"Spiritual Remedies of Nuevo León"

<v Speaker 1>So I found out three port Heaven help being for
<v Speaker 1>his grave. He read to sign on barm doom, says
<v Speaker 1>the good Lord Jesus saves.
<v Speaker 2>But I don't think Jesus knows him. Calls he in
<v Speaker 2>the Jesus Kind.
<v Speaker 1>He's a late back country picker with the lead back
<v Speaker 1>country mine.
<v Speaker 2>He gave the books.
<v Speaker 1>It's a good show after three Port colis Sin. They
<v Speaker 1>all heard he his dying, so they all come out
<v Speaker 1>to see him. Friends and neighbors make him happy.
<v Speaker 2>Lord the snuff queens streaming kind.
<v Speaker 1>He's a late back country picker with the leads back
<v Speaker 1>country mine, a first down owners turned around. He's pictive
<v Speaker 1>of the lady that his.
<v Speaker 2>Old troubles keep on swimming.
<v Speaker 1>Calls are too damn mean to drown, and he keeps
<v Speaker 1>looking for an answer that I know he'll never find.
<v Speaker 2>He's a lead back.
<v Speaker 1>Country bicker with the lead back.
<v Speaker 2>God. It's a good fucking whaling song, isn't it. You
<v Speaker 2>know you gotta listen to some of the classic country
<v Speaker 2>sometimes I think it's good. It's good for you. Wailing
<v Speaker 2>with Nick very problematic. He was never really curse through
<v Speaker 2>a lot of his material, and I found that he
<v Speaker 2>was actually he he wasn't very problematic. He was an
<v Speaker 2>ally wailing with an l A.
<v Speaker 1>Vibert yeah up, says he really turns her angy. It
<v Speaker 1>really makes you want old dancing when the DJ lades.
<v Speaker 2>Sorry, isn't there sock, It's a good sock. I'm getting
<v Speaker 2>the strap.
<v Speaker 1>You can see somebody loves him, or at least they
<v Speaker 1>did one time. He's a lead back country picker. You're
<v Speaker 1>the lead back country matter. Bubbers downers, turned arounds, picked
<v Speaker 1>him up the lad and down his old troubles, keep
<v Speaker 1>on swimming, calls it too damn mean to drown.
<v Speaker 2>He keeps looking in full mentioned clift down the stream
<v Speaker 2>port already but going to foul. I think he's did.
<v Speaker 2>I think I'm a little lazy that came here. I
<v Speaker 2>put the song in walk Away Country miner, big whiteles pick.
<v Speaker 2>It's like fetching or like what he is that I
<v Speaker 2>don't get it.
<v Speaker 3>White.
<v Speaker 2>He's way seeing that he's like fetching something. All right,
<v Speaker 2>there we go. It's good anyway. Hi, everybody, welcome to
<v Speaker 2>the crime pace. And body doesn't podcast. We're doing nice
<v Speaker 2>over here. We're doing good. It's one hundred degrees. I
<v Speaker 2>just retired for the evening. For the afternoon, I be
<v Speaker 2>you know, I like being crepuscular. The less I have
<v Speaker 2>to see of the human world, the less, you know,
<v Speaker 2>fucking hateful and terrible. I feel not even hateful. It's
<v Speaker 2>more like it's a kin. When I go out into public,
<v Speaker 2>like where I live, you know, or any anywhere that
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of human infrastructure, I generally it's like
<v Speaker 2>my battery starts straining five times as fast. It's like
<v Speaker 2>a vampire. You know. I can't go out in the sun.
<v Speaker 2>Maybe you could take a little bit of sun, but
<v Speaker 2>they'll burn. That's kind of how I feel. I feel
<v Speaker 2>like I'm getting the life sucked out of me. Like
<v Speaker 2>as good as it feels to be standing on a
<v Speaker 2>mountain top with the breeze blowing through your hair, standing
<v Speaker 2>on a cliff looking out at like a vast expanse
<v Speaker 2>of desert. You know, if you're up in like a
<v Speaker 2>sky island somewhere, you know, or like West Texas, like
<v Speaker 2>standing on a butte in West Texas looking out at
<v Speaker 2>just this wonderful landscape with no human development whatsoever, or
<v Speaker 2>in a cloud forest and uh in Wahaka, you know
<v Speaker 2>you've got like a Vistla. You got a mirror door.
<v Speaker 2>You can look out on the on the forest, and
<v Speaker 2>there's there's very few human developments, certainly no no freeways
<v Speaker 2>or plastic signs or the fucking you know, any of
<v Speaker 2>the shit that's just the death cult, the you know,
<v Speaker 2>like the heat Island, basically like the fast expanses of
<v Speaker 2>parking lot, used car dealership, big lots, dollars, all this shit,
<v Speaker 2>just this useless garbage. As as as good as it
<v Speaker 2>feels being in these places that don't have any of that,
<v Speaker 2>it feels five times worse on the opposite side of
<v Speaker 2>the spectrum when I have to exist in those places,
<v Speaker 2>like when I have to be around them, just being
<v Speaker 2>around them, having them in my visual sphere. And even
<v Speaker 2>if I couldn't see, if you blindfolded me and took
<v Speaker 2>me in a car and drove me down the frontage
<v Speaker 2>roads and some of the thirty thirty five Corridor in Texas,
<v Speaker 2>I would still feel it, Like it's so it's such
<v Speaker 2>a powerful anti human it's such a negative piece of
<v Speaker 2>spiritual fucking hell. I would still feel it even if
<v Speaker 2>I couldn't see it. You'd probably smell it to you
<v Speaker 2>can hear the sounds of the engines and tires and shit,
<v Speaker 2>and you know, people honking at each other, you know,
<v Speaker 2>mostly miserable people, which you can't blame them, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the consumer farm like it kills me. So I just
<v Speaker 2>try to avoid it as much as possible. And I've
<v Speaker 2>got this nice little green dome around my immediate sphere
<v Speaker 2>and then you know, I'm just living. This is where
<v Speaker 2>I'm living now for family reasons. But it's not ideal,
<v Speaker 2>but whatever, and make it work, you know. But it
<v Speaker 2>kills me, It really does. There's not one bit of
<v Speaker 2>the landscape around me that I find attractive at all.
<v Speaker 2>It all kills, it all killed. God, he's so negative.
<v Speaker 2>Why has he? I just I don't know who this
<v Speaker 2>guy is. He's just negative. He's so negative. That's what.
<v Speaker 2>That's what drives me nuts, too, is a fucking We've
<v Speaker 2>been through this before, you know, I really started. I
<v Speaker 2>started off kind of hot today. I think that's fine.
<v Speaker 2>I'm not personally angry. I'm just philosophically angry. And if
<v Speaker 2>you're not, you're a moron. No offense. But you know
<v Speaker 2>that's that's uh, that forced positivity thing fucking kills me.
<v Speaker 2>You gotta be able to, because then you just make
<v Speaker 2>people lie to themselves like it is pretty terrible. But
<v Speaker 2>I don't want to mention it because that makes me
<v Speaker 2>feel I don't want to be negative, so I'll just
<v Speaker 2>I'll pretend it's not there. I'll try to Well, let's
<v Speaker 2>just focus on the positive. Let's just focus and we
<v Speaker 2>won't even think about the negative. Well, this focus on
<v Speaker 2>the positive and what makes me happy. It's canned. It's phony.
<v Speaker 2>Focus on the negative and find a way to transcend
<v Speaker 2>it and make fun of it and fucking jab it
<v Speaker 2>and laugh at it, you know, don't deny it. Transcend
<v Speaker 2>it with humor and lightheartedness, keeping in mind that it's
<v Speaker 2>all the blink of an eye in our existential reality.
<v Speaker 2>It's all a blink of an eye, and we'll all
<v Speaker 2>be gone soon. That's what I do. Anyway, Welcome to
<v Speaker 2>the to the podcast. There we I just got back
<v Speaker 2>from the Asian Food Market. This is why I'm talking
<v Speaker 2>about this, because it fucking made me die going out
<v Speaker 2>there and being right and then it's all just so
<v Speaker 2>fucking hot too. But I just got back from the
<v Speaker 2>Asian Food Market. I got some fucking back CHOI you know,
<v Speaker 2>got some kimchi. You're all gonna slap myself around with
<v Speaker 2>the kim chi later, you know, my little sling. Wait,
<v Speaker 2>it's see. I can't tell if he's joking or not. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>got a big fucking half gallon of green tea. It's
<v Speaker 2>that Asian food market opening up near my house. Is
<v Speaker 2>really it's a game changer. It really opened up some
<v Speaker 2>doors from We got some shittaki mushrooms and shit, had
<v Speaker 2>some fucking tofu. I'll cook the shit out of They
<v Speaker 2>don't got I don't know if they have any meats.
<v Speaker 2>You eat some meats. They know, not too much, but
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if I would want to get it
<v Speaker 2>from an Asian food marketing offense. Yeah anyway, Uh but
<v Speaker 2>uh but yes, so here we are. Uh. There was
<v Speaker 2>another mass shooting yesterday. You know you listen to this. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's it's gets kind of grim, but I promise it
<v Speaker 2>gets better. We're gonna talk about plants. It gets better.
<v Speaker 2>It was a mass shooting yesterday and it was, uh,
<v Speaker 2>it's some fucking idiot in Minneapolis. Who is fucking It
<v Speaker 2>was like you look at this guy's because you're always
<v Speaker 2>curious who is it? Like you always know it's going
<v Speaker 2>to be a white dude, which it was, but you
<v Speaker 2>look at the fucking idea. I just you're curious, like
<v Speaker 2>where was their angle? Like why did they do? Why'd
<v Speaker 2>they shoot up a fucking school? Why'd they shoot up this?
<v Speaker 2>You know, what was the ever? You know, most people,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people, you see, not most, I would
<v Speaker 2>say a lot of people are filled with hate and
<v Speaker 2>they're miserable and they're alienated more so because of these phones.
<v Speaker 2>But what was his angle, Like, what was the mixture
<v Speaker 2>of ideology that this more unisposed espoused. Excuse me? And
<v Speaker 2>so you look at it and I couldn't. And of course,
<v Speaker 2>you know, each political side of the spectrum is trying to, like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, put him in the camp of the other side.
<v Speaker 2>This guy did. He had a diverse array of views.
<v Speaker 2>He was trans, he was a Jew hater, and and
<v Speaker 2>what else? He wanted to kill Trump and he wanted
<v Speaker 2>to I don't know, there was It was just it
<v Speaker 2>was like an ideological word salad of all this bullshit
<v Speaker 2>from the twenty twenties Internet. Just someone who's perpetually online, alienated, isolated,
<v Speaker 2>probably doesn't have very many friends, very very narrow view
<v Speaker 2>of the world probably hasn't had a lot of life experience.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know how old he was, but uh, you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's fucking it's nuts, man. It's like, uh, this is
<v Speaker 2>our now. And of course I mentioned this because the
<v Speaker 2>answer to this is to just get away from all
<v Speaker 2>of this uh shit, the online culture. It really is
<v Speaker 2>just it's the fucking scrolling and you go outside, take
<v Speaker 2>a walk and and uh, look at some life forms,
<v Speaker 2>you know, some other life forms that will give you
<v Speaker 2>They recharge your battery. You know, I'm gonna need a
<v Speaker 2>recharge after just having to go out into the shopping
<v Speaker 2>slums of the the Heat Island where I live. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it's just, ah, it kills the soul. It's funny too
<v Speaker 2>that people. I mean, you think that stuff doesn't affect you,
<v Speaker 2>It certainly does. Like having to see scenery like that,
<v Speaker 2>that's subconscious. It subconsciously affects you. Absolutely, It's it's there,
<v Speaker 2>it's in the background. It's just it's making you feel terrible.
<v Speaker 2>You're not insane for for fixating on it like I do.
<v Speaker 2>But maybe I'm insane. I don't know. I'm a little
<v Speaker 2>I'm a little off, you know, I had to I
<v Speaker 2>was going to pick my daughter up from school the
<v Speaker 2>other day, and like some of the other parents go by,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and they're whatever they're but there there's definitely,
<v Speaker 2>you know, there's like a normy, square thing that I
<v Speaker 2>don't fit into there where I live, obviously, And and
<v Speaker 2>it was funny because you know, some of these people
<v Speaker 2>might I don't know, they might have been I don't
<v Speaker 2>know whether maybe they're Trump boaters, or maybe they're just
<v Speaker 2>you know, the genteels, or maybe they're uh, you know,
<v Speaker 2>they're well to dose. I've got the very clean homes
<v Speaker 2>and they smell like, you know, expensive fragrances, and they're
<v Speaker 2>very clean, and I don't know. And some lady got
<v Speaker 2>mad at me for parking in the wrong spot, and
<v Speaker 2>I was like, lady, it's gonna be three minutes, man,
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna be here, and then I'm gonna just grab
<v Speaker 2>my kid. We're gonna get out of here. And then
<v Speaker 2>I started thinking, I'm like, if only this woman knew
<v Speaker 2>that you know, I've been, you know, I what I do.
<v Speaker 2>What my yard looks like, which is completely overgrown, ornately
<v Speaker 2>overgrown and eloquently kept. I keep it very neat and tidy.
<v Speaker 2>And then like the I'm approaching the primary secession or
<v Speaker 2>the excuse me, the secondary or third secessional stages of
<v Speaker 2>ecological secession in my yard. And so I've got like
<v Speaker 2>this nice little cactus garden gone with an understory, you know,
<v Speaker 2>nice open understory and a shady canopy off top. And
<v Speaker 2>then you know, and then there's the compost shitting thing,
<v Speaker 2>which I've been really hyping lately because I like how
<v Speaker 2>it vibes the members of the square community. Out said,
<v Speaker 2>only if this lady know that, like earlier today, I
<v Speaker 2>was shitting. That was shitting on a pile of pine
<v Speaker 2>shavings in a compost bin. That was that was, you know,
<v Speaker 2>almost the entirely colonized by soldier fly Larva. You know,
<v Speaker 2>if only she knew, it would blow her mind. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I said, wow, and then I started talking to her
<v Speaker 2>about C four photos. This is I'm just kidding. I
<v Speaker 2>wouldn't even try, but uh, but yeah, it was. It
<v Speaker 2>was uh you know, it could definitely be alienating where
<v Speaker 2>I left, could be isolating. It's it's it's weird down here.
<v Speaker 2>It's nineteen fifties culture a little bit. But anyway, back
<v Speaker 2>to the mas, so back to the mess shooting. It's
<v Speaker 2>it's fucking terrible. God, well, how is this a reality? Wow?
<v Speaker 2>How did this happen? But I, you know, looking at
<v Speaker 2>this guy's uh there was you know, I follow that
<v Speaker 2>Instagram page popular front and they had a uh some
<v Speaker 2>of screenshots that is fucking idiots, you know. Whatever he
<v Speaker 2>was into, I don't know, but it really made me think, like,
<v Speaker 2>this is this guy it was it was an ideological
<v Speaker 2>word solid. It was like if you took all this
<v Speaker 2>shit from both sides of the political dumb shit from
<v Speaker 2>both sides of the political spectrum, all this fucking nonsense
<v Speaker 2>like national inquiry, bottom of the brainstem, lowest common denominator.
<v Speaker 2>This ship they pair it, you know, from the left
<v Speaker 2>to tell and blah blah and whatever they're fucking ranting
<v Speaker 2>about as l ship and whatever. And then from the
<v Speaker 2>riot like a Democrat controlled cities. It's all the Democrat
<v Speaker 2>controlgy that's what cause is the Democrat control like the
<v Speaker 2>talking points, you know, and you just look, you look
<v Speaker 2>at this and you look at the fucking you pour
<v Speaker 2>it in the same blender, and it's it looks horrible.
<v Speaker 2>It looks horrific. It's like looking at it something you
<v Speaker 2>scooped out of the sewage treatment plant ideologically, and you're like,
<v Speaker 2>this is just there's not I mean, I guess there's
<v Speaker 2>maybe kernels of truth barely and some of this stuff,
<v Speaker 2>or kernels of originality, but it's really just you just realize,
<v Speaker 2>no one there's no critical thought whatsoever. There's no intellect,
<v Speaker 2>there's no critical thought. It's just it's mean culture. It's
<v Speaker 2>parroted talking points. It's just it's the culture war of
<v Speaker 2>modern America, which of course is good for keeping people
<v Speaker 2>in line and keeping them following rules and keeping them
<v Speaker 2>stupid and keeping them voting against their own interests and
<v Speaker 2>that kind of thing. And it helps the billionaires and
<v Speaker 2>oligarchs keep doing what they're doing. And you know, while
<v Speaker 2>we continue to just just destroy our home and ship
<v Speaker 2>where we eat and you know, cause them six mass
<v Speaker 2>extinction in biosphere, collapse everything, and no one's thinking, like,
<v Speaker 2>there's no critical thought in any of this. Then this
<v Speaker 2>is something I would always hear when I'd get into
<v Speaker 2>arguments with people strangers, you know, in the comments section,
<v Speaker 2>they leave comments on my place, some dumb shit wherever right,
<v Speaker 2>right and left, and I would say, I think, like
<v Speaker 2>you know, I would think to myself, like I've heard
<v Speaker 2>this nine thousand times. This person's telling me as if
<v Speaker 2>I've never heard it before, like they're educating me, or
<v Speaker 2>like this is something like is this person aware that
<v Speaker 2>like this? And then you realize, holy shit, this person
<v Speaker 2>isn't even aware that I can see. This isn't their
<v Speaker 2>own thought. They're literally just repackaging something, or not even
<v Speaker 2>most of the time, they're not even repackaging it. They're
<v Speaker 2>just parroting something that they saw in a fucking meme
<v Speaker 2>or they saw someone else say. And then you just
<v Speaker 2>realize there's like no one's working with original material anywhere,
<v Speaker 2>you know. And I'm not saying, you know, the next
<v Speaker 2>mass shooter, you know, if they have some original material,
<v Speaker 2>it would make me feel but I'm not saying that
<v Speaker 2>I'd rather of course the mass shootings don't happen at all,
<v Speaker 2>But you just realize, like the fucking the stuff we're
<v Speaker 2>working with here, the personas, the personalities, the citizenry, there's
<v Speaker 2>very you know, there's very little intellect, there's very little
<v Speaker 2>and like there's very little critical thought. Everyone it's just again,
<v Speaker 2>it's just parroting and repeating. Share share share share repost
<v Speaker 2>repost repost and this is how, you know, social media
<v Speaker 2>cultures ruined their minds, all of us, and we have
<v Speaker 2>to be scrolling all the time. It's like, does anyone
<v Speaker 2>just take in the information anymore and then put the
<v Speaker 2>phone down and then think about it, you know, while
<v Speaker 2>they're doing the fucking dishes, the laundry, while they're out there,
<v Speaker 2>you know, slow uttering a lawn or whatever, you know,
<v Speaker 2>or better yet, do it at your job. Waste time
<v Speaker 2>at your job doing it daydreaming, that's a great thing,
<v Speaker 2>and just thinking about things. You know, does anybody does
<v Speaker 2>that happen anymore? Like original just original thoughts, because it's
<v Speaker 2>it's just trying to make sense of this world, like
<v Speaker 2>we're all just these animals that again that we give
<v Speaker 2>ourselves too much credit and the free will and sentience department.
<v Speaker 2>I really don't think. I don't think that shit's an eight. Obviously,
<v Speaker 2>it has to be taught. Intellect has to be taught,
<v Speaker 2>critical thinking has to be taught. I don't know where
<v Speaker 2>I'm going with this. I guess I just started thinking,
<v Speaker 2>this is where I go, you know, with the next
<v Speaker 2>you know, bleak and depressing turn of world events. This
<v Speaker 2>is where I go. Is what I start thinking about so,
<v Speaker 2>you know, God, but looking at the fucking kids, looking
<v Speaker 2>at the shit he was about, you know, just reading
<v Speaker 2>about it, it's like Jesus, He's all over the place,
<v Speaker 2>and it's just it's just it's the miserable fuck who
<v Speaker 2>just never found any kind of solace. And I don't
<v Speaker 2>know what the fuck man. And mental illness, of course,
<v Speaker 2>but you know how much mental illness is genetic, and
<v Speaker 2>how much is kind of a product of the culture
<v Speaker 2>and the lifestyle and the disconnection from the living world
<v Speaker 2>and living in places that look like the frontage road
<v Speaker 2>on the I thirty five corridor. You know, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, but it's something to think about. Maybe
<v Speaker 2>it's just maybe it's half and half, huh. In other news,
<v Speaker 2>I've had a lot of pepsis, the tarantula, hawk wasp
<v Speaker 2>showing up to the yard lately, beautiful creatures, terrifying though.
