Talking Philosophy with Kerry Knudsen

<v Speaker 1>Okay, we're recording unless this thing unless this thing foks. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>there we go, carry canuts and self taught like anologist
<v Speaker 1>and autodidak. How are you doing?
<v Speaker 2>Oh? Real good, working on a project on Utah.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And one family lichens. Oh, a lot of undescribed diversity.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what was that? What is it? Akarospra? That's their
<v Speaker 1>main genus, Yeah, Acoros bracy. Those are the ones that
<v Speaker 1>you don't notice some when they're dormant, and then when
<v Speaker 1>they when they light up, they turn like a bright,
<v Speaker 1>vivid green.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah they're moist. Yeah. Well almost all lichens are like that,
<v Speaker 2>but a lot of these are are kind of plaine looking,
<v Speaker 2>some of them are, and most of the yellow yellow
<v Speaker 2>stuff you see as them.
<v Speaker 1>Oh really okay? Yeah, I saw one in the Mojave
<v Speaker 1>Desert in southwestern Utah and it was it was near
<v Speaker 1>Saint George and it was I think we talked about
<v Speaker 1>this this podcast we did, and it was, Yeah, it
<v Speaker 1>looked like Slimmer from Ghostbusters, you know, to use it
<v Speaker 1>to use in eighties reference an eighties kids movie. Beloved
<v Speaker 1>eighties kids movie. How are you doing?
<v Speaker 2>Man?
<v Speaker 1>It's I haven't talked to.
<v Speaker 2>In a year or two, you know, yeah, just working
<v Speaker 2>away on this grant. Yeah mm hm.
<v Speaker 1>And so what what is it con? I mean, so
<v Speaker 1>what so you're in Prague, you're living in Prague, which
<v Speaker 1>I don't blame you the fuck out of the US,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because it's it's kind of a fucking zoo
<v Speaker 1>over here. To put it lightly, it's.
<v Speaker 2>Kind of it's kind of a zoo everywhere in the
<v Speaker 2>world right now. But but it's good to be in
<v Speaker 2>somewhere different than where I grew up, you know, for
<v Speaker 2>the just for the experience. Yeah, and I got a
<v Speaker 2>good woman here.
<v Speaker 1>So but you guys, you guys have I mean, you
<v Speaker 1>have healthcare over there, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, way better. Yeah, it's yeah, it's complete healthcare, one
<v Speaker 2>of it, and that's disappearing in Europe. By the way,
<v Speaker 2>we have trouble not having enough doctors because they split
<v Speaker 2>and go to America to make money. So you got
<v Speaker 2>a lot of really old guys and old women working
<v Speaker 2>on the healthcare system here.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what's going on? What's going on? Are the companies
<v Speaker 1>Are the companies trying to I mean, are they trying
<v Speaker 1>to privatize it? Like everywhere? That's kind of like the
<v Speaker 1>you know, the No, it.
<v Speaker 2>Looks like it's it looks like it's gonna hold. We
<v Speaker 2>got it, we got so I think it'll hold. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>the people here aren't gonna let go a bit easy.
<v Speaker 2>Why why are.
<v Speaker 1>Moving to the US though, that's crazy to me, Like
<v Speaker 1>why would they want to come here?
<v Speaker 2>Doctors, doctors, our doctors are going there to make some.
<v Speaker 1>Money, okay, but then you have to live here.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, well that's they don't mind. They can make like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year
<v Speaker 2>instead of what they're making here.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Man, I knew a guy. I knew a guy
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico. Cool guy. He was a trail runner. I
<v Speaker 1>actually asked them to get me a gave gentry. I
<v Speaker 1>seeds from Nuevo Leone, which is that high altitude giant eggavated.
<v Speaker 1>He sends out pups and he was doing he was
<v Speaker 1>trained as a surgeon doing apendectomies and then and then
<v Speaker 1>now and then he I talked to him last He's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I moved into plastic surgery. It's like, oh god, why
<v Speaker 1>you know, like given given phrases, butt lifts are fucking
<v Speaker 1>you know, injecting and what do they do with they
<v Speaker 1>inject the lips that looks like a you know, you
<v Speaker 1>end up looking like a fifty five year old lizard
<v Speaker 1>or something, you know, I don't.
<v Speaker 2>Know, some sort of like weird move those move those
<v Speaker 2>wrinkles from your face so you look like you get
<v Speaker 2>your face doesn't move anymore.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the Kardashians have just ruined. They just fucking so
<v Speaker 1>poisoned the well of anyway of beauty, standards of beauty,
<v Speaker 1>what's considered but anyway, man, so with your uh so,
<v Speaker 1>with acharospo and all the so what how are you
<v Speaker 1>working remote? How are you You're writing a li like
<v Speaker 1>in Flora? On the are you writing a like in Flora?
<v Speaker 2>I'm I'm not. I'm only working on one part of Utah,
<v Speaker 2>this and this one family which is really diverse. There
<v Speaker 2>we right now I have I'm in the process that
<v Speaker 2>described me over fifteen new species for science from there.
<v Speaker 2>So Jesus give you an idea and we're trying to
<v Speaker 2>figure out other ones.
<v Speaker 1>Do you think, I mean, do you think a lot
<v Speaker 1>of just likings aren't on many people's radar because there's
<v Speaker 1>not there's not a human like an anthropocentric use for
<v Speaker 1>them or.
<v Speaker 2>What that's right, that's right. There isn't much use for them.
<v Speaker 1>I mean aside from being a you know, a piece
<v Speaker 1>of the living machine that is the biosphere there there,
<v Speaker 1>you know, unless you can monitor there's no way there's
<v Speaker 1>no pharmacological uses for them.
<v Speaker 2>I suppose huh, Well, they know, but like see for instance,
<v Speaker 2>we have I've even worked on a paper too with
<v Speaker 2>with people looking for for chemicals in them. And there
<v Speaker 2>are there are assets in them. But once once they
<v Speaker 2>can discover them, they once they can discover them, then
<v Speaker 2>they can synthesize them if they think they really have
<v Speaker 2>a use. But so far the research, which has been
<v Speaker 2>mostly on cancer cells, has not produced anything that I
<v Speaker 2>know of anyway.
<v Speaker 1>Mm hmmm. Isn't there there's some sort of vitamin D
<v Speaker 1>supplement that's synthesized from like in Is that true? Is
<v Speaker 1>there isn't there something?
<v Speaker 2>Well, I hadn't heard about that one. No.
<v Speaker 1>I forget, Yeah, I forget that. I'd have to get
<v Speaker 1>my competitor on my computer with me Jesus Christ. I
<v Speaker 1>forget that.
<v Speaker 2>There's there's a few things that that are commercial and
<v Speaker 2>it's some of them here in Europe are used to
<v Speaker 2>make perfume bases, and so some are some are collected
<v Speaker 2>every year in like oak forests. And we have a
<v Speaker 2>cough drop here that's made from Icelandica and it's it's
<v Speaker 2>it's a it's a lichen and it makes a darn
<v Speaker 2>good cough drop better than doctor Smith's or whatever they're
<v Speaker 2>in the United States.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, there we go. Okay, So what were you saying
<v Speaker 1>about when I paused there, I just heard you you
<v Speaker 1>mentioning What are you mentioning? You're mentioning it some sort
<v Speaker 1>of radiation and a family.
<v Speaker 2>Well, yeah, no, I said. You asked me if I
<v Speaker 2>was doing a like in Flora, Utah, and I'm not.
<v Speaker 2>I'm just working on one family there and that. And
<v Speaker 2>these Acaros bracy are really good pioneer species and in
<v Speaker 2>arid habitats. So when at the end of the ice
<v Speaker 2>age they would have moved into this area or and
<v Speaker 2>we we we think this happened to it depends, but
<v Speaker 2>they radiated and speciated. So we're at about in the southwest,
<v Speaker 2>from from the Mojave Desert in California all the way
<v Speaker 2>up to the Colorado Plateau. There's over one hundred and
<v Speaker 2>twenty species of them.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, and so why what what drives speciation and likings?
<v Speaker 1>I mean it takes isolation and different environments, right, I mean, well.
<v Speaker 2>For instance, in these Zacharos bracy, they have genetic variability
<v Speaker 2>in like the it s, the LSU and UH and
<v Speaker 2>and that variability under under select active pressures from the
<v Speaker 2>from the environment will lead to speciation. With a big
<v Speaker 2>giant event like that happening the end of the ice
<v Speaker 2>age here and the drying out of the southwest. This
<v Speaker 2>that's what caused a speciation.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, So so tell everybody who's listening again, familiarize them
<v Speaker 1>again with likings, you know, if they may not know,
<v Speaker 1>it's a it's a fungus and that's what is used
<v Speaker 1>to classify farming. An algae, right, It's so it's it's
<v Speaker 1>sometimes just three organisms, the fungus and algae.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, an algae or cyanobacteria. Yeah, it's the main they
<v Speaker 2>mainly live off of. They mainly live off the the
<v Speaker 2>algae or the cyanobacteria which they preserve inside themselves.
<v Speaker 1>So the the case of like acarasp or socialist, which
<v Speaker 1>is that that slimer woman and.
<v Speaker 2>That and oh yeah that's that yellow one.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what is it. What is there?
<v Speaker 2>Well, actually in where you saw it, it's radio radikata,
<v Speaker 2>is what we've found out.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, radicada is that a that's say, what's the photosymbiont?
<v Speaker 1>Is that an algae or a cyanobacteria?
<v Speaker 2>Now those are all of the ac rosperraci have algae.
<v Speaker 1>Just green algae, okay, and they're pretty common, like the
<v Speaker 1>photobind is normally a common green algae. And then the
<v Speaker 1>fungus is what's special?
<v Speaker 2>Oh no, man, it's kind of interesting. We did this
<v Speaker 2>study in the in the in the California, for instance,
<v Speaker 2>I collected a lichen at every five hundred meters going
<v Speaker 2>up to the top of the Sanjacino Mountains, and at
<v Speaker 2>every five hundred meters it switched this it switched the
<v Speaker 2>species of algae it was using. And then the person
<v Speaker 2>I was working with, Imka Schmidt, she was up in
<v Speaker 2>central California at that time, and she went did the
<v Speaker 2>same study and picked up the change going all the
<v Speaker 2>way up elevation, and then the actual species of algae
<v Speaker 2>match between our two locations.
<v Speaker 1>Why do you know what the reason? I mean, what
<v Speaker 1>are what are some reasons you might think why it
<v Speaker 1>would change up? What algae is whatever is available or
<v Speaker 1>whatever does something work better?
<v Speaker 2>And one niche than yeah, well, you know, the algae
<v Speaker 2>is is since we found that there was a since
<v Speaker 2>we found there was an elevational gradient, Okay, the algae
<v Speaker 2>was best adapted for each of those locations. You know
<v Speaker 2>how California is right at the base it you know,
<v Speaker 2>it rained and stuff, but hardly ever snows. By the
<v Speaker 2>time we got to the top, that area is almost
<v Speaker 2>stowed in every year. So so the algae's were apparently
<v Speaker 2>adapted to each elevational gradient. And so that's really sensitive actually,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>And so these things, how do they establish these connections?
<v Speaker 1>Is it? I mean, is that when the when a
<v Speaker 1>spore is you know, caught on the wind.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it comes down And usually usually when the sporing
<v Speaker 2>event happens, when the spores are ejected from the from
<v Speaker 2>the from the lichen, They usually come down during a
<v Speaker 2>rainstorm or during a wet period because it's hydraulic pressure
<v Speaker 2>that fires the spores out of the lichen. So when
<v Speaker 2>when it's raining or it's real wet, that squeezes this
<v Speaker 2>assi and the spores shoot out at about two hundred
<v Speaker 2>and fifty miles an hour. Jesus of course, for as
<v Speaker 2>small as they are ten microns long, they don't go
<v Speaker 2>very far unless the wind picks them up. But then
<v Speaker 2>that lands on the that lands on the ground, and
<v Speaker 2>at that particular kind of events is also a time
<v Speaker 2>when algae is active, so then they form their symbiosis. Also,
<v Speaker 2>lichens grow through through just as a fungus. A lot
<v Speaker 2>of the lichens that in in fact, all the lichens
<v Speaker 2>you see have a hypothalus in the rock, and that
<v Speaker 2>hypothalus can also come up near the surface in one
<v Speaker 2>of those events grow grow near the surface. Usually it's
<v Speaker 2>they're in the top one millimeter part of them are,
<v Speaker 2>at least, and when when all they have to do
<v Speaker 2>is to come into contact with an algae at the
<v Speaker 2>right point, And likenization can also happen from from from
<v Speaker 2>a direct relationship like that.
<v Speaker 1>The hypothelus, so that it's in there they like embed
<v Speaker 1>themselves in the rock like a porous run.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, they have the fungus embeds itself in the rock.
<v Speaker 2>Some fungi that you some fungi have the algae, like
<v Speaker 2>some of the ones we're studying right now have the
<v Speaker 2>algae in the rock. And then then all you see
<v Speaker 2>is their flower, which which will be like a black
<v Speaker 2>in the stuff we're studying as a black corrugated type
<v Speaker 2>brown disc that's producing spores in it. But the algae
<v Speaker 2>is in the rock and not in the in what
<v Speaker 2>you see.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so it's analogous to a flower. But what's the
<v Speaker 1>term for it. It's like the reproductive structure of these things. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>Apathesia apathesi, and so most of the lichens. For anybody
<v Speaker 1>listening to you got to look up, look up diagram
<v Speaker 1>of a lichen. It's a really psychedelic yeah, drawing, it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking beautiful. It's these fungal hyphie, these strands of fungal
<v Speaker 1>hyphie wrapped around these little globules of algae. I suppose
<v Speaker 1>those are just algae cells or clumps of algae cells
<v Speaker 1>of photosynthetic.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there are algae cells. They they develop a chemical
<v Speaker 2>relationship with them, so they can get sugar from them
<v Speaker 2>and also make them divide. And also when the algae
<v Speaker 2>is inside the uh, inside the thallus, it doesn't die
<v Speaker 2>right away. The normal life span of an algae, saying
<v Speaker 2>the desert may be very short a week or so.
<v Speaker 2>If it's inside the lichen, It'll be there for a
<v Speaker 2>long time.
<v Speaker 1>They thrive more at cooler temperatures. Huh like that, Like
<v Speaker 1>higher latitudes. Are there many tropical algae like I mean.
<v Speaker 2>Lichens? Yeah, there's there's a lot. There's lichens developed for
<v Speaker 2>all all of different habitats. Now, the family eye study
<v Speaker 2>usually prefers arid habitats, and when you get up past
<v Speaker 2>a certain elevation that they there's very few of them.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>These ones are usually because they've adapted to the arid
<v Speaker 2>habitat deserts. The ones you see, the ones you see
<v Speaker 2>up at the top of the mountain are ones in
<v Speaker 2>fact in the Southwest are ones that used to be
<v Speaker 2>at the base during the ice Age and have moved
<v Speaker 2>up the mountain. So those will be the first one
<v Speaker 2>that become extinct in areas. It's like some of the plants.
<v Speaker 1>I've got really into all this lately, just because I mean, well,
<v Speaker 1>first off, likings are everywhere in the desert, and some
<v Speaker 1>of them just look incredible when you get up close,
<v Speaker 1>you know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. The other thing is is that bothering me? Is
<v Speaker 2>I'm studying this group. It's adapted to temperatures now, and
<v Speaker 2>if we're you know how it is. You're hot in
<v Speaker 2>Texas right now and it's winter. If we get to
<v Speaker 2>where the southwest is as hot as Saudi Arabia, it'll
<v Speaker 2>be just like Death Valley, where the only place you
<v Speaker 2>can really find likings is way up on top of
<v Speaker 2>the mountains.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Jesus.
<v Speaker 2>And so a lot of the stuff I'm studying I
<v Speaker 2>expect to become extinct. They they won't die, they won't
<v Speaker 2>like just disappear, but they'll be habit harder to harder
<v Speaker 2>to reproduce, and maybe one hundred to two hundred years
<v Speaker 2>from now they may not be there.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I think about that with plants all the time.
