Four Corners Botany

<v Speaker 1>Home, you hand paint me, powder, you act proud.
<v Speaker 2>I feel like the growthing really helps. It does help
<v Speaker 2>set the mode verbal colonic.
<v Speaker 1>You my girl, and I'm your fella. Dressing yellow.
<v Speaker 2>I just confused someone from the last podcast. It's really
<v Speaker 2>they didn't understand what's going on. I was talking over something.
<v Speaker 2>They didn't understand it. I feel like I threw them off.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if they were old or what. No
<v Speaker 2>offense to the cheriatrice. That's really ages. Actually say that
<v Speaker 2>you be dapping? I bellowed. How many arsonists did this
<v Speaker 2>song inspire? You need somebody, somebody into Chicago area of
<v Speaker 2>forest reserves needs to set the woods on fire over there.
<v Speaker 2>We're gonna do that. We're gonna have a volunteer fire
<v Speaker 2>day where a fire just accidentally get out of control
<v Speaker 2>and burned all the buckthorn, all the invasives in the understory.
<v Speaker 2>Because those forests, you know a lot of these forest
<v Speaker 2>reserves in Chicago, they look like shit right there, and
<v Speaker 2>they're masticating now, they're chewing up all the underbrush. But
<v Speaker 2>that doesn't recreate fire. It's not the same thing, right,
<v Speaker 2>and it doesn't do anything for the ticks and the
<v Speaker 2>ticks are bad in the Chicago area forest reserves. So
<v Speaker 2>this song should be about bringing fire back to eastern
<v Speaker 2>North America, everywhere east of the hundredth meridian. You gotta
<v Speaker 2>set the woods on fire, Set the woods on fire,
<v Speaker 2>set the grasslands on fire. Do it at the right
<v Speaker 2>time of year. Maybe get some pointers from Kyle from
<v Speaker 2>Native Habitat Project. What is this? This is? We're having
<v Speaker 2>glitches with the fucking recording is a pain in the ass. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>we'll turn this down. Welcome to another episode of the
<v Speaker 2>Crime Pace A Bonding Doesn't Podcast. It's been two weeks
<v Speaker 2>since I record. I'm sorry. I've been busy as hell.
<v Speaker 2>There's never enough time for anything. I just got back
<v Speaker 2>home yesterday. I didn't sleep the night before. I got
<v Speaker 2>maybe four hours of sleep, and then I was too frazzled,
<v Speaker 2>too frazzled to do anything so to do like record,
<v Speaker 2>so I didn't get it done. But I just got
<v Speaker 2>back from three weeks in the Colorado Plateau, and god fuck,
<v Speaker 2>we had a great time, man. There was so much
<v Speaker 2>good stuff there, the Colorado Plateau, the crustal uplift. What
<v Speaker 2>caused it? Huh, Well, I'll tell you what it started.
<v Speaker 2>Roughly six million years ago. It's when a lot of
<v Speaker 2>it really happened. But that same uplift thought to have
<v Speaker 2>been caused by you know, mantle buoyancy. All right, it's brilliant,
<v Speaker 2>it's it's solid, solid rock, but it's uh, it's less dense,
<v Speaker 2>it's a little ductile. Its swelled upward due to thermal
<v Speaker 2>expansion lifting the overlying crust. At least that's the comm
<v Speaker 2>that's the theory right now. I don't know. Now, I'm
<v Speaker 2>sure there's people. This is all just a theory, so
<v Speaker 2>there might be you know, there might be other reasons too.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. Everything gets blamed on the Farolne plate,
<v Speaker 2>but it seems it's a little late. There's a little
<v Speaker 2>recent for the Ferrollon plate. That flat slab subduction, you know,
<v Speaker 2>subducting a subducting plate at a shallow angle, like a
<v Speaker 2>shovel going in at a horizontal angle to kill a lawn,
<v Speaker 2>to uproot a lawn. That would be an example of
<v Speaker 2>flat slab subduction versus if it was diving deep, like
<v Speaker 2>if you're trying to dig a hole in someone's lawn
<v Speaker 2>to plant something or to take a shit. If you're
<v Speaker 2>at a golf course, right, you're trying to tear up
<v Speaker 2>the green to take a dump in it, for instance.
<v Speaker 2>Not that I've ever done that, or I would, I would.
<v Speaker 2>I'm I'm not advocating that entirely, at least not legally,
<v Speaker 2>at least not on the record. But if you were
<v Speaker 2>digging a hole to like shit on a golf course,
<v Speaker 2>that would be you would dig a deep that would
<v Speaker 2>be a normal subduction zone. That shovel would be going
<v Speaker 2>in an angle similar to a normal subduction zone. But
<v Speaker 2>if you're uprooting the lawn, it would be more akin
<v Speaker 2>to the angle of flat slab subduction, which I really
<v Speaker 2>suggest you should google that, all right. You should use
<v Speaker 2>the AI actually to use deep Seek, the Chinese one
<v Speaker 2>that pissed every off, all the Americans. I got some
<v Speaker 2>friends that are really anti AI, And again, I can't
<v Speaker 2>stand it. It's like, man, you're not it's pissing in
<v Speaker 2>the ocean and using AI to teach yourself stuff versus
<v Speaker 2>like create you know, photos of dogs and fucking you
<v Speaker 2>know army uniforms parachuting out of planes. That's uh, that's
<v Speaker 2>a different use of AI. That's frivolous. Well, I guess
<v Speaker 2>I could see the point in that too. But using
<v Speaker 2>AI to search things quickly and you know, read research
<v Speaker 2>papers and get you information that would take you forty
<v Speaker 2>five minutes to get yourself had you been, you know,
<v Speaker 2>just doing a search on Google scholar, it's not so
<v Speaker 2>bad to shut up. When everybody settled down. Everyone likes
<v Speaker 2>to shame. I had people shaming me for picking saguaro
<v Speaker 2>fruits online. I knit that in a button. Of course.
<v Speaker 2>It was always the Caucasians, no offense, but lecturing progressive Caucasians.
<v Speaker 2>I don't take that stuff anymore.
<v Speaker 1>Man.
<v Speaker 2>That's part of the reason I left California. I can't
<v Speaker 2>handle that shit. It's part of the reason we have
<v Speaker 2>Trump in office now too. And you know, the center
<v Speaker 2>Republicans are not going to sell all your public lands.
<v Speaker 2>So you know, the the duping of the working class
<v Speaker 2>was entirely possible. How by how fucking obnoxious the American
<v Speaker 2>left got. And I'll stick to my guns on that one,
<v Speaker 2>you know, figuratively and literally. It was really, really bad.
<v Speaker 2>It was a bat I'm actually a no, no, no,
<v Speaker 2>I'm not doing that. Shut up. I thought I filtered
<v Speaker 2>you guys out right. It's just the cacophony of stupidity
<v Speaker 2>from both sides, speaking of which I hope everyone's excited
<v Speaker 2>about World War three. We'll just go and get the
<v Speaker 2>positive stuff out of the way first, the philosophical ranting.
<v Speaker 2>So I ran in Israel, not in Yahoo like a
<v Speaker 2>rabbit dog wants to start World War three. Uh, this
<v Speaker 2>is all just the repeat of Iraq. This is all
<v Speaker 2>just a repeat of the mass weapons of mass destruction
<v Speaker 2>that aren't there. I feel bad, especially for people in
<v Speaker 2>Iran too, because they know they got a shitty government,
<v Speaker 2>they know it sucks, and now they got to deal
<v Speaker 2>with Israeli bombs, you know, lighting stuff up. It's just
<v Speaker 2>this is, you know, for the whole the human condition
<v Speaker 2>right now. It's the semi conscious species of bipedal primate
<v Speaker 2>that thinks it's so much more advanced than it is.
<v Speaker 2>It's so sad, you know, here we are though. Uh,
<v Speaker 2>it doesn't need to be like this, but of course,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I guess it's gonna be. Let's hope we're
<v Speaker 2>still around in a few years. I don't know. That's said.
<v Speaker 2>Let's get back to talking about the Colorado Plateau. So
<v Speaker 2>you got this uplift and the fact that there's been
<v Speaker 2>this buoyancy. This this lifting of the crust, the crusty crust,
<v Speaker 2>that's why you got all this cool erosion happening. That's
<v Speaker 2>why you have all these abuse. That's why you have
<v Speaker 2>Monument Valley. That's why you've got ship Rock, New Mexico.
<v Speaker 2>Intense erosion as it lifts up in weathers very easily.
<v Speaker 2>And boy, I'll tell you it are some really interesting
<v Speaker 2>plants there, the same way that the Edwards Plateau of
<v Speaker 2>Texas has so many endemic plants, so many plants that
<v Speaker 2>only grow on the Edwards Plateau, right, because you go
<v Speaker 2>too far. You go to the west, you got Chihuahua desert.
<v Speaker 2>It's dry as hell. You go to the right, you
<v Speaker 2>go to the east. Excuse me, right, like I'm looking
<v Speaker 2>at them map. You go to the right, you go
<v Speaker 2>to the east, and it gets more humid, more music.
<v Speaker 2>And the adaptations that allow something to thrive on the
<v Speaker 2>thin soil limestone of the Edwards Plateau, those are not
<v Speaker 2>adaptations that are going to be beneficial in a black
<v Speaker 2>land prairie or further east where it's more humid. And
<v Speaker 2>so got a lot of interesting stuff, Vernonia, lindheimra Uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the Madrones, northern expansion of the Madrones went
<v Speaker 2>to Guadalupe Mountains Park. We just went in the visitors center.
<v Speaker 2>I had to use the bathroom, and then my kid
<v Speaker 2>demanded that I buy her something, which I'm saying, no,
<v Speaker 2>no more of this shit. I say, no, no more.
<v Speaker 2>But I bought her a ring a little ring tail plushy.
<v Speaker 2>You know that she'll lose in six months. But all
<v Speaker 2>this on the Colorado Play, to all this uplift is
<v Speaker 2>what has created this wonderful geology, these really cool geologic features.
<v Speaker 2>And boy, I'll tell you man once that hot air
<v Speaker 2>when it's dry is nothing compared to hot air when
<v Speaker 2>it's humid. I was. We came down through Tucson, stayed
<v Speaker 2>with Leo for a little while. I swam with Sonoran
<v Speaker 2>desert toads and his chlorinated swimming pool, which really confused me.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't know amphibians could take chlorine. I guess they
<v Speaker 2>can if it's low dose and it's not that long.
<v Speaker 2>There were red spotted toads in Sonoran desert toads, and
<v Speaker 2>I guess they lay tadpoles in there, but you know,
<v Speaker 2>and he goes in and rescues the tadpoles and put
<v Speaker 2>them in an actual thing of water afterwards, you know,
<v Speaker 2>of non chlorinated water. But they're swimming in this fucking pool.
<v Speaker 2>I said, I didn't know they could do that. That
<v Speaker 2>was something else, you know. It's nice. And they go
<v Speaker 2>deep down too. They could swim like eight feet down.
<v Speaker 2>So I was swimming with the toads and then I
<v Speaker 2>picked one up and it fucking hated it, And then
<v Speaker 2>I felt bad. I just wanted to look at it.
<v Speaker 2>You know, they freak out, so I said. And then
<v Speaker 2>I let him chill on my shoulder for a while
<v Speaker 2>because I think he tired himself out. And I was
<v Speaker 2>just treading water and there was a little sonor and
<v Speaker 2>as it went out, literally he was the size of
<v Speaker 2>a fucking grapefruit hanging out on my shoulder. And then
<v Speaker 2>I let him go. He climbed back up, climbed out
<v Speaker 2>of the pool. There's like a waterfall feature there. It's
<v Speaker 2>not Leo's house. This is a little luxury. This is
<v Speaker 2>a little plush, you know, for but the waterfall has
<v Speaker 2>since falling into disrepair. But it's a great habitat for
<v Speaker 2>red spotted toads and Sonoran toads. So if I lived there, man,
<v Speaker 2>I would be digging ponds and trying to create as
<v Speaker 2>much habitat as possible for those little fuckers, because they
<v Speaker 2>make a nice sound at night. It's a nice little
<v Speaker 2>wave machine sound. Doesn't sound like waves, it sounds like frogs,
<v Speaker 2>but it's still thinking. You know, you're going for the ambiance.
<v Speaker 2>And then the fucking toads are incredible, you know, the
<v Speaker 2>lovely toads. Such beauty. They're beautiful animals too. They are
<v Speaker 2>like there's wisdom in those eyes when you look at them.
<v Speaker 2>That's the one that people harvest for d MT. They
<v Speaker 2>get a little they don't kill it toad, they get,
<v Speaker 2>They hit the little gland, the venom gland. Then they
<v Speaker 2>smoke the d MT stuff. They go into a vortex
<v Speaker 2>for five minutes, lose their mind. Maybe die doesn't sound
<v Speaker 2>like my cup of tea, but that's what they do.
<v Speaker 2>That the chemicals produced and the plenty of toads produce
<v Speaker 2>really you know, nasty stuff, man, You know they got
<v Speaker 2>nasty stuff in those skins. But uh, I just like
<v Speaker 2>him because they're they're cool animals. Saw a little baby
<v Speaker 2>rattlesnake in his yard to a really feisty little fucker.
<v Speaker 2>I felt bad for him. You know, he was scared,
<v Speaker 2>but I almost stepped on him. He was sprawled out
<v Speaker 2>at dusk when I was picking soarow fruits. Anyway, that
<v Speaker 2>was the thing that drove me. Worrow fruit is some
<v Speaker 2>of the most delicious fruit I've ever tasted. And it's
<v Speaker 2>crazy and it's it's really good when it's dry. The
<v Speaker 2>fruit split open on the cac this right about and
<v Speaker 2>not right about in June, and then they fry in
<v Speaker 2>the sun and they it's like a raspberry fig It's
<v Speaker 2>what it tastes like. It's incredible. And of course these
<v Speaker 2>are sacred plants to the autumn that I always I
<v Speaker 2>feel like I always mispronounced it, even though I got
<v Speaker 2>friends in the tribe by the fucking head of the
<v Speaker 2>uh the president of the reservation, wonderful man that I know,
<v Speaker 2>who's got massive colonies of payotes in his yard. They
<v Speaker 2>do great in Tucson, Arizona, by the way, They've been
<v Speaker 2>there for thirty years, these ones he planted. Wonderful man,
<v Speaker 2>really nice guy. But I always pronounced it. Is it
<v Speaker 2>autumn autum? I don't I don't know. I always fuck
<v Speaker 2>it up. I feel bad.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 2>It's like when people miss. You know, they mispronounced santaur.
<v Speaker 2>They say santori. I just say, okay, whatever, that's fine,
<v Speaker 2>that works joey'soni anyway. Uh So, So that was a
<v Speaker 2>fucking wonderful experience was to taste these these fruits. I
<v Speaker 2>had no idea they tasted that good, because all cactus
<v Speaker 2>fruits edible, not necessarily palatable. It's not necessarily you know,
<v Speaker 2>gonna taste like a lot or be enjoyable. Barrel cactus
<v Speaker 2>fruit tastes like a juicy styrofoam with like a plastic
<v Speaker 2>foam with seeds in it. You know, some of that
<v Speaker 2>kind of serious produced good, good tasting fruit. But I'm
<v Speaker 2>all on this eth no body thing now now because
<v Speaker 2>I care so much because I think it's the easiest waste,
<v Speaker 2>the easiest recruiting tool, and if that's what gets people
<v Speaker 2>in the door initially, the power to be because this
<v Speaker 2>is honestly what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to
<v Speaker 2>get more people into this, like it's a fucking cult,
<v Speaker 2>because I'm there's enough cults out there already that are
<v Speaker 2>pushing people in the wrong direction. The cult of shiny
<v Speaker 2>Shit is a cult. The cult that gets people worshiping
<v Speaker 2>money and wanting shit that don't need and trying to
<v Speaker 2>buy it with money they don't have. Also, they can
<v Speaker 2>impress their fellow bipedal primates. You know, got a nice
<v Speaker 2>Gucci handbag, Maybe someone's gonna think you're hot. Shit, you know,
<v Speaker 2>immediate red flag to me if I see that and someone, Oh,
<v Speaker 2>I'm judging you. I see you with a muscle car,
<v Speaker 2>I see with a fucking Gucci handbag, I'm judging you.
<v Speaker 2>You know. Peace be to you, Peace be with you.
<v Speaker 2>Everyone's got you know, everyone is just doing them. So
<v Speaker 2>do it? Do you do you? But I'm gonna stay
<v Speaker 2>the fuck away. I'm gonna definitely. It shows me where
<v Speaker 2>your values are at. I'll treat you with respect, to
<v Speaker 2>be friendly to you, of course, but you know, I'm
<v Speaker 2>gonna pray to God I never get trapped at an
<v Speaker 2>elevator with you, or have to sit next to you
<v Speaker 2>on a long road trip or whatever. You know, you
<v Speaker 2>are the company you keep. This person's misled. They're misled.
<v Speaker 2>That's what I tell me. They're misled right now, best
<v Speaker 2>best of them. But I don't I don't need that. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I just spill the fucking fizzy water all over my guy. God,
<v Speaker 2>damn it. Pain in the air. It's constant frustration. I
<v Speaker 2>feel like I've and everything. Man, I'm so behind that everything.
<v Speaker 2>I got so much stuff to do, videos to edit,
<v Speaker 2>shit to write. I just canceled my book contract. Thank god.
<v Speaker 2>Now for the first one, the first one's done. It's
<v Speaker 2>coming out in April. I'm excited about that. That's got
<v Speaker 2>substance to it. The second book, I was working with
<v Speaker 2>Abram's Press. They were just a fucking nightmare to work with. Man,
<v Speaker 2>no one there knew what they were doing. They hadn't
<v Speaker 2>even read the manuscript yet they're publishing. They're trying to
<v Speaker 2>publish way too much. I guess there's the word on
<v Speaker 2>the street. They're trying to publish way too much, and
<v Speaker 2>they're you know, they're just getting them in, getting them out.
<v Speaker 2>They got this, you know, meant, I don't know what
<v Speaker 2>they There was no one I could work with there.