<v Speaker 2>I was outside in my front yard smoking a cigar
<v Speaker 2>last night. I get these little cigars you don't inhale,
<v Speaker 2>of course, you just taste it and blow it out.
<v Speaker 2>I'll get mouth cancer, but not cancer or the lungs
<v Speaker 2>at least, like the lungs are the last thing you
<v Speaker 2>want to fuck with. You want to be able to
<v Speaker 2>run and go upstairs and go up hills and stuff. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>if you do smoke, you should really quit, all right,
<v Speaker 2>and do something to quit anyway. But they've been hanging
<v Speaker 2>out a lot lately, and they were pollinating some crow
<v Speaker 2>and sickness that I got in my yard. Wonderful species
<v Speaker 2>of croton, the thorn scrub crowton about I don't know
<v Speaker 2>eight gets eight feet tall. It's a woody perennial shrub.
<v Speaker 2>I always try to get the seeds because I want
<v Speaker 2>to give them the mic heap so we can grow them.
<v Speaker 2>But I think, I think, like a lot of u forbs,
<v Speaker 2>they are explosively the hissing. So once the seed matures,
<v Speaker 2>the outer the outer line of tissue on the seed
<v Speaker 2>drives and contracts and squeezes the seeds out and they
<v Speaker 2>they shoot. You know, it's like a night as Skullus
<v Speaker 2>does that night a Skullus Texana night of skulls is
<v Speaker 2>a big genus, but Texano is the one we get here.
<v Speaker 2>It's only two feet tall, but night of Skullus. The
<v Speaker 2>stinging plant malamu here they call it, can get upwards.
<v Speaker 2>Some of them are like ten fifteen feet tall, and
<v Speaker 2>some are edible. But yeah, a lot, a lot of
<v Speaker 2>eu forbes do that, a lot of euphobias do that.
<v Speaker 2>They got explosively the hissing seeds, jet tropha, same thing,
<v Speaker 2>but the pepsis the wasps were on those, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>I love seeing them. They don't have any interest in you.
<v Speaker 2>It's supposed to be a very painful sting if you do,
<v Speaker 2>if you do get a hold of them. But then
<v Speaker 2>there was one hanging out last night when I was
<v Speaker 2>smoking this cigar up by the light, so I turned
<v Speaker 2>the porch light off and the fucker didn't leave. It
<v Speaker 2>was and that's I love them again. But there, when
<v Speaker 2>there's that close, it looked like he was drunk, like
<v Speaker 2>he was intoxicated or something. And that's what kind of
<v Speaker 2>vibed me out. I said, listen, I don't want you know,
<v Speaker 2>I don't want you to like sit on the tree
<v Speaker 2>stump that I sit on, you know, or take a
<v Speaker 2>break and the tree stump that i'm that I sit on,
<v Speaker 2>then I sit on you and you know, you sting
<v Speaker 2>me in my you know, scrot them or something that
<v Speaker 2>would be very painful. And I don't want to do that.
<v Speaker 2>I have utmost respect for you, but I'm not trying
<v Speaker 2>to go there with you right now. Right now, maybe
<v Speaker 2>at some point later, you know, if I need a
<v Speaker 2>good metaphor for for pain, you know, like how it
<v Speaker 2>feels going on the frontage road in the I thirty
<v Speaker 2>five quarridor you know, if I need and maybe then
<v Speaker 2>I would sit on a tarantula hawk and get you know,
<v Speaker 2>a tyrantula hawk a pepsis stinger in my scrotum. It's
<v Speaker 2>a good analogy for it. But I'm not there yet.
<v Speaker 2>I can always I can imagine what it feels like.
<v Speaker 2>So he was hanging out last night, and I think
<v Speaker 2>the reason that they the reason that they're around especially
<v Speaker 2>is because of this other arthropod that I love seeing.
<v Speaker 2>It's harmless to people. Well, I probably could bite you
<v Speaker 2>a little bit, but it's not going to really mess
<v Speaker 2>up too bad. U Tenisa Relatta. The trapp door spiders.
<v Speaker 2>They build what looks like a condom in the ground
<v Speaker 2>and they look kind of like tarantulas. I guess they
<v Speaker 2>can live for like a decade or two. But these
<v Speaker 2>were out during the rain a few days ago, like
<v Speaker 2>crawling around the park and of course there's the fucking
<v Speaker 2>you know people, I'm sure to just step on them.
<v Speaker 2>You have no respect, is why you got to build
<v Speaker 2>a culture that respects this shit. You know, it's the
<v Speaker 2>only way to do it. Put it out there, you know,
<v Speaker 2>culturally speaking. But anyway, so you know, the tarantula hawks
<v Speaker 2>will go hit these things, parasitize them with the larvae,
<v Speaker 2>lay eggs in them, and then is it the legs
<v Speaker 2>in them or on them. I'm obviously not an entomologist,
<v Speaker 2>but you know these that's what they use these spiders for.
<v Speaker 2>So that's what they're doing. And I actually dug one
<v Speaker 2>up nearby in a yard where I was planting a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of stuff. I planted some Bulcarnia, which you know
<v Speaker 2>is colloquially known as the ponytail palm, no relation to
<v Speaker 2>palms whatsoever. It's a monocot, but it's they're great fucking
<v Speaker 2>trees or yeah, I guess they're a tree. They got
<v Speaker 2>a massive swollen cattex looks like an hour glass with
<v Speaker 2>with a bunch of really long narrow hairs coming off it.
<v Speaker 2>They're great, but we can grow them outside down here
<v Speaker 2>in South Texas. And so I was planting one of
<v Speaker 2>those and some other stuff. And in somebody's yard down
<v Speaker 2>the block who you know, they don't have a lot
<v Speaker 2>of money, and they had a barren fucking lawn and
<v Speaker 2>I planted. I asked them if I could plant in
<v Speaker 2>a gave like eight months ago, and they said, yeah, sure.
<v Speaker 2>And then after that they said, you know, we really
<v Speaker 2>like that. Can you do some more? And I said
<v Speaker 2>I can. I absolutely do some more. This is what
<v Speaker 2>I do. And so I went out and just started planning.
<v Speaker 2>Now they're getting all kinds of shit, you know, until
<v Speaker 2>they tell me to stop. But I made sure I checked.
<v Speaker 2>I said, is this okay? I'm going a little over board.
<v Speaker 2>I know this is beyond what you asked for. But
<v Speaker 2>they said, oh, it's fine. So now I'm gonna start
<v Speaker 2>planting some ebony trees in the backyard and planting it up.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, they say thank you, and it's yeah, sure, thanks,
<v Speaker 2>But this is entirely selfish because now I get to
<v Speaker 2>see this stuff. And again, it works as a medicine
<v Speaker 2>against the fucking spiritual pain the scrotum sting from a
<v Speaker 2>pepsist wasp of having to look at the I thirty
<v Speaker 2>five corridor or any other commercial shit anywhere. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>really anyway, I say I thirty five quarter because that's
<v Speaker 2>what's near and dear. You know, that's my chosen hell
<v Speaker 2>when I start thinking of what's the most terrible human
<v Speaker 2>landscape in the first world? But for you, you might
<v Speaker 2>have your own if you live in whether you live
<v Speaker 2>in Des Moines, or whether you live in It's or
<v Speaker 2>It's of Portland, or whether you live in Southern caliph
<v Speaker 2>or Southern California's got a lot of this kind of disgusting,
<v Speaker 2>puke worthy habitat that people attempt to love. I think, well,
<v Speaker 2>you know what, let's go. I'm gonna go to this
<v Speaker 2>George Carlin quote. This is one of my favorite bits.
<v Speaker 2>I remember seeing this bit he did when I was
<v Speaker 2>like sixteen, and I said, who is this man? He's
<v Speaker 2>amazing so and then I actually met him when I
<v Speaker 2>was nineteen or twenty. Man, I was nineteen, got a
<v Speaker 2>photo of us together. But this is one of my
<v Speaker 2>favorite George Carlin. But say, let's let's listen to it.
<v Speaker 2>People are fucking dumb. Okay, that's not original. You can
<v Speaker 2>say what you want about this, but you and I
<v Speaker 2>love you, guys. I know I've played this for you. Before.
<v Speaker 1>I love it.
<v Speaker 3>I love that I.
<v Speaker 2>Love it when I.
<v Speaker 3>Didn't take a fucking catastrophe to get us to care
<v Speaker 3>for one another. I love the fact that we're on
<v Speaker 3>camera all the time from all angles. But you know what,
<v Speaker 3>you can say what you want about American and I say,
<v Speaker 3>I love this place. I wouldn't have it any other way.
<v Speaker 3>We wouldn't live in any other time in history and
<v Speaker 3>any other place. But say what you want about from
<v Speaker 3>Land of the Free, home of the brave. We got
<v Speaker 3>some dumb ass motherfuckers.
<v Speaker 2>Never forget fuck it, ugliest landscape in the first world.
<v Speaker 3>Now, obviously that doesn't include this audience. I understand that
<v Speaker 3>you seem intelligent and perceptive, but the rest of them,
<v Speaker 3>Holy jump, just get.
<v Speaker 2>To the point yards.
<v Speaker 3>Come on, let's get to the pint tum more than
<v Speaker 3>a second coat of paint.
<v Speaker 2>I never understood that.
<v Speaker 3>And this ain't just ranting and raven, this ain't just
<v Speaker 3>blowing off steam. I got a little evidence to support
<v Speaker 3>my claim.
<v Speaker 2>It just seems to me.
<v Speaker 3>Seems to me that only a really low IQ population
<v Speaker 3>could have taken this beautiful continent, this magnificent American landscape
<v Speaker 3>that we inherited. Well, actually we stole it from the
<v Speaker 3>Mexicans and the Indians. But hey, it was nice when
<v Speaker 3>we stole it. It looked pretty good. It was Christine paradies.
<v Speaker 2>Have you seen it lately?
<v Speaker 3>Have you taken a good look at it lately? It's
<v Speaker 3>fucking embarrassing. Only a nation of unenlightened half wits could
<v Speaker 3>have taken this beautiful place and turned it into.
<v Speaker 2>What it is today.
<v Speaker 3>A shopping mall, a big fucking shopping.
<v Speaker 2>There you go. I'll never forget. That's all you got.
<v Speaker 3>That's all you've got here, folks, mile after mile of
<v Speaker 3>mall after mall, many many malls, major malls and mini malls.
<v Speaker 3>They put the mini malls in between the major malls,
<v Speaker 3>and in between the mini malls they put them mini marks.
<v Speaker 3>And in between the mini march you got the car lots,
<v Speaker 3>gas stations, muffler shops, laundro match cheap.
<v Speaker 2>General book stories, four viewership.
<v Speaker 3>Of one big trans continental commercial cesspool. And how did
<v Speaker 3>the people feel about all this? How did the people
<v Speaker 3>feel about living in a coast to coast shopping mall. Well,
<v Speaker 3>they think it's just fucking dandy, all right, They think
<v Speaker 3>it is cool as can.
<v Speaker 2>All right them all? And then he just starts talking
<v Speaker 2>about fat people, which you know, I don't think that's necessary.
<v Speaker 2>We don't need that. You know, a lot of people
<v Speaker 2>are just products of what. It's not their fault. You know,
<v Speaker 2>there's shit food. You know, there's there's it's not it's
<v Speaker 2>not their fault. For Fox's sake, you know. But if
<v Speaker 2>you can get you can get into doing one hundred
<v Speaker 2>push ups a day or something, you should do it.
<v Speaker 2>I it's not gonna be that bad, you know. Just
<v Speaker 2>set a little timer, do push ups for twenty seconds,
<v Speaker 2>take a twenty second, rist do push ups for another
<v Speaker 2>twenty seconds. As many as you can do, take another
<v Speaker 2>twenty second. Rist it'll be good for you. And if
<v Speaker 2>you get tired of doing push ups and do some squats,
<v Speaker 2>it's just about getting your cardio going, you know. It's
<v Speaker 2>what I would do. And I was in the locomotive
<v Speaker 2>cab at the railroad because guy, that was fucking horrible.
<v Speaker 2>Sitting still is pain. It's terrible, it really is. Sitting
<v Speaker 2>still is is hard. And I'm worried about that with
<v Speaker 2>my kid too, because she gets I know, she's she's
<v Speaker 2>already got the add so to, you know, for learning
<v Speaker 2>things like that. There's got to be a dope to
<v Speaker 2>for learning things. When you get you got to get
<v Speaker 2>a dopamine drip. It's got to be something you're really
<v Speaker 2>stoked on. And she's not going to be good at
<v Speaker 2>just following rules and being forced to memorize stuff. And
<v Speaker 2>I think that's a good thing. So anyway, I did
<v Speaker 2>a native plant install. Somebody hit me up and they
<v Speaker 2>seen my friends another install that I did, and they said,
<v Speaker 2>I want that. And I was surprised because not a
<v Speaker 2>lot of people do down here, but you know, they
<v Speaker 2>want the lawn plants are messy. They want the Saint
<v Speaker 2>Augustine grass. But I said, okay, I will do this,
<v Speaker 2>and I said, here's what we do. He gets you
<v Speaker 2>prep it. I told her to prep it. She had nothing.
<v Speaker 2>She had just bermute everywhere. I said, get you know,
<v Speaker 2>order thirty cubic yards of mulch. Get three thirty dollars
<v Speaker 2>rolls of irrigation tubing half inch whole space twelve or
<v Speaker 2>eighteen inches apart. Get the adapter so you can hook
<v Speaker 2>it up to the hose, and then get someone to
<v Speaker 2>if you know a guy you know who can lay
<v Speaker 2>it for you. You know a guy who can lay
<v Speaker 2>it for you, you know, get the mulch dumped, laid
<v Speaker 2>on the irrigation tubing, spread the mulch out over it
<v Speaker 2>thicker than you think you'll need, like four to six inches,
<v Speaker 2>and then let me know when it's all done. I'll
<v Speaker 2>come back with a truckload of plants. That's what I did,
<v Speaker 2>and it's it's still brutally hot out today, so I
<v Speaker 2>showed up at like eight thirty pm, you know, with
<v Speaker 2>a truckload of plants and a nice sharpshooter. By the way,
<v Speaker 2>I updated the crime base of Botany doesn't dot Com
<v Speaker 2>the website and gave a tutorial it's like a step
<v Speaker 2>by step easy lawn kill because people kept asking me.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, it's on the website, along with our tour
<v Speaker 2>dates for our upcoming tour for me an Else tour
<v Speaker 2>and Peggy Notabart Nature Museum in Chicago September tenth. I'll
<v Speaker 2>be there. It's fucking great. It's after hours, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and there's not going to be you know, the kids
<v Speaker 2>aren't going to be around, so I can curse. But
<v Speaker 2>I told them I can chill out a little bit
<v Speaker 2>with the profanity, but they said, don't even worry about it.
<v Speaker 2>It's gonna be six, you know, don't worry. So because
<v Speaker 2>normally you go there's a bunch of screaming kids around,
<v Speaker 2>which is good. I love that. That's good to get
<v Speaker 2>the kids into nature. The Peggy Notabard Nature Museum is
<v Speaker 2>right there on beautiful Lake Shore Drive, right there on LSD,
<v Speaker 2>just north of the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pond, which I
<v Speaker 2>would go. I would go there sometimes and you'd see
<v Speaker 2>like Chinese ladies rolling up with buckets going to be
<v Speaker 2>like get the turtles out of the fucking pond, presumably
<v Speaker 2>to cook them. But they had a don redwood in
<v Speaker 2>that lily pond too, which is like or they have
<v Speaker 2>I think it's still there, which is actually like sixty
<v Speaker 2>seventy feet tall. Maybe it's a beautiful tree. It's a
<v Speaker 2>nice spot to lurk, you know. And if you can
<v Speaker 2>hop the fence after hours when a gates are locked,
<v Speaker 2>you get the whole spot to yourself. You know. You
<v Speaker 2>can go in and smoke a doobie, you know, or
<v Speaker 2>just hang out whatever you're doing, you know, get some
<v Speaker 2>night nice peace and quiet. But anyway, where was it
<v Speaker 2>we were talking about long killing? So all that stuff's
<v Speaker 2>on the website along with the tour dates. But so
<v Speaker 2>we were So I show up at eight thirty with
<v Speaker 2>this truckload of plants and just start planting. Got a
<v Speaker 2>sharp shooter shovel. Of course, the long narrow shovels never
<v Speaker 2>bother with the spade shaped shovel. It's a fucking I
<v Speaker 2>don't know why they do that. It's for like grave
<v Speaker 2>digging in mafia movies. You don't you don't actually use
<v Speaker 2>those for planting stuff, Okay, they're just props. And so
<v Speaker 2>within like three it took me three hours, But within
<v Speaker 2>three hours I planted god, I don't know, sixty to
<v Speaker 2>seventy different plants, and like a diverse array of stuff too.
<v Speaker 2>You know Sydney attenu, a folia skeleton leaf I got.
<v Speaker 2>You know, Texas eBones. I got tepawahes, which is probably
<v Speaker 2>one of the fastest growing trees we have down here.
<v Speaker 2>You plant a one gallon pot, it'll be twenty feet
<v Speaker 2>tall in two years if you can irrigated. It's very
<v Speaker 2>lightweight wood. But if you need like immediate cover, it
<v Speaker 2>grows fast as hell, and then you don't have to
<v Speaker 2>worry about cutting it down later on because they grow
<v Speaker 2>so fast, and you know they'll start my I planted one,
<v Speaker 2>a one gallon pot. It's already twenty feet tall. I'm
<v Speaker 2>already getting seeds out of it. Then I save the
<v Speaker 2>seeds and I can grow more. It's such a great
<v Speaker 2>fucking plant. You know, it's mimosoid. It's mimosoid legumees. So
<v Speaker 2>it's got little white powder puff flowers. I presume it's
<v Speaker 2>a pioneer species. I mean, because I'll see them in
<v Speaker 2>alleys sometimes too. But you know, in your area, figure
<v Speaker 2>out what the pioneer species are, the native pioneer species.
<v Speaker 2>That's what you use, and those you just you know,
<v Speaker 2>if you're starting with like a barren, open lot, you
<v Speaker 2>know it's a process. You got to respect the process.
<v Speaker 2>It's ecological secession. Pioneer species first, secondary secession species that
<v Speaker 2>maybe grow a little bit slower, take a little bit
<v Speaker 2>longer to get established, need that microclimate of humidity, and
<v Speaker 2>maybe can't take full sun right away. Only when they're
<v Speaker 2>you know, older, right, and those start growing in the
<v Speaker 2>climax species whatever so ebonies are like a secondary or
<v Speaker 2>climax species. Secondary session or climax climax species. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>you if they're larger, you can plant them in full sun,
<v Speaker 2>they'll do okay. And she already had the irrigation, so
<v Speaker 2>so it was great. And that was the thing, like
<v Speaker 2>prepping the site, like I would do that from now on. First,
<v Speaker 2>Like I would just lay the mulch in the fucking
<v Speaker 2>irrigation tubing, which doesn't take you know, again, it's cheap.
<v Speaker 2>It's like thirty bucks for one hundred foot roll in
<v Speaker 2>this half inch irrigation tube. You can use rainburd you
<v Speaker 2>can use whatever, and then you got to buy the
<v Speaker 2>couplers to put it together. But it's really simple. I
<v Speaker 2>think I I think I went into it on the
<v Speaker 2>Round Rock, Texas lawn kill episode on the crime Pace YouTube.
<v Speaker 2>But you do that, and then digging the hole is
<v Speaker 2>so much easier too, because the ground's not baked to shit.
