Missouri

<v Speaker 1>Hi, this is Tony. Welcome to Tony's House Trikes Podcast.
<v Speaker 1>Today we got Freeze in the house by a Shot
<v Speaker 1>Ridgey and Chris Pasco. It's a real banger. We got
<v Speaker 1>it cooking up on a grill right now, coming to
<v Speaker 1>you straight from west Mannheim Road out there in Elmwood
<v Speaker 1>Park out there, fiddly fucking around. It's just Tony's House
<v Speaker 1>Treks podcast. Wouldn't it be nice if that was a
<v Speaker 1>real thing, if there was actually like a you know,
<v Speaker 1>you just took like you took like a like a
<v Speaker 1>fifty five's maybe sixty year old gray west side Chicago
<v Speaker 1>Italian man. They moved there to the suburbs, you know,
<v Speaker 1>because they're they're afraid of uh, they're afraid of the banks.
<v Speaker 1>You know. It's all all the all the old Italians
<v Speaker 1>are like racists and trumpers. And I'm not I'm not racist,
<v Speaker 1>uh you know, but anyway, wouldn't that be funny if
<v Speaker 1>they was it they let's forget about all that, forget
<v Speaker 1>the social aspect of it. Wouldn't it be funny if
<v Speaker 1>that was the thing, if that was like, uh, minus
<v Speaker 1>the quasi racism. If there was like some old Italian
<v Speaker 1>guy who just had like a he was really into
<v Speaker 1>Chicago house and he had a like a Chicago House
<v Speaker 1>podcast where he just played different you know, classic Chicago house.
<v Speaker 1>I think it'd be funny, right, Like on the side,
<v Speaker 1>he's got like an Italian deli where they sell like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, one gallon jars at yard in era. Ah
<v Speaker 1>God anyway, but uh, you know, my grandma was actually
<v Speaker 1>she was actually a big supporter at a Black Panthers.
<v Speaker 1>Remember talking to me about that because she, uh, she
<v Speaker 1>saw the shit go down in the sixties and seventies
<v Speaker 1>on the West side of Chicago. Wonderful woman, God rest,
<v Speaker 1>God rest the saw, I said, God rest the saw,
<v Speaker 1>I said, Florence. We still think about you every day
<v Speaker 1>and the way that you painted the side of a
<v Speaker 1>pillar in your parking garage with the colors of your
<v Speaker 1>car because you probably should have had your license revoked
<v Speaker 1>at age seventy, right, no offense to her. She used
<v Speaker 1>to threat My grandma threatened to call the mob on
<v Speaker 1>me once, right, she got mad at me. I mean
<v Speaker 1>she was joking around, of course, but still she got
<v Speaker 1>really mad at me. She said, I'll make a phone call.
<v Speaker 1>Have you snuffed? I said, Jesus Christ would you take
<v Speaker 1>it easy? When I was making fun of her, she
<v Speaker 1>had was going through her freezer once I was like sixteen,
<v Speaker 1>and I found a frozen Chinese duck and I was like,
<v Speaker 1>the fuck is it? She had like six frozen Chinese ducks.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, what is it? Chinese duck? Is just
<v Speaker 1>a normal duck? She said, I guess she was. It
<v Speaker 1>was she was really she was a foodie. I guess
<v Speaker 1>she was, you know, duck she'd procured in Chinatown, you know,
<v Speaker 1>on the south side. Said well, that's near south side China.
<v Speaker 1>Time's on, like Cirmac and what is it Sirmac and
<v Speaker 1>State and anyway, Welcome to another episode of crime based
<v Speaker 1>by this podcast. I'm driving through. I just left Joplin,
<v Speaker 1>which you know, Joplin, Joplin, Missouri. The name Joplin translated
<v Speaker 1>into kickapoo means Joplin means translated kickapoo, salty cracker or
<v Speaker 1>these salty crackers. So I guess they had a lot
<v Speaker 1>of you know, it was a there was a you
<v Speaker 1>know in terms of dried breaded goods that are you know,
<v Speaker 1>meant to combat I meant to reply, meant to replenish
<v Speaker 1>the electrolytes that's what Joplin was known for. Joplin it
<v Speaker 1>means the salty crackers. It's this kind of a scary
<v Speaker 1>area of western Missouri. Woo. Anyway, we're going down here,
<v Speaker 1>We're driving to Saint Louis. We're going I'm doing a
<v Speaker 1>We're doing a talk tomorrow because it's four hundred people,
<v Speaker 1>three hundred and eighty these sick focks that want to
<v Speaker 1>listen to me. Rant. I'm gonna shit all over modern horticulture.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna make fun of the Craig myrtles. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>make fun of the box woods and the home Destboo
<v Speaker 1>garden section. I think something's wrong with my car. It's
<v Speaker 1>making a funny noise, but it's running the transmissions otherwise
<v Speaker 1>running fine. And you know it was. It was real
<v Speaker 1>bleak driving up from South Texas. I mean it's it's
<v Speaker 1>seventy six degrees during the day here in late February
<v Speaker 1>in western Missouri, but it gets chilly at night. I
<v Speaker 1>had to wear a hoodie last night. I stayed at
<v Speaker 1>Gus's house, my buddy Gus in Norman, Oklahoma. You know
<v Speaker 1>you know what I got it. We went to a
<v Speaker 1>coffee chef they got you know, they got the kits
<v Speaker 1>in there with on the tattoos, since they got the
<v Speaker 1>you know, they doing all kind of stuff. You know
<v Speaker 1>that real hip These kids down there, real hip jack,
<v Speaker 1>you know in normany. I mean you they could say
<v Speaker 1>and I said, it's Oklahoma are kind of behind the times,
<v Speaker 1>but they're you know, they're really they're really hit. This
<v Speaker 1>is Tony's house, stretched pod kids. We got another banger
<v Speaker 1>coming up by start slinger, A real a real bang
<v Speaker 1>or a real buzzer. Uh fuck yeah. Anyway, we gus
<v Speaker 1>knows I bring him up because he's you know, he's
<v Speaker 1>he's one of these young kids, twenty five or so.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how old these he's a young kid, right,
<v Speaker 1>he's not all acrid like me and he but he's
<v Speaker 1>got you know, you go to his house and he's
<v Speaker 1>got the fossil's got ammonites on there. He knows the region,
<v Speaker 1>he knows the local geology, knows all the disjunk populations.
<v Speaker 1>Did you know there's Mammalaria hidra and homelocephalae. They got
<v Speaker 1>horse cripplers. They got freaking horse cripplers over there in Oklahoma. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>they got a bunch of dis junks. They got little
<v Speaker 1>you know, disjunk populations, this stuff. He was, you know,
<v Speaker 1>he knows the You know, that's what you want. You
<v Speaker 1>want friends in different states that know the fucking regions,
<v Speaker 1>the geology and the plants and the rare dis junks
<v Speaker 1>o their other lands. He went to school for mechanical
<v Speaker 1>engineering and minored in botany. Tell me that's not a
<v Speaker 1>nice setup, right, you learn a good trade. Okay, you're
<v Speaker 1>not gonna be around all these you know, too many
<v Speaker 1>farts sniff and academics. Right, you're gonna be around, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to going to school for some pragmatic then you keep
<v Speaker 1>your foot in a you know, a good natural sciences
<v Speaker 1>education on the side, I think the great trade of
<v Speaker 1>so much of academia, especially if you're talking like social studies, sociology,
<v Speaker 1>and humanities, where people just kind of stiff each other's
<v Speaker 1>farts and rant about these obscure, uh, you know, completely
<v Speaker 1>soft science theories, theorists, you know, uh, you know. The
<v Speaker 1>tragedy is that, you know, these kids don't know basic
<v Speaker 1>fucking natural selection, natural sciences, basic biology. A lot of
<v Speaker 1>them don't because they don't they don't study it. Right.
<v Speaker 1>The answer lies in the living world. All right. You
<v Speaker 1>can pontificate all you want about fucking this and that
<v Speaker 1>and all these buzzwords that you know you hear not
<v Speaker 1>fucking going off the road again, that you hear in
<v Speaker 1>these books. You know, these kids they talking soft voices.
<v Speaker 1>Not these kids, a lot of them are adults, but
<v Speaker 1>they The point is, they sniff each other's farts and
<v Speaker 1>they you know, you want to look at people. Study
<v Speaker 1>the study anthropology study the human behavior is a semi sentient,
<v Speaker 1>recently born into consciousness, species of ape that's heavily conformist.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, the norm is conformity and requiring group validation,
<v Speaker 1>and very few people stray outside of that, right and
<v Speaker 1>they and I say, semi sent you it because the
<v Speaker 1>self awareness really isn't there with most most of us.
<v Speaker 1>It takes it takes thirty plus years to gain at least,
<v Speaker 1>especially when you grow up into a society that indoctrinates
<v Speaker 1>you into bullshit. Anyway, Okay, so you know we're getting distracted.
<v Speaker 1>So I stayed at Gus's house. I was slept on
<v Speaker 1>a couch. It was nice and Norman, you know, nice
<v Speaker 1>little town. But driving up from South Texas, yes, today,
<v Speaker 1>everything was fucking dry, horrible drought there. We did just
<v Speaker 1>nab a two hundred and twenty pound pig in the
<v Speaker 1>pig trap. We got a pig trap, So thank you
<v Speaker 1>to everybody who donated to Thorn Scrub Sanctuary nonprofit to
<v Speaker 1>get the pig trap. We just shot a big two
<v Speaker 1>hundred and twenty pound hag. Got Benny out there. He
<v Speaker 1>shot the thing in the head, one shot. It went down,
<v Speaker 1>dragged it out. He's gonna cook it up. He loves it.
<v Speaker 1>He's happy. And you know, because I was out there
<v Speaker 1>nailing rebar around these big clumps of payoti that the
<v Speaker 1>picks have been destroying. And they don't even eat it.
<v Speaker 1>They like they uprooted, because that's what they do. They
<v Speaker 1>snout around. They come from the side, they don't come
<v Speaker 1>from the top. You got these big clumps of payoti
<v Speaker 1>that are maybe a foot across eight inches off the ground.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't they paid. It doesn't behave like this in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas ver very rarely. I guess it does. Actually,
<v Speaker 1>you know what, there's a couple there's a couple places
<v Speaker 1>I've seen it, but the pet West Texas population is
<v Speaker 1>very small, and certainly if you go to San Luis
<v Speaker 1>poto c you'll see large clumps of peyote like this.
<v Speaker 1>You see many cac guy that do this. The cactody,
<v Speaker 1>the cactoid subfamily, not the prickly pairs, not the opuntioids.
<v Speaker 1>As fucking truck What are you doing? Man? What are
<v Speaker 1>you doing? Huh? You got your kidneys filled with mountain boo.
<v Speaker 1>All right, you're about eighty pounds overweight, and you're you're
<v Speaker 1>getting into the left lane even though you got nowhere
<v Speaker 1>to go. You're not. You're gonna cause an accident the
<v Speaker 1>fucking trucks. So but anyway, I was in there and
<v Speaker 1>Naleen rebar into the ground. Shout out to to H.
<v Speaker 1>William and you know the people that hooked us up
<v Speaker 1>with the rebar, and I'm drawn up lay my band
<v Speaker 1>with this farc steedd I'm sorry. In San Antonio, we
<v Speaker 1>got hooked us up with three foot sections of rebar
<v Speaker 1>and we basically nail those into the ground around these
<v Speaker 1>clumps of paoty. It doesn't look attractive, right, it's not
<v Speaker 1>photo worthy, But that's not the fucking point. The point
<v Speaker 1>is to protect these clumps from getting destroyed. And it works.
<v Speaker 1>I was in there a month ago in the little
<v Speaker 1>we call it the Elfin forest. It's like this forest
<v Speaker 1>of blackbrush which is blooming right now or trying to.
<v Speaker 1>It's very very drought stress. There's gonna be a lot
<v Speaker 1>of tree mortality, tree and shrub mortality in South Texas
<v Speaker 1>because we are in an extreme drought situation, probably exacerbated
<v Speaker 1>somewhat by fucked up climate condition is due to the
<v Speaker 1>elevated levels of CO two in the greenhouse, even though
<v Speaker 1>in an atmosphere, even though the oil companies say it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't that's that's not what's causing climate change. There is
<v Speaker 1>no climate change there. CO two does not trap, it
<v Speaker 1>does not absorb heat. Okay, everything modern physics has taught
<v Speaker 1>you is a lie. The oil companies have your best
<v Speaker 1>interest at heart. Trust them. Okay. Some ship bag that's
<v Speaker 1>living on fucking cavir and Sirloin's steak every night, he's
<v Speaker 1>got your best interest at heart. Do not trust the scientists.
<v Speaker 1>They're fucking lying to you, Okay, Jesus Christ. That's that's
<v Speaker 1>where we're at right now. Anyway. So probably exacerbated due
<v Speaker 1>to a combination of factors, you know, but certainly climate
<v Speaker 1>change is one of them, and I certainly I think
<v Speaker 1>a large part of it, too, would be the excessive
<v Speaker 1>amounts of land clearance. You know, when you can visibly
<v Speaker 1>see the amount of green space from a satellite image,
<v Speaker 1>it's been converted into concrete, shithole, sprawling parking lot hellscape.
<v Speaker 1>You can imagine, and you keep in mind that all
<v Speaker 1>those plants quote sweat, they have apple transpire moisture. You
<v Speaker 1>can imagine how that might. It just might. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if it does it. I'm just saying it might.
<v Speaker 1>It's possible to see how that might affect the amount
<v Speaker 1>of moisture and water vapor in an area, and as
<v Speaker 1>well as the heat in an area. Doesn't it seem
<v Speaker 1>like that could happen. Doesn't it seem like that could
<v Speaker 1>be a possibility. Huh? And it seemed like it could
<v Speaker 1>be part of the reason why the immediate area is
<v Speaker 1>twenty degrees hotter than the surrounding area. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>don't want to go out there. I'm no scientists, but
<v Speaker 1>it just seems like it, you know. And then you
<v Speaker 1>scrape all that vegetative cover off and you expose the
<v Speaker 1>land to the hot sun, where it loses moisture much
<v Speaker 1>faster than it would otherwise. If it was topped by
<v Speaker 1>a living skin of scrublands and shrubs that have a
<v Speaker 1>self regulatory system that governs how slowly they let water
<v Speaker 1>transpire out other stuff. Doesn't that seem like it? You
<v Speaker 1>know it? Fuck? I give up? You know in reality
<v Speaker 1>don't makes sense no more, you know, at least human reality.
<v Speaker 1>The simulation got all fucked up a few years ago,
<v Speaker 1>maybe a few decades ago, and and you see people
<v Speaker 1>just getting dumber. I got a friend, I gotta messare
<v Speaker 1>from a friend that works for textat today the Department
<v Speaker 1>of Transportation. He said they were spreading clumps of dead
<v Speaker 1>Saint Augustine on the sides of a newly built road,
<v Speaker 1>not realizing that the sod was dead, and also not
<v Speaker 1>realizing Saint Augustine doesn't you know, it's a native grass,
<v Speaker 1>but it doesn't it doesn't grow too far away from
<v Speaker 1>the coast because it needs moisture. It's it's it's certainly
<v Speaker 1>it needs irrigation in a lawn. If you have, if
<v Speaker 1>you have a Saint Augustine lawn. Uh, not only are
<v Speaker 1>you a bastard if you live if you live in Inland, Texas,
<v Speaker 1>but you're delusional and you're gonna have to. Uh, but
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna have to water it as well or else
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna die. So anyway, so South Texas looked to
<v Speaker 1>dry as a fucking bone, very depressing, lots of extreme
<v Speaker 1>drought conditions. You can look at a drought map. I
<v Speaker 1>use the my Radar app. It's a free one. They
<v Speaker 1>got a bunch of different layers you can put on
<v Speaker 1>their recent reason accumulator, brainfall, drought conditions, et cetera. The
<v Speaker 1>Windy app is good too, Windy windy. I don't like
<v Speaker 1>that word. I just decided I don't like it, you know, windy.