<v Speaker 1>I was in the Davis Mounds of West West Texas
<v Speaker 1>two weeks ago, and there's all these cool oaks up there,
<v Speaker 1>Quircus rugosa, Quirkus hyper lucoids, like beautiful oaks, and they
<v Speaker 1>all look like shit. There's all die back. They all
<v Speaker 1>have die back on them, except at the very higher
<v Speaker 1>reaches of the mountain. The mountain got you know, pathetic
<v Speaker 1>amount of rainfall this year compared to normal. Uh. And
<v Speaker 1>then there's madrones up there too, the Texas madrone, which
<v Speaker 1>is a fucking I love that whole genus.
<v Speaker 2>It's a beautiful I love the Madrones are beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>And they and they require this you know, specific, not specific.
<v Speaker 1>I think they associate with a lot of you know,
<v Speaker 1>bisidio my seat and uh mostly basidio my seat, Michael,
<v Speaker 1>rhizol ecto, Michael. But you know, there's I'm looking at
<v Speaker 1>this mountain and it's like a it's like an island,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it looks it's basically like the analogy of
<v Speaker 1>like a pond that's slowly drying up from the outside
<v Speaker 1>in and and everything that lives in that pond is
<v Speaker 1>gonna get wiped out at some point as it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>as temperatures continue to dry. And of course it's not
<v Speaker 1>that it's not the heat that's the issue, because Earth
<v Speaker 1>there's been this out before. It's the rate at which
<v Speaker 1>it's happening, and it happens so quick that things can't
<v Speaker 1>adapt the natural selection.
<v Speaker 2>They can't evolve fast enough. That's the problem, right.
<v Speaker 1>But I was thinking about that because I'm like God
<v Speaker 1>the fungal and I looked up, you know, I looked
<v Speaker 1>up on iatros, the fungal diversity that's been observed for
<v Speaker 1>the Davis mountains and it's there's nothing. I mean there's
<v Speaker 1>because it's all private land, fir ust except you know
<v Speaker 1>Nature Conservancy owns that that's private. They let you in
<v Speaker 1>like four times a week or four times a year.
<v Speaker 1>They have a public day, but if it hasn't been
<v Speaker 1>after a rain, you're not going to see that much.
<v Speaker 1>So it's, uh, you know, we really need to get
<v Speaker 1>somebody out there and you know, do a proper ass
<v Speaker 1>fungal survey. But you know it's too hard to get
<v Speaker 1>a hold of Nature Conservancy people because they're so busy
<v Speaker 1>mailing out so much fucking junk mail probably you know,
<v Speaker 1>they don't have time to actually let you into.
<v Speaker 2>They Also they also have funding problems too. It research,
<v Speaker 2>research costs money, so there's there's only for instance, for likens,
<v Speaker 2>there's only a for what I do taxonomy, and there's
<v Speaker 2>very little available funds. So I didn't start out doing
<v Speaker 2>this for money. And even though we have a large
<v Speaker 2>expensive grant working with BYU right now, I may not
<v Speaker 2>be able to get another one. I've been lucky enough
<v Speaker 2>to have two in a row, you know, Yeah, but
<v Speaker 2>there's just not money. And then look at Musking, them
<v Speaker 2>are going to be cutting down on funding for science.
<v Speaker 2>So I mean, you can't you can't listen micans. Micans
<v Speaker 2>are basically useless, so I mean the funding for them
<v Speaker 2>is going to be really hurting.
<v Speaker 1>I wanted That brings up something that was one of
<v Speaker 1>the main reasons I wanted to talk to you was
<v Speaker 1>about this, the concept of I mean just studying. I've been,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just I've been thinking of just the whole ecosystem,
<v Speaker 1>the biosphere as a living machine, and every organism in
<v Speaker 1>it is a piece to that machine. That's right, generally
<v Speaker 1>important and very you know, has a key role somewhere,
<v Speaker 1>and it is tied, you know, interlocked with all these
<v Speaker 1>other gears of the machine, et cetera. But that's not
<v Speaker 1>the common that's not the common view. I mean that
<v Speaker 1>that seems if we were an enlightened intelligence society, that
<v Speaker 1>would be the way that we would see things. We
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't have to justify, you know, studying this stuff, you know, but.
<v Speaker 2>They can see it way.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but there's so little there's so little interest. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it just every It's like the thing I go through
<v Speaker 1>all the time when people tell me, you know, I
<v Speaker 1>tell people I'm into plants, They're like, oh, it is it?
<v Speaker 1>You know, I tell them about a plant, and if
<v Speaker 1>they're not into plants at all, they're like, is it edible?
<v Speaker 1>Is it? What's the point. It's like that kind of
<v Speaker 1>just that depoperate worldview. And I don't ship on them
<v Speaker 1>for it, because we're all just the product of the
<v Speaker 1>society that we're raised in, right, But like that's this
<v Speaker 1>anthropocentric use. How do you get around it? Like with
<v Speaker 1>you you see the beauty in these things? A hold
<v Speaker 1>on one second. Fucking Jehovah's witnesses. You know, they came
<v Speaker 1>with the neighborhood, but I didn't know it was that
<v Speaker 1>kind of neighborhood. It's uh, you know, it's we've.
<v Speaker 2>Got them here in Prague too. I don't know what
<v Speaker 2>the hell they're doing here in Prague tho. We've got
<v Speaker 2>them in Prague.
<v Speaker 1>Too, so depressing. It really bums me out, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it does the high religious ship if they you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's not all religions, of course, not all religious people.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just saying that, you know, it's such a they've
<v Speaker 1>got they've got all the answer, yes.
<v Speaker 2>But they are a little bit bothersome.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they got all the answers. Okay, anyway, So,
<v Speaker 1>but how do you when you think about this, I mean, well,
<v Speaker 1>how do you? How do you? Because I we all
<v Speaker 1>have to figure out our ways to like jibe with
<v Speaker 1>the world that we're forced to live in. How do
<v Speaker 1>you when you tell people you're studying likings. I'm sure
<v Speaker 1>if you're talking to like, if you were talking to
<v Speaker 1>someone who's like a financial advisor, you know, maybe you're
<v Speaker 1>in another field that's so distant or related economics, they'd
<v Speaker 1>be like, why do you study that? What's the point? Like,
<v Speaker 1>how do you? But obviously you see the beauty in
<v Speaker 1>these things and you understand I'm port there. How do you?
<v Speaker 1>How do you rationalize this out with the world that
<v Speaker 1>doesn't respect Basically, what I'm asking carry is how do you?
<v Speaker 2>I don't rationalize it? Very irrational anyway, I don't rationalize it.
<v Speaker 2>I was out taking out people when I gave give
<v Speaker 2>liking walks, and you get you always have one guy
<v Speaker 2>going what I'm studying is useless basically, Yeah, in terms
<v Speaker 2>of capitalism, the kind of economic system we have, they
<v Speaker 2>are useless.
<v Speaker 1>And then there's people studying things emory.
<v Speaker 2>Liking in the United States disappeared. Very few people would know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I know. I mean they notice eventually because it's
<v Speaker 1>the biosphere starts collapsing.
<v Speaker 2>Well, they noticed that the trees and everything start going too. Yeah, right.
<v Speaker 1>But but you know, it's just because that's what I'm
<v Speaker 1>trying to rationalize all the time. And I don't even rationalize.
<v Speaker 1>I've just taken this more nihilistic approach. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>joyful kind of nihilism, a joyful biocentric nihilism. But I
<v Speaker 1>look at I'm like, man, you think what I'm studying
<v Speaker 1>is ridiculous. I look at what you study like someone
<v Speaker 1>who works in like fucking I don't know, investment or something,
<v Speaker 1>And I'm like, what that's yeah, I mean that's you're
<v Speaker 1>living in a made up world. At least the world
<v Speaker 1>that I'm studying is real. Like you're living in this
<v Speaker 1>fucking stupid, you know, world of make believe economies and shit.
<v Speaker 1>That's so that's just driven by like our primate, you know,
<v Speaker 1>obsolete hoarding complexes. I don't know, I just I guess
<v Speaker 1>I just think about I'm like.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I accept that what I'm doing is useless, you know.
<v Speaker 1>But according to what, according to the values of what society?
<v Speaker 1>You know, that's what I think is.
<v Speaker 2>The key according to the according to the values of
<v Speaker 2>of a of a capitalist society, where everything has to
<v Speaker 2>be a commodity.
<v Speaker 1>Right, so who gives a shit fuck them? You know,
<v Speaker 1>That's what I think.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's not I'm not dealing with a commodity. I mean, what,
<v Speaker 2>what's the most I could get out of it? I
<v Speaker 2>get money for research, or maybe I write a book
<v Speaker 2>and it sells a little bit. But even liking books,
<v Speaker 2>there's too many of them now, so that wouldn't even
<v Speaker 2>be a good deal. I think I do it for that.
<v Speaker 2>I do it for the love of love of looking
<v Speaker 2>at them.
<v Speaker 1>Uh. And and also just these these incredibly small things
<v Speaker 1>that are everywhere and just weaved into daily life. It's
<v Speaker 1>I mean, fuck man, there, what are what are some
<v Speaker 1>of the most you know, urban tolerant, urbanized lichens? Are
<v Speaker 1>there many like the ones that can tolerate not?
<v Speaker 2>I don't know. Let's say, let's stay Los Angeles. I
<v Speaker 2>see some stuff on roofs, uh, candelarreas or something that's
<v Speaker 2>that's a yellow lichen. They grow on roofs here in
<v Speaker 2>the here, in Prague and in the in we have
<v Speaker 2>a lot of forests and stuff in the city so
<v Speaker 2>there's there's lichens on the trees there, but but not
<v Speaker 2>a whole lot. But around here there's like orange caliplacas
<v Speaker 2>growing on concrete. Uh, even the genus. I'm studying one
<v Speaker 2>species that we think is not Glaucocarpa, but but we
<v Speaker 2>we're working on separating it. It can grow on concrete.
<v Speaker 2>Mm hmm. I was going to say that there's a.
<v Speaker 1>Is there a difference between lichens that can grow on
<v Speaker 1>limestone versus on volcanic rock, because that's a big thing
<v Speaker 1>for a lot of plants. The difference.
<v Speaker 2>Well, yeah, yeah, no, no, there's definitely. Well, so I'm
<v Speaker 2>I'm studying in an area where there's both limestone and
<v Speaker 2>silicate rock in fact sometimes just one layer over the
<v Speaker 2>other in the sandstone, you know, and uh, there's some
<v Speaker 2>species that are only on on on calcareous rock. And
<v Speaker 2>then then like here in here in Utah, some of
<v Speaker 2>the species are they grow on sandstone, can grow on
<v Speaker 2>regular sandstone, can show up on calciferous sandstone, which is
<v Speaker 2>sandstone that if you put hydraulic I mean if you
<v Speaker 2>put acid on, they barely bubble. And then and then
<v Speaker 2>on calcareous rock. In fact, the species I just described
<v Speaker 2>we're working on describing this last week occurs on those
<v Speaker 2>different habitats, but mostly the ones on limestone stay on limestone.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's probably the ones.
<v Speaker 2>That preferm or acid rock stay on acid rock. And
<v Speaker 2>then there's an in between zone of ultra base rock
<v Speaker 2>like some of the basalts and stuff, and you've got
<v Speaker 2>things that grow on that from either group.
<v Speaker 1>Is it? So it's I guess with the limestone, it's
<v Speaker 1>just like a pH issue. It's just the excess of
<v Speaker 1>calcium car that prevents other things from.
<v Speaker 2>Well yeah, yeah, they're full of and they're full of
<v Speaker 2>they're full of calcium inside. They absorb a lot of
<v Speaker 2>the crystals inside. You can't. I have to clear clear
<v Speaker 2>them on a slide in order to look at them.
<v Speaker 2>So I maybe have to put some acid on there
<v Speaker 2>to dissolve some of the crystals if I really need
<v Speaker 2>to see something.
<v Speaker 1>Gee, that would the what just the high high fail
<v Speaker 1>like and absorble the calcium.
<v Speaker 2>Or yeah, yeah, the hyphies Remember, Okay, the high pee
<v Speaker 2>is growing in the rock as it grows out. As
<v Speaker 2>it grows out, it's picking up all these crystals. So
<v Speaker 2>the medulla, the lowest part of the of the thallus
<v Speaker 2>usually is filled with these crystals. The top part that
<v Speaker 2>that's the flower, the apotheesia that usually doesn't have too
<v Speaker 2>much crystals up in that part unless they're from chemicals
<v Speaker 2>within the like it.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's wild. So they're actually breaking down the rock
<v Speaker 1>and then absorbing it.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, yeah, they play an important part in erosion.
<v Speaker 2>You know, one of the factors have been of erosion.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would assume there does Uh where
<v Speaker 1>do they get nitrogen from? Is it just do any
<v Speaker 1>of these photosymbind?
<v Speaker 2>No, they're living off They're living off the algae.
<v Speaker 1>Uh huh, but where's it? But the algae is getting nitrogen.
<v Speaker 1>I mean they've got to have Do they have nitrogen
<v Speaker 1>fixing abilities? They liken it all? Are the algae?
<v Speaker 2>No, there's there's there's those are the cyanobacterias. They have
<v Speaker 2>nitrogen fixing qualities. Right, Basically you're just living off of
<v Speaker 2>sun power and water. That's all the algae needs to
<v Speaker 2>produce sugar.
<v Speaker 1>But then the fungus is also secreting enzymes that help
<v Speaker 1>break down whatever it's growing on too.
<v Speaker 2>Right, Well they yeah, they're they're producing acids to eat
<v Speaker 2>through the rock.
<v Speaker 1>What about some of these lichens that you'll see growing,
<v Speaker 1>like I see lichens growing on the barren floor of
<v Speaker 1>the South Texas thorn scrub habitat. Are those just eating
<v Speaker 1>soil particles?
<v Speaker 2>I assume yeah, those are those. Yeah, some lichens are evolved,
<v Speaker 2>are turriculous. They grow just on soil. And those ones
<v Speaker 2>that you see like that have adapted have evolved to
<v Speaker 2>grow on soil.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's crazy. Do they do they ever associate with soil?
<v Speaker 1>Fungy Like, is there ever any connection between the like in.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're there there. They have bacteria in it from
<v Speaker 2>the soil. Uh they may have see they have a
<v Speaker 2>microbiome basically inside of a lichen's kind of hollow. It's
<v Speaker 2>got the it's got this algae layer, it's got this hypha.
<v Speaker 2>And and especially the soil crusts have like I mean,
<v Speaker 2>pick up this stuff from the soil. So you can
<v Speaker 2>get bacteria. In fact, you can get bacteria in any
<v Speaker 2>any like and that's growing and uh and other other
<v Speaker 2>elements like that. Sometimes there's there's fungi the soil fungi
<v Speaker 2>that are entered into the thallus and uh so those
<v Speaker 2>things we even have trouble with sometimes sequencing because they
<v Speaker 2>get in the way.
<v Speaker 1>There's all kinds of other stuff in there, basically other organisms.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of you got to imagine.
<v Speaker 2>It's kind of like, well, hey, listen, it's not any
<v Speaker 2>different than us, except maybe all of them are in
<v Speaker 2>my stomach, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when when you I guess do
<v Speaker 1>you when you when you tell people that you're studying, like,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, what what is the what does the conversation go?
<v Speaker 1>Like Like when they when they say this.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, the first reaction is, uh, what And I say, oh,
<v Speaker 2>have you ever you know, I said, you've been up
<v Speaker 2>in the mountains? You ever see on rocks big orange
<v Speaker 2>patches or yellow patches? And they go yeah, And I go, well,
<v Speaker 2>that's what I study. And most people most people don't.
<v Speaker 2>Most people don't really notice things like that. Yeah, they
<v Speaker 2>don't know the really Yeah, plants too, and like look
<v Speaker 2>at lots of beautiful plants that are small. People wouldn't
<v Speaker 2>even notice, you know, unless there's a whole field of
<v Speaker 2>them blooming or something like poppies.