<v Speaker 2>It's not like digging into dry clay and then stuff
<v Speaker 2>just thrives because the whole soil horizon's already moist. And
<v Speaker 2>so that's what I did, and yeah, I just it
<v Speaker 2>went great. Man, I just soaked in. Yeah, I mean
<v Speaker 2>in three hours to plant that much, I must have
<v Speaker 2>planted I don't know how many hundreds of square feet,
<v Speaker 2>but and then it was at night too, so I
<v Speaker 2>was just you had a headlamp so I wasn't roasting
<v Speaker 2>in the sun, so I could go longer too. It
<v Speaker 2>was great, It was really fucking wonderful. And so now
<v Speaker 2>I'm stoked to go back and see because this lady's
<v Speaker 2>got a lot of land. You got a lot of
<v Speaker 2>land to replant. So now I'm stoked to go see
<v Speaker 2>how it turns out. And then I told her, you know,
<v Speaker 2>let it grow. It might be a little dense right now,
<v Speaker 2>but you can take stuff out in two years. Again,
<v Speaker 2>it's a process, right And she's and she showed me
<v Speaker 2>a picture on her phone. She's like, this is what
<v Speaker 2>we have at the monthly. This is what we have
<v Speaker 2>at the ranch. I don't want it to look like that.
<v Speaker 2>And I said, well, why do you live here? Like
<v Speaker 2>this is what we got, you know, this is what
<v Speaker 2>you know it's and it was like a thick brush,
<v Speaker 2>you know. And I'm like, that is a stage. That's
<v Speaker 2>not the end stage. That's one stage. Your yard's gonna
<v Speaker 2>look like that for a second, well for like a
<v Speaker 2>year or two, and then you know, in two years,
<v Speaker 2>as the canopy gets taller, you can thin that shit out,
<v Speaker 2>remove some trees, make it really inviting and you know,
<v Speaker 2>wonderful to be in. And it'll be easy. Everything will
<v Speaker 2>recover from pruning and maintenance and all that shit easily
<v Speaker 2>because the whole I mean, you've basically created this microclimate
<v Speaker 2>that is, you know, ten to fifteen degrees cooler than
<v Speaker 2>you know, the next the barren lot next door, and
<v Speaker 2>the soil has you know, five times as much moisture
<v Speaker 2>in it, and the soil is you know, rich and
<v Speaker 2>full of life because the roots are acting as scaffolding
<v Speaker 2>for all the beneficial microbes. You got all this stuff
<v Speaker 2>going already, you know, compared to like a barren lot
<v Speaker 2>next door, or a fucking mode piece of turf grass,
<v Speaker 2>which people can't really do it on here. They try,
<v Speaker 2>but it just ends up looking like shit anyway because
<v Speaker 2>it's just too hot. You know. Especially, I think you
<v Speaker 2>can maybe you can do it if you keep the lawn,
<v Speaker 2>if you cut it high, like four inches, you know,
<v Speaker 2>which is what people do with Saint Augustine. But otherwise
<v Speaker 2>it just that it gets baked, and of course, irrigate
<v Speaker 2>the hell out of it. God, it's so sick, it's
<v Speaker 2>so fucking deranged. But but that's It's just again I
<v Speaker 2>say this all the time too, but it's the same thing.
<v Speaker 2>It's like, why do people not realize, like how that's
<v Speaker 2>how the fucking land heals, like the benefits, especially in
<v Speaker 2>a hot area, the benefits of having plant cover, Like
<v Speaker 2>come on, man, wait, what do you want? You just
<v Speaker 2>want it open and hot. There's like no concept of
<v Speaker 2>what would that be thermal dynamics. I guess of just
<v Speaker 2>heat and sun. Anyway, But while I was out there,
<v Speaker 2>I uh, I gotta find out what species of antis
<v Speaker 2>was because the mulch is everywhere and I was digging.
<v Speaker 2>I think the ants were in the malt and they're
<v Speaker 2>probably invasive because I mostly encounter them in people's in
<v Speaker 2>areas where the lands and cleared and you know, in
<v Speaker 2>people's yards whatever, or the land's been clear and the
<v Speaker 2>human infrastructure has been set up. But they're these little
<v Speaker 2>black ants. And they went all up my arm and
<v Speaker 2>stung me like twenty times. I feel like I got
<v Speaker 2>like it's like chiggers, and it hurts and radiates pain
<v Speaker 2>for a few hours and then it starts itching, and
<v Speaker 2>then it itches for like two days. It got so
<v Speaker 2>itchy that I had to go put my arm under
<v Speaker 2>the hot water, you know, to chill out the histamine response.
<v Speaker 2>It was fucking brutal man. And I don't know what
<v Speaker 2>species it is. I'm so curious, you know, I don't.
<v Speaker 2>I would imagine it's not native, you know, because like
<v Speaker 2>the harvest the ants, a little red harvest the ants,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the food for the Texas horned lizards. They'll
<v Speaker 2>sting too, but they're actually pretty docile, like they don't
<v Speaker 2>at least in my experience. I've been stung once or twice,
<v Speaker 2>like when I'm like standing on their nest and not
<v Speaker 2>paying attention, and you're like, ah, fucking it hurts. It
<v Speaker 2>hurts bad, but it's not horrible. Well these man, these
<v Speaker 2>were just fucking they come right at you. They come
<v Speaker 2>right at you. I still remember those, uh those they
<v Speaker 2>call them jumping jacks, those deadly ants in Tasmania. There's
<v Speaker 2>an ante in Tasmania that I guess like thirty percent
<v Speaker 2>of the population is like scared, like frighteningly allergic to,
<v Speaker 2>like where you have to go get like an epiephri
<v Speaker 2>and pen you have to go to the hospital. But
<v Speaker 2>they call them jumping jacks, but they're really fucking aggressive ants.
<v Speaker 2>They'll actually jump at you, and they form these big nests.
<v Speaker 2>And so when me and whatdy were down there, we'd
<v Speaker 2>fuck with him because they would, you know, their dicks,
<v Speaker 2>h And so you poke the nest a little bit
<v Speaker 2>and then you see him jump at you and whatever.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, we didn't go overboard, you know, just a
<v Speaker 2>couple jabs here and there. But but and they're large.
<v Speaker 2>They're like an inch long. You know. These were like
<v Speaker 2>tiny little ants, the ones that stung me in a
<v Speaker 2>mulch the other day. But my whole arm it it
<v Speaker 2>feels like chicken pox on it. Now. God, it's brutal.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, what is that. It's got to be invasive.
<v Speaker 2>If anybody knows, send me an email. Okay, I think
<v Speaker 2>I figured it out what that was after talking to
<v Speaker 2>my friend Clint. It's fire ants, which I know, you know,
<v Speaker 2>I hear the word fire ants all the time in Texas,
<v Speaker 2>but I had never I guess I had never really
<v Speaker 2>seen one, or or at least I was not aware
<v Speaker 2>of what they looked like. But man, this is it
<v Speaker 2>finally went away after four days of itching. But uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know, yeah, they're fucking terrible. They're I guess they've
<v Speaker 2>been eradicating them in Australia using some sort of hot
<v Speaker 2>water injection method, Like they roll up to the nest
<v Speaker 2>with this long tube, like a two foot long prod
<v Speaker 2>that they stick in the nest and then just inject
<v Speaker 2>uh what a like ninety degrees celsius water into the
<v Speaker 2>nest and that tends to kill them. But that's a
<v Speaker 2>physical method, you know, so it takes having to go around.
<v Speaker 2>It's better than chemical though, because there's it doesn't there's
<v Speaker 2>no bycatch. You're not killing all the other native insects. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>I just got back from Nuevo Leone. I took a
<v Speaker 2>little break between starting its recording and now, and we
<v Speaker 2>waited in the borderline for like three hours yesterday at
<v Speaker 2>the bridge, which I guess was all on the Mexican
<v Speaker 2>side too, because the Mexican military is doing some sort
<v Speaker 2>of weaponized incompetence, you know, as a response to the
<v Speaker 2>Trump tariffs. Just fucking more more. Just tangerine man, you notice,
<v Speaker 2>tangerine pig. It's very very frustrating. We're all feeling the
<v Speaker 2>effects of it. But anyway, so we I mean we
<v Speaker 2>waited like literally three hours and we moved a quarter
<v Speaker 2>of a mile and then suddenly at eate thirty, you know,
<v Speaker 2>because this is on a Monday night, eight thirty, the
<v Speaker 2>line just all of a sudden, you just moved. I
<v Speaker 2>mean we moved a quarter of a mile in three hours,
<v Speaker 2>and then we moved three miles because it's a long bridge,
<v Speaker 2>in a matter of ten minutes. So and then we
<v Speaker 2>when we went by the Mexican border station, we saw
<v Speaker 2>all the you know, the Mexican military in their fatigues
<v Speaker 2>walking home, which was funny. So it was like literally
<v Speaker 2>they were just like, okay, we're down he Harry, this
<v Speaker 2>is getting late and scap and then it was just like,
<v Speaker 2>you know, not these geopolitical borders, they get so frustrated sometimes,
<v Speaker 2>but Nuevo Leone was just it was just a fucking
<v Speaker 2>incredible experience. It's so nice. I learned so much. Every
<v Speaker 2>one of these trips, I learned so much. This was
<v Speaker 2>like a four or five day trip, and it was
<v Speaker 2>with a bunch of herpers. I was with a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of friends, three friends that are all reptile nerds. One
<v Speaker 2>of them works at the zoo, two of them work
<v Speaker 2>at the zoo, the other you know, just really good
<v Speaker 2>buddies and they know their shit when it comes to reptiles,
<v Speaker 2>and so they know the habitat, they know where to look.
<v Speaker 2>They were actually setting out ten They brought sheets of tin.
<v Speaker 2>They call it tin, it's just sheet metal to set
<v Speaker 2>out in habitat and create habitat for these snakes and
<v Speaker 2>then they'll come back in six months or a year
<v Speaker 2>or whenever. And checked them and they were looking for
<v Speaker 2>two main species tom a leap and rock rattlesnakes, which
<v Speaker 2>are so fucking cute, I mean, just immensely tiny snakes
<v Speaker 2>and they've got a uh they do this thing called
<v Speaker 2>coat alluring, which is we've probably seen it in videos
<v Speaker 2>of vipers, and I know there's like a famous viper
<v Speaker 2>in Iran that the whole snake is camouflage, but its
<v Speaker 2>tail is like a bright color and it lures in
<v Speaker 2>its prey and then uh, you know, goes for it.
<v Speaker 2>So that's what these these snakes do. I forget what
<v Speaker 2>they mainly ate. I think it was lizards. I think
<v Speaker 2>they're mainly going for for lizards, but uh, but they've
<v Speaker 2>got this like kind of bright orange tail. They're not
<v Speaker 2>that big, they're very small, like a two foot long
<v Speaker 2>one would be a large adult. But we were looking
<v Speaker 2>for them, and then we were looking for Scaloperis minor.
<v Speaker 2>You know, Scloperis the genus offense lizards. Scalaperus minor is
<v Speaker 2>like a god, it's this beautiful fucking it's it's beautiful
<v Speaker 2>blue lizard, at least the males are. We saw a
<v Speaker 2>few other Scaloperas species, Scloperis spinosis, which is massive, really
<v Speaker 2>large for a fence lizard. And we were looking for
<v Speaker 2>a king snakes for what is it. Lampropeltis leonis really
<v Speaker 2>beautiful king snake. Feisty little guys too. You know, they're
<v Speaker 2>just biting. They're just constantly biting you. It can't relax.
<v Speaker 2>Totally harmless of course, And so we would go out
<v Speaker 2>into habitat and then I'm just you know, I'm like
<v Speaker 2>the plant guy out there, just going nuts, trying to
<v Speaker 2>photograph everything, get multiple photos, because that's the record of
<v Speaker 2>a species that I'll encounter and then make a log
<v Speaker 2>of and then you know, nowhere to place it on
<v Speaker 2>my own phylogenetic tree that I keep in my mind
<v Speaker 2>and on the eye naturalist app and uh and then
<v Speaker 2>study it and just have a record of it and
<v Speaker 2>also good documentation and et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>It was.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was a great fucking trip. I mean we
<v Speaker 2>spent the whole week at elevations of like sixty five
<v Speaker 2>hundred feet, perfect temperature, just like you know, just these
<v Speaker 2>these little farming communities, essentially Galliano, the town of Galliano
<v Speaker 2>was was a little hot. I hadn't been there in
<v Speaker 2>a while, but you could tell there's been some gang activity.
<v Speaker 2>So you know, it's just just you just get these
<v Speaker 2>you know, a certain vibe you know that I'm well
<v Speaker 2>accustomed to. So uh but yeah, I mean we were
<v Speaker 2>in these mountains. You know, you've got the rain, you
<v Speaker 2>get the Sierra Madre oriental right there, which goes from
<v Speaker 2>north to south this mountain range, and uh, it goes
<v Speaker 2>from you know, you get the Gulf on the eastern side,
<v Speaker 2>and all that hot those warm ocean currents lead to
<v Speaker 2>lots of evaporation, and that all that moisture then moves
<v Speaker 2>west over the mainland and as it gets as the
<v Speaker 2>mountains rise, it gets squeezed up, it gets uplifted and
<v Speaker 2>and and uh condensed at higher elevations, and so that
<v Speaker 2>leads to lots of rain and lots of water vapor
<v Speaker 2>in the air as well. Even when it's not raining,
<v Speaker 2>lots of fog. And you can tell because when you
<v Speaker 2>go up into these oak forests, these pine and oak forests,
<v Speaker 2>the oaks are all covered in Spanish moss. They're all
<v Speaker 2>covered in Tulanzia oos nioides, a very silver ecotype, much
<v Speaker 2>more so than you might encounter in you know, southern Louisiana.
<v Speaker 2>And it is just it's a fucking phenomenal place. There's
<v Speaker 2>you know, agave montana everywhere. There's like thirty five oak
<v Speaker 2>species in the state of Nuevo Leon alone. You know,
<v Speaker 2>Mexico is the epicenter of diversity for oaks. I think
<v Speaker 2>it's the most diverse. I think it is, it's the
<v Speaker 2>most diverse region for oaks. But you know, the we
<v Speaker 2>were recount of everything from small scrub oaks to large
<v Speaker 2>spreading trees, just these fucking gorgeous trees, just all draped
<v Speaker 2>in Tulanzia. I saw Aby's vaharii, which is a a
<v Speaker 2>fur species you get up to like seven sixty five
<v Speaker 2>hundred and seven thousand feet. There's abs up there. Those
<v Speaker 2>were covered Intlanzia too. There's our Beutis halapentus. Of course,
<v Speaker 2>the madrone I mean you get an idea of what
<v Speaker 2>Texas might have looked like Central Texas and West Texas
<v Speaker 2>in the Pleistocene when temperatures were cooler, and some of
<v Speaker 2>these lineages probably occurred in Texas, you know, like when
<v Speaker 2>do that abies last occur in Texas? Was it there
<v Speaker 2>in the Pleistocene? Maybe who knows, you know, it's some
<v Speaker 2>of the Davis Mountains or something. It was just I
<v Speaker 2>feel intoxicated with the amount of things I saw and
<v Speaker 2>the amount of things I learned as well. And I also,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I also learned I guess I've known this
<v Speaker 2>for a while, but you know, Mexico frequently their landscape
<v Speaker 2>is not as trashed as the United States one is,
<v Speaker 2>and namely, I mean, you go to some areas, there's
<v Speaker 2>fucking litter and all the there's you know, garbage dumping
<v Speaker 2>in all the arroyos or whatever. It looks like shit.
<v Speaker 2>But their sprawl is so much less. They don't have
<v Speaker 2>sprawl like the United States does, which is what I
<v Speaker 2>spent you know, the first ten minutes of this podcast
<v Speaker 2>ranting about and what I probably rant about in every
<v Speaker 2>podcast episode I do, because it's such a it's just
<v Speaker 2>such an eyesore, you know, it's just spiritual eyesore as well.
<v Speaker 2>It's so depressing to see just ugliest landscape in the
<v Speaker 2>first world. Mexico doesn't have that. Why because the industry
<v Speaker 2>of development is not as big there, and also because
<v Speaker 2>of something called the Ihido system, which was enacted put
<v Speaker 2>into place after the Mexican Revolution. And I don't I'm
<v Speaker 2>not an expert on it, but it basically placed large
<v Speaker 2>tracts of land into collective ownership of indigenous and peasant
<v Speaker 2>farmer communities, and so it can be a huge pain
<v Speaker 2>in the ass for any single entity, whether it's an
<v Speaker 2>individual developer or a corporation, to come in and buy
<v Speaker 2>up a big tract of land and put you know,
<v Speaker 2>strip mall garbage, shitty condos, apartment complexes, you know, can
<v Speaker 2>sumer retail whatever there. It just is not as widespread,
<v Speaker 2>and neither is this culture of just driving fucking everywhere,
<v Speaker 2>even if it's only like a quarter mile away. So,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's you get to see what the US
<v Speaker 2>could be and could have been had we had we
<v Speaker 2>proceeded differently. But of course it's you know, it's individual ownership.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's that's too socialists. So we have what we
<v Speaker 2>have which is just every little bit of land, every
<v Speaker 2>last little bit of land is gonna get gobbled up
<v Speaker 2>and turned into garbage.
<v Speaker 4>You know, except that, well, we've got the national parks
<v Speaker 4>of the state parks.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, this is none of this is state park. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>this is all. The Ahito thing is pretty cool. I
<v Speaker 2>have a friend who was she does surveys, I think
<v Speaker 2>it was I think she was in Hakumba and they
<v Speaker 2>were working on the Mexican side for some sort of
<v Speaker 2>transmission line that goes from the United States and then
<v Speaker 2>crosses the Mexican border at California at Hkumba or thereabouts
<v Speaker 2>and goes to the Mexico And they were gonna build
<v Speaker 2>some transmission line and the developer, who is the company
<v Speaker 2>or the corporation behind it, ended up just saying fuck
<v Speaker 2>it because they couldn't work with the Ahito system. They
<v Speaker 2>couldn't get everyone in the Ahiito to agree to sell
<v Speaker 2>the land that was needed for this transmission lines. For
<v Speaker 2>better or worse. I think it's pretty good, but you
<v Speaker 2>know that that's a major stall to development. So it's
<v Speaker 2>not like Mexico naturally protects its land or like there's
<v Speaker 2>any more respect for the living world there. It's just
<v Speaker 2>it's mainly the Ajiito system, and then of course there's
<v Speaker 2>other things that come into play, like zoning laws and poverty.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you build these massive strip malts that who's
<v Speaker 2>going to go? You know, that kind of thing. But
<v Speaker 2>it's it's certainly preserved a lot more of the living world,
<v Speaker 2>and it certainly looks less ugly. I didn't see billboards
<v Speaker 2>for four days. Now we get back, you know, because
<v Speaker 2>we weren't in the cities either, and then of course
<v Speaker 2>getting back into like more developed there as use, the
<v Speaker 2>billboards start popping up, and you know, right on the
<v Speaker 2>border the billboards come. I mean that all that visual pollution,
<v Speaker 2>that mental pollution. It's it's when you go without it
<v Speaker 2>for a while, you really notice it when you get
<v Speaker 2>back to it, and then it's it's such a it
<v Speaker 2>clears your head. Man. I don't think people realize how
<v Speaker 2>much just having billboards around fox with them it's really hideous.
<v Speaker 2>And down here in South Texas people love the led billboards.
<v Speaker 2>I don't understand that either. What kind of fucking you know,
<v Speaker 2>what kind of degenerate mindset do you need to have
<v Speaker 2>where the night sky is no longer sacred? Being able
<v Speaker 2>to see stars is no longer sacred. How are led
<v Speaker 2>billboards legal? Especially some of these they're fucking bright as all.
<v Speaker 2>They look like yard lights in a prison. It's it's horrible.