<v Speaker 1>But the my Radar app you could see that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the level of drought stress basically all around the borderlands.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, so it's it's fucking rough down there. I
<v Speaker 1>got a nice message from a gentleman on face crook
<v Speaker 1>on the Facebook messager. I don't normally check Facebook messenger
<v Speaker 1>because Facebook's a toilet, but it does get a lot
<v Speaker 1>of the boomers into the plants, so I'll say it's
<v Speaker 1>good about it, you know. And uh, this man I
<v Speaker 1>met with the some natives who visited Thornscrub a while ago,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, some would call this guy. Other people
<v Speaker 1>I've heard call him a pretending and you know, the
<v Speaker 1>old Cherokee princess thing, like my great grandpa was like
<v Speaker 1>one tenth Cherokee whatever. The other's the thing that people do.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if you've noticed, but anyway, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the guy swear always at least like he's like blonde hair,
<v Speaker 1>blue eye. And I'm not holding that against him, at
<v Speaker 1>least I wasn't until he I got this message from
<v Speaker 1>him yesterday where he was angrily mouthing off to me
<v Speaker 1>about some political shit like sending me elon Musk tweets,
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, you know, one of the messages
<v Speaker 1>from was from like January fifteenth. I was an Ecuador
<v Speaker 1>or no, what a fuck was I don't know where
<v Speaker 1>I was. But I didn't get the message then because
<v Speaker 1>I don't check face crook because it's a toilet. And
<v Speaker 1>I saw it now and I think he was. I
<v Speaker 1>had posted something in stories about Ice, you know, about
<v Speaker 1>the Ice kidnappers, you know, a gestapo, Trump's secret police,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, I was upset about it because you
<v Speaker 1>see videos of these thugs with masks on manhandling people.
<v Speaker 1>You know, these just chubby thugs manhandling people and dragging
<v Speaker 1>them out of their cars and shit, you know us citizens,
<v Speaker 1>and it's upset and you don't like to see that
<v Speaker 1>in a place that you know, you know, and I
<v Speaker 1>know most of the country because I've been there and
<v Speaker 1>I've travel all over and I've lived everywhere, and so
<v Speaker 1>it upset me. So I posted in my stories and
<v Speaker 1>this guy was responding, and I guess he was upset.
<v Speaker 1>So I guess he's like a right winger, which whatever,
<v Speaker 1>you know, that's fine. I worked with a couple of
<v Speaker 1>right wingers that I was friends with and we didn't
<v Speaker 1>talk about politics and we still got along, and you
<v Speaker 1>know what, it worked. You'd say, hey, man, I don't
<v Speaker 1>want to talk about this shit, right, but this gentleman
<v Speaker 1>and he's like sixty five, he should fucking know better.
<v Speaker 1>And I don't know how he rolls with a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of natives and wraps his head around being a fucking
<v Speaker 1>right winger. That seems kind of I'm a little bit
<v Speaker 1>confused by that too. You know, I'm not saying you
<v Speaker 1>can't do it right. People are really good at mental
<v Speaker 1>gym now sticks and telling themselves all kinds of stories
<v Speaker 1>and bullshit, and nobody bullshits you better than yourself. But
<v Speaker 1>I'm just saying I'm confused by it because knowing what
<v Speaker 1>I know, that seems like that would be fucking counter counterproductive.
<v Speaker 1>But there's all kinds of stupid in this country these days.
<v Speaker 1>So to each their own, right what Thompson hit some quote?
<v Speaker 1>You know, I don't argue with stupid people or Jesus freaks,
<v Speaker 1>because if they found a way to be happy in
<v Speaker 1>this fucked up round world, you know, then they've at
<v Speaker 1>least found you know, there's no point there or it
<v Speaker 1>was less the meaning the way he put it, But
<v Speaker 1>she looked at quote up. So that's kind of my
<v Speaker 1>policy too. Like I don't care. Like, there's a guy
<v Speaker 1>in a valley. He's a plant person. He got a
<v Speaker 1>big mustard, he's like a super we got a super
<v Speaker 1>Mario mustache. He's a nice guy, but he believes some
<v Speaker 1>fucking unhinged shit. I mean, the guy's a real monster
<v Speaker 1>on Facebook. The shit he posts. I don't know if
<v Speaker 1>he lets someone else get ahold of his social media,
<v Speaker 1>but he posts really ain't as shit like right, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just really like nazisque shit, And you know, all interact
<v Speaker 1>with the dudeicle sometimes guy have to go get plants
<v Speaker 1>or whatever, right, drive out to where he lives. I've
<v Speaker 1>only done like once in the last couple of years.
<v Speaker 1>And he's not a bad guy. He's just maybe he's
<v Speaker 1>the loud or I don't know. You know, we disagree
<v Speaker 1>and I'm not gonna I'm not trying to convince him
<v Speaker 1>because I don't give a shit. Let him believe what
<v Speaker 1>he believed. I don't give a fuck. Right, still be
<v Speaker 1>nice totim. I'll treat him with respect. I think he's
<v Speaker 1>a little weird on at him, but whatever, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's none of my fucking business as long as he's
<v Speaker 1>not coming at me with it. Right, Why couldn't this
<v Speaker 1>sixty five year old man who wrote me of Cherokee
<v Speaker 1>princess guy, why couldn't Why couldn't he have just done
<v Speaker 1>that with me? And that's what I said to him,
<v Speaker 1>I said, what are you gonna bring? You really gonna imply?
<v Speaker 1>Because he was like, oh, you don't like guys. I
<v Speaker 1>thought you were smarter than that, And I think, really,
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna you're gonna fucking argue that like I'm I'm
<v Speaker 1>not intelligent because we disagree politically, You're fucking sixteen years old.
<v Speaker 1>You got the life skills of a sixteen year old.
<v Speaker 1>U you cunt. I didn't call him a cunt. I
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't do that, and I was I kept it real.
<v Speaker 1>I even call him up, pretending it kept it real.
<v Speaker 1>I was. I was cordial. You know, someone got upside
<v Speaker 1>did a podcast interview the other day and the guy was,
<v Speaker 1>you know, he was West Coast, really nice guy, but
<v Speaker 1>he was asking me I said the word cunt, and
<v Speaker 1>he got really you know I was. I was like,
<v Speaker 1>I hope you don't throw n of that out, leave
<v Speaker 1>it in, and he's like, you know, I was like,
<v Speaker 1>it's not a gender specific thing. The biggest cunts I've
<v Speaker 1>ever met in my life are always men, so don't
<v Speaker 1>you know? And I was like, you ever, And then
<v Speaker 1>he mentioned he had been to Australia, where of course
<v Speaker 1>everybody used to word cunt. You know, Hey, you're a
<v Speaker 1>good cunty. You're a good cunt, you know. But uh
<v Speaker 1>and so he's like, I know that, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>my wife she's a feminist. I said, so am I
<v Speaker 1>everyone's I mean, everybody should be a feminist, don't you know.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's the kind of nothing to do with that.
<v Speaker 1>Sometimes people are cunts. The biggest cunts are always men,
<v Speaker 1>So don't worry about it. But he's gonna think he's
<v Speaker 1>gonna go back and at anyway anyway, no, you know,
<v Speaker 1>no offense to the nice guy. But uh, anyway, So
<v Speaker 1>this guy, uh, the guy that wrote me all angry
<v Speaker 1>on Facebook. I was like, you know, I said this
<v Speaker 1>to him. I was like, you haven't figured out a
<v Speaker 1>way to just agree to disagree with people? Really, Like,
<v Speaker 1>it's my fucking story, it's my platform I'm gonna talk
<v Speaker 1>to about. I don't like seeing you know, thugs kidnapping people,
<v Speaker 1>you know, in my fucking country. I'm sorry, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna really argue with me about this, You fucking bonehead.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't call him a bonehead, but he's a fucking bonehead, right,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not saying he's a bad person. He's a fucking bonehead. Well,
<v Speaker 1>he might be a little bit, but I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, I don't know. I don't know too
<v Speaker 1>much about the guy. He annoyed me when I first
<v Speaker 1>met him, though, I will say that me and Hovier
<v Speaker 1>both met this guy at the same time I met
<v Speaker 1>the fuck. You know, he said see he said something.
<v Speaker 1>It was like a Larry David moment. We were an actor
<v Speaker 1>interacting with him. He said something and it's like you
<v Speaker 1>don't catch it at the first time he says it,
<v Speaker 1>and you're like what, and then you think about it
<v Speaker 1>later and you're like, well that was kind of fucked
<v Speaker 1>up anyway, Okay, So yeah, I was just surprised. I
<v Speaker 1>was surprised, you know. But that's my that when I
<v Speaker 1>say that, you know, you got you've got you know,
<v Speaker 1>someone who U rolls with with the natives. It rolls
<v Speaker 1>with a native trap who's who's evidently a Trump supporter,
<v Speaker 1>and that's you know, it's confusing. It doesn't make sense.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't have to make sense anymore. You know, there's
<v Speaker 1>a uh, there was a trans person with an SS
<v Speaker 1>tattoo who shot up a fucking uh. That doesn't make
<v Speaker 1>sense either. How are you? How are you trans? And
<v Speaker 1>you got an SS tattoo? I don't fucking know. Nothing
<v Speaker 1>makes sense. Everything's everything's just the simulations all fucked up, right,
<v Speaker 1>whoever's running it, it doesn't make sense anymore. Right, everything's
<v Speaker 1>probably a syop. Everybody's nuts. That's the way it goes, right,
<v Speaker 1>Just stop trying fuck the human world is only gonna
<v Speaker 1>get crazier. Tarres McKennis said that he was he talking
<v Speaker 1>about it's gonna get so weird. People have to start
<v Speaker 1>to start talking about how weird it is. It's been
<v Speaker 1>like that for a while anyway. So we got this pig.
<v Speaker 1>We finally trapped a pig in this uh trap. I
<v Speaker 1>was worried it wasn't gonna work. We got the trap.
<v Speaker 1>Willy brought it down. Thank you to Willy. Really did
<v Speaker 1>a lot for us, really brought it down a month ago.
<v Speaker 1>I baited it with some corn. I was in there
<v Speaker 1>hammering rebar around the payote to protect it. And it
<v Speaker 1>worked because I went back two weeks later and you
<v Speaker 1>could see where one of the pigs was rooting around
<v Speaker 1>in the ground hit the payote bar or the rebars,
<v Speaker 1>the pieces of rebar, and then stopped and didn't destroy
<v Speaker 1>this massive clump of payote, of old growth payote, which
<v Speaker 1>is you know, sacred to myself and many others. I
<v Speaker 1>don't use it. I'm just saying it's a sacred to
<v Speaker 1>stand in front of one of these things and realize
<v Speaker 1>how slow it grows and how long it's taken to
<v Speaker 1>get that large, and then you know, it's just it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking mind blowing. It's like standing in front of the
<v Speaker 1>old growth redwoods, you know, or an old growth monozuma
<v Speaker 1>Cyprus or something. It's so impressive, and I just I
<v Speaker 1>want to make sure because there's so little of that
<v Speaker 1>left in South Texas due to both the payote trade,
<v Speaker 1>the legal payote trade for natives as well as you know,
<v Speaker 1>especially land clearance. I want to make sure that that's
<v Speaker 1>impact for decades and centuries to come, which I realize
<v Speaker 1>is an uphill battle, especially with drought and habitat destruction.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, we don't have to worry about habitat destruction,
<v Speaker 1>but drought and feral animals especially. I mean these pigs,
<v Speaker 1>you know we have native have alinas. They're like a
<v Speaker 1>third the size of these fucking pigs, a fourth the size,
<v Speaker 1>you know, these have Alina's probably thirty forty pounds, like
<v Speaker 1>the size of my dogs. Right. This pig that we
<v Speaker 1>shot that Benny got went and got today because I'm
<v Speaker 1>I'm driving to Saint Louis two hundred and twenty pounds,
<v Speaker 1>A two hundred and twenty pound pig with nuts the
<v Speaker 1>size of grapefruits, super aggressive. He sent me a video
<v Speaker 1>of himself shooting it. You know, these plants have never
<v Speaker 1>this habitat has never encountered something like that before, right,
<v Speaker 1>especially when there's no predators to take it out. There
<v Speaker 1>used to be jaguars in South Texas health supposedly, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>we know for a fact there used to be jaguars
<v Speaker 1>in South Texas up until the mid nineteen thirties. But
<v Speaker 1>they're supposedly used to be jaguars up into Oklahoma, even
<v Speaker 1>in the seventeen hundreds. All we're hitting traffic here, right, so,
<v Speaker 1>but they're all gone now, all right, So you got
<v Speaker 1>maybe mountain lions, you've got bobcats. A podcast's not gonna
<v Speaker 1>do a fucking thing for a two hundred and twenty
<v Speaker 1>pound hog. And they get they get bigger than that too.
<v Speaker 1>And there was another one that we hidn't that we
<v Speaker 1>weren't able to catch on the video as well. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I was out there hammer and rebar into the ground
<v Speaker 1>around these payotes to protect it. These old growth payotes
<v Speaker 1>in the blackbrush forest. Again, such a wonderful smell when
<v Speaker 1>the black brush blooms, but chillier, rigid doula for BASI,
<v Speaker 1>I mean's some memozoid. It's the memosoid subfamily of the
<v Speaker 1>pea family Fabasi. And so I was hammering in and
<v Speaker 1>then we had this old feeder. I think the pigs
<v Speaker 1>like the corn when it's rotten, like they like it
<v Speaker 1>more when it's rotten. And so we had this corn
<v Speaker 1>and this old feeder and the feeder motor had busted
<v Speaker 1>and been sitting there for like a year, and the
<v Speaker 1>corn had been all infected with or infested with weavils,
<v Speaker 1>some insect which I would have loved to know the
<v Speaker 1>species of, because I've been really getting a lot more
<v Speaker 1>at that tomology lately. I said, wow. And and so
<v Speaker 1>I noticed the corn of this fucky smell. It probably
<v Speaker 1>molded a little bit too, because it does get very
<v Speaker 1>foggy there in the morning due to all the plant covered.
<v Speaker 1>I had the plants sweat. There's lichen on everything, beautiful
<v Speaker 1>clumps of lichen, which I assume the lichen's probably unaffected
<v Speaker 1>by the drought because it can just go dorman. You know,
<v Speaker 1>we got beard lichen on all the black brush, really
<v Speaker 1>wild habitat now your typical desert. Okay, A kin with
<v Speaker 1>the subtropical dryland and anyway, and so I took that corn.
<v Speaker 1>I said, what the fuck, so I gotta fight, you know,
<v Speaker 1>why not use this and bait the trap with it?
<v Speaker 1>Because something had been going in the trap and not
<v Speaker 1>setting it off. At one point we trapped the buck.