<v Speaker 1>Right, if it's just green and not flowering, there's no
<v Speaker 1>there's no context that we do.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, or even if it's it's got little tiny flowers
<v Speaker 2>that you know, unless you get down and lay down
<v Speaker 2>there on the ground and pull out your anlins, you
<v Speaker 2>can't see.
<v Speaker 1>What drives me nuts the most, though, I think, is
<v Speaker 1>when you know that in terms of just like planting
<v Speaker 1>stuff in a landscape, like people's idea of plants is
<v Speaker 1>really rooted. It's not tied to place. It's it's it's
<v Speaker 1>tied to the the home despot garden center, like the
<v Speaker 1>fucking big box garden center. It's not like the context.
<v Speaker 1>The concept of a native plant and why you use
<v Speaker 1>natives because they've been selected for for for that region,
<v Speaker 1>escapes people. It's just such this short term whatever's pretty,
<v Speaker 1>which drives me nuts too, because a lot of the
<v Speaker 1>stuff that's listed is or that's thought of is pretty
<v Speaker 1>and sold in garden centers is fucking so gaudy and
<v Speaker 1>tacky and makes me want to puke, you know.
<v Speaker 2>It's this, yeah, and then you will look at why
<v Speaker 2>are they selling it? Because it's easy to produce, right,
<v Speaker 2>You clone grow a whole bunch of geraniums, real easy,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Right, But but then when you open people up to
<v Speaker 1>when you open their minds up to the concept of
<v Speaker 1>native and it's not just this idea of you know,
<v Speaker 1>logical purity, but that it's actually spent time evolving here
<v Speaker 1>and evolving with the other things that live here, you know,
<v Speaker 1>Like again, that it's a piece to that living.
<v Speaker 2>With miss appreciation grows.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, and I've seen it growing a lot lately,
<v Speaker 1>which is cool, but it's it's uh, it's still wild, man.
<v Speaker 1>I just that the whole idea of native plants are
<v Speaker 1>messy or weedy or overgrown or they're going to bring
<v Speaker 1>in ticks always drives me. I've been writing a book
<v Speaker 1>about this later, So that's why I've been thinking about
<v Speaker 1>all this stuff.
<v Speaker 2>Well, you know, and we're from California, man, I mean
<v Speaker 2>you know, I mean we spent a lot of time
<v Speaker 2>in California where there's a real native plant culture.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and there's land that people can have access to
<v Speaker 1>as well. I mean there's a lot of public land.
<v Speaker 1>There's a lot of parks and reserves. I mean in
<v Speaker 1>Texas there's there's nothing you mentioned. Oh, you know, whenever
<v Speaker 1>I say Texas and that public land, people like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>there's tons of state parks, like what I mean? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>but it's a fraction of the land. There's there's what's
<v Speaker 1>a lot like that. I don't think there's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of state parks here. There's a good handful per region.
<v Speaker 1>They all cost money to go to, and you know
<v Speaker 1>there's regulations, there's someone fucking with you. You're not allowed
<v Speaker 1>to do this or that, or just walk out. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's not It doesn't compare it actually having publicly accessible
<v Speaker 1>land like BLM land or Forest Service land. And if
<v Speaker 1>people can't see this stuff, they they no wonder, they
<v Speaker 1>don't give a shit about it. They don't even know
<v Speaker 1>it's there. You know, there's no context, but it's it.
<v Speaker 2>You know, look at what we're look at what we're doing.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, for myself, I get contacted you know how
<v Speaker 2>they're growing plants on buildings now? Yeah you know, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I get contacted all the time about people wanting to
<v Speaker 2>grow lichens on buildings. They can't do it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, how could you.
<v Speaker 2>Can stick all You can grow mosses in big you
<v Speaker 2>can grow mosses and big things in big panels and stuff,
<v Speaker 2>and that'll work. But the lichens, you just you just
<v Speaker 2>don't stick a whole bunch of them up there and
<v Speaker 2>they're going to stay.
<v Speaker 1>How would one cult theveda liking is that. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's not even possible in a lot of cities.
<v Speaker 2>Oh you do it in a petri dish or something,
<v Speaker 2>you know. It's that's I've had at my house in California.
<v Speaker 2>I did a lot of work at home breaking up
<v Speaker 2>the rock, part of getting them so I could put
<v Speaker 2>them into packets for herbarium for study. Yeah, and I
<v Speaker 2>so I'd always have these pieces of rock with liking
<v Speaker 2>on it. Now I have my daughter's living in my
<v Speaker 2>house now. And I was just back there and where
<v Speaker 2>I spread the rock along the side of the north
<v Speaker 2>side of the garage where there was a big area.
<v Speaker 2>I went back there and I hadn't looked at it
<v Speaker 2>for seven or eight years, and none of them made it.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, no, shit, was it? What do you think?
<v Speaker 1>It was? Black? A sun?
<v Speaker 2>It's just that they're so sensitive that you move them
<v Speaker 2>around and they're completely look at one the size of
<v Speaker 2>a quarter might be twenty years old. Jesus and used
<v Speaker 2>to just one one way of growing one one relationship
<v Speaker 2>to the sun, one relationship to the shade, one relationship
<v Speaker 2>to the water. You take that rock from maybe fifty
<v Speaker 2>miles away, it breaks it up. You lay it out
<v Speaker 2>there with piles of other rocks that looked like it
<v Speaker 2>should grow and it dies.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, at different angle or something, or not in
<v Speaker 1>a flight or whatever.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. You know a good example of that was when
<v Speaker 2>I was growing up, my dad worked for Southern California
<v Speaker 2>Edison and they had a big project they were putting
<v Speaker 2>in and they wanted and that they really wanted to
<v Speaker 2>save the Joshua trees there, but they had to move them.
<v Speaker 2>And they moved them. Okay, they moved them and didn't
<v Speaker 2>realize that by just by turning them the wrong way
<v Speaker 2>and stuff, almost all of them died.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. That's the idea of moving plants is it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>work most of the time. Especially and also but the
<v Speaker 1>thing too, I think most people don't realize the parts
<v Speaker 1>of the roots that are doing all the absorption are
<v Speaker 1>the are the root tips like this, the you know,
<v Speaker 1>eighty percent of the root that's closer to the plant
<v Speaker 1>doesn't do any absorption, you know, unless it's like a
<v Speaker 1>branch with a tip on it. I mean, it's they're
<v Speaker 1>just plumbing. It's just transit. So when you dig these
<v Speaker 1>things up, you're automatically severing so many root tips unless
<v Speaker 1>you get a huge soil ball that you're sending it back.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you're just you're you're shocking, you're shocking it back.
<v Speaker 1>So then you've got to take off some shoot. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they could maintain the root to shoot ratio or or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>But I see all these people who are like, oh this,
<v Speaker 1>what's fine, We'll just move the plant. It's like you
<v Speaker 1>could do it with cactie because they can just grow
<v Speaker 1>new roots since they have energy stored up to do so.
<v Speaker 1>But it's still shocking them. You know, there was a
<v Speaker 1>solar project out here where they they God, I tried
<v Speaker 1>to get them to just give them to us so
<v Speaker 1>we could put them at our conservation property or something.
<v Speaker 1>There was a bunch of star cactus, you know, or
<v Speaker 1>give them to uh San Antonio Botanic Garden or something.
<v Speaker 1>I'm friends with some people that work there. And they
<v Speaker 1>didn't do it. The contractor didn't do it. They don't
<v Speaker 1>know shit about plants either. The you know, the contractor
<v Speaker 1>for British Petroleum that was the one setting up this
<v Speaker 1>massive fucking I sore of a solar project in South Texas,
<v Speaker 1>and god, it was brutal. There was tons of payota,
<v Speaker 1>tons of Astro fight them this rare cactus and and uh,
<v Speaker 1>they're like, no, we would like to use it as
<v Speaker 1>a pr The guys, the manager literally told me, they said,
<v Speaker 1>we'd like to use it as a PR thing for
<v Speaker 1>the company to show that we're saving you know, we're
<v Speaker 1>carrying like they're not gonna it's July. You can't transplant
<v Speaker 1>these things in July unless you can have someone there
<v Speaker 1>to water them every day and help the new roots
<v Speaker 1>get established. And the fucking things died. I knew someone
<v Speaker 1>who was working on the project. That's how we got
<v Speaker 1>into it, and he told me was like, oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>those old died like six months later. You guys just
<v Speaker 1>merked like a you know, an eighth the the US population,
<v Speaker 1>the population on this side of the border of this
<v Speaker 1>rare cactus. Good job. It's it's madden. But for me,
<v Speaker 1>I think what I wonder about, what drives me nuts
<v Speaker 1>is at what point is the development going to stop?
<v Speaker 1>And then the more I think about that, I realized
<v Speaker 1>it's never going to stop. They're going to take everything.
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's just the society. There's no respect and
<v Speaker 1>no reverence for life, and so it's going to take everything.
<v Speaker 1>Because especially when you have these religions that tell you
<v Speaker 1>it was all put here for you, you know, there's
<v Speaker 1>nothing that's going to stop it. They'll they'll take everything.
<v Speaker 1>They were trying to take state parks in Florida to
<v Speaker 1>put in golf course. They were trying to.
<v Speaker 2>Look Derry Trump's thing. They may they may be trying
<v Speaker 2>to privatize national parks and sell them off the businesses.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, oh yeah, they're gonna the privatization thing is that's
<v Speaker 1>still gonna that's I mean that it's again that you
<v Speaker 1>were you were alive. I mean, I was alive during
<v Speaker 1>Reagan two, but I was like five when all this
<v Speaker 1>ship was going on, this this idiotic talk about this
<v Speaker 1>Randian trickle down economics and privatized because government kind of
<v Speaker 1>do the job. That's what they like to say. Government
<v Speaker 1>can't do the job. Okay, well it depends on who's
<v Speaker 1>in the government. You think corporations are going to do
<v Speaker 1>it better, and they've got a motive just to make profit.
<v Speaker 1>They're gonna fucking cut corners whatever they can, at least
<v Speaker 1>with government. That's just in competence with a corporation. It's malevolent.
<v Speaker 1>You know, like what when all this ship was coming up.
<v Speaker 1>I mean what were you you were you working in
<v Speaker 1>construction then? Still were you still working in construction?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? I was, I was working in construction back in Reaganstein.
<v Speaker 1>How did how does how do you working? How did?
<v Speaker 1>How do you get working class people to believe this
<v Speaker 1>stupid shit? And what do you think it is? It's
<v Speaker 1>just it's just image, It's just superficial and shallow. Those
<v Speaker 1>are just the qualities people look at them.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, he had, he had, he had. He was a
<v Speaker 2>good actor. Yeah, in terms of being a politician. Otherwise
<v Speaker 2>I'm not sure he got He got elected with a
<v Speaker 2>big popular vote, okay the first time, and it just
<v Speaker 2>because who were fed up with Carter? So you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's and and you know, it comes down to just
<v Speaker 2>like people talking in this last election, Uh, the groceries
<v Speaker 2>are costing too much. This is costing too much a
<v Speaker 2>lot of times it's just stupid things like that. And
<v Speaker 2>well it's not really stupid. I mean, if you can't
<v Speaker 2>if food prices go up, it really is a big
<v Speaker 2>deal insurance. But yeah, but but it's things like that
<v Speaker 2>that they are manipulated or or and also during his
<v Speaker 2>time was freeing the hostages from Iran, so these things
<v Speaker 2>are manipulated in a way that that draws votes in
<v Speaker 2>most people. I don't blame them either. Most people they
<v Speaker 2>just think about their pocketbook and and they're not going
<v Speaker 2>to be watching MSNBC or or CNN and listen to
<v Speaker 2>that bullshit shit, especially like on CNN, listen to these
<v Speaker 2>guys arguing from both sides. You know who wants to
<v Speaker 2>listen to that when you can watch Yellowstone?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? Yeah, I know. The thing that the thing that
<v Speaker 1>gives me hope though, is when you see left and
<v Speaker 1>right coming together over something like healthcare, insurance companies fucking people.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's like it's like a universal and you
<v Speaker 1>could tell that scares people up top too. You could
<v Speaker 1>tell that gets some really nervous. And I'm sure there
<v Speaker 1>are memos being sent out to you know, podcasters and
<v Speaker 1>pundits me like you gotta, we gotta, we gotta nip
<v Speaker 1>this in the butt. We gotta nip this, this class
<v Speaker 1>rage against the upper class and these companies. We gotta
<v Speaker 1>nip it in the butt. Don't let this get out
<v Speaker 1>of distract them with something else, talk about you know,
<v Speaker 1>culture warship something I see. You know, there's people on
<v Speaker 1>the right or piss there's people on the left. If
<v Speaker 1>they come together, this could be a real issue for us.
<v Speaker 1>People were pissed like with this, with the claims adjuster,
<v Speaker 1>the CEO whacker. You know, it's been nice to observe.
<v Speaker 1>The commentary that came out of that was, you know,
<v Speaker 1>because it's it's people are just getting fucked in the
<v Speaker 1>United States, and it doesn't It's just.
<v Speaker 2>Like I think Trump said a couple of days ago.
<v Speaker 2>Now I don't know if it's true because I just
<v Speaker 2>see it on the internet, but says that, uh, it's
<v Speaker 2>he says, I won't be able to fix grocery prices,
<v Speaker 2>but we'll still have the successful government. And I don't
<v Speaker 2>know how many times watching that election I heard people
<v Speaker 2>complaining about how much groceries cost.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I know that was the big thing. It's like
<v Speaker 1>neither If you think either party is going to do
<v Speaker 1>anything the lower grocery prices, you're out of your fucking mind. Man.
<v Speaker 1>It's uh, the oligarchs will never let either They're never
<v Speaker 1>gonna let either party get get shitped done.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, in fact, the only way you bring grocery
<v Speaker 2>prices down is they get too high and then they
<v Speaker 2>can't sell enough and then then they'll start to go
<v Speaker 2>down again. It's early, but they never go down. Your money,
<v Speaker 2>Your money is constantly at two percent a year roughly
<v Speaker 2>is changing value every year. So you have that that
<v Speaker 2>much inflation and just money normally. So if so, when
<v Speaker 2>I started construction, I got five dollars an hour, and
<v Speaker 2>that was a big deal. That was a union job,
<v Speaker 2>was there. And now if I had the same job
<v Speaker 2>right now, I'd be making one hundred and twenty thousand
<v Speaker 2>dollars a year according to my friends, and for the
<v Speaker 2>amount we worked, and it'd be worth about sixty to
<v Speaker 2>seventy thousand ten years before, fifteen years before. So it's
<v Speaker 2>it's people don't always understand that either that that there's
<v Speaker 2>been a constant inflation. That's why you can you can
<v Speaker 2>hear about somebody buying a farm back and one hundred
<v Speaker 2>years ago or two hundred years ago for five hundred dollars.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the lack of the lack of affordability of housing,
<v Speaker 1>and the fucking healthcare thing is so big here and
<v Speaker 1>it's never I feel like it's never going to change.
<v Speaker 1>It's so it's so easy to distract people with bullshit
<v Speaker 1>that doesn't really affect them and get them to not
<v Speaker 1>pay attention to this. The housing thing's fucking nuts. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>when you've got an entire generation that's been priced out
<v Speaker 1>of ever owning their own home, it's.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, I know, listen, my daughter and her husband and
<v Speaker 2>their their child. Okay, if I didn't own a house
<v Speaker 2>that they live in, they wouldn't they wouldn't be able
<v Speaker 2>to afford to live in the area that I lived
<v Speaker 2>the last thirty years, which is not as is not
<v Speaker 2>you know, an upper class area, just it was. It
<v Speaker 2>was a middle class area, and it was also poorer
<v Speaker 2>middle class that was moving away from Los Angeles and
<v Speaker 2>where it was cheaper. And now they live in my house,
<v Speaker 2>and I just I let them stay there for the
<v Speaker 2>just for the price that they paid. You know that
<v Speaker 2>I have to pay taxes and that stuff. And uh,
<v Speaker 2>they couldn't afford to live there. They can't. They couldn't
<v Speaker 2>afford to live in the neighborhood they grew up in.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the last time that housing was affordable was after
<v Speaker 1>the crash, for which none of those fucking companies got punished,
<v Speaker 1>of course.
