soarrows, you know, so they can eat them

(01:10:36):
in thirty or forty years and they'll start off just
growing them in their little fucking apartment or whatever. That's
that's great, and that is a that's cultivating a bond
between people and plants, and that's what I want to do.
I don't give a fuck about identitarianism. The native people could, yeah,
on public lands, only native people can harves sorrows. This
is private property. And also, you know, I don't think

(01:10:59):
that the home no autumn are gonna care if someone's
picking so worrow fruits in front of a fucking luxury
tract house where the owners obviously don't give a shit,
you know. And you spread some seeds whenever you collect
seeds too, that's always good for me. Say thank you
to the plant. Thank you, fuck, I love you. You
throw some seeds out, preferably under a nurse plant like
a creosode or something, and then you take them for yourself,

(01:11:20):
eat some, and then grow some too. Learn to grow them, right,
Look at the cactus the how to grow Cactus video
there with Leo. He's grown peyotes, but but uh, you
know the same, same for any cactus. Right, high humidity
at first when they're young, slowly accli ainate them once
they get a different, different size. You know, if they
start rotting, you got to take the humidity off whatever,

(01:11:42):
or the mix is too thick. Whatever, Right, that's good.
You cultivate. Your humans have been growing shit for for
tens of thousands of years, right ever since the discovery
the creation of agriculture. So this is this is something
we do. This is something that's in our d This
is good to cultivate. I want to cultivate the inclination

(01:12:05):
to cultivate. And whether it's you know, all this shit
I used to make fun of, Oh it's edible, is
it blah blah? Sure whatever. If that's what gets people in,
I'm off for it. Get them into growing. There's so
many people I've met who start off with a narrow
focus and don't really get it, but at least they're
in the door. And then later on they figure out,

(01:12:26):
they start to get it, and they get really good
at it, and now they're like a backyard grower. They
open a nursery or whatever. I've seen it happened so
many times. So it's good. So less less online lecturing
and uh, and more cultivation of human stewardship and reverence
for Okay, let's fucking move on. Enough enough with the
h I get off my soapbox. There was a spot

(01:12:48):
on the side of the road in New Mexico and
northwestern New Mexico near NAHIZI looks like the geese, and uh,
it's on I don't know if it's on. I don't
think it's on the rest. This spot was not on
the rest. It was a bad lands environment that was
like calcareous MUDs topped by basalt. So and as the

(01:13:10):
MUDs a road, imagine these pyramids of mud, the cake
layering of basalt up top, cracks and falls down and
weather's with them. Remember this is all due to the
Colorado Plateau. Why is there so much weathering and all
these cool geologic structures in the Colorado Plateau because of
that uplift recently uplifted. Remember six million years is recent,

(01:13:30):
and the spans of geologic time right of which humans
are only a fart I'll say again, and this spot was.
You know, I've gotten so good. Not to pat myself
on the back, but when driving past areas and viewing
them from the road and saying, I bet there's some
cool shit growing there, right, Sheriff Woody matt Berger is
really good at this tool. Matt Riala is pretty good

(01:13:53):
at this too long island Dago represents shut out to
him and they you know, you start, do you see
that there's gonna be There's something different, There's something unique.
And to anyone that's viewing these who's not they're viewing
these areas from the road passing by them at eighty
miles per hour, they might not see, especially if they're
not a plant person, it's this is not this looks

(01:14:13):
like there's nothing there. And then you get close, you
start walking around out there and you notice a lot
of cool shit. That's what happened with this bad lands
area north of Nahizi. It was I found Thelipodiopsis area there,
a glaucous blue rubbery leaved mustard with auriculate leaves. Auriculate
just means like an ear ear shaped leaves that were

(01:14:34):
sessile on the chute, no petiole, tiny yellow flowers growing
in a fucking crazy looking area, just crazy barren bad lands,
that mudstone with the basalt on top. And then the
closer I got to look, the more cool shit popped out.
There was Sclerocactus clovery, which is a clover a It

(01:14:54):
looks like clover ae there, which is a rare sclerocactus.
There was a Calichordis, a genus, a wonderful genus, beautiful
fucking genus of lilies that I hadn't seen since I
lived in California. I went through a calichordas phase. I
was obsessed with them. Never tried to grow any because
it just seems it seems hard. You know, you get

(01:15:15):
to mimic that habitat, especially in the Mediterranean climate, and
they're a geophyte, so they've got that bulb in the ground.
Lots of patients required. But I saw Calichordis. I believe
it was Natalia. I a triplex everywhere, which is that
there was a triplex Canessiens, and then there was a
really weird one. I don't know if it was Argentia

(01:15:36):
or what. A triplex is a genus in a spinach family, Amaranth,
they see the Amaranth family, the quin Wa family. The
flowers are not show either, tiny, they're nothing. The leaves
are what's kind of cool to look at, chalky mint green,
interesting scales and tricombs on them, interesting growth habit Most

(01:15:57):
of the species and a triplex are pretty salt hollering.
They could be halophytes. There's a really cool one that
grows in the Mojave desert. What was it? A triplex?
It wasn't a list of folia. What was it hymenolytra
that's a really cool one, really holly leaved looking weird,
blue bastard. Oh, a triplex corragatto. Where the hell was this?

