 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today. Evolutionary insights into modern health. Welcome everybody to today's episode of the Ancestral Health Today podcast. And today we have with us my good friends, Maren Morgan and Jake Merkess. Welcome to the podcast. Hello. Thank you so much, Isabel. Yes, absolutely. So let's start with just getting to know yourself. Getting to know you a little bit better. Tell us in the audience a little bit about yourselves, a little bit of your history, how you came together. And yeah, so everybody else can get to know you as well. Yeah, for sure. Well, maybe you can trade off and stuff as the story goes on. So yeah, so most people will know us or figure out that we're making a project called Death in the Garden, which is a multimedia project that was originally started as a documentary about a wide range of things, but has kind of turned into something much bigger, which is writing podcasts, something that may be episodic and ultimately a documentary. And this project of ours got started a number of years ago. But even before that, you know, as a little bit backstory of who we are for me, I, you know, I just turned 30 this year. So all through my 20s, I was a very kind of sensitive, impassioned young person, very attuned to the world and environmental issues and global health issues. And many of the things that I think activists minded young people are sensitive to. And so early on in my 20s, in order to do a number of things that was environmental and to like address personal health issues, I started experimenting with different diets and that kind of ranged from paleo to keto and then ultimately to vegetarianism and veganism. And I was interested in veganism for, you know, my own health issues. I was having skin problems. I was having digestive problems. I was having a lot of problems that I think a lot of people struggle with. But I was also aware that as I was being told that animal agriculture was a huge problem as far as environmental issues, and it was also an ethical problem. And I watched all of the same kind of vegan documentaries and propaganda and became convinced that not only would veganism be something that I should do for my health, but also it was the best way to live on this planet. And so I began a long plant-based journey and long story short, I ended up living in a vegan community in Australia, living out of a tent in the middle of nowhere where we were planting our own food, we were growing it, we were harvesting, we were cooking it, and kind of living this plant-based ideal. You know, if we were supposed to be a plant-based society, we were really trying to live up to the highest ideals of that kind of vision. And so I did that for quite a long time until my health began to fail. And it became very obvious that the diet was not giving my body what it needed to be healthy. And I was probably 25, 26 at the time. And so it was very obvious as somebody who was supposed to be in the prime of their life biologically that I was not. And so as I began to reintroduce animal foods back in my diet and had this obvious resurgence of health and this very clear communication with my body that I needed to have animal products in my diet to be the fullest me, to be the healthiest me, I began to also look at some of the environmental claims for and against animal foods and plant-based foods, and I began to actually truly look at agriculture and research for myself, you know, what was real and how it all worked rather than what the propaganda was telling me about the evils of animal agriculture. And obviously, you know, I began to find that, yes, factory farming is just as awful as it's purported to be. That is a terrible, terrible thing, but I also began to find that there's other ways to raise animals. There's ancestral ways to raise animals. There's historical ways and regenerative and ecologically friendly ways to raise animals and actually that most ecosystems need animals on the land. And so I began to go through this very big kind of transformation of my own where I began to really, wow, I need to go deeper into this quest of what's real, what's true, what, you know, what do I believe about the world? What is, you know, can I verify things firsthand? How do I be a young person on this planet that needs so desperately for us all to be better for us to have a healthier society? Like, what does that actually look like outside of fantastical ideals of, I think, that quite often come out of the plant-based world? And so, you know, that's kind of a short way of saying that's kind of how death in the garden started for me at least. And I think Merritt has a different version of that story and I'll kind of wrap it up here was that something that the plant-based world really gave me was this denial of death and this idea that my life had now negated my participation in death. And it was something that I really had to grasp with when I began eating animal products again was, oh no, I am now participating in death and that my life requires death and that something dies for me to live. Now, in hindsight, obviously, that was never not true. I think all food requires death, even plant foods. And so for me, that was kind of this deep, personal kind of tension about living in this world that I've had to go out and kind of try to resolve and understand better through the making of our project Death in the Garden. Yeah, well said. Yeah, my version of the story is definitely different, but I think that the conflagration of our two stories together is what has made Death in the Garden really interesting is that we've come from two very different but similar and parallel angles. I met Jake. We met in early 2020 and I think that I was at a pretty serious inflection point in my life. I had just graduated college and I just started working a job at my first job outside of college. And I was moving towards becoming like a psychotherapist. I wanted to go, I wanted to become a therapist, be a counselor, do social work, do something like that. But that was really not actually what I wanted to do. And I think that a lot of young people can resonate with that, that, you know, you sort of get this idea at a certain point in your early 20s where you're like, do I be practical and do the practical thing and do things kind of by the book? Or do I jump off the cliff and see where I land? And I was kind of riding the edge of those two worlds. I wasn't sure where to go. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I had a pretty good idea. Like I wanted to move to Seattle and go to UW and like they had a really great social work program there that was going to cost me like $200,000 in student loan debts. You know, it's like, but this was like the path forward that seemed to make the most sense. But then when I met Jake, it was like something he saw within me this side of myself that I had been in conflict with for a very long time. Throughout my life, I had always been a very, very activist minded person as well. Always very opinionated, passionate. My dad would always tell me that I just, you know, I had propensity to scream at the wind and not really like move forward with things, not really do the things that I felt strongly about. And I would say that that was the case until I was around 18. And, you know, this is sort of something people will disagree with this and agree with this. But I went on a humanitarian trip, which you know, a lot of people would consider volunteerism. And I now that I'm older, I do consider it in more of that light. At the time, it was incredibly impactful for me because it was the first time in my life that I realized that my understanding of the world was so unbelievably limited. And like a lot of young people who had a lot of political ideas and a lot of philosophies about the world. I realized like how narrow my view was and it was so beast in this suburban American perspective. And I had never, never gone out of my comfort zone in a way that I did when I went on my first humanitarian trip, which was to Cambodia. And when I was there, I realized there was something that was activated in me that I wasn't ever able to shake off. And that was this this feeling of wanting to do something for the world, but not knowing what that what that actually looked like and feeling really disturbed by my incapacity and wanting badly to try to try to try to try to just help in some way like this feeling because what what ended up happening was the first day I was there in Cambodia, we were we went to the killing fields, which is where the Khmer Rouge like mass occurred, you know, millions like almost like I think it was like a 30% of the population of Cambodia was killed during the genocide in the 1970s. And something just was activated in me that I just, I was like, something is really, really wrong with not not with humans but there's something wrong with the way that our society is functioning that this kind of thing happens. But more than anything that I had never learned about it, living in America, I had no idea that that genocide even happened and that the US had had a role in it until I was there. And there's a really profound sense of small of smallness that I felt that stuck with me. And then when I came home, I had such culture shock because I was so struck by how few people cared at all about this, this really profound experience I had had, you know, just being in the killing fields and just sobbing and weeping and just feeling so so intensely a part of the world and a part of like history and a part of this, this really confusing civilization that we're And I had no mirrors in my life to reflect that back to me or to even validate it. And so I, I was feeling really this, this strong desire to want to like move, move towards being a person in the world that I could be proud of. And at the same time, I felt so isolated in that, that journey that I was just that conflict with myself. And that's why I went down this more conventional path, even though I think there was a part of me that was pulling towards wanting to do something that's a little bit more out there a little bit more unconventional and odd. And it wasn't until I met Jake that I had I met someone who mirrored that for me and was like, Oh, I see that part of you that wants to do something big and wants to do something special. And I had felt very, very captivated when we met when he was telling me about his journeys through veganism and then just this, this experience of him reading the vegetarian myth and just having this like eyeopening experience of like, Wow, like all of my feelings and discomfort about the way that the world works is validated by other people in the world that you're not this alien. And so for me, it's like, I think that so much of what has motivated me doing this project is wanting to make sure people know that if you feel like something is off, or something is strange or that things aren't adding up and that your world view that's built on from the media and and computers and from machines and isn't based in tangible reality that there's nothing wrong with you for feeling like that's weird and feeling like that there's more to the world and that there's more experiences to be had to be able to understand the actual true complexity of the world. And so I think that those kind of two things together led us on this journey of wanting to explore regenerative agriculture, which it was really incredible because, you know, you read about these types of things like a lot of people read about agriculture but very few people go out and actually try to experience it and see what see what actually happens on the ground. And from there, it was just this. Again, it was this, this feeling that I had when I was 18 years old at the, at the killing fields, this feeling of like smallness of like, Oh my God, like the world is so much more complex than I could have ever, ever imagine and ever since it's just continued to unfold like that again and again and again and again. And that's why our project has evolved it began as this sort of quest to in so many ways like debunk the vegan story. And just at least add a little nuance to it add some complexity to it, explain that things like regenerative agriculture exist, and that death is inherent to life and we can't avoid it. And it from there is a sort of expanded into this thing of like, wow, like, if we're if we're trying to address something like climate change we have to understand that there's so many moving parts and there's this this web of concerns that need to be addressed and understood within like a framework. Otherwise, we're just sort of putting out fires and not really knowing where the fire is starting. You know, where is the volcano at the center of this that's like, that's erupting and just like igniting everything and so that's that's sort of the long winded way of describing my background, I guess. Yeah, that's great guys. And there is so much to unpack there. But I want to start with the dietary perspective right and this is reminding me of a conversation I had last night with my brother law, Adam. He's a vegetarian and he is one of the very few vegetarians that I see doing it and what I would call what on quote the right way. Because it's, you know, I don't want the conversation to be perceived as you're against something, because I know you're well and I know that that's not the position that you're coming from. But this conversation goes in many different directions right and the dietary perspective is one of them. And I find that because we live in such a polarized society nowadays that has really, really eroded the conversation when it comes to diet and human health, right. And we have on one end, people saying that veganism is a solution for everyone and everything, health and ethics and climate change and all of that. And at the other end now we have people saying that everything we've learned about vegetables is a big lie and that, you know, everyone should be a carnivore. And that's where the only real source of nutrition is then, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And not always a fact that truth lies somewhere in the middle, but in this case, there is so much more complexity and so much more nuance to either of those spectrums and where somebody lands in the middle, right. So we have the current state of health of somebody which is highly influenced by our industrialized society. We have individual ancestry. We have access, which is a big, big part of that. We have all of the issues that go into real the ecosystem that