<v Speaker 1>We had to get our neighbor to come let the
<v Speaker 1>buck out of this trap. I don't know how it
<v Speaker 1>got in a pig trap. It barely fit. And so
<v Speaker 1>so I baited it with this rotten, false smelling corn
<v Speaker 1>that had holes in it, and apparently that worked. So
<v Speaker 1>the more foul it smells, the better. And I'm just
<v Speaker 1>happy we got this thing. You know, we got this thing.
<v Speaker 1>We got it. We got you know this our ninth
<v Speaker 1>pig who only got about nine hundred more to go.
<v Speaker 1>We fenced off another area that only costs six grand.
<v Speaker 1>We got to fence off another air, I mean, defence
<v Speaker 1>the whole property would probably cost like fifty grand or something,
<v Speaker 1>and it's not really feasible, and they would have to
<v Speaker 1>clear a lot of trees that have grown up alongside
<v Speaker 1>the fences, which I don't really want to do because
<v Speaker 1>I like that. I like the trees, and they take
<v Speaker 1>forever to fucking regrow, right unless you get stable rains.
<v Speaker 1>And we're in the middle of a drought. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I mean driving up from South Texas yesterday. How about
<v Speaker 1>I did like ten hours yesterday, fucking brutal, you know,
<v Speaker 1>driving up? Oh these lime these limestone road cuts in
<v Speaker 1>Missouri or gorgeous. Look at that, ah, very old limestone,
<v Speaker 1>not like the younger Cretaceous limestone we get in Texas.
<v Speaker 1>You know, Cretaceous? Do you know how you know? You
<v Speaker 1>know when a Cretaceous was from? Huh? If you don't,
<v Speaker 1>I'm disappointed in you, and you should pay attention. You
<v Speaker 1>should learn download one of these fucking geologic timescale apps.
<v Speaker 1>Cretaceous was one hundred and twenty five million years ago,
<v Speaker 1>the roughly uh sixty six million years and now roughly
<v Speaker 1>it was very very distinct point that ended with a
<v Speaker 1>mass extinction, the one that took out the dinosaurs. And
<v Speaker 1>before that was the Jurassic, and before that was the Triassic.
<v Speaker 1>The Triassic, the Jurassic and the Gretaceous compose the Musa
<v Speaker 1>sloic Era, and now we're in the Sceneozoic. H God,
<v Speaker 1>damn it. He's having trouble staying on the road. I said,
<v Speaker 1>would you stay on the road. Look, you see the lines.
<v Speaker 1>It's not that hard stand but playing the lines. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so we anyway, I was out of thorn scrub, it
<v Speaker 1>was I didn't go over to fucking lie is it?
<v Speaker 1>Why is it beeping at me? Are you getting turned up?
<v Speaker 1>Just listening? Am I making you nervous? I can't handle
<v Speaker 1>people that can't handle that. You know, if you meet
<v Speaker 1>someone who's real soft and they can't handle someone who's
<v Speaker 1>kind of turned up and straight, you know, they're just real,
<v Speaker 1>they're real sense that if they don't like it when
<v Speaker 1>people raise there, Boy, I can't handle that because then
<v Speaker 1>those people met they make me nervous. They make me
<v Speaker 1>feel bad like I'm gonna set them off or upset
<v Speaker 1>them just by being myself. You know what that happens.
<v Speaker 1>I understand that it's an acquired taste, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>why don't you go find someone else to hang out? Anyway?
<v Speaker 1>So God, if you know, I was just thinking if
<v Speaker 1>I lived in Western Missouri, I'd probably be on opis too,
<v Speaker 1>or what do they do at here? Opiates are me?
<v Speaker 1>It really is? It's you know, there's some beautiful areas,
<v Speaker 1>but then there's some really ugly areas too. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's uh, there's not a lot of there's some beautiful prairies,
<v Speaker 1>but a lot of it is just you know, destroyed
<v Speaker 1>habitat and rolling hills. The amount of mowers that it
<v Speaker 1>must take to keep all of this clear. And I
<v Speaker 1>guess you had, you know, twenty two million bison doing
<v Speaker 1>it before. God, you know what I you know what
<v Speaker 1>I'd do to used to go back in time like
<v Speaker 1>six hundred years and see the setup in North America? Oh,
<v Speaker 1>can you imagine? Fucking a. It must have been incredible,
<v Speaker 1>must have been incredible, you know, before Bucky's and billboards
<v Speaker 1>and walmarts and I mean, you know some of those
<v Speaker 1>modern conveniences, of course are nice, we need them, But
<v Speaker 1>do we need to just every thank you for Okay,
<v Speaker 1>we don't need to get this. How is Vermont the
<v Speaker 1>only state that's outlawed billboards? Billboards are fucking idious? I think,
<v Speaker 1>I mean it is allowing them? Really that good for
<v Speaker 1>the economy with the billboard company? Then who's who's making
<v Speaker 1>money off this? Right? Like a couple of schmucks that
<v Speaker 1>have what do they do with them money? They do?
<v Speaker 1>Is it good? Does it go towards the people. I
<v Speaker 1>doubt it. Yeah, so I'm excited. I'm gonna lurk at mobile.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna lurk pretty hard. I'm only gonna be I'm
<v Speaker 1>driving seventeen hours one way to go lurk in Saint
<v Speaker 1>Louis for two or three days, you know, in the winter,
<v Speaker 1>and then and then come back. But I'm excited for
<v Speaker 1>her to talk tomorrow. It should be it should be fun.
<v Speaker 1>I'm of course getting paid, so this is work, but
<v Speaker 1>I like doing it. And then I got a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of specimens to drop off in Missouri Botanical Garden as well,
<v Speaker 1>which again is like the American queue, and uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and then uh, I guess I'm just gonna Yeah, there's
<v Speaker 1>see normally there's like there's ship to see along the way,
<v Speaker 1>there's a botany to do, but it's you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>still a dormant season, so there's not a lot of
<v Speaker 1>stuff out. You know, there's a lot of there's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of stuff to see. There's not a lot of
<v Speaker 1>stuff right now. There's not a lot of hold, not
<v Speaker 1>a whole lot of stuff to see. Yesterday I was
<v Speaker 1>I was where the hell was I was in Flugerville.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't make it that far from out of Texas
<v Speaker 1>up only like five hours away. I was in Flugerville, Texas,
<v Speaker 1>and uh I went pulled out behind a hobby lobby
<v Speaker 1>to find a little spot to you know, I got
<v Speaker 1>a little stove. I go go make some tea. Gonna go,
<v Speaker 1>uh do one hundred and fifty you know, just pop
<v Speaker 1>out one hundred and fifty kettle bell swings, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to compensate for all the ass time I'm gonna be spending,
<v Speaker 1>you know, slowly getting heart diseases. I sit in the
<v Speaker 1>truck without moving for seventeen hours, so it was nice.
<v Speaker 1>The sun was going down. I was in the edge
<v Speaker 1>of oblique shopping center and there's so many in Texas,
<v Speaker 1>and I was just you know, doing sets the thirty
<v Speaker 1>wait for the heart to catch up, give yourself a rest,
<v Speaker 1>wait twenty twenty five seconds to pop out thirty more,
<v Speaker 1>make some green tea. Nice time. And then I drove,
<v Speaker 1>you know into the night, and I remember, I forget
<v Speaker 1>where I saw this, but I saw some stupid quote
<v Speaker 1>by someone, and this is something I hear at the
<v Speaker 1>redneckt thing all the time. And no offense to the rednecks.
<v Speaker 1>They could be fun to hang out with. Right, depending
<v Speaker 1>on the nature of the red neck, the particular redneck
<v Speaker 1>doesn't always imply any kind of a political affiliation. And
<v Speaker 1>even if it does, you just find a way to
<v Speaker 1>just not talk about that. We're not gonna talk about this.
<v Speaker 1>Doesn't fucking matter. Stop no politics or religion on the railroad.
<v Speaker 1>That's what you used to say. But there's this this
<v Speaker 1>piece of redneck lore, and I've heard it many times
<v Speaker 1>that the trees, the native trees, like the junipers, then
<v Speaker 1>the stars, they shuck out out the water. They'll suck
<v Speaker 1>out the water. Shuck out the water, you get bit
<v Speaker 1>bashed heater, or you gotta shuck out the parson suck
<v Speaker 1>it out. They don't suck the first off. And you
<v Speaker 1>hear this in Nevada. You hear it in Texas, right,
<v Speaker 1>you get june a porous monosperma and oxidenttalis, and Nevada
<v Speaker 1>get the juniperous ash ei and texts as many different
<v Speaker 1>juniper species. You always hear the trees are gonna suck
<v Speaker 1>out the water, first off, you know. And it's just
<v Speaker 1>a great Rednecks are great for a lot of things.
<v Speaker 1>They're not great on fucking uh land land management or
<v Speaker 1>an awareness of plant physiology or even basic ecology all
<v Speaker 1>the time, sometimes but not always, most of the time.
<v Speaker 1>Not trees don't actively suck out water. There's no energy
<v Speaker 1>required to suck the water out. They don't pump it.
<v Speaker 1>They don't suck it, they don't actively move it. Right,
<v Speaker 1>They actively move sugars and sap through their flow them right,
<v Speaker 1>which are the tubes that carry sugars and other nutrients
<v Speaker 1>you know, produced in the leaves via photosynthesis. Whereas the
<v Speaker 1>xylum carries the water. But they don't suck anything. They
<v Speaker 1>don't pump anything. It's a passive process. The only thing
<v Speaker 1>pulling water into the roots is the transpirational pull right,
<v Speaker 1>the negative pressure created by water evaporating out of the
<v Speaker 1>leaf stomata. And it turns out many of the native plants,
<v Speaker 1>like the cedars, are really good at regulating how quickly
<v Speaker 1>water transpires out of their leaf stomata. They can close
<v Speaker 1>and open their leaf stomata using the guard cells depending
<v Speaker 1>on how hot, dry, or windy it is, okay, And
<v Speaker 1>so that if they're able to slow down the rate
<v Speaker 1>at which water evaporates out of the stomata, they're then
<v Speaker 1>able to slow down the rate at which water's pulled
<v Speaker 1>up from the roots through the soil, or from the
<v Speaker 1>soil through the roots through the xylum up to the leaves.
<v Speaker 1>And since they're good at moderating this, at regulating this, right,
<v Speaker 1>it's much more efficient and more efficient use of water
<v Speaker 1>and a slower evaporation of water than it otherwise would be.
<v Speaker 1>If you were to say, I don't know, take a
<v Speaker 1>giant you know, anchor chain of a ship and stringing
<v Speaker 1>it between two giant bulldozers, drag it across the landscape
<v Speaker 1>and denude that landscape of all vegetation, leaving it barren
<v Speaker 1>and open and exposed to the sun, to the hot sun. Right,
<v Speaker 1>it is what I see happen. I mean, this is
<v Speaker 1>just basic, you know. It just takes a little bit
<v Speaker 1>of thinking about a basic awareness of plant physiology, like
<v Speaker 1>shit they teach you and you know, general botany and
<v Speaker 1>uh and and a little bit of time to think
<v Speaker 1>about it logically, like really, what's gonna be hotter, what's
<v Speaker 1>gonna lose moisture faster? Right? This? This? And I saw
<v Speaker 1>I think when I saw it was, you know, one
<v Speaker 1>of these fucking Trump cronies that got put into like
<v Speaker 1>the BLM. It's some position that they don't deserve, but
<v Speaker 1>they're just there for, you know, to act as a
<v Speaker 1>whrror to sell these lands off the private companies who've
<v Speaker 1>probably paid off the Trump administration. You know, you know
<v Speaker 1>it works. It's just totally corrupt politics. And so this
<v Speaker 1>guy was saying, you know that, no, I forget what
<v Speaker 1>it was. It was some you know, what are these
<v Speaker 1>twats that just is living on sirloin's steak. He's got
<v Speaker 1>the three chins, pasty, pink turkey neck and you know,
<v Speaker 1>and a very well fed man. And he was saying that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, when you remove the tree cover, it actually
<v Speaker 1>conserves water. It's not the data centers. It's not the
<v Speaker 1>over extraction of the aquifer, which is technically a non
<v Speaker 1>renewable resource. It's not trying to grow crops or graze
<v Speaker 1>cattle in a desert that gets ten inches sixteen inches
<v Speaker 1>of rain a year. It's the trees. The trees are
<v Speaker 1>the enemy. Fucking idiots. Unbelievable again, it just it's only
<v Speaker 1>getting dumber from here on out. Okay, I have hope,
<v Speaker 1>just not with humanity. We're not going to change your
<v Speaker 1>behavior till we're forced to by running into a brick wall,
<v Speaker 1>just like an alcoholic doesn't. The alcoholics don't start going
<v Speaker 1>to meetings and working the steps. And I got a
<v Speaker 1>lot of friends working the steps right now, just just
<v Speaker 1>trying to get sober. We're actually going to meat. They
<v Speaker 1>don't do that until they've hit rock bottom, until they're
<v Speaker 1>confronted with the reality that their own behavior is shooting
<v Speaker 1>them in the foot right, that they're fucking themselves. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, that was what it was. He was saying,
<v Speaker 1>you know, no, we need to clear the trees because
<v Speaker 1>we're gonna conserve water. He wasn't talking about clearing you know.
<v Speaker 1>He wasn't talking about eliminating fire suppression and reducing woody
<v Speaker 1>encroachment so that you can have grasslands. He was talking
<v Speaker 1>about just destroying habit That just bulldozing, right, fucking nuts,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, just crazy, the shit they can get people
<v Speaker 1>to believe. And this is you can do this when
<v Speaker 1>you have an uneducated populace, which we certainly do in America.
<v Speaker 1>We're doing really good at the uneducation thing. You know,
<v Speaker 1>is that a thing instead of or education? And I
<v Speaker 1>think that's a new word, this education. The word of
<v Speaker 1>the day is this education when you have a greedy,
<v Speaker 1>sleazy political class that is well connected to all local
<v Speaker 1>business interests and global business interests, and any barriers separating
<v Speaker 1>the two have been removed by you know, personally installed
<v Speaker 1>the court appointees. You you have a benefit from defunding education,
<v Speaker 1>making everybody dumber, and telling them that all they need
<v Speaker 1>to do to be good people is get God. They
<v Speaker 1>just got to get God. They don't have to educate themselves.
<v Speaker 1>They don't have to learn about anything around them that.
<v Speaker 1>You know, we all use technology. Nobody knows how it works.
<v Speaker 1>We all exist within this living fabric of ecosystems, whether
<v Speaker 1>we like it or not. But nobody knows how it works.
<v Speaker 1>Most people don't. Ninety nine percent of people don't. Ninety
<v Speaker 1>nine percent of people can't name three native plants around them. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>ninety nine percent of people don't even know. Well, I'd
<v Speaker 1>say it's primate. Ninety percent don't even know what native means.
<v Speaker 1>That something evolved there and was selected for by the
<v Speaker 1>specific sort of set of circumstances, the geology, the climate,
<v Speaker 1>the presence of certain herbivores in that place. Okay, ninety
<v Speaker 1>people don't know that. They just think that well, the
<v Speaker 1>grass is always the land has always been mote grass
<v Speaker 1>on the sides of the highway, and the empty lots
<v Speaker 1>and the billboards have always been there. And the water
<v Speaker 1>always comes out of the faucet whenever you turn this spigot.
<v Speaker 1>So so it's good, it's good. Good for the economy. Right,
<v Speaker 1>never mind, we're going to burn everything out. It's a
<v Speaker 1>series of decades. But but you know, it's good for
<v Speaker 1>the economy. Keeps the machine moving. It's stupid fucking economy, right,
<v Speaker 1>that doesn't place any value on living things? Is this will?