<v Speaker 2>I'd email the person I work with, she'd get back
<v Speaker 2>to me a week or two later. I couldn't. And
<v Speaker 2>then the real thing came when I was like the man.
<v Speaker 2>I submitted the manuscript, they never read it. And then
<v Speaker 2>I submitted photos. I submitted all the shit, it was
<v Speaker 2>ready to go. I said, the person who's doing the
<v Speaker 2>layout is going to have to figure it out. I
<v Speaker 2>want the layout done this way. I want to you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's got to be shots of habitat, insets of photos,
<v Speaker 2>all this stuff. We're trying to pack a lot of
<v Speaker 2>info here, you know. And the layout they sent it
<v Speaker 2>back to me. The layout looked like a fucking pharmaceutical brochure,
<v Speaker 2>just super basic, unenthralling. I then taught myself in design,
<v Speaker 2>showed them a sample of what I wanted. Looked fucking great,
<v Speaker 2>and they said, well, well, we're still gonna do the layout,
<v Speaker 2>but we'll take we'll definitely take your your points into consideration.
<v Speaker 2>Don't give me that. Don't get you. Don't getting to
<v Speaker 2>take any into consideration. Don't give me. Don't talk to
<v Speaker 2>me like I'm a fucking customer at the bank. Don't
<v Speaker 2>do this. This is bullshit. This is that phony. Yeah, God,
<v Speaker 2>it was fucking on. So I was just like, man,
<v Speaker 2>this isn't gonna work. This is fucking miserable. It's taken
<v Speaker 2>two years already. This is not working on a project
<v Speaker 2>with someone. This is they just want me to do everything.
<v Speaker 2>They're not paying me enough and you know, on top
<v Speaker 2>of it, which is fine if they're working with me,
<v Speaker 2>but then they're not working with me. It's just I
<v Speaker 2>was like, why the fuck am I even doing this?
<v Speaker 2>So I'm you know, and I've been hit up by
<v Speaker 2>two other publish since then, so fuck them. I'm going
<v Speaker 2>to take this, you know, sell the book to someone else.
<v Speaker 2>And it's nice, but it's you know, if it's plant photos,
<v Speaker 2>it's it's Uh. It's like a coffee table book of
<v Speaker 2>photos of plants from all over the world, with descriptions
<v Speaker 2>of their habitat and what makes them evolution evolutionarily unique
<v Speaker 2>and why the fuck that I choose to put them
<v Speaker 2>in a book anyway? What aspects about them? Okay, anyway,
<v Speaker 2>so what But anyway, I picked a bunch of sarrow
<v Speaker 2>fruits and uh, and I'm drying. I'm saved some because
<v Speaker 2>you know, for friends, dried them out, save some for
<v Speaker 2>friends to eat because the seeds added the texture too.
<v Speaker 2>It's like a fig but uh. And then I'm taking
<v Speaker 2>a bunch of the seeds because they'll grow. In South Texas,
<v Speaker 2>there's a couple of soorrows that are like fifteen twenty
<v Speaker 2>feet tall already probably fifty years old. Uh, down here
<v Speaker 2>in South Texas. So I'm gonna start a bunch of
<v Speaker 2>seedlings and get them out. But anyway, that was really
<v Speaker 2>that was really lovely to see. And then you know,
<v Speaker 2>spending time with Leo was always always so pleasant and mellow.
<v Speaker 2>You know, Louis Louis got to see a coyote running
<v Speaker 2>through his backyard, little scraggly coyote. You know, she gets
<v Speaker 2>along with the coyotes. It's happened many times she's met
<v Speaker 2>the coyotes. They exchanged glass glances. You could see her
<v Speaker 2>doing the dog thing when they put their nose in
<v Speaker 2>the air when they can sniff somethings nearby. But uh,
<v Speaker 2>it was it was rough to see because you know,
<v Speaker 2>West Texas has gotten a lot of rain recently, like
<v Speaker 2>crazy afternoon monsoons. I was in when I was in
<v Speaker 2>West Texas, every every day I was there, we get
<v Speaker 2>an afternoon monsoon. It's like what you used to hear.
<v Speaker 2>West Texas used to be like, you know, in the
<v Speaker 2>nineteen eighties and nineties, but now it's uh, you know,
<v Speaker 2>recently it's just been so dry. But goddamn, it just
<v Speaker 2>got it got dosed with rain. Everything was green, massive
<v Speaker 2>hailstorm rolls in. You know, thirty minutes later, the clouds
<v Speaker 2>are gone, it's sunny again. It was wonderful. But southern
<v Speaker 2>Arizona isn't a bad drought. God, going through Phoenix always
<v Speaker 2>feels so dirty, you know, it really does. The death
<v Speaker 2>cult is strong there. I feel like many of the
<v Speaker 2>big cities, the death cult is strong. People are just
<v Speaker 2>turned up. You could tell people are just fucking miserable.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's awful, you know, it's I think that's a
<v Speaker 2>lot of too. You know, just you vote for these
<v Speaker 2>people that don't give a fuck about you, and they've
<v Speaker 2>convinced you that they do. And then even when they're
<v Speaker 2>blatantly going against everything they said they were going to
<v Speaker 2>do for you, and shit hasn't gotten better, you still
<v Speaker 2>believe that they're on your team. And I just I
<v Speaker 2>don't get it. It's a fucking I think this happens
<v Speaker 2>all over the world. I'm sure it does, but in
<v Speaker 2>so called democracies. But the US case is really it's wild.
<v Speaker 2>It's just it's nuts. I mean, now they're doing this
<v Speaker 2>public land sell off. This is insane. They've been doing this.
<v Speaker 2>Mike Lee, a senator, is he a senator or a congressman, know,
<v Speaker 2>some pig from Utah. Of course it's from Utah because
<v Speaker 2>Sagebrush rebellion. That's where the big public land sell off
<v Speaker 2>first started. The idea is for it. They're horny for it.
<v Speaker 2>They don't want the public. They only want to tell
<v Speaker 2>them what they what they could do. They don't want
<v Speaker 2>rules and restrictions. Of course there's rules and restrictions on
<v Speaker 2>public land.
<v Speaker 1>Ah.
<v Speaker 2>And so they there was this big, you know, push
<v Speaker 2>to sell off federal lands to have and put them
<v Speaker 2>in private ownership. And it's fucking insane, it's nuts, it's
<v Speaker 2>it's goes against everything that America supposedly stands for. But
<v Speaker 2>uh yeah, this is they're trying to sneak this into
<v Speaker 2>this bill, the big beautiful bill, which you know, defunds Medicaid,
<v Speaker 2>sells public land, gives tax cut the billionaires, and yet
<v Speaker 2>the work a lot of working class people vote for this.
<v Speaker 2>But it boggles the mind. I look at them and
<v Speaker 2>I'm just like, God, what a mark, no offense to
<v Speaker 2>these poor morons. But you gotta have a you gotta
<v Speaker 2>have some stupid people that in order for this ship
<v Speaker 2>to go through, you gotta people that are duped. You
<v Speaker 2>know a lot of people I think their churches tell
<v Speaker 2>them to vote for you know, this party. Uh but
<v Speaker 2>you know, I gotta be honest, so too Again, like
<v Speaker 2>I said, the left, the American left, got taken over
<v Speaker 2>by rich college kids who pushed all the identitarian shit
<v Speaker 2>so hard and you know, fixation on gender this, and
<v Speaker 2>it's just fucking you know, it's one thing to stand
<v Speaker 2>up for someone's rights, it's nothing to make that like
<v Speaker 2>a central pennant of the party or just even you know,
<v Speaker 2>put it out there to the extent that it was,
<v Speaker 2>and of course it was captured. You just you lost
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people. You focus on fucking health care,
<v Speaker 2>You focus on education, you focus on hooking up the
<v Speaker 2>working class and the middle class, and you know, you
<v Speaker 2>stick with that, stick with that, make that central part
<v Speaker 2>of your platform. But of course, you know, the Democrats,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of them are owned by the same oligarchs
<v Speaker 2>that own the right. So it's you know, neither party
<v Speaker 2>is working. For you to think that they are is insane.
<v Speaker 2>But here we are, and it's not gonna don't think
<v Speaker 2>it's gonna get any better. There's no one that's that's
<v Speaker 2>providing any alternative but let's hope we don't have a
<v Speaker 2>public land cell because goddamn that would be that's horrible.
<v Speaker 2>Once that land is sold and it's in private hands,
<v Speaker 2>it's never coming back either. Now you have to have someone,
<v Speaker 2>you'd have to have like a left wing version of
<v Speaker 2>Trump who's just like, fuck it, I don't care. I'm
<v Speaker 2>gonna do this anyway. We're gonna eminent domain this shit,
<v Speaker 2>take it away from these fucking crooks who bought it.
<v Speaker 2>And that's not gonna happen too. That's not gonna happen.
<v Speaker 2>So anyway, Okay, well we're talking about Colorado. Plateau started
<v Speaker 2>off southern New Mexico Albuquerque Natural History actually in Albuquerque's
<v Speaker 2>northern New Mexico, but it's not that far north. It's
<v Speaker 2>like central Northern. Started off southern New Mexico, went through
<v Speaker 2>all the cool gyps and habitats, and then we visited
<v Speaker 2>the Albuquerque Natural History Museum afterwards, which is a great
<v Speaker 2>natural history natural history museum. I highly recommend it, and
<v Speaker 2>they do the reciprocal admissions thing too, which is nice
<v Speaker 2>because they took the membership. I head to another museum
<v Speaker 2>and go to a lot of fucking museums. You know
<v Speaker 2>it's important to bring your kids to the museums. Uh.
<v Speaker 2>But they have that life sized dinosaur and that makes
<v Speaker 2>the roar every half hour. Uh, and they didn't on
<v Speaker 2>the hour, and they didn't. My daughter didn't like that.
<v Speaker 2>She didnt appreciate it. She was really freaked out. She
<v Speaker 2>was like, it was its plastic, honey, it's not real.
<v Speaker 2>She did she just she didn't. She didn't believe me,
<v Speaker 2>you know, which is good. Don't believe what they tell you.
<v Speaker 2>Don't believe what any authority figure tells you. Trust your
<v Speaker 2>own intuition.
<v Speaker 1>Uh.
<v Speaker 2>Anyway, but before that, yeah, we've been through the gypsum
<v Speaker 2>really cool gypsum flats, undulating gypsum hills near the Texas
<v Speaker 2>New Mexico border east of Carlsbad. Got to see Nama
<v Speaker 2>carnosa again. Really cool gypsum endemic endemic. Nama. It's got
<v Speaker 2>a weird It's got these these you know, erect upward
<v Speaker 2>facing linear leaves covered in the hisspit hairs, those stiff
<v Speaker 2>hairs with the these little white flowers. Lots of moth pollination,
<v Speaker 2>I tell you. Moth pollination and gypsum in the Chihuahua
<v Speaker 2>Desert go hand in hand moth and hummingbird because Annulo
<v Speaker 2>callisly salinas was there too. Another gypsum endemic the habitat
<v Speaker 2>here as well. It's just these barren you know, gypsum
<v Speaker 2>flats with the consistency of bad concrete, like crusty concrete
<v Speaker 2>that hurts the kneel on crusty, jagged concrete, and then
<v Speaker 2>when it's wet it gets all spongy, and there's there's
<v Speaker 2>a ton of endemics there. There's a ton of endemics
<v Speaker 2>that only grow on the gypsum. A kind of cactus
<v Speaker 2>horizontalonius was there too. There was Escobaria viviparo, which is
<v Speaker 2>pretty widespread throughout western North America. Other pink flowered cactus.
<v Speaker 2>Lots of good stuff. And I hadn't I hadn't been
<v Speaker 2>to this specific habitat in a while, so it was
<v Speaker 2>cool to see. Shout out the Cacama velvada too, the
<v Speaker 2>what is it, the little misquit mosquito. What's the common name, Oh,
<v Speaker 2>that's it, the cactus dodger is the common name. And
<v Speaker 2>they were ever I guess they're and what are they eating?
<v Speaker 2>Cacta roots of Opuntia's I think, I think you know,
<v Speaker 2>choyas and prickly pair of roots. These things are eating,
<v Speaker 2>which is good because those are two very common species
<v Speaker 2>of cacti. They need to get checked a little bit.
<v Speaker 2>But cacamo of Alvada really fucking loud cicada beautiful black
<v Speaker 2>and white, and they're everywhere, and they're juicy as hell,
<v Speaker 2>and they won't let you get close to them. They
<v Speaker 2>alway they were flying off. They were a bunch near
<v Speaker 2>Guadalupe Mountains at the base of that peak right there,
<v Speaker 2>and it was you know, we encountered them. They're pretty widespread.
<v Speaker 2>I think they go on to Arizona too. But uh,
<v Speaker 2>I was so proud of my daughter too. We stopped
<v Speaker 2>at this little like picnic area. Texas has these picnic
<v Speaker 2>areas and near Guadaloupe Mountains, and she just started climbing
<v Speaker 2>up this sketchy limestone hillside on her own. And I
<v Speaker 2>was like, oh shit, okay, you know, if your kid's
<v Speaker 2>doing something dangerous but they're doing it cautiously, let them
<v Speaker 2>do it, just you know, watch them. So I went
<v Speaker 2>up behind her and let her climb up that thing,
<v Speaker 2>and she was all excited it. It was pretty cool
<v Speaker 2>to see. So yeah, so we stopped and lurked at this,
<v Speaker 2>you know, roadside little gypsum spot where you get I
<v Speaker 2>think it's just blm land. You can drive in there
<v Speaker 2>grazing leases probably, but you could drive in there and
<v Speaker 2>see all these cool gypsum endemics. Really great to see.
<v Speaker 2>And uh, it's just a it's so weird. It's such
<v Speaker 2>a weird habitat. There's so much to think about when
<v Speaker 2>you get to these places. You know, how does this
<v Speaker 2>grow here? Why did this evolve like this? Why are
<v Speaker 2>these leaves like this? You know, what are the other
<v Speaker 2>stresses that plants have to cope with here that ends
<v Speaker 2>up selecting for them? Because remember, the environment breeds the plant.
<v Speaker 2>The environment, which is a combination of the elevation, the climate,
<v Speaker 2>the climate and weather patterns, the iridity or lack thereof,
<v Speaker 2>the presence of a certain insect or herbivore, the fungi,
<v Speaker 2>all this stuff. It's all part of this equation that
<v Speaker 2>breeds the plants and has done so over millions of years,
<v Speaker 2>just the same way a human might select different kinds
<v Speaker 2>of tomatoes that may or may not tolerate heat better
<v Speaker 2>than the other phenotypes, et cetera. So so yeah, so
<v Speaker 2>this is. You know, this was a fucking These gypsum
<v Speaker 2>areas are so cool and they go all the way
<v Speaker 2>up through through New Mexico into Arizona. You can always
<v Speaker 2>tell because you start seeing selenite crystals. It's got like
<v Speaker 2>a white rocket, looks like limestone, but a different, slightly
<v Speaker 2>different consistency, and the selenite crystals really give it away.
<v Speaker 2>So so that was a really cool thing because I
<v Speaker 2>hadn't been there in a while, and there's so many
<v Speaker 2>cool gypsum endemic plants, especially in New Mexico. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>this band of gypsum goes all the way down into
<v Speaker 2>Nuevo Leone and into Wahaca, Mexico, and all the way
<v Speaker 2>north to you know, Albuquerque area. Even southwestern Utah has
<v Speaker 2>a bunch of gypsum. There's a I was looking for,
<v Speaker 2>what is that Cyclodinia jonesy I it's a member of
<v Speaker 2>apostan ac I know, I know the genus Cyclodenia from
<v Speaker 2>from northern California. It's really cool plant with long tube flowers,
<v Speaker 2>pink tube flowers. But there's a gypsum subspecies, a gypsum
<v Speaker 2>endemic subspecies that I encountered, or that that grows in
<v Speaker 2>southwestern Utah. But I guess it was a shitty year
<v Speaker 2>for it. It was kind of dry. Yeah, there's southwest
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's getting hammered. Man not New Mexico where
<v Speaker 2>we're it's southwest of their. Utah looked rough. There was.
<v Speaker 2>There's a bunch of Ariogonum that are endemic to gypsum
<v Speaker 2>there to shep Herdia, which is basically a native version
<v Speaker 2>of the Russian olive. Stupid common name. It's not in
<v Speaker 2>the olive family at all. Eleagnus is the genus highly
<v Speaker 2>invasive from you know that air base in Brooklyn all
<v Speaker 2>the way to fucking New Mexico. There's like two different
<v Speaker 2>ely Agnus species that are really invasive and really problematic,
<v Speaker 2>really invasive in North America, and they suck it. They've
<v Speaker 2>got nitrogen fixing bacterian there leaves. But Shepherd like Shepherd
<v Speaker 2>is the native genius. It's in the same family and
<v Speaker 2>has those really cool scale like tricombes that give the
<v Speaker 2>leaves this arid dozence and this weird texture. And Shepherdiero
<v Speaker 2>tundafolia was in Utah at on the gypsum and then
<v Speaker 2>shepherdy At canadensis was at higher elevations, like in the
<v Speaker 2>Bristol Combe Pine forest at Cedar Breaks National Monument. You know,
<v Speaker 2>I told some guy to fuck off there. This old
<v Speaker 2>man was walking his dog and I and Louis went
<v Speaker 2>up to go like sniff the dog, and they got along.
<v Speaker 2>They got on. Well, it wasn't a big issue. And
<v Speaker 2>I'm sitting there with my daughter on this two thousand
<v Speaker 2>year old Bristol Combe Pine on the dead part of it.
