Episode 54

The Skill of Staying Human with Daniel Vitalis

Published on: 12th April, 2023

As the digital world looms, this discussion is an exploration of built and natural worlds and how they impact us as a species. Daniel Vitalis, host of WildFed on the Outdoor Channel and formerly host of the podcasts Rewild Yourself and Wild Fed, joins Kate in a conversation that finds humanity at different points in time and with different viewpoints of time itself. It’s an exploration of the environments that shaped our species, from our hunter-gatherer roots, to agriculture, and into our dreams of launching ourselves into space. At this precipice that we find ourselves on, it’s more important than ever to consider how modern thinking has been shaped by our environments - the natural world, the built world, the socio-political world, and beyond. Nested in the conversation is an exploration of death’s role in connecting us to reality and to our food. Towards the end, there is a question around what skills we want future generations to know that we must keep alive today, as it’s not just multiple species that are on the brink of extinction. 

We also talk about:

  • Living in captivity and the degeneration of humans
  • How our thoughts and viewpoints might impact something like how we run or swim
  • Cyclical time 

Find Daniel:

Instagram: @wild.fed @danielvitalis @surthrival 

Website: WildFed, Surthrival 

Podcasts: WildFed, Rewild Yourself 

Timestamps:

00:00:00: Kate introduces Daniel in her intro

00:09:16: Built vs Natural world 

00:22:48: A Space Race

00:32:50: Are we zoo animals?

00:43:22: Feeding hunter-gatherers

00:50:49: Cataclysmic events change humans

01:00:31: How we think influences how we do anything

01:07:50: Getting back to cycles: men, women, time, days of the week

01:24:20: Death is part of the cycle

01:39:52: Saving skills for the next generation

Other Great Interviews with Daniel: 

on the Align Podcast

On Luke Storey


(A Few) Favorite Episodes of Wild Fed:

Doug Bock Clark

Philippe Grenade-Willis

Dan Flores


Books Mentioned:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Fourth Turning by Neil Howe + William Strauss

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card 



Current Discounts for MBS listeners:

  • 15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV15
  • 20% off Home of Wool using code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% off
  • 15% off Bon Charge blue light blocking gear using code: MINDBODYSOIL15


Join the Ground Work Collective:

Find a Farm: nearhome.groundworkcollective.com

Find Kate: @kate_kavanaugh

More: groundworkcollective.com

Podcast disclaimer can be found by visiting: groundworkcollective.com/disclaimer

Transcript
Kate:

Howdy.

Kate:

I'm Kate Kavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind, body and Soil Podcast where

Kate:

we're laying the groundwork for our land, ourselves, and for generations to

Kate:

come by looking at the way every threat of life is connected to one another.

Kate:

Communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which

Kate:

mirror the vast community of the cosmos as the thing goes as above, so below.

Kate:

Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history,

Kate:

spirituality, health, and so much more.

Kate:

I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

Kate:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mind, body and Soil Podcast.

Kate:

I am your host, Kate Kavanaugh, and I am so excited to bring you

Kate:

these episodes week after week.

Kate:

This week's episode is a.

Kate:

Quite special to my heart.

Kate:

When I started The Mind, body and Soil Podcast over a year ago now, I made a list

Kate:

of dream guests that I wanted to have on, and the person I'm interviewing today was

Kate:

towards the top of that list, and I just felt like I needed a lot of interviews

Kate:

under my belt to even reach out.

Kate:

I did finally reach out and he agreed to come on, and it really

Kate:

set off a deep dive into his work.

Kate:

Uh, my guest today to, to tell you who it is, is Daniel Vitalis, and I have

Kate:

been listening to Daniel Vitalis in one form or another for at least five years.

Kate:

I tried to trace it back and that's probably the longest that I have really.

Kate:

Been listening to anybody that has been on the podcast, been

Kate:

listening to and enjoying their work.

Kate:

And so I had a really good foundation for what Daniel's

Kate:

work is about as it's traversed.

Kate:

His first podcast, rewild Yourself, which is still there for anybody that wants to

Kate:

explore it into his next podcast, wild Fed, which just wrapped up there, the last

Kate:

episode, the week that we recorded this, and into the Wild Fed TV show, which is

Kate:

truly fantastic, a a stunning storytelling effort around what it means to hunt and

Kate:

to gather and build food around community.

Kate:

Daniel has a reverence for the natural world that is truly unparalleled, and

Kate:

this comes through in the storytelling of his work, whether it's his podcasts

Kate:

or you can see it in Wilded when, especially when he's hunting animals

Kate:

and pauses to have this moment after he has shot and killed an animal where he

Kate:

is just there in awe of that physiology and in awe of the relationship that

Kate:

we as humans have to life on earth.

Kate:

And I've always respected him, not only in.

Kate:

The spaces of hunting and foraging and human health, but also in the way

Kate:

that he thinks about the world, uh, from a historical and anthropological

Kate:

lens and the way that he has sort of put together his own philosophy.

Kate:

For this episode, I did a very deep dive looking at interviews that he

Kate:

had done and as, as a guest, but also looking deep into some of the episodes

Kate:

of Wild Fed and Rewild Yourself.

Kate:

Some new to me, some that I have really enjoyed in the past and wanted to revisit.

Kate:

I had a moment before recording where I was concerned that I had so

Kate:

over-prepared that I might end up with the YPs, where you just kind of

Kate:

drop the ball because you have too much floating around in your head.

Kate:

And I don't believe that I did that in this episode, but I was just so

Kate:

excited to connect with Daniel and.

Kate:

I experienced something that was really interesting following our interview,

Kate:

which was a sort of deep sadness.

Kate:

I had so enjoyed my immersion into Daniel's brain over the weeks

Kate:

preceding this episode that I wasn't sure where I was going to go next.

Kate:

And I loved that because it actually provided a real guiding force for I

Kate:

think the topics that are lighting me up as the host of the Mind,

Kate:

body and Soil Podcast and some guests that we might have on next.

Kate:

I encourage everyone to seek out Daniel's work, whether it is through podcasts or

Kate:

through his TV show or through his company Surf Rival, and I mentioned this at the

Kate:

end, but Daniel has owned a supplement company since 2008, surf Rival, and my

Kate:

husband and I have used various things from Surf Rival over the years, used their

Kate:

pine pollen and their Chaga, their vitamin D three, as well as their elk antler

Kate:

supplements, and really enjoyed them.

Kate:

And I think that what he is doing in terms of sourcing and the way that

Kate:

he thinks about things is, is very in line with what I want for my body.

Kate:

They just came out with a fully wild foraged black walnut protein powder

Kate:

that is certainly worth checking out.

Kate:

I really hope you enjoyed this episode.

Kate:

I so enjoyed recording it.

Kate:

I think that we could have gone for many hours.

Kate:

Hopefully Daniel will grace us with a round two, but we dive into

Kate:

some pretty deep topics head first.

Kate:

Now, for those of you that are listeners of the podcast, you'll know that I

Kate:

often skip backstories with guests that have been generous with sharing their

Kate:

backstory on other podcasts, and I will link to some of those podcasts where

Kate:

they share about that in the show notes.

Kate:

So we just kind of dive into the deep end, and it is the very deep end of the pool.

Kate:

We get into some very big topics around what it means to be human, but also some

Kate:

things that are a little topical and maybe even a little bit taboo in today's world.

Kate:

I encourage you to give it a listen, listen all the way through and hear us

Kate:

out as we explore some of these concepts around how are food makes us human and

Kate:

how the connections that we have to our food and to other incredible storytelling

Kate:

nutrients within the the human's fear, whether that's birth or death or the way

Kate:

that we relate in community can have on.

Kate:

the, the form and function of what Daniel calls the domesticated

Kate:

human and what it might mean to, to get a little bit more wild.

Kate:

I am incredibly grateful to Daniel for his work over the years.

Kate:

I'm gonna link to a couple of my favorite episodes of his, and I'm really looking

Kate:

forward to having some more conversations that are very much in this vein.

Kate:

I am enjoying this thread immensely, and so I, I hope that you are too.

Kate:

We always do a little bit of business here right before we

Kate:

dive into the actual interview.

Kate:

And I just wanna encourage if these conversations have been impactful for

Kate:

you, the way that I know they've been impactful for me, if you could leave a

Kate:

reading and review of the podcast, it just helps, helps people find the podcast and

Kate:

know what they're getting into and get excited that other people are excited.

Kate:

We have over a hundred reviews on Apple Podcast.

Kate:

We're getting close on Spotify, so I would so appreciate this

Kate:

little act of reciprocity.

Kate:

As always, if you leave a written review on Apple Podcast and shoot me a little

Kate:

screen grab of it, I would love to send you a thank you note in real life so

Kate:

that we can connect here in the physical.

Kate:

Without further ado, I want to bring you this episode with Daniel Vitalis and I

Kate:

do just really reiterate to seek out his work as a speaker, as a podcaster, as

Kate:

a TV host, just as a human, and let it inspire you to go forth and find meaning

Kate:

and story and connection within your food.

Kate:

Thank you so much for tuning in each week.

Kate:

And without further ado, here is Daniel Vitalis.

Kate:

I feel really honored that I'm actually catching you in this space where you

Kate:

just released the last episode of Wild Fed and you're in this transition.

Kate:

And I think throughout preparing for this interview, I thought a lot about

Kate:

transitions and transitory spaces, uh, both, both for for humans and for society

Kate:

and for some of these skills that, that you and I are, are so passionate

Kate:

about, whether it's hunting and foraging or on my end butchery and farming.

Kate:

And I actually, I pulled a quote to kind of get us started off from a book that I

Kate:

think you and I both have enjoyed and is, is pretty salient for where we are today.

Kate:

And so this is from the fourth turning.

Kate:

And it says, more recently, the West begin using technology to flatten

Kate:

the very physical evidence of natural cycles with artificial light.

Kate:

We believe we defeat the sleep wake cycle with climate control, the

Kate:

seasonal cycle with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle, and with high tech

Kate:

medicine, the rest recovery cycle.

Kate:

Triumphal.

Kate:

Linearism has shaped the very style of Western and especially American

Kate:

civilization before, when cyclical time reigned, people valued patience, ritual,

Kate:

the relatedness of parts to the whole, and the healing power of time within nature.

Kate:

Today we value haste, iconoclasm, the disintegration of the whole into parts

Kate:

and the power of time outside nature.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, Kate: as I collected a lot, I was

Daniel:

about our relationship with the natural world and what it means to reclaim that

Daniel:

relationship in a time where there is maybe a bifurcation of this natural

Daniel:

world that we are inextricably linked to and this built world that mm-hmm.

Daniel:

continues to take us further away from that relationship.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Well I love that.

Daniel:

I love that whole quote because.

Daniel:

So many things that we do are like a sine wave.

Daniel:

So many things in the world are like a sine wave.

Daniel:

But then so much of what we do is like a flat line.

Daniel:

And it's so obvious cuz you, you know, when I think flat line, I

Daniel:

think of like a P person dead, yes.

Daniel:

On a, in a hospital room, you know?

Daniel:

But when I, when I look at a thermostat and it says 72 degrees, it's like,

Daniel:

chart that over the course of somebody's day and it's just always 72 degrees.

Daniel:

And then you go outside and it's like, hey, it starts off at 30 and it rises

Daniel:

up right now to probably 52 and it's gonna go back down to 30 and it's a

Daniel:

sine wave and it's like, Hey, wait a second, how come in indoors we make it a

Daniel:

flat line and outside it's a sine wave.

Daniel:

And then we do that just about everything that we can, we're always trying to, you

Daniel:

know, you look at the surfaces we walk on, you know, go outside and a surface

Daniel:

is like a sine wave and you come inside and a surface is flat and, and it's

Daniel:

like the, the last 10,000 years of human existence have been about, it's almost,

Daniel:

I, I sometimes think of somebody who's really angry at their mom and so their

Daniel:

whole life, you know, maybe I'm speaking to myself here, but , it's like your

Daniel:

whole life can become a rejection of.

Daniel:

Her ways or her, you know, you're mad at your mom.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And so it's like a species, we're like mad at our mom.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. And so for 10,000 years we're like, well, we'll conquer you.

Daniel:

I'll show you mom.

Daniel:

I'm sick of it getting cold at night.

Daniel:

I'm tired of tripping on rocks.

Daniel:

I'm gonna make everything perfect just how I want it to be.

Daniel:

And then it's like we're coming into that stage of life right

Daniel:

now where you kind of, some of us are going like, oh wait a second.

Daniel:

Now I understand what mom was doing.

Daniel:

You know where that happens, where you're like, oh man, my mom wasn't

Daniel:

as stupid as I thought I was stupid.

Daniel:

Oh, now.

Daniel:

So some of us are going, how do we reincorporate some of

Daniel:

these natural principles?

Daniel:

But at that same time, so if we can, we could call those last 10,000 years, like

Daniel:

the creation of the built environment.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

as opposed to the natural environment.

Daniel:

But now as we go into the digital environment, we're

Daniel:

standing at a precipice.

Daniel:

Cuz those of us who don't want to go down that digital road, a

Daniel:

I mean we're all like, we're all going down the digital world.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

We're here for sure.

Daniel:

We're in the digital world.

Daniel:

Right?

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

I just took off my heart rate monitor a few minutes ago.

Daniel:

It's like , you know, we're a cyborg.

Daniel:

You know what I mean?

Daniel:

So, so we're in it.

Daniel:

So, um, but that said, some of us are like, Hey, the metaverse doesn't

Daniel:

sound like a place I wanna live.

Daniel:

So we're, we're looking not, not at just emersing back into the built environment,

Daniel:

but like, hey, how do we start to get back into the natural environment?

Daniel:

But then there's this other contingent of people who are really excited about going.

Daniel:

down that road.

Daniel:

So that's that bifurcation that you mentioned.

Daniel:

But I think, um, a lot of us are trying to figure out how to get some of that

Daniel:

sign wave rhythm back because, because we we're realizing that our mental

Daniel:

health, physical health, emotional health, psychic health, spiritual health

Daniel:

is all dependent on feeling like we're part of a community and not just a

Daniel:

community people, but a community of life.

Daniel:

And that's, I think, what the natural world

Kate:

represents for us.

Kate:

You know, something I often talk about is that our biology is

Kate:

having this constant conversation with our environments and mm-hmm.

Kate:

, and I've heard you relate this often in looking at maybe the

Kate:

way that a chihuahua might be perfectly fit for its environment.

Kate:

And so mm-hmm.

Kate:

In what ways, as we begin to change our environment as homo

Kate:

sapiens, are we actually changing what it means to be human?

Kate:

And I think that so much of that is that interaction with that sine

Kate:

wave, with the periodicity and the cyclical nature of things.

Kate:

And when you take us and you put us in a static space, or you put

Kate:

us in a very linear space, it's going to begin to shift what we are.

Kate:

And I think, I think that there's really no predicting what that

Kate:

could look like the further down the digital environment we go,

Daniel:

you might be able to predict what it looks like.

Daniel:

I think, I mean, I do think it does look a lot like that gray alien,

Daniel:

. Kind of iconic image that we, we all grew up with could be really

Daniel:

representative of where we're headed.

Daniel:

But I think to your point, we, there's this missing piece in the

Daniel:

conversation that's happening right now.

Daniel:

Cause it feels like we have access to so much information now, and yet

Daniel:

there's like big gaping holes in it.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And one of the holes in the average person's understanding of the

Daniel:

world is relates to domestication.

Daniel:

And so, so much of my work in the past is focused on this

Daniel:

idea of human domestication.

Daniel:

Hence why you brought up Chihuahuas.

Daniel:

Cuz I want to always point out that Chihuahuas are wolves.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, um, that have been domesticated.

Daniel:

And right now we're in this stage, this piece of history where a lot of

Daniel:

writers have, uh, proposed this idea that we're evolving into something

Daniel:

new, some kind of technological ape.

Daniel:

Like we're, we're on this evolutionary path, it's unfolding in front of

Daniel:

us, and Human 2.0 is emerging.

Daniel:

And I think this is, um, incorrect.

Daniel:

I think that what we're really seeing is that we're a domesticated.

Daniel:

We come from a stronger stock in the way that the chihuahua

Daniel:

comes from stronger stock.

Daniel:

It comes from the gray wolf.

Daniel:

And so as do all dogs, so for your listeners who haven't heard me talk

Daniel:

about this before, all dogs are gray wolves that have been domesticated.

Daniel:

And so there isn't any other canine lineage in our domesticated dogs.

Daniel:

So before I understood that fully, I thought, well, maybe there was coyotes

Daniel:

or African wild dogs or you know, other species of canids that had, you

Daniel:

know, that we had drawn dogs out of.