<v Speaker 2>And then you have no man, nobody had any.
<v Speaker 1>Money, right and then but then in like twenty fourteen,
<v Speaker 1>they started going up and just going ridiculously up and
<v Speaker 1>just basically being price gouged, you know, for investment purposes.
<v Speaker 1>People are fucking gambling on it. You know, there's no
<v Speaker 1>regulation about that. I mean, if a person can own
<v Speaker 1>as many houses as they want, that they're never going
<v Speaker 1>to live in that they're just treating as as.
<v Speaker 2>As Oh well, this is even getting worse. This is
<v Speaker 2>even getting worse now because people from other countries are
<v Speaker 2>buying upper houses.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So for instance, we stopped and we're talking with these
<v Speaker 2>people that run a gift shop on our way to
<v Speaker 2>Bryce Canyon, and they were telling me we were talking
<v Speaker 2>about the price of housing just like we were. And
<v Speaker 2>they were saying that in this air area around them,
<v Speaker 2>which was all ranch land or you know, small small houses,
<v Speaker 2>you know, small houses here and there on small properties,
<v Speaker 2>that that was all being bought up by Indian people in.
<v Speaker 1>India, Indian individuals or investors like investment.
<v Speaker 2>Companies, Yeah, Indian investors. And and now the people that actually,
<v Speaker 2>just like I was talking about my daughter, the people
<v Speaker 2>that actually grew up there cannot afford to get a house. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>unless they managed to inherit it. You know, and it's
<v Speaker 2>owned by Indians. Yeah, guys that they don't even live there.
<v Speaker 2>There's Chinese people buying up loads of houses. And by
<v Speaker 2>the way, this is in California. This is what pushed
<v Speaker 2>up all the rental fees. Well, it's Chinese companies buying
<v Speaker 2>up houses.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's Chinese companies. It's not it's not like it's
<v Speaker 1>individuals or people who are just Look, I play my.
<v Speaker 2>Head really on these Indian guys. There are you know,
<v Speaker 2>big corporations too.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, these fucking companies. I I went to do some
<v Speaker 1>presentation in Austin when was it last March, and uh
<v Speaker 1>for a friend and and he's like, where do you
<v Speaker 1>want to stay? I should have just fucking said days in,
<v Speaker 1>give me like the filthiest days in. You know, that's
<v Speaker 1>not gonna fuck with me having a dog like on
<v Speaker 1>like give me the fucking day, give me a days
<v Speaker 1>in by the fucking airport or something, you know. But
<v Speaker 1>I was like, just give me an Airbnb. I didn't know.
<v Speaker 1>I had only stayed in one air and be Airbnb before.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't even know. You know, Airbnb is fucking more
<v Speaker 1>expensive than hotels almost eighty percent of the time, and
<v Speaker 1>it's a fucking scam, and the pert you know it's
<v Speaker 1>and they all look the same, this bland gray, this
<v Speaker 1>miserable like gray black white, gray, black and white, you know,
<v Speaker 1>tricolor decoor with the plastic plants and the fucking live
<v Speaker 1>laugh love style, that stupid shit. And he got me
<v Speaker 1>this Airbnb. When I found out the price, I was like,
<v Speaker 1>holy fuck, that's obscene. Why did you do that, Like
<v Speaker 1>just you should have just said no, we're going to
<v Speaker 1>get you a day's in, you know, or tell me
<v Speaker 1>like I didn't. I don't want you to spend that
<v Speaker 1>much money. But then it was a fucking scam too.
<v Speaker 1>I couldn't get into the thing. It was in a
<v Speaker 1>It was one unit in this giant condo complex, this
<v Speaker 1>soulless condo apartment building that was like eight stories tall
<v Speaker 1>in Austin, like one of these horrible places, like this
<v Speaker 1>hive of just fucking broken values. You know, it's like
<v Speaker 1>expensive hive of broken We have.
<v Speaker 2>Ahead here in Prague. We have the problem with this
<v Speaker 2>RB and these uh yeah, these in this they own
<v Speaker 2>so many apartments around the city and there's a shortage
<v Speaker 2>of apartments for people, and so the city's trying to
<v Speaker 2>close them down.
<v Speaker 1>Good.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's just there's more apartments for people, Yeah, to
<v Speaker 2>regulate them out.
<v Speaker 1>There was. But there was funny though, because this Airbnb
<v Speaker 1>I ended up, there was some fucking weird thing with
<v Speaker 1>the parking and the parking card. This building is new, right,
<v Speaker 1>It didn't. It didn't exist ten years ago. And uh,
<v Speaker 1>I've had some And I got the fucking car got
<v Speaker 1>towed like it was a rental car I had to
<v Speaker 1>get because mine had gotten fucking I re rendered some
<v Speaker 1>moron who was on his phone and stopped at a
<v Speaker 1>yield like this was this whole month was just the
<v Speaker 1>real fucking runner for me. And uh, the car got
<v Speaker 1>towed and just it was just a fucking pain in
<v Speaker 1>the ass and I couldn't get in. And it was
<v Speaker 1>just such a bleak place to live, too, Like the
<v Speaker 1>fucking decor was so shiny and nice. Like I'd rather
<v Speaker 1>if I'm gonna stay in bleak, I'd rather stay like
<v Speaker 1>where that, you know, in a like truly bleak hotel
<v Speaker 1>where the sink is held up by a two by
<v Speaker 1>four and there's some mold on the wall, rather than
<v Speaker 1>one of these spiritually bleak places that's shiny and has
<v Speaker 1>a new countertop, but just as has the personality of
<v Speaker 1>a fart, like gray walls and the plastic. But I
<v Speaker 1>ended up stealing a uh some of the wall decor
<v Speaker 1>from this place just because I I just out of spite,
<v Speaker 1>you know. It was just one of those It was
<v Speaker 1>like one of those peer one imports things. Yeah, it's weird, man,
<v Speaker 1>it's weird. I think I find ways to to work with.
<v Speaker 1>I hear these young kids say like, oh, the world
<v Speaker 1>is so fucking bleak, and I'm never gonna you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's so fucked and I'm like, you just gotta you
<v Speaker 1>can accept all that, but find a way to work
<v Speaker 1>it into like a lighthearted, cynical, dark humor, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like find the fuck, you know, to find a way
<v Speaker 1>to rationalize it, because nobody wants to hear a constant
<v Speaker 1>complainer unless you're funny. So find a way. Find a
<v Speaker 1>way to fucking talk about the declining dystopia, the end
<v Speaker 1>of empire, all that shit in a way that can
<v Speaker 1>at least make people laugh or make yourself laugh. And
<v Speaker 1>that's the way I cope that in the geologic time.
<v Speaker 2>Score, yeah, we need some black humor, that's for sure.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, so Okay, so you're writing a paper on acorospiration.
<v Speaker 2>I'm writing a bunch of papers.
<v Speaker 1>And just describing a species that have not been described yet.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, who is working on lichens before you were
<v Speaker 1>in this region?
<v Speaker 2>Okay, working there? There has been a group at BYU
<v Speaker 2>that I'm that I'm working with that have been in
<v Speaker 2>that area and been collecting lichens for thirty hey wait
<v Speaker 2>almost fifty years now, going back into the eighties. The herbarium.
<v Speaker 2>I'm actually working with the people and his students. Steve
<v Speaker 2>Levitt there, who's, by the way, enjoys your show. He
<v Speaker 2>has his students. He's training his students in molecular work
<v Speaker 2>bioinformatics using li Likens. So there's a tradition there of
<v Speaker 2>li Likens. But still, I was in New Mexico and
<v Speaker 2>mostly down near Las Crusis in that part, in the
<v Speaker 2>Chiuahuan desert part, and I did not I honestly, I'm
<v Speaker 2>connected in the liking world, and I didn't know of
<v Speaker 2>anybody in the whole half of the state that was
<v Speaker 2>studying li Likens. Right, Yeah, That's what drives me to
<v Speaker 2>And I don't even know if in the other half,
<v Speaker 2>if there was anybody.
<v Speaker 1>Why not you got these fucking kids playing Call of
<v Speaker 1>Duty all the stupid shit. No offense to anyone who's
<v Speaker 1>playing video games out there and is a little sensitive,
<v Speaker 1>But the video game thing especially depresses me to a
<v Speaker 1>certain extent because I feel I just feel like it's
<v Speaker 1>that's somebody else's world, that's a make believe, bullshit world.
<v Speaker 1>There's a real world here that's really fucking cool. You
<v Speaker 1>can get out there and just yeah, I mean, people
<v Speaker 1>might be like, why is it, what's the point of
<v Speaker 1>studying this shit? The point of studying is you get
<v Speaker 1>out there and you learn. You're inherently going to learn
<v Speaker 1>more by even by studying something like li Likens about chemistry,
<v Speaker 1>about biology, about life, about evolution, about your role in it.
<v Speaker 1>It's it fulfills this philosophical underpinning that can determine your
<v Speaker 1>opinion about the world you live in or your understanding
<v Speaker 1>of the world you live in. You know, I just
<v Speaker 1>the whole thing of like and go ahead.
<v Speaker 2>Go ahead, no, you go ahead. Yeah. The other thing
<v Speaker 2>is is it connects you. It connects you with nature.
<v Speaker 2>So it's just it's something that we've lost in most
<v Speaker 2>of our urban and suburban type environment. Right and that,
<v Speaker 2>and by studying things like this or being even interested
<v Speaker 2>in them, to go out and look at plants, to
<v Speaker 2>go out and look at like and go see if
<v Speaker 2>you can spot a mountain lion or something that that's
<v Speaker 2>something primal in us, that that we're losing, right, And
<v Speaker 2>so you get to make connection again.
<v Speaker 1>Two million years of human evolution, living and you know,
<v Speaker 1>having a relationship with the living world. And now we're
<v Speaker 1>walled into these fucking cars, especially if you're in America,
<v Speaker 1>the car centric, the car slum cars, and fucking human infrastructure.
<v Speaker 1>And we've been able to dupe ourselves into believing that
<v Speaker 1>we don't need any of this stuff. It's meant it's there.
<v Speaker 1>We evolved with it, you know, this is we need it,
<v Speaker 1>whether you know it or not. And what I love,
<v Speaker 1>what gives me hope because I don't have a lot
<v Speaker 1>of it. I'm pretty cynical and misanthropic, upbeat, you know,
<v Speaker 1>but still I fucking nihilist in my own way, at
<v Speaker 1>least about you know, human civilization. I've got a lot
<v Speaker 1>of disrespect for most of human civilization. But the thing
<v Speaker 1>that gives me hope is watching people who weren't into
<v Speaker 1>something like that before, experience it, experience going on a
<v Speaker 1>fucking you know, bushwhacking hike, trail off trail, hike up
<v Speaker 1>a mountain range, seeing cool shit, asking questions, immersed in it,
<v Speaker 1>and excited too, like when you can when the excitement
<v Speaker 1>is palpable, That's what gives me hope. I'm like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>we're not We're not so fucked. There's still like blood
<v Speaker 1>in those veins. We haven't been fully you know, synthesized
<v Speaker 1>and integrated into the fucking bleak machine the matrix yet.
<v Speaker 3>So I yeah, In fact, I get a lot of
<v Speaker 3>thrill out of our grandkids here in the in the
<v Speaker 3>Czech Republic, this is a great mushroom area, like four
<v Speaker 3>hundred species.
<v Speaker 2>The weather's just right for mushrooms in the forest easy,
<v Speaker 2>and just taking them out to the forest and just
<v Speaker 2>showing them mushrooms, you know. Yeah, and they can actually
<v Speaker 2>collect some of them and take them home and eat them.
<v Speaker 2>But but just to see that connection that they're they feel,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and and uh and then of course they
<v Speaker 2>go back and they're on their video games, but still
<v Speaker 2>they get that extra they get that extra connection there,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, and and are thrilled every time Grandma comes
<v Speaker 2>and is ready to take them out into the woods.
<v Speaker 2>You know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. And video games, you know, they're fine. I get it.
<v Speaker 1>They're fine for you know, when you're younger and I
<v Speaker 1>used to play Super Mario and shit whatever. But I
<v Speaker 1>just think when you meet people who don't and at
<v Speaker 1>least if you're getting that outside time too, it's fine.
<v Speaker 1>But when it's just like your whole world is just
<v Speaker 1>work in video games, I just can't imagine. That's got
<v Speaker 1>to be such a just a disconnection, like you're not
<v Speaker 1>interacting with anything else alive besides other people or pets.
<v Speaker 1>There's no living world, there's no living fabric that you're
<v Speaker 1>touching and learning about, and I just, yeah, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>It's yeah, And it's also more addictive because you're interacting
<v Speaker 2>with it instead of just turning on the TV and
<v Speaker 2>watching the show. You're making the show. Yeah, and that's
<v Speaker 2>that's that's addictive in itself.
<v Speaker 1>What is Chech Czech Republic is? I mean what is
<v Speaker 1>the Is there still a lot of intact forest there
<v Speaker 1>or is it mostly like planted forest for lumber or
<v Speaker 1>what is it?
<v Speaker 2>Like? No, no, what happened here is is uh? Well,
<v Speaker 2>as you know, in an old in in nineteenth eighteenth
<v Speaker 2>and earlier, wood was a major for everything. You know,
<v Speaker 2>wood cups, would this, would that, and by the by
<v Speaker 2>by the nineteenth century. For instance, up where the family
<v Speaker 2>house is in uh in Ezertine, when you look at pictures,
<v Speaker 2>they cut down every tree for as far as you
<v Speaker 2>could see. And so now basically what you have here
<v Speaker 2>is managed forests. So so you have or you know
<v Speaker 2>the same thing like a uh you know, like a
<v Speaker 2>wild forest that that's filling in a trashed area where
<v Speaker 2>everything's growing too close all the all the trees are
<v Speaker 2>too thin, they're too close together, there's too much shade
<v Speaker 2>for the lichens. Uh. And in a lot of cases
<v Speaker 2>where they've allowed non native plants to come in, then
<v Speaker 2>there's no mushrooms because they have they have no connection
<v Speaker 2>with those kinds of plants. So here here and in Europe,
<v Speaker 2>most of the forests were cut down. And then if
<v Speaker 2>you see a forest now that they're managed forests and
<v Speaker 2>uh and uh and and here we have a forestry
<v Speaker 2>whole forestry group that that and the wood industry here
<v Speaker 2>of cutting these down, so it's monol cultures now for instance,
<v Speaker 2>instead of cutting them all down, they cut down part
<v Speaker 2>of them, let that part fill in and then cut
<v Speaker 2>down another part next to it, and let the other
<v Speaker 2>one start to grow.
<v Speaker 1>You know, But there's I mean, there's not much. There's
<v Speaker 1>not much diversity in other words, though like it's it'll
<v Speaker 1>be a monol not in those Is there any intact
<v Speaker 1>ecology in your region of Eastern Europe that you know
<v Speaker 1>of or is it it's all big cut.
<v Speaker 2>No, there's areas. If there No, it's not all destroyed.
<v Speaker 2>But people have been living here a long time, so
<v Speaker 2>it's not it's not how it was. If we went
<v Speaker 2>back five hundred years in time or a thousand years
<v Speaker 2>in time, we probably wouldn't even recognize how much trees
<v Speaker 2>there are.
<v Speaker 1>That's what I am agin.
<v Speaker 2>You know, there's areas. There's enough areas because because of
<v Speaker 2>development here, there is enough areas that you can get
<v Speaker 2>into a natural forest here and there, you know, and
<v Speaker 2>then up on the higher elevations there's natural forests and
<v Speaker 2>they have some extent forests here. So it's not as
<v Speaker 2>bad as bad as I made it just sound. But
<v Speaker 2>if you're normally driving through the Czech Republic on a highway,
<v Speaker 2>you'll be seeing managed forests usually off to each side.