somebody's life ends up being. So I wanted you guys to elaborate a little bit more on your perspective on, you know, where you're coming from in terms of that dietary conversation and how meat fits into it, how vegetables fit into it, how the entirety of the agricultural system fits into it. And where can people look at for sources of information? Yeah, this is great. And this is a topic that we could go on forever on because food is infinitely complex and food systems are also infinitely complex and fascinating. And I think what it comes down for for me and where I get passionate about is that in our attempts to address something so scary, such as climate change and the collapse of global ecosystems and the collapse of human health and the burgeoning, the huge diseases that are facing almost all societies around the world. In that attempt, we're getting very top down, almost authoritarian pushes towards a strictly vegan plan based diet. And personally, I have no problem with anybody who wants to be vegetarian or vegan. I think, especially vegetarianism can work for a lot of people health wise. And I think it's also very important to understand that the context of our lives and our societies and where we live actually plays a huge factor in what we eat. And so from either side, if there is some sort of authoritarian, very strict push towards eating in any way that doesn't take in the context of individual and cultural and environmental contexts, then we've gone astray. You know, I think a good example of this is that if you were to take people who live in the far north of Europe, and the people who live close to the equator, and we tell them to eat the same thing, not only health, but ecologically wise, we're going to have very drastic like outcomes. You can't grow mangoes and avocados or most plant foods as some, you know, the farther north you go, that becomes an impossibility. So if we're talking about the environmental impacts of that thing, that becomes intangible, then you can only animal foods can be grown in certain locales. Whereas compared to closer to the equator, plant foods and fruits are grown in abundance naturally very easily, and that's the most ecologically viable thing as well. And I think we have to look at this from a very broad stroke on humanity sometimes where we do have to find generalities that there is no strictly vegan society ever in human history until the modern age of like modern veganism. That doesn't exist. And so that can give us a lot of indications on maybe some steps towards some ideal ish diet towards humanity. And so that's where I come. And I also think that living, you know, we're in suburbia right now. And I think any food that comes into suburbia is an environmental catastrophe. You know, there's nothing around me. None of my food comes anywhere near me. And so I think as well when we begin to, you know, critique others or find out what works for us, like, well, what's your local context? Where is your food coming from? And if you live in a city or if you live in suburbia, all of your food, let alone your water and your clothes and everything is an environmental tax. And most likely a lot of it is going to be processed foods as well. Which is I think anybody on the spectrum, extreme spectrum of what we should eat is going to start agreeing that the hyper industrialized processed foods are nowhere near what we should be eating. You know, if we talk about ancestrally and eating ancestrally and returning to ancestral ideals, I think that is such a good place to start one as individuals like, well, what is my ancestry? Where do I come from? What most likely were my ancestors eating? But in general, what were humans eating? And I think there's a plethora of information and knowledge out there to get a little bit closer. And yeah, I mean, only thing to add to that. I mean, yeah, as you said before, like this is such a complex topic because, you know, one of the things that I think people tend to miss when it becomes this meat versus plant, meat based versus plant based carnivore versus vegan. And like this, this sort of like binary that has developed. What people aren't talking about is the fact that we are everyone around the world is part of a globalized food system. That being said, there are a lot of people like the majority of the people on the on planet Earth are being fed by subsistence farmers locally. But when we consider our context in like North America or Europe or you think of like Australia, like there's there's few there's the westernized world is a globalized food system, more more so than the global south. So when we think about that context, you have to ask yourself, how appropriate is it for us to all be eating the same thing all the time, which is a globalized food, you know, it's like I can I could go outside and get any kind of food that I want. And my body does okay with that. I think a lot of people's bodies do okay with that, right. But when we when we're thinking about like, what is the actual context that we're aiming for right now. If we're aiming to have a more ecologically sustainable food system, then a globalized food system doesn't actually make sense, because it shouldn't be the case that I can get whatever kind of food I want any time of year, and just drive down to the Walmart and be able to buy whatever I want, and assume that just because it's a plant, it's sustainable. So that that's one of the problems I think with this this sort of binary that we can get into is because when you think about a globalized food system, what has happened historically is that the landscape had to be rendered legible by the state in order to then be able to produce enough storehouses of food to be able to stop grocery shelves and to be able to have this intricate and really really convoluted system of trade to be able to support this system. And so when you when you're rendering the landscape legible in that way to numbers and quantification, no matter what you are likely degrading the land. And so that's something that we have to consider in our calculus of like what of what we eat and what we find to be the most sustainable food, at least from my point of view. So for me, that's why I like to bring in animals into my diet is because I can I understand that that is like a part of a food system that has historically not been legible to the land to the state. Historically, you know, husbanding animals, the pastoralists were have been one of the most colonized groups of people on planet Earth because they wanted because they had too much freedom to be able to roam through the landscape and be able to create food from what was already existing. That's not the case with agricultural systems as not the case with the globalized food system the globalized food system wants everything in neat tidy rows and everything to be counted. Now, today, of course, with factory farming, the animal food system has become more legible in that sense. I would like to have our society move towards something that's a lot more like pastoralist and that there's a lot more animals on the landscape, and there's a lot less control over the the quantification of the food that we eat and that is so much more based in what are the natural rhythms of the of the world is not natural. I mean, and