<v Speaker 1>He was so abrasive, he's said. I tried to listen
<v Speaker 1>to him, but he's just so abrasive. So so yeah,
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, so the tree, The point is the trees.
<v Speaker 1>The trees don't suck the water. Okay, it's actually a
<v Speaker 1>very well regulated and controlled system. If you're using native
<v Speaker 1>plants that evolve, their junipers are very very good at
<v Speaker 1>controlling how quickly moisture transpires out of those stomates, those stomata,
<v Speaker 1>those gas pores that look like little coin purses that
<v Speaker 1>have two guard cells on either side that can regulate
<v Speaker 1>when they open it when they close. And also, you
<v Speaker 1>know the leaves of these plants, junipers especially. I'm looking
<v Speaker 1>at a bunch of junipers Virginiana on the side of
<v Speaker 1>the highway right now that probably actually needs to get burned. Right.
<v Speaker 1>They're covered in wax. They're covered in very thick cuticular wax.
<v Speaker 1>The cuticle. You know what plants had to evolve when
<v Speaker 1>they moved onto land from from these shallow near shore environments.
<v Speaker 1>When they evolve, that of algae, the cuticle, right, so cuticles,
<v Speaker 1>leaf hairs. Native plants have evolved very very you know,
<v Speaker 1>very efficient strategies because they've been there for so long,
<v Speaker 1>Like different phenotypes have been selected by the environment inadvertently,
<v Speaker 1>of course, not intentionally. There's not intelligent design. It's just
<v Speaker 1>how natural selection works. The more efficient phenotypes have been selected,
<v Speaker 1>they got leaf hairs, they got thicker wax, they got
<v Speaker 1>drought dormancy strategies. I'm really curious about the drought dormancy
<v Speaker 1>because I see that a lot where I live. You
<v Speaker 1>see these plants that look dead, but they're not dead.
<v Speaker 1>They're just in a state of torpor. They're just dormant.
<v Speaker 1>They're leafless. They've just dropped their leaves or their leaves
<v Speaker 1>are just in like a wilting state without dropping, you know,
<v Speaker 1>for a number of weeks. They exist in this wilting
<v Speaker 1>state for a while and then once they get water,
<v Speaker 1>they perk back up. How do they do that? That's
<v Speaker 1>what I'm curious about, you know, especially in these dry
<v Speaker 1>tropical forests where that's more of a thing when you've
<v Speaker 1>evolved the trait of deciduousness, just like the Grand Old
<v Speaker 1>Force of New England the fall color. Do you ever
<v Speaker 1>go to Vermont in New Hampshire to catch the ball color?
<v Speaker 1>Just like that, but instead of a response to cold,
<v Speaker 1>it's a leaf dropping strategy in response to a six
<v Speaker 1>month dry season because the intertropical convergence zone has moved
<v Speaker 1>to the other side of the Equator and you don't
<v Speaker 1>have a low pressure system in your hemisphere anymore at
<v Speaker 1>your latitude that's bringing afternoon thunderstorms like it does every
<v Speaker 1>day during the wet season. Have you ever been to
<v Speaker 1>a dry tropical forest in northwest Costa Rica or the
<v Speaker 1>southwestern Dominican Republic during the summer it's lush, it's green,
<v Speaker 1>Or in Minajerias, Minas Jurias, Brazil in this in their summers,
<v Speaker 1>which is like January for us, like that's ending summers
<v Speaker 1>in Brazil right now. It's ending the wet season. You
<v Speaker 1>go there in July, it's dry as balls. It's winter,
<v Speaker 1>but our balls dry. I guess, so is that you
<v Speaker 1>know what I mean? I don't know why it's speaking.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I didn't drive over the line. Well, you
<v Speaker 1>better do something, body, All of them goddamn trees. You've done, bastard,
<v Speaker 1>they're gonna suck up all the water. Gotta get some good.
<v Speaker 1>Where's that young man? You head out here and the
<v Speaker 1>skids there. Kid ain't too smart, it's not working with
<v Speaker 1>a bull shit, but he knows how to drive skits there.
<v Speaker 1>Get his ass out here, getting all the goddamn trees
<v Speaker 1>out here, give him straight ball his ship off here.
<v Speaker 1>And there's lamb bear because the trees are sucking up
<v Speaker 1>all the water. So why not expose all of this
<v Speaker 1>land to that one hundred and sixteen degree temperatures during
<v Speaker 1>the heat of your life? Seems like a smart idea.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, that's how we get where we are. It
<v Speaker 1>isn't that lovely? The least you can see it in action.
<v Speaker 1>You got a full picture. It's a fucking a living
<v Speaker 1>cartoon anyway, So Uh the fuck was I talking about?
<v Speaker 1>I was, I was just working on some videos old
<v Speaker 1>Ecuador stuff, Potain and Drogony, Cleo Macey. Real weird looking
<v Speaker 1>all the Cleomes. They do weird shit. You know, their
<v Speaker 1>order of brass akalls. They're in the mustards. They used
<v Speaker 1>to be in the Caper family capa race, which is
<v Speaker 1>also a mustard, which you can kind of smell in
<v Speaker 1>the leaves and you can kind of tell when you
<v Speaker 1>look at the uh, the flowers. But you know, there's
<v Speaker 1>some really weird tropical members of that family that are
<v Speaker 1>just the flowers are bigger, the leaves are bigger. It's
<v Speaker 1>more humid. They can afford to be bigger without having
<v Speaker 1>to worry about losing too much moisture out of those
<v Speaker 1>big those big leaves, those big spreading leaves with all
<v Speaker 1>the stomata. You know, you go to deserts, the leaves
<v Speaker 1>get a lot in narrow or they're reducing service area.
<v Speaker 1>But we saw Poda in Dragony. We saw, oh god,
<v Speaker 1>damn it, there was another one, really weird one. I
<v Speaker 1>think it was Cleome Anomala. It might have some different name,
<v Speaker 1>but this thing was a massive shrub. We saw it
<v Speaker 1>like eight thousand feet just below the Paramo on the
<v Speaker 1>cloud forest. I still got Paramo videos that'll be nice,
<v Speaker 1>real weird habitat up there, but PoTA androgony, I think
<v Speaker 1>it was uh bractice. I've practiced something if I have
<v Speaker 1>to look again. But you know, trying to get ideas
<v Speaker 1>on some of these plants can be a real It's
<v Speaker 1>fucking hard, you know, especially some of those like cranopigiums,
<v Speaker 1>the weird Panama hat family, the cyclon they see family,
<v Speaker 1>the Panama had they look like palms, but they related
<v Speaker 1>to screw pines and the order pandinals. I might be
<v Speaker 1>going to Speaking of the screw pines, I might be
<v Speaker 1>going to the Philippines for two weeks in April. Got
<v Speaker 1>invited there. I guys should actually look into getting airfare
<v Speaker 1>soon because that'll be really cool with the team of
<v Speaker 1>botan of bot Philippine botanists, Filipino botanists, and and checking
<v Speaker 1>out some of the for est there. I really want
<v Speaker 1>to see the oh god, damn it, the dip tarot
<v Speaker 1>cars Order mal Vley's. But it's a clade of trees,
<v Speaker 1>the Dipterocarpaci that's in the Old World tropics. Should be
<v Speaker 1>really fucking wild. There's reflegia out there to the giant
<v Speaker 1>parasitic plant with a huge flowers basketball the yoga ball
<v Speaker 1>sized flowers that mimic rotting meat that are probably pollinated
<v Speaker 1>by small beetles or small beetles or flies. I'm also
<v Speaker 1>teaching a plant i D class sliding scales like one
<v Speaker 1>to five bucks, right, super cheap donation based. Nobody turned
<v Speaker 1>away for lack of funds at Kinta, Maza Lan and
<v Speaker 1>McAllen in South Texas. This is an entirely selfish act
<v Speaker 1>because the more people that know how to identify plants,
<v Speaker 1>the more people might start paying attention to them, which
<v Speaker 1>means that the world I live in down there is
<v Speaker 1>less bleak. You've got more of a you know, more
<v Speaker 1>of a culture for native plants there, and an awareness
<v Speaker 1>of bodany. It directly benefits the immediate world that I
<v Speaker 1>have to live in, right, because it's it's rough down there.
<v Speaker 1>Car dealerships, so many personal injury attorneys. I've never seen
<v Speaker 1>such a density of personal injury attorneys. I bet there's some.
<v Speaker 1>There's a lot of personal injury attorneys in the Chicago area,
<v Speaker 1>but per capita though, I think it's probably I think
<v Speaker 1>it's certainly denser in the in the valley. Okay. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>we're a little bit further down along the road, watching
<v Speaker 1>the Golden Hour, the sunset, and our out of Saint Louis.
<v Speaker 1>I forgot they got Deli's. They got Italian delis in
<v Speaker 1>Saint Louis. I'm gonna get some nice meats. I'm just kidding.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna get some nice Deli sandwiches. I'm gonna get
<v Speaker 1>some provo loan and a big gallant jar of jardanira.
<v Speaker 1>And I don't really you out to meet some chicken
<v Speaker 1>here and there, perhaps little bit of popop, perhaps a
<v Speaker 1>little bit of turkey, but by and large I avoid
<v Speaker 1>the red meats because if they make you predisposed to
<v Speaker 1>colon cancer, the as cancer. Anyway, So I'm excited to do.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna get a gamus. How much does a gallon
<v Speaker 1>jar of hot jardin near a cost? You know, the oils,
<v Speaker 1>you get some olive oi, you get some carrots and
<v Speaker 1>jalapenos and onions and celery and shit. They got that
<v Speaker 1>stuff in in uh, you know, in over there in
<v Speaker 1>Saint Louis. I got some Italian Delis. I'm so close
<v Speaker 1>to Chicago, but I can't go all the way because
<v Speaker 1>I got to head back to Texas. It's so sad,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's just nice up there. Seventy four degrees
<v Speaker 1>in Saint Louis in late February. Fuck anyway, we didn't
<v Speaker 1>even talk about intimopathogenic fungi yet, which is are really
<v Speaker 1>big in the tropics. You go down to the lower latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna see a lot of antemopathogenic fungi. That's cordis
<v Speaker 1>EPs ovo cordiss a, cant of cordyceps is that one.
<v Speaker 1>All these different fungi that eat insects, and they're much
<v Speaker 1>more prevalent at lower latitudes than at higher ones. I
<v Speaker 1>presume just because the insects are larger and there's more bugs.
<v Speaker 1>But it's a common thing, and a lot of people
<v Speaker 1>get really amped about them. A lot of people that
<v Speaker 1>I associate with get really amped about them. I guess not.
<v Speaker 1>You know, your fucking plumber. Your plumber probably doesn't know
<v Speaker 1>what ntemopathogenic fungi are. But you should tell him or
<v Speaker 1>her or they them next time, you know, you want to,
<v Speaker 1>you have an interaction, right the fucking AC guy comes over,
<v Speaker 1>start talking about intimopathogenic fungi and why he or she
<v Speaker 1>or whatever shit should care about him? Right? Do you
<v Speaker 1>fucking know what to ask him? Do you know what
<v Speaker 1>antemopathogenic fungi are? And why not you think it? Does?
<v Speaker 1>You think it's not cool? You think it doesn't apply
<v Speaker 1>to you? Are you not a living being tied within
<v Speaker 1>this vest interwoven web, this network of life? Do you
<v Speaker 1>think you just then a vacuum? Are you fucking special? Huh?
<v Speaker 1>You just start ranting at him like that, very aggressively
<v Speaker 1>as he's up there, you know, fucking with the ducks
<v Speaker 1>and shit, trying to figure out, you know, what's going
<v Speaker 1>on in your attic and why you know the is it?
<v Speaker 1>Is it like a cooling issue? Is the is the
<v Speaker 1>condenser fan fucked up? Or you know? Do you maybe
<v Speaker 1>you just need more cooland what's going on? You know,
<v Speaker 1>last time I had an AC issue was because the
<v Speaker 1>the you know, the bathroom sink that the you know,
<v Speaker 1>AC drain because the AC's in the attic drained in
<v Speaker 1>due the bathroom sink got clocked because I got hard water.
<v Speaker 1>So I said to go in there with a little
<v Speaker 1>pipe cleaner and clean it. What the fuck is this
<v Speaker 1>semi truck trying to do? Eat a fucking cock. You're
<v Speaker 1>not getting over. Settle down, all right, mountain dew kidneys,
<v Speaker 1>Let you settle down, chill out. Where are you going?
<v Speaker 1>You're not going anywhere, you fucking Jesus Christ these trucks man. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so we didn't we didn't talk about ntemopathogenic funky. We're
<v Speaker 1>talking about them now, very common and really cool. I
<v Speaker 1>you know, I didn't do any long videos when I
<v Speaker 1>was in Ecuador. I don't think I did, maybe just one,
<v Speaker 1>but I just did shorts. I didn't have the energy.
<v Speaker 1>I'm fucking burnt out. But I did a lot of
<v Speaker 1>short videos. And one of the short videos had a
<v Speaker 1>moth that had been infected, a large moth, the sphinx
<v Speaker 1>moth that had been infected with a species of Cordyceps.
<v Speaker 1>And I think that was Acantho Cordyceps. Maybe was there
<v Speaker 1>in a kindo Cordyceps. I don't think so. Anyway, it
<v Speaker 1>looked really cool, it looked insane, and the I forget
<v Speaker 1>the species. It's on my iaz somewhere if you type
<v Speaker 1>in corticipitacy or whatever. The one of the main clades
<v Speaker 1>of Cordyceps fungi are. I've seen quite a few in
<v Speaker 1>Mexico too, And of course I'm not out there looking
<v Speaker 1>for these things. I've probably been around them numerous times,
<v Speaker 1>but I don't I'm always looking at plants, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Unless the thing is right in front of my face,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not gonna notice it, or if one of my
<v Speaker 1>my collegist friends points it out. And so. But that said,
<v Speaker 1>I have seen some really cool ones. And my friend
<v Speaker 1>Robert Kelly, he's like, you know, Mexican as hell, he
<v Speaker 1>looks Mexican. His name's Robert Kelly. I don't get it. Whatever,
<v Speaker 1>fuck it's like, oh Leary's tacos whatever. Anyway, he lives
<v Speaker 1>in Morellos, the state of Morellos in Mexico, and he
<v Speaker 1>and a friend just discovered a new species, what appears
<v Speaker 1>to be a new species of Cordyceps that infects a tarantula.
<v Speaker 1>That's really cool, that's really exciting, looks really cool under
<v Speaker 1>UV light, as many fungui normally do. Is it fungy
<v Speaker 1>or fun guy? I was doing the audiobook recordings for
<v Speaker 1>Concrete Botany and I kept fucking this up. I would
<v Speaker 1>go back and forth between fungi and fung guy. I
<v Speaker 1>think it's a fun guy anyway. So that's really interesting.
<v Speaker 1>And there's probably numerous new species of Cordyceps fungi all
<v Speaker 1>over the world right, probably hundreds, if not thousands of
<v Speaker 1>undescribed species of Cortyceps. This phenomenon is really interesting to me.
<v Speaker 1>It's interesting. I mean, the process, how it works. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know much about it. It's why it's such a phenomenon.