<v Speaker 2>Hopefully somebody shoots them out. That is what that is
<v Speaker 2>what a AR fifteen is made for, you know, shooting
<v Speaker 2>out billboards, right, and occasionally pigs. So you know, given
<v Speaker 2>how ugly the landscape of the human built landscape of
<v Speaker 2>South Texas can be, all the retail slums, you know,
<v Speaker 2>it just looks like the I thirty five quarter between
<v Speaker 2>Austin and San Antonio, or probably in Dallas. I mean
<v Speaker 2>really these are places of course that this is most
<v Speaker 2>of what the United States is now. Given how ugly
<v Speaker 2>that is, it's so easy to forget that. The mountains,
<v Speaker 2>the Sierra Madre is literally three hours over the border,
<v Speaker 2>two hours maybe, and it would be closer if you know,
<v Speaker 2>you can go faster on the roads. We were actually
<v Speaker 2>Kyle was driving pretty goddamn fast, and the way back
<v Speaker 2>it was, you know, I was jarring. It was scary,
<v Speaker 2>but you know it's it's it's closer than San Antonio
<v Speaker 2>and then you start getting elevation and with that elevation,
<v Speaker 2>you start getting drastic change ups in the plant communities
<v Speaker 2>and and you know, at three thousand feet, so you know,
<v Speaker 2>you cross the border, you drive through all the shitty
<v Speaker 2>border towns are depressing the bleak. It's just just you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's a it's as you would expect. It's all sorts
<v Speaker 2>of you know, economic and political aspects today. And then
<v Speaker 2>you're driving through what looks like the scrublands of I
<v Speaker 2>guess Star County, like the Paote gardens. It looks like that.
<v Speaker 2>And you can't really see what any of that looks
<v Speaker 2>like around the McCallen or Brownsville area because it's all
<v Speaker 2>been destroyed either for agriculture or for strip malls. And
<v Speaker 2>so you're driving through these kind of undulating hills with
<v Speaker 2>Helietta part of a flora, the member of rutesi to
<v Speaker 2>citrus family. That's pretty rare, all these plants that only occupy,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the Northern Mexico South Texas region. It's a
<v Speaker 2>very special region near and dear to my heart, at
<v Speaker 2>least floristically, not so much culturally. And you go through
<v Speaker 2>this and it's you know, I'm sure there's tons of
<v Speaker 2>payote in these scrub lands and this thorn scrub that
<v Speaker 2>you're going through, and tons of astrophytem and asterious and
<v Speaker 2>all kinds of other cool cactus species. And then slowly
<v Speaker 2>you start to gain up elevation a thousand feet, two
<v Speaker 2>thousand feet, and then you hit three thousand feet and
<v Speaker 2>when you're driving towards you know, eatthrbide going into the
<v Speaker 2>mountains of the Sierra Madre, which again, you know, these
<v Speaker 2>these bedding planes that were originally deposit horizontally in the
<v Speaker 2>ocean floor in the mid Cretaceous one hundred million years
<v Speaker 2>ago have been flipped up almost vertically, and they've created
<v Speaker 2>just these incredible landscapes. I mean, that's why you get
<v Speaker 2>these sheer cliffs that are basically you know, horizontal ocean
<v Speaker 2>floor flipped up almost ninety degrees vertical, and you get
<v Speaker 2>all these incredible rock dwelling plants. I mean, the terrain
<v Speaker 2>is so drastic. There was there were still new species
<v Speaker 2>being described there as recently as when was a gayve
<v Speaker 2>albo pelosa described twenty years ago or something, And so
<v Speaker 2>you know, you go from this really hot, just unbearably
<v Speaker 2>hot thorn scrub plant habitat, which is much like our
<v Speaker 2>conservation property thorn Scrubs sanctuary where it's got all these
<v Speaker 2>nurse plants, the blackbrush, the vicelias, all these legumes. Uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know Castilla erecta, solo feminists, Spinosis Texas, snake eyes, helietta.
<v Speaker 2>You know, these these shrubs to small trees. And then
<v Speaker 2>underneath that is of course all the peote and the
<v Speaker 2>astrophied the other cool plants. You know, Cora phanta, macro maris,
<v Speaker 2>a kindo serious any of Cantu's a kind of serious posegai,
<v Speaker 2>a kind of serious penthalopis. And you start going up
<v Speaker 2>in elevation and you hit these mountains, and not only
<v Speaker 2>are you going up in elevation, but the mountains create
<v Speaker 2>these micro climates because they shade these canyons. And then
<v Speaker 2>you've got all the water running through the canyons. It
<v Speaker 2>goes right off the mountain sides, is funneled into these
<v Speaker 2>little canyons, and you start getting more interesting plants. You
<v Speaker 2>start getting Nahuatlia hypo luca, which is like a shrubby
<v Speaker 2>member of the the Astaacei. There's I don't think there's
<v Speaker 2>any other members of that subfamily in the United States.
<v Speaker 2>We've got some thorn scrub, really bright white undersize to
<v Speaker 2>the leaves. You know, it gets ten feet tall, needs
<v Speaker 2>full sun, happy as a pig and shit in full sun.
<v Speaker 2>Beautiful plant, white flowers that look like many discoid sunflower floorrets,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and it always gets butterfly crack. It's always
<v Speaker 2>covered in butterflies. When it's blooming. Starts seeing that around
<v Speaker 2>you start seeing there was another really cool member of
<v Speaker 2>rutasi that we don't get in South Texas, and I
<v Speaker 2>wish we did. I wonder if you could grow it here,
<v Speaker 2>it would probably die back in a freeze. Decatropis by color.
<v Speaker 2>I think they've got it growing it. You see Berkeley
<v Speaker 2>at the Botanic Gardens there. But it's got these like
<v Speaker 2>rusty undersides, pinnate leaves, and then when it flowers, I
<v Speaker 2>think the flowers are like little white flowers. And of
<v Speaker 2>course if you crush up the leaves, you know, typical rutasi,
<v Speaker 2>it's got a pungent smell to it, and it's got
<v Speaker 2>like this rusty pubescence on the stems as well. It's
<v Speaker 2>a fucking gray plant. And I wish, I wish it
<v Speaker 2>was available in horticulture, but it's not, of course. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 2>the flowers because I only saw it flowering from the road.
<v Speaker 2>The flowers are incredible, like these spikes of you know,
<v Speaker 2>small inch inch wide white flowers, and it's a dominant shrub.
<v Speaker 2>It's likes these hotter elevations. You start going up and
<v Speaker 2>then that's when you start seeing other really cool and
<v Speaker 2>weird plants like diune edgily, which is a pycad. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it's a gymno sperm. Cycads are those really weird. I
<v Speaker 2>call them conifers, but they're technically gymno sperms. If you
<v Speaker 2>want to really get down to it, if you want
<v Speaker 2>to be a pedantic snob about it, they you know,
<v Speaker 2>the cycads are an old lineage. They produce cones. You
<v Speaker 2>get the encephalardos in South Africa, psychis revoluta quote unquote.
<v Speaker 2>The sago palm is a psychad. You know, you probably
<v Speaker 2>see that like your granny's yard in Florida, you know,
<v Speaker 2>planted with the Saint Augustine grass. They're common in the
<v Speaker 2>home dust bit kind of a horticultural atrocity, but kind
<v Speaker 2>of cool. They're just overplanted, but you know, with no context.
<v Speaker 2>They're native to Asia. But then the New World pycads
<v Speaker 2>like the Zamias. There's that rare Zamia from the Miami
<v Speaker 2>Pine Rocklands. It's I think the only cycad that occurs
<v Speaker 2>in the United States. And I've got a couple of
<v Speaker 2>those growing in my friend yard from when we filmed
<v Speaker 2>Kill your Lawn, because they they'll grow in South Texas too.
<v Speaker 2>That's Zamia and Tegrafolia, and then Zamia for Forasia, it
<v Speaker 2>can be somewhat common too, but that's more Mexican one.
<v Speaker 2>And of course they've got the corlloid roots with the
<v Speaker 2>nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria in the root nodules. You know, got
<v Speaker 2>to convert that N two in the atmosphere into NH
<v Speaker 2>three so it can be used by plants. And that's
<v Speaker 2>what the cyanobacteria do. Of course they're photosynthetic bacteria, but
<v Speaker 2>they also produce nitrogeny enzymes that that can do the
<v Speaker 2>work turning atmospheric nitrogen into usable NH three. So anyway,
<v Speaker 2>but so I knew there was dione in this this air,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, I'd never seen them before, and so
<v Speaker 2>when we were rolling through these cliffs, I was just
<v Speaker 2>rubber neck and hard. I wasn't driving, thank God, because
<v Speaker 2>I would have driven us off the fucking road. We're
<v Speaker 2>going through these forested well woodland, thorn scrub forest, thorn
<v Speaker 2>forest lowlands in these narrow canyons, and I'm looking up
<v Speaker 2>at this limestone seeing all the cool of gaves and
<v Speaker 2>all the cool shit whatever, and I see the fucking
<v Speaker 2>pinnate leaves of this diune and I say stop, stop, stop,
<v Speaker 2>you know, we gotta go, gotta go back. You know,
<v Speaker 2>these are all herpers too, So I appreciate this because
<v Speaker 2>they have no interest in plants whatsoever. Kyle does a
<v Speaker 2>little bit, but Clinton Chris, I don't think. Well, Chris
<v Speaker 2>had some interest either way, you know, that's their main jan.
<v Speaker 2>It's like if I was, you know, going on like
<v Speaker 2>a plant expedition, I brought a reptile nerd with me
<v Speaker 2>and he was like, oh, stop stop, I gotta see that,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So I really appreciate it. They were kind enough.
<v Speaker 2>So we go back and I just been geeking out
<v Speaker 2>over this this diune that's growing eighty feet above the
<v Speaker 2>road out of a limestone cliff in full sun. And
<v Speaker 2>it's you know, that's another thing. It's like, why is
<v Speaker 2>this not grown more like these? These would do great
<v Speaker 2>in South Texas where they're and they're actually you know,
<v Speaker 2>native into this region. They probably occurred in South Texas. God,
<v Speaker 2>I don't know, a million years ago. Maybe the or
<v Speaker 2>the ancestor of them occurred in South Texas million years ago.
<v Speaker 2>You got to think about I'm always thinking about that,
<v Speaker 2>how these distributions shift according to climatic change over you know,
<v Speaker 2>over expanses of time that while still short and still
<v Speaker 2>relatively recent, they still dwarf a human lifespan. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it just just wild. And that's what I was thinking about,
<v Speaker 2>Like how many you know, I mean, madrones still occur
<v Speaker 2>in the Edwards Plateau and in the Austin area. But
<v Speaker 2>what was it like when they were like a dominant
<v Speaker 2>tree species there? And how long ago was that? Five
<v Speaker 2>hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago? What else
<v Speaker 2>grew there that doesn't grow there anymore and can now
<v Speaker 2>only be found in the higher elevations of the Sierra
<v Speaker 2>Madre further south right like we were in we were
<v Speaker 2>in fucking Hickory forests Man Hickory and Aby's Vaharii for
<v Speaker 2>us in some of these spots seven thousand foot elevation,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the feet to meters calculation, right, it's tie.
<v Speaker 2>It's not divide by three, it's multiply feet by three
<v Speaker 2>and then move a decimal point over to the left.
<v Speaker 2>You know, so like six sixty two hundred feet would
<v Speaker 2>be what's three times sixty two one hundred and eighty six,
<v Speaker 2>it'd be eighteen sixty meters. So anyway, so so I
<v Speaker 2>saw this dayun and I'm just theirding out there. There's
<v Speaker 2>this one section where they're all over the road. They're
<v Speaker 2>right on the road. And when I say right on
<v Speaker 2>the road, I mean they're on you know, it's it's
<v Speaker 2>a road that's basically carved into the side of a mountain.
<v Speaker 2>You got a canyon one hundred and twenty feet below you,
<v Speaker 2>and you got you know, however, many hundreds of feet
<v Speaker 2>of cliff above you. And they're coming out of the
<v Speaker 2>rock wall. But you know, these these pinnate, kind of
<v Speaker 2>spiny blue green leaves that look like almost like a
<v Speaker 2>giant plastic you know, coriaceous fur leaves like you know,
<v Speaker 2>like emanating from a central rosette. And these things are
<v Speaker 2>of course call lessened, so they can get the you know,
<v Speaker 2>they can get a stem on them, they can get
<v Speaker 2>a trunk, and so that was really cool. And then
<v Speaker 2>I saw Helietta growing there too, which is again it's
<v Speaker 2>another rare plant that's really only known from a couple
<v Speaker 2>of these lomas in South Texas and doesn't get very
<v Speaker 2>far north of the border. But then it's everywhere between
<v Speaker 2>South Texas and these foothills, basically the foothills of the
<v Speaker 2>Sierra Madre, where you've got all these really cool cliffs
<v Speaker 2>and rock formations. And if you were to look at
<v Speaker 2>these cliffs, these mountains in a cross section, of course,
<v Speaker 2>they look from west to east like you know, an
<v Speaker 2>accordioned rug, like an accordioned throw rug. Like imagine a
<v Speaker 2>throw rug, you know, like a ten foot you know,
<v Speaker 2>ten foot by three foot throw rug on a hardwood floor,
<v Speaker 2>and if you push it from one end, you know,
<v Speaker 2>would it would accordion up up against the wall that
<v Speaker 2>you pushed you And that's what these it's the word
<v Speaker 2>for that is a full thrust belt. But that's what
<v Speaker 2>the Sierra Madre look like. And they've just created some
<v Speaker 2>of the most spectacular wild ass habitat, you know. And
<v Speaker 2>part of the reason that a gave wasn't discovered for
<v Speaker 2>so long is because it doesn't grow on the ground.
<v Speaker 2>It grows on these cliffs, you know, in this one
<v Speaker 2>section of canyon, and most of the population is like
<v Speaker 2>three hundred feet above the ground, you know. So it's
<v Speaker 2>just it's it's fucking wild man. So anyway, so you
<v Speaker 2>go up and you start seeing more diversity, and then
<v Speaker 2>at some point you start seeing pines scattered here and there,
<v Speaker 2>and oaks scattered here and there, and more flora that
<v Speaker 2>starts to resemble the Edwards Plateau west of Austin. You know,
<v Speaker 2>you start seeing at one point there's a madrone like
<v Speaker 2>right over the road, and it's just there, it is.
<v Speaker 2>And then there's of course, you look across this canyon
<v Speaker 2>that the road is near, and there's just these epic
<v Speaker 2>it looks like a staircase because of the way that
<v Speaker 2>the limestone has eroded, these horizontal strata layers, which are
<v Speaker 2>now a flip up at seventy degrees you know in
<v Speaker 2>some places ninety degrees and some almost ninety degrees in
<v Speaker 2>some places. But and it just gets better from there,
<v Speaker 2>and you start seeing more diversity, and the decatropis eventually
<v Speaker 2>tapers off. In the guck Nadia now Nahuatlia Hypeluca astraraci.
<v Speaker 2>That trouble to tell me about that that eventually tapers
<v Speaker 2>off and suddenly you're up at six thousand feet elevation
<v Speaker 2>and you start seeing just incredible shit. There's pinion pines,
<v Speaker 2>there's oaks, there's I mean, where we ended up was
<v Speaker 2>basically like an oak savannah. It was like hilly oaks savannah,
<v Speaker 2>and parts of it looked like northern Inland, northern California,
<v Speaker 2>like some of those oak woodlands that you see where
<v Speaker 2>they're not super dense, they're open. There's dense parts, but
<v Speaker 2>but there's uh, you know, there's there's these woodlands where
<v Speaker 2>the trees are relatively scattered. It's like a grassland with oaks.
<v Speaker 2>And you know, that was where I saw the calacordas.
<v Speaker 2>Calacordas is a really cool genus of lily. If you,
<v Speaker 2>you know, you do botany in California or Oregon, you're
<v Speaker 2>really familiar with them because there's Caloricordas everywhere. They're all
<v Speaker 2>incredibly beautiful. There's some really rare ones that only grow
<v Speaker 2>on serpentine, like Abyspoensis or the one that grew tiberon
<v Speaker 2>Ensis that grows in Tiberat and Marin County. But it's
<v Speaker 2>you know, the epicenter of diversity. Of course, like many
<v Speaker 2>things is in California. For the genus Caloricordus, there's a
<v Speaker 2>few Mexican ones, and it was Calicordus Marcille that I
<v Speaker 2>saw in those oak woodlands. But you know, it's just
<v Speaker 2>it's it's just wild. It's it. And you're closer to
<v Speaker 2>South Texas than San Antonio, so it's really you know,
<v Speaker 2>being in those habitats too, especially, I really realized, wow,
<v Speaker 2>Texas is just Mexico. I mean I've always been saying
<v Speaker 2>that for the last you know, five ten years, but
<v Speaker 2>Texas is just Mexico Floristically, it's just Mexico. And this human,
<v Speaker 2>this ephemeral human mask that we've put on everything really
<v Speaker 2>fucks things up. You know, you really want to get
<v Speaker 2>an accurate perception of the land. Look at the biology
<v Speaker 2>that occurs on it, and you'll see, Yeah, this whole
<v Speaker 2>border region is just it's it's all the same plants
<v Speaker 2>on either side, and it's similar lineages on either side.
<v Speaker 2>Then you think back what was going on the places,
<v Speaker 2>seeing what was going on five hundred thousand years ago,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the same lineages have been in the region
<v Speaker 2>for millions of years, and they've just had different shifts
<v Speaker 2>of their distribution as the climate changes. You know, they
<v Speaker 2>move up in elevation, or they move south, or they
<v Speaker 2>move north or or whatever. And of course this takes,
<v Speaker 2>you know, amounts of time that dwarf a human life span.
<v Speaker 2>But it's it's again, it's all about zooming out and
<v Speaker 2>having that that that perspective of something larger than yourself. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>I'm back. I took a little break. You know, my
<v Speaker 2>neighbor is getting ballsy. I'm just kidding. He's a sweet
<v Speaker 2>he's a sweet old man, but he's asking. He just
<v Speaker 2>asked me to cut his grass for him. He let
<v Speaker 2>me plant some shit in his front yard. So I said, fine,
<v Speaker 2>I see what's going on. You're trying to You're trying
<v Speaker 2>to make this like a business interaction, and I'm okay
<v Speaker 2>with that. I'll pay you. I'll cut your fucking grass.
<v Speaker 2>I still have an electric lawnmower, avenused in like a
<v Speaker 2>year and a half, which I got. It's Skill brand, uh,
<v Speaker 2>which is all the tools I use. Skill. I'm trying
<v Speaker 2>to get them to fucking throw me an extra battery
<v Speaker 2>or something, some sort of sponsorship because I I amp
<v Speaker 2>them up so much. I just hate fucking with gas.
<v Speaker 2>It's a pain in the ass. And you don't use
<v Speaker 2>something that clogs the fucking filter. You don't use something
<v Speaker 2>for a month and a half, you know, you fuck
<v Speaker 2>up the fuel oil mixtures. It's a pain in the ass.
<v Speaker 2>And then starting those fucking weed whackers with the with
<v Speaker 2>the you know, especially if you haven't used it in
<v Speaker 2>a while, and it takes forever and you just out
<v Speaker 2>there sweating like a pig. At least I am, because
<v Speaker 2>it's ninety eight degrees all the fucking time. I hate
<v Speaker 2>gas and they're just loud and fucking. The electric shit's
<v Speaker 2>just so much easier. But you know what they say
<v Speaker 2>about electric electrics, pussies, like electric cars are totally away
<v Speaker 2>at the future. I mean, not designing cities to be
<v Speaker 2>car slums. Is there real way of the future. But
<v Speaker 2>if you're gonna do that shit anyway, electric cars are
<v Speaker 2>away in the future because internal combustion engines just have
<v Speaker 2>too many you know, there's just too many. It's just
<v Speaker 2>not efficient. A lot of energy is lost in heat.
<v Speaker 2>The electric cars fucking you know, you don't need oil
<v Speaker 2>to you just got to change a whole bunch of infrastructure.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, you do it once and anyway, but
<v Speaker 2>you know the US will never do that because electric
<v Speaker 2>cars like reading are for pussies, and knowing things that's
<v Speaker 2>for pussies too. Anyway. Okay, so what the fuck was
<v Speaker 2>I talking about? So my neighbors, So I went back
<v Speaker 2>and I moticed. I said, yeah, what the fuck, I'll
<v Speaker 2>cut your grass. You know, it's better than you hire
<v Speaker 2>these guys. I don't know what they charge. Everything's a
<v Speaker 2>ripoff down here because everybody's on the hustle. They're gonna
<v Speaker 2>charge you eighty bucks to mow your fucking lawn. And
<v Speaker 2>you're an old guy. He's like an old veteran. You
<v Speaker 2>know his daughter. I don't know what she did. There's
<v Speaker 2>they're fucking sweet man, and and they you know, they
<v Speaker 2>tolerate my overgrown yards, So what the fuck I owe
<v Speaker 2>it to them anyway. And then this way, I can
<v Speaker 2>leave the entire back half of the yard, which is
<v Speaker 2>not grass anyway, it's all Solena malagna folium, which is
<v Speaker 2>a pioneer species here, wonderful solenum species. Ask the bumblebees.