(01:16:19):
This is a bad Lands habitat, so I gotta get
more habitat shots everything. Emory County, Utah Okay. Uh a
triplex Barklayana. Knessen's already said that one. A cantocarpa is
a common a triplex in in west West Texas. A cantocarpa,

(01:16:41):
it's got kind of spiny fruits. I believe. What is
that Latin book the sterns it's got the it's got
descriptions of all the Latin terminologies here krpa. You know
it's fruit or carpal and then a canto. I think
that generally means spiny. Is that what that is? I
don't know? But anyway, so this this was uh. I

(01:17:04):
think there's a triplex Argentia, but really cool pink flowers,
beta lane pigments because it's in Carriophilales, the same order
as is cactus and spinach, which also have that distinct
reddish pink tinge to them, you know, looks different from
the anthocyanins one might encounter and other other orders of angiosperm.
The beta lanes are specific to Caryophilalies, all but two

(01:17:27):
or three families have them. But this spot I could
tell it was a special site. There was Delphinium scaposum too.
There was a lark spur, beautiful purple flowers with that
nectar spur basal rosette of leaves, and then it sends
up escape a solitary inflorescence. And again this is all
on like bad lands, right bad lands, But there was

(01:17:48):
there was some sort of extractive industry there. There was
a loud fucking generator fenced off. I don't know what
they're pulling out of the ground, probably oil and geh,
who the fuck knows. But this area was just it
was special, man, it was cool. And then I found
there was an afalon. It was the which is the
parasite parasitic plant growing beneath Artemisia. What was it grow?

(01:18:11):
What was it growing beneath? I forget it was one
of the ac things. A lot of aflons parasitized members
of Astaaci perennial shrub, members of Astoraci. It was a fasciculatum,
that's right. Yeah, what was it on? Artemesia? Tried and
thought it was on great basin sage brush, of which
I got I got some, uh some leaves because it

(01:18:32):
smells so goddamn good. That was such a cool spot.
Where was it was that east in the easy or north?
I forget? Maybe it was east. I don't know. I
don't know what a fuck this was? What is I'm
all messed up on a locale, but either way, didn't
expect to see that a chlorophylis pink inflorescences, no leaves,
it's a parasite on grete basin sage brush. Really interesting

(01:18:58):
plant community here, you know, you roll up, it's bad lands.
You think you're not going to be there too long.
You get out and there's just there's a ton of
cool shit everywhere, and you just take photos, document it,
upload it to I naturalists, save it, obscure the location,
save it, record it for later. You know. Yeah, it

(01:19:18):
was a fucking nice that wasn't That was one of
my favorite spots. And I knew that that thel of
podiopsis was rare, and I got that. I got it
confirmed by doctor l Shabaz, the brassica guy, the mustard
guy go with I go to him from my weird mustards,
by the rare mustards, Masta silastrom, that rare one from Harlingen,

(01:19:40):
another rare mustard. Little documented, you know, little elements of
the living world slowly getting wiped out by the tumor
of modern money worshiping civilization. You gotta record these things,
record that they occurred there. And then after that the
highlight of the day came from me another roadside spot.
You just I like driving slow. I drive slow. I'm
not a fucking speeder. I drive slow. Oh, I take

(01:20:00):
my time. If you're behind me and you're driving, you
can fucking deal with it. Go around. If you're on
a single lane road, you fucked. I don't have to
tell you I'm gonna drive slow. I'm gonna drive like
a geriatric because I want to look at stuff, right
unless i'm driving in the death cult, then I'm driving normal.
You know. I just I don't want to have to
look at strip malls and all the hideous shit. It
makes me puke. It's bad for my health. But if

(01:20:20):
I'm in beautiful areas, I drive slow. So you know,
this is a Texas thing. I obstruck a lot of
the time. You know. People just have to deal with that.
I don't care, right, they get all upset. You know
they should drive slow too. They got stuff to look at.
There's nice stuff they're driving by. You got somewhere to be,
do we all fucking settle down and you drive slow?
So I stopped. I saw Mirabolis multiflora going off on

(01:20:42):
the side of the road, big four foot spread of
golf ball sized pink flowers. Holy shit, that's nice. I
gotta stop and look at that. This is just after
Ship Rock, New Mexico, which I will say does look
like a ship. It looks more like a castle. It's
it's a weathered and eroded volcanic plug on the Navajo Reservation.
It's a beautiful piece of rock. It's really cool. Look

(01:21:03):
I told my daughter it was a castle. I just
figure why not. You know, She's like, she doesn't know
I'm lying to these No, I'm bullshitting nor Maybe she'll
figure it out a few years. Be mad. At me,
But I just you get bullshit kids. Now, if you
tell them Santa Claus isn't real, it's not too bad.
But you can tell them Ship Rock, New Mexico is
a castle. So I stopped to look at this mirabolous

(01:21:26):
and then saying, like with everything, you stop to look
at one thing, you find ten more cool things. I
found Thelis Sperma's subnewtum. Thelis sperma is an herbaceous, little
weedy quote member of astaraci related to Coreopsis. It's got
those caliculi, those long narrow bracts under the yellow flowers.
It's glabrius, it's rubbery, and there's a bunch of members

(01:21:48):
in Texas. There's a bunch of probably I don't know
where else. It goes throughout the American West. You got
a couple in and it's widespread actually. And so this
was cool though, because it was sufferutestent that had a
woody base. It was like a subshrub Thelis sperma, which
I which blew my mind. It looked like a little