<v Speaker 2>We weren't trying to crush. We weren't trying to cramp
<v Speaker 2>it style. Get on the vascular system, you know, sit
<v Speaker 2>on the living part. Because these trees are magnificent. They're
<v Speaker 2>old as hell. They're not as old as the ones
<v Speaker 2>in California or in the Great Basin. It's some of
<v Speaker 2>the higher elevations, but it's Bristol Comb Pine. It's still
<v Speaker 2>the oldest you know, non living clonal organism uh in
<v Speaker 2>the world. And this guy, I don't know what his
<v Speaker 2>deal was, but he goes he all of a sudden,
<v Speaker 2>I hear him call me a stupid asshole, and I
<v Speaker 2>look and it's my dog is just sniffing his dog's
<v Speaker 2>But they're doing they weren't fighting, and he goes it's
<v Speaker 2>supposed to be out a leash, And I said, what
<v Speaker 2>the hell's your problem? Man? You're going to die old
<v Speaker 2>and alone. You know. I started going off. I'm like,
<v Speaker 2>take your meds, old man, you need therapy. I just
<v Speaker 2>went off because I had I got it, you know,
<v Speaker 2>I got some some anger built up, you know, and
<v Speaker 2>I just couldn't. I couldn't believe it. I was like, yo,
<v Speaker 2>what is your what's your issue? Like? What do you
<v Speaker 2>You've probably had an easy ass life too. He looked
<v Speaker 2>like a well to do. It's like, why are you
<v Speaker 2>talking to me like that? You don't need to talk
<v Speaker 2>to people like this. You could say, can you please,
<v Speaker 2>you know, get your dog away or something like that,
<v Speaker 2>to which I would respond, oh, dang, I'm sorry. I didn't.
<v Speaker 2>I wasn't even looking. I didn't even notice, and uh
<v Speaker 2>and then I just you know, and then he was
<v Speaker 2>walking away, and I just was shouting him the whole time,
<v Speaker 2>with my daughter on my shoulders. I wasn't cursed very much.
<v Speaker 2>And then of course I have to explain to her.
<v Speaker 2>You know, he's upset. He's not a happy person. He's upset.
<v Speaker 2>That's why he's being mean to other people. So, but
<v Speaker 2>I couldn't believe it. I was like, what the fuck?
<v Speaker 2>Where did the fuck these people come from? Take your
<v Speaker 2>fucking mets, Go find a therapist. You're eighty, How old
<v Speaker 2>are you? Seventy? Maybe he was seventy five, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>But you got an issue like that, you tell you,
<v Speaker 2>like what, there's a deeper It's not about me pale,
<v Speaker 2>all right, And I'm old enough to know that there's
<v Speaker 2>you got other issues in your life. Deal with those,
<v Speaker 2>all right, Deal with those, because happy, fucking well adjusted
<v Speaker 2>people don't act like this, right wild. And I you know,
<v Speaker 2>I'm never one to shy away from confrontations unless I
<v Speaker 2>can tell the person is stupid or insane, and then
<v Speaker 2>I'm just kind of like, ah, right, you just do
<v Speaker 2>your thing. I'm not going to get involved. But uh,
<v Speaker 2>with this, it was Yeah, it was weird. It was
<v Speaker 2>a fucking weird issue. So hopefully that guy doesn't kill
<v Speaker 2>himself the next year. Hopefully he gets Hopefully he gets
<v Speaker 2>some I think I told me, told me he was
<v Speaker 2>gonna die old and alone. I really let into him
<v Speaker 2>a little bit. But you know that's what happens. You
<v Speaker 2>press the wrong button, you just get you get the dump,
<v Speaker 2>the garbage shoot opens, all the shit comes out. So
<v Speaker 2>but anyway, so we were going through checked out the
<v Speaker 2>gypsum areas in southern Arizona or southern New Mexico, and
<v Speaker 2>then kept going north. Stopped at the Albuquerque Natural History
<v Speaker 2>Museum wonderful spot highly recommend five out of five stars.
<v Speaker 2>Saw the San Miguelia fossil, which is that curious fossil
<v Speaker 2>from the Triassic that looks like a palm leaf. It's
<v Speaker 2>got the plycate leaf like a fan palm. But uh,
<v Speaker 2>and I think I guess I didn't know the reproductive
<v Speaker 2>structures had been found, because you need reproductive structures for
<v Speaker 2>a good solid idea of what it might be related to.
<v Speaker 2>But I guess they had. Someone sent me a paper
<v Speaker 2>later on and the thing had been there was I
<v Speaker 2>guess there are fossils of it, but this fossil is
<v Speaker 2>pretty widespread throughout the southwest. San Miguelia named I think
<v Speaker 2>it was named after San miguel County, New Mexico, and
<v Speaker 2>I got to see more fossils of it when we
<v Speaker 2>went to the Dinosaur Discovery Site in Saint George, which
<v Speaker 2>is a really cool area built on the site like
<v Speaker 2>they incorporated the naked rock into the floor of the museum,
<v Speaker 2>Like they just built this basically huge shed around this
<v Speaker 2>fossil site where there's all kinds of dinosaur tracks and
<v Speaker 2>ample plant fossils, and you know, Saint George has gone
<v Speaker 2>through a spurt of obscene development in the last ten years.
<v Speaker 2>You know, the death cult is strong there, just you know,
<v Speaker 2>garbage driving, commercial cesspool. You know, strip malls, parking lots,
<v Speaker 2>drive everywhere, not set up for walking at all, kind
<v Speaker 2>of like many parts of Texas, you know. So you
<v Speaker 2>got an unhealthy populace and they're probably miserable because they're
<v Speaker 2>trapped in their cars all the time and they're just
<v Speaker 2>being farmed as consumers, which is just the modern American condition.
<v Speaker 2>No healthcare, uneducated you know as well. So that kind
<v Speaker 2>of gives you an idea of what the dominant culture
<v Speaker 2>is like there. But there's a lot of wonderful things
<v Speaker 2>around there, including that arctomic on humorless, that bear poppy
<v Speaker 2>and other gypsum endemic. Highly recommend should you get a
<v Speaker 2>chance to see it on the gyps and flats where
<v Speaker 2>it grows. I think there's a mountain bike trail nearby
<v Speaker 2>hopefully the Mountain bikers know what they're riding over and
<v Speaker 2>don't go off trail and respect the plants. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>I don't give anybody too much credit, but lots of cool,
<v Speaker 2>lots of cool stuff around Saint George, lots of cool stuff.
<v Speaker 2>Lots of lawns too, which is insane. I mean, they're
<v Speaker 2>acting like there's no issue with water or that they
<v Speaker 2>don't live in a desert. The lawn thing is weird.
<v Speaker 2>You tall loves lawns. I don't get it. It's some
<v Speaker 2>weird Mormon shit. God bless the Mormons, right, God bless them,
<v Speaker 2>Bless their hearts. I've got a lot of cool friends
<v Speaker 2>that are Mormon. I have a lot of gay friends
<v Speaker 2>that grew up Mormon. Funny how that happens, You know,
<v Speaker 2>you grow up in this repressed environment and then uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I don't know what I don't know what
<v Speaker 2>it is. But yeah, a lot of a lot of
<v Speaker 2>gay friends that with Mormon backgrounds who got the fuck
<v Speaker 2>out as soon as they could, you know, Shout out
<v Speaker 2>to my friend Joe, Shout out to Vanessa, shout out
<v Speaker 2>to uh, how many? How many? How many gay people
<v Speaker 2>do I know that grew up in Utah, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>in the in the depths of the Mormon church. I
<v Speaker 2>saw some. I saw some who was it someone in
<v Speaker 2>my neighborhood, especially I live in a relatively low income
<v Speaker 2>Hispanic neighborhood. And so you get the Jehovah's witnesses preying
<v Speaker 2>on people here because that's their whole gimmick, right, that's
<v Speaker 2>their deal. They prey on people who are having a
<v Speaker 2>hard up, hard up time and may not know any better.
<v Speaker 2>So it got so bad because I had to hang
<v Speaker 2>a sign in Spanish it says, no Jehovah's Witnesses, no
<v Speaker 2>religious soliciting, please go away, thank you. And so I've
<v Speaker 2>got one of those stickers on my door. But you
<v Speaker 2>should do that too, if you suffer from the same problem.
<v Speaker 2>I just I I can't stand it. They're pedaling ideology.
<v Speaker 2>It's almost worse than pedaling. They're pedaling bunk ideology that
<v Speaker 2>prays on the desperate. It's almost worse than you know,
<v Speaker 2>people who are running Ponzi schemes, praying on desperate people,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like doing lottery, lottery scams or something, you know.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, but I was I think it was Jehovah's
<v Speaker 2>witnesses or Mormons. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>They're all.
<v Speaker 2>They're all, you know, goofy bastards hanging out my neighborhood.
<v Speaker 2>They're on the little bikes whatever. And I was I
<v Speaker 2>was biking with my daughter and I said they they
<v Speaker 2>started to approach me while I was moving. I said, no,
<v Speaker 2>go away, like really loud screaming, you know, as if
<v Speaker 2>they were like horseflies, you know, biting horse flies. And
<v Speaker 2>the one guy goes wow, and I go, yeah, that's right,
<v Speaker 2>stay away from me, Go away, sir, thank you. But
<v Speaker 2>it was funny he was. I don't think anyone because
<v Speaker 2>people are polite where I lived to you know, and
<v Speaker 2>I was not polite, so I think he wasn't used
<v Speaker 2>to the treatment that blew his mind anyway. But uh,
<v Speaker 2>but yeah, so that these gypsum flats and Utah, Holy hell,
<v Speaker 2>there's a bunch of cool stuff. And then of course
<v Speaker 2>that red sandstone and these are all the fossils that
<v Speaker 2>are at the Dinosaur Discovery site are all Triassic, and
<v Speaker 2>I was impressed to see. I was grateful. An anonymous
<v Speaker 2>donor purchased the brick, and my friend Brian, who did
<v Speaker 2>the mural, in the Dinosaur Discovery site told me about this.
<v Speaker 2>He said, someone actually purchased the brick and you could
<v Speaker 2>put your name on a brick, and they put instead
<v Speaker 2>of their name, they put crime pace with botany doesn't
<v Speaker 2>And I guess I I guess it's been there for
<v Speaker 2>a year or two. I was like, Oh, it's really sweet,
<v Speaker 2>that's really nice. So uh anyway, so yeah, and then uh,
<v Speaker 2>Andrew Milner, who's a paleo paleontologist there, excuse me, a
<v Speaker 2>paleontoloigence it was a paleobotanist, took us in the back
<v Speaker 2>and showed us some cool plant fossils. Saw a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of San Miguelia, all these weird ferns. They need Italians,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the psychad looking things that went extinct. I
<v Speaker 2>don't think they made it one of the benit Italians
<v Speaker 2>go out. I think that. I don't think they made
<v Speaker 2>it through the k T boundy. I don't think they
<v Speaker 2>made it out of the Cretaceous. But you should look
<v Speaker 2>them up if you get a chance. They're a really
<v Speaker 2>cool clade of plants. The benited Italians, they look like
<v Speaker 2>pych heads, Benitta titty Titalians. How do you spell that
<v Speaker 2>b E n n it T you spell it. It's
<v Speaker 2>b e n n E T T I T A
<v Speaker 2>l e s. We're an extinct group of seed plants
<v Speaker 2>that flourished story in the Misazoic Eara roughly two and
<v Speaker 2>fifty two to sixty six million years ago. They are
<v Speaker 2>notable for their pychhead like appearance. So these things popped
<v Speaker 2>up after the permean extinction two fifty two million years ago,
<v Speaker 2>and they are notable for their psychhead like appearance and
<v Speaker 2>for some features that led to theories about their relationship
<v Speaker 2>to modern flowering plants. Will not directly ancestral to angiosperms,
<v Speaker 2>they share some features that make them an interesting group
<v Speaker 2>to study in a context of plant evolution. So we're
<v Speaker 2>gonna be selling merch. It says I'm horny for Benita
<v Speaker 2>Italians or Hank if you're horny for Benita Tillans. But
<v Speaker 2>I think that sounds good. Honk if you're horny, because
<v Speaker 2>you don't necessarily own it yet, just saying, you know,
<v Speaker 2>if the enthusiasm's out there for you like it is
<v Speaker 2>for me, Honk, you know, if you're horny, Honk. There
<v Speaker 2>was a cool spot. I think it was in central
<v Speaker 2>New Mexico. I hadn't been there in a while, but
<v Speaker 2>there was a huge lava flow. And it's again it's
<v Speaker 2>public lands, so you could just roll right up there
<v Speaker 2>and walk out on the lava flow. I was first
<v Speaker 2>there five years ago maybe, and uh god, it's fucking
<v Speaker 2>it's so cool. I figet what is the name valley
<v Speaker 2>of what is it called? Value of the Valley of
<v Speaker 2>Fires Recreation. Here, they got a little boardwalk you could
<v Speaker 2>walk out on these lava flows where there's these massive
<v Speaker 2>cracks in the basalt. Fucking lava caves everywhere. I think
<v Speaker 2>the elevation is like five thousand feet. Forget it. It's
<v Speaker 2>kind of high up sodall prickly pair, it's kind of serious.
<v Speaker 2>I forget what species was there, but it's a fucking
<v Speaker 2>wonderful plant community. It's a really old gnarl junipers, probably
<v Speaker 2>osteosperma or Mono sperma. I don't fucking they all look
<v Speaker 2>the same, but they're beautiful. They got these twisted old
<v Speaker 2>tra man. New Mexico is so nice. It's the best
<v Speaker 2>thing about Texas is that it's close to New Mexico.
<v Speaker 2>You could just go over there. Vibes a little bit
<v Speaker 2>more mellow, but also there's a lot more drug use
<v Speaker 2>and fucking it's brutal. That sucks to see. Like Albuquerque
<v Speaker 2>Channel five, Andrew Kelligan just did a bit on on
<v Speaker 2>the fennail problem in Albuquerque. And you know, when we
<v Speaker 2>were staying with my friend Spooner for a night on
<v Speaker 2>the res north of Santa Fe, and we went out
<v Speaker 2>the next day, and going out the next day, there's
<v Speaker 2>like narcan just discarded on like a parking area in
<v Speaker 2>the side of the road. There's fucking needles everywhere. It's brutal. Man,
<v Speaker 2>it's just the you know, it's genocide of the youth.
<v Speaker 2>All part of the death cult though, all that, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the heroine, the fucking alcohol especially, it's all part of
<v Speaker 2>the death cult. You need people to be numb alcohol,
<v Speaker 2>especially because it's legal. Of course it's legal, right, and
<v Speaker 2>I think it's all this stuff should be legal because
<v Speaker 2>if you can't, I mean, damned, if you do, damn
<v Speaker 2>if you don't, you make it illegal, then you're just
<v Speaker 2>creating a black market for it. Whatever. But the booze especially,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, god, it's Alcohol's fucking terrible. There's a reason
<v Speaker 2>every major you know, world religion has had some central
<v Speaker 2>tenet discouraging alcohol use, cause it is it is poison.
<v Speaker 2>You gotta be numb to how you feel. That's what
<v Speaker 2>enables the death cult to function so well and to
<v Speaker 2>keep people down. And so that's you know, it's the purpose.
<v Speaker 2>But uh, but the Fennyl shit especially, it's God, it's
<v Speaker 2>fucking needles everywhere. It's and I wonder, like what would
<v Speaker 2>it take to get people off that or to show
<v Speaker 2>them something else? Right? Those are all symptoms just like
<v Speaker 2>the rat Park experiment, the famous rat Park experiment. Should
<v Speaker 2>look it up. You know, there's nothing to fill that void.
<v Speaker 2>And life sucks in this society, and so that you
<v Speaker 2>fill it with this poison, right, or with fucking gambling
<v Speaker 2>or with you know, chasing shiny shit whatever. It's all
<v Speaker 2>part of the death cult too, not knowing the living
<v Speaker 2>world is there. Instead, you can embrace the living world
<v Speaker 2>and learn about it and it doesn't you know, just
<v Speaker 2>look closer, learn closer, you know, get some education. That's
<v Speaker 2>the thing too, is like people don't know how to
<v Speaker 2>look at They have to be shown, they have to
<v Speaker 2>be taught, and so how do you how do you
<v Speaker 2>do that in a society that's so defunded education where
<v Speaker 2>the schools are taught to just where this the whole
<v Speaker 2>point of schools. You're taught to just memorize stuff, not
<v Speaker 2>really understand it. And it's just like this supposed to
<v Speaker 2>be a gateway to a career, right, obedience a gateway
<v Speaker 2>to learning how to be obedient and subordinate and have
<v Speaker 2>a career. That's a brutal fucking that's not education. So uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I don't know, Man's that's the education is
<v Speaker 2>key to lifting people up, Showing people how to think critically,
<v Speaker 2>not what to think, but how to think, how to
<v Speaker 2>digest things, how to look at things, how to take
<v Speaker 2>them apartmentally, how to ask questions, how to how to
<v Speaker 2>envision things in their mind so that they can foresee
<v Speaker 2>what might happen if this or that behavior is applied,
<v Speaker 2>or if you know, even just practical things like if
<v Speaker 2>you're setting something up or building something, what could go wrong,
<v Speaker 2>how to correct for that. Teaching people how to think,
<v Speaker 2>how to exist in this world. And that's not what's taught.
<v Speaker 2>It's memorization and obedience are what's thought. It's tragic, and
<v Speaker 2>of course you know, the world sucks. It's the human
<v Speaker 2>world that we've created sucks. Doesn't need to, but it does.
<v Speaker 2>It's look at who's in power, look at who's running things,
<v Speaker 2>look at who's conditioning everyone else. And the values that
<v Speaker 2>are being put out there, they're poison. So anyway that
<v Speaker 2>it was sad to see. I mean, it's all over
<v Speaker 2>in New Mexico. It's all over depending on where you are.
<v Speaker 2>You know, people looking for and escape, people looking for
<v Speaker 2>something to fill the void, not knowing what's right in
<v Speaker 2>front of them. Just disconnected from the land, disconnected the
<v Speaker 2>life on it, disconnected from the living machine. Really sand
<v Speaker 2>to watch. That said. Going north of New Mexico, we
<v Speaker 2>were in Santa Fe for a while too, which is
<v Speaker 2>a weird town, very expensive, lots of expensive stuff everywhere,
<v Speaker 2>you know. But going north from Santa Fe and then
<v Speaker 2>heading towards the Four Corners region was a trip. There's
<v Speaker 2>a man, there's so much beautiful stuff, so much beautiful
<v Speaker 2>Asclepius Involue, crowd of this little dwarf milkweed, tiny little milkweed.