<v Speaker 2>Of the road.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's what you know. That's been one of the
<v Speaker 1>reasons why I've never been into Europe. People have asked me, like,
<v Speaker 1>would you ever go. I'm like, yeah, I guess maybe
<v Speaker 1>to go to like museums and stuff. But in terms
<v Speaker 1>of I mean, I don't travel for human culture because
<v Speaker 1>I find.
<v Speaker 2>It no man, if you're traveling for plants, stay where
<v Speaker 2>you are.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well I do. I want to go to I
<v Speaker 1>want to go.
<v Speaker 2>We have a lot of plants here. I mean, we
<v Speaker 2>have a really thriving botany community and there are plants
<v Speaker 2>to study. But it's not like it's not like in America.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, everything was wrecked pretty early on. Well in the
<v Speaker 1>United States. What it's like, the East Coast got got
<v Speaker 1>fucked so much, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, three hundred years prior example.
<v Speaker 1>But I do want to go. I want to go
<v Speaker 1>to Portugal and Spain to see Drosophylum lusitanicum, this really
<v Speaker 1>cool carnivorous plant. I want to see those Mediterranean habitats.
<v Speaker 1>I do want to see some of those those Mediterranean
<v Speaker 1>being you know, because I'm so into arid land plants,
<v Speaker 1>I want to see some of There was a rock rose,
<v Speaker 1>a really glandular rock rows that they had at UC
<v Speaker 1>Berkeley Botanic Gar and that was really sticky, and I
<v Speaker 1>could tell. I'm like, this thing's adapted to fire. This
<v Speaker 1>thing I bet goes up and it's probably comes back
<v Speaker 1>and the rootstock goes up in a fire, low morning
<v Speaker 1>wildfire like Mediterranean climates. Get where the summer is the
<v Speaker 1>dry season, and I forget it was as cisus. I
<v Speaker 1>forget what's but yeah, I mean overall, and I'd like
<v Speaker 1>to go to Italy to see if you know, my
<v Speaker 1>own fucking neurosis are indeed hereditary. If there's a hereditary.
<v Speaker 2>Case, probably mine are.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I know, I was. I was. I rewatched Sopranos
<v Speaker 1>for the first time like eight years and still I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>Jesus Christ, my fucking relatives growing up, you know, some
<v Speaker 1>of the terms and behaviors and ship and just it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking but Central Italy would be interesting. Yeah, but uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I don't. I don't know, man, I it's it's wild
<v Speaker 1>to think about.
<v Speaker 2>Well, man, most people, most people that come here are
<v Speaker 2>are if if if you're into like like like the
<v Speaker 2>experience that we have had in America, like you and
<v Speaker 2>I have had in nature, it's kind of disappointing sometimes here,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and I mean now I have got my
<v Speaker 2>wife knows the whole area. We go to places that
<v Speaker 2>you wouldn't go to. But still it's if your first
<v Speaker 2>reaction would be disappointment, I think, yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Wait till the whole world is like that. Not to
<v Speaker 1>be negative, but wait till we've homogenized the flora of
<v Speaker 1>the whole world in diversity has just been reduced.
<v Speaker 2>A tree of heavens everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, that's some Yeah, that's an Asian species that
<v Speaker 1>wasn't there. I was in Brazil and I remember the
<v Speaker 1>drive from Rio Dijonio and we were going to minajer Ice,
<v Speaker 1>which is one of those seasonally dry areas with a
<v Speaker 1>ton of diversity, and just the drive, you know, we
<v Speaker 1>had to drive through just so much shit, like monocultures
<v Speaker 1>of yuka non native eucalyptus, and barren hillsides, a couple
<v Speaker 1>of fires that were burning. God, it was just so,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and you think about what would have grown
<v Speaker 1>there before. That's the other thing that drives me nuts
<v Speaker 1>about human the way humans do things. It's like, we
<v Speaker 1>you can have all that just save you know, for
<v Speaker 1>every four hundred acres you clear, save one hundred acres
<v Speaker 1>maybe even fifty of habitat, There's still gonna be shit
<v Speaker 1>that goes extinct. There's still gonna be something. But like
<v Speaker 1>if you if you recognize the biosphere as a living machine,
<v Speaker 1>then you realize the importance of you know, if you
<v Speaker 1>just operate on that principle the biosphere is a living machine.
<v Speaker 1>We needed the native plants in a region. And you
<v Speaker 1>operate on that principle, you you know, you end up steal.
<v Speaker 1>You can make space in society and the popular consciousness
<v Speaker 1>for it to save it, or even just have a law,
<v Speaker 1>like there's got to be this much space set aside
<v Speaker 1>just so that living machine can function. It can fucking
<v Speaker 1>you know, if apotranspiration, it can act as a seed
<v Speaker 1>stock and a you know, reserve for the local life forms,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. Just even that. But they don't they don't
<v Speaker 1>do that now. They take everything, Like you look at
<v Speaker 1>the development going on in Fort Worth or Dallas, which
<v Speaker 1>are two of the biggest overdeveloped shitholes in Texas, and
<v Speaker 1>they don't leave anything. They take everything, like they bulldoze everything.
<v Speaker 1>There have been like precious prairie habitats destroyed in the
<v Speaker 1>last year. You know, I've got friends that have work
<v Speaker 1>on that. It's fucking mindflel It's just like, what kind
<v Speaker 1>of deaf cult is this? And everyone's caught up in it,
<v Speaker 1>like so few people realize, you know. When I was younger,
<v Speaker 1>I always thought like, oh, at some point, like people
<v Speaker 1>set things aside, at some point, maybe the development will stop,
<v Speaker 1>maybe they won't take everything. But that's not like I
<v Speaker 1>said before, that's not happening. I don't know, what do
<v Speaker 1>you think about that?
<v Speaker 2>I think you got to You're onto something there, because
<v Speaker 2>it is true. It's I see. I saw where we're living.
<v Speaker 2>Where my house is in southern California is in the
<v Speaker 2>Lake elsin Or Valley, and I used to go up
<v Speaker 2>there and click plants and stuff. Back in nineteen early
<v Speaker 2>nineteen seventies, there was just one road through the place,
<v Speaker 2>one basically one road going towards San Diego that went
<v Speaker 2>through this valley, and there was houses near the lake
<v Speaker 2>from the fifties. And in fact, my wife from Europe,
<v Speaker 2>I took her out and I said, I'm going to
<v Speaker 2>show you the oldest buildings here, and she almost I
<v Speaker 2>had to laugh when she's when I showed her some
<v Speaker 2>bungalows from the nineteen forties.
<v Speaker 1>Compared to Europe. Yeah, oh god, what do they got
<v Speaker 1>going sixteen?
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, listen, I'm living in a city that's two
<v Speaker 2>thousand years old. You know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's crazy and that's kind of feel weird. But anyway, but.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so so that area, like was, there was areas
<v Speaker 2>you could pull off, great for collecting plants. I was
<v Speaker 2>really into plants at that time, native plants, and it
<v Speaker 2>was just fantastic. That area has a highway down the
<v Speaker 2>center of it now right up to the hills or
<v Speaker 2>houses everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>And.
<v Speaker 2>It's just, uh, it's just not gone. It's just gone.
<v Speaker 2>The whole valley is gone. Nobody could ever experience it
<v Speaker 2>like I did, even and that was in the seventies.
<v Speaker 1>I bet they put them to the dumbest shit. They
<v Speaker 1>always build the dumbest shit. That's the thing is, like
<v Speaker 1>they don't. It's not like, oh, we're just having to
<v Speaker 1>put up like we're building beautiful things at least. It's
<v Speaker 1>like it's always just the lowest common denominator, bottom of
<v Speaker 1>the brains them. Shit these strip malls, fucking car dealerships, billboards,
<v Speaker 1>it's like shit that I would hate on its own,
<v Speaker 1>even if it wasn't destroying things that I loved.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I know, where does it?
<v Speaker 1>Where does it go?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you know it, it's gonna keep going. We need
<v Speaker 2>more houses in southern California.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. But if you preserve things, or you make certain
<v Speaker 1>things off limits, and there's a reason for it, and
<v Speaker 1>it's justified, and people under stand, I think that's the thing.
<v Speaker 2>I think. I think there's a certain amount of people
<v Speaker 2>that understand that, or at least we have a tradition
<v Speaker 2>of it, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So even Ronald Reagan, by the way, I was working
<v Speaker 2>at the Theodore Payne Foundation there for a little while.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, And and.
<v Speaker 2>He wrote a letter he wrote he wrote a letter talking.
<v Speaker 2>He wrote a letter to the people there at the
<v Speaker 2>Theodore Payne Foundation about how when Theodore Payne had his
<v Speaker 2>first native plant garden in Los Angeles, he used to
<v Speaker 2>go there and buy native plants for his ranch.
<v Speaker 1>The Gipper. The Gipper said this, Yeah, the Gipper ship.
<v Speaker 1>Where's the tell everybody where Theodore Payne.
<v Speaker 2>Theodore Payne Foundation is out there in the on the
<v Speaker 2>in a valley off of the San Fernando Valley.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, So Southern californ What is it.
<v Speaker 2>But but but his actual his actual nursery. He was
<v Speaker 2>an Englishman and he he's he's he he got he started,
<v Speaker 2>he came to California and he got turned on to
<v Speaker 2>the how beautiful the shrubs were and everything. And then
<v Speaker 2>some rich people that he was doing some gardening for
<v Speaker 2>wanted native plants on their property because they liked them,
<v Speaker 2>and they also you know, especially like ceanothus and stuff,
<v Speaker 2>and so he had a nursery down in Los Angeles. Bruh,
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, I think forty years or so.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy. What blows my mind is how groundbreaking shit
<v Speaker 1>like that is, like in the nineteen twenties, like people
<v Speaker 1>that were in the native plants then, because it takes again,
<v Speaker 1>it takes seeing all these things together and habitat to
<v Speaker 1>appreciate them. Whereas conventional European horticultural ideas, as fucked as
<v Speaker 1>they are, they always tend to view things like it's
<v Speaker 1>in a pot, like the plant just exists by itself.
<v Speaker 1>It's this autonomous entity. It misses the connections to everything else.
<v Speaker 1>But when you see you know, like Modelly.
<v Speaker 2>On Europe though completely well.
<v Speaker 1>While Eurasian too, you know, there was a history. I
<v Speaker 1>mean where do you think that comes? I know, I
<v Speaker 1>know where do you think those range were?
<v Speaker 2>I'm saying, like, look at look at look at Jepson's flora.
<v Speaker 2>For instance. The people that were growing native plants then
<v Speaker 2>could could could go into the Orange County and see
<v Speaker 2>like fantastic flowerings every year. Now now luckily we still
<v Speaker 2>have some like in in on the mountains in the
<v Speaker 2>Elsinore Valley, we still have those so big of blooms
<v Speaker 2>of poppies that I could see him from an airplane
<v Speaker 2>flying in during the pandemic, see the whole hillside. And
<v Speaker 2>for twenty years I lived there, I never saw a
<v Speaker 2>native poppy along that area.
<v Speaker 1>So it takes seeing it, obviously, it takes being It's
<v Speaker 1>hard to stand in front of something like that and
<v Speaker 1>not be amazed by it and then want to share
<v Speaker 1>a shit. So that and that for me is the
<v Speaker 1>big that's the bummers, Like that's how you get to
<v Speaker 1>the shifting baselines area. When there's none of it left
<v Speaker 1>to be seen, then there's no reason to care about it.
<v Speaker 2>Like you're living this this this new this new life
<v Speaker 2>we have where you don't have to go outside, you
<v Speaker 2>don't have to, you don't and if you go outside,
<v Speaker 2>you're going out to in and out Burger or going
<v Speaker 2>to the mall. You know, you don't ever get outside.
<v Speaker 2>You don't ever get outside of that. I like in
<v Speaker 2>and out burgers, but but I.
<v Speaker 1>Can't do any I can't do all the fucking chains
<v Speaker 1>and stuff. I mean, it's I don't even when I'm
<v Speaker 1>doing it.
<v Speaker 2>I feel like I'm doing some Hamburgers, a good Hamburger.
<v Speaker 2>I know.
<v Speaker 1>A good Starbucks bathroom is a good Starbucks bathroom. You
<v Speaker 1>go in there, you wash your ass. You know, they
<v Speaker 1>got nice soap. They're not going to harass you. You know,
<v Speaker 1>unless you're in here too long or something. The Starbucks
<v Speaker 1>bathroom is nice. And I'll get coffee too, you know.
<v Speaker 2>There you go there, you go talk.
<v Speaker 1>Anybody who's gonna judge me on using a Starbucks. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I just, uh, my thing is just trying to get
<v Speaker 1>this on people's radar mora and show them and really
<v Speaker 1>with like with kill your lawn, that's been really really
<v Speaker 1>fun is because like here's something you can do, get
<v Speaker 1>rid of fucking lawn and plant this stuff. And I
<v Speaker 1>mean the amount of people that write me being like, man,
<v Speaker 1>I planted this, I planted this native It's amazing. It's
<v Speaker 1>so cool. They're so excited. I'm like, that's fucking that's
<v Speaker 1>so nice to see. That's so nice see humans excited
<v Speaker 1>about the living world. You know, I think that's probably
<v Speaker 1>know best. But you could put that stuff. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you could put native plants in like commercial shitty strip
<v Speaker 1>mall landscaping too. You know. That's the part. That's why
<v Speaker 1>it's so important to normalize this, you know what I mean?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I agree. I In fact, my property there was
<v Speaker 2>nice going back to it because I lived there thirty
<v Speaker 2>years and my uncle that I got the property from,
<v Speaker 2>he just had some garbage plants there. But right next
<v Speaker 2>to behind the house is oaks growing along a creek,
<v Speaker 2>and so where the house was, they had cut down oak.
<v Speaker 2>So whenever an oak came up, I can't it and
<v Speaker 2>and man, now I was sitting there under the oak trees.
<v Speaker 2>They're now thirty forty years old, and it's uh, it's
<v Speaker 2>it's really beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>No, that's dope. That's so nice. It's so nice to
<v Speaker 1>sit in the shade of a tree that you planted
<v Speaker 1>or nurtured or like knew when it was you know, ceiling.
<v Speaker 2>And courses Coursus agrifoli. I've always loved that tree.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, oh there's God, there's California's got a ton of
<v Speaker 1>cool oak diversity. I really liked there was a Quarcus
<v Speaker 1>tormentally they do that island oak, and I guess it
<v Speaker 1>existed on the maland but that and Qurcus chrystolopus the
<v Speaker 1>canyon live oak. But talking about all this stuff, it
<v Speaker 1>makes me think of this thing. My friend Hunter brought
<v Speaker 1>it up once. He was like, he's a cactus guy,
<v Speaker 1>and he was like, you know, I think he did.
<v Speaker 1>I've never done ayahuasca. He had done ayahuasca, which sounds like,
<v Speaker 1>at this point's so cliche. Everyone's done ayahuasca, you know,
<v Speaker 1>depending on where you are, what circles you hang around,
<v Speaker 1>and but he had mentioned, you know, he like it
<v Speaker 1>was he was talking about he like started crying a
<v Speaker 1>little bit, almost like I could see the tears welling
<v Speaker 1>up in his eyes, Like you could tell how fucking
<v Speaker 1>much this impacted him and helped him deal with shit.
<v Speaker 1>And I've done the same thing. I mean, I'll like
<v Speaker 1>fucking tear up when I think of, you know, times
<v Speaker 1>I did psychedelics and they made me realize something that
<v Speaker 1>I needed to change in my life or about myself.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they made me sniff, They made me able
<v Speaker 1>to sniff my own bullshit and work around it. But
<v Speaker 1>he then later brought up and this is kind of funny.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe it was a little too woo woo, but he
<v Speaker 1>was like, I think he's like, it could be maybe
<v Speaker 1>the psychedelics are a way to, you know, for the
<v Speaker 1>plants to like wake people up and protect themselves, which
<v Speaker 1>I think is that. I mean, it would be a
<v Speaker 1>really cool storyline for like a sci fi.
<v Speaker 2>For his sci fi movie.