(01:22:09):
bondz eyed Thelis sperma, you know, thickened woody stem, but
then those yellow linear leaves and a cool flower coming out.
It looked fucking dope. I was whoa wow, No talk
about variations on a theme. I was excited to see that.
But the highlight for me came when I looked over
and the sun was starting to go down and I
could see all these awns of grasses. They look like

(01:22:31):
the feathery shits you could call them, that feathery shits
coming off the tops of these grass influorescences. It was
the most beautiful site, right at the golden hour. And
I went and looked over at it, identified the grass
and it was Hespero stipa neo mexicana, which is now
my favorite species of grass. It was fucking this thing

(01:22:55):
is so beautiful. And it's those those feathery shits. The
curly cue feathery shit are the as they're basically the
wind dispersal mechanisms for the seed. And the seed is
hard and sharp and maybe half an inch long. And
I guess people that grow up nearby told me they
used to throw these things at each other. Used to

(01:23:15):
throw these things at each other. You knows it hurts.
I collected a bunch of seed. It hurts if it
stabs you in the thigh, like it was when it
was in my pocket. But these this grass was just intoxicating.
These are the kinds of experiences you want, you know,
to take everything else away. You'll take any shit you got,
they'll take it, but these experiences they can't take. So

(01:23:37):
I was taken with that. And then I saw aria
Coma hymenoides common name Indian rice grass, which is probably
a common name that's been applied to five or six
different grass species throughout the USA. But regardless, and Spooner
had showed that to me when we were on the Reds,
when I was on the Reds with the way where
he lives, and I even then I saw, this is

(01:23:59):
a fucking beautiful gras. Man, this is a gorgeous grass.
The grains are like these little balls with these fuzzy
things on them, and they, you know, have this bifurcating inflorescence,
just branches. It's like a forked inflorescence. And so I
collected some of that for the herbarium to two beautiful
grass species. Man, you want to get into grasses, the

(01:24:21):
Colorado Plateau is the spot to do it. I was impressed.
I was, you know, we sat there for a while
and took it and my daughter was getting pissed. She
wants to go. You know, it's not what she of course,
I understand that kids don't see this stuff is interesting
till they're older, so they have a context for how
much the human world sucks if they're smart. So, but

(01:24:43):
you also got to show them. You got to show them,
you got to introduce them. I tell her all the time.
This is limestone. This used to be the floor of
the ocean. That's basalt that came out of a volcano
a long time ago. It was so hot it was
it was like a liquid. It was like a puddy.
I just keep reinforcing it, you know, keep telling her.
She'll it eventually. That's what worked on me, my mom
telling me that the limestone I was seeing in the

(01:25:05):
quarries by the ship plant of I fifty five in Chicago,
her telling me that those were composed of tiny plankton,
tiny single celled creatures in the bottom of an old ocean. So,
needless to say, that night in New Mexico, I guess
we were Actually we just crossed into Arizona. We just
crossed the state line. Four corners Botany, Navajo, Botany. We

(01:25:27):
have a friend who lives on a Navajo reservation, and
she'd commented, when I post hespero stipa neo Mexicana, she
knew it. She knew it already, she knew it culturally
significant plant. How could it not be so beautiful? Right there?
There was sclero cactus part of a florists nearby, two
which is relatively common, one of the fish hook caced I.

(01:25:50):
The whole landscape was beautiful. We saw a prairie rattlesnake
as well, at least my kid that I didn't see it.
She said she saw the rattle going into the bush,
so she knows. She knows her snakes too, only five,
but she knows. You see that rattle, stay away and uh.
And then I saw it after it already, I saw

(01:26:10):
part of it after after it had already gone into
the whole beautiful prairie rattlesnake. But that area was God damn.
I mean, I just that's why I say, you gotta stop,
And you got to stop at some of these places.
You can't be, you know, driving through I can't drive
long hours at a time. I get fucking bored and

(01:26:31):
there's just too much cool shit to stop, you know,
speaking of which pelos style's that weird parasite grows on
Dalya just west of Junction, Texas. That's that's like a
common stopping point for me. I always stop and see
that one near Exit four, Beautiful Junction, where Native American
Seed used to be. I think they're still there. They

(01:26:52):
got their mainware house in New bron Fels now. But
you know, I'm frequently stopping. If it's an eight hour,
it's gonna take me twelve hours. I'm gonna stop a lot.
I'm gonna be looking at stuff, collecting seed. I got
shit to check up on. So driving through the Four
Corners region I could have spent I could have spent
eight more days in this small area alone. So much

(01:27:14):
cool stuff, especially if it's going off. If it's not
going off, then you're looking at rocks and you're collecting seeds.
But you know, really special place. Spheralsia was there as well.
Spheralcia lepto phyla lepto means thin, fine, slight, and that's
what this looked like. The leaves were thin, narrow, it

(01:27:34):
looked more like a broom. Looked like a broom speralsi
and it was growing with Spherlsia parvifolia. Is it parvafolia
parva fluoris? I forget, but either way it's a you know,
there were two species growing together. Apparently they don't hybridize.
I don't know if they have different ploided levels or what,
but you know, you see leaves like that too. I