<v Speaker 2>There were tons of them there. This was six thousand
<v Speaker 2>foot elevation. It was on sand and a lot of
<v Speaker 2>those same plants, including poliomitta in Cana that El Paso
<v Speaker 2>bush mint that you see on the dunes east of
<v Speaker 2>El Paso and also does very good in cultivation. James
<v Speaker 2>Piece is growing a ton of them, grown a ton
<v Speaker 2>of those plants. He fell in love with it. He
<v Speaker 2>pushed it on me. I had never seen it before.
<v Speaker 2>I said, okay, I'll plant this. I guess I like white, thin,
<v Speaker 2>fuzzy leaves. Sure smells fucking good, smells minty. I put
<v Speaker 2>that in the ground. It's doing great in South Texas,
<v Speaker 2>it's doing great in West Texas. It's built for the heat,
<v Speaker 2>it needs full sun. It was a really cool It's
<v Speaker 2>a fucking great plant, and it was growing here. A
<v Speaker 2>lot of the plants were that I encountered in Alpasso
<v Speaker 2>were growing here, even though it was, you know, four
<v Speaker 2>hundred miles north and it's six thousand feet elevation in
<v Speaker 2>northern New Mexico. It was like a juniper these juniper hills,
<v Speaker 2>a juniper woodland looked like parts of the Great Basin
<v Speaker 2>almost and a sclepias. Involucrada there was aflon, which is
<v Speaker 2>in the paintbrush family. It's a parasitic plant, doesn't have
<v Speaker 2>any chlorophyll. I think it was was it ludovicy ainum.
<v Speaker 2>I forget which one I think that was it. It
<v Speaker 2>was parasitizing Artemisia philifolia, which is a filifolia philiferous leaves,
<v Speaker 2>thin leaves. It was a sage it's a sagebrush, Artemisias.
<v Speaker 2>They all smell good, sagebrush, wormwood, they're all all Artemesia.
<v Speaker 2>Artemesia vulgaris is the invasive one. Like in New York City,
<v Speaker 2>there's Artimia vulgarris everywhere. European arrival fucking super common smells. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>doesn't smell as nice as sage brush. It's got kind
<v Speaker 2>of a it's fragrant, but it's kind of unpleasant. Of course,
<v Speaker 2>all those things prevent them from being eaten. Uh, you know,
<v Speaker 2>you got to have a certain gut bactery to be
<v Speaker 2>able to eat sage brush. I'm sure there's stuff that
<v Speaker 2>does it. I've noticed that deer state they stay away
<v Speaker 2>from a lot of the mints too, Those things that
<v Speaker 2>smell good about plants in the mint family deer evidently
<v Speaker 2>don't like. But that that spot was amazing. A Bronia
<v Speaker 2>fray grants was there too, A really fragrant moth pollinated
<v Speaker 2>member of the boogin Fia family Nictageneci. It's got these
<v Speaker 2>white globular inforescent influorescences, spherical inflorescences with little white tube flowers.
<v Speaker 2>So many members of Nictageneti are moth pollinated, especially A. Klaisantes.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of nice A klaisanthes out there. Longe Folia
<v Speaker 2>is a weed in West Texas. It's got, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the leaves or maybe an inch long. The flowers are
<v Speaker 2>six inches long and tubular. Blessed to have these kinds
<v Speaker 2>of weeds around. It's a native plant that takes over
<v Speaker 2>you know what. Speaking of weeds. The book that I
<v Speaker 2>got coming out in April, which is I think it's
<v Speaker 2>like one hundred and fifty pages. I was thinking about
<v Speaker 2>maybe doing a reading of a chapter of it. We're
<v Speaker 2>part of a chapter for the Patreon maybe I'll do that.
<v Speaker 2>And then I got a whole other manuscript I wrote
<v Speaker 2>for this book I canceled with Abrams, so I might
<v Speaker 2>do a bit of that too. They just make it
<v Speaker 2>patreon only. I hate doing patreon only because I like
<v Speaker 2>more people to be able to hear it and have
<v Speaker 2>access to it and for it to be public. But
<v Speaker 2>that's you know, that's it's I feel like I got
<v Speaker 2>to give the Patreon people something because that's really what
<v Speaker 2>sustains me, you know. So this spot that the Spooner
<v Speaker 2>took us to, where the Sclepias Involucrata was, was really
<v Speaker 2>curious because there it's six thousand feet elevation. But there
<v Speaker 2>were all these beautiful fucking cobbles, like two or three
<v Speaker 2>pound heavy cobbles that had been rounded, like beautifully rounded
<v Speaker 2>by a river at some point in the distant past
<v Speaker 2>or not too distant past. You know, four million years
<v Speaker 2>is not distant in the long spans of geologic time,
<v Speaker 2>in the winds of time of which humanity is only
<v Speaker 2>but a fart so. But these these rocks were just
<v Speaker 2>fucking great, I mean, you know, and they were like
<v Speaker 2>metamorphosed nice g n ei s s. There were streaks
<v Speaker 2>in them. You could tell they started off as something
<v Speaker 2>else than they've been cooked. That's what metamorphic rocks are,
<v Speaker 2>the rocks that have been cooked by depth or pressure
<v Speaker 2>or whatever the fuck, exposure to a body of magma
<v Speaker 2>nearby that heats them up. And uh, I was trying
<v Speaker 2>to take a lot of them home because they're so beautiful.
<v Speaker 2>But the fact that they were so heavy and so
<v Speaker 2>rounded implied that they had been carried by a very
<v Speaker 2>swift moving, high energy river at some point. It must
<v Speaker 2>have been a big fucking river too, because these were
<v Speaker 2>these were large rocks. These were not pebbles, So uh,
<v Speaker 2>I don't you know, can only guess what that might
<v Speaker 2>have been, what it might have looked like. Now. It
<v Speaker 2>was these kind of steep hills of sand. It was
<v Speaker 2>hot as fucked. It was like ninety degrees maybe ninety five.
<v Speaker 2>That's not hot, but when it's humid, it's hot. And
<v Speaker 2>that man, the aridity ninety five degrees when it's arid
<v Speaker 2>is nothing. It's I'll take that, And I could have
<v Speaker 2>walked ten miles in that shit easy. You gotta be
<v Speaker 2>careful that it's the good where I live. This humidity
<v Speaker 2>is so bad ninety five will kill you. It just
<v Speaker 2>it's brutal. It feels horrible to experience. But it was
<v Speaker 2>cool because you get at this spot that you get
<v Speaker 2>elements of like the plains still a little bit. There
<v Speaker 2>was Trediscontia there, Trediscontia occidentalis with the purple flowers coma
<v Speaker 2>lines Monocott family obvious. Obviously you get Trediscantia Ohiensis and
<v Speaker 2>the prairies of the Midwest setting the woods on fire.
<v Speaker 2>Remember that that Hank Williamsung wants, I'm going to go
<v Speaker 2>start a fire. Be like Jerry Wilhelm who sets his
<v Speaker 2>prairie home Companion on Fire's He lives in glenn Ellen, Illinois.
<v Speaker 2>He sets his yard on fire every fall. I said, hey, path,
<v Speaker 2>more people were doing this, you know the world will
<v Speaker 2>be in a lot better shape, at least the Midwest.
<v Speaker 2>You know. Shit. Some guy wrote me asking for help
<v Speaker 2>with an hoa problem, fucking with him for a native
<v Speaker 2>plant guard, and I just couldn't get back to him.
<v Speaker 2>I have no fucking time. I have no time to
<v Speaker 2>do anything. God it kills me. The native Speaking of which,
<v Speaker 2>the native plant nursery list is up on the Crime
<v Speaker 2>Pays website. It's got a state by state listing of
<v Speaker 2>native plant nurseries. So if you have anything to contribute,
<v Speaker 2>you could send it to me. A Crime Pays a
<v Speaker 2>bot and he doesn't at Gmail. Keep it short, please,
<v Speaker 2>I don't read long emails. I see I open long
<v Speaker 2>emails and I just I know. Sorry, But if you
<v Speaker 2>wanted to. You know, you got a list at you
<v Speaker 2>know city first city or town first address, very brief
<v Speaker 2>description of what they sell and how much is native,
<v Speaker 2>and then I can put it in there, make it
<v Speaker 2>easy as fuck for me to copy and paste and
<v Speaker 2>put into the native plant directory, Native plant nursery directory.
<v Speaker 2>So this, this spot in New Mexico was Yeah, it
<v Speaker 2>was just so rich. It was and I guess they'd
<v Speaker 2>gotten good rains. A lot of stuff was going off.
<v Speaker 2>It was so nice to walk there. You just you know,
<v Speaker 2>botanist paste ten feet at a time, stopping crouching down
<v Speaker 2>looking and stuff. Made a lot of herbarium collections. That's
<v Speaker 2>another thing I've got. I still have so many labels
<v Speaker 2>to create for all the collections I've made, and I
<v Speaker 2>feel like this is really important to do, especially plants.
<v Speaker 2>You know. The reason I collect or barium specimens is
<v Speaker 2>so that someone who's studying a genus, or someone who's
<v Speaker 2>just fascinated by a genus can see different variations on it,
<v Speaker 2>different species in the genus from disparate localities, far away localities,
<v Speaker 2>and see and be able to compare those species with
<v Speaker 2>ones they already made. Love and no, that's the wonder
<v Speaker 2>of studying this shit. You could see how different environments
<v Speaker 2>and different elevations in different places have selected for different
<v Speaker 2>variations on a theme. That wonder. That imagination is what
<v Speaker 2>makes studying life so fun and so fucking lovely. Shout
<v Speaker 2>out to the Kantos Cephala TOMASI. I want to give
<v Speaker 2>a shout out to the agave bugs. They're scary looking bugs.
<v Speaker 2>They have a really weird sound they make when they
<v Speaker 2>fly by you. They're about almost an inch and a
<v Speaker 2>half long. In some cases, they're big fucking black bugs
<v Speaker 2>that hit the agaves. I think probably other related monocots too,
<v Speaker 2>So I'd like to give a shout out to them.
<v Speaker 2>Bring them to your attention so that you know that
<v Speaker 2>they're out there. Someone should draw one that make a
<v Speaker 2>nice mascot for something. When I was in Tucson, and
<v Speaker 2>I'll just take a little break before we get back
<v Speaker 2>into talking about four corners Bonni, I went to visit
<v Speaker 2>my friend Beto Robert Anthony Villa, who if you live
<v Speaker 2>in Tucson, you probably know who. If you're into natural issue,
<v Speaker 2>you probably know who he is. Wonderful man. We didn't
<v Speaker 2>talk for a few years. We had a falling in.
<v Speaker 2>Now we're sensual with each other again, sensual, not sexual.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I wouldn't suck him off, but I would
<v Speaker 2>probably give him like a nice massage or something. Right,
<v Speaker 2>Just got to put that out there, and also, you know,
<v Speaker 2>use the opportunity say of the words suck him off
<v Speaker 2>out loud in case you're listening to this at work.
<v Speaker 2>So it makes people uncomfortable. Who might be, you know,
<v Speaker 2>in the might be happened to be a route, you know,
<v Speaker 2>if it's loud, if you got me out a speaker.
<v Speaker 2>So hopefully you don't. I pray that you don't. But
<v Speaker 2>I got to see him. He's got a reptile handler permit.
<v Speaker 2>He's got a hel a monster that can't be released
<v Speaker 2>because it was acclimated of people. It's fifty years old,
<v Speaker 2>called Pancho Hia. But I think it's I think it's
<v Speaker 2>a sheet. Maybe it's a non binary helo monds, maybe
<v Speaker 2>it's a they them. I don't know, but in any case,
<v Speaker 2>it was great to see him again and his little
<v Speaker 2>apartment in this old adobe building in Tucson. I love
<v Speaker 2>going to vish. He's got all the plants outside. And
<v Speaker 2>you got to have friends that have libraries of books,
<v Speaker 2>good shit to look at where you were. Like you,
<v Speaker 2>even if they weren't there, you'd still go into their
<v Speaker 2>house if it was unlocked and just look around. You
<v Speaker 2>just want to see what they got. My friend Benny
<v Speaker 2>used to do that to me all the time. He
<v Speaker 2>used to be I want to go to Joey's house,
<v Speaker 2>just look around, see what he's got. You know, he
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't take anything. I think one time he fucking took something. Actually,
<v Speaker 2>the motherfucker'll I need to hit him over the head
<v Speaker 2>and get it back. But most of the time he
<v Speaker 2>didn't take anything. He just want to go look around.
<v Speaker 2>He just wanted to go see. It was like he
<v Speaker 2>was in a museum or he was perusing a thrift store.
<v Speaker 2>And I wasn't offended by it because I did the
<v Speaker 2>same thing with him. You know. Sometimes I took some
<v Speaker 2>his shit too. Maybe it took a marker so I
<v Speaker 2>forget what anyway, or some art that he made that
<v Speaker 2>he didn't like and wasn't caring about. I would take that,
<v Speaker 2>you know, that's the kind of friendship we had. But
<v Speaker 2>I would go I would never do that to Beato,
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, I went to go visit Beto, he's got
<v Speaker 2>you blacktail rattlesnakes, same thing that was you know, can't
<v Speaker 2>be released. He's got that and it's just in his library,
<v Speaker 2>you know. And you shout out to the heel of Monsters,
<v Speaker 2>Fertio Zepic for all the American fat He's it's good,
<v Speaker 2>thank you. You know the connection between ozempic and and
<v Speaker 2>the Helo monsters. Anyway, I digress. Hanging out with Beto
<v Speaker 2>is wonderful because he knows his shit really well. He's
<v Speaker 2>got a scientific mind. He's involved in all kinds of projects.
<v Speaker 2>I think he's going back to school. I'm not sure
<v Speaker 2>if he's going for herpetology whatever. He came to Botany
<v Speaker 2>by way of herpetology and a sincere love and respect
<v Speaker 2>for the Sonoran desert. And so we got to go
<v Speaker 2>to what's it called Tukumak Hill or Tuckham Curry, what's
<v Speaker 2>the hill down there? And Phoenix in Tucson. It's a
<v Speaker 2>hill by the university where they got a research center
<v Speaker 2>up top and some cool plants planting. And it's cute
<v Speaker 2>because Tucson's so fucking hot that, you know, but at
<v Speaker 2>night people come out of their shells there. You gotta
<v Speaker 2>be crepuscular in that heat. And they hike up Tucumcock Hill.
<v Speaker 2>What's it called Tuma Mack Hill. God, I'm fucking this
<v Speaker 2>is like Mount Yaki all over again. I'm just butchering.
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna be so fun as an old man. If
<v Speaker 2>I make it that long, I'll be doing malapropisms everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>May the Late Mayor Daily, the pig Mayor Daily was.
<v Speaker 2>He had his shortcomings. I'm sure there were good things
<v Speaker 2>about him. Maybe if he got him drunk, he could
<v Speaker 2>mention the lightest farts on fire back in the day.
<v Speaker 2>Anyone who's not willing to light their farts on fire
<v Speaker 2>at some point in their life. Anyone who hasn't done acid,
<v Speaker 2>Anyone who hasn't been to jail or the army, I
<v Speaker 2>can't talk to. I don't have any respect for. That's
<v Speaker 2>when of Leo told me that. Leo told me his
<v Speaker 2>old peote teacher in the Native American church told him,
<v Speaker 2>don't trust anybody who's never been to jail or the army.
<v Speaker 2>I would add a couple other stipulations in there, or
<v Speaker 2>of people not who are not to trust, But you
<v Speaker 2>get the idea anyway, So I see in Betho was great.
<v Speaker 2>We went up to the hill, the house on the hill,
<v Speaker 2>beautiful old building on Tucumcock Hill, Tumamak Hill, uh tinsil
<v Speaker 2>Cock Hill, well on Tensail, I'll just call it that.
<v Speaker 2>We went up to the building on tinsel Cock Hill,
<v Speaker 2>wonderful library up there. Got to touch fifty thousand year
<v Speaker 2>old ground sloth shit and they were eating a lot
<v Speaker 2>of spheralcia and e fedra I guess which is very interesting.
<v Speaker 2>So the ground sloths really loved spheralcia and efedra. It's
<v Speaker 2>groundsloth ethnobotany for you. And there was a mast it
<v Speaker 2>on tooth. You know, the Sonoran Desert twenty thousand years ago,
<v Speaker 2>thirty thousand years ago, it was a much different place,
<v Speaker 2>let me tell you, right. And this is the same
<v Speaker 2>spot where Thomas van Devender did all his work with
<v Speaker 2>the pack rat middens. We got to hold a chunk
<v Speaker 2>of encrusted pack rat urine plant material encrusted with packrat urine.
<v Speaker 2>It was a nice chunk. It was like cinderblock sized,
<v Speaker 2>and that of course was instrumental and informing modern day
<v Speaker 2>ecologists and bodanist what the plant community would have been
<v Speaker 2>like thirty thousand years ago in the Sonoran Desert, because
<v Speaker 2>the pack rats pack all this stuff into their little
<v Speaker 2>middens deep in a cave. You know, they use their
<v Speaker 2>piss to encrust. I don't know why do they do that? Why?
<v Speaker 2>Let's ask deep seek Why did the pack rats encrust
<v Speaker 2>everything in piss? Okay, I asked it, and it says
<v Speaker 2>pack rats also known as wood rats dusky footed wood
<v Speaker 2>rats in northern California. Shout out to them, too, used
<v Speaker 2>to see their little stick, their massive stick tpiece everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>Pack Rats in a Sonoran desert encrust plant material in
<v Speaker 2>their middens using a substance often referred to as urine,
<v Speaker 2>but it's more accurately a thick, viscous fluid. Ooh, that
<v Speaker 2>is a combination of urine and other secretions. Jesus Christ,
<v Speaker 2>this is nasty. This behavior serves several important functions preservation
<v Speaker 2>of plant material the pack rats. Urine crystallizes over time
<v Speaker 2>due to its high urea and mineral content. These guys
<v Speaker 2>gotta drink more water forming I tell my daughter that
<v Speaker 2>all the time too. You know, you want your piss
<v Speaker 2>to be clear. You don't want this yellow piss, it's
<v Speaker 2>not good, be easy on your kidneys, forming a hard
<v Speaker 2>amber like coating called amber rat amber at Really, this
<v Speaker 2>coding helps protect the plant material from decay, insects and
<v Speaker 2>fungal growth woo. So they're gonna use it again, effectively
<v Speaker 2>mummifying it for long term storage. So if you find
<v Speaker 2>a pack rab min and it's got a bunch of
<v Speaker 2>juniperis and pinion pine and all this shit that doesn't
<v Speaker 2>grow in the Sonoraan desert, especially at these elevations anymore,
<v Speaker 2>then you know how much things have changed. It's a
<v Speaker 2>different world now. You know, I'm gonna start hoarding shit
<v Speaker 2>from Dollar General all this, you know, plastic stuff that
<v Speaker 2>comes over from China and encrusting it and piss. That's
<v Speaker 2>an old Italian man thing. That's another thing is these
<v Speaker 2>old Italian guys saving their piss so they could water
<v Speaker 2>their tomato plants with it, which is good, you know,
<v Speaker 2>as long as you mix it eight to one, right,
<v Speaker 2>As long as you mix it eight to one, water
<v Speaker 2>to piss, that's good. You know the real problem you
<v Speaker 2>gotta worry about is when these guys get into shit composting.