you know, there's you can end debate endlessly about what is natural and what is it natural and then people will always disagree about about that question. But to me, you know, it's like I do consider I do think we should consider, you know, does it make sense for me to be able to buy food from Chile right now? Does it make sense for me to be able to buy? Does it make sense to have a salmon that's farmed, that's farmed in Scotland, sent to China to be filleted and then sent back to be fold sold to the British people. Does that make sense? Is that natural? To me, I don't think so. I think that the more that we can have our food part of like closed systems. I think that we will also a health will come from that as well as Jake was saying, if you live near the equator, you're surrounded by food like there's there's food everywhere and there's also food everywhere, everywhere we live. It's the way that we have constructed our society and our civilization has made made locations that are civilizations, cities, suburbs, whatever towns, and then there's nature. And then there's the farmland right like we have everything bifurcated in this way. And it is inherently going to leave to lead to environmental degradation but it's also going to lead to a disconnection between us and the food that we eat. And it leaves all of these steps where then we have this industrialized food system coming in where you don't know you have no idea how many things how many steps are between you and the landscape that that food came from especially if it's a process food that has 100 different ingredients. And so there's there's there's there's a tension between the distance in my mind. When when we have this conversation, I think it should be so much more about like how close am I to the food that I that I eat, and how close is that to the land that I live on. I think that that's a really important question to ask, whether you're vegan or your carnivore, like that doesn't really matter to me. It more matters to me as if we're if we're thinking on that level, rather than this idea that of the sort of fictional idea that humans aren't omnivores, and that there is this like one diet that we can use like optimize our health. I don't I don't think that that's true. I haven't found that to be true. I think that humans are omnivores, and that we eat a variety of things. And that's how we that's how we adapted. That's how we became what we are. That's, you know, we were these apes who just were scavenging and, you know, being opportunistic. And so I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. I don't think that we need to find some sort of ideal diet to satisfy some some idea that goes against I think what humans really are, which is that we have historically just been really, really good at leveraging the nutrients in our landscape to be able to support our lives. And the industrial and globalized food system has really severed us from those that reality. And I think that's why we have a lot of the health consequences we have today to Yeah, I fully agree with that from a health environmental and probably every perspective that you can feed into that. But that also adds another layer of complexity. And it's the fact that we do live in within the industrialized food system and industrialized societies that drive pretty much everything that we do. So one of the things that I really struggled with is at the core, I know an advice that eating as local as possible is the best solution, right, for everybody, whatever your landscape is, but the complexity that that adds into it is accessibility and cost. Because as of right now, the way our system is being able to do that is a very privileged position. And it affords, you know, people who can do it, the luxury of, you know, perhaps being able to enjoy better health and being able to, I don't know, put ourselves on the back saying that, you know, we're supporting the local food systems, etc, etc. But there's a lot of people who cannot afford to do that, that, you know, they are working minimum wage, they're supporting a family that they don't even have the time of the day to do the research that's required to even know where to go and buy their food. So that is a big struggle for me. And I don't know what your opinion is and, you know, moving the needle forward and bringing change. Yeah, yeah. Well, first, I would just say that a lot of that is by design, like a lot of the way that our food system is structured, it is to create that distance and make the food make a localized food sovereign system, almost impossible and inaccessible to people. There's a reason why you have to pay the state all of this money to go hunting or to go fishing. There's a reason why, you know, sometimes there are laws around if you can have a community garden here or why you can't do this and this and this. Then also on top of that you add like the subsidy system which highly highly prioritizes the industrial food system and so there are there's there's plenty of money at like in circulation to be able to afford us to have this like localized food sovereign sustainable food system. It's just not being allocated that way because that's not the way that the power dynamics work. And so I that's that's where I personally feel like, you know, if you have the ability to to access health and through local food local good food, absolutely do that. But I think that we also do have a responsibility to challenge the food system as it is and to try to create a more just food system because that's just not what we have right now. And so there's there's about there's a fine balance between accepting where you are and not judging yourself for the purchases that you may have to make in order to just like access the health that you need. I think that that's really important is that there's no silver bullet for any of this that anyone individual can do, but we can all work together. If we recognize that so many of the problems with the food system have to do with the way that the money in the power is allocated and the how it's, it's a tale as old as time, you know, control the food control the people. And there is an element in this of like fundamental freedoms and freedoms that have been stripped from us through this industrial system that is really not only like 100 years old 100 years ago people didn't have these problems. And so I personally think that there are ways for us to sort of move the needle and move move back towards that that sort of society but it's going to take a really really long time and it's going to take a lot of energy and effort. And it's going to take, it's going to take legal willpower. It's going to take people like getting fed up with, you know, it's going to take a lot of farmers, recognizing that we have to figure out how to work together in order to like make food that good food accessible for people. We have to figure out how to influence the farm bill, because if there were subsidized subsidies going to farm like sustainable farming and help helping that food become accessible to the people. We could solve this problem so fast. But there's a lot of political and geopolitical agendas that go into all of this that make that really really hard. And so what I would say to people is, you know, do do the best that