Daniel:

But turns out, no.

Daniel:

Uh, they all come from gray wolves, not red wolves, you know, not Mexican

Daniel:

wolves, specifically gray wolves.

Daniel:

So all of our dogs are gray wolves.

Daniel:

But it would be, it, it'd be tough to argue that they're evolved gray wolves.

Daniel:

I think it's a more accurate to say that domestication is a degenerative

Daniel:

process, if I had to pick between it being evolution or de degeneration.

Daniel:

So the animals that you guys raised there on your farm through

Daniel:

domestication, They are changed in such a way that they are adapted to

Daniel:

the built and stewarded environment.

Daniel:

And without you guys there, they would become prey really, really rapidly.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

Because of course the trade is we will offer you protection from all the things

Daniel:

that could get to you in exchange, that you give up, all the things

Daniel:

that you have that protect you now.

Daniel:

So the chihuahua gives up that incredible bite that super fine wit that

Daniel:

commitment to a pack of other canids.

Daniel:

That ability to hunt all the things that it did in the wild as a wolf.

Daniel:

It gives those up in order to live with us.

Daniel:

And then we in turn take care of its needs.

Daniel:

And so, you know, is that evolution or is that degenerative?

Daniel:

And when we look at plants, you know, it's such a similar thing cuz

Daniel:

something I've tried to point out over the years is I'll always say to

Daniel:

people, why doesn't your lettuce become an invasive species in your yard?

Daniel:

I mean, here you are putting it in the soil.

Daniel:

If I came to your house, you had no dandelions and I put

Daniel:

dandelions in your lawn, you've got 'em for the rest of your life.

Daniel:

They're, and, and you'll die with them.

Daniel:

And someone else will, will live there with them later on.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

You, you won't get rid of them.

Daniel:

They, they're a wild species and they are so competitive in their environment.

Daniel:

And I mean that in a positive way.

Daniel:

They're so good at competing that they will out-compete other species

Daniel:

and they will get a foothold and you'll never get rid of them.

Daniel:

But your lettuce can't do that.

Daniel:

Why?

Daniel:

You know, a wild lettuce can, you know, I've got wild lettuces out in my yard

Daniel:

here and they're very hardy, but if I brought a lettuce and I planted it

Daniel:

out there the next day, herbivorous insects have mowed it down or you

Daniel:

know, other larger herbivores will come in and eat it and it's gone.

Daniel:

It needs to be fenced off.

Daniel:

It needs to be watered.

Daniel:

I always joke it needs, it's soil fluffed, you know, . It's like

Daniel:

everything has to be just right.

Daniel:

And even then a lot of people can't really get 'em to grow.

Daniel:

Like look at all the people who fail at gardening because it's like

Daniel:

the, these plants aren't that hardy.

Daniel:

Generally speaking.

Daniel:

I mean obviously there's exceptions to this, but I would argue

Daniel:

again that it's degenerative.

Daniel:

So as we domesticate other things, we in turn probably are really

Daniel:

the first domestic, you know, we often say that the dog is the first

Daniel:

domesticated species, so our evidence is like 15,000 plus years of this.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

with dogs.

Daniel:

The furthest, it goes back way before plant domestication that

Daniel:

we know about, at least currently.

Daniel:

But I'd argue we were domesticated in tandem and the process has been

Daniel:

degenerative and we, we, like the lettuce or the chihuahua have, we need our

Daniel:

built environment in order to survive.

Daniel:

Now most of us, and this is so evident because all you have to do

Daniel:

is just watch any survival show.

Daniel:

and you see, of which there are so many now, because we find that, I think

Daniel:

because we find it so interesting.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

I'm sure if dogs made television, they would like to watch shows about

Daniel:

dogs that go try to live like wolves.

Daniel:

Cuz that would be fascinating cuz they would know inherently there's

Daniel:

something not right about me.

Daniel:

What I'm not, I'm built for something more than this, but I I'm not capable of it.

Daniel:

There's sort of that sense.

Daniel:

There's a void, so there's something missing, right?

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Like you have all of these genetic programs and then you, you don't have

Daniel:

any way to use them or access them even.

Daniel:

So we like to watch somebody go try to survive in nature.

Daniel:

It's fascinating to us cuz we know in the deep subconscious, man, if I was

Daniel:

ever without this built environment and that tether back to civilization,

Daniel:

I don't know if I could make it.

Daniel:

But then we also know, wait a second, that's what we did for

Daniel:

three and a half million years in the Hammond and evolution.

Daniel:

That's how we lived.

Daniel:

So why That's how we got here.

Daniel:

Suddenly can't we do that?

Daniel:

Right?

Daniel:

So we are like the chihuahua and the Chihuahua as you pointed out,

Daniel:

it's very wa It's not that it's um, not adapted to its environment.

Daniel:

It is, its environment is the built environment, but it's no longer

Daniel:

adapted to the natural world because of something called artificial selection.

Daniel:

So in nature, natural selection of course is dominant along with sexual

Daniel:

selection by females and that that shapes species over time and their phenotypes.

Daniel:

But artificial selections where we go, no, no, no, no.

Daniel:

I don't want it to come out like a wolf.

Daniel:

I want it to.

Daniel:

Long and short-legged so I can put it down a hole and it can pull a gopher out.

Daniel:

So I'm gonna pick the animals that have the longest bodies and the shortest legs,

Daniel:

and I'll keep breeding those artificially, making them select each other.

Daniel:

So we take over the role of natural and sexual selection,

Daniel:

and then we shape species out.

Daniel:

So we've done that with a couple dozen animals and, and

Daniel:

dozens and dozens of plants.

Daniel:

And we're, we're quite good at that.

Daniel:

And it did incur a huge adaptive advantage in a sense, cuz here we are

Daniel:

now, we've taken over the whole plant.

Daniel:

We win, we won the human race, uh, we're winners.

Daniel:

And then now we're in this situation where we're degenerating really rapidly.

Daniel:

So we have all of this incredible health and medical technology that can't keep up

Daniel:

with the speed of degenerative diseases, which we call degenerative diseases.

Daniel:

Yet these authors are like, we're evolving into something better.

Daniel:

. It's like then, but the names of the diseases we have are

Daniel:

degenerative, we are degenerating.

Daniel:

So this is really bizarre to me that the people don't seem to grasp it and

Daniel:

they, and, and they don't necessarily understand, like when they step into

Daniel:

the supermarket, when they, when they walk through any built environment, most

Daniel:

of the species they encounter are not species you would find in the natural

Kate:

world.

Kate:

No.

Kate:

And, and you've been very good at describing in the past that they are

Kate:

all, that many are just the same species that there is an illusion of mm-hmm.

Kate:

diversity there.

Kate:

And I.

Kate:

, you know, I wonder is, I hadn't thought about that in terms

Kate:

of degenerative diseases.

Kate:

I think that's a, that's a really great point.

Kate:

And I have to wonder, and I've been thinking a lot about, at the point of

Kate:

the agricultural revolution, you see this sort of idea, had a friend call it

Kate:

the other day where you take a circle and you break it and you make a line.

Kate:

And I think that within that space, suddenly when you're looking at things

Kate:

from a linear perspective, hierarchy becomes a part of that linear ex.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

expectation and progress.

Kate:

The idea that we must be progressing towards the apex of, of what man has been

Kate:

ever at any point in history, becomes a part of the story that we have been

Kate:

telling ourselves for a, a very long time.

Kate:

That we are, we are progressing and this is, this right now

Kate:

is the greatest generation.

Kate:

We've made it the furthest, uh, done the best things that have ever happened.

Kate:

And so you have this sort of hierarchical view in, in multiple different ways.

Kate:

You have the hierarchy of, of species, I think in many ways.

Kate:

And you have a hierarchy of, of evolution and this idea of progress,

Kate:

which, you know, I think makes some pretty strong arguments about what

Kate:

progress is and what progress isn't.

Daniel:

Hmm.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

It's funny right now where we have the progressive movement, so-called.

Daniel:

Um, but so many aspects of it feel really degenerative.

Daniel:

So it, it, it's confusing.

Daniel:

It's, the language has gotten very confusing.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. Um, but I, I do wanna say that when you're talking about that progress

Daniel:

that you're talking about reminds me a little bit of like, um, the behavior

Daniel:

of an addict is like this cuz it can't ever, they can't ever stop because

Daniel:

if they stop, everything catches up.

Daniel:

So the addict is always having to move forward, grasping to try to not let

Daniel:

all of the sins of the past catch them.

Daniel:

So imagine you're like, uh, you're on a road and you're running because

Daniel:

behind you, the road's collapsing into an abyss and you can't ever stop.

Daniel:

Cuz if you do, you'll fall in.

Daniel:

That's more like what we're actually doing than really progressing.

Daniel:

Um, and to speak to, and what, what, I mean just, I

Daniel:

guess that's kind of abstract.

Daniel:

What I, what I mean is we are progressing at the expense of the

Daniel:

very systems that support all life.

Daniel:

Not just our lives, but all life.

Daniel:

We seem to think that it's more important that we get a new iPhone.

Daniel:

This year, or maybe two, then we actually take care of the like umbilicus that

Daniel:

bonds us to the whole of ecology.

Daniel:

Like there's this belief and I, I've, when I first started saying this, I

Daniel:

thought it was more metaphorical, but over time I've kind of come to see it as

Daniel:

actually like maybe it's actually true.

Daniel:

I think that we have been so inculcated in science fiction from my earliest memories.

Daniel:

I mean, the first film I remember is Star Wars.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

I grew up with this idea that we could travel the galaxy.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, like I didn't understand then how far away a galaxy is from here.

Daniel:

Of course, we're in a galaxy, right?

Daniel:

So we're in an arm of a galaxy, and so the closest star is separated

Daniel:

by Interstellar space, like what's it take to get to Mars from here?

Daniel:

That's in our own solar system.

Daniel:

We share a star that's like a three year journey with what we can currently

Daniel:

even like, imagine the idea that we could go through Interstellar space or.

Daniel:

Intergalactic.

Daniel:

The, the distances are incomprehensibly vast.

Daniel:

We don't have anything like the kind of technology that would allow this,

Daniel:

but we, we fosters belief that, not just that we could come up with the

Daniel:

technology to do it, but that a human being could live away from the earth.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

and all the bacteria that live here and the fungi that live here that

Daniel:

are, that we're symbiotic with.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

That we could just live without animals and running water and trees.

Daniel:

Like, no, no, no, we'll be fine.

Daniel:

We can just live in a biodome.

Daniel:

It's like, I don't know, can we, do we even, has anyone even te

Daniel:

do we even know if that's true?

Daniel:

I know they put some people in one of those BioD domes and that didn't

Daniel:

go very well from what I understand.

Daniel:

Um, so I don't even know that we can do that.

Daniel:

Like, can you get away from the magnetic and radiological forces of the earth?

Daniel:

Do you, do you know, can you move away from this tight band of like

Daniel:

electromagnetism that we live in with the relationship to the sun and all?

Daniel:

Like, I don't know how capable we are.

Daniel:

I know when astronauts go to space, even for a short time, they come back and their

Daniel:

bones are ready to fall apart, apart, lose it, walk massively outside of gravity.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

So maybe you can hack every one of these things and find a solution,

Daniel:

but I'm not sure it's possible.

Daniel:

Well, and

Kate:

I think that there's a question, can you thrive within that space?

Kate:

But I don't think we even understand.

Kate:

How interwoven we are into the places that we live in.

Kate:

I don't think we understand the complex interaction between our microbiota on

Kate:

our, on our skin, in our guts everywhere.

Kate:

And

Daniel:

our place.

Daniel:

We didn't even know there was microbiota until so recently.

Daniel:

I was just listening to a description yesterday of Sel Weiss saying, maybe

Daniel:

some of these women are dying in childbirth because we, we do dissections

Daniel:

on cadavers in the morning and then we go birth these babies in the evening.

Daniel:

Could we be possibly contain, is that, could that be causing death?

Daniel:

That was

Kate:

a, this just what, a hundred years ago

Daniel:

just happened.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

Just happened.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

Just happened.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

So, so we don't know what we don't know.

Daniel:

No, and the other thing is, is I for sure personally can say I have seen

Daniel:

far more science fiction imagery in my life than imagery that depicts

Daniel:

the interrelatedness of species.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

So I grew up seeing it with my own eyes, like people in space, people traveling

Daniel:

to other planets and traveling on ships.

Daniel:

I mean, the number of films alone that I've.

Daniel:

That depict that.

Daniel:

And I'm not saying like that, there's some agenda there, but I'm just saying that

Daniel:

it, it causes you to believe this stuff is real so that it appears that the progress

Daniel:

we're after if you really ask yourself.

Daniel:

Cause I've spent so much time sitting there thinking like, what

Daniel:

are we, what are we doing this for?

Daniel:

Like, where are we trying to get to?

Daniel:

So many people I know would like to do what you're doing is just sort of like,

Daniel:

tend a piece of land, have relationships with other species, produce their own

Daniel:

food, kind of get out of that rat race.

Daniel:

So many people wanna do that.

Daniel:

It's like, why are we at like breakneck speed and what are we trying to do?

Daniel:

And as you follow the line of thinking, it's like, oh, we're trying to get off

Daniel:

the planet and, and go out into space and we'll destroy this planet to do it.

Kate:

I've wondered a lot, I'm curious to kick this to you.

Kate:

I think a lot about the universe beneath our feet, right?

Kate:

You have 1 billion microorganisms in a single teaspoon of soil, miles

Kate:

of fungal networks in a shovel full.

Kate:

And here we are looking at the cosmos because in many ways I

Kate:

think they're, they're above us and, and in that hierarchy.

Kate:

And so we look to that space.

Kate:

I think that there is a transparency that we can see the stars in the

Kate:

sky, but we can't see this micro universe that exists all around us.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

and.

Kate:

within that is an ease of imagination that there, there aren't really any

Kate:

barriers to entry of imagination of what happens above, but there, there are

Kate:

some barriers to entry on what happens.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

below and imagining this deep inner space, I think a lot about, did you ever see

Kate:

the movie Powers of 10 in high school?

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

, uh, it's, you know, play it in biology class.

Kate:

Right.

Kate:

And they zoom out, you know, powers of 10 Oh.

Kate:

All the way to space.

Kate:

And then they come back on the couple in the picnic all the way

Kate:

down to electrons in their cells.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

super cool.

Kate:

And I think it's harder to imagine those relationships in some ways mm-hmm.

Kate:

but when you're in them and you're seeking that out, I like to think for me that

Kate:

that has been more fantastical than any imagery of ships flying through space

Kate:

and in Star Wars or, or whatever that

Daniel:

is.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

I'm trying to think of who the author was that I or heard describe uh, I think

Daniel:

he was the guy who wrote Ender's Game.

Daniel:

Mm

Kate:

mm-hmm.

Kate:

, Scott Orson or Scott Card.

Daniel:

Scott Card.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. Yeah.

Daniel:

He was talking about when he was publishing and he said, you know,

Daniel:

them trying to figure out if he was in fantasy or in science fiction.

Daniel:

And he said, fantasy has trees.

Daniel:

and science fiction doesn't have trees.

Daniel:

Uh, like if you look at the picture on the cover, you know?

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Uh, cuz you're like, you know, just Lord of the Rings fantasy.

Daniel:

Is there stuff, it's like, that's fantasy.

Daniel:

Hmm.

Daniel:

And so the, the fictional depiction of what you're talking about is more

Daniel:

that like fairy realm Lord of the rings middle earth kind of thing, where it's

Daniel:

like an interest in the relationship of different types of species.

Daniel:

That's like a, that's a hallmark of fantasy fiction versus science

Daniel:

fiction, which is extremely sterile and tends to focus only on homo sapiens

Daniel:

living in an extremely like clean hospital-like environment and space.

Daniel:

You know?

Daniel:

So there's these two proclivities.

Daniel:

I mean, honestly I think both of those things are useful and important.

Daniel:

Um, psychological tendencies that if we had balanced nicely within ourselves,

Daniel:

we probably would be really good.

Daniel:

Because having spent a lot of time, you know, wrestling food out of the wild, uh,

Daniel:

I'm in many ways grateful that I don't have to live like that all the time.

Daniel:

You know, there's many things about the built environment I like,

Daniel:

in particular, one of the things that excites me is, um, you know,

Daniel:

there's pretty good evidence now.

Daniel:

It's like animals, mammals in particular that live in a zoo will outlive their

Daniel:

wild counterparts significantly.

Daniel:

The problem is they're in captivity.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And so you have to weigh that cuz the farm environment, as

Daniel:

you know, is really different.