<v Speaker 1>But it's like, in a way, it kind of it
<v Speaker 1>is I think, what you can't do. You can't experience
<v Speaker 1>that and not have this reprints. You know. Maybe it'll
<v Speaker 1>take a few times of getting it hammered in until
<v Speaker 1>you get the message, but you can't do those things
<v Speaker 1>and have a reverence and not have a reverence for
<v Speaker 1>the living world around you. It just it makes me
<v Speaker 1>want to dose everybody, you know, I think, because I
<v Speaker 1>just I just want to see. Yeah, man, it's just
<v Speaker 1>about you know, not what he needs it obviously, but
<v Speaker 1>I think it's certain people do and it would wake
<v Speaker 1>them up.
<v Speaker 2>Hey. I think, hey, listen when a person loves something
<v Speaker 2>like you love plants, or a person like me loves
<v Speaker 2>something like like lichens. The people that you touch, you're
<v Speaker 2>a drug yourself.
<v Speaker 1>Right, Yeah, yeah, that's true.
<v Speaker 2>You pass on that perception. They these they feel the excitement,
<v Speaker 2>the joy, but it takes it and that really communicates nature.
<v Speaker 2>That does it with our kids, our grandkids for instance,
<v Speaker 2>you know, Yeah, but they see how excited we are
<v Speaker 2>about native plants or seeing this mushroom, and then the
<v Speaker 2>excitement goes to them too, because it's something they can
<v Speaker 2>see and name.
<v Speaker 1>No, you're right, you're right, but don't ruin my plans
<v Speaker 1>for dos and everybody. I'm gonna dose of water supply
<v Speaker 1>some time, right. I just think, I think, I think, seriously,
<v Speaker 1>some people are hard to They're hard to reach. They're
<v Speaker 1>too embedded in the fucking matrix, whatever you want to
<v Speaker 1>call it. They're too like embedded in the death culture.
<v Speaker 1>I think that there's a way. And again, if people
<v Speaker 1>can't see the living world in front of them, they're
<v Speaker 1>not going to wake up to how cool it is
<v Speaker 1>and how how worth preserving it is. You know. I
<v Speaker 1>it's a massive cultural failing, I think, and and it's
<v Speaker 1>that's what needs to change. It's not laws, it's not
<v Speaker 1>any of that. I mean, it'd be nice to obviously
<v Speaker 1>have a lot of things protected. But when you've got
<v Speaker 1>a culture that respects the living world around it and
<v Speaker 1>sees a place for it, maybe it doesn't need to
<v Speaker 1>worship it like I do. But I mean it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>when you've got a culture that respects it, there's gonna
<v Speaker 1>be there's gonna be space for that living world within
<v Speaker 1>that culture. And right now they're not any space for it.
<v Speaker 1>You don't put any space.
<v Speaker 2>I am actually concerned that there's less and less space, yes.
<v Speaker 1>But I mean just you know, I mean, and even
<v Speaker 1>with like restoration project, just like take somebody's fucking, you know,
<v Speaker 1>burnt agricultural fields that you know, got fucking overused, blown
<v Speaker 1>out four decades ago and are now becoming tracked house subdivisions.
<v Speaker 1>Like for every four that gets built, mandate that one
<v Speaker 1>of them's got to be returned to like a restoration
<v Speaker 1>project and put money into, you know, funding ecologists and
<v Speaker 1>native horticulturalists whatever to replant it and establish it to
<v Speaker 1>be so. And then that enriches everybody's life. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's the thing that is having this stuff around, you know,
<v Speaker 1>drastically improves human life. It does. It's just being able
<v Speaker 1>to go take a walk through it or experience it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I don't know how we got to.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. That's one thing I love about this city is
<v Speaker 2>they have a lot of trees, even if they all
<v Speaker 2>are native trees. You know, they had a lot of
<v Speaker 2>trees all through the place. And that alone to just
<v Speaker 2>just when the fall comes. I'm right here in the
<v Speaker 2>in the middle of a big city, and when I
<v Speaker 2>can walk around and uh, I can walk right up
<v Speaker 2>on the hill over here where they used to hang
<v Speaker 2>people and uh and walk through loads of oak leaves
<v Speaker 2>laying on the ground, you know. I mean even that's
<v Speaker 2>that's and people here that are living mostly in flats
<v Speaker 2>like we are, they were building Communist times. They they
<v Speaker 2>go up on that hill and sit out there a
<v Speaker 2>lot and so and and you can go up into
<v Speaker 2>the back parts all covered with trees and and man
<v Speaker 2>in fall, it's it's just just beautiful. So Progs, that's
<v Speaker 2>what everybody needs.
<v Speaker 1>So Progue's got. I mean, like where you live, you've
<v Speaker 1>got a lot of trees, a lot of maybe not
<v Speaker 1>necessarily wild nature, but you've got plant life around at least.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, a lot of deciduous trees. Yeah, so it gets
<v Speaker 2>and if you if you, if you, for instance, stand
<v Speaker 2>on the top of the University here and look across.
<v Speaker 2>We were doing it with Danish guy one day, having
<v Speaker 2>some beers up there, and he went, wow, he says,
<v Speaker 2>this city is really green.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's cool, man.
<v Speaker 2>I've not I mean, you know, the noticeable. It's not
<v Speaker 2>like New York. You get up and yeah, a Central
<v Speaker 2>Park looks great, but but uh yeah, they're not turned
<v Speaker 2>to the left a little bit, or look out the
<v Speaker 2>back windows.
<v Speaker 1>I was on. Some of those fucked up industrial canows
<v Speaker 1>like the Gowanas or Newtown Creek or whatever in New
<v Speaker 1>York actually have a lot of a lot of life
<v Speaker 1>on them. It's surprising for what they are. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there might be a garbage bush, you know, floating by
<v Speaker 1>at some point, but uh yeah, I don't know. It's
<v Speaker 1>I think it's so important to make space for nature
<v Speaker 1>or whatever you want to call it in in cities
<v Speaker 1>and around new developments. You know, I just I get
<v Speaker 1>so fucking depressed seeing lawns and then like the lone
<v Speaker 1>non native oak tree planted in yards, and I think
<v Speaker 1>it's I'm hopeful. I think it's I think it's changing.
<v Speaker 2>But uh yeah, I like the idea that people have
<v Speaker 2>to get rid of lawns because it's just their water
<v Speaker 2>bills are too high. That's great.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So with well, anyway, with your work, So what
<v Speaker 1>where do you plan to go on with it? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you've got a bunch of papers you're working on. You're
<v Speaker 1>describing your species. I take it with most of those.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, yeah, I like over two hundred and fifty papers,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, I just go.
<v Speaker 2>I just keep looking at new stuff. People send me stuff. Right,
<v Speaker 2>since I'm specializing in the In California, I worked on inventory,
<v Speaker 2>so I was dealing with all all likings. Now I
<v Speaker 2>work on just one group that's around the world, and
<v Speaker 2>that's that's what I'm going to finish my career doing.
<v Speaker 2>So in fact, I'm old enough that that most people
<v Speaker 2>have have have already quit having a career.
<v Speaker 1>But it's your passion.
<v Speaker 2>Seventy five in just a couple of months, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, holy shit, So this is okay. So but this
<v Speaker 1>is like a I mean, this is obviously a passion,
<v Speaker 1>Like this is you made this your career, transferring from
<v Speaker 1>construction to this to studying.
<v Speaker 2>Like, yeah, yeah, I got disabled and needed to do something.
<v Speaker 2>I could get a I could get a her I
<v Speaker 2>could get a space at or herbarium. I could get
<v Speaker 2>involved in and the work on it all the time
<v Speaker 2>because I couldn't get a job.
<v Speaker 1>How did you familiarize yourself it's disabled. How did you
<v Speaker 1>familiarrself with familiarize yourself with writing papers like and all
<v Speaker 1>the scientifics?
<v Speaker 2>Oh well, yeah, well what happened is like normal people,
<v Speaker 2>I wrote poetry when as a kid, and then then
<v Speaker 2>I thought maybe I'd try and write some novels I wrote.
<v Speaker 2>I wrote a couple of shitty ones, but I learned
<v Speaker 2>to doing that, how to sit down and write instead
<v Speaker 2>of just staring at the blank page. I mean, you
<v Speaker 2>just get it moving. I learned that it doesn't matter
<v Speaker 2>that those novels were shitty. I was doing that for
<v Speaker 2>fun basically, and just from that experience, and I learned
<v Speaker 2>how to sit down and write.
<v Speaker 1>So but I mean, obviously to write a paper, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>where did you to write a scientific paper? It's the
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of.
<v Speaker 2>Just you have to learn it step by step. We're
<v Speaker 2>training people how to do that now. Of course that
<v Speaker 2>you're doing that in any scientific group at a university,
<v Speaker 2>they have to you have to read them. Well, I
<v Speaker 2>mean just like if you're don't write novels, you have
<v Speaker 2>to watch novels. If you're don't make movies, you have
<v Speaker 2>to watch movies. You start reading all this stuff and
<v Speaker 2>then pretty soon you can learn from it how to
<v Speaker 2>write if you if you know how to sit down
<v Speaker 2>and write.
<v Speaker 1>And then you would submit them to different journals for
<v Speaker 1>pub and see if they would want to publish.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Well I started off just like like Rancho Santa
<v Speaker 2>Ana had had a journal that, you know, like a
<v Speaker 2>fans inc for plants that they've been putting out for
<v Speaker 2>a long time. So so I would send liking papers there.
<v Speaker 2>So some of the first things I published with in
<v Speaker 2>Crosis Soma, which is which is just it is not
<v Speaker 2>even an impact journal. It's just a small journal that
<v Speaker 2>was put out by people at Rancho Santa Ana. I
<v Speaker 2>started out doing that. Then I then I found this
<v Speaker 2>liking group, the California like in Society for their bulletin.
<v Speaker 2>To this day, I still write for and have written
<v Speaker 2>the most amount of articles of anybody for it in
<v Speaker 2>the last twenty five years.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus.
<v Speaker 2>But it's just and that that's not worth worth anything
<v Speaker 2>in science, science, for in all sciences. The way it's
<v Speaker 2>set up is you've got to get a game for
<v Speaker 2>the highest impact paper. You got to get get it
<v Speaker 2>in the biggest journal of Nature. You and anything else
<v Speaker 2>is not of value. And so I started out in
<v Speaker 2>those places that were no value. And still I still
<v Speaker 2>publish stuff there too.
<v Speaker 1>I think that's good though. I mean again, it's what
<v Speaker 1>I didn't. I'm not coming from academia either, you know.
<v Speaker 2>I do mean neither, I mean me either. I'm a
<v Speaker 2>construction guy, and even at the university here where where
<v Speaker 2>I'm doing research, I know little little about what's going on,
<v Speaker 2>you know, in terms of the academic world.
<v Speaker 1>But there's so you know, if I was if I
<v Speaker 1>were to write papers, for instance, it would be strictly
<v Speaker 1>that's the thing is, like, I'm not doing it to
<v Speaker 1>advance my career or make a name for myself. It
<v Speaker 1>would strictly be because I'm coming from the perspective of
<v Speaker 1>somebody who I'll I'll think about something an ecology that
<v Speaker 1>I've noticed, or a propensity.
<v Speaker 2>You want to write it down that a.
<v Speaker 1>Certain plant has to grow on a certain type of substrate,
<v Speaker 1>and I look it up and there's nothing there, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, fuck, I got to put something up there now.
<v Speaker 1>Same thing I do with e naturalists. I'll be like,
<v Speaker 1>there's not a good photo of the flowering structure this
<v Speaker 1>rare plant. Now, I got to go find it and
<v Speaker 1>get a good macro photo and put it up so
<v Speaker 1>that other people, you know, it's contributing to a body
<v Speaker 1>of knowledge that will I started.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, you know, I just started doing this. I
<v Speaker 2>didn't think, you know, that i'd marry achnologist. I didn't
<v Speaker 2>think that I'd end up peered working on somebody's grant.
<v Speaker 1>I forgot your wife like anologists too. Fuck, that's got
<v Speaker 1>power couple right there. That's got to be amazing. Man
<v Speaker 1>like that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, you can make love and talk about Lichens
<v Speaker 2>and the other person is not going to go crazy,
<v Speaker 2>you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, just to be like, especially like dating someone that
<v Speaker 1>you know, you can talk about the ship you're into
<v Speaker 1>with and go down a wormhole and they reciprocate. That's nice.
<v Speaker 2>We can even argue about it.
<v Speaker 1>About text. You ever argue about taxonomy. I guess likings
<v Speaker 1>aren't going through massive taxis.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, sure you do. You know she'll go like,
<v Speaker 2>what do you how can this structure be? How can
<v Speaker 2>you do this? And then I have to she'll go,
<v Speaker 2>She'll and I'll have to explain, well, you know, look
<v Speaker 2>at look at I checked it all out. Here's how
<v Speaker 2>it works. Okay, she'll go, Okay, Yeah, that one's gonna
<v Speaker 2>be hard to identify. I think, what's cool, you know,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, and yeah, we disagree about some stuff like that,
<v Speaker 2>but but we but you know, we work it out.
<v Speaker 2>It's not like it's not like getting mad about like
<v Speaker 2>where you put your slippers in the house.
<v Speaker 1>Right, or someone left the fucking jar open and now
<v Speaker 1>it's got bugs in it or something like left the jar.
<v Speaker 2>No, this is about doing, you know, this is about
<v Speaker 2>understanding or.
<v Speaker 1>Didn't through their dishes. I think what I what I
<v Speaker 1>find remarkable about you is that, especially like you came
<v Speaker 1>at this from outside of academia, which I think is
<v Speaker 1>gonna be the way that a lot of people come
<v Speaker 1>at the natural sciences now, especially since the Internet is
<v Speaker 1>around and it gives you this. I mean, but you
<v Speaker 1>did you did this bit of time before there were
<v Speaker 1>smartphones and there were as many there were as many
<v Speaker 1>Internet resources as there are now, which is like, how
<v Speaker 1>the fuck you were I guess you were. You were
<v Speaker 1>living in southern California in an area that's rich with
<v Speaker 1>natural sciences and natural scientists. But you know, back then,
<v Speaker 1>to be into this stuff and to be able to
<v Speaker 1>access information on it must have been hardy. You actually
<v Speaker 1>had the go to Orberia. You actually had to get
<v Speaker 1>out into the field.
<v Speaker 2>No. Actually, actually when now, when I was into native
<v Speaker 2>plants and for a while I was a native plan horticulturalist,
<v Speaker 2>I took a break from contry struction and did that
<v Speaker 2>for a little bit, and it just I didn't like
<v Speaker 2>working for non private for private uh you know, non
<v Speaker 2>private foundations, so I went back to construction work. But
<v Speaker 2>the thing was is that that was before the Internet.
<v Speaker 2>What made my career possible is the first windows, the
<v Speaker 2>first Apple that made a way to interconnect with people.
<v Speaker 2>So I have a whole interconnection with people around the world. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And and actually my career and the ability to make
<v Speaker 2>an impact has been all influenced by the Internet.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. But still, I mean what years were you really,
<v Speaker 1>like were you starting to really get into this, like
<v Speaker 1>what like early nineties?
<v Speaker 2>Okay, well listen, like in the nineties though, see I
<v Speaker 2>was in the native plants.
<v Speaker 1>Back in the seventies, okay, pain in the ass, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I would be fucked. I mean, I guess you just
<v Speaker 1>got to up to go to the library or the
<v Speaker 1>barium and just lurk harder.
<v Speaker 2>But go on, sorry, yeah you did. That's what you
<v Speaker 2>would have to do. That's back in the seventies. You know,
<v Speaker 2>you'd have to go. You'd have to go, you'd have
<v Speaker 2>to go dig into some books, you know, and learn
<v Speaker 2>how to read months and all that stuff. You know.