(01:27:57):
guess the thing that's cool about when I put stuff
up there, I can always see the distributions. There's a
little map you gotta take with a grain of salt.
It's on Naturalist. You see the most of the distributions
is in the Rocky mountains, and you see a fucking
little red dot showing that it also occurs in Maine.
You know, to take that with a grain of salt.
That was a fuck up. Someone just someone put the

(01:28:17):
wrong thing in there or whatever. You gotta take it
with a grain of salt. But it was. You know,
I'm always looking at distributions, always looking at family because
I want to know how these things species. What caused
this species to evolve, however many millions years ago that
it did, and why is it restricted to the Four
Corners area? What about the way this thing grows means

(01:28:38):
that it does so well in the Colorado Plateau, but
has not reached outside of there. You'd think in a
few million years seeds would have gotten around. This is all,
after all, it's all on the same continent, but something
keeps it confined to the region that it grows in.
Whatever is adaptive in the region that it grows and
may not be adaptive outside of that region. S Fralsia

(01:29:00):
leptophilus frelsia parva folia? Was it parv folio parvifolia parva
I think means little But this was not little leave.
These leaves were kind of big. But that just might
be environmentally phenotypic, you know, maybe they do good rain
rather lush. That's the cool rocks. There was a cali
cordis there too. I didn't know calichordas grew all the

(01:29:23):
way that you know the Four Corners region. I got
a flora of the four Corners. Where the fuck did
I put it? That's a great that's a big tome.
That's a book. I should have brought it. I don't
know why I you know, I collect all these different
floras and the kinds of books just to have I
want to have a library. I don't know why I
was such a dumbass. I didn't bring flora of the
Four Corners with me on this trip. So anyway, Well,
the next day saw us uh going to check out

(01:29:46):
the pedio cactus peeblesanus after peebles really goofy fucking name.
This is when you know you're naming shit after. I
think so many of the pedio cactus and there's nine species.
There's been a radiation in this genus throughout the Colorado
Plateau because it's very cold tolerant. These are small, generally

(01:30:07):
small cacti species, except Pediocactus ssilar eye, which is a
gypsum endemic in southwestern Utah, also goes into Arizona, grows
on really cool gypsum flats, some of which were being
demolished to put in these death cult homes with the lawns.
Good luck, Good luck with that, Good luck having a
lawn on a gypsum desert in southwestern Utah. Fucking morons.

(01:30:31):
Ah God, I feel so bad for him. How much
of those houses cost and they're all gonna be obsolete
in fifty years. But Pediocactus simpsonii is a cool pedio
cactus is probably the most common one. But there's nine
species Nigrispinus Brady I also named after it. Dead white
guy silar I probably also named after it, dead white

(01:30:51):
guy the Spainyi is that a dead French guy? Now
TONI I They're all named after people, which is pretty
fucking annoying, stupid wink Lori Peebles he ain't as is
named after Peebles, who was a botanist. But you know,
in a video, of course, I said he ran a
bondage seatomasachism, bondage, dungeon, bondage and domination dungeon makes it
spice it up a little bit. You know, It's just

(01:31:13):
a little lie. It doesn't matter. It's a common name anyways.
So this was a really cool so I had a point.
I forget where I got it from, but I got it.
It was a long time ago, a GPS point and
driving out there middle of fucking nowhere man, just you know,
dusty hot north of the Grand Canyon. We went to

(01:31:36):
the Grand Canyon too, which was cool. I wanted to
show my daughter that got to see Perridley, Congesta and
fend Lorella, which is what was this speed? I always
forgot I hadn't seen I saw fend Lorella in uh
where did I see this? Ooh same gene. Okay, yeah,
I saw fend Lorella lazio pedla on gypsum in Nuevo

(01:31:56):
Leone and it had a remarkable growth, have a really
cool It wasn't in flower the first time I saw
it in twenty nineteen. I went back to nuwaval aone
to these gypsum exposures and saw it in flower in
April of twenty two. But you know, the leaves just
white pubestans on the underside, white undersides to these lancelate leaves,
and they're cob kind of like oblong leaves. Excuse me,

(01:32:21):
and uh, little shrub growing out of a gypsum rock wall.
You know, the habitat's as interesting as the plant. The
fact that's growing out of what looks like a giant
salt lick made it all the more interesting to me.
Took me a while to I positively identify it, but yeah, anyway,

(01:32:42):
got it, And yeah, man, fend Lorella lasi opedola. So
fend Lorella lasi opedla on gypsum in the Wavo laone.
That's a habitat you go to where everything you better
be taking pictures of everything, because everything you better be
documenting everything, because that's a fucking really remarkable that those
gyps and exposures in the way to lay on tons

(01:33:03):
of endemics. You want to build a picture of what
the plant community looks like. You want to have a
species list, so like on Inina, you can later go
in with a draw a polygon around it and get
a print out or a list of everything that grows there.
That's what I like doing. I like getting pictures of
community assemblages, plant community assemblages. I want to know all
this shit there. They're all important parts of the living machine,

(01:33:26):
all important cogs. Same thing we're doing at Thorn Scrub Sanctuary, everything,
even the plants that don't really carry much for like
some of the grass there's no fence. Some of the
invasives too, and document those. Because buffalo grass is spreading,
it's getting worse. We're in the middle of the what
will be a very long and eventual takeover of buffalo grass.
So just because it's not there yet doesn't mean it's