<v Speaker 1>How this serves as it kinds of kind of checks
<v Speaker 1>and balances on insects populations, what the role is in
<v Speaker 1>the larger ecosystem, you know, the chemistry of some of
<v Speaker 1>these fungi. It's all really interesting. Right. So there's a
<v Speaker 1>new species that they discovered in a cave in Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>some friends of mine. And then there's an this is
<v Speaker 1>even more bizarre, there's a species of spider. I think
<v Speaker 1>it's an orb weaver that mimics cort Aceps infection, because
<v Speaker 1>many Cordyceps actually infect spiders. Doing spiders aren't insects, they're
<v Speaker 1>not insects. Spiders, they're not insects. Neither are mites. And
<v Speaker 1>but this mimicry. This batsy and mimicry. I mean, this
<v Speaker 1>is this is the weird is saying, like, what selects
<v Speaker 1>for that? Now, of course the spider is not intentionally
<v Speaker 1>mimicking that. You know, for those of you that are
<v Speaker 1>familiar with natural selection, you already know this, of course,
<v Speaker 1>but many people aren't. They think, how does a plant
<v Speaker 1>know how to look like a rock? How does the
<v Speaker 1>spider know how to that? It doesn't, It doesn't. It's
<v Speaker 1>natural selection. But my, you know, myke A better way
<v Speaker 1>to say it is, what is what in the environment
<v Speaker 1>is selecting for this trait? What in the environment that
<v Speaker 1>the spider is selecting for the trait of us? You know,
<v Speaker 1>the trait of looking like you have infection with cortesps?
<v Speaker 1>Is it because animals that you're praying on and waiting
<v Speaker 1>to ambush, or insects that you're insects or animals? But
<v Speaker 1>you know what I mean, insects that you're that you're
<v Speaker 1>pray insects, pray insects that you're you're waiting to ambush
<v Speaker 1>and eat. Would think that you're a dead You're already dead,
<v Speaker 1>and you have already been infected with this thing, and
<v Speaker 1>so you can kind of protend, you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 1>There's like with zombies, do you know, they pretend to
<v Speaker 1>be dead, and the next thing you know, they're chopping
<v Speaker 1>on your ankle right as you walk past them, and
<v Speaker 1>they're laying on the ground and pretend to be as stiff,
<v Speaker 1>and they're actually still you know what I mean, they
<v Speaker 1>reanimate or whatever. And so I can see how that
<v Speaker 1>would be an adaptive benefit. Maybe you start off with
<v Speaker 1>a few of these fungal fungal like projections sticking off
<v Speaker 1>of your body due to some weird mutation, and that slowly,
<v Speaker 1>over time gets that trait becomes accentuated, you know, it
<v Speaker 1>becomes embellished, and suddenly and after a certain amount of
<v Speaker 1>generations it becomes fixed in the population or what. But
<v Speaker 1>the benefits also, I would assume, and that birds might
<v Speaker 1>pass you over as a prey if you look like
<v Speaker 1>you're infected already. Birds want to eat spiders, they don't
<v Speaker 1>They probably don't want to eat spiders that look like
<v Speaker 1>they're already infected and colonized by a fungus, right, I
<v Speaker 1>would assume. I don't know, Can you ask the birds,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if do you guys, do you guys normally
<v Speaker 1>pass over spiders that are have already been you know,
<v Speaker 1>they look like they got you know, fungals poking out
<v Speaker 1>of them. You know, if you like that, you passed
<v Speaker 1>over Cordyceps infected spiders because maybe the the heifel strands
<v Speaker 1>the kitan doesn't taste good. I don't know, but obviously
<v Speaker 1>something selecting for it, because if there wasn't something selecting
<v Speaker 1>for it, the bucking spider wouldn't look like like a
<v Speaker 1>like it was infected with Cordyceps. So this is a
<v Speaker 1>newly described species. I think the paper I'm not sure
<v Speaker 1>if it just came out or what. My friend Alex
<v Speaker 1>Uh down in Mara, Ecuador put this out. The species
<v Speaker 1>if you want to read about it is uh. It's
<v Speaker 1>a it's a Courtyceps mimicking spider. It's called tax Zanowski
<v Speaker 1>aca t A c z A n O W s
<v Speaker 1>k i A. It's a polloc name. Can you say polock?
<v Speaker 1>Pollock's not like a racism thing, right, not racist against Polish.
<v Speaker 1>She's the polo, you know, it's what you say. In Chicago,
<v Speaker 1>I had a friend he is to go out of
<v Speaker 1>mang graffiti writer. He used to write Polac. I think
<v Speaker 1>he still does write polarch so tony anyway, But uh,
<v Speaker 1>it's a Polish name. T a c z a n
<v Speaker 1>O w s k i A tajanowskia wasca w a
<v Speaker 1>s k a I think the well, I think Wasca
<v Speaker 1>means it means river mother or something in an indigenous
<v Speaker 1>language of that quarter. I'm sorry, I can't give you
<v Speaker 1>more information, and I don't know what what tribe it was.
<v Speaker 1>Either way, it's astoundingly cool. You know, this is like
<v Speaker 1>this is like on par with that snake and iran
<v Speaker 1>you know what that viper with the funny tale that
<v Speaker 1>mimics of, you know, a centipede. The bird comes down
<v Speaker 1>and get the centipede and next thing, you know this,
<v Speaker 1>the viper's got the bird. Right, So it's all just selection,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's such a high degree of selection, and
<v Speaker 1>it's probably occurs under such stressful circumstances in a in
<v Speaker 1>a stressful environment where there's high population stress on. Whatever
<v Speaker 1>is slowly evolving this adaptation. It's remarkable. So I wonder
<v Speaker 1>how many other insects and iraq nids out there do
<v Speaker 1>this mimic? God, that's fucking wild. The thing really does
<v Speaker 1>look like it's it's infected. If you want to see
<v Speaker 1>pictures of it, you can go to Instagram and go
<v Speaker 1>to Bentley seven Underscore seven and it's the post from
<v Speaker 1>well from like right about now, like, what is it February?
<v Speaker 1>What's the day today? What's the day twenty February twenty seventh.
<v Speaker 1>You've got nice pictures on there. God, it's wild though,
<v Speaker 1>man the fuck? Oh wait, no, that there's a either Okay,
<v Speaker 1>there's a picture of spiders that actually are infected, and
<v Speaker 1>then there's this or weaver that looks like it's affected.
<v Speaker 1>It's bizarre. It's so weird, really cool stuff. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, it's like the the Fritillaria fertilaria the lava
<v Speaker 1>in China that you know, humans have slowly selected for
<v Speaker 1>ones that it's a it's a you know, Fertilaria. The
<v Speaker 1>lava is a lily essentially that grows in talus piles
<v Speaker 1>and it's thought to have some herbal Chinese erbal medicinal qualities.
<v Speaker 1>If you you know, Masha pulled this above it and
<v Speaker 1>put it on a sore in your answer or something.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. So there's high harvesting pressure on it.
<v Speaker 1>For the bulbs, and so humans have inadvertently selected for
<v Speaker 1>phenotypes that look more like the gravels that they grow
<v Speaker 1>in the color of the gravels like this kind of
<v Speaker 1>deepish purple hue as opposed to more of like a
<v Speaker 1>green leaf. Cool stuff. Who to thunk, I mean people
<v Speaker 1>that natural selection works, I guess, But you know, again,
<v Speaker 1>there's just varying degrees of of amazingness. All right, we're driving,
<v Speaker 1>We're driving back from Mobot and Saint Louis and all
<v Speaker 1>that ship went to a nice Italian then deli uh
<v Speaker 1>eight half of pizza at some fucking pizza place that
<v Speaker 1>was delicious. Uh. Hung out with my friend Ben, my
<v Speaker 1>friend's Ben and Megan, both wonderful plant taxonomists and uh
<v Speaker 1>plant the collegists and field botanists. Uh. Almost got kicked
<v Speaker 1>out of the Missouri Botanical Garden Herbarium. Again. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>get kicked out at you, but I did. I did.
<v Speaker 1>I guess. There were some very upset people. They were
<v Speaker 1>all over the ages and they were upset about one
<v Speaker 1>of the videos that I did there near burium. Uh. Uh, Well,
<v Speaker 1>you know there's is there's a lot of people that
<v Speaker 1>have just clenched it not a lot. A couple, okay, couple.
<v Speaker 1>My friend Peter Bernard works there. He studies orchipolination biology.
<v Speaker 1>Wonderful guy. Always hang out with him. He's fun to
<v Speaker 1>go lurker on the library. But then they get word
<v Speaker 1>that I'm there, and they got to send someone down
<v Speaker 1>to you know, to monitor me, to make sure I
<v Speaker 1>don't film anything. They're always very nice, they're very nice.
<v Speaker 1>But there, you know, you could tell they run a
<v Speaker 1>tight ship over there, Missouri Botanical Garden. It's not as free.
<v Speaker 1>It's not as loose as I thought. And I got
<v Speaker 1>a you know, I got a friend there who's working
<v Speaker 1>in horticulture, who's having a bummer time. I guess this
<v Speaker 1>was this really bummed me out to here. And I
<v Speaker 1>guess it's not surprising because this happens to every good
<v Speaker 1>botanic garden. But they were clear. I guess they were
<v Speaker 1>clearing out in the living specimens and the h you know,
<v Speaker 1>they had to change up in leadership, and uh they
<v Speaker 1>you know, they the new guy is more of like
<v Speaker 1>a show garden guy. Doesn't know a lot about botany's
<v Speaker 1>not not doesn't really know anything about bondy. He's a
<v Speaker 1>horticultures bless his heart, and he came in. He didn't
<v Speaker 1>like all it's plaid hare one of the stuff that's
<v Speaker 1>a showy. I like the show Garden and basically everything
<v Speaker 1>I make fun of in my presentations. This guy is
<v Speaker 1>fo and and it turns out he he threw out
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of interesting stuff and uh, and they wanted
<v Speaker 1>to put in these fucking knobs. There's some guy with it.
<v Speaker 1>This guy's your car sounds like a fucking lawnmower in
<v Speaker 1>an head up. You know, I was one of a
<v Speaker 1>uh a valve fucked up? Why people want to have
<v Speaker 1>cars that sound like that. I just like small men
<v Speaker 1>that just always if not physically small, then figuratively small. Okay, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so this guy got these beautiful limestone road cuts in
<v Speaker 1>the Ozarks. You know, there's a lot of meth here,
<v Speaker 1>but there's a lot of uh wonderful geology too. But
<v Speaker 1>so anyway, so I remember the first time I went
<v Speaker 1>to mobile back in the back greenhouses like five years ago.
<v Speaker 1>They had amazing living specimens, right, things that if you're
<v Speaker 1>adult are gonna you're gonna find boring. But if you
<v Speaker 1>have any interest in bodany or ecology or how plants
<v Speaker 1>evolve really cool strategies to deal with the stresses of
<v Speaker 1>the bizarre habitats that they evolve in. Uh, if you
<v Speaker 1>have any insight into that, you're gonna know what some
<v Speaker 1>of this stuff isn't find it interesting, right, If you
<v Speaker 1>have an inquisitive mind, you can ask questions. But if
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you like the home deskot garden section
<v Speaker 1>and you like the showy shit, you know, the bullshit
<v Speaker 1>that the you know, some rich orthodontist's wife likes and
<v Speaker 1>wants in her front yard and the north Shore suburbs.
<v Speaker 1>If you like that stuff, you're gonna see some of
<v Speaker 1>these specimens and go, that's boring. A bunch of boring stuff.
<v Speaker 1>The graphic fuck I want you Why can't I just
<v Speaker 1>get some nice moms? I like it when you have
<v Speaker 1>the cascading month, it's like you girl, mom, and then
<v Speaker 1>you train it to look like at the fall, like
<v Speaker 1>all that kind of shit, you know, the stuff that
<v Speaker 1>made me think that botanic gardens were boring as fuck
<v Speaker 1>when I was a kid, because that's what they were.
<v Speaker 1>They were the people like that people put that stuff
<v Speaker 1>in right, And so there's two different styles of botanic
<v Speaker 1>gardens and The one that's far more prevalent is this
<v Speaker 1>kind of show garden bullshit. I've ranted about this plenty
<v Speaker 1>of times before. And the really cool botanic gardens, like
<v Speaker 1>the UC Berkeley style Botanic gardens, where it's literally like
<v Speaker 1>a living museum and it's all separated geographically, Like you
<v Speaker 1>go to the South Africa section and you see all
<v Speaker 1>these cool plants that you can't find anywhere else in
<v Speaker 1>the United States because no one's growing them. You find
<v Speaker 1>those plants, you feel like you're in South Africa. Or
<v Speaker 1>you go to the Eastern North America section and you
<v Speaker 1>feel like you're in Eastern North America even though you're
<v Speaker 1>in the Bay Area of California. Or you go to
<v Speaker 1>the Chile section and they've got all these all the
<v Speaker 1>bits of the Chilean ecosystem. They're really really cool shit, right,
<v Speaker 1>Or the College of Biological Sciences. I was surprised to
<v Speaker 1>see this, the College of Biological Sciences at in St. Paul, Minnesota. Right,
<v Speaker 1>They've got a greenhouse that's full with like every room
<v Speaker 1>is like that. They've got that new Caledonian section of
<v Speaker 1>South Africa section. Fascinating shit. Right, you put people who
<v Speaker 1>are smart and well traveled or at least know about
<v Speaker 1>these different ecosystems in charge, and you give them freedom
<v Speaker 1>and they can produce amazing things. Right. They've got passion
<v Speaker 1>and they've got intellect, and they're really interested in this stuff.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, fucking Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago has an
<v Speaker 1>amazing desert house, right because the cause Ray is interested
<v Speaker 1>in playing, you know, he doesn't care about oh the
<v Speaker 1>showy stuff, but put it has a nice flower at
<v Speaker 1>arregated leaves like this, whack shit. Right, He's not into that.
<v Speaker 1>He's into really cool xerophytes. Right, Zerophytic plants, really interesting
<v Speaker 1>stuff that have cool ecological or evolutionary stories to tell.
<v Speaker 1>It's pollinated by an interesting flower or interesting animal, it's
<v Speaker 1>its evolved some novel traits that looks totally bizarre because
<v Speaker 1>it's a way that it enables it to deal with
<v Speaker 1>a stressful geologic substrate or a stressful habitat or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>You know, that kind of stuff. But anyway, they're clearing
<v Speaker 1>I guess and miserve attentne garden. They're clearing a lot
<v Speaker 1>of that out and hopefully this goes back. And that's
<v Speaker 1>another thing I guess they've been saying that the pendulum
<v Speaker 1>has swung too far. It's swung too.
<v Speaker 2>Far towards science and conservation. We're educating the public too much, right,
<v Speaker 2>the pendulum has swung too far. We need to make
<v Speaker 2>it more of an appeasing garden for the rich donors,
<v Speaker 2>because that's who we're trying to please. And of course
<v Speaker 2>we'll take that money. We'll take all that money, and
<v Speaker 2>we'll fund science and conservation. Yes, yes, of course we will, yes, yes, yes,
<v Speaker 2>But we need to please those rich donors, right, And
<v Speaker 2>we don't want to make the rich donors feel stupid
<v Speaker 2>because we're giving them too much information or because we've
<v Speaker 2>got informational signs that tell.
<v Speaker 1>Them about an ecological habit of a plant. We need
<v Speaker 1>to come at them like they've got a fifth grade education.