<v Speaker 2>When these old wops discover shit composting. It's a whole
<v Speaker 2>other world. Next they're shitting in cardboard in their backyard,
<v Speaker 2>shitting on a piece of cardboard, you know, putting it
<v Speaker 2>in a compost tumbler with you know, ten parts pine
<v Speaker 2>shavings you could purchase from tractor supply for eight dollars.
<v Speaker 2>I've never done this before. That's not why I know
<v Speaker 2>so much about this. You know, you put it in
<v Speaker 2>the tumbler. And of course, if it's hot you live
<v Speaker 2>in a hot climate, you can't use earthworms. You got
<v Speaker 2>to use soldier fly larvae. Uh, and they go to
<v Speaker 2>town on it. Soldier fly larvae are instrumental in a
<v Speaker 2>hot climate for composting, especially for shit composting. And again
<v Speaker 2>I wouldn't know anything about this because I've never done it.
<v Speaker 2>I do not do this. I don't actively do it,
<v Speaker 2>and I wasn't doing it four hours ago in my backyard, naked,
<v Speaker 2>looking like a fucking maniac, shitting on a piece of
<v Speaker 2>cardboard and putting it in a comp I did not
<v Speaker 2>do that, nor do I recommend it. But I will
<v Speaker 2>say soldier fly larvae are really cool and they're good
<v Speaker 2>to feed to you know what a little critters and
<v Speaker 2>stuff you know, I think they're the mosquitofish I have
<v Speaker 2>in my stock tank pond. They require. I don't know
<v Speaker 2>what those fuckers are eating. Honestly, I don't think they're
<v Speaker 2>it's too small to eat soldier fly larva. But I'm
<v Speaker 2>sure if you had a tortoise, they would eat soldier
<v Speaker 2>fly larva. And Betho has a tortoise. He's got a
<v Speaker 2>desert tortoise, so impossibly cute, so IMPI have you ever
<v Speaker 2>seen one of the mojave desert tortoise gopher Us agasazii,
<v Speaker 2>right the genus gopher Us. You got Gophers berlandii, gopher
<v Speaker 2>Us morathki, gopher Us agasazii, each speciating having speciated over
<v Speaker 2>the last nine or ten million years. According to different
<v Speaker 2>environments throughout the arid west of North America, Gophers berlandier
<v Speaker 2>is probably the most common. I've seen all of them
<v Speaker 2>in situ, but go first, Berlandier R. The Texas tortoise
<v Speaker 2>is probably the rarest. And uh god, they're so fucking cute,
<v Speaker 2>and I'm guessing they're going to be endangered at some point.
<v Speaker 2>I think they're probably more abundant because the climate here
<v Speaker 2>in the thorn scrub of South Texas is more more
<v Speaker 2>a measic it gets, it's higher rainfall, so it's an
<v Speaker 2>easier environment. They have an easier time, say with those
<v Speaker 2>box turtles that I saw in northern Alabama. That's of
<v Speaker 2>box turtles up up to Virginia. But no, you know,
<v Speaker 2>we need more people appreciating tortoises. That's another thing. Don't
<v Speaker 2>trust anybody who doesn't appreciate tortoises or turtles. You can't
<v Speaker 2>trust them. You can't fucking try. They don't have any
<v Speaker 2>respect for tortoises or turtles. Don't have any respect for them.
<v Speaker 2>All right, James Peace appreciates turtles and tortoises. Our nursery
<v Speaker 2>is supposed to be called Limestone Tortoise. I'd like to
<v Speaker 2>design a logo for it. It's some point, but added
<v Speaker 2>to the list of shit that I have to do.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, so Beatos got all these cool herbs, and
<v Speaker 2>I took my daughter over there to see it because
<v Speaker 2>they're so they're so fucking cool. And he's got the
<v Speaker 2>wonderful library, and it's just you know, the time to
<v Speaker 2>go visiting would be ideally when it's not hot as
<v Speaker 2>balls in the Sonoran desert. But I got people in Tucson.
<v Speaker 2>I got my friend Marca, Marco in Mesa shut out
<v Speaker 2>to Republica and Panada over there in Meysare's will go
<v Speaker 2>visit Marco. Wonderful man. But anyway I got, I got
<v Speaker 2>my people over there. New Southern Arizona's nice. I would
<v Speaker 2>move there if I wasn't trying to leave the United
<v Speaker 2>States eventually all together. And I just want to get
<v Speaker 2>away from the car slump, that's all I want. I
<v Speaker 2>want to live in a nice, walkable fucking place where
<v Speaker 2>I can have a yard. No one's gonna fuck with
<v Speaker 2>me for it. My yard in West Texas. I just
<v Speaker 2>had to kill an Africanized honeybee colony. I don't care.
<v Speaker 2>I don't want any shit for it. They're they're vicious,
<v Speaker 2>they're aggressive, they were living in the tool shit. I
<v Speaker 2>went in there late at night, sprayed them with permethrins,
<v Speaker 2>which degrade somewhat readily in the environment and aren't going
<v Speaker 2>to poison everything else. That didn't work, you know, because
<v Speaker 2>I couldn't get into the nest. I have to crack
<v Speaker 2>the thing open and get into the nest. But then
<v Speaker 2>I'm afraid to do that because you're letting all of
<v Speaker 2>them out. So then I went and I got this
<v Speaker 2>stuff that's made for carpenter bees. It's like a gel.
<v Speaker 2>It's like an expanding gel foam with emata cloprit a,
<v Speaker 2>systemic neo and the cotton in. It's the stuff that
<v Speaker 2>killing the bees, but it's killing the bees when it's
<v Speaker 2>applied wholesale to crops and to horticultural atrocity landscape plants
<v Speaker 2>that you buy a home depot. If you're using in
<v Speaker 2>a closed greenhouse, it's not that bad. And definitely you
<v Speaker 2>need that. For a lot of cacti, you need systemics
<v Speaker 2>because they get mites, and they get spider mites, and
<v Speaker 2>they get root meals really bad because this is stuff
<v Speaker 2>that they have no prior controls for or adaptation to,
<v Speaker 2>since they never encounter it in the dry desert environment.
<v Speaker 2>And I believe the reason that mites are so bad
<v Speaker 2>in greenhouses is because the predatory mites that keep these
<v Speaker 2>in check are not there, whereas in sit to it
<v Speaker 2>might be a little easier. There's more predatory insects, all
<v Speaker 2>kinds of little stuff you'll never see unless you get
<v Speaker 2>a microscope that keeps this stuff in check. So uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know, at least that's my theory. And a greenhouse
<v Speaker 2>is just too plush, it's too easy for them. So
<v Speaker 2>you gotta use some of the uh, you got to
<v Speaker 2>use some of the systemics, which it's not ideal, but whatever.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, I went in to the I found the
<v Speaker 2>hole where these Africanized bees and there I think they're
<v Speaker 2>all Africanized in Texas. You see a feral honeybee County,
<v Speaker 2>it's going to be the Africanized one. It's going to
<v Speaker 2>be those hybrids that were released, I think originally in Brazil,
<v Speaker 2>because that's just what is best suited to the environment here.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I think the ones that are too friendly,
<v Speaker 2>those European ones die out. I don't know, but every
<v Speaker 2>beekeeper I've talked to says, you see a feral honeybee County,
<v Speaker 2>it's Africanized. God. There was one at this property in
<v Speaker 2>Presidio County that I used to go through surveys that
<v Speaker 2>they were fucking horrible. They'd come at you. You're walking
<v Speaker 2>down a limestone talis hill, trying not to break your
<v Speaker 2>ass getting, you know, having bees swarm around you. Oh
<v Speaker 2>and then once they sting you, you're marked. So then
<v Speaker 2>the rest come at you anyway. So I took this
<v Speaker 2>amatic cloprid can. It's like an aerosol can with a
<v Speaker 2>six inch plastic tube on it, and you stick it
<v Speaker 2>in the hole and you just foam the fuckers out.
<v Speaker 2>Hopefully that will kill them, because I'd be going back there.
<v Speaker 2>I couldn't go in my backyard. You get to you
<v Speaker 2>get thirty feet close to the nest, and they start
<v Speaker 2>coming out, you dix so, and I also fucked the
<v Speaker 2>honey bees anyway. You know, we want the native bees.
<v Speaker 2>We want Diadasia. We want Diadasia anthophila. We want the
<v Speaker 2>Xyla copa. Don't forget the Xyla copas. We want mega Kylie.
<v Speaker 2>Is that what it is? Mega Kylie? Or mega Chili?
<v Speaker 2>We want mega chili. We want ash Metiella. Right, we
<v Speaker 2>don't want these. We don't want the APIs malifra complex,
<v Speaker 2>Lasio glossom pilosum. What is that? That's a sweat bee? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>the Xyla copas, I put the little uh. I get
<v Speaker 2>the agave poles or dasilerion poles or yucca poles, the
<v Speaker 2>inflorescent stocks. I put them out. I stack them up,
<v Speaker 2>you know, vertically, put them next to each other, lean
<v Speaker 2>him against the door in the corner of a We
<v Speaker 2>got a corner to the front of my house, and
<v Speaker 2>I let the do that just for the bees so
<v Speaker 2>they can go in there. And they they You could
<v Speaker 2>tell they're going in there because you see the wood
<v Speaker 2>shavings on the ground from where they cut a little
<v Speaker 2>hole in there. And then you know, even sometimes you
<v Speaker 2>see their little their little face poking out from there.
<v Speaker 2>It's sucking cute. The zila copas are big. They could sting.
<v Speaker 2>I got one of my house once. I tried to
<v Speaker 2>wrap it up in his shirt to get it out.
<v Speaker 2>It was trying to go go through the window, up
<v Speaker 2>against the glass, so I tried to put it using
<v Speaker 2>a shirt, you know, to wrap it and take it out,
<v Speaker 2>and it fucking stung me through the shirt. Hurt really bad,
<v Speaker 2>like almost like a numbing pain. I was impressed. Probably
<v Speaker 2>somewhat similar to tarantula hawks, which they kind of look like.
<v Speaker 2>They look like a fatter tarantula hawk that like bluish,
<v Speaker 2>iridescent black. But anyway, you know, they're not gonna sting,
<v Speaker 2>you know, they just want to. They're gonna sing unless
<v Speaker 2>you try to do what I did. Which is catch
<v Speaker 2>one so you could take it outside. So anyway, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I got to see beato. That was wonderful. And then
<v Speaker 2>the thing with the suaro fruits, we could just go
<v Speaker 2>back to that for a second. You know, I understand this,
<v Speaker 2>this lecturing. This is like definitely a Caucasian California thing,
<v Speaker 2>Caucasian progressive. You know, you're not supposed to harvest the
<v Speaker 2>suaro fruits. But this is on private land. I was trespassing.
<v Speaker 2>It was on the side of the road, it was
<v Speaker 2>on like luxury home developments. But it was just it
<v Speaker 2>was so fucking you know, I knew this was gonna come.
<v Speaker 2>It was well intentioned, but it made me realize that
<v Speaker 2>getting people to know something edible might approach and make
<v Speaker 2>them approach it in a different way and be interested.
<v Speaker 2>And I've seen this thought process work so many hundreds
<v Speaker 2>of times in people. Whereas if that's the thing that
<v Speaker 2>gets them into looking at the living world or looking
<v Speaker 2>closer or maybe trying to grow siguarrows, that is what
<v Speaker 2>gives me hope. And I think that's the point we're
<v Speaker 2>at in human history now where people just got to
<v Speaker 2>start growing shit, right. This is the stewardship that's needed.
<v Speaker 2>This is the cultivation of the living world. If you
<v Speaker 2>love something, grow it. If you fuck up and you
<v Speaker 2>gotta brown thumb, you just got to start thinking more
<v Speaker 2>about what you're doing. Why did this not survive? What
<v Speaker 2>happened to it? Look at the roots, look at the soil.
<v Speaker 2>Start actively thinking and ask questions. You can teach yourself
<v Speaker 2>this stuff by actively observing things and asking questions, how
<v Speaker 2>does water move through a medium? How does temperature affect
<v Speaker 2>plant metabolism? How does why is this thing not growing?
<v Speaker 2>I mean it's the same thing when everyone gets into botany.
<v Speaker 2>They're trying to grow shit that just based on how
<v Speaker 2>it looks, right. Like I talked to my friend Lily today.
<v Speaker 2>She was really into Sylpium albaflorum, the white flowered sylphium
<v Speaker 2>that grows on these then limestone limestone deserts around Dallas
<v Speaker 2>Fort Worth, Austin. Lots of populations have been destroyed lately,
<v Speaker 2>especially with the development that's you know, growing like a
<v Speaker 2>tombor around the Austin area. And she lives in Florida
<v Speaker 2>where it's very high rainfall, very human, you know. She
<v Speaker 2>I was talking to her todays like I was so
<v Speaker 2>obsessed with that. I finally got to see it. She
<v Speaker 2>came out here to give a presentation at San Antonio
<v Speaker 2>Backgarden on carnivorous plants, of which there are many in
<v Speaker 2>Florida and Tallahassee area, where she lives. She says, I
<v Speaker 2>was so obsessed with Sylphium albafloram. I wanted to try
<v Speaker 2>and grow it in Florida. And I said, there's no
<v Speaker 2>way it would have grown there. She's like, I know,
<v Speaker 2>it would have done thing where it grows now, you know,
<v Speaker 2>in these blazing hot, thin soiled limestone areas. I realized
<v Speaker 2>it would have rotted in Florida and the humid, high
<v Speaker 2>rainfall every afternoon thunderstorm area of North Florida. But that's okay.
<v Speaker 2>I mean people, you know, you get obsessed with something
<v Speaker 2>you want to grow. When I was first trying to grow,
<v Speaker 2>before I understood the importance of natives and how every
<v Speaker 2>region has its own native plants, I was trying to
<v Speaker 2>grow things that just I found whimsically interesting or that
<v Speaker 2>I thought looked cool, with no understanding that, like man
<v Speaker 2>keeping it alive here is going to be an uphill battle.
<v Speaker 2>Go for something that plays, you know, a role as
<v Speaker 2>a cog in the living machine. That might be, but
<v Speaker 2>I learned that later. But initially I was trying to
<v Speaker 2>grow all kinds of schefs, trying to grow don redwoods
<v Speaker 2>in fucking Oakland, California. They'll grow there, but they need irrigation.
<v Speaker 2>They're not going to thrive. You can't illegally plant them.
<v Speaker 2>They need to be in like a protected area that
<v Speaker 2>gets a little bit higher humidity and more rainfall bottom
<v Speaker 2>of an wash or something in a yard irrigated, you know,
<v Speaker 2>that kind of thing. But that's what gets people interested.
<v Speaker 2>And so if people are initially getting interested, the people
<v Speaker 2>who live in some of the retail car suburban slums
<v Speaker 2>of the Tucson Phoenix area. Yeah, Phoenix is a fucking
<v Speaker 2>heat island. Man, It's just a giant all that pavement,
<v Speaker 2>It's just a giant heat battery that heats up and
<v Speaker 2>then cooks throughout the night so that the knight's never
<v Speaker 2>cool off, leading to more and more accumulative heat throughout
<v Speaker 2>the hot season. Terrible, But you know, more people get
<v Speaker 2>into growing this, maybe there'll be someone who's growing a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of soarrows, you know, so they can eat them
<v Speaker 2>in thirty or forty years and they'll start off just
<v Speaker 2>growing them in their little fucking apartment or whatever. That's
<v Speaker 2>that's great, and that is a that's cultivating a bond
<v Speaker 2>between people and plants, and that's what I want to do.
<v Speaker 2>I don't give a fuck about identitarianism. The native people could, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>on public lands, only native people can harves sorrows. This
<v Speaker 2>is private property. And also, you know, I don't think
<v Speaker 2>that the home no autumn are gonna care if someone's
<v Speaker 2>picking so worrow fruits in front of a fucking luxury
<v Speaker 2>tract house where the owners obviously don't give a shit,
<v Speaker 2>you know. And you spread some seeds whenever you collect
<v Speaker 2>seeds too, that's always good for me. Say thank you
<v Speaker 2>to the plant. Thank you, fuck, I love you. You
<v Speaker 2>throw some seeds out, preferably under a nurse plant like
<v Speaker 2>a creosode or something, and then you take them for yourself,
<v Speaker 2>eat some, and then grow some too. Learn to grow them, right,
<v Speaker 2>Look at the cactus the how to grow Cactus video
<v Speaker 2>there with Leo. He's grown peyotes, but but uh, you
<v Speaker 2>know the same, same for any cactus. Right, high humidity
<v Speaker 2>at first when they're young, slowly accli ainate them once
<v Speaker 2>they get a different, different size. You know, if they
<v Speaker 2>start rotting, you got to take the humidity off whatever,
<v Speaker 2>or the mix is too thick. Whatever, Right, that's good.