(01:33:48):
not going to be there in ten years. It's going
to get worse. The buffalo grass is getting worse if
the weed wack and spray the buffalo actually but Anyway,
we tried using cows and they ate a lot of
buffalo grass, but then it just comes back because it's
adapted to megafauna browsing on it where it's native to Africa.
And then they cows just trampled all the other shit too,

(01:34:09):
So you know, fuck that, We're not We're done with
the cows. The cows are doing damage out there. They trample.
It's the problem with with cattle. It's all all these
all these people, all these dudes especially, it's always these
fucking men, no offense to them in Texas and other
Rocky Mountain rock some of some of the Rocky Mountain
states who were all, oh the benefits of grazing, you
need the grat with none of the nuance. Okay, it's

(01:34:29):
not just about bringing cows in there. It's these plants
evolved with a different animal, with bison and other other uh,
other browsing animals. Cows are dumber and often occurring denser
populations that don't move, and they destroy, they trample. It's
just a dumber animal. You know, they've been bred to
beat them like you know, American consumers, same thing. So anyway,

(01:34:51):
fend Lorella utah insis was growing out of a limestone
rock wall in the Grand Canyon. Epic fucking scenery. We
were there at the uh what's it called Bright Angel
Broken Angel Point, north rim of the Grand Canyon. And
then of course Fendlerella lazio pedola one I just told
you about. So there's two two species in the genus uh,

(01:35:16):
not to be confused with fendleerra, right, which is uh,
these are the families hydrangeac. They're in the hydrange of family,
you know, but they got boy, I tell you what,
they're fucking they're fucking cool plants. How many species in
fend Lorella let's see this. I think it's just those two.
Is it just the two? Oh? No, fend Lorella mexicana,

(01:35:38):
lazy Opedola corret dorana and Eutaensis from Corretto. Are there
any pictures? Oh yeah, there's some pictures of fend Lorella correttorana.
That's a fucking cool one. Again, variations on a theme.
How did this this genus specie? Okay, so I saw this,
these tiny white five pedal flowers, trying to document everything

(01:35:58):
out there, saw some cool pence theemen north rim of
the Grand Canyon, all with you know, white fur and
Juniperus around it. But these cool rockout croppings, I mean,
you know, that's where the good stuff is. Saw a
lot of good stuff there. Pence them in barbadis symphoric

(01:36:19):
Carpus rotundufolius, which is the honeysuckle family, Percius things Buriana
Rose family roseesy big white flowers. These are all great
fucking plants to put in a yard if you live
in the high desert, especially in the Four Corners region.
Philadelphus Microphilus holoduscus, another Rose family member rose se ocean spray.

(01:36:40):
They call it Garia flavesceens opposite leaves Glaucus and Glabrius
Arctostaphalos pungens, which there's supposed to be a disjunct population
that Davis Mountains. Good luck getting in there. I just
tried to get in there, and someone had reached out
to someone in Nature Conservancy for me, and so I
reached out them too, and he sounded nice. He sounded
like he was gonna have me out there. I reached
out to him, and the email I got today was

(01:37:01):
from someone who seemed about as fun to talk to
as a sidewall heater, like you know, like one of
the like one hundred and thirty pounds steel, you know,
boiler boiler fed sidewall heaters. And they told me I
can't get in for three It takes I have to
apply for a permit just to fucking go there to
document fungal diversity after the recent reigns, and then I've

(01:37:23):
got to fill out this permit and then wait three months.
And by the way, say we don't always allow. It's
not a guarantee that you're gonna be allowed. Just I
just want to go in and take pictures of fungie
and maybe bring allan. I'll chloroform him if I have to,
you know, he says he's got obligations. I'll chloroform is asked,
throw him in the car. It'll be like weekend that
Bernie's will have a good time. You know, he'll wake

(01:37:43):
up out of the color. How long does chloroform last?
I don't know. You ever done an ether rag over
someone to kidnap him. I'm not sure. I probably wouldn't
even need to do that. It's just funny. I love
Alan Rockfeller, one of my best friends. So you know,
we'll go out there. We're gonna see what's growing in
the Davis Mountains in this sky island of the Chihuahua Desertment,
the fungal diversity there. It's all private lands, so you know,
people are disconnected from it. This is the Texas feudalism.

(01:38:06):
Like medieval feudalism. You have no access to the land
around you because it's quote owned by someone. But we're
still going to go out there. We're going to document
all the funky maybe collect some tissue samples for DNA sequencing.
You know, see what's there. Compare the its gene region
of the species we encounter with the its gene region

(01:38:27):
of similar species all over North America, you know, and
see if how they line up. And I just want
to document. We'll obscure all the locations, but I just
want to document. There's a lot of cool micorhizoal plants there,
some of the oaks, some of the madrones, right ectomycorrhizol

(01:38:47):
that will produce cool fruiting bodies of mushrooms. There's probably
some cool saparotrophs that specialize on decomposing the material, the
leaf material of some of those plants. It's it's a
very worthy play. Would be a cool spot to do
a fungal diversity survey. But you can't go in there
because you have to apply for a permit wait three months,
at which that point that's not the rainy season anymore.

(01:39:09):
So what's the fucking point of trying to go there
to do fungi? Right? Just the fucking nightmare? I got it.
I got this email, and I was just I was
just kind of a smart ass in the response. I
was like, this is like a trip to the DMV.
Don't worry about it, forget about it. We just want
to go. If we can't just go, show you our
show you our identification whatever. Get into this this, buy
the book. Shit, are you fucking kidding me? This is brutal.