<v Speaker 1>This is the kind of shit that they say that
<v Speaker 1>that people in administration, in positions of authorities say. It's
<v Speaker 1>fucking embarrassing. It's terrible, all right, what they're doing there,
<v Speaker 1>Like they're throwing out specimens like really interesting shit. They've
<v Speaker 1>thrown on a bunch of cool cacti, a bunch of cool,
<v Speaker 1>dry tropical stuff because it's not showy enough. They've got
<v Speaker 1>entire fucking greenhouses where they're training mums to look like
<v Speaker 1>they're cascading over the rock wall. Fucking mums. You know
<v Speaker 1>what I would ship my paint. If I went to
<v Speaker 1>UC Berkeley and they the botanic gardner and they cleared
<v Speaker 1>out everything and planted fucking mums, you know what I
<v Speaker 1>would do. I would probably defecate right there in the middle.
<v Speaker 1>I would be so upset as a matter of protest.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it'd be like if you went into the
<v Speaker 1>Smithsonian and you got rid of all the cool artifacts
<v Speaker 1>and all the cool exhibits and instead used to you
<v Speaker 1>filled it with like the American girl Doll collection, and
<v Speaker 1>like some fucking glass bunny figurines from the nineteen sixties
<v Speaker 1>and some you know, metal lunch boxes with cool uh
<v Speaker 1>you know, cartoon imagery on them from the nineteen fifties.
<v Speaker 1>You know what, do you understand what I'm saying? You understand?
<v Speaker 1>And this is what if you go to botanic gardens
<v Speaker 1>like you go to fucking Longwood Gardens. I've heard is like,
<v Speaker 1>this is anybody listening to this podcast from Longwood Gardens?
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry, I'm shitting on your workplace, right, I've never
<v Speaker 1>been there. I could be totally wrong. I've just heard
<v Speaker 1>it is this. I call it rich cunt. It's a
<v Speaker 1>non gender specific cunt, rich cunt botanic gardens, right, like
<v Speaker 1>just boring fucking stiffs. People that are just it's all
<v Speaker 1>people sniffing each other's parts out of wineglasses, trying to.
<v Speaker 2>Have cotillion dinners to fundraisers. Yes, very rich dollnews.
<v Speaker 1>Right. I cannot shit on this stuff enough. I could
<v Speaker 1>do a whole podcast shitting on these kind of fucking
<v Speaker 1>knobs because they make everyone dumber. They're spreading stupidity, and
<v Speaker 1>they're all chicken shit anyway, right, And I'm not attacking
<v Speaker 1>any one direct person. I'm just this is a phenomenon
<v Speaker 1>I've seen. I saw it happen at San Francisco Botanical Garden.
<v Speaker 1>They took everyone when I first started volunteering there, and
<v Speaker 1>by volunteering, I didn't sign anything, I didn't sign a waiver.
<v Speaker 1>I just started lurking around the greenhouses because I was
<v Speaker 1>really interested and passionate about plants. And they took me
<v Speaker 1>another wing, the people that were working there at the time,
<v Speaker 1>it's like twenty ten, and showed me how to grow
<v Speaker 1>plants and showed me a bunch of cool plants that
<v Speaker 1>were just you know, have you heard of this thing before?
<v Speaker 1>It's really weird. It's formed this mutualist relationship with this
<v Speaker 1>species of blows so and so, and they had specimens
<v Speaker 1>of it. I felt it was like going into a museum.
<v Speaker 1>You learn so much. Right, when I go to Field Museum,
<v Speaker 1>I learned so much when I'm there, I feel like
<v Speaker 1>I'm walking into a textbook. Field Museum, Chicago. It's fucking that.
<v Speaker 1>It is such an asset, right, And what's the benefit
<v Speaker 1>of learning, of teaching the public. Well, it prevents the
<v Speaker 1>whole American public from further sliding into this Saganesque dystopia
<v Speaker 1>that we're living in. Right, exactly what Carl Sagan imagined.
<v Speaker 1>We all have technology, we don't know how the fuck
<v Speaker 1>it works. We live in the living world. We don't
<v Speaker 1>know how the fuck that works. Right, everyone's just collectively
<v Speaker 1>getting dumber. That's good for the economy. That's what's happening.
<v Speaker 1>That's what's happening in America. This shit makes me mad, Right,
<v Speaker 1>you do this lowest common denominator shit fucking show gardens. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's got a place, right, I guess like the boring
<v Speaker 1>rich stiffs, they need a spot to go sniff each
<v Speaker 1>other's farts and bump shoulders and shit and jack each
<v Speaker 1>other off figuratively speaking, of course they need that. Why
<v Speaker 1>does it need to be, you know, what's supposed to
<v Speaker 1>be a public institution, like a boot panic garden. It's
<v Speaker 1>just it's so sickening, and you know, it's I don't
<v Speaker 1>think it's I think this shit is really condescending to
<v Speaker 1>the public too, because I think if you show people
<v Speaker 1>what it could be instead of a show garden, it's
<v Speaker 1>a really cool educational you know, where you're taking pieces
<v Speaker 1>of a living ecosystem and putting them on display for
<v Speaker 1>the public and then telling the public what's so cool
<v Speaker 1>about them? I think people would like that, right. I
<v Speaker 1>think you're vastly underestimating what people would be into by
<v Speaker 1>assuming they would not like that and that it's not
<v Speaker 1>worth doing and that you have to talk to them
<v Speaker 1>at a fifth grade level. I think that. I think
<v Speaker 1>you're vastly underestimating them and fucking insulting them. It's disgusting.
<v Speaker 1>And who gets put in these positions of power too?
<v Speaker 1>Like why is someone that you know, for instance, let's
<v Speaker 1>just say, would be better off managing a TGI Fridays
<v Speaker 1>or an outback steakhouse. Why are we putting them, you know,
<v Speaker 1>in charge of in charge of this stuff in charge
<v Speaker 1>of shouldn't it be field bodanists or people that work
<v Speaker 1>from the ground up, or people that you know both
<v Speaker 1>grow plants and also have seen them in habitat and
<v Speaker 1>are really excited about this. Shouldn't they be the ones?
<v Speaker 1>Like a friend of mine who was working there used
<v Speaker 1>to be he used to you know, he was salary,
<v Speaker 1>so they didn't give him straight hours, and he would
<v Speaker 1>come in on the weekends. Right, he'd show up at
<v Speaker 1>like ten am weekdays, nine am the weekdays, but they
<v Speaker 1>ain't come in in the week weekend because he just
<v Speaker 1>loved being there. He loved it. Right, new boss comes in,
<v Speaker 1>I watch you here right at seven am, and I
<v Speaker 1>want you to be gone by that. You can't hang
<v Speaker 1>out after three? Right? Why? Why that's fucking stupid? All right,
<v Speaker 1>this isn't a fucking Benegan's restaurant, buddy, Okay, this isn't chips.
<v Speaker 1>Let's give people who are passionate and have intellect, give
<v Speaker 1>them freedom and watch what they can do. Right. Who
<v Speaker 1>the fuck else comes into work on a week will
<v Speaker 1>if I work there, and I never would in a
<v Speaker 1>million years because it sounds like the people in charge
<v Speaker 1>are fucking clueless. But if I did work there, I'd
<v Speaker 1>be coming into the weekends. I love it and I
<v Speaker 1>would want to do everything I could to watch to
<v Speaker 1>make sure that that place thrived. Right, you take pride
<v Speaker 1>in it, But then you start hammering people down. You
<v Speaker 1>start being stiff and rigid, and that's good for stupid people.
<v Speaker 1>That's not good for people that have passionate or smart. Right,
<v Speaker 1>you start hammering people down, you make it just feel
<v Speaker 1>like I sick any fucking job. I could just be
<v Speaker 1>working the desk at a d dentist office and it's
<v Speaker 1>you know whatever, Yeah, fuck it, I don't care about
<v Speaker 1>this place anymore. You just drive morale as low as
<v Speaker 1>you can. And I've seen this happen. This happens not
<v Speaker 1>just at botanic gardens, but at private companies. Right. You
<v Speaker 1>need to get people that do shit like this, You
<v Speaker 1>need to get them out right, you can't. I just
<v Speaker 1>it's amazing, man. More rules, more rigidity, more trying to
<v Speaker 1>please rich donors, more dumbing everything down. It's embarrassing. It
<v Speaker 1>really would be like if you put to the fucking
<v Speaker 1>Field Museum in the SMITHSONI and you throw it all
<v Speaker 1>the cool, got rid of all the cool exhibits, and
<v Speaker 1>you filled it with lowest common denominator bullshit. Right, we're
<v Speaker 1>gonna take you know, we're gonna get rid of the
<v Speaker 1>Hall of Body. Let's fill it with I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>a collection of plastic Star Wars figurines from the late
<v Speaker 1>nineteen seventies, right, have you seen these action figures. We've
<v Speaker 1>got every different, you know, because there's a multiple different
<v Speaker 1>you know, during throughout the early eighties they were doing
<v Speaker 1>different runs of Star Wars figurines, and so we've got
<v Speaker 1>all of them here. It just it makes let's make
<v Speaker 1>people dumber. That's great. It's it's horrific to see, man.
<v Speaker 1>So but that's what's going on. And uh, you know
<v Speaker 1>you can see it in the greenhouses. And so it's
<v Speaker 1>my job to shit on that. It's my job to
<v Speaker 1>ship on that. We went there. They were having the
<v Speaker 1>Orchid Show on Sunday, and I went to I went
<v Speaker 1>to the fucking Orchid Show. I was like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>because we had to go there anyway. I had to
<v Speaker 1>drop them stuff out of their barrium and we went
<v Speaker 1>into the orchid show, and I was just, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's they're first off, they're playing music that sounds like
<v Speaker 1>it'd be playing in the dialysis clinic. It's like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>or a cotillion dinner. It's like, really fancy. I felt
<v Speaker 1>like I was at a fucking symphony where I was
<v Speaker 1>gonna get, you know, thrown out for pocket too loud. Right,
<v Speaker 1>they're playing they should have been playing Cumbia's. Most of
<v Speaker 1>the fucking orchids they were showing come from neotropical areas.
<v Speaker 1>Play Cumbia's. Play something that doesn't suck. You're playing this
<v Speaker 1>music for these rich stiffs night. And then it's all
<v Speaker 1>just show. It's all cultivars, it's all showy. Or there's
<v Speaker 1>no mention of or kids have the whole family has
<v Speaker 1>one of the coolest pollination systems, a diversity of pollination systems,
<v Speaker 1>really cool stories ecologically and evolutionarily to tell there. And
<v Speaker 1>there was nothing, there was no information about any of
<v Speaker 1>these things. It was just here's a pretty flower. Hmm,
<v Speaker 1>doesn't it smell nice? You know? And some of them
<v Speaker 1>didn't smell nice. Some of them smelled like rotting meat
<v Speaker 1>because like the bulb of phylens and shit, there. Some
<v Speaker 1>of those are pollinated by flies that go after carcasses.
<v Speaker 1>No mention of that, No mention, let's make everyone dumber.
<v Speaker 1>Let's just put it's just the pretty plant. That's I
<v Speaker 1>need to know. It's the pretty shower, pretty flower. And
<v Speaker 1>this is more of the mentality again that separates us
<v Speaker 1>from the living world. Right. Fuck the education, Fuck the
<v Speaker 1>philosophical context. You can glean about your own place in
<v Speaker 1>the world from learning about how these lineages work, how
<v Speaker 1>taxonomy works, how evolution works, how two different species have
<v Speaker 1>evolved that are relatively closely related have evolved different you know,
<v Speaker 1>pollination strategies or ecologies. Fuck all that. He was a
<v Speaker 1>pretty flower. Isn't it pretty? Isn't it It listened to
<v Speaker 1>the music. Isn't it pretty music? Dude? It's pretty just
<v Speaker 1>you know, bottom bottom of the fucking brainstem stuff. It
<v Speaker 1>kills me. Man. So anyway, security finally kicked us out
<v Speaker 1>of the orchid show. It's because they had a dog
<v Speaker 1>in there, you know, the old service animal thing. Louis
<v Speaker 1>was being really good though, but so they kicked this
<v Speaker 1>out and then we were just walking around the little
<v Speaker 1>gardens with all the beds in the green yard. They
<v Speaker 1>got some interesting stuff in the in the bed they
<v Speaker 1>had lighting area, which is cool. It's a cool member
<v Speaker 1>of Simarubasi, a pretty rare genus. I've seen it here
<v Speaker 1>in Missouri. I've seen it in East Texas. It also
<v Speaker 1>grows in Florida. It's a wetland member of Simarubasi, the
<v Speaker 1>Atlantis and Castilla family. But uh, but you know, they
<v Speaker 1>said a lot of garbs. They had English ivy as
<v Speaker 1>a specimen like it had its own label, and shit
<v Speaker 1>English ivy in the fucking garden beds. You have a
<v Speaker 1>listed invasive noxious weed as a specimen plant. That's like
<v Speaker 1>when I went the four Worth Botanic car And they're
<v Speaker 1>horrible for this stuff too, or at least they were
<v Speaker 1>five years ago. Maybe they've changed. Probably not right, because again,
<v Speaker 1>anywhere you have, you know, you're dependent on rich twats
<v Speaker 1>for donations. You have to dumb it down. You have
<v Speaker 1>to put this puke out there, right. I bet that,
<v Speaker 1>you know. I bet if the rich people don't care,
<v Speaker 1>they just want to spot to stiff each other's asses,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and show off their money. They don't care.
<v Speaker 1>You could put the take a gamble. You could put
<v Speaker 1>some of the educational shit in there to a lot
<v Speaker 1>more of it actually, and get rid of some of
<v Speaker 1>this dumb show garden fluff. And they wouldn't give a shit, right,
<v Speaker 1>you just had to explain it to them. Well, we
<v Speaker 1>put this in there because it's a really cool plant
<v Speaker 1>that's got a cool ecology. It's related to this thing,
<v Speaker 1>but it took this drastically different turn on the phylogenetic
<v Speaker 1>tree of life, and it looks rapidly or it looks,
<v Speaker 1>you know, extremely different from all of its uh, all
<v Speaker 1>of its relatives. Right, you can explain it. The little
<v Speaker 1>rich don't care. They just want to sniff each other's butts.
<v Speaker 1>They just want to be They want to have a spot.
<v Speaker 1>They have their little banquets and shit, you know the
<v Speaker 1>rich donors. You don't have to. It's just it's so
<v Speaker 1>pathetic and chicken shit. But to have to have English
<v Speaker 1>ivy like forwith Botanic Garden had Nandina domestica in the
<v Speaker 1>fucking garden beds Atlanta Botanical Garden is another shithole for
<v Speaker 1>this no offense. They do have some cool stuff, it's
<v Speaker 1>like stuffed off in the corner. You got like some
<v Speaker 1>New Caledonian stuff. But they have a lot of garbage,
<v Speaker 1>a lot of this garbage. And I think it's because,
<v Speaker 1>you know, no offense to anybody working there, at least
<v Speaker 1>on the ground. This is administrative decisions. These are administrative
<v Speaker 1>decisions made to attract oh, beautiful rockout cropping, holy hell
<v Speaker 1>over here on Highway sixty seven through Missouri. These are
<v Speaker 1>administrative decisions that are made to attract the wealthy and
<v Speaker 1>to please the wealthy so that they keep getting money,
<v Speaker 1>and they don't want it. They're afraid that if they
<v Speaker 1>plant wild plants, wild ecotype plants of shit that's interesting.