<v Speaker 2>You cultivate. Your humans have been growing shit for for
<v Speaker 2>tens of thousands of years, right ever since the discovery
<v Speaker 2>the creation of agriculture. So this is this is something
<v Speaker 2>we do. This is something that's in our d This
<v Speaker 2>is good to cultivate. I want to cultivate the inclination
<v Speaker 2>to cultivate. And whether it's you know, all this shit
<v Speaker 2>I used to make fun of, Oh it's edible, is
<v Speaker 2>it blah blah? Sure whatever. If that's what gets people in,
<v Speaker 2>I'm off for it. Get them into growing. There's so
<v Speaker 2>many people I've met who start off with a narrow
<v Speaker 2>focus and don't really get it, but at least they're
<v Speaker 2>in the door. And then later on they figure out,
<v Speaker 2>they start to get it, and they get really good
<v Speaker 2>at it, and now they're like a backyard grower. They
<v Speaker 2>open a nursery or whatever. I've seen it happened so
<v Speaker 2>many times. So it's good. So less less online lecturing
<v Speaker 2>and uh, and more cultivation of human stewardship and reverence
<v Speaker 2>for Okay, let's fucking move on. Enough enough with the
<v Speaker 2>h I get off my soapbox. There was a spot
<v Speaker 2>on the side of the road in New Mexico and
<v Speaker 2>northwestern New Mexico near NAHIZI looks like the geese, and uh,
<v Speaker 2>it's on I don't know if it's on. I don't
<v Speaker 2>think it's on the rest. This spot was not on
<v Speaker 2>the rest. It was a bad lands environment that was
<v Speaker 2>like calcareous MUDs topped by basalt. So and as the
<v Speaker 2>MUDs a road, imagine these pyramids of mud, the cake
<v Speaker 2>layering of basalt up top, cracks and falls down and
<v Speaker 2>weather's with them. Remember this is all due to the
<v Speaker 2>Colorado Plateau. Why is there so much weathering and all
<v Speaker 2>these cool geologic structures in the Colorado Plateau because of
<v Speaker 2>that uplift recently uplifted. Remember six million years is recent,
<v Speaker 2>and the spans of geologic time right of which humans
<v Speaker 2>are only a fart I'll say again, and this spot was.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I've gotten so good. Not to pat myself
<v Speaker 2>on the back, but when driving past areas and viewing
<v Speaker 2>them from the road and saying, I bet there's some
<v Speaker 2>cool shit growing there, right, Sheriff Woody matt Berger is
<v Speaker 2>really good at this tool. Matt Riala is pretty good
<v Speaker 2>at this too long island Dago represents shut out to
<v Speaker 2>him and they you know, you start, do you see
<v Speaker 2>that there's gonna be There's something different, There's something unique.
<v Speaker 2>And to anyone that's viewing these who's not they're viewing
<v Speaker 2>these areas from the road passing by them at eighty
<v Speaker 2>miles per hour, they might not see, especially if they're
<v Speaker 2>not a plant person, it's this is not this looks
<v Speaker 2>like there's nothing there. And then you get close, you
<v Speaker 2>start walking around out there and you notice a lot
<v Speaker 2>of cool shit. That's what happened with this bad lands
<v Speaker 2>area north of Nahizi. It was I found Thelipodiopsis area there,
<v Speaker 2>a glaucous blue rubbery leaved mustard with auriculate leaves. Auriculate
<v Speaker 2>just means like an ear ear shaped leaves that were
<v Speaker 2>sessile on the chute, no petiole, tiny yellow flowers growing
<v Speaker 2>in a fucking crazy looking area, just crazy barren bad lands,
<v Speaker 2>that mudstone with the basalt on top. And then the
<v Speaker 2>closer I got to look, the more cool shit popped out.
<v Speaker 2>There was Sclerocactus clovery, which is a clover a It
<v Speaker 2>looks like clover ae there, which is a rare sclerocactus.
<v Speaker 2>There was a Calichordis, a genus, a wonderful genus, beautiful
<v Speaker 2>fucking genus of lilies that I hadn't seen since I
<v Speaker 2>lived in California. I went through a calichordas phase. I
<v Speaker 2>was obsessed with them. Never tried to grow any because
<v Speaker 2>it just seems it seems hard. You know, you get
<v Speaker 2>to mimic that habitat, especially in the Mediterranean climate, and
<v Speaker 2>they're a geophyte, so they've got that bulb in the ground.
<v Speaker 2>Lots of patients required. But I saw Calichordis. I believe
<v Speaker 2>it was Natalia. I a triplex everywhere, which is that
<v Speaker 2>there was a triplex Canessiens, and then there was a
<v Speaker 2>really weird one. I don't know if it was Argentia
<v Speaker 2>or what. A triplex is a genus in a spinach family, Amaranth,
<v Speaker 2>they see the Amaranth family, the quin Wa family. The
<v Speaker 2>flowers are not show either, tiny, they're nothing. The leaves
<v Speaker 2>are what's kind of cool to look at, chalky mint green,
<v Speaker 2>interesting scales and tricombs on them, interesting growth habit Most
<v Speaker 2>of the species and a triplex are pretty salt hollering.
<v Speaker 2>They could be halophytes. There's a really cool one that
<v Speaker 2>grows in the Mojave desert. What was it? A triplex?
<v Speaker 2>It wasn't a list of folia. What was it hymenolytra
<v Speaker 2>that's a really cool one, really holly leaved looking weird,
<v Speaker 2>blue bastard. Oh, a triplex corragatto. Where the hell was this?
<v Speaker 2>This is a bad Lands habitat, so I gotta get
<v Speaker 2>more habitat shots everything. Emory County, Utah Okay. Uh a
<v Speaker 2>triplex Barklayana. Knessen's already said that one. A cantocarpa is
<v Speaker 2>a common a triplex in in west West Texas. A cantocarpa,
<v Speaker 2>it's got kind of spiny fruits. I believe. What is
<v Speaker 2>that Latin book the sterns it's got the it's got
<v Speaker 2>descriptions of all the Latin terminologies here krpa. You know
<v Speaker 2>it's fruit or carpal and then a canto. I think
<v Speaker 2>that generally means spiny. Is that what that is? I
<v Speaker 2>don't know? But anyway, so this this was uh. I
<v Speaker 2>think there's a triplex Argentia, but really cool pink flowers,
<v Speaker 2>beta lane pigments because it's in Carriophilales, the same order
<v Speaker 2>as is cactus and spinach, which also have that distinct
<v Speaker 2>reddish pink tinge to them, you know, looks different from
<v Speaker 2>the anthocyanins one might encounter and other other orders of angiosperm.
<v Speaker 2>The beta lanes are specific to Caryophilalies, all but two
<v Speaker 2>or three families have them. But this spot I could
<v Speaker 2>tell it was a special site. There was Delphinium scaposum too.
<v Speaker 2>There was a lark spur, beautiful purple flowers with that
<v Speaker 2>nectar spur basal rosette of leaves, and then it sends
<v Speaker 2>up escape a solitary inflorescence. And again this is all
<v Speaker 2>on like bad lands, right bad lands, But there was
<v Speaker 2>there was some sort of extractive industry there. There was
<v Speaker 2>a loud fucking generator fenced off. I don't know what
<v Speaker 2>they're pulling out of the ground, probably oil and geh,
<v Speaker 2>who the fuck knows. But this area was just it
<v Speaker 2>was special, man, it was cool. And then I found
<v Speaker 2>there was an afalon. It was the which is the
<v Speaker 2>parasite parasitic plant growing beneath Artemisia. What was it grow?
<v Speaker 2>What was it growing beneath? I forget it was one
<v Speaker 2>of the ac things. A lot of aflons parasitized members
<v Speaker 2>of Astaaci perennial shrub, members of Astoraci. It was a fasciculatum,
<v Speaker 2>that's right. Yeah, what was it on? Artemesia? Tried and
<v Speaker 2>thought it was on great basin sage brush, of which
<v Speaker 2>I got I got some, uh some leaves because it
<v Speaker 2>smells so goddamn good. That was such a cool spot.
<v Speaker 2>Where was it was that east in the easy or north?
<v Speaker 2>I forget? Maybe it was east. I don't know. I
<v Speaker 2>don't know what a fuck this was? What is I'm
<v Speaker 2>all messed up on a locale, but either way, didn't
<v Speaker 2>expect to see that a chlorophylis pink inflorescences, no leaves,
<v Speaker 2>it's a parasite on grete basin sage brush. Really interesting
<v Speaker 2>plant community here, you know, you roll up, it's bad lands.
<v Speaker 2>You think you're not going to be there too long.
<v Speaker 2>You get out and there's just there's a ton of
<v Speaker 2>cool shit everywhere, and you just take photos, document it,
<v Speaker 2>upload it to I naturalists, save it, obscure the location,
<v Speaker 2>save it, record it for later. You know. Yeah, it
<v Speaker 2>was a fucking nice that wasn't That was one of
<v Speaker 2>my favorite spots. And I knew that that thel of
<v Speaker 2>podiopsis was rare, and I got that. I got it
<v Speaker 2>confirmed by doctor l Shabaz, the brassica guy, the mustard
<v Speaker 2>guy go with I go to him from my weird mustards,
<v Speaker 2>by the rare mustards, Masta silastrom, that rare one from Harlingen,
<v Speaker 2>another rare mustard. Little documented, you know, little elements of
<v Speaker 2>the living world slowly getting wiped out by the tumor
<v Speaker 2>of modern money worshiping civilization. You gotta record these things,
<v Speaker 2>record that they occurred there. And then after that the
<v Speaker 2>highlight of the day came from me another roadside spot.
<v Speaker 2>You just I like driving slow. I drive slow. I'm
<v Speaker 2>not a fucking speeder. I drive slow. Oh, I take
<v Speaker 2>my time. If you're behind me and you're driving, you
<v Speaker 2>can fucking deal with it. Go around. If you're on
<v Speaker 2>a single lane road, you fucked. I don't have to
<v Speaker 2>tell you I'm gonna drive slow. I'm gonna drive like
<v Speaker 2>a geriatric because I want to look at stuff, right
<v Speaker 2>unless i'm driving in the death cult, then I'm driving normal.
<v Speaker 2>You know. I just I don't want to have to
<v Speaker 2>look at strip malls and all the hideous shit. It
<v Speaker 2>makes me puke. It's bad for my health. But if
<v Speaker 2>I'm in beautiful areas, I drive slow. So you know,
<v Speaker 2>this is a Texas thing. I obstruck a lot of
<v Speaker 2>the time. You know. People just have to deal with that.
<v Speaker 2>I don't care, right, they get all upset. You know
<v Speaker 2>they should drive slow too. They got stuff to look at.
<v Speaker 2>There's nice stuff they're driving by. You got somewhere to be,
<v Speaker 2>do we all fucking settle down and you drive slow?
<v Speaker 2>So I stopped. I saw Mirabolis multiflora going off on
<v Speaker 2>the side of the road, big four foot spread of
<v Speaker 2>golf ball sized pink flowers. Holy shit, that's nice. I
<v Speaker 2>gotta stop and look at that. This is just after
<v Speaker 2>Ship Rock, New Mexico, which I will say does look
<v Speaker 2>like a ship. It looks more like a castle. It's
<v Speaker 2>it's a weathered and eroded volcanic plug on the Navajo Reservation.
<v Speaker 2>It's a beautiful piece of rock. It's really cool. Look
<v Speaker 2>I told my daughter it was a castle. I just
<v Speaker 2>figure why not. You know, She's like, she doesn't know
<v Speaker 2>I'm lying to these No, I'm bullshitting nor Maybe she'll
<v Speaker 2>figure it out a few years. Be mad. At me,
<v Speaker 2>But I just you get bullshit kids. Now, if you
<v Speaker 2>tell them Santa Claus isn't real, it's not too bad.
<v Speaker 2>But you can tell them Ship Rock, New Mexico is
<v Speaker 2>a castle. So I stopped to look at this mirabolous
<v Speaker 2>and then saying, like with everything, you stop to look
<v Speaker 2>at one thing, you find ten more cool things. I
<v Speaker 2>found Thelis Sperma's subnewtum. Thelis sperma is an herbaceous, little
<v Speaker 2>weedy quote member of astaraci related to Coreopsis. It's got
<v Speaker 2>those caliculi, those long narrow bracts under the yellow flowers.
<v Speaker 2>It's glabrius, it's rubbery, and there's a bunch of members
<v Speaker 2>in Texas. There's a bunch of probably I don't know
<v Speaker 2>where else. It goes throughout the American West. You got
<v Speaker 2>a couple in and it's widespread actually. And so this
<v Speaker 2>was cool though, because it was sufferutestent that had a
<v Speaker 2>woody base. It was like a subshrub Thelis sperma, which
<v Speaker 2>I which blew my mind. It looked like a little
<v Speaker 2>bondz eyed Thelis sperma, you know, thickened woody stem, but
<v Speaker 2>then those yellow linear leaves and a cool flower coming out.
<v Speaker 2>It looked fucking dope. I was whoa wow, No talk
<v Speaker 2>about variations on a theme. I was excited to see that.
<v Speaker 2>But the highlight for me came when I looked over
<v Speaker 2>and the sun was starting to go down and I
<v Speaker 2>could see all these awns of grasses. They look like
<v Speaker 2>the feathery shits you could call them, that feathery shits
<v Speaker 2>coming off the tops of these grass influorescences. It was
<v Speaker 2>the most beautiful site, right at the golden hour. And
<v Speaker 2>I went and looked over at it, identified the grass
<v Speaker 2>and it was Hespero stipa neo mexicana, which is now
<v Speaker 2>my favorite species of grass. It was fucking this thing
<v Speaker 2>is so beautiful. And it's those those feathery shits. The
<v Speaker 2>curly cue feathery shit are the as they're basically the
<v Speaker 2>wind dispersal mechanisms for the seed. And the seed is
<v Speaker 2>hard and sharp and maybe half an inch long. And
<v Speaker 2>I guess people that grow up nearby told me they
<v Speaker 2>used to throw these things at each other. Used to
<v Speaker 2>throw these things at each other. You knows it hurts.
<v Speaker 2>I collected a bunch of seed. It hurts if it
<v Speaker 2>stabs you in the thigh, like it was when it
<v Speaker 2>was in my pocket. But these this grass was just intoxicating.
<v Speaker 2>These are the kinds of experiences you want, you know,
<v Speaker 2>to take everything else away. You'll take any shit you got,
<v Speaker 2>they'll take it, but these experiences they can't take. So
<v Speaker 2>I was taken with that. And then I saw aria
<v Speaker 2>Coma hymenoides common name Indian rice grass, which is probably
<v Speaker 2>a common name that's been applied to five or six
<v Speaker 2>different grass species throughout the USA. But regardless, and Spooner
<v Speaker 2>had showed that to me when we were on the Reds,
<v Speaker 2>when I was on the Reds with the way where
<v Speaker 2>he lives, and I even then I saw, this is
<v Speaker 2>a fucking beautiful gras. Man, this is a gorgeous grass.
<v Speaker 2>The grains are like these little balls with these fuzzy
<v Speaker 2>things on them, and they, you know, have this bifurcating inflorescence,
<v Speaker 2>just branches. It's like a forked inflorescence. And so I
<v Speaker 2>collected some of that for the herbarium to two beautiful
<v Speaker 2>grass species. Man, you want to get into grasses, the
<v Speaker 2>Colorado Plateau is the spot to do it. I was impressed.
<v Speaker 2>I was, you know, we sat there for a while
<v Speaker 2>and took it and my daughter was getting pissed. She
<v Speaker 2>wants to go. You know, it's not what she of course,
<v Speaker 2>I understand that kids don't see this stuff is interesting
<v Speaker 2>till they're older, so they have a context for how
<v Speaker 2>much the human world sucks if they're smart. So, but
<v Speaker 2>you also got to show them. You got to show them,
<v Speaker 2>you got to introduce them. I tell her all the time.
<v Speaker 2>This is limestone. This used to be the floor of
<v Speaker 2>the ocean. That's basalt that came out of a volcano
<v Speaker 2>a long time ago. It was so hot it was
<v Speaker 2>it was like a liquid. It was like a puddy.
<v Speaker 2>I just keep reinforcing it, you know, keep telling her.
<v Speaker 2>She'll it eventually. That's what worked on me, my mom
<v Speaker 2>telling me that the limestone I was seeing in the
<v Speaker 2>quarries by the ship plant of I fifty five in Chicago,
<v Speaker 2>her telling me that those were composed of tiny plankton,
<v Speaker 2>tiny single celled creatures in the bottom of an old ocean. So,
<v Speaker 2>needless to say, that night in New Mexico, I guess
<v Speaker 2>we were Actually we just crossed into Arizona. We just
<v Speaker 2>crossed the state line. Four corners Botany, Navajo, Botany. We
<v Speaker 2>have a friend who lives on a Navajo reservation, and
<v Speaker 2>she'd commented, when I post hespero stipa neo Mexicana, she
<v Speaker 2>knew it. She knew it already, she knew it culturally
<v Speaker 2>significant plant. How could it not be so beautiful? Right there?
<v Speaker 2>There was sclero cactus part of a florists nearby, two
<v Speaker 2>which is relatively common, one of the fish hook caced I.
<v Speaker 2>The whole landscape was beautiful. We saw a prairie rattlesnake
<v Speaker 2>as well, at least my kid that I didn't see it.
<v Speaker 2>She said she saw the rattle going into the bush,
<v Speaker 2>so she knows. She knows her snakes too, only five,
<v Speaker 2>but she knows. You see that rattle, stay away and uh.
<v Speaker 2>And then I saw it after it already, I saw
<v Speaker 2>part of it after after it had already gone into
<v Speaker 2>the whole beautiful prairie rattlesnake. But that area was God damn.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I just that's why I say, you gotta stop,
<v Speaker 2>And you got to stop at some of these places.
<v Speaker 2>You can't be, you know, driving through I can't drive
<v Speaker 2>long hours at a time. I get fucking bored and
<v Speaker 2>there's just too much cool shit to stop, you know,
<v Speaker 2>speaking of which pelos style's that weird parasite grows on
<v Speaker 2>Dalya just west of Junction, Texas. That's that's like a
<v Speaker 2>common stopping point for me. I always stop and see
<v Speaker 2>that one near Exit four, Beautiful Junction, where Native American
<v Speaker 2>Seed used to be. I think they're still there. They
<v Speaker 2>got their mainware house in New bron Fels now. But
<v Speaker 2>you know, I'm frequently stopping. If it's an eight hour,
<v Speaker 2>it's gonna take me twelve hours. I'm gonna stop a lot.