(01:39:31):
This is like the kind of world I want to avoid.
And the person who wrote us back didn't seem too
fun either. Maybe I'm wrong, you know, you never know
who's who's who can get loose, but they didn't seem
very fun. They seemed like kind of a bummer, kind
of a drag, right, Like if you had to go
on a road trip with them, it would just it'd
be like taking a fucking xanax the whole time. That's

(01:39:52):
what it would feel like. They're just a downer. They're
like a benzo in human form. Bummer. So uh, anyway,
who can get me into the Davis Mountains. Somebody had
reached out to me. Who's got a land, got a
parcel near there? We just want to document some they're
all the cool oaks, the Mexican oaks. They're in Arizona.

(01:40:14):
And then they got this little sky island in West
Texas where they grow. And if no one's documenting the fungi,
we just want to go document the fungi. What a
fucking nightmare Texas predicament. Anyway, But I'm alanchire Utah instance
Utah service Berry. God, there was so much good stuff
around here, you know. And we're still in the north

(01:40:36):
rim of the Grand Canyon, mind you. We went there
and the next day we went to go see pedio cactus.
Now the genus pedio cactus. Is there a paper on
the diversification and radiation adaptive radiation of the genus pedio Cactus,
whereby what might be a larger population of a single
species gets broken up through climatic change, and so you know,

(01:41:01):
it was a large distribution. The climate shifts gets drier
at lower elevations or otherwise whatever these these popular this
large population gets broken up into isolated many populations, which
then speciate over however, many million years, and turn into
new species. All the ones I just read you that
were named after dead honkys. What is it? Brady, Brady, Seiler, Peebles, Winkler, Winkler,

(01:41:25):
Nelton Knowlton. I want to be commemorated and have a
plant named after me. But anyway, it's a pretty interesting
phenomenon to look into. Nine species of pediocactus. We were
going for peebles anus. I've seen silar eye before, Winkler eye,
and SIMPSONII, so this I knew. This pediocact is having

(01:41:48):
a hard time. It's been a drought. The elevation I
think was it five thousand feet. I got a video
on it. It'll be out next week if I can
get my shit together. Tiny fucking things. Marble sized golf
pall side is an old growth plant growing in a
limestone hills. The whole drive out there is this red sandstone.
You get to the limestone that's where they are and

(01:42:09):
they're tagged. The first one I found I only found
because it had been tagged. So this was being monitored
at some point the individual that the tag was for
was dead. This plant had died, but the body was
still there, so it must have been a recent death
last year or so. And then we were looking and uh,

(01:42:30):
pre have found another couple individuals on the other hill,
and uh and then more on the other hill, and
you know, they started to kind of reappear, but they
hide really well. This is a phenomenal species, really cool.
I love cryptic cacti. I love cryptic plants. Lots of

(01:42:51):
a kindo serious around there too. What's what a kind
of serious species was the coccinnies. I don't know, I
don't know, but it was. It was good looking, it
was all good life. And I was just happy to
document this thing. And this is something that those European collectors,
those creepy nerds that come poach stuff, might have trouble
growing because it's just so hard to recreate that kind

(01:43:14):
of environment, the high desert of northern Arizona, the geologic substrate.
This thing probably rots very easily. Once again, the best
thing to do is conserve the habitats, express reverence and
love for the habitat, and make sure it's protected, like
nothing is in an area in an era when politicians

(01:43:35):
are trying to sell off public land. I put something
on the Facebook page. Facebook is mostly a toilet to
It's really funny. You just watch these miserable, fucking people.
There's a lot of really lovely people who are doing okay,
you can tell mentally at least. But every ten comments
there's like a comment by someone who's you know, emotionally
mentally disturbed. No shade to them. Aren't so many of
us in this day and age, right, especially with social

(01:43:58):
media toxicity and becoming a pone of the algorithm. And
I put up that something about how Republicans are trying
to sell off public lands, which they've been trying to
do since the eighties, and uh, there were only like two,
you know, paranoid racist Grandpa comments. Maybe they're not racist,
maybe they're just fucking delusional Q and on nuts. I
don't know, but I try to make it not politically.

(01:44:20):
I want to recruit those people into my cult. They
want to get them away from the Fox News paranoia
and get them into my cult. But there were still
one or two, So I just go through and I
delete the comments. I don't believe in giving people a
voice here. This is at my fucking page is a dictatorship.
You say stupid shit, you get, destroy you get. I'll
either keep it up and make a smart ass reply

(01:44:41):
to you that hopefully gets the point across, or I'll
just remove the comment altogether and restrict you, and then
you can just have a conversation with yourself like a
good boy, like a five year old, you know, just
throwing a tantrum in a rubber room where he thinks,
you know, people are listening, but totally unaware that no
one's paying attention to them. This is which is what
you have to do with social media, especially with Americans.