<v Speaker 2>But but when I when this started, it made it
<v Speaker 2>easy to communicate with people. And uh, and and luckily
<v Speaker 2>likens is a small, relatively small scientific group of people
<v Speaker 2>that are usually botanists or other stuff that actually do
<v Speaker 2>it teach botany maybe, and but but actually lichens are
<v Speaker 2>their their passion, like Tom Nash and Arizona was and uh,
<v Speaker 2>and I met people that way. So for me, if
<v Speaker 2>there hadn't been an Internet, I'm not sure what would
<v Speaker 2>have happened. Now I started studying, well, I was on
<v Speaker 2>disability and they were talking about sending me back to work,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and uh, there's a problem with me sitting.
<v Speaker 2>I have to do a whole bunch of things Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>to make sure my blood's glowing in my legs. But
<v Speaker 2>so so, anyway, I was I was going to go
<v Speaker 2>back and study botany. But I was fifty years old.
<v Speaker 2>They said, they told me. I said, they said, you're
<v Speaker 2>you're a construction worker. We're not going to let you
<v Speaker 2>go back to college. We're not going to pay for
<v Speaker 2>you to go to college.
<v Speaker 1>Who is this?
<v Speaker 2>And uh? And my doctor said, My doctor got pissed off.
<v Speaker 2>He says, you know, you're too smart. He says, I've
<v Speaker 2>been loving you, like bringing in mosses and showing them
<v Speaker 2>to me and stuff. He says, I've got He wrote
<v Speaker 2>up a big thing and I stayed permanently disabled. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and then I was like depressed because I was going like, hey, man,
<v Speaker 2>I was hoping to be at Rancho Santa Anna studying Pinsteman.
<v Speaker 2>Wait wait wait wait, who said we're not going back
<v Speaker 2>at the house.
<v Speaker 1>Who said we're not going to pay for you to
<v Speaker 1>go to college? What was that?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's these people that in California. Well anyway, it's
<v Speaker 2>in every any part of a disability program, they a
<v Speaker 2>certain periods they check everybody, uh, you know, and see
<v Speaker 2>if anybody's improved in their health and stuff I hadn't improved,
<v Speaker 2>you know, yeah, so so I mean it was It's legitimate.
<v Speaker 2>I have a legitimate problem, you know. I mean it's
<v Speaker 2>even affects me not being able to hide more within
<v Speaker 2>a couple hours now, you know. Yeah, the only don't
<v Speaker 2>get enough oxygen in my lege.
<v Speaker 1>My only disability, my only disability is my fucking mind.
<v Speaker 1>It's I can't focus.
<v Speaker 2>But oh no, it is it, but listen. No.
<v Speaker 1>But the thing that's cool though now is like I
<v Speaker 1>can be in my garden looking at you, and I
<v Speaker 1>grow a ton of plants too, and I'm always paying it.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, that's the I learned so much just by
<v Speaker 1>growing plants, by just observing them why they're failing with
<v Speaker 1>their respond learning to read their behavior, if they're yellowing,
<v Speaker 1>if they're growing fast, if they're just you know, uh,
<v Speaker 1>atrophying and not not growing or what. But I can
<v Speaker 1>I can think of something, have a question, which I
<v Speaker 1>think is the most important part of learning, and then
<v Speaker 1>look it up in this pocket computer that I carry around,
<v Speaker 1>which is also the bane of my systems in some ways,
<v Speaker 1>because it's constantly distracting me. You know, I'd be like,
<v Speaker 1>I got to check this email from this thing, and
<v Speaker 1>then I checked my email, I got another one from
<v Speaker 1>someone else, and suddenly I forgot what I was there
<v Speaker 1>for in the first place. But you've got this oracle
<v Speaker 1>that you can just ask. And now with the fucking
<v Speaker 1>AI too. It's why, I mean, it's crazy. You can
<v Speaker 1>you can check your own material with AI, asking questions,
<v Speaker 1>you know, asking it questions whatever. I mean. There's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of dumb shit about AI, and you have to
<v Speaker 1>parse through it because sometimes I have used just just
<v Speaker 1>a Google search.
<v Speaker 2>Now are some of our students are already using it
<v Speaker 2>to throw their papers in and check check for ye information.
<v Speaker 2>You can ask help and just writing advice.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you can ask Google. I remember because I would
<v Speaker 1>look up questions before AI, and it would, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I would The question wouldn't be directly answered. You'd have
<v Speaker 1>to look through it would look for keywords, right, and
<v Speaker 1>you have to go through the material and find it,
<v Speaker 1>find a keyword and then parss through it. But now
<v Speaker 1>I'll ask it a question and I will literally get
<v Speaker 1>an answer from the fucking AI, which I'm not gonna lie.
<v Speaker 1>Is kind of cool. You still have to read through
<v Speaker 1>it because sometimes it's wrong, but but it's it's really
<v Speaker 1>like for a learning tool, it can be really cool,
<v Speaker 1>but then for like certain things, it doesn't. It won't
<v Speaker 1>touch it. Like if you ask it like a political
<v Speaker 1>question or something about you know, the something that's in
<v Speaker 1>the news, it won't the AI won't touch it with
<v Speaker 1>a ten foot poll. But for natural science stuff, it's it's.
<v Speaker 2>Uh, yeah, they're not too good at least uh, they're
<v Speaker 2>not too good for lichens. But now finally on Google,
<v Speaker 2>I can put in a species name and at least
<v Speaker 2>I get something from the genus, you know, or or
<v Speaker 2>in some cases stuff that I describe will show up
<v Speaker 2>on the Internet and just a short amount of time. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, you know. And if you're for
<v Speaker 1>for me, like if I'm curious about plant like these,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you can't tell a lot from a photo
<v Speaker 1>and a lot of plant like these, but there's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of digitized there barium specimens, which are you know,
<v Speaker 1>like invaluable, that's invaluable material when you've got a pressed
<v Speaker 1>plant there, right, you know. Uh, it's so it's so
<v Speaker 1>that's something like the main reason I collect a bearium
<v Speaker 1>vouchers now because or barium that I accession them at
<v Speaker 1>is this small or barium in West Texas that few
<v Speaker 1>people are going to go physically visit, but they digitize
<v Speaker 1>everything so then it gets automatically uploaded to a database. Cool,
<v Speaker 1>which is cool. So yeah, I don't know that. Do
<v Speaker 1>you get Do you get emails from like younger people
<v Speaker 1>studying this, like people twenty five or thirty or younger.
<v Speaker 2>I get emails. Yeah, I get emails from all over
<v Speaker 2>the place. I mean, you know, I it's not unusual
<v Speaker 2>to have, Yeah, to get from people I don't know
<v Speaker 2>or I get I have people write me and go
<v Speaker 2>I want to know about what it's like to become
<v Speaker 2>a scientist, if they should go ahead with it, and
<v Speaker 2>and you know, I explain kind of the reality of
<v Speaker 2>it to them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what do you say?
<v Speaker 2>And what? It's not easy?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's no money in it.
<v Speaker 2>Find it's easy if you're co Yeah, you know, I'm
<v Speaker 2>I'm lucky. I got some kind of talent that worked.
<v Speaker 2>But uh, it's it's it's not easy. It's like listen,
<v Speaker 2>science is like your your radio show. You got to
<v Speaker 2>make a new one. You can't just keep doing the
<v Speaker 2>same show over and over again. You got to make
<v Speaker 2>another new one and another new one, I have to write.
<v Speaker 2>Every paper I write have to be about something new.
<v Speaker 2>I mean that's like that feels forced being an artist,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it feels forcible.
<v Speaker 1>It feels forced after a while, like if I didn't,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I think it's that's what's cool about not
<v Speaker 1>having it as your career. Like I I do podcasts
<v Speaker 1>when it's about when I think there's something to talk
<v Speaker 1>about that's interesting and I want to do. It's not
<v Speaker 1>like it's just I've got to come up with material.
<v Speaker 1>I've got to constantly be creating content. But I think
<v Speaker 1>that pressure is definitely on you when you do have
<v Speaker 1>this as a career. And so yeah, you know it's
<v Speaker 1>maybe I don't want to do it for two weeks.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe I want to go fucking I don't know, you know,
<v Speaker 1>learn to fucking croche.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Well, like I mean, I'm doing this for the
<v Speaker 2>love of it. So so you know, if I don't
<v Speaker 2>feel like doing it, I don't do it. You know,
<v Speaker 2>when we got a grant like this, I have agreed
<v Speaker 2>to do a certain amount of things. So like, for instance,
<v Speaker 2>right now, I work seven days a week, but I
<v Speaker 2>do it slow. I get up at four in the morning,
<v Speaker 2>get to work, at six, work straight through till noon
<v Speaker 2>or two, and then call it a day. But in
<v Speaker 2>doing seven days a week, I can easily get in
<v Speaker 2>more time. I can get in a lot of work done.
<v Speaker 2>I'll only do that for a certain period and then
<v Speaker 2>slow down a little bit. But you know, I have
<v Speaker 2>We're at a point in the job where I have
<v Speaker 2>to really bring everything together, so I have to work
<v Speaker 2>on it. We have a lot of specimens for processing.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah you've got no one. That's cool. I mean that's
<v Speaker 1>the thing with me is I can't. I have so
<v Speaker 1>much trou I'm distracted so easily, especially.
<v Speaker 2>If I yeah, well in my yeah, yeah, and yeah,
<v Speaker 2>you know. And there's two parts of this too, you know,
<v Speaker 2>like if if if if it was just if if
<v Speaker 2>it was for the money or anything, yeah, or for
<v Speaker 2>the ego. If it's for that, it's it's and we
<v Speaker 2>have a lot of scientists that are just into this
<v Speaker 2>for their ego and and and it's not I mean
<v Speaker 2>not lots of them, but they and and they can
<v Speaker 2>never be satisfied because they're doing it for ego or
<v Speaker 2>they're or there. They can't be satisfied because they have
<v Speaker 2>to make money. And uh, I'm not under that kind
<v Speaker 2>of pressure. So when I have a I'm working on
<v Speaker 2>a grant. I I agreed to do certain things. That's
<v Speaker 2>fine and uh, and have to really throw some energy
<v Speaker 2>into it right now. But it's it's what I want
<v Speaker 2>to do. And the other thing is is just like
<v Speaker 2>with what you do, you stop and you may be
<v Speaker 2>wanted saying, get these ideas for a show or whatever,
<v Speaker 2>but you you sit there and you start just digging
<v Speaker 2>on what's there. I mean, it's and man, I'll be
<v Speaker 2>working on a microscope and I have to be writing
<v Speaker 2>down details and stuff, and then I'll just stop and
<v Speaker 2>like look at it in the microscope and just just
<v Speaker 2>dig on it.
<v Speaker 1>I get. I get fucking brown. Like like right now,
<v Speaker 1>I'm trying to learn like blues piano, Like I bought
<v Speaker 1>a fucking hundred dollars keyboard and I'm like, I just
<v Speaker 1>want to learn blues piano because it's nice and it
<v Speaker 1>sound good to play, and it'd be fun to fuck
<v Speaker 1>around and be able to do that. And I and
<v Speaker 1>so it's like I don't know if I want to
<v Speaker 1>work on botany that. I don't know if I want
<v Speaker 1>to do this. I mean, I always feel the urge,
<v Speaker 1>but I think there's it's definitely important to make room
<v Speaker 1>for shit like that, for art, for whatever, to give
<v Speaker 1>yourself space, you know, as long as you're not just.
<v Speaker 2>I agree, I'm in the art on like for instance,
<v Speaker 2>I'm and reading like check check novels, you know, like
<v Speaker 2>their whole their stuff. I wouldn't read maybe in America,
<v Speaker 2>you know, but just just for to go somewhere else
<v Speaker 2>in my mind.
<v Speaker 1>Were you uh, were you reading philosophy like when you
<v Speaker 1>were younger, Like where did you get your ideas? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>what did you? Because I think stuff like that is
<v Speaker 1>important too, Like it's good to have a philosophy. It's
<v Speaker 1>good to have a bunch of different viewpoints as a
<v Speaker 1>way of coping with the world. And I think that
<v Speaker 1>a lot of if people don't have that, And that's
<v Speaker 1>why I think I see these younger kids sometimes commenting
<v Speaker 1>on the internet. They're like, ah, everything is pointless, this
<v Speaker 1>is you know, it's so fucked and it's just like
<v Speaker 1>this utter negativity, you know again, And I always just
<v Speaker 1>say laugh it off, like it's yeah, it's fucking bleak,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, find a way to you know, make
<v Speaker 1>the turn easier to swallow with dark humor or something whatever,
<v Speaker 1>find a way you could get into the far.
<v Speaker 2>Be Like the guys on the Titanic, the band that's
<v Speaker 2>playing to the lef askmate it before they went under. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that analogy is they could get off the thing.
<v Speaker 1>Right and just realized there's an inherent pointlessness in everything.
<v Speaker 1>So it fucking doesn't matter, None of it matters, So
<v Speaker 1>do it. That's that shouldn't be a reason to give up.
<v Speaker 1>That's a reason to do whatever the fuck you want
<v Speaker 1>in terms of art or learning a new thing or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>Why not. I mean that's my kind of thing with
<v Speaker 1>with you know, studying botany, or or with studying like ands,
<v Speaker 1>Whi's the point in doing that? There's there's no point.
<v Speaker 1>There's no point in anything. We live where these fucking
<v Speaker 1>semi sentient you know, apes that think we're not animals
<v Speaker 1>that you know, are driving the world and through a
<v Speaker 1>fucking uh, you know, cesspool and causing mass extensions. There's
<v Speaker 1>no point than anything. It's that everything is absurd. So
<v Speaker 1>that's why I do this, and why because it gives
<v Speaker 1>me dopamine. It feels good, you know, it's a sustainable,
<v Speaker 1>hippy way to get dopamine. But I think the main
<v Speaker 1>I think what's gonna I think the main demographic that's
<v Speaker 1>going to be doing a lot of science, not the
<v Speaker 1>main the main ist demo rab' still going to be academics.
<v Speaker 1>But I think that there's a growing certainly a growing
<v Speaker 1>population of just random futs like you and me who
<v Speaker 1>get into this and go down a wormhole and then
<v Speaker 1>really end up trying to contribute something to the the
<v Speaker 1>body of human knowledge around these subjects, you know, putting together.
<v Speaker 2>It's because we love what we're doing.
<v Speaker 1>Man, Yeah, yeah, putting putting together, the love put trying
<v Speaker 1>to trying to put together the instruction manual of the
<v Speaker 1>living world, you know, and document each piece.
<v Speaker 2>But hey, man, I'm studying like a totally useless group
<v Speaker 2>in terms of any economic value. Yeah, but I might
<v Speaker 2>as well just be writing poems again, I fucking love it.
<v Speaker 2>Though it's breaking pot and writing poems, I might as
<v Speaker 2>well just be doing that, you know. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 2>the same thing. I'm doing it because I want to
<v Speaker 2>do it.
<v Speaker 1>I wanted I wanted to ask. Yeah, but those things
<v Speaker 1>are like integral again, They're a piece of the Junga tower.
<v Speaker 1>They're an important part of this larger living machine.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, of course they are.
<v Speaker 1>So it's and I would say that to anyone who doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>I mean again, it's like the whole like trying to
<v Speaker 1>explain biodiversity to like squares that work in finance or
<v Speaker 1>something you know and don't see it. It's like, well,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's here. It's part of the living world we
<v Speaker 1>see in front of us. There's a reverence for it.
<v Speaker 1>It's got a function. Do you fuck? I forgot. I
<v Speaker 1>was going to ask you. I forget. Oh that was
<v Speaker 1>what I What made you pick this question?
<v Speaker 2>It's okay, I'll do that all the time before we go.
<v Speaker 1>What made you pick this group that you're working on?
<v Speaker 1>The acrospirasi?
<v Speaker 2>There was one growing on soil around my house and
<v Speaker 2>h and uh, this guy hasa that was the pioneer
<v Speaker 2>licnologist in southern California. He named it. He named it
<v Speaker 2>with Nylander twice and it had already been named once before.
<v Speaker 2>And when they were doing the Sonor and Flora on Lichens,
<v Speaker 2>the first volume had come out, and and I had
<v Speaker 2>and I wrote them that. I wrote them and said, hey, man,
<v Speaker 2>I said this, when you have somebody get to study
<v Speaker 2>these acorosper acey. Uh, this one they got wrong. Here.