you can to maintain your health but have this context in mind have this awareness in mind. Anything you'd like to say. Yeah, well, and I think what you're pointing out here is about this conflict between access and privilege, which is very real. I think is why our project in the garden and a lot of our work and research expanded into new territory because we realized we couldn't just talk about this ideal regenerative agricultural society that I would love to see in the world. I think it led us to wonder, well, why, why has it always been this way has access to food and health always been a privilege for the very few. How did we end up in this situation and how do we get ourselves out of this situation and that's why we are our work has moved towards really ultimately looking at civilization and humans, modern societies through the lens of agriculture and the history of agriculture. And talking about the enclosure movement talking about how it in fact wasn't a novelty and it wasn't a privilege for most humans to or let me rephrase that that most humans have until a very recent time it was a given that the healthiest most nutrient dense foods and environments were given to everybody. That's that's where our bodies in sexually developed was in the most healthy vibrant ecosystems full of the most abundant healthy food. That's just how our ancestors. That's why we went everywhere on the planet is because we went and settled in the most biodiverse lush abundant places on earth. And that's what our bodies still expect our bodies are still expecting that we're going to get the most nutrient dense foods every single day. And I think that's why we're having so many diseases in the modern era is because our bodies are expecting something that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years and up until 10,000 years ago that wasn't the story. And so I think for us to have food justice and for us to solve the environmental crisis and for us to solve the health crisis. We really have to look at these basic fundamental features of civilization which have enclosed all human societies have enclosed all ecosystems and land and access to land. And made it a privilege to have what our bodies are used to having as a basic fundamental right what I believe. I truly believe that every human I don't understand what we've built a society in which it's not a given right that every human just gets the best food every day. And that we have to squabble and fight for even just a few bites of something that our bodies really need. And that's the vision I have is to get back to a place and if we're going to envision and work together and collaborate in a society and a civilization. Well, why isn't that at the basic fundamental level of how we build our societies because we've done it the exact opposite way. And our societies and our food systems has been built upon an exactly inverted pyramid of that idea. And so for me that's where it gets interesting and I think that's where we should all really fight to. And I think that kind of ties into a lot of what people are saying now that a lot of injustice happens on an almost environmental level to begin with. Yeah. And if I might just add as well you know and I think that I think that's why my I fundamentally do disagree with this like industrial vegan plant based worldview is because to me it's just a continuation of that enclosure movement. It's a continuation of this globalized food system. It's a continuation of these these these systems that are the are part of the fundamental problem right like there's there's so many problems that we can talk about. But I when I when I look towards like what could be a solution what what could we look moving forward. I really think that like pastoralism is a really excellent way of moving forward in you know leveraging technology that we have now I mean I think I'm a I'm a big critic of a lot of technology that's that doesn't have you know very good uses but you know we've seen so many people using electric fencing and just being able to do incredible things to the landscape and produce so much food. Using sheep and goats and cows and I just think that like that sort of model. It's not only is a different philosophical model but it's also just an entirely different way of understanding how the food system could function and so to me the vegan the vegan worldview. If I may use scare quotes you know obviously other people are going to have a different worldview when it comes to how they perceive their veganism. But the overarching Bill Gates in kind of idea of pushing the entire world towards plant based industrially produced processed foods. That idea is a very very specific idea that to me is based in this state state control the civilization control this way of maintaining the status quo exactly as it is. Putting a little green bow it's not even green but putting a green bow on it and telling people that everything's okay situation normal no worries were good. My point of view is that there's everything is wrong with the system itself the system itself needs to be reconstructed into something that's more more humane but also just more human is pastoralism is a very very human activity. So is horticulture so is agriculture but this industrial scale machine based agriculture is not it's a different it's a different kind of thing entirely. Yeah, and let's let's talk a little bit about that industrial food system but from the perspective of death. Because again and I want everybody to, you know, look at things from the context that were coming from it's not a pick on veganism, you know, perspective, but that's the conversation only because that has been framed as the solution to, you know, health problems and environmental problems and so forth and so on. And the reason why I say that, you know, my brother-in-law is one of the few people that I know that do he's not a vegan he's a vegetarian that do vegetarianism right is because I know that he is, you know, buy local foods and supporting farmers and cooking from scratch and doing all of this things and not judging all the people for, you know, their dietary choices. But again, it comes from, you know, a great amount of privilege to be able to do that and I'm on the same boat I do a lot of the same things. Now from a vegetarian perspective, I'm an omnivore but also, you know, realize that that axis that I have is very limited to other people. But the conversation around death is another one that gets brought into the ethics of animal agriculture. And I think we need to put the caveat that we all agree that industrial animal farming is horrific and that that system along with the entire system is entirely wrong. But the ideal that you can not kill anything, not kill animals in order to, you know, live and have your food and sustain yourself is just, it just comes from a place of not understanding ecosystems, right? So can we talk a little bit more about that? Absolutely. This is our favorite topic. I love this topic. So the reasons that, you know, I went vegan, I think most people go vegan or plant based or change their diet or become an environmentalist are usually four reasons environmental reasons we want a healthy planet to live on. We want human health. We all want to do things that provide good outcomes