<v Speaker 2>And so I can leave the whole back half and
<v Speaker 2>that's what I told him too. I was like, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>just leave the back half. Actually, I think I offered
<v Speaker 2>the cut his grass a month ago, and so I
<v Speaker 2>think he's just taking me up on the offer. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>So I was hyping up Nuevo Leon and that's where
<v Speaker 2>we'll return to. So I uh, so we're rising up
<v Speaker 2>into the foothills past Decatropis by color, which for some reason,
<v Speaker 2>we don't get in Texas. I'm sure it was here
<v Speaker 2>at some point in the last five hundred thousand years.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know what happened to it. Someone should certainly
<v Speaker 2>be growing it down here in the Rio Grande Valley.
<v Speaker 2>It's a beautiful member of rutace pinnate leaves rusty, that
<v Speaker 2>fucking rusty orange pubescence. Oh but that's crazy though too,
<v Speaker 2>because they grow it at UC Berkeley, which is a
<v Speaker 2>much different climate, and then it also grows here in
<v Speaker 2>like ball busting heat with GK. Nadia, with Nihualia and
<v Speaker 2>all the thorn scrub blackbrush. But anyway, I don't know. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>it's a it's a really cool species. I saw an
<v Speaker 2>LCLO biosphere reserved too. See what I'm doing, really doing,
<v Speaker 2>I'm getting paid by the cartels to hype up northern
<v Speaker 2>Mexico so that more people go there, and then that
<v Speaker 2>creates a market for kidnapping and robbing. I'm just kidding.
<v Speaker 2>Just get oh god. But really some of these places
<v Speaker 2>that we went to and the herpers, I can't reveal
<v Speaker 2>any of the exact locations because the herpers, my friends
<v Speaker 2>don't want me to to say, because herpers are vicious.
<v Speaker 1>Man.
<v Speaker 2>First off, it's it's like eighty percent mail, and so
<v Speaker 2>that puts this like competitive you know, because we are apes.
<v Speaker 2>It puts this this competitive dynamic in it, like male chimps,
<v Speaker 2>and so you know, they all it gets weird, It
<v Speaker 2>gets really weird, and some people will try to Like
<v Speaker 2>Kayaway was telling me, people try to gank his spots,
<v Speaker 2>and it's just about gang his spot. It's like not
<v Speaker 2>about it's like getting like a bucket list. It's like
<v Speaker 2>a more aggressive form of birding. It's weird. But they're
<v Speaker 2>making fun of birders too, because that's something geriatrist. I'm not. Hey,
<v Speaker 2>they'll kill the messenger. I got nothing with birds. I
<v Speaker 2>like birds, you know, I mean, all this stuff is
<v Speaker 2>really just trying to find something else to look at.
<v Speaker 2>But besides the human tumor that makes you want to
<v Speaker 2>puke and die, which is what I feel most of
<v Speaker 2>the time. Well, he's the negative anyway. So but the
<v Speaker 2>Herper's man, there's some of them, you know, It's it's
<v Speaker 2>just one of those things. I think that at some
<v Speaker 2>point it becomes for some people, it becomes less about
<v Speaker 2>conservation and the dopamine rush you get from seeing wonderful
<v Speaker 2>things in beautiful places and more about like collecting, even
<v Speaker 2>if you're just collecting, uh, you know, photographs and like
<v Speaker 2>a bucket list, you know, type of I don't know,
<v Speaker 2>I don't get it, but I like seeing fucking snakes
<v Speaker 2>and cool lizards. So that's what we were there for.
<v Speaker 2>And if I can inject them with a little bit
<v Speaker 2>of botanical none Kyle, Kyle's already on a train, you know,
<v Speaker 2>he's already on it's getting he getting it on a train.
<v Speaker 2>He knows what he's looking for. I don't think any
<v Speaker 2>of them noticed the wonderful KLi chorda species we were
<v Speaker 2>seeing in these grasslands, these oak savannahs. It's sixty five
<v Speaker 2>hundred feet. God fuck, I can't take it. It was
<v Speaker 2>so nice. It's so fucking nice, and it's like just
<v Speaker 2>these little farming communities, you know, these little fucking farming communities,
<v Speaker 2>and everyone is chill, like just these fucking you know,
<v Speaker 2>they're they're maybe not rich, but they're just fucking It's
<v Speaker 2>like Steinbeckian in a way almost. And what's amazing is
<v Speaker 2>that they haven't fucked their landscape in the ass, right.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, there's development, there's agriculture. It's not like they're
<v Speaker 2>they have this innate respect for this innate indigenous respect
<v Speaker 2>in stewardship for nature because they're part indigenous, not like that.
<v Speaker 2>It's just it feels like going back in time, you know.
<v Speaker 2>In some places, I met a donkey I fell in
<v Speaker 2>love with, fucking such a nice guy. He had some
<v Speaker 2>weird scabs on his head I felt batter for and
<v Speaker 2>some the flies were kind of hanging out at but
<v Speaker 2>other that he was clean. And then I went and
<v Speaker 2>hung out with him. And some of the donkeys are dicks,
<v Speaker 2>like they'll they'll freak out, but this guy was super chill.
<v Speaker 2>And I went over there because I wanted to look
<v Speaker 2>at There was circle circocarpus mountain mahogany rose family Rose si,
<v Speaker 2>which is also micro rhizo, which I was surprised to
<v Speaker 2>know some members of the rose family also have nitrogen
<v Speaker 2>fixing bacteria in the genus Frankie in their roots. When
<v Speaker 2>were they go look at Circocarpus, the Malacoma les was
<v Speaker 2>going off, which is also in the rose family. And
<v Speaker 2>I just discovered yesterday that this and Malacomis can be
<v Speaker 2>very very variable, very variable you go up the higher elevations.
<v Speaker 2>It's got white pubescents on the undersides. Might even be
<v Speaker 2>a different species ovate leaves.
<v Speaker 3>Uh.
<v Speaker 2>And then the most distinctive thing about it, of course,
<v Speaker 2>are the flowers. At flowers in spraying, the fruits are
<v Speaker 2>ready now. The fruits are like this hot pink magenta
<v Speaker 2>with little orange slice shaped seeds in it. Probably the
<v Speaker 2>birds love it, I would assume. But that's another plant
<v Speaker 2>that's like got that'd be fucking great, like in West Texas,
<v Speaker 2>even in Austin, you know. And that's someone commented because
<v Speaker 2>I found Salvia darcii too, which is I'll get into
<v Speaker 2>that later. But someone had commented on a post Facebook
<v Speaker 2>is a toilet. I've heard the amount of men. Most
<v Speaker 2>it's always men that got triggered by the invasion biology
<v Speaker 2>post I did. Somebody had made the comment that you
<v Speaker 2>know they have a nursery in Austin, and they were like, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>Salvia darcii because it's common in Texas horticulture. But no one.
<v Speaker 2>You can't find pictures of it in habitat. You can't
<v Speaker 2>find herbarium records of it from habitat. There's three on
<v Speaker 2>signet Southwest Biodiversity dot org or sw Biodiversity dot org.
<v Speaker 2>Great site. There's pictures of it on sign it, but
<v Speaker 2>they're from a cultivated setting. It's really it's such a
<v Speaker 2>great species. It gets like three to four feet tall.
<v Speaker 2>It's hummingbird crack, smells like minty strawberries. And I found
<v Speaker 2>it growing in this limestone wash at sixty two hundred feet.
<v Speaker 2>The type specimen was reportedly collected from nine thousand feet
<v Speaker 2>west of Galleiana, which I don't know if I believe that.
<v Speaker 2>Basically on Sarah Poto c which is the big hill
<v Speaker 2>west of Gallean. It's a wonderful hill. Pinus hertweggii forest,
<v Speaker 2>a guy of a gentry eye, cool Euphorbia species, and
<v Speaker 2>the understory all sorts of wonderful things. Garya. You should
<v Speaker 2>go visit it some time. Wonderful cobblestate made a nice
<v Speaker 2>cobblestone path. It's probably three hundred years old. It goes
<v Speaker 2>all the way to the top, and then there's cast
<v Speaker 2>the lay of Bella up top. I think it's it Belle.
<v Speaker 2>It's the Dwarf one whatever that is. They got a
<v Speaker 2>Doppler system up there. You'll go take pictures in front
<v Speaker 2>of the doppler. Anyway, someone to comment that I stopped.
<v Speaker 2>I don't offer Salvia Darcie because it's not native, and
<v Speaker 2>I get where they're coming from. But it is native.
<v Speaker 2>It's native three hundred miles south. And if it's that
<v Speaker 2>close to lineage is close enough and it was probably
<v Speaker 2>here at some point last five hundred thousand years, this
<v Speaker 2>is my rationale, or relatives of it were, or it's
<v Speaker 2>and so you know, it's close enough that it's it's
<v Speaker 2>not going to be invasive, and it's I think the
<v Speaker 2>benefit to the wildlife especially is fucking great. It's close enough,
<v Speaker 2>it's not going to be invasive. It's basically the lineage
<v Speaker 2>is native to the region. You know, you got to
<v Speaker 2>again think beyond the span of a human life. Some
<v Speaker 2>strict native people may not want that, and I totally
<v Speaker 2>respect that. You know, some some native ecotype, but it's
<v Speaker 2>basically I mean, it was here at some point and
<v Speaker 2>relatives of it were all these all these again, all
<v Speaker 2>these plant communities all there are so many affinities with
<v Speaker 2>Central Texas and West Texas. And that's what I love seeing,
<v Speaker 2>is like West Texas, Central Texas, the Sierra Madre. They're
<v Speaker 2>basically you get you stop looking at those stupid geopolitical
<v Speaker 2>boundaries which are only a few hundred years old, and
<v Speaker 2>you look at a topographic map or a map of
<v Speaker 2>the watersheds and you're like, oh, these are the same.
<v Speaker 2>This is the same fucking place, right, And how have
<v Speaker 2>plant distributions shifted over time? Take that long term approach.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it was only fourteen thousand years that the
<v Speaker 2>mamoson in ground slots anyway, So but anyway, but this
<v Speaker 2>guy was like, well, now that I see where it grows,
<v Speaker 2>and it's really like, as the crowfly is not that far,
<v Speaker 2>maybe I'll start offering it. And it doesn't behave invasively
<v Speaker 2>in a garden. It doesn't. It's just a fucking great plant.
<v Speaker 2>It spreads rhizominously. It's probably in cultivation in California. I
<v Speaker 2>guess the guy who discovered it was a brit You
<v Speaker 2>discovered it in ninety one? Was it Compton? I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>There's a paper in Q magazine that I've been trying
<v Speaker 2>to get my hands on. I guess you can create
<v Speaker 2>a free account on Jaystore. Now they went ahead and
<v Speaker 2>did that because so many people were just stealing stealing
<v Speaker 2>papers on jay store anyway, via sy Hub. Did you
<v Speaker 2>know India banned sy Hub? What the fuck? It's okay
<v Speaker 2>they get off the hook because I got a friend
<v Speaker 2>who's in India now and she said that they're they
<v Speaker 2>basically fund science. There are people in India botanists getting
<v Speaker 2>paid to write floras. Can you imagine a country as
<v Speaker 2>stupid as the United States doing that? No way, now
<v Speaker 2>we're defunding science, buddy. But if you want to go
<v Speaker 2>into business, god damn, go into business and open up
<v Speaker 2>a franchise. That's the best thing you can do with
<v Speaker 2>your life. No offense to anyone that's opened up a franchise.
<v Speaker 2>I'm just saying it's you know, our values in the
<v Speaker 2>United States here are pretty deranged and twisted. So that's
<v Speaker 2>why we're creating this, you know, nation of dumb fatties.
<v Speaker 2>No offense to anybody who's I love the fatties. I'm
<v Speaker 2>just saying, you know, you eliminate walking in human movement
<v Speaker 2>from a landscape. That's just what's gonna happen. You know,
<v Speaker 2>you move to South Texas, you gained thirty pounds. Happened
<v Speaker 2>to me. But I've been doing a push ups, do
<v Speaker 2>one hundred push ups today, got the squats and everything.
<v Speaker 3>You know.
<v Speaker 2>The dogs look at me like I'm fucking nuts. They
<v Speaker 2>do that anyway. Jack's been puking a lot in the uh,
<v Speaker 2>the carpet. I think he's gonna go soon, poor guy.
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna be crying all over to fucking play, crying,
<v Speaker 2>cry all the time. You gotta let it out.
<v Speaker 1>Crying.
<v Speaker 2>Crying is the new shitting? No is it? Shitting is
<v Speaker 2>the new crying? What was the phrase people used to say?
<v Speaker 2>I don't know either way. I'm gonna be crying when
<v Speaker 2>he's gone. I'm gonna get a Jack tattoo. But he
<v Speaker 2>pukes every now and then, and you'll just find these
<v Speaker 2>like puddles of like dog bio. We don't need to
<v Speaker 2>get into it anyway. So, but Salvia darcii was discovered
<v Speaker 2>in ninety one. The paper that described it came out
<v Speaker 2>in nineteen ninety six. It's been misidentified on I Naturalist
<v Speaker 2>as Salvias SCHAFNERAI. And when you go to the tax
<v Speaker 2>on page on I Naturalists and you look at the photos,
<v Speaker 2>you realize all the photos that are quote research grade
<v Speaker 2>of Salvia DARCIAI aren't even all of the same species.
<v Speaker 2>There's Salvia fulgens in there. And it turns out Salvia
<v Speaker 2>schafter eye is a synonym of fulgens. I went down
<v Speaker 2>the wormhole last night looking at this. I mean, Salvia
<v Speaker 2>is a huge genus and in Mexico it's hyper diverse
<v Speaker 2>and there, I mean, it's such a big genus. There
<v Speaker 2>are entire sections and sub gen eera of this clade,
<v Speaker 2>and it's a fucking great claide. I got obsessed with
<v Speaker 2>the Mexican salvia is when I was living in the
<v Speaker 2>SF Bay Area, and so many of them because they
<v Speaker 2>grow in these high elevation kind of you know, really
<v Speaker 2>cool temperate forests in Mexico at mid elevations to high
<v Speaker 2>elevations six thousand to ten thousand feet there. They do
<v Speaker 2>well in the Bay Area climate and so they and
<v Speaker 2>they go fucking nuts over Selva's out there. I tell
<v Speaker 2>you it's if. To be a hummingbird in the Bay
<v Speaker 2>Area has got to be a wonderful thing because you've
<v Speaker 2>really got your choice of what, you know, what to
<v Speaker 2>eat for nectar. I mean, howeybirdsy bugs, of course, but
<v Speaker 2>they're also going for nectar, and there are so many
<v Speaker 2>fucking and then they plant a ton of aloes in
<v Speaker 2>the Bay area too. None of the aloes that I
<v Speaker 2>know of are very invasive, which is cool because as photolists,
<v Speaker 2>which is an allo family, is one of the worst
<v Speaker 2>invasives ever. I got into it with someone who turned
<v Speaker 2>out to be a permaculture bro, which is not surprising
<v Speaker 2>about the s photalist post I put up, because it's
<v Speaker 2>one of the worst invasions I've seen, probably as Photolis fistulosis.
<v Speaker 2>It's everywhere. It's everywhere in northern Mexico. My friend Carlos
<v Speaker 2>told me about it when I was first down there
<v Speaker 2>five years ago. He said, we saw some in the
<v Speaker 2>Sierra Madre in some of those uplifted fold thrust belt canyons,
<v Speaker 2>and he said, this is one of the worst invasive
<v Speaker 2>plants we have, and I realized, wow, it's not only
<v Speaker 2>one of the worst invasive plants you have. It's one
<v Speaker 2>of the worst invasive plants. It's invasive in South Africa,
<v Speaker 2>where there are already members of that family. South Africa's,
<v Speaker 2>of course, is still three thousand miles away from where
<v Speaker 2>as Photolis is native in like the Mediterranean region of Spain.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, but to be a hummingbird in the Bay
<v Speaker 2>Area to go back, I'm really leading you all over here.
<v Speaker 2>The fucking eighty of these bad today. But to be
<v Speaker 2>a hummingbird in the Bay Area has got to be
<v Speaker 2>a wonderful thing because there are so many different salvia species.
<v Speaker 2>Annie's annuals that it's which is a cool nursery in Richmond.
<v Speaker 2>I remember during COVID, they were just fucking punishing people.
<v Speaker 2>It's outdoors, and they were like making you wait because
<v Speaker 2>it's under new ownership now. They were like making you wait.
<v Speaker 2>And people were wearing masks outside and shit, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the Bay Area whatever, it's it's fucking it's like people stuff. Now,
<v Speaker 2>if you're doing crime, I could understand wearing a mask.
<v Speaker 2>There was a there was a you know, at one point,
<v Speaker 2>a Toyota Corolla rolled up with two large men inside
<v Speaker 2>and to steal my friend Travis's catalytic converter. And they
<v Speaker 2>had masks on, you know, like these little they looked
<v Speaker 2>like the last people that would be Oh yes, masking.
<v Speaker 2>Masking is a form of protection for both me and you.
<v Speaker 2>They had masks on the windows rolled down and they
<v Speaker 2>were it was in Oakland. They were like these big,
<v Speaker 2>burly dudes and they had those fucking COVID masks on.
<v Speaker 2>This was like two years post pandemic too, and uh.
<v Speaker 2>And I was like, oh, those guys are committing crime.
<v Speaker 2>And I just didn't think anything of it. And then
<v Speaker 2>I came back outside after I heard the saws all
<v Speaker 2>and I was like, I saw him driving off and
<v Speaker 2>I was like, yep, that's all right. Fuck that sucks.
<v Speaker 2>And then I went I told my friend Travers, I'm like, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they just jacked your catalytic converter. He had one of
<v Speaker 2>these like old ass toyotas that was lifted by some
<v Speaker 2>humble weed.
<v Speaker 1>Lord.
<v Speaker 2>He's not like, you know, he's not someone that would
<v Speaker 2>drive a lifted truck because they're pretty fucking stupid. But
<v Speaker 2>unless you're actually using it for, you know, what it's
<v Speaker 2>made for. But he bought it off some humble weed
<v Speaker 2>lord he had been working for and he came out
<v Speaker 2>and he was like fuck fuck And then like this
<v Speaker 2>rich anarchist kid that lived on the other side of
<v Speaker 2>the block, this is this is really this is Oakland
<v Speaker 2>and like the twenty twenties, you know, this is a
<v Speaker 2>horrible time for for Oakland. Was like, oh, wow, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I guess they really must have needed it. And they
<v Speaker 2>like they were like shaming us for fucking being pissed
<v Speaker 2>that this this crack edd died. Well I think he
<v Speaker 2>was a crackhead. He's on some I don't know crack.
<v Speaker 2>He was a little hefty for a cracket but you know,
<v Speaker 2>you said, yeah, I must have really needed it, Like
<v Speaker 2>why are you upset that they they like it's going
<v Speaker 2>to the collective because they really needed that kind of
<v Speaker 2>little converter. They you're kind of like occupying this neighborhood anyway.
<v Speaker 2>And they by the way, I'm from Arinda, which is
<v Speaker 2>a rich which is a rich suburb of Oakland. But
<v Speaker 2>it's always the fucking I mean, I peep a lot
<v Speaker 2>of people just fit into their It's it's predictable. That's
<v Speaker 2>what's always depressing. They're just predictable. You meet like the
<v Speaker 2>old fucking old Hankeys. They're gonna be you know, bitter,
<v Speaker 2>angry Trumpers who've been propaganized by Fox News. You meet
<v Speaker 2>the fucking you know, twenty four year old day of them.
<v Speaker 2>It's no offense. If that's any anybody here, I'm not.