Daniel:

So in the farm, The animals in captivity, but they have an

Daniel:

extremely abbreviated lifespan.

Daniel:

I mean, if you're going to eat an animal, you typically aren't gonna let

Daniel:

it live, what, six months to two years?

Daniel:

Something like that.

Daniel:

It's a very short window.

Kate:

We raise older animals.

Kate:

But yes, in general it is a shorter window.

Kate:

But

Daniel:

even still, you're probably not like, Hey, let's raise this

Daniel:

one to 15 before we eat it.

Daniel:

It's like, not probably gonna happen.

Daniel:

Uh, but in the zoo, the, in the goal, because the goal is observation.

Daniel:

The goal is keep the animals alive as long as possible, and then

Daniel:

also to try to create habitats that sort of replicate mm-hmm.

Daniel:

at least a little bit for the mental health of that animal.

Daniel:

So you're like, Hey, let's put the gorilla in an enclosure that kind of

Daniel:

looks like gorilla habitat and has maybe some running water, some trees and plants

Daniel:

that it can eat or play with at least.

Daniel:

And we'll try to come up with food, kind of like what it eats.

Daniel:

And, and you create this environment that, that at least on the surface

Daniel:

resembles its natural habitat and you'll get this animal to live a lot longer.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

in captivity, uh, the zoo is kind of like, that's a possibility for us here.

Daniel:

We are living pretty long lifespans now.

Daniel:

There's a lot of possibility, not just living, but you could thrive.

Daniel:

You know, my mother, my mother-in-law's 80, and I I, you know, she just

Daniel:

started working out last year.

Daniel:

I mean, it's amazing.

Daniel:

No real significant de I mean, I think if you live a very, very long

Daniel:

time, you'll live, you, you, you'll die with degenerative diseases.

Daniel:

You don't have to die of them, but you will die with some of them for sure.

Daniel:

Um, but she's, it's just amazing what's possible now.

Daniel:

But how free are we?

Daniel:

Because our environment that we're in now is not a zoo, it's a farm.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

The goal is work you really, really hard.

Daniel:

So your labor is the produce that you produce and your

Daniel:

taxes dollars are your produce.

Daniel:

So you are like a livestock animal, less like necessarily butchered for food.

Daniel:

Thank God we're not being eaten.

Daniel:

But we are more like a draft horse in a sense.

Daniel:

Like you go to your job every day, you're trained for 18 years, and

Daniel:

then you go out and you do the job.

Daniel:

And when we're done with you, we're done with you.

Daniel:

It's up to you to figure out an exit plan because there isn't

Daniel:

one like put there for you.

Daniel:

So, so I think we could really look at our current environment more

Daniel:

like a, a factory farm for people in their labor and their tax dollars.

Daniel:

That's unfortunate, but I think it's a more accurate assessment's.

Daniel:

A very accurate, we had pick assessment this more this way or this way.

Daniel:

Now a lot of us have these like, um, kind of utopian ideas like, man, we

Daniel:

could really turn like bio utopian ideas.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, um, not like the sci-fi utopian ideas that we could turn this place into such a a,

Daniel:

an abundant paradise, like a permaculture paradise that we could theoretically still

Daniel:

have these really, really long lifespans, but be really healthy and be happy.

Daniel:

Now that's possible too.

Daniel:

Unfortunately, there's some farm human farmers around.

Daniel:

who they don't, they don't really like this idea for us.

Daniel:

Like they have a different idea cuz they wanna own livestock.

Daniel:

You know, I'm not, um, just to be clear, and I'm sure you know this

Daniel:

from my work, but I'm, I'm, I'm like pretty anti-communist, anti-socialist.

Daniel:

Like, I don't want anything to do with that.

Daniel:

But I hate being in this binary where it's like, oh, so you're,

Daniel:

then you're a capitalist.

Daniel:

It's like, well, I live in a capitalist environment and I make that work for me.

Daniel:

But capitalism refers to capital, which means head, and, and it's essentially

Daniel:

a reference to head of cattle.

Daniel:

So the idea of capitalism was always, how many head of cattle do you have ? And

Daniel:

then later, you know, also chattel, which is human slaves, how many do you

Daniel:

own, is a, the marker of your wealth.

Daniel:

And so today capitalism is still going on and the the best capitalists.

Daniel:

Have a lot of employees and to employ means to knowingly or willingly

Daniel:

go into someone else's scheme.

Daniel:

Cuz a ploy is a scheme and m means to knowingly or willingly go into.

Daniel:

So when you're an employer, you have roped other people into your

Daniel:

scheme and they become like chattel.

Daniel:

And, and obviously like as an employer, I try to be a really good one and I try

Daniel:

to treat people me too fairly and make people part of a great community to,

Daniel:

you know, and all of that because I'm trying to work with what we have here.

Daniel:

But, but at the top, top, top of this are people who I think do kind of look

Daniel:

at human beings like they're farmable.

Daniel:

And we, those of us who are living in that, people like yourself and myself

Daniel:

are like trying to figure out how to convert this into more of a zoo.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

the challenge is trying to figure out how to do that in a way that also balances

Daniel:

the needs of all these other species.

Daniel:

Because, you know, the idea of species going extinct, uh, at our hands is so

Daniel:

shocking and horrible and horrifying.

Daniel:

I mean this, these millions and millions of years of collective evolution.

Daniel:

And then, you know, I, I'm so saddened by what happened to the passenger pigeon, not

Daniel:

just saddened, but I, I think about, um, I mean, for your listeners who don't know,

Daniel:

I mean, the passenger pigeon was a, a dove native to North America that flew in such

Daniel:

massive flocks that when they would go over your de your town, they would darken

Daniel:

the sky sometimes for days at a time and they would land on trees in such huge

Daniel:

numbers that branches were breaking off.

Daniel:

And, and native peoples here lived with them, harmoniously

Daniel:

with them for a really long time.

Daniel:

Um, and obviously ate them too, but just didn't wipe them out.

Daniel:

But Europeans got here and I mean, they were firing cannons into the sky

Daniel:

just at random, blast 'em out of the sky, you know, selling 'em into the

Daniel:

marketplace and eventually caused the extinction of those animals, which has

Daniel:

massively affected our forests, which all evolved in the presence of yes.

Daniel:

Tremendous amounts of bird feces, you know, that it is no longer

Daniel:

present and it's changing the dynamics of our ecosystems.

Daniel:

But we pushed this animal that it's hard to even ima, it's like bison on

Daniel:

the ground, used to be, but in the sky.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And we cause that extinction and it's like we had to live with that

Daniel:

sort, almost like species guilt.

Daniel:

It kind of sucks, you know, the idea that we keep doing that.

Daniel:

So, so I want, I'm saying all this because it's like the f the human

Daniel:

farmers, I say with air quotes, I mean, I'm being kind of vague there, but

Daniel:

those folks, there's not really like much room for ecology in their world.

Daniel:

They're not necessarily caring so much about that.

Daniel:

And then when we get really on our home thing about, like how we wanna change

Daniel:

the world in positive ways, sometimes we forget about all of these relationships.

Daniel:

And so it's like all of that has to get balanced in with whatever future.

Daniel:

We create because it's not just like, oh, sad, the passenger pigeons are gone.

Daniel:

It's like every time one thing blinks out, it destabilizes

Daniel:

this thank god ex incredibly interconnected, resilient system.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

But a system that can on like any system can only take so many changes

Daniel:

to the nodes, the nexus points.

Daniel:

And as you start pulling those things out, things destabilize and become chaotic.

Kate:

Yeah, absolutely.

Kate:

I think, you know, you said a couple of things, and I think I'm always

Kate:

a little shy of the idea of utopia.

Kate:

I think that I like to be careful about my ideas around, around reaching a

Kate:

utopian state, um, because I don't think that is something that we can reach.

Kate:

I think that, you know mm-hmm.

Kate:

The, the goal is more integrated and less perfected.

Kate:

And

Daniel:

I'll just add that, that utopian movements tend to

Daniel:

become mass murdering, move.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

Yes.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

A lot of eugenics come out of utopianism.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

and mm-hmm.

Kate:

. I think that there's this idea, you know, I mean, I come from, from the

Kate:

idea of regenerative agriculture and it's how can we build an environment

Kate:

that is interconnected into systems that are put in place with this hope?

Kate:

And I think that we often fall short of that hope that we can see in a

Kate:

holistic viewpoint, all the players within an ecosystem and, and build

Kate:

a space where we are honoring all.

Kate:

Parts of the whole, and they are working together in a symbiotic

Kate:

way to create that environment.

Kate:

And so as we look at this space as humans, where it's like, yes, I want to get back

Kate:

to a more natural space in the world as opposed to this built world, but I still

Kate:

want some of the, the built world in it.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

. And so how do I balance these two things?

Kate:

It's an interesting model and I wanna actually go back to something that

Kate:

you said, which was this idea of this addict where you kind of have the

Kate:

ground that's dissolving behind you.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

. And one of the, one of the interviews I actually returned to that I think was

Kate:

one of the first interviews I ever heard you do was with Daniel Quinn because

Kate:

it was just such a, such a wild thing.

Kate:

And so I actually, I, I picked up Ishmael before, um, before this interview just

Kate:

to kind of touch back in that space.

Kate:

Cause it had been been a really long time.

Kate:

And I pulled this quote and I think that this kind of encompasses this idea

Kate:

that we're, we're running and, and the road is kind of crumbling beneath us.

Kate:

And I think that for people like you and me, we're looking

Kate:

at this loss of biodiversity.

Kate:

We're in the six mass extinction event, but we're also looking

Kate:

at a loss of biodiversity of skills that we have carried with.

Kate:

And I heard you and Dan Flores, 40,000 generations of hunters mm-hmm.

Kate:

and something that we could lose.

Kate:

Faster than I, I think we might think and, and farming coming into that.

Kate:

But this quote, you know, from Daniel Quinn is your captives of a civilizational

Kate:

system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.

Kate:

You are captives and you had, you have made a captive of the world itself.

Kate:

That's what's at stake, isn't it?

Kate:

Your captivity and the captivity of the world.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Uh, that's heavy.

Daniel:

Yeah, it's hard because the, there's, um, again, people don't

Daniel:

always understand what we come from and there's like a cartoonishness

Daniel:

about people's ideas about the past.

Daniel:

Very often, unless you've have really immersed yourself, uh, either

Daniel:

in something like you're doing practically, like actually living it

Daniel:

or academically really having been through the literature in anthropology

Daniel:

and biology, it's like in archeology it's really hard to have a clear view.

Daniel:

So people might say something like, well, if you feel like that, why don't you just

Daniel:

go to Alaska and live into wild ? And it's like, because humans need groups

Daniel:

of like 30 to 50 people to do that.

Daniel:

They need massive land bases that don't have, um, fencing and

Daniel:

trespassing in borders, um, to move about because we need to.

Daniel:

There's with very few exceptions, there are some, but very few

Daniel:

exceptions, hunter gatherer groups.

Daniel:

You know, need massive land bases cuz they're moving around all

Daniel:

season to go from place to place.

Daniel:

Because as a forager, even in the modern world, I know that what I need each

Daniel:

season happens in different places, in different ecotypes and ecotone.

Daniel:

And so to get to all those places, I'm running into signs all the time.

Daniel:

Tell me to stop, you know,

Kate:

we see those really easily with bison, with the idea of, well,

Kate:

why wouldn't we just introduce bison back into the plains because

Kate:

they're a keystone species.

Kate:

Well obviously because there's a lot of fences and they have these

Kate:

seasonal cyclical migrational patterns.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

because they depend on different forage and food stuffs throughout time.

Kate:

Well we're, we're not any different

Daniel:

than that.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

We're pretty similar.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And similarly too, I, I spoke to um, a Lakota uh, bison

Daniel:

rancher a couple years ago.

Daniel:

I went out there to harvest a bison for our television show, wild.

Daniel:

And um, I'm interviewing, uh, this man, Ron Brown Otter, and I say, cuz

Daniel:

he used to raise cattle and then he transitioned over to bison exclusively.

Daniel:

And I like asking him, what are some of the differences?

Daniel:

Why are the bison better for the land?

Daniel:

He's like, well, cows are lazy , they stay in one place.

Daniel:

They keep using the same ground, they tread over the same spot until

Daniel:

it's denuded and they ruin it.

Daniel:

He's like, the bison just go.

Daniel:

and they carry seed in their, they rub around and then they go

Daniel:

to some other distant place and they move those seeds over there.

Daniel:

And then, versus the cattle like life.

Daniel:

So it's like similar like us now we've become sedentary.

Daniel:

So I think the average person today hears the word sedentary and the

Daniel:

word means like couch potato to them.

Daniel:

Um, you know, le sedentary lifestyle.

Daniel:

Like I sit on the couch netflixing, and I'm not, I'm not getting enough

Daniel:

movement, but sedentism initially, it refers to people, groups that settle

Daniel:

into towns because of agriculture.

Daniel:

So of course, as you know, the agricultural revolution, so-called

Daniel:

Neolithic revolution, you know, begins something like 10, 12,000, 14,000

Daniel:

years ago, and people go from that semi nomadic lifestyle of moving through.

Daniel:

You know, it's not like they just traveled endlessly, but because

Daniel:

there was other people groups.

Daniel:

So everybody's bounded by all these people groups, like something we're now

Daniel:

understanding about North America as we re we pieced the story back together.

Daniel:

So many people, 90% of people here, roughly died of European

Daniel:

diseases very early on after the first Europeans came here.

Daniel:

So as in the first Europeans came, I mean, there's a quite a stretch of time before

Daniel:

the pilgrims come by the time they come.

Daniel:

, it seems like what was landscapes pretty open and empty.

Daniel:

But before that, it wasn't at all.

Daniel:

So it wasn't like you just roamed endlessly.

Daniel:

You had your winter area, you had your summer area, your spring area,

Daniel:

but that was your territory that you defended and protected and lived in.

Daniel:

So you, you were semi nomadic.

Daniel:

That's not really an option when you're growing your food because

Daniel:

you kind of need to be there.

Daniel:

Because look, what we said is those plants become domesticated and then

Daniel:

they require that soil fluffing all the time, , and, you know, in

Daniel:

order to keep them happy, right?

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Or else they'll die.

Daniel:

So versus like, if I have a patch of choked cherries that I'm

Daniel:

harvesting wild choked cherries.

Daniel:

I don't have to be there to tend them like they tend themselves.

Daniel:

In fact, they don't, they don't need me at all.

Daniel:

So, uh, when I come back around, they're there fruiting.

Daniel:

They don't need me to do any of that work, watering them, fertilizing

Daniel:

them or anything like that.

Daniel:

But if I'm gonna put weed in the ground as, you know, I'm gonna need

Daniel:

to be there to do a lot of work.

Daniel:

It's a lot of labor.

Daniel:

In fact, the archeological record's really clear that this is a, a really

Daniel:

hard thing for us to initially adapt to because of the, the, all that

Daniel:

bending over kind of work was created, arthritic conditions in people.

Daniel:

And there was a lot of malnourishment events that happened, especially early

Daniel:

on in agriculture, because it's really hard to have a famine and wild food.

Daniel:

That's maybe another thing people don't understand.

Daniel:

There's this sense of, well, people in the wild were always

Daniel:

on the edge of starving to death.

Daniel:

It's like, no, actually that's just not true.

Daniel:

Uh, it might look like that today, you know?

Daniel:

What, what year were you born?

Kate:

1988.

Kate:

Ah, . . What is that?

Kate:

What is that last ? Yeah.

Kate:

Well, you remember these problems.

Kate:

You're right.

Kate:

Are you my husband's age?

Kate:

My husband was born in 1978.

Daniel:

Yeah, I'm 78.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Cool, cool.

Daniel:

Right?

Daniel:

. GenX.

Daniel:

I'm so extreme.

Daniel:

So, um, , when I, when we were growing up, he and I, there was, um, commercials

Daniel:

on TV a lot of times about giving money to, I mean, you might remember these

Daniel:

giving money to kids in third world countries that, that were, are starving.

Daniel:

And they'd be like, just for the, the cost of a cup of coffee.

Daniel:

You could feed a family, you know, one of these Yeah.

Daniel:

Kinda things.

Daniel:

And they would show these pictures of kids with like bloated bellies

Daniel:

and flies on their faces and stuff.

Daniel:

And I grew up and flies on their eyeballs.

Daniel:

I grew up thinking, oh, that's what people are like when

Daniel:

they don't have civilization.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, I didn't understand.

Daniel:

No, those are people who had extreme, those are the remnants of people who had

Daniel:

extremely productive landscapes and life ways who were marginalized and pushed

Daniel:

off their land by agriculturalists.