for humans. We want animal ethics. I mean, who doesn't love animals who wants to do cruel things to animals. We all want to live in a way that takes we all have pets. So we love our pets and why would we do why would we kill and hurt our pets? Why would we torture animals? We all want to do right by animals. And then there's like the fourth quasi reason why some people would go vegetarian or vegan. It was part of the reason I went is kind of a quasi spiritual connection to some higher vibration. I want to connect to mother nature. All four really good intentions. I mean, if anybody has those intentions for their life and for their actions on this planet, you're my friend. I love you. That said, those are great intentions. And so that's that's the reason I went out into the world trying to be vegetarian and vegan and living in a vegan community and living that vegan lifestyle was for those four intentions. But what I have found on for my own life is that that veganism didn't really address those reasons. It didn't satisfy those things. And we can land here on this death part this not doing any harm to animals. And we have to look at, you know, what I've come to is that fortunately or unfortunately the universe has her own rules. Mother nature operates how she operates and there's no way of escaping that. And so what I found was even though I think what you start growing your own food is even as a vegan, you realize how silly the notion of a death free diet is because the way all ecosystems work is that death is nutrition for everything else that every living thing eats something else to live life eats life. And that is a fundamental law of the universe. Even on a cosmic stale that black holes eat other black holes black holes consume other stars stars eat other stars. And we can go to a very macro level that for a tree to live it needs decomposing deer and animals in feces and that for this the soil to grow the soy that gets turned into vegan products. You need manure which is decomposing organisms and plants and better the soil loves blood the soil loves decomposing flesh. And if you've ever seen roadkill or if you've ever seen an animal that's left in the woods or organs after a hunt. The rest of nature sure is grateful for that decomposing body. And so life eats life and it's this from a human perspective sometimes this horrific cycle of death but it's really a beautiful thing. And it's this continuation of energy that starts as radiation from the sun that gets caught by something green on planet earth that gets turned into sugars that gets digested in a room and that gets pooped out and turned into a grain again. And it's this incredible flow of energy and from the conscious monkey perspective that is humanity it's this horrible existential dread. And when I realized working in vegan gardens watching like wow well we still need to put manure on and wow there's pests so sometimes we keep like the pythons we let the pythons stay in the garden so they eat all the rodents and oh there's too many snails. So I'm not going to kill the snail but I'm going to buy diamacious clay which is very sharp shards of rock that kill all the pests. You still have to participate in death and every time I think Leara Keith says it great in her book Vegetarian Myth and she was you know very very vegan. Every time she turned over a rock she killed a million aunt babies and it's there's no way of living on this planet that doesn't participate in death. I realized when I started gardening that a lot of people didn't realize a lot of gardeners didn't realize that bone meal really meant that. Absolutely absolutely it's bone meal and anybody who gardens or has had struggled growing good crops the moment you put bone meal or fertilizer anything dead on that soil everything comes to life. And so when you recognize that life needs life to live you know for me when I began to accept these hard lessons that I still have a hard time with. I actually became more and more responsible for what I ate and I become more responsible for how I live and every time I see a piece of meat and I eat meat basically every day. I see that as an animal I see that as a living creature that probably had moments of fear and had many experiences that could be akin to what it's like to be a human. I recognize that what it is and every time I buy that or buy that and consume that it makes me more grateful and it makes me more responsible. It makes me want to change my lifestyle and makes me want to consume less of other things and it gets me closer and closer to the land. And it's what has driven us to go out into the world and visit with various cultures all over the world whether that's the Sammy reindeer herders whether that's with regenerative pastoralists all over the world. Spending so much time on land and spending so much time with death that has been the result of me trying to understand how nature works. And if we want to save nature that can be done if we want to save the planet and if we want a healthy ecosystems to live in we have to play by its rules. And we have to live in its own reality that it will never go away. Yeah. And you know I think that there's many ways to sort of angle this you know because I think a lot of people may hear that and still be like but death. Death is the most horrible thing in the world like death is the thing I want to avoid at all costs like death is the worst thing that will befall us all. Well it's permanent. Yeah. And so humans are the only animal who has kind of constructed this idea that we can somehow escape death right. Like there's a reason why there's there's all of these efforts to like upload your consciousness to the cloud and there's been you know even since the time of Francis Bacon there there have been people who have been wanting to you know create the elixir of life and like live forever like humans I think inherently one of the things that makes us unique as as a species is this fear of death. And understandably so you know we have the ability to really foresee it and really understand what that means and that you know it's that it is the end in some capacity. And so I but I think it's important for us to recognize that like one there are worse things in life than death and our civilization has done a really really good job of prioritizing avoiding death over maintaining a good quality of life. And I think that's where like a death denial it becomes very pernicious and it's the same it's the same thing it's the same reason why we can you know cover the entire world in monocultures of plant based foods and call that progress. It's the same sort of idea as you know living lives that aren't full and aren't full aren't full of life be in an attempt to avoid death you know one of the things that I think about a lot is. The way that often death is considered this failure or it's a considered a cruelty. And I don't think that that's always the case I think that it's it's often can feel like that because it feels like the only thing that we have because every day we have some sort of some conscious awareness that one day it's going to be my turn. And whether we're thinking about all the time or not it doesn't really matter I think it still animates what we do and how we live in the world. But I think that one of the