<v Speaker 1>And they if they you know, they don't plant a
<v Speaker 1>hundred of them all in a line or group to
<v Speaker 1>by color, that that's gonna be a turn off to
<v Speaker 1>the wealthy donors. And so they want to do more
<v Speaker 1>of this Victorian garden, this Renaissance garden bullshit that kills
<v Speaker 1>me on the inside every time I have to see it.
<v Speaker 1>If I never saw this kind of gardening style again
<v Speaker 1>in my entire life, I wouldn't miss it. I wouldn't cry,
<v Speaker 1>I wouldn't mourn it. There would never be an afternoon
<v Speaker 1>where I woke where you know, or a morning where
<v Speaker 1>I woke up and then thought, oh, Wow, I'd love
<v Speaker 1>to see a hundred fucking moms cascading over a brick wall.
<v Speaker 1>Wouldn't that be something? Wouldn't that? I do miss being
<v Speaker 1>able to see that. That will never happen. That will
<v Speaker 1>never fucking happen. I spend time in a living world.
<v Speaker 1>I go, I do field botany, I go look at
<v Speaker 1>wild shit, I go look at cool stuff. Right, I
<v Speaker 1>have a lot of context for what I like, like
<v Speaker 1>having a lot of context for what I go. Look at.
<v Speaker 1>My context for this bullshit is that some rich cunt
<v Speaker 1>just make just bread this stuff to look stupid. It
<v Speaker 1>looks really goofy. It doesn't look wild, it doesn't look natural,
<v Speaker 1>and they just found it whimsically attractive, and it's supposed
<v Speaker 1>to please some you know, double digitiq dolt with a
<v Speaker 1>lot of money. That's what my context is for those plans, right,
<v Speaker 1>That's what the context is. That's what you've turned it into.
<v Speaker 1>That's what you're making us all look at. I've spent
<v Speaker 1>twenty minutes talking about this. I'll spend another twenty east.
<v Speaker 1>I mean I won't put it. I could easily spend
<v Speaker 1>spend another twenty minutes. Really, heterohelis, you get English ivy
<v Speaker 1>in the garden bed is a specimen tree? Are you
<v Speaker 1>trying to be an asshole? Is this a joke? We
<v Speaker 1>should make a joke. I want to make a horticultural
<v Speaker 1>atrocity garden. If I ever have a botanical gun, I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna make a horticultural atrocity garden. And there's gonna be
<v Speaker 1>a big fucking toilet in the middle of it, like
<v Speaker 1>a big surrand. It's gonna be an art installation with
<v Speaker 1>a toilet and a bunch of garbage, like just a
<v Speaker 1>giant pile of garbage in the middle of this. And
<v Speaker 1>I'll laminate it with that plastic you know, some some
<v Speaker 1>epoxy so it doesn't move or blow around in the wind.
<v Speaker 1>It'll be a big pilot trash with a toilet in
<v Speaker 1>the middle, maybe some old rolls, a carpet, a lot
<v Speaker 1>of plastic trash, soda bottles, you know, chip bags, shit
<v Speaker 1>like that. And then I'm gonna plant crape myrtles and
<v Speaker 1>Andina domestica and daylilies and all this dumb bullshit around it.
<v Speaker 1>And that's gonna be the horticultural atrocity garden. We'll stuff
<v Speaker 1>it in the corner. It'll be an installation piece so
<v Speaker 1>people can understand what was still going on in early
<v Speaker 1>twenty first century American horticulture. Tony's Garden of Trash and Pain,
<v Speaker 1>that's what we'll call it. Oh god, it's forty degrees.
<v Speaker 1>It's like two in the afternoon. It's forty degrees. I'm
<v Speaker 1>headed south. I'm going. I'm getting south to Texarcana. Man,
<v Speaker 1>get south as soon as possible. The other route would
<v Speaker 1>have taken me west before it went south. I need
<v Speaker 1>to get south. This is Chili. I liked it for
<v Speaker 1>a day. It's nice to get like a gray, gloomy day.
<v Speaker 1>But now it's uh, you know, it's wearing on me.
<v Speaker 1>But then, like three days ago was seventy degrees here.
<v Speaker 1>You know, winter doesn't happen anymore. I remember growing up
<v Speaker 1>as a kid in Chicago. You'd get snowfall on Halloween sometimes.
<v Speaker 1>Now it doesn't come to like late December January. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's so wild. It's just it's like there's no winter anymore.
<v Speaker 1>Oh my god. So one hundred was one hundred degrees
<v Speaker 1>in South Texas in late February, just nuts it's gonna
<v Speaker 1>be a hot summer. And we started a war with Iran, well,
<v Speaker 1>not you and me, but the US, the pigs and change.
<v Speaker 1>You know, this is fucking nuts. It's nuts that just
<v Speaker 1>that it wasn't bleak enough already, we got to add
<v Speaker 1>a little bit to it. It was the thing. Going
<v Speaker 1>back to Missouri Botanic Guarden though, and I talk about
<v Speaker 1>Missouri Botanica Garden of course if you're wondering why Missouri
<v Speaker 1>Botanical Garden, because it's it's like the American Queue, it's
<v Speaker 1>one of the best, or supposed to be one of
<v Speaker 1>the best botanical gardens in the UH in the country.
<v Speaker 1>They've got a library, they have a press, they're responsible
<v Speaker 1>for printing a ton of floras, a ton of books.
<v Speaker 1>They're you know, they have pioneered a bunch of research.
<v Speaker 1>They've got I mean, they wrote the Ecuador Catalog of
<v Speaker 1>Vascular Plants that I was using when I was in
<v Speaker 1>Ecuador came from Missouri Botanical Garden. It was funded there.
<v Speaker 1>So they're they do good work. But the actual garden
<v Speaker 1>itself is kind of going into the shitter. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure it's always been like this because that horticultural
<v Speaker 1>garbage has always been a thing the Shill gardens. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, normally botanical gardens will have that stuff, and
<v Speaker 1>then they'll have people like cool people working behind the
<v Speaker 1>scenes to actually get some educational stuff in there. But
<v Speaker 1>it seems like now they've got someone behind the scenes
<v Speaker 1>who's working to like liquidate all the educational stuff and
<v Speaker 1>and put in show guards. You know again. San Francisco
<v Speaker 1>Potano Garden, same thing used to be a lot of
<v Speaker 1>interesting stuff. If I went back there five years ago
<v Speaker 1>and I had heard this was happening, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>some some guy had taken it over who cleared out
<v Speaker 1>all the interesting stuff, probably because he didn't understand it.
<v Speaker 1>He didn't he wasn't a botanist, he wasn't a plant
<v Speaker 1>a cologist whatever, uh and and filled the ship with petunias.
<v Speaker 1>They're show garden people, right. I like plants. People tell
<v Speaker 1>me that I like plants, and what do you like?
<v Speaker 1>And then it's like it's just a fucking and no offense.
<v Speaker 1>And then that's great, but it's you know again, it's
<v Speaker 1>just dumped down. It could you can really get people
<v Speaker 1>to understand the context of where they fit into the
<v Speaker 1>world and and to educate them, right, And that's that's
<v Speaker 1>the kind of society I'd like to live in, right,
<v Speaker 1>a place where people are smart, and because if they
<v Speaker 1>have the if they have the context and to understand
<v Speaker 1>where they fit in and they can, that affects everything else.
<v Speaker 1>That affects everything else in society. You want scientifically literate people, right,
<v Speaker 1>even just if it's just some dude working in a
<v Speaker 1>fucking gas station, why not, you know, and why not
<v Speaker 1>why should he not have a little bit of an
<v Speaker 1>understanding scientific understanding? Well should he not know the geologic timescale? Right? Right?
<v Speaker 1>Empower people anyway. But so we were we were in
<v Speaker 1>the climatron though, and there's I guess there's a hummingbird
<v Speaker 1>that got stuck in the Climatron, which is like their
<v Speaker 1>massive greenhouse that's got to cost an arm and a
<v Speaker 1>lake to cool man, because even on a chilly day,
<v Speaker 1>that's got to get fucking hot in there. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a giant dome shaped the greenhouse. And I guess this
<v Speaker 1>hummingbird made it in there. He got stuck, and and
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, it's a it's a it's it's uh,
<v Speaker 1>it's a win anna lose because and on one end
<v Speaker 1>he's got all these wonderful sources of food because there's
<v Speaker 1>so many hummingbird pollinated plants in there. It's in this
<v Speaker 1>tropical greenhouse. But then also he's got to be lonely
<v Speaker 1>because he doesn't have a mate, you know, but to
<v Speaker 1>make it in there over the he also doesn't have
<v Speaker 1>to worry about flying south for the winter. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you gotta get them a friend in there. But yeah, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so yeah, but if you're in saying, look, if you're
<v Speaker 1>in a Saint Paul, Minnesota, go to the College of
<v Speaker 1>Botanical College of Biological Sciences greenhouse. It's fucking phenomenal. The
<v Speaker 1>people that are working there are doing amazing work. They've
<v Speaker 1>got a lot of cool stuff. You can see living
<v Speaker 1>specimens of plants that grow on really really cool ecosystems,
<v Speaker 1>and wild type specimens, not some dumbass cultivar someone thought
<v Speaker 1>was attractive. It's more shilly than there is, right. You
<v Speaker 1>could see wild type specimens of really cool plants, like
<v Speaker 1>plants that you would read about in botany textbooks because
<v Speaker 1>they exhibit a really cool trait or evolutionary strategy or
<v Speaker 1>ecological strategy. So that's good. Garfield Park Conservatory is really good.
<v Speaker 1>You see Berkeley Botanic Gardens really good. Boyce Thompson Arboretum
<v Speaker 1>is really good. In Arizona, They've got some really cool stuff.
<v Speaker 1>You know that the kind of shit that Doults would
<v Speaker 1>think is weedy, but it's actually really fascinating. They've got
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of different types of Kreosode of Larrea trident
<v Speaker 1>data at Boyce Thompson, which is cool like all the
<v Speaker 1>South American because that's where Kreosa bush came from. South America.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, but back to the mobile, So I had
<v Speaker 1>to go to the arbarium to check on some identifications
<v Speaker 1>I had made when I was in Hidalgo. Mainly I
<v Speaker 1>wanted to look at three dry land or at least
<v Speaker 1>dry tropical members of the coffee family. And these plants
<v Speaker 1>grew at higher elevations like five six thousand feet, so
<v Speaker 1>they're not lowland tropics, but they were remarkable. Nonetheless, Searing
<v Speaker 1>Ganta culture I was one of them. It was growing
<v Speaker 1>with the Vaccalinia species, which was fucking wild to see
<v Speaker 1>because Collinea is like a west They grow that in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas horticulturally, so these are xerophytes. They're like dry shrubs.
<v Speaker 1>Searing get the culture. I had really bizarre shaped yellow
<v Speaker 1>tube flowers, probably moth pollinated. I think all these coffee
<v Speaker 1>family members ruby Ac members I was looking at were
<v Speaker 1>moth pollinated. Nernstya mexicana was another one that I saw
<v Speaker 1>growing out of limestone with Hibiscus marchianis and a whole
<v Speaker 1>and Aerocarpus and a whole bunch of other I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it was wild to me. It's wild to see shrub
<v Speaker 1>ruby ace xerophytes growing in deserts with cacti and all
<v Speaker 1>this other shit, because it's just I normally just think
<v Speaker 1>ruby ac is more of like a lowland tropical thing.
<v Speaker 1>If we're not talking like you know, how Stonia or
<v Speaker 1>something that it's it's gonna be, it's not, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's if it's gonna be like a shrub or tree,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's gonna be more of a tropical, more music thing.
<v Speaker 1>But that's not the case. So Nerdstya my Xicana formerly
<v Speaker 1>Siguria mexicana, really cool one. And these should all be
<v Speaker 1>in cultivation, by the way, you know, as zero fitic
<v Speaker 1>plants in Texas, Arizona, southern California, and as far as
<v Speaker 1>I know, no one is growing any of these. So
<v Speaker 1>Nurdstya Mexicana searing Ganta cultureI and then Coude Portia. I
<v Speaker 1>think uh co O U t E p O r
<v Speaker 1>t I A maybe was another Guys Brick Giana ges
<v Speaker 1>Geys brand g h I E S. That was another one.
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to confirm, I said, I just want to
<v Speaker 1>make sure. I saw him in in uh Hidalgo and
<v Speaker 1>in San Luis poto C And I wanted to make sure.
<v Speaker 1>And I took me a while to figure out what
<v Speaker 1>they were just going through the flora, I I d
<v Speaker 1>them and then wanted to make sure that's what indeed
<v Speaker 1>what they all were, and it was. And they're all
<v Speaker 1>really fucking cool shrubs, you know, shrubs, small trees that
<v Speaker 1>should be in cult innovation, moth pollinated whatever, and that
<v Speaker 1>you know, a couple of them grow just south of
<v Speaker 1>the border in south Texas or and in northern Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>excuse me, right, So they were probably there before the
<v Speaker 1>place to seem cooling they were probably probably occurred farther north.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, who's to say, right, but I'm guessing that
<v Speaker 1>once that place to seem cooling happened, that knocked out
<v Speaker 1>a lot of northern populations of stuff that still around
<v Speaker 1>or lineages ancestors of shit that's still around in northern Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>so I wanted to go look at that confirm. And
<v Speaker 1>then there was a weird red flowered scutelaria I saw
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico Scutlarium mulang tensius. They didn't have that at thebarium.
<v Speaker 1>There was a weird rus kondra loma from Wahaca that
<v Speaker 1>I'm still not confident that was the identification of the
<v Speaker 1>small tree that I saw, but I'm guessing it is,
<v Speaker 1>who knows. And then I was looking at some of
<v Speaker 1>those pseudo smodingium as rash plants. Pseudo Smodingium P s
<v Speaker 1>E U d O S M O d I N
<v Speaker 1>g I U n which is a fucking dope genus
<v Speaker 1>and a cardiac supposedly contains rushia all the poison IV compound,
<v Speaker 1>and it was U pernissiosa. What was what was the
<v Speaker 1>one I saw? Pseudo Smodingium pernissiosa priniciosa. I forget P
<v Speaker 1>E R. I don't know. It was incredible though. The
<v Speaker 1>leaves look fucking gorgeous, and I guess it's pretty common,
<v Speaker 1>and there were quite a few specimens of it. You
<v Speaker 1>could actually see the u rushi all on the leaves,
<v Speaker 1>oxidizing the black. Not everything that oxidizes to black is
<v Speaker 1>going to be rushi all of course, But you rushy
<v Speaker 1>all does do that. So I'm gonna sharg you know,
<v Speaker 1>to get these specimens looking really good if you do
<v Speaker 1>collect them and you're from a wet environment, because I
<v Speaker 1>would fork you up before. I used to just dry
<v Speaker 1>these things, put them in a notebook, dry them on
<v Speaker 1>the dash of a car. But if you don't have
<v Speaker 1>a car around, like I didn't when I was in Ecuador,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I just brought a fucking food dehydrator, and
<v Speaker 1>you find a way to set them up right on
<v Speaker 1>the food dehydrate, to use chopsticks or something to hold
<v Speaker 1>them in place, sticking the chopsticks through the grill on
<v Speaker 1>the dehydrator and put the book vertical holding, you know,
<v Speaker 1>wrap it with a rubber band or something, and then
<v Speaker 1>use that to dry. But you know, you want to
<v Speaker 1>do it slowly enough so that you preserve the color.