<v Speaker 2>I'm just saying you still be friends. You know, they
<v Speaker 2>get the septum piercing and the blue hair and are
<v Speaker 2>going to be ranting about the same fucking talking points
<v Speaker 2>and buzzwords and it just gets depressing after awhile, can't
<v Speaker 2>you just does anyone just break the stereotype? Fuck? But anyway, yeah, so,
<v Speaker 2>uh but anyway, So Annie's annuals had a bunch of
<v Speaker 2>these Salvias species. They had a great fucking inventory of stuff,
<v Speaker 2>and so I would That's when I became. I fell
<v Speaker 2>in love with all these Mexican cloud forests, Salvias and Colombian.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lot of higher elevation Central American ones. Where's
<v Speaker 2>Wagniana KARWINSKII all these species, I think those might be Mexican,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, and if you go to the forests,
<v Speaker 2>the Hespirocyprus, Lusitanica forests, the Mexican cypress, true cypress not
<v Speaker 2>like taxodium, not like bald cypress. You go to these
<v Speaker 2>forests at high elevations, you will see a lot of
<v Speaker 2>wonderful Salvia species, my friend purple's reds blues. Some of
<v Speaker 2>them are fifteen feet tall, forming multi stemmed, you know,
<v Speaker 2>perennial shrubs. Just it's fucking wild. This genus has been
<v Speaker 2>extremely successful in the high elevation tropics, mid to high
<v Speaker 2>elevation tropics where there are a lot of hummingbirds and
<v Speaker 2>bumblebees as well. Bumble bees can keep warm at those
<v Speaker 2>higher elevations where the air is thinner and the night's
<v Speaker 2>cool off, but you know a lot of other solitary
<v Speaker 2>bees can't. And so the cool thing about some of
<v Speaker 2>these salvy is if you cut that they've got two statements.
<v Speaker 2>If you cut these corollas open, you could see this
<v Speaker 2>really cool lever mechanism that looks like the little bird dipper,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the little bird dipper, paperweight, little desk, novelty chingada,
<v Speaker 2>you know, you know what I'm talking about. And that's
<v Speaker 2>basically what they do. Is like the point of it is,
<v Speaker 2>they've got this lever in the back that looks like
<v Speaker 2>a paddle. This really weird shape to these statements. It's
<v Speaker 2>not just a simple strand. It's like a strand with
<v Speaker 2>like a boomerang in the the filament. It's like a
<v Speaker 2>filament with a boomerang two thirds of the way back.
<v Speaker 2>And that's triggered by something going in there, like a
<v Speaker 2>hummingbird beak or whatever. And at that point it causes
<v Speaker 2>the stamens, which are pointed up at a forty five
<v Speaker 2>grand agle, to come down and deposit pollen on the
<v Speaker 2>back of a pollinator's head. And and that's what they do,
<v Speaker 2>and you can it's a little lever mechanism. It's really cool.
<v Speaker 2>And it's the hummingbird ones have that especially so that
<v Speaker 2>when a hummingbird sticks its beak in there to get nectar,
<v Speaker 2>that it gets a dollop of pollen on its head.
<v Speaker 2>And then the style is up there too. And I
<v Speaker 2>assume this style probably matures at a different time to
<v Speaker 2>avoid a cross pollination. I think it's like a biffed
<v Speaker 2>style style and stigma, a biffid stigma, the Biffed Stigmas.
<v Speaker 2>It's a nice name for a band, you know, Biffed Stigmas.
<v Speaker 2>And so that that comes and deposits pollen on the
<v Speaker 2>hummingbird's head. And then that's how these things get paint
<v Speaker 2>it and it works great for them. And then they smell.
<v Speaker 2>They all smell fucking wonderful. Of course they smell wonderful
<v Speaker 2>to humans, but to things like deer, and it's they don't.
<v Speaker 2>They're not gonna like that. That's a that's a yucky
<v Speaker 2>that's a yucky taste for a deer. And I didn't.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't find Salvia darcii until the second until last day,
<v Speaker 2>and these were all, you know, we're going to snake spots, right.
<v Speaker 2>They were looking for Curdalus marulus, which is the tomal
<v Speaker 2>leap in rock rattlesnake, beautiful little guys uh And and
<v Speaker 2>they were you know, you can hold those with welding
<v Speaker 2>glove because they just the fangs aren't big enough. You
<v Speaker 2>would never do that with a snake that was larger,
<v Speaker 2>because these are these are tiny. These are tiny snakes, man,
<v Speaker 2>They're tiny rattlesnakes. They're like the size of massasaugas. And
<v Speaker 2>they were looking for Lampropeltus leonis, which I guess is
<v Speaker 2>a highly coveted species among herpers. And because of that,
<v Speaker 2>I put all my observations to private. I didn't even
<v Speaker 2>put them obscured, you know, because I didn't they the
<v Speaker 2>the herpers were asking me to put it on private.
<v Speaker 2>I said, fine, you know, this is your guys the trip.
<v Speaker 2>You just didn't were kind enough to invite me along.
<v Speaker 2>And it was it was fucking cool being down there too,
<v Speaker 2>because two of the three people I was with work
<v Speaker 2>at a zoo. Kyle is in organic chemists, so it
<v Speaker 2>was just, you know, they really knew their shit and
<v Speaker 2>they're just for the love the love of the uh
<v Speaker 2>of the animals. So it's a it's a you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's like going out with like really really knowledgeable mycologists.
<v Speaker 2>It's the same thing like going out with Alan and Mandy.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's I learn a lot about something I'm interested
<v Speaker 2>in but not obsessed over like I am with plants.
<v Speaker 2>But but anyway, so we're driving through, yeah, this canyon,
<v Speaker 2>and I saw on the other side of this rock
<v Speaker 2>wall it was a bunch of cobbles that were held
<v Speaker 2>together by that fencing material in the shape of a
<v Speaker 2>cube to basically protect the river when it rages, because
<v Speaker 2>during a hard rain, I'm sure they're dry. Arroyo just
<v Speaker 2>fucking rages, and the and it was up against the
<v Speaker 2>wall and the salvia. You know, it was like four
<v Speaker 2>feet tall, but the salvia was so tall. It was
<v Speaker 2>on the other side in the wash. It was so
<v Speaker 2>tall I could see the flowerheads. And I said, fuck,
<v Speaker 2>I was already looking for salvia Darcy. It was already
<v Speaker 2>on my radar. I said, holy fuck, stop the car.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I got out frothed at the mouth, and shit,
<v Speaker 2>they're laughing at me, and I just went I jumped
<v Speaker 2>the fucking thing. I was like, this is fucking salvia Darcy.
<v Speaker 2>I man, this is so cool to do you have
<v Speaker 2>any idea like this. There's no photos of this in situ.
<v Speaker 2>There's no photos of this in habitat. I don't know
<v Speaker 2>where the type specimen is that Compton collected, if it's
<v Speaker 2>at Q. If someone is at Q, can you look
<v Speaker 2>that up for me? Where the fuck? Where is the
<v Speaker 2>type specimen? And how did I mean? I've read the paper.
<v Speaker 2>You could read it on jstore in that issue of
<v Speaker 2>Q magazine, but there's no there's no like description of habitat,
<v Speaker 2>and it just you know, the type specimen occurs three
<v Speaker 2>thousand feet higher than this and nine thousand feet you
<v Speaker 2>know in Nuevo Leone is pretty fucking kai. It's high
<v Speaker 2>and chili and it's it doesn't seem like that. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I guess this could grow up there, but nine thousand
<v Speaker 2>feet is like those Pinus Hartweggii forests with loopin and
<v Speaker 2>a guy ve a gentry eye, and anyway, I almost
<v Speaker 2>don't believe it. I think maybe I don't know who
<v Speaker 2>the fuck knows, But either way, the guy who discovered this,
<v Speaker 2>we got some a bunch of seeds and introduced introduced
<v Speaker 2>it to horticulture, and salvia are all self fertile anyway,
<v Speaker 2>So you get one plant, you're gonna get a ton
<v Speaker 2>of seed. And so that's how this plant is everywhere
<v Speaker 2>and horticulture and then little known in the wild. But
<v Speaker 2>apparently this is a new location of it, and there
<v Speaker 2>are some other observations of it on eye naturalists that
<v Speaker 2>are misidentified as Salvias schafnarai. But Salvia schaffner i reportedly
<v Speaker 2>is only known from Hidalgo and San Luis Poto Sea,
<v Speaker 2>and you know farther west and south so and it
<v Speaker 2>has Salvias schafnari has bracts that subtend the flowers. Salvia
<v Speaker 2>darcy i doesn't you know, they're they're different, clearly different species.
<v Speaker 2>So there's a book on Salvi's what is it, uh, Salvius,
<v Speaker 2>A New World, A World of Salvius. I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I had it at some point. It's like a gardening
<v Speaker 2>book though it's not like a scientific monograph. But it's
<v Speaker 2>got some good info in it. It's got some good
<v Speaker 2>dope anyway. But so I said, you stop. So I
<v Speaker 2>jumped the fucking the fucking rock wall, looked at this thing,
<v Speaker 2>and there's honte Mania if you Maria folio grown there too,
<v Speaker 2>which is only known from the Big Bend area where
<v Speaker 2>it grows in Tallis, basically on the river. Mike Easton
<v Speaker 2>found that population and you have to hike through like
<v Speaker 2>brutal desert to find it, to get to it, and
<v Speaker 2>it said only at like two thousand feet elevation. It's
<v Speaker 2>fucking hot and uh. And it was growing with Berkelia lesciniata,
<v Speaker 2>which of course we get in very common pioneer species
<v Speaker 2>in uh in Texas, like from Junction area West, you know,
<v Speaker 2>loves limestone washes. It's all over, it's all over. Uh.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it's a really really common plant Upatoya tribe
<v Speaker 2>this Stevia tribe, and it was growing with what else
<v Speaker 2>was there? Oh yeah, Chilopsis, which was kind of weird chill.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, Chilopsis is so you know, it occupies a
<v Speaker 2>ride of different habitats from like really hot desert washes
<v Speaker 2>to where we were, which was like six thousand foot
<v Speaker 2>elevation in these pine forests, and all the pines and
<v Speaker 2>oaks are draped, and Tilansia oose and the oidies, which
<v Speaker 2>is just fucking It's such a cool such a create
<v Speaker 2>such a cool habitat, you know, and that Telansia probably
<v Speaker 2>helps retain a lot of moisture and create this microclimate.
<v Speaker 2>The oak diversity was just fucking nuts. There were so
<v Speaker 2>many species of oaks, and I mean oaks can already
<v Speaker 2>be so phenotypically plastic, you know, the same species can
<v Speaker 2>have drastically different kinds of leaves. Good luck trying to
<v Speaker 2>figure out you know, I don't know. It's one of
<v Speaker 2>those places that you could do research there for fucking
<v Speaker 2>three months, like collecting herbarium specimens, taking photographs, keeping notebooks
<v Speaker 2>of locations, descriptions of habitat, and you would still be
<v Speaker 2>scratching the surface. So but anyway, yeah, but I was.
<v Speaker 2>I was totally excited to see that Salbi. I couldn't
<v Speaker 2>fucking believe it, man, I was. I didn't think I
<v Speaker 2>would ever see it and sit to that's nice. One
<v Speaker 2>of my friends just texted me he heard I was
<v Speaker 2>gonna be in Chicago. He said, hey, you filthy prick,
<v Speaker 2>are you gonna come see me when when you get
<v Speaker 2>in town. He's nice, you know, he thought. I like
<v Speaker 2>it when he talks to me. He comes with some
<v Speaker 2>really creative names to call me. It's you know, we
<v Speaker 2>known each other a long time. He's living on SSI
<v Speaker 2>in a fucking nursing home, even though he's like forty four.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know what his deal is. He can't function
<v Speaker 2>in a real world. You know. He's a writer and
<v Speaker 2>uh and I know him from I knew him from
<v Speaker 2>military school. We were both thrown in military school together.
<v Speaker 2>You know, some of the kids ended up there by
<v Speaker 2>the courts. I got kicked out, I got asked not
<v Speaker 2>to come back after two years, which I think that's
<v Speaker 2>I'm proud of that, because it's a fucking reform school.
<v Speaker 2>If you can find a way. It's like getting asked
<v Speaker 2>not to come back to jail. It's like like jail
<v Speaker 2>is already for bad kids. If you can find a
<v Speaker 2>way to be so bad that they won't let you
<v Speaker 2>back into the jail, now you really, you know anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so I'm gonna go. I'm gonna visit when he and
<v Speaker 2>she's on the north side. He's living in a fucking
<v Speaker 2>nursing homes andwhere on the north side. It's all you
<v Speaker 2>never know how he's doing. Sometimes he's good, sometimes he's rough.
<v Speaker 2>I think he's generally kind of rough, but he's had
<v Speaker 2>a hard life anyway. Uh yeah, So anyway, I'm the
<v Speaker 2>one of the first spots going back. We're getting away
<v Speaker 2>from Salviatarcia here, going back. Once we finally ascended the mountains,
<v Speaker 2>past the staircases of limestone that are the inverted stratigraphic
<v Speaker 2>layers of the Sierra Madre Oriental, we ended up. We're
<v Speaker 2>at six thousand feet and we're just through these driving
<v Speaker 2>through these farming communities and and we you know, you
<v Speaker 2>start seeing a lot of it's like a mixture of
<v Speaker 2>West Texas flora higher elevation West Texas flora. Nice cool breeze,
<v Speaker 2>blowing temperatures are perfect. Sun's a little intense because you're
<v Speaker 2>you know, at the mid elevations, like eighteen hundre two
<v Speaker 2>thousand meters and we stopped at some kind of rundown farmhouse.
<v Speaker 2>It was like someone's property and and uh, the guy,
<v Speaker 2>the property owner rolled up on us three days later,
<v Speaker 2>and it's like anywhere in I school. He's just like,
<v Speaker 2>what are you doing? Super nice, not freaked out. Explained
<v Speaker 2>to him, we're looking for snakes. I got a big camera. Man,
<v Speaker 2>it's obvious, like what we're doing. And he's like, oh, okay, cool,
<v Speaker 2>you know, just in Spanish, and he's okay, cool, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I just you know, just curious. And he said there's
<v Speaker 2>a lot of snakes here, and we're like, yeah, you know,
<v Speaker 2>we like to photograph them. And I told him I'm
<v Speaker 2>a botanist. It's their thing. Really nice guy didn't tell
<v Speaker 2>us to get off whatever, and and yeah it was chill.
<v Speaker 2>It was fucking chill. But it's funny because these are
<v Speaker 2>like relatively degraded areas. They're not places I would be
<v Speaker 2>going to look for plants necessarily, but I still find
<v Speaker 2>a lot of great shit there. And this was just
<v Speaker 2>a it was a cleared area for a house and
<v Speaker 2>a small pasture and then the the the monte, the scrubland,
<v Speaker 2>pinion woodland was you know, just just yonder. It was
<v Speaker 2>a right on the edge of the property, and I
<v Speaker 2>saw Salvia cama driorites. Speaking of salvias, which is again
<v Speaker 2>I think it only occurs in the United States in
<v Speaker 2>the Chizos Mountains. But it's a fucking pioneer species. I
<v Speaker 2>did not know that it's a pioneer species. It is common,
<v Speaker 2>it's everywhere. It's got, you know, small blue ovate leaves.
<v Speaker 2>They smell fucking delightful opposite, of course, because it's a salvia.
<v Speaker 2>It's not alternate leaves, its opposite. You always remember that
<v Speaker 2>when you're so and these little blue flowers. And it's
<v Speaker 2>actually planted somewhat commonly, I mean among the small group
<v Speaker 2>of native plant people that live in West Texas. I
<v Speaker 2>think it's planted in the Austin area too, would probably
<v Speaker 2>do great there. It likes limestone, it can take the heat.
<v Speaker 2>I've got it in West Texas, and it grows like
<v Speaker 2>a fucking weed once it's established and spreads rhizominously, gets
<v Speaker 2>about eighteen inches tall if that maybe like twelve inches
<v Speaker 2>tall with the leaves, but then with escape with these
<v Speaker 2>beautiful blue, small blue salvia flowers on it gets a
<v Speaker 2>ten inches tall and it you know, you could propagate
<v Speaker 2>it by cutting really easily. There's definitely something that should
<v Speaker 2>be planted more. You know. I just hope that there's
<v Speaker 2>someday I can roll into like a bleakue strip mall
<v Speaker 2>in the Austin or San Antonio area and see plants
<v Speaker 2>that I know from habitat, from these wonderful places that
<v Speaker 2>I drink up like a tall glass of medicine. That
<v Speaker 2>will be the antidote for when I'm driving through the
<v Speaker 2>ugly shitholes, the ugly commercial automobile slum shitholes that constitute
<v Speaker 2>most of human development in places like Texas and many
<v Speaker 2>other places in the United States. So you know, it'll
<v Speaker 2>ease the pain a little bit of having to be there,
<v Speaker 2>because really I start I start dying. I start dying
<v Speaker 2>on the inside, having you know, contractions of my heart.
<v Speaker 2>I start getting heart palpitations, I start getting you know,
<v Speaker 2>my blood pressure raises. I'm angry. I just hate there's
<v Speaker 2>someone trying to sell me some shit I don't want.
<v Speaker 2>At every turn, there's you know, ambulance chasers telling me
<v Speaker 2>they're going to make me millions if I get in
<v Speaker 2>a car. I mean, it's just it's a horrible, horrible place.
<v Speaker 2>It's just the lowest common denominator attributes of humanity, just
<v Speaker 2>so much wasted potential in these places. It's just the
<v Speaker 2>consumer farm. Okay, let's move on. I won't. I'll probably
<v Speaker 2>mention another nineteen times before the podcast is over, but
<v Speaker 2>my fucking hate for these But it's the death of art,
<v Speaker 2>the death of biology, the death of ecology, the death
<v Speaker 2>of one. Okay, anyway, sorry, So we're at this clear
<v Speaker 2>pasture with this kind of rundown house. There's an Opunthia
<v Speaker 2>species that I never bothered identifying, but it's fucking beautiful
<v Speaker 2>and it's got these big red fruits on it, and
<v Speaker 2>and what else did we have there? There was? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that salvy was everywhere. There's scrub oaks. I think it
<v Speaker 2>was Corcus striatula striatula, which kind of looks like Corcus moriana,
<v Speaker 2>which is another like scrub oak. The you know, two
<v Speaker 2>to four feet well six feet in some cases that
<v Speaker 2>you encounter in West Texas. Pubesten's on the leaves and
<v Speaker 2>the acorns on this Corcus striatula have extriations on them.
<v Speaker 2>Very small little acorns. I wonder if you can eat
<v Speaker 2>them like some of those scrub oaks have, you know,
<v Speaker 2>very delicious, edible acorns that don't even need to be treated.
<v Speaker 2>I know Qurcus vaccinioides or was it Vexcina foia, whatever
<v Speaker 2>the one is that grows in the mountains of northern California,
<v Speaker 2>like the Klamath Mountains, et cetera. Is you can just
<v Speaker 2>eat those right off the right, off the tree or
<v Speaker 2>the bush rather. But I was stoked to see that
<v Speaker 2>salva everywhere. That was really surprising. Again, I didn't know
<v Speaker 2>it was a pioneer species. It's everywhere. It was fucking
<v Speaker 2>everywhere at these elevations. And another common plant that we
<v Speaker 2>encountered a lot which also had opposite leaves, but was
<v Speaker 2>in the Joe pieweed tribe, the Stevia tribe the jupatore
<v Speaker 2>was Agoratum corumbosum, which another be another great candidate for
<v Speaker 2>Texas native plant horticulture. It's it's got it looks like
<v Speaker 2>a conoclinium, kind of like purple flowers, very very common,
<v Speaker 2>very abundant. There was berlandierra like rotta. There the chocolate daisy,
<v Speaker 2>which is another common it's related to Sylphium that was
<v Speaker 2>all over. Dichondra argentea, the little podifoot whatever that I
<v Speaker 2>think is the name, which is stupid common. It's a
<v Speaker 2>pody foot. It looks like a body foot. It's like
<v Speaker 2>a groundcover convolvulece member morning glory family member. And then
<v Speaker 2>there was a really cool member of the Oroban case,
<v Speaker 2>the paintbrush family that I saw fucking everywhere, and this
<v Speaker 2>was really cool. This was cool because you can tell
<v Speaker 2>some of those hemi parasitic members of the paintbrush family
<v Speaker 2>Oroban case. I think everything in oroban case, except for
<v Speaker 2>some of the more basal genera which is not very
<v Speaker 2>men's like two or three, are parasitic. They're either hemi parasitic,
<v Speaker 2>which means they produce chlorophyll, but they also have historial
<v Speaker 2>roots hostorial roots knights that tap in to their host
<v Speaker 2>plant or their hollow parasites, meaning they don't produce any
<v Speaker 2>chlorophyll all their obligate parasitic species. But there was this plant,
<v Speaker 2>Simeria scabra s. E. Y ri a tiny yellow flowers.