<v Speaker 2>It should be called across for but delkaloids, and it's
<v Speaker 2>been named before. I said, so make sure they don't
<v Speaker 2>screw that up when they're putting together the flora. And uh,
<v Speaker 2>the guy in Arizona they had they Tom Nash came
<v Speaker 2>out to California and said, hey, you know, we got
<v Speaker 2>a Spanish lady working on acorosper acy, but she doesn't
<v Speaker 2>want to do that. She only wants to do the
<v Speaker 2>yellow ones. Can you you know you're you're disabled, you
<v Speaker 2>know you have the time. Can you come out and
<v Speaker 2>take a look at how to do if you want
<v Speaker 2>to contribute to the flora, come out and take a look,
<v Speaker 2>visit and sit down with the lady and see if
<v Speaker 2>you want to do it. I got there in the
<v Speaker 2>first I'd already been studying plants. So the first thing
<v Speaker 2>I do is listen to this lady, who I really love.
<v Speaker 2>But I just went man, this lady doesn't know how
<v Speaker 2>to do taxonomy. And that's how I got into it.
<v Speaker 2>They because all because of this one thing that grows
<v Speaker 2>on soil only in the southern from central California down
<v Speaker 2>to Baja Shit, what what species this is? Oh acoros
<v Speaker 2>berate alkaloides it's a really beautiful small small, uh small
<v Speaker 2>like and that grows on soil, has rounded globe globes
<v Speaker 2>that that the aplethesia are in and covered with a
<v Speaker 2>ring of white crystal around the aplethesia.
<v Speaker 1>Real beautiful when you're looking at I mean, what do
<v Speaker 1>you use to classify? Is it like plants use reproductive
<v Speaker 1>structures for taxonomy or what?
<v Speaker 2>Oh? Yeah, yeah, you know, like well I use I
<v Speaker 2>use like every character, so I go through like describing
<v Speaker 2>every part of it, and then sooner or later, you know,
<v Speaker 2>there's something that there's some combination of those things that
<v Speaker 2>distinguish it. So so that's that's typical morphological taxonomy. But
<v Speaker 2>we also use of course DNA stuff to check stuff,
<v Speaker 2>so so we have another way to support what we learn.
<v Speaker 2>But usually every every species is usually still discrete, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's mostly for most of the lichens.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there's a couple of basidio li likens, but
<v Speaker 1>they're they're mostly what is I forget the fucking word,
<v Speaker 1>what is the other group of I don't know why
<v Speaker 1>I'm blanking on this, the other main clay of fun.
<v Speaker 2>Don't worry, man, I'm I thought it's getting old, but
<v Speaker 2>I've been blanking since I was eighteen.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's the pot the asco my seats. Why are
<v Speaker 1>why are most lichens asco my seats and not not
<v Speaker 1>basidio my seats? Do you know? Why are there anything?
<v Speaker 2>Because that's just that's just the way the evolution shouldn't
<v Speaker 2>happened over millions of years. You know, it started out
<v Speaker 2>with one or two made the crossover that that you know,
<v Speaker 2>formed an order that that led to this order.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, is there something like? Yeah, is there something about this?
<v Speaker 2>That's just how it's just what happened.
<v Speaker 1>It just is because the way it is. But it's
<v Speaker 1>what's interesting though, is like when you see basidio likens,
<v Speaker 1>I mean you can tell because of the shape. Like
<v Speaker 1>I saw this blue one in Brazil and it I
<v Speaker 1>mean I thought it was a shelf. Yeah, I thought
<v Speaker 1>it was a shelf fungus at first. Like there's the
<v Speaker 1>whole I mean, I guess it makes sense. The form
<v Speaker 1>that it takes is is much different. But when you're
<v Speaker 1>when these things are are dried, well, like if if
<v Speaker 1>it's if they're not active, because they can go dormant
<v Speaker 1>for long periods, how.
<v Speaker 2>Do you and then then eventually they die in their herbarium.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, how do you I mean, can you put water
<v Speaker 1>on them and wake them up? Or what do you
<v Speaker 1>do if you're collecting them.
<v Speaker 2>Well, if you're collect well, if you're collecting them, you're
<v Speaker 2>going to be drying them, and so they'll eventually So
<v Speaker 2>when you're working on them, if you're used to working
<v Speaker 2>on them dry, you can you can see them as
<v Speaker 2>you can you can see them as alive. Okay, but
<v Speaker 2>but yeah, you know I have to wet them and
<v Speaker 2>cut them and whatever, you know, to put them on
<v Speaker 2>slides and stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean that's what I thought to put them on,
<v Speaker 1>like to put it on a slide or for diagnostic purposes.
<v Speaker 1>If it's dry, it's not going to be very helpful.
<v Speaker 1>I think about that with a lot of stuff like liverwool.
<v Speaker 2>Actually no, actually, with these it works pretty good. The
<v Speaker 2>trouble is is we can't get DNA out of them
<v Speaker 2>if they get too old. So oh, really, we're doing
<v Speaker 2>real good. We get we get DNA from from ninety years,
<v Speaker 2>from the nineteen nineties, we're doing pretty good.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, but it's hard to I mean, if older than that,
<v Speaker 1>you can't really use specimens for DNA.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean there are ways to do mushrooms and
<v Speaker 2>stuff for older but it's way more expensive than what
<v Speaker 2>we could, you know, I mean it's just too expensive. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>but a lot, and it doesn't work all the time.
<v Speaker 1>Like that achorospros Socialist or what was it radicans radic? Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Does that? I mean, when it's alive and it's well,
<v Speaker 1>when it's active and not dormant, it's like this brilliant green,
<v Speaker 1>it looks incredible, it's really cool. But then when it's dry.
<v Speaker 1>I mean a lot of these things, probably the yellow
<v Speaker 1>it turns yellow. Well, this is like a green.
<v Speaker 2>They stay yellow. Yeah, it's a green. They actually stay
<v Speaker 2>yellow green. The green is bades inside.
<v Speaker 1>And then it turns kind of like a yellow.
<v Speaker 2>No, the yellow that you see that it's the pigment. Well,
<v Speaker 2>it's actually some fatty acids that are that make it
<v Speaker 2>make it yellow. Those preserve really well.
<v Speaker 1>Well in this in this this one is like bright,
<v Speaker 1>vivid green. It's like that slimer green.
<v Speaker 2>That's because you've seen it when it's wet.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, yeah. And then but that's what I'm saying,
<v Speaker 1>how different do they look versus like dry versus and
<v Speaker 1>dormant versus uh actively.
<v Speaker 2>Well that that likeen when it's dry, just looks yellow.
<v Speaker 2>It looks bright yellow, and is that it's you don't
<v Speaker 2>you don't see any green or anything, and.
<v Speaker 1>It could just i mean, going dormant. It just seals
<v Speaker 1>itself off from the atmosphere and fully a yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, that big that that that yellow for instance,
<v Speaker 2>protects it from from a certain amount of inflowing light,
<v Speaker 2>you know, so it's protective. Or that's why you see
<v Speaker 2>a lot of white lichens too, Yeah, because the white
<v Speaker 2>reflects off some of the heat and light off of them.
<v Speaker 2>So in the desert it's really a common to see
<v Speaker 2>also white lichens.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the desert, the desert ones. I mean, I'm I'm
<v Speaker 1>just interested in any plants, whether it's bryophytes or Selaginella's
<v Speaker 1>or even some of the kylanth ferns that can grow
<v Speaker 1>in these really dry areas and tolerate those long periods
<v Speaker 1>of just not I suppose they're not metabolizing, they're just
<v Speaker 1>kind of hybernating.
<v Speaker 2>They're they're dormant, Yeah, they're kind of Yeah, they're hibernating,
<v Speaker 2>is probably the best way to talk about it. That's
<v Speaker 2>what alichen does part of the time.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's very few, you know, there's very few flowering
<v Speaker 1>plants that can do that. You know, like Velosia, that
<v Speaker 1>plant that's in the gunner Alis. The Oh god, man,
<v Speaker 1>my mind is just blank. And this is dry. I
<v Speaker 1>mean that begins with an M. It's in the Miybia.
<v Speaker 1>I've got it. I did a video on it. But
<v Speaker 1>this is this is like why one of the main
<v Speaker 1>reasons I use inat so I can just remember because
<v Speaker 1>I'll remember, you know, one of the levels of taxonomy.
<v Speaker 1>That's but I'll forget the genus name or something happens
<v Speaker 1>all the time.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's normal if you especially, it's normal if you're
<v Speaker 2>dealing with lots and lots of them.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I'm sure when you're older, I'm fucked too, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, oh anyway, but it's yeah. But the point
<v Speaker 1>is it's just that dormancy. That that dormancy is so
<v Speaker 1>it's such a cool trait and it's why a lot
<v Speaker 1>of these things are just you know, are where they
<v Speaker 1>are where a few other things can grow.
<v Speaker 2>I'll tell you a great liking story right now. There's
<v Speaker 2>a there's down in that, there's there's a there's a.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lichen that's yellow called zograph rhizocarpa geographicum okay,
<v Speaker 2>and it grows down in Antarctica too, And it just
<v Speaker 2>so happened that recently somebody had some pictures from from
<v Speaker 2>found in a in a collection of pictures from Antarctica,
<v Speaker 2>found a picture of this lichen growing on a rock,
<v Speaker 2>and they had the exact coordinates for it, so they
<v Speaker 2>checked it out and and when in photographed it like
<v Speaker 2>sixty years later, and it had only grown like less
<v Speaker 2>than one or two microns.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus god, how some of that.
<v Speaker 2>And that particular that particular liken has been estimated sometimes
<v Speaker 2>to be as old as seven thousand years. So it's
<v Speaker 2>it's not only it's not only it's probably been it's
<v Speaker 2>probably been dormant most of that that's that time.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, yeah, I would imagine how long is the
<v Speaker 1>growing you know.
<v Speaker 2>An Antarctica you don't be under snow and you know
<v Speaker 2>over part of the year.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, some of these things must be incredibly old. I
<v Speaker 1>was I mean, I was going to ask you, it's
<v Speaker 1>are there any that grow fast? Not really? Probably? Oh yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I mean what is fast?
<v Speaker 2>Some of them up? Like, yeah, fastest you know, grow
<v Speaker 2>a couple of inches.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, in a century.
<v Speaker 2>In ten years, Yeah, no, I don't know. It just depends.
<v Speaker 2>It depends on the environment. Yeah, some of the stuff
<v Speaker 2>like that ramline amens eazy eye you see in California,
<v Speaker 2>that big lay see stuff growing on the trees. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that goes pretty fast.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but yeah, you know, I mean wolf like in
<v Speaker 1>two is another cool one, that day glow green one
<v Speaker 1>you'd see everywhere in northern California. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, that one's cool too, what if you Yeah, anyway,
<v Speaker 2>I like one thing I like about fungi, both mushrooms
<v Speaker 2>and lichens, is they've got a lot of unusual shapes
<v Speaker 2>and colors and stuff. Yeah, back mushrooms outd do lichens
<v Speaker 2>for for sure. Sure, visual diversity, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah. What's crazy to me too, I think is
<v Speaker 1>that a lot of people, well initially they don't a
<v Speaker 1>lot of people. I think it's changing again because there's
<v Speaker 1>more interest in this stuff, but a lot of people
<v Speaker 1>don't even know that. Like a mushroom is just it's
<v Speaker 1>analogous to the fruit on a tree, like the actual
<v Speaker 1>thing that's alive that's producing. It's just the reproductive, reproductive
<v Speaker 1>structure the thing that's alive that's producing it. Are these
<v Speaker 1>webs of my celium and hyphie, uh you know underground
<v Speaker 1>or within the body host plant or the dead log
<v Speaker 1>or whatever. But most of the color and achen comes
<v Speaker 1>from the algae or is there's there's pigments created by
<v Speaker 1>the fungus.
<v Speaker 2>To no, it comes from pigmentations. The whole the whole
<v Speaker 2>idea of colors with lichens have to do with their
<v Speaker 2>inner relation to light and heat.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, god.
<v Speaker 2>It so like like you go out on the Channel Islands,
<v Speaker 2>you know, in California, and there's a lot of white likes,
<v Speaker 2>and then you go like out in the certain parts
<v Speaker 2>of like the valleys and stuff, and they're all brown.
<v Speaker 2>I still don't know why they're all brown. And then
<v Speaker 2>you get out in the desert and then suddenly they're
<v Speaker 2>like white and yellow and especially or a lot of
<v Speaker 2>brown too. So something about brown works for him. You know,
<v Speaker 2>there's not there's not there's very few ones that are
<v Speaker 2>really black, you know, that would be absorbing a lot
<v Speaker 2>of heat.
<v Speaker 1>For instance, I'll see pink pink like ins sometimes on rocks,
<v Speaker 1>like on bolders, yeah and stuff. How is this affected?
<v Speaker 1>How is studying likings affected your general approach to life,
<v Speaker 1>like your general philosophy. Like I know that seems like
<v Speaker 1>an absurd connection to make, but how is it.
<v Speaker 2>No, it's not absurd. I do something because you love it. See,
<v Speaker 2>there's two ways to do it if you're a scientist.
<v Speaker 2>I have to use one part of my mind that's analytical. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>So that's the part of me that's looking at something
<v Speaker 2>and going, okay, the leaves are this way, the or
<v Speaker 2>that liking is looks like it's up on a on
<v Speaker 2>a squaw, it's a squabbal and on an aerial. And
<v Speaker 2>I that's that's that part. And then maybe I'm there
<v Speaker 2>with that analytical thing saying I've got to click these
<v Speaker 2>ones and these ones and these ones to go to
<v Speaker 2>the lab. But I always I always stop on and
<v Speaker 2>off when i'm collect and just dig it, just be
<v Speaker 2>mindful or whatever you want to call it. You know. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we have my and and it's not just aesthetic, it's
<v Speaker 2>you know, and and stop and use that non rational
<v Speaker 2>part of my mind.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so.
<v Speaker 2>So I some scientists, some like anologists I know, are
<v Speaker 2>just into that they have They don't always have that,
<v Speaker 2>you know, but it's it's a real part of my
<v Speaker 2>It's a real part of my inner relationship with nature.
<v Speaker 1>I think. I think that's such an important part of
<v Speaker 1>all the natural sciences, man, especially. I mean if you
<v Speaker 1>look at like people, especially people like astronomers and ship
<v Speaker 1>I mean, where those some of those guys. I'm sure, yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>some of them are probably just you know, you're straight,
<v Speaker 1>like I diect that a slinky once when I was younger.
<v Speaker 1>But I'm sure there's other also, others that are just
<v Speaker 1>you know, you get them loose.
<v Speaker 2>Man, look at this fucking alexy.
<v Speaker 1>You get them loose, and they just they let it out.
<v Speaker 1>You know. It's just like the fucking there's blood in
<v Speaker 1>those veins, you know. And I think that's so required.
<v Speaker 1>That's such a requisite for all science.
<v Speaker 2>There's got to be like it is, because you lose
<v Speaker 2>that and then it just becomes if it just becomes accounting.
<v Speaker 1>It's just like writing code, right, yeah, same thing. It's
<v Speaker 1>just the accounting. My accountant is cool, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>you know, she's a she girls mushrooms on the side,
<v Speaker 1>so cool anyway. But well, man, thanks for thanks for
<v Speaker 1>being down to do this. I won't take too much
<v Speaker 1>of your.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, let's do this some other time. This was fun, man, Man,
<v Speaker 2>hit me up when some people will enjoy it.
<v Speaker 1>Hit me up. Whenever you come back to the US.
<v Speaker 1>I'd love to, you know, get together and hang out.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, we got to do that sometime. I'm on
<v Speaker 2>a kind of I'm on this pressure schedule right now.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, all right man, Well, good luck with everything,
<v Speaker 1>Kerry Knutson, and thank you so much.
<v Speaker 2>Same with you.
<v Speaker 1>All right.
<v Speaker 2>Take care, okay, take care.