(01:45:03):
They just say horrible throwing fits. You know, there's lots
of angry, lonely people out there. It's a terrible feeling. Well,
we're all prone to that, though. Who hasn't left the
shitty comment and gotten into a spat with someone. I
do it a little bit less now than I used to,
but this is definitely a symptom of the modern day.
It's a modern day sickness. Facebook especially is really just horrible,

(01:45:27):
just shit posting. It seems to be a venue where
there's just far more miserable people comment things. So there
were only two that went on some rant about, oh,
the Republicans that are doing the Democrats, but they're both
like listen, but he both parties are owned by the oligarchs.
I'm talking the Republicans are the one pushing this public
land bill. Though it's not it's not mince words, you know,

(01:45:49):
just because you've been duped to think that they care
about you. It doesn't mean that I'm somehow for the
Democrats or anything, you know, I just uh whatever, you
settle down anyway. So this Pediocactu was fucking really cool
to It's one of those places where you just want
to spend time. You're in the middle of nowhere, which

(01:46:10):
is also very pleasant. You want to just spend time
there and and the limestone uplift. Again, the geology is
always important, so I'm always paying attention to lithology and age.
I try to figure out what it is, which you
can normally do. Once you become familiar with geology, which
everybody should look up the three basic rock types, understand
what they are, how they form. To understand how they form,

(01:46:33):
it becomes easier to identify them, to picture how they
formed when you're sitting there looking at them, and then
I always try to look for age. You know, how
old is this rock? I forget, I forget the age
in this case of the pedio kick, this peeblesenus. But
god damn, we have a very special, very special site.

(01:46:57):
And that morning on the trip out there, I went
to that tourist spot. Where is it? It's near Page
where is it? It's like a tourist spot, you know,
the Horseshoe Bend. I don't know if I think it's
like east end of the Grand Can. You've probably seen.
It's a famous piece of motel art. It's very popular
in the motels. They put like a photoshopped image of
this bend in the Colorado River. And the river looked

(01:47:20):
filthy by the way. It was very low and it
was very ridden with algae, probably due to all the
cowshit and other nitrates flowing into it from ranching. But
we went there was clogged with tourists. You know, it
was great, the great time. You know, there's shit ton
of people. Whatever the fuck. I had to take my
daughter there, and then I just wanted to see it

(01:47:41):
too and document it. And boy, oh boy, were there
are a bunch of fucking cool plants growing there. Agave
utaisis kaiba bens. This grows beneath the I caught it
growing out of the canyon rock wall three hundred feet
above the river below. I got this nice lens I
using a nikon. I used Nikon D seven D. Shout
out to the Nikon D seventy five hundred. It's a

(01:48:03):
beginner DSLR that's got its own built in flesh, which
I need because I'm always shooting at low at a
high aperture, a small hole high aperture to let in
less light, get better depth of field. So shout out
to the D seventy five hundred. But I got this
nice lens so I could see what this monocot, this
rosette forming monocot was growing beneath the viewing platform that

(01:48:27):
all these tourists are, you know, mobbing up to go
take pictures of the Shiftfield River and gave U times.
It's a plant I'm familiar with from the Clark Mountains
of Nevada, the Limestone areas of eastern southeastern California, the
Limestone deserts. There's Hasparo Yucca New Berriey too that I

(01:48:49):
want to see that grows in the North rim of
the Grand Canyon and Hespero Yucca whipleyi is the far
more common California species. Not quite a yucca, it's monocar,
but it forms these beautiful rosettes, very stabby, very beautiful inflorescences,
torched like inflorescences when it plooms. But this area in

(01:49:10):
their horseshoe ben you pay ten bucks, they let you in.
There was a scrub oak everywhere, Quircus welschii, kind of
analogous to Quirkus havardii, which is the sand shrub oak
that forms these dense colonies. It only gets like eighteen
inches two feet tall, but it'll have multiple stems in
the colonies, probably centuries old, hundreds of years old. Corcus

(01:49:31):
welschii was all throughout this area, you know, growing with
Ariagonum corumbosum, which is like a shrub buckwheat, with these zigzag,
divaricating branches that form this little cage above the leaves.
And that's probably perhaps why those zigzag branches evolve. They
form a little cage two inches above the rest of

(01:49:53):
the leaves that prevent herbivores or make it a little
bit harder for them to actually get the the tender
leaf tissue. But ARIAGONM. Cormbosum can get probably I don't
know what four feet Diane, some of these four feet wide.
There are so many cool plants there, uh coleogny ramisissima,

(01:50:15):
which is again the I think this is the common
name is blackbrush, not to be confused with our vicelli
a rigid doula. This South Texas blackbrush ari agon corumbosum.
Holy shit, what is the what is the what's the range?
What's the distribution on this guy? So ari Agonum corumbosum
because it produces a korm co o r y mb

(01:50:38):
is a type of inflorescence. It's an inflorescence structure. So
this this you know, tourist spot. I mean, that's kind
of why I wanted to go there was you know,
I know it's going to be obnoxial all the tourists.
You gotta walk down there. Everyone's sweating like it. You know,
the people probably drop on this trail because it's a
good quarter to a half mile walk to this spot.
It's the Kaibab Plateau. It's hot as fuck. There's probably

(01:50:58):
people dropping. How often do people you know from heat
exhaustion when they're walking the Horseshoe Bend to go see
the Motel photo where the famous Motel photo was taken.
I don't know, but there's a lot of cool fucking
plants there. Everything's low growing, there's pens them and palmerai.
There was a lot of stuff I didn't take photos
of because I'm, you know, all too familiar with the

(01:51:18):
plants already. But there's a lot of good stuff there.
Quirkus welschei and Tekilia laddi or latti or bradjian ace.
The hispit hairs that will look almost looked like one
of those little stiff you know, matted floxes perennial floxes
with the woody stem that those were two great ones.
There were two very notable ones. And then that area.