<v Speaker 2>It almost looks like like an Hermannia from Malvasi. The
<v Speaker 2>flowers do like they're probably I don't know, I would
<v Speaker 2>say a centimeter long, but you know, it's very obviously
<v Speaker 2>not malvasi. The leaves are kind of lanceolate, linear, fascicled,
<v Speaker 2>and it's got this multi stem, you know, herbaceous perennial
<v Speaker 2>to maybe two feet tall. And when you look at
<v Speaker 2>the the flowers are yellow, the kalses are red. When
<v Speaker 2>you look at the foliage, you realize, wow, this looks
<v Speaker 2>like Pendicularis or paintbrush or both of which are genera
<v Speaker 2>and orobanc case that produce very red foliage anthocyanin rich foliage.
<v Speaker 2>And of this, it turns out, of course, is a
<v Speaker 2>synapomorphy or a trait. I don't know if it's a snapmorph,
<v Speaker 2>if it's a trait that you commonly encounter in the
<v Speaker 2>paintbrush family. And it's directly tied to the parasitism, the
<v Speaker 2>parasitism of the family and the fact that these plants, well,
<v Speaker 2>these genera at least like Pendicularis and Castillaa and Symeria,
<v Speaker 2>while they're photosynthetic and they produce chlorophyll, they're not a
<v Speaker 2>chlorophylis lacking chlorophyll. They're photosynthetic, they can produce some of
<v Speaker 2>their own chlorophyl. They're partially autotrophic. It's because of that
<v Speaker 2>parasitism that they're able to produce these red pigments which
<v Speaker 2>grant them. You know, these anthocyanins can be expensive to produce,
<v Speaker 2>but when you're stealing and tapped into a host plan anyway,
<v Speaker 2>it's not that big of a deal. It doesn't take
<v Speaker 2>that much. And so it's a direct trait of their parasitism.
<v Speaker 2>So sometimes you know, and there's other there's other lineages
<v Speaker 2>that kind of do this, Like there's some members of
<v Speaker 2>there's some partially parasitic, partially mycoheterotrophic members of gentianac that
<v Speaker 2>I believe do this as well, that you'll encounter in
<v Speaker 2>the neotropics at higher elevations. Being hemi parasitic means that
<v Speaker 2>you're acquiring a surplus of water and minerals, quote for
<v Speaker 2>free from your host. Right, so you face a different
<v Speaker 2>set of constraints. It's not water and minerals, it's now
<v Speaker 2>it's just carbon you can't get you're not getting carbon
<v Speaker 2>from your host. Some of these hemi parasites are not
<v Speaker 2>or not enough, so the limiting factor is no longer
<v Speaker 2>water and minerals. But it's carbon, and so the plant
<v Speaker 2>needs carbon to build its structures, which it gets through photosynthesis.
<v Speaker 2>So it's it's to build it to make its own food.
<v Speaker 2>It's getting that carbon through photosynthesis. The water and minerals
<v Speaker 2>aren't a problem. And because you're using a hostorial route
<v Speaker 2>to tap into a host, you don't need to build
<v Speaker 2>an extensive root system. But you're limited in carbon, and
<v Speaker 2>so what do you do? I mean, the chlorophyll, you know,
<v Speaker 2>is obviously how you're getting the carbon, but you the
<v Speaker 2>chlorophyll has constraints too, And if you're growing in somewhat
<v Speaker 2>exposed places like many casteleia are, you've got to use
<v Speaker 2>a sunscreen. You've got to use some sort of sunscreen
<v Speaker 2>to make the car the photosynthesis more efficient than prevent
<v Speaker 2>the chlorophyll from the grating from sunburn, et cetera. And
<v Speaker 2>that is where the red pigments come in. Because the
<v Speaker 2>red pigments are basically plant sunscreen. They're stress pigments, right.
<v Speaker 2>They can also protect against cold, and some species like
<v Speaker 2>Cryptomarria japonica or other conifers Junipers virginiana does that as well.
<v Speaker 2>Eastern red cedar produces anthocyoni pigments. You know, if you look,
<v Speaker 2>Eastern red seed are very common. It's it's a ruteral
<v Speaker 2>plant in in the Midwest and in parts of the
<v Speaker 2>East coast. And if you look at them in winter
<v Speaker 2>and other members of cooper Sacy as well, you'll see
<v Speaker 2>they turn kind of an orangeish red. Why is that?
<v Speaker 2>So those red pigments help protect against both sunburn and
<v Speaker 2>freeze damage. There's stress pigments. They're protective pigments, and so
<v Speaker 2>that's why. And but more so they can be metabolically
<v Speaker 2>expensive to make, and so that's why you know you're
<v Speaker 2>gonna produce those to protect the nitrogen rich chlorophyll beneath
<v Speaker 2>from photo inhibition, from sunburn, protected from the grade. And
<v Speaker 2>so that's what these plants are doing. And because they're
<v Speaker 2>not limited in how much they can produce, because again
<v Speaker 2>they're stealing it from their host plant. Like paintbrush, castallias
<v Speaker 2>technical usually parasitizes grasses, particular parasitize shrubs. What is Samaria
<v Speaker 2>parasitize Sameria probably you know hemi parasitizes grasses or nearby shrubs.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't really see any large shrubs growing around it.
<v Speaker 2>But because you're parasitizing, you could just create these these
<v Speaker 2>anthocionin pigments. No big deal. It's it's not as you're
<v Speaker 2>not as limited as a non parasitic plant. And so
<v Speaker 2>that's why a lot of them can flush red. It's
<v Speaker 2>again it's protection for the chlorophyll, and it makes them
<v Speaker 2>much more photosynthetically efficient. And so that's a good giveaway
<v Speaker 2>that a plant is hemi parasitic. If it's got the
<v Speaker 2>flower structure of ooral bank case and it's got this ripe,
<v Speaker 2>you can automatically not okay, that's probably oorbank case, I
<v Speaker 2>mean the flower structure alone, but definitely it's it's interesting
<v Speaker 2>to know that trade paintbrush does the same thing. Look
<v Speaker 2>at castilla, look a look at paintbrush. They got the
<v Speaker 2>same fucking red tones to the pigment. But in paintbrush again,
<v Speaker 2>some of those red bracts are also acting as attracted
<v Speaker 2>It's like red bracts at subten the flowers. They're also
<v Speaker 2>acting as as flags for pollinators like hummingbirds and butterflies
<v Speaker 2>to make those those flowers more efficient, but not efficient,
<v Speaker 2>more conspicuous. Excuse me, So anyway, after this, after this, uh,
<v Speaker 2>this guy's this gentleman's land that we were looking for
<v Speaker 2>stuff on just flipping tin flipping checks. It's sheets of
<v Speaker 2>sheet metal and blogs and other stuff looking for snacks.
<v Speaker 2>We didn't find any there. We went to another spot
<v Speaker 2>that was kind of along this cutty road that paralleled
<v Speaker 2>a rock out cropping for a good length of it,
<v Speaker 2>and I saw Mirandiella, a species of Mirandiella vine, or
<v Speaker 2>was it I think it was Mirandia. Actually it was
<v Speaker 2>a fucking stunner though, the big red, big purple flowers,
<v Speaker 2>you know, Morandiella. Of course we get in Texas. The
<v Speaker 2>snap drag advibe is the common name for it. It's
<v Speaker 2>actually a great fucking vine. This was. This was large though.
<v Speaker 2>This was a large flowered vine growing directly out of
<v Speaker 2>a crack in a limestone cliff face. And this whole
<v Speaker 2>rock out cropping was cool. It was covered in there
<v Speaker 2>was a ringium, lounge of folium relative of rattlesnake master
<v Speaker 2>looks like, you know, it looks like a bromeliad almost,
<v Speaker 2>and then it's got a scape coming up from it,
<v Speaker 2>leave long you know, rosettes of long leaves. It's like
<v Speaker 2>a bromeliad or a kind of floppy a gave companula
<v Speaker 2>or Tundafolia was abundant. There penstemen species that the God
<v Speaker 2>still not sure I couldn't find it. It'll go through
<v Speaker 2>the The way I identify a lot of this stuff
<v Speaker 2>is going through the checklist, the Nueva aon checklist. I'll
<v Speaker 2>put a link in this podcast episode description to a
<v Speaker 2>Google Drive link to the floor of Nuevo aon checklist.
<v Speaker 2>The taxonomy is bad on some of it, like OORL
<v Speaker 2>bank Casey. You know that that's got way less species
<v Speaker 2>in this checklist because it wasn't the checkl is from
<v Speaker 2>like two thousand and five, so a lot of that
<v Speaker 2>shit was in scrofulary ac. It hadn't been placed in
<v Speaker 2>orbit in cac yet. There's you gotta kind of, you know,
<v Speaker 2>genera names are different. You gotta kinda you won't be
<v Speaker 2>able to find things as easily. You have to kind
<v Speaker 2>of remind yourself what the old family they were grouped
<v Speaker 2>in is. But it's still helpful. So I would go
<v Speaker 2>through this and I know something as a family or genus,
<v Speaker 2>and I would just have to check everything. And that's
<v Speaker 2>kind of what I prefer. I prefer using checklists because
<v Speaker 2>some floras are just fucking garbage and They're just a headache.
<v Speaker 2>They're a headache to sort through because what is a flora?
<v Speaker 2>It doesn't give you a description of habitat I mean
<v Speaker 2>some do, some really good ones do. It doesn't give
<v Speaker 2>you description of where this thing grows, the elevations that's at.
<v Speaker 2>It just tells you these whatever whatever descriptive factor is
<v Speaker 2>that someone who's working in an iparium and may not
<v Speaker 2>get out much and it's only looking at or barium
<v Speaker 2>specimens and doesn't know the habit tet. It's just based
<v Speaker 2>on what they are able to tell from characters they're
<v Speaker 2>able to see in the herbarium. So it's not always helpful.
<v Speaker 2>And sometimes the traits are you know, not in season,
<v Speaker 2>they're phenologically discordant. When you're out there in the field
<v Speaker 2>looking at it, like you need to reference seed size
<v Speaker 2>or or whatever. You'll know something's an areagonum, but it's
<v Speaker 2>you have to be able to have flowers on you
<v Speaker 2>don't have flowers on it. You know the and the
<v Speaker 2>you know the leaves will be you know, it'll say
<v Speaker 2>one to five one to five centimeters and then the
<v Speaker 2>next species that it's closely related to is like two
<v Speaker 2>to six centimeters. Fucking phone call sorry, so you know
<v Speaker 2>it'll it'll say it's you get my point. I mentioned
<v Speaker 2>this before the floor, A dichotomist key is not always
<v Speaker 2>the most helpful. The checklist is helpful. And then going
<v Speaker 2>through if you know something's already in a genus or family,
<v Speaker 2>which again this is when knowing systematics and plant textonomy
<v Speaker 2>come in and being familiar with the traits of a
<v Speaker 2>genus or family, and then you can just go through
<v Speaker 2>and check. You know, some checklists. What checklist was I
<v Speaker 2>using that had just had elevation descriptions in it, like
<v Speaker 2>it was a checklist and it gave you know, arranged
<v Speaker 2>by family and then genus, and then it would describe,
<v Speaker 2>you know, what elevations something occurred at. Was it Costa Rica?
<v Speaker 2>I think it was Costa Rica. That was fucking great.
<v Speaker 2>And it's not always right with the elevations. There's you know,
<v Speaker 2>sometimes it's wrong. You'll find something growing higher or lower
<v Speaker 2>then it's listed in the in the checklist, but Jesus
<v Speaker 2>Christ it was, you know, it really helps narrow it down.
<v Speaker 2>So a checklists all the way, and they're much easier
<v Speaker 2>to reference, and they're shorter too. You get a PDF
<v Speaker 2>of a checklist on your phone or something, and then
<v Speaker 2>you'll you know, again, you might have to go cross
<v Speaker 2>reference it with or barium collections on a website or
<v Speaker 2>something and see. But it's got it so much easier
<v Speaker 2>than using floras. Man, they could just be a fucking
<v Speaker 2>pain in the ass, because again, it's all it depends
<v Speaker 2>on the flora. Maybe it's written by some desk jockey
<v Speaker 2>that doesn't get out much, no offense to them. Sometimes
<v Speaker 2>it's written by someone who's very has an intimate familiarity
<v Speaker 2>with the plants of a region and the habitats that
<v Speaker 2>they occur in. You know, you get the ladder, you're
<v Speaker 2>that's great, You get the former, You're fucked. Okay. So anyway,
<v Speaker 2>so we're going along this road cut seeing a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of interesting shit and I'm just I'm just waiting. I'm
<v Speaker 2>just like, god, I just need the look of it.
<v Speaker 2>We're gone by it and try I can't get out
<v Speaker 2>the car and I'm like, ah, fuck, I need to
<v Speaker 2>see it. And then we finally park in this pine
<v Speaker 2>and oak forest. It was just so beautiful. Rich Duff.
<v Speaker 2>On the ground, there's fucking mushrooms everywhere. The fungal diversity
<v Speaker 2>here is insane. Wish I had Alan and Mandy with me.
<v Speaker 2>I just there was hypomyces everywhere. That parasitic mushroom. What
<v Speaker 2>is that is it? Is it the lobster mushroom? Ushold?
<v Speaker 2>I should notice I think it is a lobster mushroom. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it is. It's it's a fungus that parasitizes Russolas or Lactarius,
<v Speaker 2>both of which are micro rhyzels. So because of these
<v Speaker 2>pines and oaks, all of which are draped in telanzioos
<v Speaker 2>and theoides and covered in cool bromeliad other talanzias, and
<v Speaker 2>and you know they were telansi it was nets higher up,
<v Speaker 2>but on the trunks they were covered in pleopeltis, and
<v Speaker 2>you know the fern and uh and and other like
<v Speaker 2>rosette forming Talanzia species. And so I mean, just looking
<v Speaker 2>at the mushrooms alone, I was going nuts. It was God,
<v Speaker 2>it was fucking great. There was Chaptalia texano there, which
<v Speaker 2>is it's a mutissioid composite, so subfamily mutissioid e. It's
<v Speaker 2>got the different shaped floor. It corollas mostly South American clay,
<v Speaker 2>but of course it's we Chaptalia trixis Acordia. Those are
<v Speaker 2>the members that we tend to get in Texas in
<v Speaker 2>different places and also throughout the Southwest into California. Lots
<v Speaker 2>of cool accordias. And it was a really cool accordia.
<v Speaker 2>And what is the time where people do the shove
<v Speaker 2>crystals up their asks? What is it town? Oh Hi? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>there's a lot of cool accordios in the woodlands around Ohi.
<v Speaker 2>I remember. It's where the the you know, the ladies
<v Speaker 2>were the wide brimmed hats and they people do herbal
<v Speaker 2>colonics and stuff, you know, and it's like fucking five
<v Speaker 2>thousand dollars to rent the room the size of a closet.
<v Speaker 2>What is it? What is OHI? What do I do
<v Speaker 2>over there? They got stuff over there. You can get
<v Speaker 2>like a nine dollars latte and a fucking get slapped
<v Speaker 2>around by someone where with the oak leaves, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>you pay them three hundred dollars. They slap you around,
<v Speaker 2>They do some chiatzu on your back and stick a
<v Speaker 2>crystal up your ass and slap you around, send you
<v Speaker 2>on your way out the door. Ah, there you go.
<v Speaker 2>Your chakra's fucking fine for the next two weeks. Come
<v Speaker 2>back in two weeks, I'll charge you double fucking wow. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I think really cool. It's fucking great. I love a high.
<v Speaker 2>I think amitting All right, Uh well, let's see why
<v Speaker 2>I'm going through my fungal photos. Oh, I had this
<v Speaker 2>nice little bull eat. I found a cute little bully.
<v Speaker 2>I took a little sliver of it, dried it out,
<v Speaker 2>and I was using the Alan Rockefeller method of dehydrating specimens.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you put them on the dash with the
<v Speaker 2>defrosters blowing, which makes the fucking it's it's just makes
<v Speaker 2>it ridiculously hot. But you know that's okay. You need
<v Speaker 2>that airflow and this bully. Yeah, I took a specimen.
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna send it to the FUNDUS because they've got
<v Speaker 2>that guy. Where's that guy, he's in Ohio. You could
<v Speaker 2>send him mushrooms that are connected to an EYG naturalist
<v Speaker 2>observation and he'll sequence the DNA and so perhaps we
<v Speaker 2>might have a new species. I don't know, because a
<v Speaker 2>lot of stuff is undescribed still, or it's just lumped
<v Speaker 2>in with European species and the same genus because it's
<v Speaker 2>just that's assumed what it is. And again with you're
<v Speaker 2>somewhat limited, and how how much you can examine the
<v Speaker 2>fruit of a fungus, which is the mushroom, you know,
<v Speaker 2>So there's the characteristics. There might be drastic differences in
<v Speaker 2>DNA or stark differences in DNA sequences, but you can't
<v Speaker 2>really see in the fruiting bodies, or you can somewhat
<v Speaker 2>see in the fruiting bodies, but they're subtle. Again, my my,
<v Speaker 2>after seeing some plants and seeing just different ecotypes different,
<v Speaker 2>I've really loosened up my idea of what a species is.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's why I can't even take it seriously
<v Speaker 2>in some cases. And I just you know, I just
<v Speaker 2>get something down to genus if I'm out there in
<v Speaker 2>the field identifying stuff for a video or some because
<v Speaker 2>there's just you know, there's there's so much variation, and
<v Speaker 2>every different habitat is sculpting via natural selection a different
<v Speaker 2>ecotype or potentially a different species. So who knows, man,
<v Speaker 2>it's you know, it could be cryptic species. There could anyway.
<v Speaker 2>And in this woodland, once you got outside of the
<v Speaker 2>woodland in the cleared areas, there was a gave Montana
<v Speaker 2>everywhere too, which is a great fucking species. Just so beautiful. Ah,
<v Speaker 2>the waxy imprints left by the prior round of leaves,
<v Speaker 2>you know, on the underside of these massive two foot
<v Speaker 2>long foot wide leaf blades. You know that just that
<v Speaker 2>waxy toothed margin that's left is the they're all coming
<v Speaker 2>out of bud. You know. I'd love to see a
<v Speaker 2>time lapse photo of and agave growing. It's got to
<v Speaker 2>be beautiful the way that the leaves. I wonder if
<v Speaker 2>they come out in a spiral or what like the
<v Speaker 2>way that they unfurl from bud. Anyway, there was Ipomea
<v Speaker 2>or azabensis that was a common ipomea everywhere. There was
<v Speaker 2>really cool seatums. I think just got it. I think
<v Speaker 2>one of them just got listed as righty eye, but
<v Speaker 2>ide'da is right eye, but I don't think it is.
<v Speaker 2>And there's cool likeen in Tolanzia on everything not though
<v Speaker 2>scored and bivalve was there too, And anyway, and assaustrates
<v Speaker 2>all limestone, it's limestone talus everywhere here. Glandelaria there was
<v Speaker 2>like a hot pink Glandelaria that was abundant here as well.
<v Speaker 2>There was an abundance of Stevia's species. I think it
<v Speaker 2>was Stevias serrata, and then there was a pink one. Again.
<v Speaker 2>I haven't I haven't gone through the checklist yet and
<v Speaker 2>seen what's there. What's listed is growing in Nueva Leone.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, the stevia is they can look like agritinas,
<v Speaker 2>but the capitulum, the flower head generally only has four
<v Speaker 2>to five florets, and Stevia it has fewer florets. And
<v Speaker 2>then they just got a gestalt to him. I think
<v Speaker 2>Stevia serata occurs in West Texas too, but it's somewhat limited.