things that we realize and one with like Lear Keith's help you know this idea of adult knowledge the idea that like I can't avoid my own death. I obviously I'm going to do the things that I can to try to survive like we all have a survival instinct but at the end of the day something's going to get me. I don't know what it's going to be but something's going to get me. But was we can't avoid it outright it will never be able to avoid it forever. And that the rest of the world doesn't operate under that that pretense. You spend time with animals and you spend time around animals that are that are being killed around each other. You get this sense that they understand this better than we do that it's it's all part of a cycle and that it's not this like cruel evil thing. What's cruel and evil to me is to put animals in a factory and then slaughter them after a life of torture. To me that's that's the thing that we need to think of and we also need to think about how how are we putting our how is our civilization putting us in factories and waiting to send us to hospitals to die. And you know this very lonely dehumanized alienated sort of civilization that we tend to exist in. We need to consider how that is as well but my my priority is quality of life. And when we've gone to these these farms or we go to these pastoralist communities you see animals and people living really really good lives and and like eating the best grass and then they die just like how we all die. And so I think that's that's a that's a thing that we need to accept in our own lives to is that we're going to die also and that we're also part of a cycle. But the way that our civilization is structured is to put a barrier between every step of that process as I said before. You know your your your meat even even as you try to to to recognize that that that came from an animal. It's still wrapped in plastic. You still may have gotten it from a grocery store. It's it's hard. It's a hard thing to conceptualize and you actually have to really put a lot of effort into making that connection of like what is giving me life. And I think the same kind of thing can happen when when we die. You know the way that we may interact with death the way that we may want to have our bodies dealt with after we die. These are all considerations and they all indicate our understanding or our willingness to be a part of a cycle to be a part of a process of life. And recognizing that there are these barriers I think is a really important step in figuring out how to get yourself into an ecology. Because I what one of the sort of I would say like maybe thesis statements of death in the garden is it's like the the best way for us to save the world. If we if we can indeed do that as you said is to become part of ecosystems again because everything about our civilization as I mentioned before the rendering of the landscape to be legible to the state. Every aspect of that is about taking away life and creating something uniform and standardized in its place and putting us in there and having us also live these uniform standardized lives. And so we have to figure out how to break free from that in some capacity. And if I can just add one thing to kind of you know at the end of this all is that you know if we don't it's if we're. If we don't accept death as a reality and we think that any food is going to be more pure from death and evade more death that we're actually likely to cause more death and more harm. I think if we believe that our impossible burgers or our soy whatever or whatever vegan product it is especially if you're in North America please please go find out where your kale goes. Find out where your strawberries and your almonds and your pistachios and whatever kale or whatever vegan product it is. Please figure out where that comes from because I'm telling you entire landscapes were decimated to create industrial amounts of whatever vegan product it is. And when you kill ecosystems it's not just a few lives of an animal. It's millions and millions all the way from the biotic level to the fauna level it's everything has to be destroyed on a landscape year after year after year. There's a lot a lot of death that doesn't even get turned into nutrition for humans when it comes to vegan diets. And I think when we deny that's a reality again we're not responsible. We don't need to be responsible where our food comes from when we're vegans because we're not eating animals. And therefore we allow these huge travesties and this huge destruction to happen because we're not facing the death that's required for us to live. Yeah and there's a veil that happens in there too because if you know what goes on and you know and farms and even in gardens as well. You have pests right they're eating your crops and you don't want them as farmers and you don't want them as gardeners because it's going to damage your end product. So at a garden level you know I can either take a pesticide whether that's synthetic or organic right and decimate that pest. But I'm going to be ultimately consuming that and instead I can bring predators that consume that pest. And then there are other predators that you know consume those predators so that cycle is completely integrated. But the reality is that death is still happening. It is just happening in a way that is ecologically sound and that benefits the entire system. And a lot of people don't realize that farmers will bring in hunters to kill deers that are eating the crops right. And if you do that in an ecologically sound way you're bringing in all of the steps of that food chain within that ecology. And ultimately you're creating a much more sound environment that is going to benefit human health as well without decimating your ecosystem. And I think that the gap in that knowledge is so big that allows us to pretend that we're eating food and that no death was cost in the process. Absolutely. And on top of that too you know the landscape really needs the death too. And so that's you know I think that's one of the things that I would squabble with some not all but like some maybe more conventional regenerative farmers who are less interested in maybe moving towards transforming the USDA system to be more comfortable with having field harvests. Because for me I think it's really really important for the landscape to have that blood to have the guts to have the decaying flesh of animals. And you know and maybe that is also a reason why so much of our food has lacked so many nutrients is because we've really removed the death we've put it into a big slaughterhouse. And those nutrients don't go back into the landscape where they came from. And so there's also a problem there and I think obviously the onus isn't just on farmers it's on everybody. It's on people wanting to move towards a more localized food system. But I personally think that the death on the landscape is really really important and it's also something that I think everybody should make an effort to try to witness. You know it's like like go see that piece of land where that animal died and see it just like erupt with life at every stage of decomposition. Even when the animals come like you know the animal will first die and it's like covered in insects. And you think like oh my God where