Daniel:

And now they live in bad lands where they can't produce enough food.

Daniel:

Similar to many native peoples here who are on reservations that are not

Daniel:

their traditional lands and they cannot.

Daniel:

And now it looks like, oh, they suffer from poverty.

Daniel:

But it's like they weren't suffering from poverty.

Daniel:

It's just all their stuff in land got taken and they, they could no longer,

Daniel:

the things that made them ultra healthy and productive are no longer accessible.

Daniel:

So I think a lot of people imagine, oh, hunter-gatherers,

Daniel:

they were just starving to death.

Daniel:

It's not only were they not, they were very famine resistant.

Daniel:

Because like, even when I think about like, we're, it's March

Daniel:

31st today, so we'll be going into April here pretty soon.

Daniel:

The spring foraging is gonna kick off.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And there's the plants that I, I'm real excited about foraging.

Daniel:

Me too.

Daniel:

They have a, a bigger return.

Daniel:

Calorically, they're more abundant, they're more hardy.

Daniel:

They just are more filling and satiating.

Daniel:

But there's also all the plants that I know I can forage, but

Daniel:

I'm just not as interested in.

Daniel:

Hmm.

Daniel:

But if somehow, like the crop of fiddleheads failed, I know that

Daniel:

I can go get at the trout Lilly and the, you know, these other

Daniel:

plants that are in that same area.

Daniel:

They're just not as desirable.

Daniel:

But I'm not gonna starve because I know all these other foods.

Daniel:

And if it gets real bad, I can eat the inner bark of pine trees.

Daniel:

It's like just really not very desirable, but I'm not gonna starve.

Daniel:

Agriculturalists traditionally put all their eggs in one basket.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

No d.

Daniel:

not very well diversified.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

So the, so that all those nodes that you have in the forging life are gone.

Daniel:

And now if there's a crop failure, which there often is or was, uh, people

Daniel:

really did struggle and go hungry.

Daniel:

And that was, you know, I, we've largely solved that through globalization

Daniel:

efforts of, you know, our food supply.

Daniel:

But that was a so far that was a real, that was a real issue,

Daniel:

you know, in the, in antiquity.

Daniel:

And so yeah, hunter gatherers were definitely not starving.

Daniel:

We add very productive.

Daniel:

That's why we're here.

Daniel:

That's the other thing that's weird to me is that people think, how

Daniel:

could, it's like, doesn't make sense.

Daniel:

How could we have had a failure to thrive?

Daniel:

We just limped along for 300,000 years in the most intense

Daniel:

environments through an ice age.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

and through, you know, the longer I live, the more time I ha okay.

Daniel:

The less I just wanna believe fantastical things for the sake of it.

Daniel:

Um, and the more clear eye I get, and yet one thing I can't shake because when

Daniel:

I was younger I was attracted to a lot of very alternative ideas, you know?

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, I guess a full disclosure, I'm an alternative person.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Well, you and both, I can tell.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

So, uh, I, but I'm pretty drawn to this idea that, that cataclysmic

Daniel:

events, Might be the undergirding of why we're mad at mom.

Daniel:

Um, and there's this idea of something like 14,000 years ago,

Daniel:

some pretty heavy, um, yeah.

Daniel:

The younger drives maybe impact events that happened here Yeah.

Daniel:

That were changed climate and that, um, that maybe had

Daniel:

caused some extinction events.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And really put human beings through.

Daniel:

And it might be the cause of this species wide amnesia that we

Daniel:

seem to have, cuz we can't really remember what anything is out there.

Daniel:

We're like, we still can't figure out this FX or the pyramids, you know?

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

like, we, we don't understand why there's all these massive civilizations

Daniel:

that suddenly come out of nowhere.

Daniel:

We're very, we can't remember it.

Kate:

It's funny you asked Daniel Quinn this, like, why do, why do

Kate:

we have this propensity to say, oh, maybe aliens dropped down

Kate:

and, and made the pyramids mm-hmm.

Kate:

and it is that, that cultural amnesia?

Kate:

This this, yeah.

Kate:

Forgetting.

Kate:

Keep going.

Kate:

Sorry.

Kate:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Well, I, I think one trap I fall into constantly is I'm very,

Daniel:

very immersed in and inculcated in the current scientific.

Daniel:

Archeological and anthropological belief about the linear

Daniel:

timeline of human development.

Daniel:

And you know, that's that thing of like, we're, you know, modern homo sapiens

Daniel:

emerged something like 300,000 years ago.

Daniel:

They leave Africa, you know, 55,000 years ago and they make it over to

Daniel:

Australia and they push up into Europe.

Daniel:

And then 14,000 years ago they get to North America.

Daniel:

And then around that time, you know, different domestication events happen

Daniel:

and the Neolithic Revolution begins.

Daniel:

And, you know, there's this whole timeline that we have.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

And, and this quest to find the fossils to prove it mm-hmm.

Daniel:

And all of that.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

Um, and it's plausible except for these, just except for these structures

Daniel:

that we find all over the world.

Daniel:

They're like, man, that doesn't really fit with the story very well.

Daniel:

It would if we could see how it was done, if it was like, oh

Daniel:

yeah, they just, those pyramids.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

You just move these stones 300 miles.

Daniel:

Like how did this happen where we don't know how it happened and,

Daniel:

and it leaves us a little bit, it doesn't fit with the full narrative.

Daniel:

And so I think something happened, and I think that might be why we said we're

Daniel:

willing to put ourselves at massive risk.

Daniel:

We're willing to degenerate ourselves, we're willing to radically alter

Daniel:

how we do things in order to create a kind of stability, that flat

Daniel:

line we initially talked about.

Daniel:

Was like, we can't deal with these massive oscillations.

Daniel:

Like if, if com part particles of comets are gonna smash into the earth

Daniel:

and cause you know, nuclear winters, well then, okay, it's worth it.

Daniel:

Let's do some radical Darth Vader level interventions in order to,

Daniel:

to, to make ourselves stable.

Kate:

Uh, that's a weird tangent.

Kate:

No, that's a, that's a good tangent.

Kate:

And I think that's really interesting as a, a point where we're mad at Mom and

Kate:

I hadn't considered it from that space.

Kate:

I know that one of the things that I think a lot about is here we

Kate:

are trying to recreate history, and I think you covered this.

Kate:

Like I said, I listened to too many interviews with you, so I don't know,

Kate:

I don't know who you were talking to, but, um, you were talking about

Kate:

archeological sites and, and Clovis, it might have been with Dan Flores.

Kate:

We haven't uncovered everything and we keep pushing back these events.

Kate:

Right.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

And we keep, we keep hilarious finding more and it's, it's not as if there

Kate:

aren't massive amounts of land that are unexplored or as you said, you know,

Kate:

coastally that are now underwater Yeah.

Kate:

That we're never going to find because people like to live on coasts

Daniel:

and the water's getting deeper

Kate:

currently too.

Kate:

And, and so one of the things that I think a lot about is that here we have this

Kate:

very linear view and kind of take us back.

Kate:

We have this very linear view and I think it shapes the way that we

Kate:

shape our historical perspective.

Kate:

And I think we are solo.

Kate:

So to use your word inculcated in that viewpoint, that it is hard for us

Kate:

to even get out of the walls and the boundaries of that, to look at history

Kate:

or archeology or anthropology through a more cyclical lens, a less reductive

Daniel:

lens.

Daniel:

Yeah, that's a great, great point.

Daniel:

Um, I, I wanna just speak quickly to that Ice Age piece, and I'm gonna come back to

Daniel:

what you said about what you just said.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Just so people know what we meant.

Daniel:

It's just that, um, you know, people do tend to live along the coast and

Daniel:

we've just come out of an ice age.

Daniel:

And we're currently continuing on that same trend line and that it's warming.

Daniel:

And that means that the ice and the ice caps continues to melt and

Daniel:

the permafrost continues to melt.

Daniel:

And as that does, the ocean levels rise as that water runs down into the sea.

Daniel:

And so all of the archeological sites along the coast get flooded and they're

Daniel:

probably flood, you know, some of the best stuff is probably 300 feet

Daniel:

underwater and, and maybe obliterated.

Daniel:

And it's really unfortunate because that means when we find archeological

Daniel:

sites, they're deep inland and they're not necessarily representative

Daniel:

of what the greater bulk of those sites would've been had we been

Daniel:

able to access 'em at the coast.

Daniel:

So we're piecing stuff together and I think one of the fatal flaws

Daniel:

for me of science, uh, cuz, cuz obviously the scientific method

Daniel:

is incredible in many ways.

Daniel:

Like it really is mm-hmm.

Daniel:

in many ways, like mm-hmm.

Daniel:

some of the things that we used to think and do you know, can you imagine

Daniel:

having like heated liquid mercury put on your, your, I don't know, like

Daniel:

you're, what would be, what is it, like chlamydia or sores or something, you

Daniel:

know, and they're like, oh, the answer to that is hot liquid mercury, or Yeah.

Daniel:

Like, oh, you know, bleeding you is the, yeah.

Daniel:

Like, you're sick and they're like, we're gonna bleed you.

Daniel:

It's like, thank God.

Daniel:

Like we've figured that out.

Daniel:

But the, the problem with the scientific method is that it's

Daniel:

so evidence-driven that things don't exist until they're shown.

Daniel:

And that means that you have to then be like, well this is currently what's true.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. And then a dis site gets found and then what's true suddenly change.

Daniel:

And so I, I often joke when I started doing what I do now, the homo sapiens were

Daniel:

200,000 years old in our current form.

Daniel:

Today as we do this interview, we're 300,000 years old.

Daniel:

Wow.

Daniel:

Well, that's a pretty significant, right?

Daniel:

That's, that's pretty significant.

Daniel:

It's 33%.

Daniel:

So yeah, it's pretty major thing.

Daniel:

So I mean, what will we find out next year and in 10 years?

Daniel:

And what about when we have better ground penetrating radar and we can, you

Daniel:

know, sites like Gobek Tepe were found not long ago, so before that, like the

Daniel:

oldest sites that, you know, we're like, oh, civilizations are 6,000 years old.

Daniel:

And then we're like, oh, maybe they're 14,000 years old.

Daniel:

Well, this stuff radically alters our timelines.

Daniel:

So yeah, that's a pretty big deal.

Daniel:

Anyway, going back to what you were saying about, about the

Daniel:

sort of linear nature of things.

Daniel:

It, it's interesting when I've, again, just hearkening back to my friends at

Daniel:

Standing Rock, Lakota and Dakota, people and, and not just them, actually many

Daniel:

indigenous groups, when you look at their homes, uh, they're not squares

Daniel:

with 90 degree angles, very, very rarely, but their circles most of the time are

Daniel:

ovals, hoop houses and things like that,

Daniel:

And they talk about living in the round.

Daniel:

And that the idea, like the idea that energy can move properly in a 90

Daniel:

degree angle kind of structure to them is like, doesn't really make sense.

Daniel:

So you see this kind of tepe style design or this wiki up design

Daniel:

or again, this sort of longhouse design, the big oval rounded edges.

Daniel:

Um, they weren't, they were cyclical thinkers.

Daniel:

So the circle represented completion.

Daniel:

Uh, we're into this linear thing.

Daniel:

I mean, we literally call ourselves the human race as if like we're

Daniel:

trying to get to the, a finish line somewhere ahead of other people.

Daniel:

Sure.

Daniel:

And I, I think that's really fascinating because you've probably heard this, uh,

Daniel:

in people who, who read, uh, sapiens will, will remember this, that, uh, like

Daniel:

a hundred thousand years ago, there was multiple species of humans on earth.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

So humans, just quick, quick biological refresher for listeners, humans

Daniel:

are any species in the genus homo.

Daniel:

And, and there's, you know, we're Homo Sapien Sapien, which is the

Daniel:

domesticated form of Homo Sapien, which is like the hunter gatherer human.

Daniel:

But you know, there was the Neanderthals, right?

Daniel:

The Dennis Sos, um, there was the florencian, there's all these different

Daniel:

kind of in that Lord of the Rings esque style thing where you have like, well

Daniel:

there's, those are the elves and those are the dwarfs and these are the humans.

Daniel:

And there it was sort of like that there was all of these species of,

Daniel:

of homo on the, um, planet and at multiple there at the same time.

Daniel:

You know, you and I both probably have some amount of neander.

Daniel:

You know, you look at like your, your European descendants, so

Daniel:

guessing you have some Neanderthal, um, mitochondrial, d n mm-hmm.

Daniel:

most likely, right?

Daniel:

So people have up to 3%, which means even though we're homo sapiens we're, we did

Daniel:

hybridize with another species of human.

Daniel:

Um, and then when you go to Asia, you see Dennis Oen genes and people there

Daniel:

because tho that species, um, went east.

Daniel:

And so there were a whole bunch here.

Daniel:

We don't really know what happened.

Daniel:

We certainly know we did breed with them, which is kind of

Daniel:

a wild mind-blowing concept.

Daniel:

Incredibly, some survive in us in that way.

Daniel:

But we usually, what you'll hear is we out-competed them.

Daniel:

Again, it's a human race, it's a race.

Daniel:

So those are all types of humans.

Daniel:

And we won the race and now here we are, now, we're not done racing.

Daniel:

We're gonna go until there's no species left and we go to Mars.

Daniel:

It's like, it's this incredible like, linear thing, you know?

Daniel:

And, and you know, as an, as like, as a sort of weekend warrior athlete,

Daniel:

I, um, it's been interesting over the years, like when, uh, with running,

Daniel:

for instance, I love to run and, um, I learned I had to learn to run properly.

Daniel:

The way homo sapiens run because the way you run with a pair of

Daniel:

Nikes on isn't how homo sapiens run.

Daniel:

It's like, and what it is is like we've, we've taken sprint, you

Daniel:

know, race style, sprinting and tied to apply that to running.

Daniel:

So you, you hear about like, uh, and it's incredible that human beings routinely

Daniel:

were running a hundred, 200 miles.

Daniel:

There would be people who are runners who would go between city states, you

Daniel:

know, so if like, you're the Inca and you need to send a message, you send

Daniel:

it with a dude who's gonna run 200 miles and deliver it just like our

Daniel:

ultra-marathon ultra runners do today.

Daniel:

But they weren't wearing Nike, so they ran with a shorter gate,

Daniel:

more on the midsole of the foot.

Daniel:

It's a different running style.

Daniel:

It's more like this rather than that lean forward, quick, long strides

Daniel:

where you smash your heel against the ground with every step because you

Daniel:

had that big, you have that big pad.

Daniel:

It allows you to, if you take your shoes off, try to run like

Daniel:

that, you can blow your knees out.

Daniel:

Um, similarly, I'm going on a swim workshop, um, later

Daniel:

this month because I can swim.

Daniel:

I was a lifeguard, but I've never been comfortable in the water, cuz

Daniel:

the way I was taught to swim is a racing style swimming method.

Daniel:

And it's.

Daniel:

Comfortable if you're like me and you're not buoyant.

Daniel:

So I'm going to learn a style of swimming that I think is more innate

Daniel:

to how the actual human animal swims.

Daniel:

Cause we have to relearn all this stuff cuz we've been racing.

Daniel:

Everything is racing and it's that progress thing you're talking

Daniel:

about cuz the fastest ones win.

Daniel:

And I just don't understand like where this leads, when I look out, like I

Daniel:

put my metaphorical binoculars and I look like out into the distance

Daniel:

where it seems to be leading is so uniformly not good that I don't

Daniel:

understand how seven plus billion is it.

Daniel:

8 billion people now are all on board with a plan.

Daniel:

They don't even know what the goal of it is.

Kate:

I'm struck, I hadn't thought about the form that we take when we run, when

Kate:

we swim, and how maybe even that has been inculcated in our worldview, right?

Kate:

That mm-hmm.

Kate:

. We are so tied into our environment and I, I think that our environment here, right?

Kate:

We can look at the natural world, we can look at the built world, but we

Kate:

can also look at a sort of conceptual, intellectual environment and how

Kate:

our viewpoint as a, as, as a culture shapes even the form of our bodies

Kate:

and the way that we utilize them.

Kate:

And that an idea of linearity, of racing, of competition could, mm.

Kate:

Even begin to change the natural running gate or swimming style

Kate:

of a human is a little bit, yeah.

Kate:

Without one for a minute.

Kate:

Um,

Daniel:

yeah.

Daniel:

Well, and and unfortunately, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Daniel:

No, no, go ahead.

Daniel:

I think part of what's happened too is that I think there's

Daniel:

this perception, again for the untrained in this discipline.