<v Speaker 2>It's in the higher reaches of the Davis Mountains which
<v Speaker 2>are slowly drying out and dying. There was a spot
<v Speaker 2>we went to later, and this is what blew my
<v Speaker 2>mind is at one of these locations, I think it was.
<v Speaker 2>We were at seven thousand feet now in these incredible
<v Speaker 2>can you hear my neighbor's dogs park and he fucking
<v Speaker 2>never lets him in.
<v Speaker 4>It's horrible.
<v Speaker 2>I gave one of them a fucking h flea medication
<v Speaker 2>the other day because people just torture the shit out
<v Speaker 2>of dogs down here. It's sad, and I don't think
<v Speaker 2>they think it's cure. I think I think it's just normal.
<v Speaker 2>It's fucking horrible anyway, really makes me mad. And this anyway,
<v Speaker 2>that first pineoak force is where he found the first
<v Speaker 2>uh you know, Crodalus marulus and some of the other
<v Speaker 2>cool say I think there was a Sciloporus miner. We
<v Speaker 2>saw there as well, tons of Michael Riizel fungus diversity,
<v Speaker 2>just fucking mind blowing. Anyway, the next spot we went
<v Speaker 2>to was up at seven thousand feet and this was
<v Speaker 2>like beautiful. I mean, you could have thought you were
<v Speaker 2>in some place in the rocky mountains, like these undulating
<v Speaker 2>hills valleys that are grasslands flanked by like pinion oak woodland.
<v Speaker 2>And uh, there was fucking Monarta, Citrio Dora there, Monarda
<v Speaker 2>and Solidago. I mean there were these lineages that you
<v Speaker 2>expect to see generally the same longitude, but maybe ten
<v Speaker 2>or you know, fifteen or twenty degrees latitude further north.
<v Speaker 2>At fifteen, I guess it was fucking wild to see.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't expect to see Monarda here, you know, these
<v Speaker 2>these and god that it was just beautiful clouds, perfect temperature,
<v Speaker 2>just fucking wonderful. Oh, there was penstem In leonensis there too.
<v Speaker 2>Penstem In the Nuevo leon penstemen just fucking oh god,
<v Speaker 2>it was such a Again, it's like drinking a tall
<v Speaker 2>glass of medicine. Just you remember these places when you
<v Speaker 2>have to go to, these these human shittles we've created,
<v Speaker 2>these these despair and futility ridden uh cadavers land the
<v Speaker 2>cadavers of the landscape. Oh, there was a pine snake
<v Speaker 2>to a Mexican pine snake Pittuophus depii that we came across.
<v Speaker 2>That is a fucking beautiful snake, beautiful snake. Ah. And
<v Speaker 2>then there was a it was a clear there was
<v Speaker 2>a cleared area that had you know, that was in
<v Speaker 2>the first stages of primary secession, and it was covered
<v Speaker 2>into Thnia tuberform us, which looks like a sunflower, but
<v Speaker 2>the stem just beneath the capitulum, you know, it's a
<v Speaker 2>it's an annual, it's an herb. They can get five
<v Speaker 2>to six feet tall and so no woody tissue. But
<v Speaker 2>the stem below the flower head like swells out like
<v Speaker 2>it's it looks it's like funnel shaped. And then the
<v Speaker 2>whole thing is pubescent covered in hairs. And then there
<v Speaker 2>was bunch of Dysodia species which I think we only
<v Speaker 2>get a few the dysodias we get in the which
<v Speaker 2>is Marigold Tribe d y sso d Ia, and it smells.
<v Speaker 2>The leaves smell incredible. They got the glands on a
<v Speaker 2>Marigold tribe. Everything in the Marigold tribe basically smells has
<v Speaker 2>leaves that smell really nice, whether it's Nickelletia or or Tegidi's,
<v Speaker 2>et cetera. And there was Dsdia everywhere, but there was
<v Speaker 2>there was much larger Dysodia species there as well, and
<v Speaker 2>some that were like, you know, two feet tall. They're
<v Speaker 2>all annuals, I believe, but two foot tall. And then
<v Speaker 2>there was Biden's. There was a white Biden species. I
<v Speaker 2>think it was Biden's Odorata uh as well. But God, Diamond,
<v Speaker 2>I don't want to hear your Biden agenda. The Biden agenda,
<v Speaker 2>Joe Biden voters coming across the border boten for fuck
<v Speaker 2>you Biden. So uh. And there were fields of this
<v Speaker 2>ship going off, I mean, just like intoxicating California Stupeblum
<v Speaker 2>style fields of Biden's and Desodia and just nobody around. Nothing.
<v Speaker 2>There was no fucking road and it was just such
<v Speaker 2>a like take it in. Take it and take it
<v Speaker 2>and take it and take it in. I can go
<v Speaker 2>back to these, you know, I can go back to
<v Speaker 2>the terrible places. Now it's a way. This is what
<v Speaker 2>I need to last, you know. And and so, and
<v Speaker 2>there was a kind of a gave striata too, which
<v Speaker 2>used to be a gave striata until when the DNA
<v Speaker 2>was looked at on the phylogeny, a kind of a
<v Speaker 2>gave and gave bractiosa as well, which I think that
<v Speaker 2>was Paleoa. Gave came out on the other side of
<v Speaker 2>man Freda from a gave, and so they split it
<v Speaker 2>up and they created these other two genera, and then
<v Speaker 2>man Freda was able to stay man Freda and not
<v Speaker 2>be lumped into a gave like some dufas wanted to
<v Speaker 2>do no offense to him, and it would have been
<v Speaker 2>a really bad idea. You know what they did to
<v Speaker 2>do to Kathion. They lumped in with premium. That was
<v Speaker 2>pretty shit for brain too.
<v Speaker 4>Well, actually we've got we've got a foul a rolls
<v Speaker 4>potactic lubblic later. So you rather they create the other
<v Speaker 4>genera that are flipper from prebula, well you think it
<v Speaker 4>to just loved this completely different, Jedith, that's different in
<v Speaker 4>pollination syndrome and flora or fality with the rough to
<v Speaker 4>privile that's what you gonna do. Anyway, that's my own
<v Speaker 4>personal beat, so h.
<v Speaker 2>But anyway, uh. And then so this is like these
<v Speaker 2>it's like these islands of lowland vegetation that have been cleared,
<v Speaker 2>possibly for cattle pasture at some point, and then they're
<v Speaker 2>margined by these pine woodlands, pinion pine woodland. And there's
<v Speaker 2>also yucca carnurosana growing there as well, beautiful yucca. And
<v Speaker 2>that was where I saw something that was really cool.
<v Speaker 2>I saw the orchid dicromanthis cinebarinus, which is not uncommon
<v Speaker 2>in these higher elevation areas of Nuevo Leone, beautiful red orchid,
<v Speaker 2>hummingbird and lepidopter and pollinated obviously with those long, bright orange,
<v Speaker 2>conspicuous floral tubes. But it frequently occurred. I saw it
<v Speaker 2>probably five times. Only once did I not see it
<v Speaker 2>growing with the kino agave striata, which makes sense. It's
<v Speaker 2>kind of a companion planting they do. And I wonder
<v Speaker 2>if there's any anything going on down below root wise,
<v Speaker 2>like not parasitism, of course, but if there's some sort
<v Speaker 2>of mutualist if this relationship is more than just the
<v Speaker 2>akino agave protects the dicromanthis from being eaten, or if
<v Speaker 2>there's like some sort of other mutualism, because it was,
<v Speaker 2>it was an affiliation I saw quite frequently. Mathis Cinnabarinus,
<v Speaker 2>the orchid growing with a kind of a gave striata,
<v Speaker 2>which I actually just planted a kind of a gave
<v Speaker 2>down here in South Texas in my yard. There was
<v Speaker 2>some nursery selling them. They had Dasilearian longisimum too, which
<v Speaker 2>I was, that's wild to see, but uh, because that's
<v Speaker 2>a really cool Dasileian. It's like a colescent sodaal. It's
<v Speaker 2>like a tall growing sodaal that looks like the Australian
<v Speaker 2>grass tree. It looks like Kenya Australis. But anyway, so
<v Speaker 2>there was dicromanthis cinnabarinus growing there, and that was just like,
<v Speaker 2>it was a fucking lovely thing to see this spot.
<v Speaker 2>And then we were there right at sunset too, and
<v Speaker 2>so the sun's going down. I didn't have any time
<v Speaker 2>to really do a thorough floristic inventory here because everybody
<v Speaker 2>wanted to go. But uh, you know, I I'll go back.
<v Speaker 2>It was just it was fucking gorgeous. Though, man Like,
<v Speaker 2>I'm so glad that places like that still exist and
<v Speaker 2>haven't been destroyed. And again, I think it's largely well
<v Speaker 2>as a number of factors, but especially the ihido system.
<v Speaker 2>You know, if some shitbag developer wanted to come in
<v Speaker 2>and buy that up in the United States, they would
<v Speaker 2>just find the owner and purchase it from him and
<v Speaker 2>then build a shitty condo there or some resort or
<v Speaker 2>whatever the fuck you want to do that. In Mexico,
<v Speaker 2>you've got to negotiate with the whole collective. You've got
<v Speaker 2>to negotiate with the whole community, and it's a pain
<v Speaker 2>in the ass. And then of course there's other factors too,
<v Speaker 2>you know, poorer, populous, not as much development, but it's
<v Speaker 2>just not as much incentive for development. But I mean,
<v Speaker 2>so much of Mexico it just looks so much better
<v Speaker 2>then the United States. There's just suburban sprawl isn't really
<v Speaker 2>a thing in Mexico, and that suburban sprawl, that tumor,
<v Speaker 2>that cancerous growth is such a huge part of America now,
<v Speaker 2>of the United States. It's it's just so you can't
<v Speaker 2>escape it. It's fucking everywhere, just sprawling suburban sprawl, sprawling
<v Speaker 2>suburban s. I guess that's redne what I mean. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>that's two hours. I'm gonna cut it there. I could
<v Speaker 2>go on, but holy fuck. You know, but you know,
<v Speaker 2>the russolas in that oak forest did look nice. Russela,
<v Speaker 2>the ectomycorrhizo, mushrooms. Oh, salvia, himejime hintoniana. It's the rare
<v Speaker 2>salvia that I saw there as well. Uh, just epic diversity.
<v Speaker 2>And I probably took I must have taken four thousand photos.
<v Speaker 2>I think that's what is what my phone was telling me,
<v Speaker 2>because I take photos and then they're uploaded to my
<v Speaker 2>phone automatically through the Nikon snap bridge app. I was in.
<v Speaker 2>I was in the field and discovered that my fucking
<v Speaker 2>macro lens, the uh diaphragm flaps I control the aperture,
<v Speaker 2>I just fucking totally come apart and ship all over
<v Speaker 2>the inside of the camera. It sucked. So I'm like,
<v Speaker 2>one of my most important lenses, especially for you know,
<v Speaker 2>taxonomy and floral morphology, was just useless. I couldn't use it.
<v Speaker 2>It was fucked and I normally carry it like an
<v Speaker 2>little holster in my waistband. But and I just had
<v Speaker 2>to thing repaired like five months ago, and they did
<v Speaker 2>a half assed job. Now Nikon's gonna charge me four
<v Speaker 2>hundred bucks or something probably to recharge. Yeah, I fucking yeah,
<v Speaker 2>getting tired of this shit. That was a bummer anyway.
<v Speaker 2>So the Church of the Living World tours coming up
<v Speaker 2>will be starting. The first show is on September tenth,
<v Speaker 2>whereas I gotta look at this again. First show is
<v Speaker 2>on September tenth at the Peggy Notobart Museum just north
<v Speaker 2>of Fullerton there at Lake Short Drive, right on the
<v Speaker 2>lake north of the Alfred Caldwell Lilypool. Then we're doing
<v Speaker 2>September eleventh, the Possibility Placed Nursery and Beautiful Money, Illinois.
<v Speaker 2>I don't think I've ever been to Money, did I
<v Speaker 2>ever drive through MONI uh, And so that'll be cool.
<v Speaker 2>I've always wanted to check that nursery out. Haven't gotten
<v Speaker 2>a chance that all the tour dates are available on
<v Speaker 2>the Crime Pays website Crime pays at BONDI doesn't dot com.
<v Speaker 2>It should be a fun time, it'll be nice. I
<v Speaker 2>think I think you'll enjoy it. Come out and you
<v Speaker 2>will enjoy it. Have a good wholesome, family fun entertainment,
<v Speaker 2>just kidding. And what else is September thirteenth at the
<v Speaker 2>Hideout on Wabangia, which is that's like a shell space,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's like a show space in bar. Probably
<v Speaker 2>smells like wood, wood and beer and bleach for the countertops,
<v Speaker 2>which I do. I do like bars. You know, I
<v Speaker 2>don't like hanging around drunks too much. But you know,
<v Speaker 2>you go in there. You can't smoke in her anymore.
<v Speaker 2>It's been twenty years since the Maybe I'll smoke a
<v Speaker 2>stogy outside and drinking NA beer, non alcoholic beer. And
<v Speaker 2>then we're doing the fourteenth September fourteenth at Pizzos Nursery
<v Speaker 2>three pm. And there it's a wholesale nursery and they're
<v Speaker 2>gonna have plugs and plants for sale, which is great
<v Speaker 2>because they're one of the best nurseries in the Midwest
<v Speaker 2>and they're mostly wholesale. But I think, you know, obviously
<v Speaker 2>this will be open to the public. That's three pm
<v Speaker 2>on a Sunday at Pizzos and we start the actual
<v Speaker 2>tour four days later. So the Chicago dates, we still
<v Speaker 2>got to sell out some of the Chicago dates. The
<v Speaker 2>Peggy Note of Art Museum, which is a great museum.
<v Speaker 2>That's that's a Wednesday. I think that's the one on
<v Speaker 2>what is it the tenth? Is it the tenth? And
<v Speaker 2>then you have Possibility Place that's their thing. I think anyway,
<v Speaker 2>it's come out. It'll be nice, it'll be a good time.
<v Speaker 2>And then uh, yeah, and they we're doing Milwaukee, Saint Paul, Omaha, Lincoln,
<v Speaker 2>Kansas City, and the quad cities over there, so I
<v Speaker 2>hope to see you there. I'll have books for sale,
<v Speaker 2>We'll have shirts for sale. I'm printing to shirts in
<v Speaker 2>a garage right now. If Buddy Drew helped me press them,
<v Speaker 2>heat set them. It'll be a fun time. And I
<v Speaker 2>think y'all might sing. We'll sing a couple ditties, you know,
<v Speaker 2>we'll sing a couple folks songs in the style of
<v Speaker 2>the Frogs, you know, maybe with less not as crude,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, I feel good tune with lyrics that
<v Speaker 2>really help you swallow the turd of modern reality a
<v Speaker 2>little bit easier. Yeah, but yeah, it'll be good to
<v Speaker 2>come out, and uh and I think that's it. It
<v Speaker 2>suggested donation. No one turned away for lack of funds,
<v Speaker 2>but definitely. Please. We're on fucking tour man. If you
<v Speaker 2>if you can help us, it'd be cool. So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that's it. Anyway, have a good rest of day, and
<v Speaker 2>and remember, oh you know what I want to I
<v Speaker 2>want to close with this, uh this bit by the
<v Speaker 2>late the late George Hinton. No, no, it was Jerry. No,
<v Speaker 2>it was Jerry. Jerry Risadowski. Hitten's still alive. I think
<v Speaker 2>I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. This is from the paper Diversity
<v Speaker 2>and Origins of the Phanero orgamic Flora of Mexico phener
<v Speaker 2>organics like a old school Spanish and Portuguese word for
<v Speaker 2>angiosperm basically, but diversity that he or heene is de
<v Speaker 2>la florida organica de Mexico by the late Jerry Risadowski.
<v Speaker 2>It says Jersey here is it is that correct? I
<v Speaker 2>think his name was Jerry. That's okay anyway. It's all
<v Speaker 2>in Spanish, but the English translation is. On the other hand,
<v Speaker 2>it is important to remember that the geographic distribution of
<v Speaker 2>organisms generally ignores the political divisions that a planet's crust.
<v Speaker 2>It is, however, frequently linked to the delimitation of natural
<v Speaker 2>regions defined by physiographic climatic edaphic that means soil, et cetera. Conditions.
<v Speaker 2>To be consistent with such circumstances, and to account for
<v Speaker 2>many true endemisms, it will be necessary in this chapter
<v Speaker 2>to extend the country's borders, and thus the term Mega
<v Speaker 2>Mexico will be used when including parts of the arid
<v Speaker 2>zones of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Tamilipis, which belonged to the
<v Speaker 2>United States of America, the term Mega Mexico two when
<v Speaker 2>covering the Central American territory up to northern Nicaragua, and
<v Speaker 2>the term Mega Mexico three to include both areas see
<v Speaker 2>maps in figure two. So right there he's saying it.
<v Speaker 2>It's Mega Mexico. Texas is Mega Mexico. Parts of the
<v Speaker 2>West are just Mega Mexico. Meke America Mexico. Again, I
<v Speaker 2>mean not politically, but just recognize that's what all the
<v Speaker 2>flora of these regions is the same. There are no
<v Speaker 2>these geopolitical borders we've made up our bullshit. Sure they're
<v Speaker 2>great for fucking getting people to vote for your or
<v Speaker 2>whatever you're having different but whatever. But when you look
<v Speaker 2>at when you scrape away the thin veneer of human bullshit,
<v Speaker 2>and you look at all the living things in a region,
<v Speaker 2>and you look at something like a watershed map or
<v Speaker 2>a topographic map that that doesn't have any geopolitical borders
<v Speaker 2>on it. So it really starts to click and you realize,
<v Speaker 2>these things have been here for much longer than us,
<v Speaker 2>and they will be here much longer than us. Some
<v Speaker 2>of them will not the ones we drive to extinction
<v Speaker 2>through invasive species and extensive land clearance and building strip
<v Speaker 2>mall hell like Texas loves to do. And so that
<v Speaker 2>really gives you some perspective. And that's what I like
<v Speaker 2>thinking about, and that's why I like going to these
<v Speaker 2>places that remind me both of the Edwards Plateau and
<v Speaker 2>the Davis Mountains of West Texas or Elephant Mountain in
<v Speaker 2>West Texas, but are instead, you know, six hundred miles
<v Speaker 2>five hundred miles south and have also they've got all
<v Speaker 2>these floristic affinities, all these species, but they've also got
<v Speaker 2>all these incredible new species and variations, and the land
<v Speaker 2>is just in better condition and not owned by some
<v Speaker 2>rich freak who will let you on it to look
<v Speaker 2>at some plants, so, you know, make Texas Mexico again
<v Speaker 2>and just have a long term as more zoomed out
<v Speaker 2>perspective on life and on the land that you live on.
<v Speaker 2>Because this stuff, I mean, this stuff's been there a
<v Speaker 2>lot longer than us, and you could see it. And
<v Speaker 2>that's why I love. That's what I love saying. I
<v Speaker 2>love seeing these places. They give me an idea of
<v Speaker 2>what parts of like the western region of Austin may
<v Speaker 2>have looked like seven hundred years ago before it was spoiled,
<v Speaker 2>or what you know, what god, parts of West Texas
<v Speaker 2>might have looked like before they started getting really really dry.
<v Speaker 2>And when you find those madrones in Pecos County, you know,
<v Speaker 2>growing in these relictual areas, like in the wash of
<v Speaker 2>a desert, and you can see what it might what
<v Speaker 2>it might have looked like in the Pleistocene. That's when
<v Speaker 2>you start connecting the dots. You know, you're like an
<v Speaker 2>ant finally realizing what's around you and finally realizing that
<v Speaker 2>you're just living in this tiny little crack and what
<v Speaker 2>is this much larger landscape with all these different connecting factors.
<v Speaker 2>You know, it's much larger than yourself. So anyway, that's
<v Speaker 2>nice to think about. Anyway, that's like a heavy grocery day,
<v Speaker 2>Go fuck you, up by