<v Speaker 1>You don't turn the whole specimen black. Whatever. There's a
<v Speaker 1>whole method to the madness of this. How people do
<v Speaker 1>this stuff right, That's one way I'm going to do
<v Speaker 1>it the food dehydrate or the other ways, you know,
<v Speaker 1>getting milk crates and setting the whole plant press on
<v Speaker 1>the milk rate, throwing a blanket over it, getting a
<v Speaker 1>small space heater, putting that under and to the you know,
<v Speaker 1>right of the milk crate that your specimens are on,
<v Speaker 1>and then you know, dramping a blanket over that. I
<v Speaker 1>think I mentioned this in the last podcast, that the
<v Speaker 1>channels the warm air up some warm air and movement,
<v Speaker 1>of course pulls the moisture out of these plants and
<v Speaker 1>uh and drives them right as opposed to just if
<v Speaker 1>you heat them up too rapidly and then you just
<v Speaker 1>cook them and they turned black and look like shit.
<v Speaker 1>Oh now we just crossed an Arkansas, beautiful Neelyville, Missouri.
<v Speaker 1>Stopped into the Longhorn restaurant and gas station to go
<v Speaker 1>use the can, and some some fucking idiot had written
<v Speaker 1>deports some MOLLI parasites parasites. They spelled parasites wrong. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know fucking how. I guess the education systems fucked
<v Speaker 1>just like it is. You know, the education system a
<v Speaker 1>Neelyville's probably fucked like it is in much of Texas.
<v Speaker 1>But I was proud of them whoever wrote that they
<v Speaker 1>did spell so Mali wrong, So I you know, I failed.
<v Speaker 1>They failed to explain in their athroom diatribe right on
<v Speaker 1>a stall there, how Somali pirates are in any way
<v Speaker 1>relevant to their meager ass life here in Neelyville, Missouri.
<v Speaker 1>But I have a feeling that I can probably explain
<v Speaker 1>that for him. It has something to do with, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the propaganda they're inhaling on their bullshit, the Facebook page
<v Speaker 1>or media source whatever, you know, it's all the same.
<v Speaker 1>There's still critical thought anymore. People are just told what
<v Speaker 1>to think and believe from. You know, they're ponds of
<v Speaker 1>the algorithm that I was. I was proud they spelled
<v Speaker 1>so Mali wrong, which I wouldn't have thought anyone from
<v Speaker 1>this region could. Am I being mean? Yes, but we
<v Speaker 1>did see we and bye by we, I mean me
<v Speaker 1>and Louis the dog. We stopped and saw this wonderful
<v Speaker 1>one point four billion year old exposure of rhyolite on
<v Speaker 1>this rockout cropping. Most of southern and eastern Missouri is dolomite,
<v Speaker 1>but we saw this beautiful exposure a ryolite. I saw it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, we're going by these dolomite rockout crops on
<v Speaker 1>a high way, on beautiful Highway sixty seven, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>and they look just like you would expect any kind
<v Speaker 1>of carbonate rock to look, you know, horizontal betting planes,
<v Speaker 1>great texture. Where it's been fractured, you could see more white.
<v Speaker 1>And then suddenly we get this. We hit this beautiful
<v Speaker 1>forty to fifty foot tall exposure of a much more
<v Speaker 1>darker rock which turned out to be this beautiful skeletor
<v Speaker 1>purple ryot. Like ah, it was just fucking amazing. And
<v Speaker 1>now where am I coming into? Now? God, what if
<v Speaker 1>you had to grow up one of these times? I
<v Speaker 1>feel so bad for kids. I got to do that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and you don't have cool parents or anyone
<v Speaker 1>cool to like, you know, open your eyes to the
<v Speaker 1>you know, window to the world. You know, all you
<v Speaker 1>know is the relax in in the McDonald's and the
<v Speaker 1>just everything is bleak and shit and the Dollar General
<v Speaker 1>storets you know, you get the Internet. Of course, you
<v Speaker 1>have the potential of seeing getting exposed to other facets
<v Speaker 1>of the world, but it's likely not you know, it's
<v Speaker 1>likely now what's gonna happen? It's likely, Now, what's gonna happen.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna get distracted watching stupid dances on TikTok and
<v Speaker 1>you know, maybe whatever political shit your parents are inhaling
<v Speaker 1>and there's not a lot of cultural opportunities, right, I know,
<v Speaker 1>you never know though. Man, some of these kids, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they surprised it it really there's hope, you know, Oh,
<v Speaker 1>there's a Johndro that weren't they fucking people? Weren't they
<v Speaker 1>fucking farmers? Recently they built in some software that was
<v Speaker 1>bound to fail, or that you had to get set
<v Speaker 1>up on, like a monthly payment plan to after you
<v Speaker 1>and you only find that out there. You have to
<v Speaker 1>do that after you buy the fifty thousand dollars piece
<v Speaker 1>of farm equipment. Amica Mayriica, God shit, it's light for
<v Speaker 1>day anyway. I just saw a wonderful fat Vance meme
<v Speaker 1>of it was like an AI. I approve it. I
<v Speaker 1>use of AI normally for procreating videos and pictures and
<v Speaker 1>shit it's stupid, but if we're talking fatdvants, it's different.
<v Speaker 1>It was Fadvance getting into an F sixteen with Pete
<v Speaker 1>Hegseth and all these other worms. Look at it was
<v Speaker 1>just a really nice little sequence you know. It was
<v Speaker 1>like a twenty second sequence fadvance. So you look so
<v Speaker 1>happy and proud, our bravest boy, A perfect symbol of
<v Speaker 1>the dystopia or moving into it's moving forward into anyway. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>So I loaded up a bunch of fucking pieces of
<v Speaker 1>rhyolite into the back of my truck from this this
<v Speaker 1>one point four billion year old exposure, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>most of them again surrounding that it's most of this
<v Speaker 1>uh Devonian dolomite, and then you've just got you can
<v Speaker 1>even see it on the Rocked app again. Download that
<v Speaker 1>roc KD. The Rocked app can see what the rock
<v Speaker 1>beneath your feet, and any map is most of the dolomites,
<v Speaker 1>like four hundred million year old dolomite, and then there's
<v Speaker 1>just these exposures. I love seeing stuff like that because
<v Speaker 1>it got like, God, this fucking rock. Is it cooled
<v Speaker 1>from a magma one point two billion years ago? And
<v Speaker 1>what other like when did it get uplifted and exposed?
<v Speaker 1>What is it doing here? I just want to know
<v Speaker 1>what's it doing here? Next stop Texar Cana. We're going
<v Speaker 1>to Texar Cana. We'll stay in Texar Canada night unless
<v Speaker 1>I drink a shit done a cold brew, and we
<v Speaker 1>decided to drive in the midnight into the outskirts of Houston,
<v Speaker 1>Texar cana is not that bad. I was there last
<v Speaker 1>year and I saw some nice I saw some nice stuff.
<v Speaker 1>When was I there? Was it last? I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what to fuck it? Maybe was the year before that
<v Speaker 1>I stayed in a really shit bag motel though, I
<v Speaker 1>mean it was it was bleak. It wasn't you know.
<v Speaker 1>It ended up being hygienic enough, but it was just
<v Speaker 1>culturally and spiritually. I lost the bit of myself that
<v Speaker 1>night just by being there. So but I remember seeing
<v Speaker 1>some really nice habitat there was also there were some
<v Speaker 1>woods that was you could tell fire suppression that had
<v Speaker 1>been a thing they I wanted to burn them. I didn't.
<v Speaker 1>I wasn't gonna do it, but you know, someone needs
<v Speaker 1>to go in there and burn the woods. Northeast of Texas, Canada.
<v Speaker 1>It was you could tell it was a nice It
<v Speaker 1>was a piece of public land. I forget where exactly
<v Speaker 1>it was. Could tell it was nice. They had a
<v Speaker 1>lot of nice mushrooms coming up, but it was very
<v Speaker 1>fire suppressed and it needed to be burned. Goddamn though, man,
<v Speaker 1>the mojave. I guess is going off right now? I
<v Speaker 1>got friends sending me pictures of Polisma sonore that parasites
<v Speaker 1>in baranj and Ac. A parasitic plant that hits ambrosia
<v Speaker 1>looks like a little disc. They call it sand food,
<v Speaker 1>really stupid fucking common name, which is not surprising, sand food,
<v Speaker 1>because you can eat it. It's incredibly rare and really
<v Speaker 1>cool plant. And the fact you can eat it, that's
<v Speaker 1>like the least interesting thing about it. It's a parasitic
<v Speaker 1>plant that grows in the dests. What disperses the seeds,
<v Speaker 1>what pollinates? Say? What? Is one of the most common
<v Speaker 1>host plants. But you can eat it. You can put
<v Speaker 1>it in your mouth without dying, without poisoning yourself. Is
<v Speaker 1>it somebody hitchhiking out here? No, God, this has got
<v Speaker 1>to be a bleak man Northern Arkansas, southeast of Missouri.
<v Speaker 1>That's gotta be a bleak fucking place to hitchhike. I
<v Speaker 1>can imagine all kinds of feeling, all kinds of depravity.
<v Speaker 1>If you were like riding the freight train, you got
<v Speaker 1>kicked off here, you got a hitchhike into town. Holy hell,
<v Speaker 1>you're in for your going in buddy, you're going down
<v Speaker 1>for a deep one, all right. Get ready to feel
<v Speaker 1>some some spiritual futility for a few days or whatever
<v Speaker 1>long it takes you to get out of there. I
<v Speaker 1>experienced that in Deshler, Ohio. Shut up the beautiful Duschler
<v Speaker 1>saying that sarcastically, Ohio. There were actually some nice guys.
<v Speaker 1>They were probably mildly racist, but you know, I passed
<v Speaker 1>that that were hanging out in the little rail fan
<v Speaker 1>park there to I don't of them, help me get out.
<v Speaker 1>They were nice enough, you know, they they were. It's
<v Speaker 1>kind of working class SMOs. But yeah, Deshla, Ohio man
<v Speaker 1>rough rough spot. Anyway, there was I was looking at
<v Speaker 1>when I was at a friend's house in Saint Louis.
<v Speaker 1>I was looking at that Bursra book. You know, the
<v Speaker 1>genis Bursa, don't you, huh. Bursa racey, the Frankinsense family,
<v Speaker 1>one of the the one of the main genera that's
<v Speaker 1>known as the elephant trees. And there's a book that
<v Speaker 1>came out by this lady out of Mexican. I forget
<v Speaker 1>her name, but it's it's it's all about the genus
<v Speaker 1>burs in their ecology it's really cool. And Bursa, you know,
<v Speaker 1>most their flowers look alike. The main way that you
<v Speaker 1>tell the difference. They're one of those families where the
<v Speaker 1>main way you tell the difference are the leaves and
<v Speaker 1>the habit And there are some fascinating I mean, she
<v Speaker 1>really covers all the different species. She talks about the
<v Speaker 1>resin canals that they have in their leaves and stems,
<v Speaker 1>some of which are pressurized and actually squirt resin out,
<v Speaker 1>mainly to dissuade these beetles that have they've had like
<v Speaker 1>a a evolutionary cold war with you know, co evolutionary
<v Speaker 1>war with over the last few million years. There's different
<v Speaker 1>different species of beetles that attack different species of Bursara.
<v Speaker 1>Because these things are Franknanson's family. They've got these volatile
<v Speaker 1>chemicals in their leaves and stems that smell wonderful to
<v Speaker 1>us but are meant to you know, their their armaments
<v Speaker 1>in the the war against the evolutionary war against their
<v Speaker 1>main antagonist beetle species. So, but the pressurized resin canals
<v Speaker 1>thing is nuts, Like these things actually squirt resin out
<v Speaker 1>if they're punctured or chewed into. So and there's a
<v Speaker 1>photograph of it in the book Real Nice. It's called bursas,
<v Speaker 1>copals and quiexotes or something like that. The different common
<v Speaker 1>names for the different kinds of bursra b U, R,
<v Speaker 1>S e r A. Yeah, really fucking cool book. I
<v Speaker 1>had it in PDF form, but I just order the
<v Speaker 1>hard copy tool because I need it for my library.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you need it for your library. There's some
<v Speaker 1>good stuff in Arkansas. You know, it's just the wrong
<v Speaker 1>time of year, early March. Stuff is still just waking up.
<v Speaker 1>There's some good habitat left in Arkansas. There's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of uh, you know, devastation, though you look at a
<v Speaker 1>satellite map, it's all squares of farmland with little areas
<v Speaker 1>left around the rivers and creeks, little areas of remaining greenery,
<v Speaker 1>much of it probably invaded by invasive species. But there
<v Speaker 1>is that weird vernonia here that grows in the novaculate
<v Speaker 1>exposures along the river. I think that's more southwestern and
<v Speaker 1>so that. But there's you know, there's there's there's good
<v Speaker 1>ship everywhere. There's some really cool Arkansas that vernonia grows
<v Speaker 1>with and Amsonia as well on these novaculate rockout crops.
<v Speaker 1>Above the river. If I could, I wish I could
<v Speaker 1>remember where it was. Let me look it up for you.
<v Speaker 1>There we go. Yeah, it was Vernonia letter Mania, right
<v Speaker 1>where Tanner Street crushes the watch it Tall river. Your
<v Speaker 1>sick baster wears that. I don't know, Malvern Arkansas, somewhere
<v Speaker 1>around there. There's some good stuff in Arkansas. There's and
<v Speaker 1>Amsnia growing down there too. You go under the bridge
<v Speaker 1>just like you're a bummy going to have a fire
<v Speaker 1>and spray your shit against the wall under there, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and and it's right there. But it's the the Wachita
<v Speaker 1>River has created these little microhabitats where this species gets in.
<v Speaker 1>It's a really beautiful species. Team Supris. There's not more
<v Speaker 1>people growing this thing? Letter Mania? Who's Letterman? What else
<v Speaker 1>is going on in Arkansas? I don't know anyway, I
<v Speaker 1>guess we can wrap it up there our forty five minutes,
<v Speaker 1>not bet, Are you still with us? Are you paying attention?
<v Speaker 1>We're going on tour with the Horticultural Atrocity slash book
<v Speaker 1>tour late May early June. We're looking for venues, ls
<v Speaker 1>cruses Tucson. Maybe I'll Passo San Diego, La et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>Al still working out the shows. We should be the
<v Speaker 1>book tour that starts in like like May twenty seventh
<v Speaker 1>or something, I think, And then what am I doing.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna be in North Carolina at the Carnivorus Plant
<v Speaker 1>Society thing in mid May. Hopefully that goes all right.
<v Speaker 1>It'll be fun, and working on another book that's gonna
<v Speaker 1>be a pain in the ass. It'll be fine, but
<v Speaker 1>it'll be a pain in the Ass's gonna be just photos.
<v Speaker 1>It's gonna be all all photo book. And then we will,
<v Speaker 1>Uh what am I doing in April? I know I
<v Speaker 1>got a bunch of bullshel If I forget half this
<v Speaker 1>stuff I got going on, you know, you just can't.
<v Speaker 1>We'll check in next time. I'll be posting it on
<v Speaker 1>the social media is and all that and uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's it. So anyway, enjoy the spring and try not
<v Speaker 1>to focus too much on the dystopia that we're living through.
<v Speaker 1>Have a grocery day, Go fuck yourself, bike o head
<v Speaker 1>over road. Now, old h I hit on the wrong problem.
<v Speaker 1>Who am the rose? Her mind? And the dream long
<v Speaker 1>the kindle bring with now a shallow wol I pay
<v Speaker 1>the fucking tas mother the fish