Daniel:

There's this perception that, well before civilization, you know,

Daniel:

cuz it's funny, like the men of a civilization are called gentle men.

Daniel:

That's really interesting, gentle men.

Daniel:

And the idea is, well, we were barbarians, right?

Daniel:

Like, we must have been really awful.

Daniel:

And it's like, well, that actually turns out not to be true.

Daniel:

No.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

It's kind of true, but it's not fully true.

Daniel:

It was not just like men dominating everything.

Daniel:

It was a men and women did.

Daniel:

Women had a, a very strong voice at the table in most stable

Daniel:

indigenous cultures through time.

Daniel:

And it's really in civilization, as you mentioned, in that hierarchy

Daniel:

where that starts to get eroded away.

Daniel:

Um, I'm a little confused what's happening right now, because the trajectory of

Daniel:

women's rights was like really incredible.

Daniel:

It was like working, working, working.

Daniel:

And now it seems like a lot of biological men are now crowding

Daniel:

women out of their own spaces.

Daniel:

And women seem to be like clapping for it in a way where you're like, yeah,

Daniel:

but then like, like if the, if the best women athletes can't win in their own

Daniel:

sport, like, it's very confusing where we've gone because women started to get

Daniel:

like a really good voice at the table and now it seems like they're, they're

Daniel:

at risk of losing it to some degree, back to men who are gonna somehow retake

Daniel:

those spaces, but in a different form.

Daniel:

It's very strange to me.

Kate:

And it's under the guise of progress.

Kate:

I mean, just to under of progress.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

This is under the, this is the most progressive view.

Daniel:

Very progressive.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

It's a very progressive view.

Daniel:

. So, so, uh, yeah, versus by the way, I think a really interesting way to

Daniel:

consider the, what we call conservatism.

Daniel:

This is also interesting because.

Daniel:

. If you think of somebody who's like, I, I believe in, um, human beings

Daniel:

having a powerful relationship to nature the way we always did.

Daniel:

Well, that's a incredibly conservative view because conservatives trying

Daniel:

to keep stuff from the past.

Daniel:

Today when we hear conservative, we think Republican, but really to conserve

Daniel:

versus, and the other side of that is to progress away from those things.

Daniel:

And I think, again, we want both of those things.

Daniel:

Like I, I, you probably have heard me say it, but I always

Daniel:

say we have two wings on a plane.

Daniel:

Like, I don't wanna be in a one winged plane, so I, I kind of wanna be in a

Daniel:

plane that has a left and a right wing.

Daniel:

Um, and I think this is, it's not a terrible model for government,

Daniel:

it's just, I like the idea that you have opposing views.

Daniel:

One of the things that, that seems obvious to me is that in any civilization,

Daniel:

and prior to that, in any culture, you would've had, because I, I don't think

Daniel:

that it's just these, these viewpoints, if somebody's identifies as a conservative or

Daniel:

identifies as a progressive, I don't think that, that, I don't wanna say progressive,

Daniel:

let me say somebody identifies as liberal or somebody identifies as conservative.

Daniel:

I don't know how much of that's chosen and how much of that is

Daniel:

sort of nature's whim, because it seems like you want roughly half.

Daniel:

Half.

Daniel:

And the anthropologists say that conservative individuals protected

Daniel:

the tribe from new stuff coming in.

Daniel:

That would change the culture, affect the children, and bring in foreign diseases.

Daniel:

but the liberal people in the culture made sure new ideas got in

Daniel:

ideas and, and technologies could evolve and new genetics got in.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. So you didn't inbreed yourselves into a gen genetically shallow pool.

Daniel:

So you want liberals and you want conservatives.

Daniel:

You don't want them at war, that's for sure.

Daniel:

That makes no sense.

Daniel:

No, and you don't want this thing.

Daniel:

Unfortunately, progressivism isn't really related to liberalism.

Daniel:

They're not actually the same thing.

Daniel:

Like it's sort of, that's like saying that, um, like sometimes the liberals

Daniel:

currently will, will try to make it seem like anybody who's conservative is a Nazi.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. And it's like, well that seems really extreme to me.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, because Nazis are kind of, maybe that's the farthest end of it, but

Daniel:

the progressives are kind of like the farthest end of like liberalism

Daniel:

gone mad and the Nazis are maybe like conservatism gone mad, but it's like,

Daniel:

who wants to be out in those outlying pools like somewhere in the middle?

Daniel:

You want both of these concepts because it.

Daniel:

You don't wanna stagnate and you don't wanna, um, invite,

Daniel:

uh, your enemy in either.

Daniel:

You have to balance that.

Daniel:

But anyway, going back to my point, um, women were a really important check,

Daniel:

I think, on this idea of it's all our linear race, it's all a com competition.

Daniel:

It's like that's, we hold a cycle.

Daniel:

I know.

Daniel:

Some

Kate:

incredible, we hold a cycle.

Kate:

Yeah, exactly.

Kate:

And I, and, and I don't, I don't wanna say that you don't, right?

Kate:

Testosterone works on a, on a circadia on a daily cycle that there is a,

Kate:

there is a peak in the morning.

Kate:

A sun rhythm.

Daniel:

A sun rhythm when they work on moon rhythm.

Kate:

Yes.

Kate:

And I think holding that moon rhythm, because there is more of

Kate:

a, a consistent sine wave on a sun rhythm, but on a moon rhythm.

Kate:

There, there are these bigger peaks and troughs to that wave.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

And I, 13 times

Daniel:

a

Kate:

year.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

13 times a year.

Kate:

What?

Kate:

And it fits with the moon and it, it could fit with a yearly calendar if we

Kate:

had made different choices and Yeah.

Kate:

Um,

Kate:

, Daniel: well said.

Kate:

And we see that in our bodies.

Kate:

And I think to go back to this idea of living in a c circular

Kate:

environment, so much of how we build our spaces and imagine.

Kate:

Even imagine our ideologies, because that's kind of where we're at right now.

Kate:

Even how we imagine our ideologies are born out of the relationship that we have

Kate:

to our environment and that worldview.

Kate:

And so when you have something, you know, in that quote, they talked about

Kate:

refrigeration, breaks the seasonal cycle.

Kate:

Well, birth control broke the menstrual cycle in many ways.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

from, from where I'm sitting mm-hmm.

Kate:

. And so you see these things that actually disrupt the cyclical

Kate:

nature of what it is to be human.

Kate:

And how that viewpoint shapes how our environment shapes our viewpoint,

Kate:

and how our viewpoint shapes even our biology down to mm-hmm.

Kate:

to bring it back to that space of gait and the way that we swim.

Kate:

And so mm-hmm.

Kate:

within that, there is this feedback loop that is occurring.

Kate:

And, you know, you talk about this from a space of we're made out of the food

Kate:

we eat and the place we are mm-hmm.

Kate:

right?

Kate:

Like that, that is informing our biology.

Kate:

There's this conversation that's happening between the food we eat at

Kate:

a biological and epigenetic level as we intake these nutrients from place.

Kate:

And so all of this, all of this together is part of this feedback

Kate:

loop that I think whether we're aware of or not, we are experiencing.

Kate:

And I think in some ways you can look at it as a spiral, right.

Kate:

and sometimes maybe we're spiraling outwards or we're spiral reeling inwards.

Kate:

But I think even within the, the binary of liberalism and conservatism

Kate:

and these angulations that we're seeing, and I think that pendulum

Kate:

is swinging further and further out to these more extreme edges of that.

Kate:

But what if it's not a, a pendulum at all?

Kate:

And there there are more options and it's not just mm-hmm.

Kate:

that Yeah, yeah.

Daniel:

That space.

Daniel:

There's a false dichotomy that's called.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And, and to your, a couple things I wanna talk about the calendar and

Daniel:

time, um, and I wanna talk about this idea you just mentioned about

Daniel:

food and where, what you're made of.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And I also wanna talk about first though, this thing about the spiral you

Daniel:

just mentioned because, uh, a spiraling inward is a constructive event and

Daniel:

spiraling outward is a destructive event.

Daniel:

So, you know, when you think of, um, the formation of a

Daniel:

galaxy, it's an inspiration.

Daniel:

So it's topi inward.

Daniel:

A aspire is a spiral, inward is inspiration, and then to

Daniel:

spiral outward is expiration.

Daniel:

That's the thing dying.

Daniel:

So if a galaxy is dying, it starts to spin outward, it

Daniel:

expires like your food expires.

Daniel:

And when you inspire spirals inwards.

Daniel:

So, um, this is kind of an interesting, a lot of it's embedded in our language.

Daniel:

So, um, again, to your point about the calendar, which is very astute

Daniel:

observation, cuz there are 13 mos in a year, but now we only have 12.

Daniel:

So one of the things that's happened is our calendar has taken

Daniel:

us off of, of the natural cycle.

Daniel:

So, Like most of us live by today, what's called civic or civil time.

Daniel:

And then there's natural time.

Daniel:

So, uh, if you've ever played with a, um, a sundial, which is a very powerful

Daniel:

human technology, it's unfortunate.

Daniel:

People think about, oh, that's antiquated.

Daniel:

It's, first of all, it's not antiquated and it's incredibly effective.

Daniel:

Um, all the RQ astronomy stuff holds today.

Daniel:

And in fact, astronomers today don't really like to admit that they

Daniel:

still map the sky using the earth as the center of the universe model.

Daniel:

That's still how we tell you where something is in the sky.

Daniel:

We use still the same ancient interesting model interesting of the,

Daniel:

the earth is flat kind of a view.

Daniel:

It's, it's funny, this idea of a celestial in a terrestrial sphere.

Daniel:

Uh, by the way, I didn't know way.

Daniel:

I'm like a flat earth person.

Daniel:

I don't mean any of that.

Daniel:

I'm just saying the Archie astronomy holds and, um, we ha

Kate:

that.

Kate:

Go ahead.

Kate:

We're always gonna come from a viewpoint.

Kate:

We have to be tied to.

Kate:

It's very hard come from view for us to otherwise un untethered.

Kate:

Oh.

Kate:

Untethered from a viewpoint or a space right?

Daniel:

Or a point in time.

Daniel:

What are, we put an eye in the sky and we're gonna map from

Daniel:

some random point in space.

Daniel:

No, we, we started earth and we look outward just like the ancients did.

Daniel:

Now, when you look out from the earth, I know we have more

Daniel:

planets in our solar system.

Daniel:

We know now, but we can see seven celestial bodies.

Daniel:

That's why we have seven days in a week.

Daniel:

And that's why they're named after those celestial bodies.

Daniel:

So you have the day of the sun, we call it Sunday, you have the day of Saturn.

Daniel:

It's called Saturn.

Daniel:

Day of day of the moon, it's called moon day.

Daniel:

Then you get into Tuesday.

Daniel:

Tuesday, Wednesday, Woden Day and Thursday's, Thursday.

Daniel:

But those are, those are other languages.

Daniel:

So Tuesday, I believe, uh, in French I think is, um, Mardi Mars.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. Then you have Wednesday, wos day is, um, medi and then Freeez day

Daniel:

free as the goddess of Venus.

Daniel:

But in French, it's Vera Day.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

Venus Day.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

Um, and so our days of the week correspond to planets.

Daniel:

The moons of the year are moon cycles.

Daniel:

There aren't 12, there's 13.

Daniel:

But we used to base everything off of this observation of the sky,

Daniel:

uh, which is really fascinating.

Daniel:

And as you said, a a man's cycle.

Daniel:

His testosterone cycle is kind of an annual and daily.

Daniel:

Cycle that's based on the sun.

Daniel:

And women have a cycle that's based on quite clearly.

Daniel:

I mean, any man who's married to a woman knows, like her body and the

Daniel:

lunar cycle are very tied together.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

And that's this beautiful balance.

Daniel:

And, and it's so cool because one of the things that makes you, this,

Daniel:

this gets like freaky like, wait a second, what is this place we live in?

Daniel:

Because the sun and the moon are vastly different size yet when we

Daniel:

have a full solar eclipse and the moon passes in front of the sun just right.

Daniel:

This is so weird.

Daniel:

It exactly is the same size because the sun is 400 times larger than the

Daniel:

moon, but the moon is 400 times closer than the sun, such that they appear

Daniel:

to be equal sized bodies in the sky.

Daniel:

And in the summer, at the summer solstice, the sun is the highest in the south

Daniel:

in the sky that it will be all year.

Daniel:

And the moon and a full moon at that time of year is the

Daniel:

lowest it will be in the sky.

Daniel:

And then in the winter it flips at the winter solstice, the moon is the

Daniel:

highest and the sun is the lowest.

Daniel:

In other words, there's this perfect balance between these two celestial

Daniel:

bodies, how they tug at the tides, how they, um, how they affect the earth and.

Daniel:

It's a beautiful model for what the relationship of men and women could

Daniel:

and should and was at one point.

Daniel:

But, um, today we're, we live in a solar dominant culture.

Daniel:

I mean, we light up the, the night we, we resist the dark.

Daniel:

And I was in Peru once, uh, I was at a museum and I was looking at, it was

Daniel:

the bottom floor was indigenous art and the top floor was Christian art.

Daniel:

You know, because there had been, conquering that happened

Daniel:

there, Christians conquering it.

Daniel:

And I'm downstairs and I'm like, oh, this, I get what this is.

Daniel:

This is the sun religion being conquered by another sun religion.

Daniel:

Because cuz, cuz Jesus is the son of God who rises on the third day and

Daniel:

he travels with his 12 zoia signs.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, he calls the, the disciples and it's this, it's this very clear sun Yes.

Daniel:

Myth.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

He's the light of the world because he is the sun.

Daniel:

So it's like, it's really funny because, and he's on the cross,

Daniel:

which is the four seasons.

Daniel:

So the cross represents the equinoxes and solstice of which there are four.

Daniel:

And so we make a cross to through the circle of the year and we pin the sun

Daniel:

on there and that's the crucifixion and his dying and going into the

Daniel:

underworld for three days of course references what happens at the solstice.

Daniel:

And that's why Jesus is born at Christmastime, which is the winter

Daniel:

solstice and all this stuff.

Daniel:

So, so we're a sun religion that went around and conquered

Daniel:

all these other sun religions.

Daniel:

I mean this is stuff is hilarious how it works.

Daniel:

Uh, tragic, but like there's something there.

Daniel:

So anyway, um, one of the things that's happened is, and, and back to civic

Daniel:

time versus, or civil time versus natural time, like in natural time.

Daniel:

What's really interesting when you put a sundial out, um, and you face

Daniel:

that thing south and it casts a shadow through the day, the way it works is

Daniel:

the sun always, every everyday rises at six and every day it sets at.

Daniel:

And when the sun is in the south every day, that's noon, high noon.

Daniel:

So, uh, and, and by the way, that line, if you were to look into the, to the

Daniel:

south, if you went outside and just faced south and you imagined a line

Daniel:

from the ground all the way up through the heavens to your zenith, directly

Daniel:

overhead, that's called the meridian line.

Daniel:

And so when the sun is left of that or east of that, it's anti meridian.

Daniel:

And when it's past that, it's post meridian.

Daniel:

That's am and pm.

Daniel:

That's what that means.

Daniel:

So am is anti meridian.

Daniel:

The sun is east of the meridian line, and when it gets across it's post meridian.

Daniel:

Now, of course, days aren't equal in length because of seasons

Daniel:

and it changes where you live.

Daniel:

So what ends up happening is in the summertime, what's

Daniel:

an hour of time is longer.

Daniel:

And in the winter, an hour is shorter.

Daniel:

And what we've done is we've made everything uniform again.

Daniel:

So we're back to that flat line, that straight line where

Daniel:

everything is uniform again.

Daniel:

And one of the, there's benefits because what happens is everywhere

Daniel:

you are on the earth will have a different time based on its location.

Daniel:

So the way it used to work is your sundial telling you what time it is.

Daniel:

Well, if you go a hundred miles east or west and you put up a sundial,

Daniel:

it's gonna be a different time.

Daniel:

. So not everybody was synced up because everybody's time was local based.

Daniel:

Now everybody's time is uniform, which is really weird if you live too far away

Daniel:

from the center of your time zone, cuz you're kind of in this weird mm-hmm.

Daniel:

place where you're not experiencing time the same way people in the

Daniel:

middle of that time zone would be.

Daniel:

Or you end up with like my friend Lori McCarthy who lives in Newfoundland

Daniel:

and they have a, they're one and a half hours different from me.

Daniel:

It's so odd.

Daniel:

So all of that stuff is this unnatural forced time space that we've

Daniel:

overlaid over natural time and now people have forgotten natural time

Daniel:

and it's massively disempowering.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

And um, there's so many little Go ahead.