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna be looking at stuff, collecting seed. I got
<v Speaker 2>shit to check up on. So driving through the Four
<v Speaker 2>Corners region I could have spent I could have spent
<v Speaker 2>eight more days in this small area alone. So much
<v Speaker 2>cool stuff, especially if it's going off. If it's not
<v Speaker 2>going off, then you're looking at rocks and you're collecting seeds.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, really special place. Spheralsia was there as well.
<v Speaker 2>Spheralcia lepto phyla lepto means thin, fine, slight, and that's
<v Speaker 2>what this looked like. The leaves were thin, narrow, it
<v Speaker 2>looked more like a broom. Looked like a broom speralsi
<v Speaker 2>and it was growing with Spherlsia parvifolia. Is it parvafolia
<v Speaker 2>parva fluoris? I forget, but either way it's a you know,
<v Speaker 2>there were two species growing together. Apparently they don't hybridize.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if they have different ploided levels or what,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, you see leaves like that too. I
<v Speaker 2>guess the thing that's cool about when I put stuff
<v Speaker 2>up there, I can always see the distributions. There's a
<v Speaker 2>little map you gotta take with a grain of salt.
<v Speaker 2>It's on Naturalist. You see the most of the distributions
<v Speaker 2>is in the Rocky mountains, and you see a fucking
<v Speaker 2>little red dot showing that it also occurs in Maine.
<v Speaker 2>You know, to take that with a grain of salt.
<v Speaker 2>That was a fuck up. Someone just someone put the
<v Speaker 2>wrong thing in there or whatever. You gotta take it
<v Speaker 2>with a grain of salt. But it was. You know,
<v Speaker 2>I'm always looking at distributions, always looking at family because
<v Speaker 2>I want to know how these things species. What caused
<v Speaker 2>this species to evolve, however many millions years ago that
<v Speaker 2>it did, and why is it restricted to the Four
<v Speaker 2>Corners area? What about the way this thing grows means
<v Speaker 2>that it does so well in the Colorado Plateau, but
<v Speaker 2>has not reached outside of there. You'd think in a
<v Speaker 2>few million years seeds would have gotten around. This is all,
<v Speaker 2>after all, it's all on the same continent, but something
<v Speaker 2>keeps it confined to the region that it grows in.
<v Speaker 2>Whatever is adaptive in the region that it grows and
<v Speaker 2>may not be adaptive outside of that region. S Fralsia
<v Speaker 2>leptophilus frelsia parva folia? Was it parv folio parvifolia parva
<v Speaker 2>I think means little But this was not little leave.
<v Speaker 2>These leaves were kind of big. But that just might
<v Speaker 2>be environmentally phenotypic, you know, maybe they do good rain
<v Speaker 2>rather lush. That's the cool rocks. There was a cali
<v Speaker 2>cordis there too. I didn't know calichordas grew all the
<v Speaker 2>way that you know the Four Corners region. I got
<v Speaker 2>a flora of the four Corners. Where the fuck did
<v Speaker 2>I put it? That's a great that's a big tome.
<v Speaker 2>That's a book. I should have brought it. I don't
<v Speaker 2>know why I you know, I collect all these different
<v Speaker 2>floras and the kinds of books just to have I
<v Speaker 2>want to have a library. I don't know why I
<v Speaker 2>was such a dumbass. I didn't bring flora of the
<v Speaker 2>Four Corners with me on this trip. So anyway, Well,
<v Speaker 2>the next day saw us uh going to check out
<v Speaker 2>the pedio cactus peeblesanus after peebles really goofy fucking name.
<v Speaker 2>This is when you know you're naming shit after. I
<v Speaker 2>think so many of the pedio cactus and there's nine species.
<v Speaker 2>There's been a radiation in this genus throughout the Colorado
<v Speaker 2>Plateau because it's very cold tolerant. These are small, generally
<v Speaker 2>small cacti species, except Pediocactus ssilar eye, which is a
<v Speaker 2>gypsum endemic in southwestern Utah, also goes into Arizona, grows
<v Speaker 2>on really cool gypsum flats, some of which were being
<v Speaker 2>demolished to put in these death cult homes with the lawns.
<v Speaker 2>Good luck, Good luck with that, Good luck having a
<v Speaker 2>lawn on a gypsum desert in southwestern Utah. Fucking morons.
<v Speaker 2>Ah God, I feel so bad for him. How much
<v Speaker 2>of those houses cost and they're all gonna be obsolete
<v Speaker 2>in fifty years. But Pediocactus simpsonii is a cool pedio
<v Speaker 2>cactus is probably the most common one. But there's nine
<v Speaker 2>species Nigrispinus Brady I also named after it. Dead white
<v Speaker 2>guy silar I probably also named after it, dead white
<v Speaker 2>guy the Spainyi is that a dead French guy? Now
<v Speaker 2>TONI I They're all named after people, which is pretty
<v Speaker 2>fucking annoying, stupid wink Lori Peebles he ain't as is
<v Speaker 2>named after Peebles, who was a botanist. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>in a video, of course, I said he ran a
<v Speaker 2>bondage seatomasachism, bondage, dungeon, bondage and domination dungeon makes it
<v Speaker 2>spice it up a little bit. You know, It's just
<v Speaker 2>a little lie. It doesn't matter. It's a common name anyways.
<v Speaker 2>So this was a really cool so I had a point.
<v Speaker 2>I forget where I got it from, but I got it.
<v Speaker 2>It was a long time ago, a GPS point and
<v Speaker 2>driving out there middle of fucking nowhere man, just you know,
<v Speaker 2>dusty hot north of the Grand Canyon. We went to
<v Speaker 2>the Grand Canyon too, which was cool. I wanted to
<v Speaker 2>show my daughter that got to see Perridley, Congesta and
<v Speaker 2>fend Lorella, which is what was this speed? I always
<v Speaker 2>forgot I hadn't seen I saw fend Lorella in uh
<v Speaker 2>where did I see this? Ooh same gene. Okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I saw fend Lorella lazio pedla on gypsum in Nuevo
<v Speaker 2>Leone and it had a remarkable growth, have a really
<v Speaker 2>cool It wasn't in flower the first time I saw
<v Speaker 2>it in twenty nineteen. I went back to nuwaval aone
<v Speaker 2>to these gypsum exposures and saw it in flower in
<v Speaker 2>April of twenty two. But you know, the leaves just
<v Speaker 2>white pubestans on the underside, white undersides to these lancelate leaves,
<v Speaker 2>and they're cob kind of like oblong leaves. Excuse me,
<v Speaker 2>and uh, little shrub growing out of a gypsum rock wall.
<v Speaker 2>You know, the habitat's as interesting as the plant. The
<v Speaker 2>fact that's growing out of what looks like a giant
<v Speaker 2>salt lick made it all the more interesting to me.
<v Speaker 2>Took me a while to I positively identify it, but yeah, anyway,
<v Speaker 2>got it, And yeah, man, fend Lorella lasi opedola. So
<v Speaker 2>fend Lorella lasi opedla on gypsum in the Wavo laone.
<v Speaker 2>That's a habitat you go to where everything you better
<v Speaker 2>be taking pictures of everything, because everything you better be
<v Speaker 2>documenting everything, because that's a fucking really remarkable that those
<v Speaker 2>gyps and exposures in the way to lay on tons
<v Speaker 2>of endemics. You want to build a picture of what
<v Speaker 2>the plant community looks like. You want to have a
<v Speaker 2>species list, so like on Inina, you can later go
<v Speaker 2>in with a draw a polygon around it and get
<v Speaker 2>a print out or a list of everything that grows there.
<v Speaker 2>That's what I like doing. I like getting pictures of
<v Speaker 2>community assemblages, plant community assemblages. I want to know all
<v Speaker 2>this shit there. They're all important parts of the living machine,
<v Speaker 2>all important cogs. Same thing we're doing at Thorn Scrub Sanctuary, everything,
<v Speaker 2>even the plants that don't really carry much for like
<v Speaker 2>some of the grass there's no fence. Some of the
<v Speaker 2>invasives too, and document those. Because buffalo grass is spreading,
<v Speaker 2>it's getting worse. We're in the middle of the what
<v Speaker 2>will be a very long and eventual takeover of buffalo grass.
<v Speaker 2>So just because it's not there yet doesn't mean it's
<v Speaker 2>not going to be there in ten years. It's going
<v Speaker 2>to get worse. The buffalo grass is getting worse if
<v Speaker 2>the weed wack and spray the buffalo actually but Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>we tried using cows and they ate a lot of
<v Speaker 2>buffalo grass, but then it just comes back because it's
<v Speaker 2>adapted to megafauna browsing on it where it's native to Africa.
<v Speaker 2>And then they cows just trampled all the other shit too,
<v Speaker 2>So you know, fuck that, We're not We're done with
<v Speaker 2>the cows. The cows are doing damage out there. They trample.
<v Speaker 2>It's the problem with with cattle. It's all all these
<v Speaker 2>all these people, all these dudes especially, it's always these
<v Speaker 2>fucking men, no offense to them in Texas and other
<v Speaker 2>Rocky Mountain rock some of some of the Rocky Mountain
<v Speaker 2>states who were all, oh the benefits of grazing, you
<v Speaker 2>need the grat with none of the nuance. Okay, it's
<v Speaker 2>not just about bringing cows in there. It's these plants
<v Speaker 2>evolved with a different animal, with bison and other other uh,
<v Speaker 2>other browsing animals. Cows are dumber and often occurring denser
<v Speaker 2>populations that don't move, and they destroy, they trample. It's
<v Speaker 2>just a dumber animal. You know, they've been bred to
<v Speaker 2>beat them like you know, American consumers, same thing. So anyway,
<v Speaker 2>fend Lorella utah insis was growing out of a limestone
<v Speaker 2>rock wall in the Grand Canyon. Epic fucking scenery. We
<v Speaker 2>were there at the uh what's it called Bright Angel
<v Speaker 2>Broken Angel Point, north rim of the Grand Canyon. And
<v Speaker 2>then of course Fendlerella lazio pedola one I just told
<v Speaker 2>you about. So there's two two species in the genus uh,
<v Speaker 2>not to be confused with fendleerra, right, which is uh,
<v Speaker 2>these are the families hydrangeac. They're in the hydrange of family,
<v Speaker 2>you know, but they got boy, I tell you what,
<v Speaker 2>they're fucking they're fucking cool plants. How many species in
<v Speaker 2>fend Lorella let's see this. I think it's just those two.
<v Speaker 2>Is it just the two? Oh? No, fend Lorella mexicana,
<v Speaker 2>lazy Opedola corret dorana and Eutaensis from Corretto. Are there
<v Speaker 2>any pictures? Oh yeah, there's some pictures of fend Lorella correttorana.
<v Speaker 2>That's a fucking cool one. Again, variations on a theme.
<v Speaker 2>How did this this genus specie? Okay, so I saw this,
<v Speaker 2>these tiny white five pedal flowers, trying to document everything
<v Speaker 2>out there, saw some cool pence theemen north rim of
<v Speaker 2>the Grand Canyon, all with you know, white fur and
<v Speaker 2>Juniperus around it. But these cool rockout croppings, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>you know, that's where the good stuff is. Saw a
<v Speaker 2>lot of good stuff there. Pence them in barbadis symphoric
<v Speaker 2>Carpus rotundufolius, which is the honeysuckle family, Percius things Buriana
<v Speaker 2>Rose family roseesy big white flowers. These are all great
<v Speaker 2>fucking plants to put in a yard if you live
<v Speaker 2>in the high desert, especially in the Four Corners region.
<v Speaker 2>Philadelphus Microphilus holoduscus, another Rose family member rose se ocean spray.
<v Speaker 2>They call it Garia flavesceens opposite leaves Glaucus and Glabrius
<v Speaker 2>Arctostaphalos pungens, which there's supposed to be a disjunct population
<v Speaker 2>that Davis Mountains. Good luck getting in there. I just
<v Speaker 2>tried to get in there, and someone had reached out
<v Speaker 2>to someone in Nature Conservancy for me, and so I
<v Speaker 2>reached out them too, and he sounded nice. He sounded
<v Speaker 2>like he was gonna have me out there. I reached
<v Speaker 2>out to him, and the email I got today was
<v Speaker 2>from someone who seemed about as fun to talk to
<v Speaker 2>as a sidewall heater, like you know, like one of
<v Speaker 2>the like one hundred and thirty pounds steel, you know,
<v Speaker 2>boiler boiler fed sidewall heaters. And they told me I
<v Speaker 2>can't get in for three It takes I have to
<v Speaker 2>apply for a permit just to fucking go there to
<v Speaker 2>document fungal diversity after the recent reigns, and then I've
<v Speaker 2>got to fill out this permit and then wait three months.
<v Speaker 2>And by the way, say we don't always allow. It's
<v Speaker 2>not a guarantee that you're gonna be allowed. Just I
<v Speaker 2>just want to go in and take pictures of fungie
<v Speaker 2>and maybe bring allan. I'll chloroform him if I have to,
<v Speaker 2>you know, he says he's got obligations. I'll chloroform is asked,
<v Speaker 2>throw him in the car. It'll be like weekend that
<v Speaker 2>Bernie's will have a good time. You know, he'll wake
<v Speaker 2>up out of the color. How long does chloroform last?
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. You ever done an ether rag over
<v Speaker 2>someone to kidnap him. I'm not sure. I probably wouldn't
<v Speaker 2>even need to do that. It's just funny. I love
<v Speaker 2>Alan Rockfeller, one of my best friends. So you know,
<v Speaker 2>we'll go out there. We're gonna see what's growing in
<v Speaker 2>the Davis Mountains in this sky island of the Chihuahua Desertment,
<v Speaker 2>the fungal diversity there. It's all private lands, so you know,
<v Speaker 2>people are disconnected from it. This is the Texas feudalism.
<v Speaker 2>Like medieval feudalism. You have no access to the land
<v Speaker 2>around you because it's quote owned by someone. But we're
<v Speaker 2>still going to go out there. We're going to document
<v Speaker 2>all the funky maybe collect some tissue samples for DNA sequencing.
<v Speaker 2>You know, see what's there. Compare the its gene region
<v Speaker 2>of the species we encounter with the its gene region
<v Speaker 2>of similar species all over North America, you know, and
<v Speaker 2>see if how they line up. And I just want
<v Speaker 2>to document. We'll obscure all the locations, but I just
<v Speaker 2>want to document. There's a lot of cool micorhizoal plants there,
<v Speaker 2>some of the oaks, some of the madrones, right ectomycorrhizol
<v Speaker 2>that will produce cool fruiting bodies of mushrooms. There's probably
<v Speaker 2>some cool saparotrophs that specialize on decomposing the material, the
<v Speaker 2>leaf material of some of those plants. It's it's a
<v Speaker 2>very worthy play. Would be a cool spot to do
<v Speaker 2>a fungal diversity survey. But you can't go in there
<v Speaker 2>because you have to apply for a permit wait three months,
<v Speaker 2>at which that point that's not the rainy season anymore.
<v Speaker 2>So what's the fucking point of trying to go there
<v Speaker 2>to do fungi? Right? Just the fucking nightmare? I got it.
<v Speaker 2>I got this email, and I was just I was
<v Speaker 2>just kind of a smart ass in the response. I
<v Speaker 2>was like, this is like a trip to the DMV.
<v Speaker 2>Don't worry about it, forget about it. We just want
<v Speaker 2>to go. If we can't just go, show you our
<v Speaker 2>show you our identification whatever. Get into this this, buy
<v Speaker 2>the book. Shit, are you fucking kidding me? This is brutal.
<v Speaker 2>This is like the kind of world I want to avoid.
<v Speaker 2>And the person who wrote us back didn't seem too
<v Speaker 2>fun either. Maybe I'm wrong, you know, you never know
<v Speaker 2>who's who's who can get loose, but they didn't seem
<v Speaker 2>very fun. They seemed like kind of a bummer, kind
<v Speaker 2>of a drag, right, Like if you had to go
<v Speaker 2>on a road trip with them, it would just it'd
<v Speaker 2>be like taking a fucking xanax the whole time. That's
<v Speaker 2>what it would feel like. They're just a downer. They're
<v Speaker 2>like a benzo in human form. Bummer. So uh, anyway,
<v Speaker 2>who can get me into the Davis Mountains. Somebody had
<v Speaker 2>reached out to me. Who's got a land, got a
<v Speaker 2>parcel near there? We just want to document some they're
<v Speaker 2>all the cool oaks, the Mexican oaks. They're in Arizona.
<v Speaker 2>And then they got this little sky island in West
<v Speaker 2>Texas where they grow. And if no one's documenting the fungi,
<v Speaker 2>we just want to go document the fungi. What a
<v Speaker 2>fucking nightmare Texas predicament. Anyway, But I'm alanchire Utah instance
<v Speaker 2>Utah service Berry. God, there was so much good stuff
<v Speaker 2>around here, you know. And we're still in the north
<v Speaker 2>rim of the Grand Canyon, mind you. We went there
<v Speaker 2>and the next day we went to go see pedio cactus.
<v Speaker 2>Now the genus pedio cactus. Is there a paper on
<v Speaker 2>the diversification and radiation adaptive radiation of the genus pedio Cactus,
<v Speaker 2>whereby what might be a larger population of a single
<v Speaker 2>species gets broken up through climatic change, and so you know,
<v Speaker 2>it was a large distribution. The climate shifts gets drier
<v Speaker 2>at lower elevations or otherwise whatever these these popular this
<v Speaker 2>large population gets broken up into isolated many populations, which
<v Speaker 2>then speciate over however, many million years, and turn into
<v Speaker 2>new species. All the ones I just read you that
<v Speaker 2>were named after dead honkys. What is it? Brady, Brady, Seiler, Peebles, Winkler, Winkler,
<v Speaker 2>Nelton Knowlton. I want to be commemorated and have a
<v Speaker 2>plant named after me. But anyway, it's a pretty interesting
<v Speaker 2>phenomenon to look into. Nine species of pediocactus. We were
<v Speaker 2>going for peebles anus. I've seen silar eye before, Winkler eye,
<v Speaker 2>and SIMPSONII, so this I knew. This pediocact is having
<v Speaker 2>a hard time. It's been a drought. The elevation I
<v Speaker 2>think was it five thousand feet. I got a video
<v Speaker 2>on it. It'll be out next week if I can
<v Speaker 2>get my shit together. Tiny fucking things. Marble sized golf
<v Speaker 2>pall side is an old growth plant growing in a
<v Speaker 2>limestone hills. The whole drive out there is this red sandstone.