(01:51:38):
Who's someone's got to grow that Ariagonum funck. What if
I look the bush ariagonoms you get out west, the
bush buckwheats are the coolest. Ariogonum giganteum from the Channel
Islands was a plant I miss. That was a great
plant for gorilla gardening in Oakland because you could plant
it in the winter and it's just it sits like
a champ through those fucking long dry summers and then

(01:51:58):
gets big as hell fucking dope blue leaves, big blue
fuzzy leaves, big krems, compound or can maybe the compound dumbles,
compound dumbles of these tiny white flowers that could you know?
The humble itself can get upwards to twelve inches across,
if not more twenty four inches across in some cases.
The ariogonums, the buckwheats. Wish we got more in Texas

(01:52:21):
and I'm black. Just posted a cool areagonom from Tennessee.
A rare one gets nine fucking feet tall, giant nine
foot tall buckwheat? What is it? Ariagonam HARPERII? Where's where's
that grow? Where's ariagonam harpriy go? It's got a restricted distribution.
Grows the east of Nashville. It's like two hours east

(01:52:42):
of Nashville. Why is it so restricted? Areagonams do do
best the west where it's dryer. And then there's some
what is that is that that's in Alabama? There's some
in Alabama too? Is that where that is? I can't
tell what it is? What a shit out? Are restricted?
There's a county in Alabama grows and can't see it
their muscle shoals. Where the shit at? Where am I? Oh?

(01:53:06):
Maybe that's I don't know where it is. I think
it's Alabama. But yeah, Arie Agenham Harper, I after Harper?
Who was Harper? Harper? Was it the guy that stuck?
He started the itt Technical Institute, he started all he
did a craft school. What was his name? No? He
ran to the dirty bookstore. Harper ran the dirty bookstore

(01:53:26):
that used to be located in Schomberg before they put
them all in there. There was a lot of dirty
bookstores over there in in uh Schamberg. Why the fuck
does it have? Are those my photos? Why are my
photos popping up under it? No? Maybe they're not. Huh
oh shit, hold on, anyway, that's two hours. I'm gonna
cut it there. Maybe we'll do another one here shortly.

(01:53:49):
I got to be in Austin tomorrowady give a presentation.
I guess it's already sold out. Uh it's I think
it's the tenants's living like fifty. I wanted to sell
some stuff, but there's only fifty heads there. I don't
know if it's gonna make sense that I forget where
it is. Then I got another thing in Austin at
the Elizabeth Nay Museum on the twenty eighth, I'll be there.
Then we're doing our Costa Rica thing in July. Then

(01:54:13):
I'll be with Alan Rockefeller at the Cloudcroft, New Mexico,
New Mexico Mycological Society gathering July thirty first to like
what is it August second or third? I don't know, uh.
And so those are the events we got going on now.
I think there's an Ecuador trip that Alan and Mandy
are planning for November, so maybe you can get in

(01:54:34):
on that. I don't know, But if you want to,
there's Miyagi Labs. If you want to take a class,
learn some plant that identification Miagi Labs. Search for on Google,
on the Google on the Oracle, search for Miyagi Labs
Crime pays and you'll get hopefully you'll get the Miyagi

(01:54:54):
Labs pop up. It's me Miagi Labs m I Y
A G I. And they got courses for plant identification,
taxonomy and then natural selection that all those all the
fun shit. If you want to better your understanding of those,
or if you have no concept of them at all,
want to learn some stuff, those are classes. I don't

(01:55:16):
I don't know. What they're charging. I think they I
don't think it's too much. I think it's reasonable. But
definitely check that out because I saw what they're doing,
and they approached me about it, and they sent me
some samples of some of their lessons and I was
pretty influenced. It's good shit, so anyway, and then there's
also lectures from last year around October November on some

(01:55:38):
of these concepts as well. So that's all I got. Hopefully,
hopefully you got some out of that podcast. There's a
whole bunch more shit to talk about in the four
Corners region, but I'll save it for the next podcast.
It's all I gotta have a grection. They go pick
you up by ripping off the brim of my hat.

(01:56:03):
It's your ris cold today.

Speaker 1 (01:56:07):
And here I am walking down sixty six.

Speaker 3 (01:56:11):
Wish she hadn't done me that way, Steeping under the
table in a root side for a man could wake
up dead, but it's yours, seems warning many steeping in
ocking sizement.

Speaker 1 (01:56:31):
Here's anybody going the sands RUFFI side soona he face
is alright, his arm the side and gonna get I ever,
non quen whipping down the neck of my shirt like

(01:57:00):
I ain't gotten nothing, No, but I'd rather fight to
end and rain than BRD. I've been fighting at home
con to come the.

Speaker 2 (01:57:13):
Trunk with the US map.

Speaker 1 (01:57:16):
Now people writing letters back home.

Speaker 3 (01:57:20):
Argill probably want me back.

Speaker 1 (01:57:24):
Ter still need just that, don't There's anybody.

Speaker 2 (01:57:29):
Going to say.

Speaker 1 (01:57:32):
I'll be a Sadrisolt any places alright is long desire

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