Daniel:

We're,

Kate:

I mean the, the way that we view time governs the

Kate:

way that we act in the world.

Daniel:

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

And we're running from like appointment to appointment, to

Daniel:

appointment to appointment, all in this rigorous time thing because

Daniel:

we live like animals in a zoo.

Daniel:

Sorry.

Daniel:

In a farm who, who've gotta produce our product really quickly cuz you

Daniel:

know, this is an economic environment.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Uh, so it's, it's just, to me it's so wild.

Daniel:

All, all of it, the way it's embedded right in front of us all, everywhere.

Daniel:

Again, I'm not trying to say it's like this massive conspiracy.

Daniel:

This has played out over thousands of years.

Daniel:

So if it is a massive conspiracy, you'd need beings capable of living

Daniel:

really long period of time and rolling out a really big plan.

Daniel:

So I'm not saying that's what's happening or maybe it is, but what, what is.

Daniel:

Clear is that all of the things that connect us to nature have systematically

Daniel:

we've changed them and we've replaced them with something close, but just

Daniel:

a little off, so nothing lines up.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

But hidden in plain sight is the language of all of it

Daniel:

that explains what it all was.

Daniel:

And yet the average person will hear Sunday and never think of the sun.

Daniel:

That's crazy.

Daniel:

Right.

Kate:

I think there's this, this is how I tend to think of it and you know, maybe,

Kate:

maybe it is al some big conspiracy, but I think there's almost an emergent property

Kate:

where we have been in service to this idea for so long that there is almost mm-hmm.

Kate:

this organism of human consciousness that is driving this based on these ideals that

Kate:

have become so deeply embedded in society.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

. And I think that oftentimes there isn't even a point of recognition

Kate:

where you pull back and have some perspective and say, oh, maybe, maybe

Kate:

this is just because of the way that we're viewing all of life and mm-hmm.

Kate:

and we're so indoctrinated into that viewpoint.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

That we can't get outside of our own myopia.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And, and because it's a race, the challenge is like that, uh, if somebody

Daniel:

wins a race, then you're like, well, they were somehow superior at the thing

Daniel:

because either they had better strategy or they had better tactics, or they had

Daniel:

better genetics, or something like that.

Daniel:

Right?

Daniel:

So they are better.

Daniel:

So that's why they win.

Daniel:

And so what's happened with the, um, in particular with the conquering of so

Daniel:

many indigenous groups, you know, it's reprehensible thinking today and so hard

Daniel:

for us to understand, but Europeans were thinking like, well, we're obviously

Daniel:

doing it right cuz we keep winning.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

You know, and now we're at this point where we're coming

Daniel:

to like a reckoning moment.

Daniel:

We're like, wait, and we're all kind of turning back to these ideas that come

Daniel:

from indigenous groups or, or other traditions because we're like, we we're

Daniel:

starting to realize that, that we're, we're like, um, a competitive athlete

Daniel:

who, who worked so hard to become so good at what they did, that they sacrificed

Daniel:

their relationships and they sacrificed.

Daniel:

like basic joys.

Daniel:

And they, they haven't gotten to ever feel what it's like to just

Daniel:

enjoy something in a relaxed way cuz everything is so regimented and

Daniel:

time-based and they gotta move from thing to thing to thing to thing.

Daniel:

And then they get to a certain agent.

Daniel:

It's like, oh man.

Daniel:

Like I, I didn't even watch my kids grow up kind of a thing.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, I think we're kind of like that, where we're realizing, oh, this western

Daniel:

paradigm is leaving us like mentally ill and emotionally unbalanced

Daniel:

and we're destroying our own home and we're destroying our own world

Daniel:

and we're destroying our bodies.

Daniel:

And like, we gotta look somewhere else now because this isn't, this isn't

Daniel:

like working, but we're like looking back on all these, we're trying to

Daniel:

like pull stuff from, from devastated traditions and crushed cultures, you know?

Daniel:

And it's a, it's where it's like, oh, we weren't the best, we were the most

Daniel:

willing to go to the furthest length.

Daniel:

So again, like I made a Darth Vader joke earlier.

Daniel:

Exactly.

Daniel:

Cause it's like Darth Vader is willing to become that horrifying

Daniel:

thing in order to carry out his plan.

Daniel:

He's willing to become that.

Daniel:

And it goes from Anakin Skywalker to that like thing inside the mask that he's like

Daniel:

built out of machine parts and everything.

Daniel:

It's like that I'll go to any level to win, you know?

Daniel:

And we've done that.

Daniel:

We've been willing to give up so much of what is good in order to.

Daniel:

Get to this what?

Daniel:

To get to what?

Daniel:

Because what happens when we get to Mars?

Daniel:

Are we like, this is it, we're good now we're, now we're happy.

Daniel:

It's like, no progress.

Daniel:

Now we gotta get to Jupiter.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, we gotta keep going.

Daniel:

You know, it's never gonna, this, this thing doesn't stop

Daniel:

if you let it run its course.

Kate:

I actually wanna bring this piece in and, and this was something I

Kate:

wanted to talk to you about, and it's interesting that you bring up Darth Vader.

Kate:

I had another podcast with some friends of mine that he, another nerd, he

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

Just from my life is full of great nerds.

Kate:

Um, he brought up this idea of latent archetypes like Darth Vader, um, like

Kate:

Voldemort and Harry Potter that are carrying with them this fear of death

Kate:

and that so much of what they do could be looked at through this lens

Kate:

of being driven by a fear of death.

Kate:

And one thing that comes up a lot on the podcast is how our divorce from

Kate:

death, whether we've, you know, put this in, in hospice and, and we don't

Kate:

see our, our human loved ones die.

Kate:

I just did a, a podcast on home funerals and how to, how to care for bodies

Kate:

and berry bodies, uh, and outside of the funeral industrial complex.

Kate:

But I think that there's this idea, and as a butcher in somebody that kills all of

Kate:

the food that I eat, that death actually roots us back into part of that cycle.

Kate:

And.

Kate:

I was listening to the podcast with you and Philippe Grenade, Willis and

Daniel:

Wild guy.

Daniel:

You

Kate:

were talking about how much that moment of death with an animal,

Kate:

whether you're looking at, you know, whatever language you want to use

Kate:

to harvest, to kill, brings you deeply back into the real world.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

. And that there, in that moment, and I think you said something along the lines

Kate:

of, you can't, you can't bullshit me in that moment because it is so real.

Kate:

Yeah, yeah.

Kate:

Like, it is so real and it is so present.

Kate:

And so as you talk about this, this never ending line of progress, I think that one

Kate:

thing that nature offers us is the idea that there is no growth in perpetuity.

Kate:

And, and that is mm-hmm.

Kate:

in many ways what that progress without end, without goal, that race to, to wear.

Kate:

When you put death back in the equation, there is no race.

Kate:

There is just a chance for all the things that were once, one

Kate:

dissolved back into mm-hmm.

Kate:

many.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

If we could put emphasis on that again as a culture, I think that a lot of this

Daniel:

race would, uh, end because that is what we're trying to do ultimately, right?

Daniel:

Is we're trying to outrun death.

Daniel:

And then I think it's one of the major goals of the medical sciences.

Daniel:

and eugenics.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

too.

Daniel:

You know, it's trying to create life extension for the elite,

Daniel:

and it's like a, a fear of dying.

Daniel:

And, um, you look at many other cultures and what you see is there's, there's

Daniel:

almost an embrace of it because it's like, I'm going to be with my ancestors,

Daniel:

And that's like a really different view.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. And one of the, huh.

Daniel:

I, I'm sure you've thought about this, it's kind of like, uh, is it better to

Daniel:

entertain the idea of the afterlife to en to engender, uh, an embrace of death?

Daniel:

Or is it better to do the cold hard math and be like, no, it's just over.

Daniel:

And then watch people scramble to, to do anything they can, to

Daniel:

like freeze their brain in liquid nitrogen with the hopes of coming

Daniel:

back because we can't, we can't know.

Daniel:

So it's the greatest mystery.

Daniel:

This is so interesting to me with all, we've, the fact that we know

Daniel:

so much about subatomic particles or, um, interstellar space and, and

Daniel:

y you know, we can find exoplanets.

Daniel:

I don't know if people get, like, often talk to people about this.

Daniel:

Like, we can't go to space like we are, we go up into the

Daniel:

space stations in earth orbit.

Daniel:

It's not in space.

Daniel:

We can't, we can't go into space.

Daniel:

It's ridiculous.

Daniel:

We can't, we have no technology to go to space.

Daniel:

It doesn't, we don't have that.

Daniel:

We, we go up in an upper Earth orbit, yet we can see exoplanets, we can't

Daniel:

see them, we can detect them, yet we don't know what's happening when we die.

Daniel:

Like, oh my goodness, is this completely unexplored terrain?

Daniel:

Um, that fear of that unknown creates some weird pathology

Daniel:

psychologically in the world.

Daniel:

And I think it's a big part of it.

Daniel:

And it's interesting to note how recently you go back in history to

Daniel:

a place where every person would be constantly seeing death around them.

Daniel:

And I don't just mean like pre agriculturally, because like you're

Daniel:

saying on a farm, you, you're seeing death all the time and you also are

Daniel:

anticipating death all the time because the birth of an animal there Yeah.

Daniel:

Is essentially the beginning of a death process.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

That's gonna happen.

Daniel:

And then, and then you're thinking out further, like, well, geez, maybe

Daniel:

we're gonna bury ourselves here too.

Daniel:

And, and all of that stuff is just woven in.

Daniel:

And so, you know, there is research showing that the more you

Daniel:

contemplate your own mortality, the more mentally healthy you'll be.

Daniel:

Um, so what's happened now is interest.

Daniel:

Interesting.

Daniel:

People are completely removed from all of this.

Daniel:

Oh, yeah.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

This is, that's interesting.

Daniel:

This stuff's pretty well established too.

Daniel:

Um, so what's going on now is that we have, for a, for several generations,

Daniel:

we've, we've been, especially in the last couple generations, completely removed.

Daniel:

From death such that it's like when I walk in the supermarket, I always

Daniel:

remind myself that every single food item I see is a body part.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

of some living creature.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, whether it's plant, animal, fungal, algal, this stuff, and, and it can be refined

Daniel:

to the point that it's unrecognizable and it's now it's a cracker or something.

Daniel:

You know, I don't look at a cracker and see a recognizable body part,

Daniel:

but realistically, what am I seeing?

Daniel:

Well, I'm seeing the seed of a wheat plant or a barley plant, and that seed is part

Daniel:

of its living tissue, so it's a body part.

Daniel:

And then that thing has been refined down and repurposed into a cracker, but that's

Daniel:

body parts, just like, you know, if I found a pig's foot there or a chicken's

Daniel:

liver there, I mean, those are all, those are more clearly body parts, but

Daniel:

kids today don't necessarily understand that what they're seeing is body parts.

Daniel:

I mean, because it's all compartmentalized into all these different pieces and

Daniel:

wrapped so nicely and, and all changed.

Daniel:

And so, um, built, built into our diet, this is like this thing that's hard to

Daniel:

re reconcile for people that predators, you know, yes, we are predators, we

Daniel:

are killers, and, and that's okay.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

You know, and, and you don't have to hate anything to kill it, as you know.

Daniel:

Um, but that's not clear to people who don't participate.

Daniel:

, you know, they don't know that they, they assume that you must be cold

Daniel:

and heartless to kill, even though they too function are functionally

Daniel:

predators living off these same things.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

But they've

Kate:

outsourced, they don't know.

Kate:

Right.

Kate:

They have outsourced, outsourced the killing.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

to, you know, I mean within, within the industrial agricultural complex.

Kate:

Right?

Kate:

Like, I mean, you're talking about 15 to 20,000 animals that get

Kate:

processed in three shifts per day.

Kate:

And so how many, how many people are responsible for those deaths?

Kate:

And I think that that is an incredible burden to put on some.

Kate:

Can you imagine?

Kate:

No, I can't.

Kate:

And as somebody, one question.

Kate:

When we go through a heavy processing day, if I go out there

Kate:

and I process five goats, there is, there's a myriad of emotions, right?

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

And, and there is some weightiness to it.

Kate:

There is some weight, there's blood on your hands, literally some joy.

Kate:

There is some exhaustion.

Kate:

But yeah, I think it connects you back into something so real.

Kate:

And I, I wanna offer and, and kind of kick this to you, we have this

Kate:

idea that there has to be an life or there has to be a nothing, but

Kate:

there is some evidence of something that happens at death, and that's.

Kate:

That all of the constituent parts that make up the idea of, of this

Kate:

vehicle, of whatever it is, that we are the nitrogen from our blood, the

Kate:

phosphorus from our bones, right?

Kate:

The potassium and our flesh, the minerals that once made up our cellular processes

Kate:

then dissolve back into the earth and become a part of a cycle that is unending.

Kate:

And then you have mm-hmm.

Kate:

, you know, you have my cial networks that liberate minerals from rocks that

Kate:

we could say came from the singularity that burst forth from the big bang.

Kate:

And we're just cycling all of these throughout time.

Kate:

And so death doesn't have to be either or it can just be this transformation of

Kate:

the matter that is us that was once our food, that we were eating the plants,

Kate:

we were foraging, the game, we were hunting, and the, you know, the oxygen

Kate:

that came out of, you know, the plant in my office that is becoming a part

Kate:

of my tissue and my carbon dioxide.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

will become that.

Kate:

And, and so there is this interconnected relationship between

Kate:

all of these things in death.

Kate:

And I think that that point of being somebody that ta

Kate:

being a predator, taking life.

Kate:

Closes that circle for me.

Kate:

It takes that line and it, and it clearly makes it a circle because these

Kate:

things are just, I am made up of food.

Kate:

Right.

Kate:

And that you, you say this so much more beautifully than I could, but I

Kate:

am made up of food and, and then I'll make up soil that'll make up more food.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

. Daniel: Yeah.

Kate:

You're saying that pretty well, I think.

Kate:

Um, yeah.

Kate:

I, you know, like you mentioned too, I mean, some of those plants in your room

Kate:

for sure have tissues made out of carbon that you exhale as carbon dioxide and then

Kate:

they inhaled and they, and they utilize that carbon to build actual tissue.

Kate:

I mean, it's like really fascinating to me.

Kate:

There's also this emerging science now of looking in the sort of humus

Kate:

and folate in the planet's, like in our, in our soil, and then finding

Kate:

ancient dna n and this is so cool.

Kate:

Cause they can go to a lake bed now and they can be like,

Kate:

oh, there were mammoths here.

Kate:

And they don't have to find tusks or bones.

Kate:

They can find the dna.

Kate:

In other words, your DNA doesn't just like when you die, your

Kate:

DNA doesn't just break apart.

Kate:

Actually a lot of it remains, at least sequences enough that, you know, you could

Kate:

be discovered thousands of years later.

Kate:

That's fascinating.

Kate:

Especially if your d n a is any kind of like a, kinda like an antenna

Kate:

or something, or at least it's a, it's a, it's a packaged blueprint.

Kate:

It's pretty cool that that can go on for a really long time.

Kate:

Um, and I'm fascinated by, as you mentioned, like the

Kate:

funerary industrial complex.

Kate:

Desire to make sure that we don't return is also Yeah.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

Super disturbing to me.

Kate:

Fair.

Kate:

I mean, this idea of like concrete box with another box inside the box, and

Kate:

then all of these pickling chemicals to make sure that like no matter what,

Kate:

we will not allow ourselves to return.

Kate:

Because one thing that's very clear to me is all, everything that I'm made of is

Kate:

I'm borrowing exactly from this ecosphere.

Kate:

It's all borrowed material, you know?

Kate:

And like one day I give it back and, and you know, I can't take any of it with me.

Kate:

It's just, it's gotta stay here and it's gotta get used by the next generations.

Kate:

And so, uh, I've gotta return it.

Kate:

And so the idea that your last thing you do is like, fuck you, fuck . And then he's

Kate:

like, I'll not let anyone use my parts.

Kate:

You know, it's, it's um, it's like that thing I said about being angry

Kate:

at your mom, it's like, it's like your last act is to make sure that you

Kate:

don't even return back to the cycle.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

You know, that's, we've come to that place and we're, ever since I was

Kate:

little, I always saw, I always saw cemeteries and it felt like it was

Kate:

such a weird waste of the space.

Kate:

It's like, man, that's.

Kate:

What do, why do that?

Kate:

I don't understand.

Kate:

Like, let the bodies go back in.

Kate:

You know?

Kate:

I, you know, I mean, I think it's put a rock there.

Kate:

Okay, great.

Kate:

But like, do, do we need the bodies to be preserved inside boxes like that.