<v Speaker 2>You get to the limestone that's where they are and
<v Speaker 2>they're tagged. The first one I found I only found
<v Speaker 2>because it had been tagged. So this was being monitored
<v Speaker 2>at some point the individual that the tag was for
<v Speaker 2>was dead. This plant had died, but the body was
<v Speaker 2>still there, so it must have been a recent death
<v Speaker 2>last year or so. And then we were looking and uh,
<v Speaker 2>pre have found another couple individuals on the other hill,
<v Speaker 2>and uh and then more on the other hill, and
<v Speaker 2>you know, they started to kind of reappear, but they
<v Speaker 2>hide really well. This is a phenomenal species, really cool.
<v Speaker 2>I love cryptic cacti. I love cryptic plants. Lots of
<v Speaker 2>a kindo serious around there too. What's what a kind
<v Speaker 2>of serious species was the coccinnies. I don't know, I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, but it was. It was good looking, it
<v Speaker 2>was all good life. And I was just happy to
<v Speaker 2>document this thing. And this is something that those European collectors,
<v Speaker 2>those creepy nerds that come poach stuff, might have trouble
<v Speaker 2>growing because it's just so hard to recreate that kind
<v Speaker 2>of environment, the high desert of northern Arizona, the geologic substrate.
<v Speaker 2>This thing probably rots very easily. Once again, the best
<v Speaker 2>thing to do is conserve the habitats, express reverence and
<v Speaker 2>love for the habitat, and make sure it's protected, like
<v Speaker 2>nothing is in an area in an era when politicians
<v Speaker 2>are trying to sell off public land. I put something
<v Speaker 2>on the Facebook page. Facebook is mostly a toilet to
<v Speaker 2>It's really funny. You just watch these miserable, fucking people.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lot of really lovely people who are doing okay,
<v Speaker 2>you can tell mentally at least. But every ten comments
<v Speaker 2>there's like a comment by someone who's you know, emotionally
<v Speaker 2>mentally disturbed. No shade to them. Aren't so many of
<v Speaker 2>us in this day and age, right, especially with social
<v Speaker 2>media toxicity and becoming a pone of the algorithm. And
<v Speaker 2>I put up that something about how Republicans are trying
<v Speaker 2>to sell off public lands, which they've been trying to
<v Speaker 2>do since the eighties, and uh, there were only like two,
<v Speaker 2>you know, paranoid racist Grandpa comments. Maybe they're not racist,
<v Speaker 2>maybe they're just fucking delusional Q and on nuts. I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, but I try to make it not politically.
<v Speaker 2>I want to recruit those people into my cult. They
<v Speaker 2>want to get them away from the Fox News paranoia
<v Speaker 2>and get them into my cult. But there were still
<v Speaker 2>one or two, So I just go through and I
<v Speaker 2>delete the comments. I don't believe in giving people a
<v Speaker 2>voice here. This is at my fucking page is a dictatorship.
<v Speaker 2>You say stupid shit, you get, destroy you get. I'll
<v Speaker 2>either keep it up and make a smart ass reply
<v Speaker 2>to you that hopefully gets the point across, or I'll
<v Speaker 2>just remove the comment altogether and restrict you, and then
<v Speaker 2>you can just have a conversation with yourself like a
<v Speaker 2>good boy, like a five year old, you know, just
<v Speaker 2>throwing a tantrum in a rubber room where he thinks,
<v Speaker 2>you know, people are listening, but totally unaware that no
<v Speaker 2>one's paying attention to them. This is which is what
<v Speaker 2>you have to do with social media, especially with Americans.
<v Speaker 2>They just say horrible throwing fits. You know, there's lots
<v Speaker 2>of angry, lonely people out there. It's a terrible feeling. Well,
<v Speaker 2>we're all prone to that, though. Who hasn't left the
<v Speaker 2>shitty comment and gotten into a spat with someone. I
<v Speaker 2>do it a little bit less now than I used to,
<v Speaker 2>but this is definitely a symptom of the modern day.
<v Speaker 2>It's a modern day sickness. Facebook especially is really just horrible,
<v Speaker 2>just shit posting. It seems to be a venue where
<v Speaker 2>there's just far more miserable people comment things. So there
<v Speaker 2>were only two that went on some rant about, oh,
<v Speaker 2>the Republicans that are doing the Democrats, but they're both
<v Speaker 2>like listen, but he both parties are owned by the oligarchs.
<v Speaker 2>I'm talking the Republicans are the one pushing this public
<v Speaker 2>land bill. Though it's not it's not mince words, you know,
<v Speaker 2>just because you've been duped to think that they care
<v Speaker 2>about you. It doesn't mean that I'm somehow for the
<v Speaker 2>Democrats or anything, you know, I just uh whatever, you
<v Speaker 2>settle down anyway. So this Pediocactu was fucking really cool
<v Speaker 2>to It's one of those places where you just want
<v Speaker 2>to spend time. You're in the middle of nowhere, which
<v Speaker 2>is also very pleasant. You want to just spend time
<v Speaker 2>there and and the limestone uplift. Again, the geology is
<v Speaker 2>always important, so I'm always paying attention to lithology and age.
<v Speaker 2>I try to figure out what it is, which you
<v Speaker 2>can normally do. Once you become familiar with geology, which
<v Speaker 2>everybody should look up the three basic rock types, understand
<v Speaker 2>what they are, how they form. To understand how they form,
<v Speaker 2>it becomes easier to identify them, to picture how they
<v Speaker 2>formed when you're sitting there looking at them, and then
<v Speaker 2>I always try to look for age. You know, how
<v Speaker 2>old is this rock? I forget, I forget the age
<v Speaker 2>in this case of the pedio kick, this peeblesenus. But
<v Speaker 2>god damn, we have a very special, very special site.
<v Speaker 2>And that morning on the trip out there, I went
<v Speaker 2>to that tourist spot. Where is it? It's near Page
<v Speaker 2>where is it? It's like a tourist spot, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the Horseshoe Bend. I don't know if I think it's
<v Speaker 2>like east end of the Grand Can. You've probably seen.
<v Speaker 2>It's a famous piece of motel art. It's very popular
<v Speaker 2>in the motels. They put like a photoshopped image of
<v Speaker 2>this bend in the Colorado River. And the river looked
<v Speaker 2>filthy by the way. It was very low and it
<v Speaker 2>was very ridden with algae, probably due to all the
<v Speaker 2>cowshit and other nitrates flowing into it from ranching. But
<v Speaker 2>we went there was clogged with tourists. You know, it
<v Speaker 2>was great, the great time. You know, there's shit ton
<v Speaker 2>of people. Whatever the fuck. I had to take my
<v Speaker 2>daughter there, and then I just wanted to see it
<v Speaker 2>too and document it. And boy, oh boy, were there
<v Speaker 2>are a bunch of fucking cool plants growing there. Agave
<v Speaker 2>utaisis kaiba bens. This grows beneath the I caught it
<v Speaker 2>growing out of the canyon rock wall three hundred feet
<v Speaker 2>above the river below. I got this nice lens I
<v Speaker 2>using a nikon. I used Nikon D seven D. Shout
<v Speaker 2>out to the Nikon D seventy five hundred. It's a
<v Speaker 2>beginner DSLR that's got its own built in flesh, which
<v Speaker 2>I need because I'm always shooting at low at a
<v Speaker 2>high aperture, a small hole high aperture to let in
<v Speaker 2>less light, get better depth of field. So shout out
<v Speaker 2>to the D seventy five hundred. But I got this
<v Speaker 2>nice lens so I could see what this monocot, this
<v Speaker 2>rosette forming monocot was growing beneath the viewing platform that
<v Speaker 2>all these tourists are, you know, mobbing up to go
<v Speaker 2>take pictures of the Shiftfield River and gave U times.
<v Speaker 2>It's a plant I'm familiar with from the Clark Mountains
<v Speaker 2>of Nevada, the Limestone areas of eastern southeastern California, the
<v Speaker 2>Limestone deserts. There's Hasparo Yucca New Berriey too that I
<v Speaker 2>want to see that grows in the North rim of
<v Speaker 2>the Grand Canyon and Hespero Yucca whipleyi is the far
<v Speaker 2>more common California species. Not quite a yucca, it's monocar,
<v Speaker 2>but it forms these beautiful rosettes, very stabby, very beautiful inflorescences,
<v Speaker 2>torched like inflorescences when it plooms. But this area in
<v Speaker 2>their horseshoe ben you pay ten bucks, they let you in.
<v Speaker 2>There was a scrub oak everywhere, Quircus welschii, kind of
<v Speaker 2>analogous to Quirkus havardii, which is the sand shrub oak
<v Speaker 2>that forms these dense colonies. It only gets like eighteen
<v Speaker 2>inches two feet tall, but it'll have multiple stems in
<v Speaker 2>the colonies, probably centuries old, hundreds of years old. Corcus
<v Speaker 2>welschii was all throughout this area, you know, growing with
<v Speaker 2>Ariagonum corumbosum, which is like a shrub buckwheat, with these zigzag,
<v Speaker 2>divaricating branches that form this little cage above the leaves.
<v Speaker 2>And that's probably perhaps why those zigzag branches evolve. They
<v Speaker 2>form a little cage two inches above the rest of
<v Speaker 2>the leaves that prevent herbivores or make it a little
<v Speaker 2>bit harder for them to actually get the the tender
<v Speaker 2>leaf tissue. But ARIAGONM. Cormbosum can get probably I don't
<v Speaker 2>know what four feet Diane, some of these four feet wide.
<v Speaker 2>There are so many cool plants there, uh coleogny ramisissima,
<v Speaker 2>which is again the I think this is the common
<v Speaker 2>name is blackbrush, not to be confused with our vicelli
<v Speaker 2>a rigid doula. This South Texas blackbrush ari agon corumbosum.
<v Speaker 2>Holy shit, what is the what is the what's the range?
<v Speaker 2>What's the distribution on this guy? So ari Agonum corumbosum
<v Speaker 2>because it produces a korm co o r y mb
<v Speaker 2>is a type of inflorescence. It's an inflorescence structure. So
<v Speaker 2>this this you know, tourist spot. I mean, that's kind
<v Speaker 2>of why I wanted to go there was you know,
<v Speaker 2>I know it's going to be obnoxial all the tourists.
<v Speaker 2>You gotta walk down there. Everyone's sweating like it. You know,
<v Speaker 2>the people probably drop on this trail because it's a
<v Speaker 2>good quarter to a half mile walk to this spot.
<v Speaker 2>It's the Kaibab Plateau. It's hot as fuck. There's probably
<v Speaker 2>people dropping. How often do people you know from heat
<v Speaker 2>exhaustion when they're walking the Horseshoe Bend to go see
<v Speaker 2>the Motel photo where the famous Motel photo was taken.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, but there's a lot of cool fucking
<v Speaker 2>plants there. Everything's low growing, there's pens them and palmerai.
<v Speaker 2>There was a lot of stuff I didn't take photos
<v Speaker 2>of because I'm, you know, all too familiar with the
<v Speaker 2>plants already. But there's a lot of good stuff there.
<v Speaker 2>Quirkus welschei and Tekilia laddi or latti or bradjian ace.
<v Speaker 2>The hispit hairs that will look almost looked like one
<v Speaker 2>of those little stiff you know, matted floxes perennial floxes
<v Speaker 2>with the woody stem that those were two great ones.
<v Speaker 2>There were two very notable ones. And then that area.
<v Speaker 2>Who's someone's got to grow that Ariagonum funck. What if
<v Speaker 2>I look the bush ariagonoms you get out west, the
<v Speaker 2>bush buckwheats are the coolest. Ariogonum giganteum from the Channel
<v Speaker 2>Islands was a plant I miss. That was a great
<v Speaker 2>plant for gorilla gardening in Oakland because you could plant
<v Speaker 2>it in the winter and it's just it sits like
<v Speaker 2>a champ through those fucking long dry summers and then
<v Speaker 2>gets big as hell fucking dope blue leaves, big blue
<v Speaker 2>fuzzy leaves, big krems, compound or can maybe the compound dumbles,
<v Speaker 2>compound dumbles of these tiny white flowers that could you know?
<v Speaker 2>The humble itself can get upwards to twelve inches across,
<v Speaker 2>if not more twenty four inches across in some cases.
<v Speaker 2>The ariogonums, the buckwheats. Wish we got more in Texas
<v Speaker 2>and I'm black. Just posted a cool areagonom from Tennessee.
<v Speaker 2>A rare one gets nine fucking feet tall, giant nine
<v Speaker 2>foot tall buckwheat? What is it? Ariagonam HARPERII? Where's where's
<v Speaker 2>that grow? Where's ariagonam harpriy go? It's got a restricted distribution.
<v Speaker 2>Grows the east of Nashville. It's like two hours east
<v Speaker 2>of Nashville. Why is it so restricted? Areagonams do do
<v Speaker 2>best the west where it's dryer. And then there's some
<v Speaker 2>what is that is that that's in Alabama? There's some
<v Speaker 2>in Alabama too? Is that where that is? I can't
<v Speaker 2>tell what it is? What a shit out? Are restricted?
<v Speaker 2>There's a county in Alabama grows and can't see it
<v Speaker 2>their muscle shoals. Where the shit at? Where am I? Oh?
<v Speaker 2>Maybe that's I don't know where it is. I think
<v Speaker 2>it's Alabama. But yeah, Arie Agenham Harper, I after Harper?
<v Speaker 2>Who was Harper? Harper? Was it the guy that stuck?
<v Speaker 2>He started the itt Technical Institute, he started all he
<v Speaker 2>did a craft school. What was his name? No? He
<v Speaker 2>ran to the dirty bookstore. Harper ran the dirty bookstore
<v Speaker 2>that used to be located in Schomberg before they put
<v Speaker 2>them all in there. There was a lot of dirty
<v Speaker 2>bookstores over there in in uh Schamberg. Why the fuck
<v Speaker 2>does it have? Are those my photos? Why are my
<v Speaker 2>photos popping up under it? No? Maybe they're not. Huh
<v Speaker 2>oh shit, hold on, anyway, that's two hours. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 2>cut it there. Maybe we'll do another one here shortly.
<v Speaker 2>I got to be in Austin tomorrowady give a presentation.
<v Speaker 2>I guess it's already sold out. Uh it's I think
<v Speaker 2>it's the tenants's living like fifty. I wanted to sell
<v Speaker 2>some stuff, but there's only fifty heads there. I don't
<v Speaker 2>know if it's gonna make sense that I forget where
<v Speaker 2>it is. Then I got another thing in Austin at
<v Speaker 2>the Elizabeth Nay Museum on the twenty eighth, I'll be there.
<v Speaker 2>Then we're doing our Costa Rica thing in July. Then
<v Speaker 2>I'll be with Alan Rockefeller at the Cloudcroft, New Mexico,
<v Speaker 2>New Mexico Mycological Society gathering July thirty first to like
<v Speaker 2>what is it August second or third? I don't know, uh.
<v Speaker 2>And so those are the events we got going on now.
<v Speaker 2>I think there's an Ecuador trip that Alan and Mandy
<v Speaker 2>are planning for November, so maybe you can get in
<v Speaker 2>on that. I don't know, But if you want to,
<v Speaker 2>there's Miyagi Labs. If you want to take a class,
<v Speaker 2>learn some plant that identification Miagi Labs. Search for on Google,
<v Speaker 2>on the Google on the Oracle, search for Miyagi Labs
<v Speaker 2>Crime pays and you'll get hopefully you'll get the Miyagi
<v Speaker 2>Labs pop up. It's me Miagi Labs m I Y
<v Speaker 2>A G I. And they got courses for plant identification,
<v Speaker 2>taxonomy and then natural selection that all those all the
<v Speaker 2>fun shit. If you want to better your understanding of those,
<v Speaker 2>or if you have no concept of them at all,
<v Speaker 2>want to learn some stuff, those are classes. I don't
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. What they're charging. I think they I
<v Speaker 2>don't think it's too much. I think it's reasonable. But
<v Speaker 2>definitely check that out because I saw what they're doing,
<v Speaker 2>and they approached me about it, and they sent me
<v Speaker 2>some samples of some of their lessons and I was
<v Speaker 2>pretty influenced. It's good shit, so anyway, and then there's
<v Speaker 2>also lectures from last year around October November on some
<v Speaker 2>of these concepts as well. So that's all I got. Hopefully,
<v Speaker 2>hopefully you got some out of that podcast. There's a
<v Speaker 2>whole bunch more shit to talk about in the four
<v Speaker 2>Corners region, but I'll save it for the next podcast.
<v Speaker 2>It's all I gotta have a grection. They go pick
<v Speaker 2>you up by ripping off the brim of my hat.
<v Speaker 2>It's your ris cold today.
<v Speaker 1>And here I am walking down sixty six.
<v Speaker 3>Wish she hadn't done me that way, Steeping under the
<v Speaker 3>table in a root side for a man could wake
<v Speaker 3>up dead, but it's yours, seems warning many steeping in
<v Speaker 3>ocking sizement.
<v Speaker 1>Here's anybody going the sands RUFFI side soona he face
<v Speaker 1>is alright, his arm the side and gonna get I ever,
<v Speaker 1>non quen whipping down the neck of my shirt like
<v Speaker 1>I ain't gotten nothing, No, but I'd rather fight to
<v Speaker 1>end and rain than BRD. I've been fighting at home
<v Speaker 1>con to come the.
<v Speaker 2>Trunk with the US map.
<v Speaker 1>Now people writing letters back home.
<v Speaker 3>Argill probably want me back.
<v Speaker 1>Ter still need just that, don't There's anybody.
<v Speaker 2>Going to say.
<v Speaker 1>I'll be a Sadrisolt any places alright is long desire