Kate:

And, and then now I know how toxic it is actually that those cemeteries,

Kate:

all that stuff, leeches eventually right into the ground there.

Kate:

It has concrete breaks apart and you poison the earth with it too.

Kate:

So it's not even like, my last act is to try to restrict myself from

Kate:

going, being eaten by anything.

Kate:

But then it's also like, and I'm gonna poison a little bit

Kate:

more too . So it's wild to me.

Kate:

So, uh, I love what you're talking about because, um, the, the idea

Kate:

that there's, now that we can do this at home, it's amazing.

Kate:

Uh, that's really beautiful.

Kate:

Um, I got to, uh, so a couple years ago, um, there was a, my, my

Kate:

wife had a friend at our wedding, a family friend, uh, named Chuck.

Kate:

And he came to the wedding at age 92.

Kate:

Um, and he.

Kate:

They're, she's Canadian, so, um, laws are different up there and they

Kate:

have, um, medically assisted suicide.

Kate:

There is an option for people and, uh, I think that some

Kate:

of that gets a little abused.

Kate:

But anyway, that's fine.

Kate:

There's some,

Kate:

uh, there's a great article about that as a slippery slope.

Kate:

Uh, well,

Daniel:

yeah, I agree.

Daniel:

I separate issue, but yeah.

Daniel:

But Chuck was 92 and everyone around him had died and, uh, he'd lost,

Daniel:

you know, all his friends were gone and it's just him and he felt he was

Daniel:

becoming a bit of a burden to his family and he was ready to duck out.

Daniel:

And so, um, he had been at our wedding and I, as a consequence, was invited to this.

Daniel:

And it was like a very strange moment because I'm, I'm in the room with this man

Daniel:

who I, I know a little bit, but not well.

Daniel:

Um, and all of their family and I had never, I had seen people die, uh, cuz I've

Daniel:

worked on ambulances and stuff, so I've seen people die and, you know, I've done

Daniel:

c P R and lost people and all of that.

Daniel:

But, um, I had not watched a person go willingly before.

Daniel:

And I've lost a lot of friends to suicide, but I was not there ever.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

But I watched this man fortify himself just before it was incredible because

Daniel:

a doctor comes, uh, doctor and a nurse team came in and they have to

Daniel:

first, you know, it's a very intense emotional experience in the room.

Daniel:

Um, everybody's saying goodbyes to this man, but like, It's

Daniel:

in the living room, you know?

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And, uh, then they show up the medical folks and they gotta check in.

Daniel:

They gotta make sure he's not being coerced.

Daniel:

They gotta make sure he is not on drugs.

Daniel:

They gotta make sure he's willing to do this.

Daniel:

So there's this moment and they start injecting him with stuff and Right.

Daniel:

But right before they do, I watched him start to panic.

Daniel:

I just, I kept for a second, there's just brief a second, but I saw it in

Daniel:

his eyes at that moment of like, wait a second, I don't, I, what am I doing?

Daniel:

And then he went, okay.

Daniel:

And then they started and I just watched every, I was really trying to

Daniel:

pay attention to the physiology cuz I could see his pulse in his neck, you

Daniel:

know, when I watched that stop and then I watched his body start to tighten

Daniel:

and then I watched it relax and I watched it, you know, the whole process,

Daniel:

like getting to be there with it.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And that was such a gift because something I've noted over the

Daniel:

years is that very few humans watch anyone come into the world and watch

Daniel:

anyone go out of the world mm-hmm.

Daniel:

that's like reserved for this medical priesthood almost, who

Daniel:

get to watch the whole process.

Daniel:

And so in addition to that, we've been taken off our time and we've

Daniel:

been taken off our diet and we've been taken out of our natural environment.

Daniel:

All those kind of things.

Daniel:

The sacredness of life is less obvious when you ne you don't see

Daniel:

the miracle in the beginning and you don't see the miracle at the end.

Daniel:

And so, um, typically if someone sees someone born, it's their

Daniel:

own kids only, and then people don't talk about it that much.

Daniel:

You know, it's sort of like this kind of, it's almost taboo.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, I don.

Daniel:

It's a little taboo.

Daniel:

And then most people aren't present with someone when they die.

Daniel:

And so something, some kind of gateway opens when you come out and some kind of

Daniel:

gateway closes behind you on your way out.

Daniel:

And, uh, it's weird to me that we have dissociated so completely from it,

Daniel:

like you said about the, about meat and farming, uh, that out to someone else to

Daniel:

do the killing for us, like we've paid someone else so we don't have to see it.

Daniel:

Well, similarly we're doing that same thing with birth and death,

Daniel:

and so you have a gen I feel, so I actually feel really naive.

Daniel:

I just found out the other day, like I didn't understand the degree to which Gen

Daniel:

Z kids are using pharmaceutical drugs.

Daniel:

Like especially with things like Xanax and things like that.

Daniel:

I didn't, didn't understand that.

Daniel:

Or the level of anxiety and the way kids are using sort of designer drugs

Daniel:

now instead of maybe some of the more like, kind of more fun drugs that we

Daniel:

grew up around and, and, um, . Yeah.

Daniel:

It, it sounds really horrifying to me honestly.

Daniel:

Like all, all this anxiety that they feel, but it's like, okay, you,

Daniel:

you don't believe life is sacred.

Daniel:

You don't see it start, you don't see it end.

Daniel:

You have no connection to the natural world.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, you have no connection to real time.

Daniel:

You're told that there is no meaning to life.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

That all that exists is science.

Daniel:

Um, It's so bleak.

Daniel:

Oh, and by the way, uh, it's getting warmer out.

Daniel:

So we're all dead in 10 years.

Kate:

And it's your fault also, by the way.

Kate:

Yeah,

Daniel:

yeah, yeah.

Daniel:

The way it's like, definitely your fault.

Daniel:

It's definitely your fault.

Daniel:

It's your fault.

Daniel:

Sorry.

Daniel:

We pushed you all into this consumer model now it's your fault.

Daniel:

Um, yeah.

Daniel:

It, it's, it's pretty bleak, you know, uh, it's sad to me the

Daniel:

level of anxiety that they have.

Daniel:

So, um, while it doesn't sound like a fun time to go watch someone die, or

Daniel:

it doesn't sound like a fun time to go process five goats, I'm not saying that

Daniel:

stuff is fun, but I'm saying that it will create psychological, emotional health

Daniel:

in a way that very few other things can.

Daniel:

I mean, it's kind of like an equivalent, I think, to just drive

Daniel:

home how a big the deal this is.

Daniel:

Imagine if, and it's not hard to imagine this actually 20 years out from now,

Daniel:

imagine that all reproduction happens.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

You know, outside of the body.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And that it's more of a clinical thing and that it's more of

Daniel:

a, um, a transactional thing.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

and, you know, a like Gatica, the film where it's like, well, let me see your

Daniel:

genome sequence and my genome sequence.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

and let's see how, and you know, imagine if sexuality went to,

Daniel:

because we're already seeing where it's like it's getting, it's not

Daniel:

like when I grew up, this was this.

Daniel:

Consensual thing that people did.

Daniel:

But today it's like, well, you know, like consent form type Oh yeah.

Daniel:

Thing.

Kate:

Oh, I mean, a whole different level of,

Daniel:

a whole different level.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

So imagine that and, and a lot more fear around Yes.

Daniel:

It, and what can go wrong and what you can be accused of and how you, you know.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

So, okay, so imagine 20 years out insidious, 50 years out where,

Daniel:

and, and note two, the reduction in reproductive capability.

Daniel:

You know, I come from a grandmother, 1%

Kate:

per year, testosterone since 1960 with 50% drop in.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

I mean, I have Shauna Swan's book sitting on my bookshelf, right?

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

50% drop in sperm counts, you know, and, and that's just

Daniel:

looking at men.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And that's just looking at men and then women having previously been

Daniel:

birthing tremendous numbers of children.

Daniel:

The, the stories that I hear of women who had 25 kids where you're like, I,

Daniel:

it, it's astonishing that the hu the female form can handle such things.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

Because it doesn't seem physiologically possible.

Daniel:

But my mom was one of nine kids at that time.

Daniel:

Nine was like a downgrade from what had been happening.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And then my mom had three kids and I have no kids.

Daniel:

And so you can see the trend line again, where we're headed.

Daniel:

So we, from where we're sitting, could understand what would be lost,

Daniel:

how crucial the thing that would be lost if, if all of that reproduction

Daniel:

started to become a transactional thing that happened outside the body.

Daniel:

It's really sad to imagine.

Daniel:

Well, similarly that's what we've done ar around our experience of life and death

Daniel:

and, and removing ourselves from it.

Daniel:

Obviously the making of babies is a more fun thing than killing,

Daniel:

but like killing is like a pretty essential We are a predator.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

So it's like, is a lion still a lion?

Daniel:

If you, if you always throw at stakes like part of b that's what it's part of.

Daniel:

What it's, that's under my brought up earlier, being in the zoo and living

Daniel:

twice as long is, would the lion, if it could choose, would it, would it live

Daniel:

on the Savannah half as long hunting with a, with a pride or would it choose

Daniel:

a twice as long of a, a life being GED at by passers by and eating, you know,

Daniel:

ground steaks thrown at it or whatever?

Daniel:

I mean, I think it would probably choose the shorter lifespan is my guess.

Daniel:

You in order

Kate:

to do its thing.

Kate:

You said that when you described you were summing up rewild yourself, your

Kate:

previous podcast, a Wild Fed and you said, would a lion rather live free

Kate:

in a, in the wild and die a difficult death or live twice as long in a

Kate:

zoo and be bored every single day?

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

. And so what does it mean to live fully in that?

Kate:

And I think that people like you, maybe people like me are trying to figure

Kate:

out how we sort of bridge some of these gaps because I think to kind of.

Kate:

Begin to wrap it up and, and tie some bows on some things.

Kate:

One of the things that I think you do so beautifully is you bring story into

Kate:

this and one of the things I heard you say is that we have become illiterate

Kate:

to the stories around our food, but I don't think it's just our food, right?

Kate:

Like birth is this part of the human story that is inextricable to what it

Kate:

means to be human and would have been for millennia for a very long time.

Kate:

So much a part of, not daily, but, but frequent life.

Kate:

Death is a part of this story.

Kate:

Uh, the way that we hunt and gather and process our food is a part of this story.

Kate:

And you said something where you talked about story as a nutrient.

Kate:

Well, we are very nutrient deficient in so many different ways when it comes to this.

Kate:

And if we lose in this generational.

Kate:

Turnover.

Kate:

And, and you talked about this with hunting as, as boomers age out of hunting.

Kate:

You know, are millennials picking up that mantle?

Kate:

Uh, not at the same rate.

Kate:

And so what does that do to preserve hunting?

Kate:

And I think there are so many of these life ways, whether it's hunting or death

Kate:

or birth or farming, or the stories of our food that we are losing mm-hmm.

Kate:

as vital nutrition to what it means to be human, whether or not we're

Kate:

living in a farm, the zoo or the wild.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. Yeah.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And I think it's, um, all of us are attracted to different things.

Daniel:

And so we, it's important that we all do our thing cuz it's like,

Daniel:

like farming needs to be preserved, hunting needs to be preserved, like

Daniel:

foraging needs to be, they all do.

Daniel:

And so it's like each person, I think choose your passion

Daniel:

and keep that thing alive.

Daniel:

Cuz we're at this stage I have, I've often related it to the

Daniel:

book, uh, fair Fahrenheit 4 51.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Ray Bradbury or 51.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

So, uh, at the end of that book, of course what, you know, as the books are being

Daniel:

burned, what happens is each revolutionary memorizes one book and that that's their

Daniel:

job is to carry that story because, um, they're, they're all going away.

Daniel:

I was, I remember when the Amazon's e-reader came out

Daniel:

and it was called Kindle.

Daniel:

And I was like, yeah, shitting me Kindle, like to burn, like to burn the books like.

Daniel:

Really?

Daniel:

Is that what we're gonna call it, that though?

Daniel:

You're like gonna call it that?

Daniel:

It's kind of like when Apple's like logo where you're like, yeah, wait,

Daniel:

the Forbidden Fruit, that's your logo.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Like you're actually just going full satanism here.

Daniel:

Like the, not just an apple, but an apple with a bite taken out.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

So we're clearly referencing that La Adam and Eve story.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

This is really demented to me and it's right there, but so it's in

Kate:

front of you, . Yeah.

Kate:

I mean this is, this is, this is some of what we talked about too, right?

Kate:

It's, it's right there.

Kate:

And I think that some of us are witnessing and looking out and

Kate:

being like, and especially over the last three years, but mm-hmm.

Kate:

, this is, they're telling, they're telling you what it is.

Kate:

They're, they're putting a nice clean little label on it.

Kate:

They're giving it a name that creates what it's, it describes what

Kate:

it's doing, what it's meant to do.

Kate:

What do, yeah.

Kate:

And yet,

Daniel:

have you ever seen that thing of, like, there was the old vampire

Daniel:

mythology, like the vampire can't come into your house without your permission.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, that was like old.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

old lore has to get you to invite it in.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

Or there's this idea, you know, in like summoning of demons where it was like,

Daniel:

again, in these mythologies where it, it, it can't, like a devil can't just fool

Daniel:

you, has to tell you what it's doing.

Daniel:

And then we see these kind of, cuz you said like it's emergent,

Daniel:

there's emergent properties.

Daniel:

It's like, um, whether this stuff is.

Daniel:

What it looks like or whether it looks like that.

Daniel:

Cuz these are archetypical patterns and, and deepen our

Daniel:

psychology that then are born out.

Daniel:

So somebody has to be the Darth Vader, somebody has to be the Hitler

Daniel:

because we summon this through these, um, emergent properties of

Daniel:

a, of archetype that are within us.

Daniel:

But, but regardless, these myths point to things that are immortal

Daniel:

in a way, uh, ideas that don't die.

Daniel:

Like the idea that evil has to first tell you, it can't just

Daniel:

trick you, uh, it tells you.

Daniel:

And so you look in the agendas in your face all the time and it's,

Daniel:

it's being explained and then you look and you're like, why does

Daniel:

everybody on board with this?

Daniel:

But then, but then we use it all too.

Daniel:

So it's a, it's, I don't know, we invite 'em in too, you know, because we've,

Daniel:

this is a Mac that I'm on, by the way.

Kate:

Yeah, me too too.

Kate:

Not above it.

Kate:

Me too.

Kate:

Not above it.

Kate:

. Uh, yeah.

Kate:

And I think you get trapped.

Kate:

I mean, to go back to that, that Daniel coin quote, right?

Kate:

Like, you get, you get trapped in this feedback loop where there yeah.

Kate:

It is almost impossible to escape captivity as you keep perpetuating.

Kate:

Captivity and Right.

Kate:

I mean, and that is a cycle, right?

Kate:

And to look at that as a cycle or to look at the fourth turning, which

Kate:

is just these cycles that we go through generationally in a mm-hmm.

Kate:

macro sense and, and so mm-hmm.

Kate:

, I mean it, at regard we are living within a cycle.

Kate:

Uh, it's just not necessarily one we, we

Daniel:

want to be in.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

I mean, if I had to guess like where we are in this too, we're in this moment.

Daniel:

This has happened a lot.

Daniel:

This happened in Egypt and this happened in, you know, south America when it

Daniel:

happened in Mexico, where, where you get to a point in civilization that

Daniel:

you're so advanced and there's a class distinction between the elites and the

Daniel:

people who are doing the day-to-day work and the people doing the day-to-day

Daniel:

work can see signs all around them that things are not stable anymore.

Daniel:

But the elites are seeing the growth of their technologies and the advancement

Daniel:

of their plans so rapidly that they lose touch with what's happening in

Daniel:

the base and they look around them and everything is gilded and beautiful.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

cuz they've created that environment around themselves.

Daniel:

So they think, yes, not only can it go on forever, but it's

Daniel:

gonna continue to progress.

Daniel:

And then the whole thing destabilizes and there's like a collapse that happens.

Daniel:

And so this is why there's no longer the Egyptian culture here, and this

Daniel:

is why the Greeks are gone and the Romans are gone, and the Mesopotamians

Daniel:

are gone, and the Babylonians are gone, and the Inca are gone.

Daniel:

And the, well, it's actually not why the Inca are gone, but

Daniel:

that's why the Maya are gone.

Daniel:

So, um, so this , this stuff, uh, has happened a lot.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And we're in this moment where it's pretty obvious to me looking around

Daniel:

that we're in a really, we're in a pretty tight spot right now because, um,

Daniel:

there's no longer new lands to conquer.

Daniel:

There's nowhere else to go.

Daniel:

There's no more space, there's no more there, there's very finite resources.

Daniel:

I understand.

Daniel:

Like, so technology can always produce new, um, unforeseen solutions.

Daniel:

And so, you know, when we were running out of whales to turn into the,

Daniel:

basically to fuel the industrial Revolut is whale fat that lit the cities.

Daniel:

It was whale fat that lubricated the machines.

Daniel:

And, and we thought there was a panic where running a, you know,

Daniel:

peak whale oil happened and there was like real panic about that because

Daniel:

no one could have imagined petroleum.

Daniel:

And now we're like, oh my God, the petroleum, like, and you know

Daniel:

what, what's, you know, we're, we can't see yet what's coming,

Daniel:

but these fixes are temporary.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

And we're, we're seem to be running out of them . And um, in particular, I think.

Daniel:

The elites have missed the boat, really, especially is on the food piece

Daniel:

because, uh, those of us who really understand what food is, know that

Daniel:

this game can't be played forever.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Um, you know, we have to regenerate the landscape.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

At some point we can't live off of empty calories forever.

Daniel:

We can't live off of an, you know, there's a, at my farmer's market,

Daniel:

there's a, um, there's a company there selling stuff where, uh, the o organic

Daniel:

farmer I work with has always like, dude, look at the size of that zucchini.

Daniel:

It's not organic.

Daniel:

You know, like, like they got stuff in there that's too

Daniel:

big, too plump, too perfect.

Daniel:

You know, they're cheating.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, you know, it's just, that's not how big those vegetables are.

Daniel:

Like that's not what those things really are.

Daniel:

And I look at her, who I know is like hardcore, the real

Daniel:

deal, organic and her produce.

Daniel:

If you didn't know, you'd walk in, you'd be like, well, that stuff's crap.

Daniel:

I'm gonna buy this over here.

Daniel:

It looks so much better.

Daniel:

And I think that that's confused people.

Daniel:

Like, it seems like this can go on forever, but I, I

Daniel:

don't believe that it can.

Daniel:

And so I think we're at a real dire moment.

Daniel:

And, um, that's why in the style of, of Fahrenheit 4 51, I think everybody

Daniel:

needs to memorize the story, not actual story, but like a, a skill, um,

Daniel:

something that harkens back to the past.

Daniel:

Because at some point we might need to like throw those things back on

Daniel:

the table and it would be a real shame if no one knew how to do it anymore.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Um, we're pretty innovative, but, uh, it would be good to have, like,

Daniel:

the more that we have going into the next, whatever's at the end of this,

Daniel:

this is gonna be a rough decade.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

You know, it's just gonna be a rough decade.

Daniel:

And it's amazing.

Daniel:

By the way, har, you know, harkening back to the fourth turning that they

Daniel:

knew that in the nineties when they wrote that book, just by observation of cycles.

Daniel:

Like they pre they did a pretty damn good job of summing up

Daniel:

what this was gonna be like.

Daniel:

Um, and you might not have known it until about 2016 when all of a sudden.

Daniel:

, everything just went crazy.

Daniel:

It just has gone completely mad.

Daniel:

And, and I've been thinking a lot lately about the trauma of the Covid

Daniel:

19 in experience, and particularly the lockdown experiences and

Daniel:

the shutdowns and all of that.

Daniel:

Like this was a massive trauma to our civilization.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

This kind of thing to be nationwide, where every human who has access

Daniel:

to the technosphere was part of it.

Daniel:

You know, I know there are some, you know, there's indigenous tribes,

Daniel:

maybe deep in the jungle who weren't affected, but for most of us were,

Daniel:

went through this thing together.

Daniel:

Um, and it's so unprecedented and, and the way we are right now, it's

Daniel:

almost like somebody who's, let's say, let's say a person who, who's

Daniel:

going living a normal life and then one day they're sexually assaulted

Daniel:

and maybe something horrible like a rape or like a forcible rape mm-hmm.

Daniel:

And then after the next day, it's kind of like, okay, well I'm

Daniel:

just gonna get on with my life.

Daniel:

And they don't maybe have therapy.

Daniel:

They don't have a support system, they don't have, you know, I've known people

Daniel:

who've had this kind of experience and then they just go on with life.

Daniel:

Except that life becomes very dysfunctional because the trauma is so

Daniel:

severe and so horrifying and violating.

Daniel:

And they, they're, they feel so alone and unsupported that they,

Daniel:

and I feel like we're kind of in a place like that where we've just

Daniel:

come through this horrifying trauma.

Daniel:

Now we're finding out that what we were told it was and what

Daniel:

it was, don't line up at all.

Daniel:

Um, that the cure is worse than the disease in many cases.

Daniel:

We're just like, oh, go on with life.

Daniel:

Okay.

Daniel:

Like back at it, you know?

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Uh, and we haven't even reckoned with that.

Daniel:

It's a, and there's, that's just one example.

Daniel:

It's a collective

Kate:

freeze response, right?

Kate:

Like, I mean, if you think about what a trauma does to an individual

Kate:

nervous system and, and the ways that that can present, how is

Kate:

this presenting collectively?

Kate:

Because what I see is a, a frozenness that is mm-hmm.

Kate:

. I, I mean, some people are unwilling to change their minds.

Kate:

Other people are unwilling to talk about it.

Kate:

We're pretending it never happened.

Kate:

Uh, all of all of these different responses are just kind of frozen.

Kate:

And I think that, well, I mean, what's wild is the fourth turning

Kate:

talks about 2020 being mm-hmm.

Kate:

that space and Yeah.

Kate:

And talks about one of the options being a sort of a, a, a

Kate:

disease, a pandemic that mm-hmm.

Kate:

That sweeps

Daniel:

the globe and Yeah.

Daniel:

And then we come out of that, we come out of that sort of hibernation

Daniel:

moment to a very different world.

Daniel:

That's the other thing that's really interesting is many agendas

Daniel:

were implemented during that time.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

And now we come out and the whole landscape is different, politically

Daniel:

different, socially different, yes.

Daniel:

Economically different.

Daniel:

Yes.

Daniel:

It's all in just like radical moment of change that, that, that

Daniel:

was seized upon and used to, to implement a whole bunch of things and.

Daniel:

Man, are we just passive in it?

Daniel:

You know, because everybody's, what do you say?

Daniel:

What can you do?

Daniel:

The, the consequences are so high, you know?

Daniel:

Yeah.

Kate:

I mean, there, there were many things I didn't say that I

Kate:

didn't, you know, many things I didn't do, um, despite consequences.

Kate:

But that being said, you know, and I think what you're saying is there is

Kate:

this sort of sweeping, taking away of agency, however, the building of

Kate:

skills, the transmission of skills to further generations mm-hmm.

Kate:

the, the inoculating yourself.

Kate:

Right.

Kate:

This is the word that you use when you talk about the metaverse.

Kate:

Like this is, this is how we inoculate ourselves.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

is these skills, these stories, the meaning that we imbue our food with as

Kate:

we, as we interact with it, I think has the power to give us agency back that has

Kate:

been taken from us and to give us autonomy and sovereignty and ownership over this

Kate:

piece of us that is very human, which is, yeah, to eat, to die, to be born to kill.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

to be a predator.

Daniel:

Yep.

Daniel:

Yeah, like staying human is probably the greatest skill right now.

Daniel:

It's like just staying human, um, because there's a real pull towards transhumanism

Daniel:

and, and ultimately it's, it's an and and it's attractive in a lot of ways too.

Daniel:

That's the thing is it's attractive and it's also, it's

Daniel:

like, well, they have a car.

Daniel:

I need a car.

Daniel:

Okay, they have a Rolex.

Daniel:

I need a Rolex.

Daniel:

Like, oh, they, they have a, you know, a Louis Vuitton, I need a Louis Vuitton.

Daniel:

It's like that kind of thing.

Daniel:

Like that's how it's gonna pull at us.

Daniel:

It's gonna be very competitive to get into the metaverse.

Daniel:

It's gonna be very, it's not gonna be, oh, they're gonna make you do it.

Daniel:

It's gonna be clambering to get in there because you don't wanna lose your spot.

Daniel:

And, and I think that, like you said, these things are antidotes, they're

Daniel:

inoculations against some of that.

Daniel:

Like, when you have these skills, you start to be like, I don't even want that.

Daniel:

I don't care about that.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

Um, and so, yeah, I don't know how it will bifurcate, but I know

Daniel:

that deep inside I feel committed to staying human and to, and to

Daniel:

maintaining skills into being useful.

Daniel:

And, um, hopefully we pass through this more easily than, than the

Daniel:

apocalyptic amongst us sort of imagined.

Daniel:

But, but I say now's a good time to be kind

Kate:

of ready for anything.

Kate:

I agree.

Kate:

And I think that you are doing such a beautiful job and as you know,

Kate:

I'm looking at the time and I don't wanna, I don't wanna hit your,

Kate:

your heart out, but, um, thanks.

Kate:

I look at what you have built and the stories that you are telling.

Kate:

And I think that the TV show is a really beautiful space for this to,

Kate:

to invoke people's curiosity about.

Kate:

Mm-hmm.

Kate:

story and about hunting and gathering, but also about cooking and community.

Kate:

And I, I had a whole piece on that, but I think that's important too, right?

Kate:

And you kind of traverse that in such a beautiful way and then have done so much

Kate:

deep storytelling with, with both podcasts and I'm sure more is, is coming in the

Daniel:

future.

Daniel:

Thanks for saying that.

Daniel:

I, I've never actually really thought of it as storytelling, but I, I appreciate

Daniel:

how you, you framing it that way.

Daniel:

It is.

Daniel:

Um, cuz uh, I guess it is, but uh, yeah, the TV show is a awesome

Daniel:

opportunity for me to entice a young generation into nature a little bit.

Daniel:

So I'm just trying to do a bit of a Pied Piper act and Yeah.

Daniel:

And draw people into something that maybe looked redneck to them before.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

And because I'm not, I'm not one of those, I'm, because I don't fit that mold.

Daniel:

Um, it's like, oh, that, that, maybe that's something I'm interested in.

Daniel:

And, and as you.

Daniel:

, this isn't like a thing you overnight do.

Daniel:

It's like you, you get interested in a little thing and before you know it, you

Daniel:

find yourself owning a farm or something.

Daniel:

Right.

Daniel:

So, and like you just, you just get drawn deeper and deeper.

Daniel:

So I feel like all I gotta do is just like, Dr.

Daniel:

Just get them over to the edge and then once they try something, they,

Daniel:

they all fall in love with it.

Daniel:

And it's far more interesting than anything happening on TikTok, you know?

Daniel:

Well,

Kate:

thank you for telling those stories, because I do think that they

Kate:

provide an inroads for the, the future generations, current generations to

Kate:

find a way and into skills that might give them a bigger sense of peace,

Kate:

bigger sense of their humanity back.

Kate:

Thank you.

Kate:

I really, and I really appreciate that.

Kate:

I mean, yeah.

Kate:

I mean, getting to go back over, I went back to one of my favorite

Kate:

interviews with you, with, of yours, which was with Doug Bach Clarke.

Kate:

As you, as you were talking about whaling, I was just like, because that

Kate:

all the time, favorite really right interviews and is just so beautiful.

Kate:

And I do think that you have told so many fantastic stories

Kate:

and I, I know you're not done.

Kate:

Oh, thank you.

Kate:

Um,

Kate:

, Daniel: thank you.

Kate:

So we, yeah, fantastic interview.

Kate:

This was really fun.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

Um, we have a very comprehensive view of

Kate:

these things.

Kate:

Thank you.

Kate:

Thank you.

Kate:

I appreciate that.

Kate:

Um, I did.

Kate:

Too much prep.

Kate:

And we could have, I mean, I have, I have so much more we could have covered too.

Kate:

Um, and we'll do part two sometime.

Kate:

This was really important to me, so I thank you for doing this.

Kate:

This has been a long journey of listening to you while I fence, while

Kate:

I butcher, while I do these things.

Kate:

. Um,

Daniel:

my absolute pleasure.

Daniel:

Uh,

Kate:

really quick, I'll have all your things in the show

Kate:

notes where people can find you.

Kate:

Um, great.

Kate:

Do you wanna talk about surf rival really quick, because

Kate:

I don't wanna leave that up.

Kate:

Yeah, yeah.

Kate:

I'll real quick.

Kate:

And we've used Sure.

Kate:

Thank you.

Kate:

My husband has used the pine pollen for years.

Kate:

I, you know, we've used the Vitamin D and Eller.

Daniel:

Great.

Daniel:

Yeah.

Daniel:

So I have a nutritional supplement company I've run for

Daniel:

15 years, um, called Surf Rival.

Daniel:

And so we've got a handful of very boutiquey products you won't

Daniel:

find at like a regular health food store, that's for sure.

Daniel:

And, um, those include things like colostrum for immune

Daniel:

systems and, uh, a very special medicinal mushroom preparation.

Daniel:

We do, um, science-based kind of thing that we do with mushrooms that I think,

Daniel:

uh, a lot of companies aren't doing.

Daniel:

Um, your pine pollen, which you mentioned is our testosterone support.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

, we're really excited about the black walnut protein powder.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

. Put out because it's a 100% hand foraged wild protein powder, which

Daniel:

I think is just absolutely unique.

Daniel:

So me too, I'm pretty pumped about that.

Daniel:

And, uh, yeah, so, so my company's surf rival.com and then you mentioned

Daniel:

the TV show, wild Fed, which we're on outdoor channel Monday nights at seven

Daniel:

30, and we're in our, we're premiering up the last episodes of the third

Daniel:

season now, but just getting ready to start shooting the fourth season.

Daniel:

So super pumped to be going into another season of that.

Daniel:

That's

Kate:

very exciting and it's fantastic.

Daniel:

It, it's really great.

Daniel:

Thank you.

Daniel:

Thank you, thank you.

Daniel:

I feel like it's getting a lot better, you know, in the beginning it's a

Daniel:

little bit figuring out how to do it.

Daniel:

Of course, now we we're in a really good rhythm, so I'm pretty,

Daniel:

pretty pumped about this season.

Daniel:

It's just airing now and, uh, very excited for the one we're about to shoot.

Daniel:

But, um, yeah, it's been a real blessing to get, to follow

Daniel:

my passion all these years.

Daniel:

And, um, I have left behind, I guess two, two podcasts now that both

Daniel:

are right around the same amount of episodes, right around 175 episodes each.

Daniel:

So Rewild yourself still, you know, up on, uh, anywhere you get podcasts.

Daniel:

And then also, um, wild Fed now, which we just finished, which is much deeper.

Daniel:

You know, rewild yourself was more of a, a broad view of a lot of the

Daniel:

things we talked about today, which is like human beings as a, I was

Daniel:

exploring human beings as an animal.

Daniel:

Mm-hmm.

Daniel:

and, uh, wild Fed is more of exploring the wild food journey.

Daniel:

And, uh, I am kind of gearing up to go into a straight Daniel Byas podcast,

Daniel:

which will just be me, kind of, without any limitations exploring my interests.

Daniel:

I like that.

Daniel:

I'm very excited about as well.

Daniel:

That too.

Daniel:

Uh, thank you.

Kate:

Yeah.

Kate:

Appreciate that.

Kate:

Well, it was, it was such a pleasure.

Kate:

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Mind,

Kate:

body, and Soil Podcast.

Kate:

If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with

Kate:

your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts.

Kate:

This act of reciprocity helps others find mind, body, and soil.

Kate:

If you're looking for more, you can find us@groundworkcollective.com

Kate:

and at Kate underscore Kavanaugh.

Kate:

That's k a t e underscore K A V A N A U G h on Instagram.

Kate:

I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth Kent of the

Kate:

band, allright Allright for the clips from their beautiful song over the

Kate:

Edge from their album, the Crucible.

Kate:

You can find them at Allright allright on Instagram and

Next Episode All Episodes Previous Episode

Listen for free

Show artwork for Mind, Body, and Soil

About the Podcast

Mind, Body, and Soil
Where the health of land and the health of bodies and communities meet.
Welcome to Mind, Body, and Soil. Join me, Kate Kavanaugh, a farmer, entrepreneur, and holistic nutritionist, as I get curious about human nature, health, and consciousness as viewed through the lens of nature. At its heart, this podcast is about finding the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth. I'm digging into deep and raw conversations with truly impactful guests that are laying the ground work for themselves and many generations to come. We dive into topics around farming, grief, biohacking, regenerative agriculture, spirituality, nutrition, and beyond. Get curious and get ready with new episodes every Tuesday!

About your host

Profile picture for Kate Kavanaugh

Kate Kavanaugh