did all these come from like it's just it's gross but it's like this pulsating of life that's breaking it down making that that animal be able to be useful to these even smaller decomposers and to the plants. But then it's just it's always this incredible eruption. And I think that that's a really profound thing for us to see is that like that's that's the way that nature has like set itself up is that it utilizes all of the parts of us back into the land. And every step of our system has has taken that away and put it somewhere else and disconnected every step. And so the more that we can kind of bring those things back together the better the better our society is going to be the healthier we're going to be. I mean that's my that's my theory like and I hope I can spend my life like practicing that and bringing that in and see in testing that but that's my theory. Yeah, that's that's well said. So let's pivot a little bit towards the environmental aspect and everything is later and integrated but those things tend to be separated as well in the conversations. And we have a lot of blaming animal agriculture for all of the environmental pitfalls. And I know that figures get presented in the way that skew, you know people's understanding of what's really going on. But everything is, you know, connected as well. And people make decisions based on all of this information and the environmental impact that's portrayed is a big one. So if you can speak to that. Yeah, yeah. You know, when it comes to the environmentalism aspect of animal agriculture versus other things, you know, the way I come down to it is that this is something we say a lot is that we're factory farming the world. And I think that factory farming animals and factory farming them in hyper environmentally unsound ways is the symptom of the problem. It's not the problem itself. And I think this is a mistake we our society makes so often is that we, and we talked, we've talked about this with you quite a bit is our symptom focused society when it comes to anything whether that's health. What it implies to environmentalism is that we try to attack the symptom right rather than getting to the actual problem. You know, a lot of people who are against animal products on an environmental level will say, we're cutting down the rainforest, the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the earth so we can all have beef, right? It's like, well, okay, let's get into the nuance of that one most that beef is being sold to Russia and China. So if you're in North America, that's not had nothing to do with you. Besides the point. The point is, is whether it's beef, or it's gold, or it's coal, or it's oil, or it's wood, or it's whatever. We're going to cut down the rainforest because the rainforest represents money. It has nothing to do with beef. Beef just in many cases, the beef is the end product. Actually, first, some company will go into the rainforest and say, well, there's a bunch of balsa wood. Let's cut that during down, turn it into cheap Ikea furniture or windmills or houses or whatever it is because balsa wood is very, you know, as you make a lot of money off of that. And then they find, well, actually, there's like, there's some minerals buried here. So let's, you know, force the local indigenous people to dig up all these mines to sell a bunch of minerals on the economic market. And then once that's tapped, they're like, yeah, let it go to pasture and put the cows there. And then everybody says, oh, we're cutting on the rainforest, the cows. I'm like, no, they're just trying to make money off of this area of land. The problem isn't the cows. The problem is the capitalistic marketplace that incentivizes factory farming the world. We're trying to turn everything into money. The market doesn't want to stop growing. And so that's where I get to. I'm like, I'm glad people are upset about the rainforest being cut down, but it's a little myopic to say it's cows faults. If we all went vegan, they're still going to cut down the rainforest. They're still going to cut it down for money somehow. It's like, you know, so that's where I get to the environmental thing. But I do want to say there are real environmental concerns when it comes to animal husbandry, but it's still, again, it's not the animals fault. It's because we need cheap product for the market, right? We need to grow a bunch of alfalfa. So let's make a monoculture of alfalfa to force feed to cows and feed lots so we can have really cheap, regular beef for fast food restaurants. Because nobody wants to pay a good price for high quality beef. We need to have a million, whatever, burger chains. And so it's never the problem. It's always the symptom of the real problem. If we want to stop destroying the environment through the tool of cow, then we should fix the real problem, which is the economic incentive to do so. Yeah. And, you know, I think that a lot of people also maybe don't understand the history behind like how, how, how did factory farming begin? Like we kind of are just like trying to tackle the problem with factory farming by eliminating it without understanding where it came from. And, you know, one of the critiques of factory farming, which is, which is a true critique is that it does use a considerable amount of grain and land to produce the grain. But I think the question that people sometimes neglect to ask is, but why are we producing that much grain in the first place? And it's a really simple answer. So around World War Two, we started producing incredible stockpiles of food for the war effort. The war ended. And we, we developed this subsidy system to be able to maintain a system of always having more grain than we need. And so we have these surpluses that have led to this, this excess that will just go to waste. So let's use it somehow. Before then cows were just eating grass on pasture and were being rotated with crops and were part of an integrated system. And I'm not sure if you've ever been oriented that that system wasn't always perfect, of course. But what's important to people for people to recognize is that the factory farming system is an artifact of these excess, this, this excess storage of grain. And so then what ended up happening was like this control over the food system. And this is sort of an interesting fact, too. I mean, there's so many ways that you can like, you can look into this, but this is sort of an interesting fact about like my family, actually. Great, great, great grandfather. He was the person who he patented the refrigerated rail car, because he was he was like a meat baron in Illinois. And I like it. There's like this. No, sorry, Indiana. There's a town called Hammond in Hammond, Indiana. And that's where he had his factory. And, you know, Chicago became the meat packing center of the country when the railroad system became came into the fold in the late 1800s. He was a big part of that. His patent ended up needing to be modified and then they ended up fixing it. And so it wasn't that's not the rail car that ended up taking over. But up until that point, people were eating from within their localized landscapes. It wasn't until the railroad system began and then also later on, like a few decades later, this, these surpluses of grain that then allowed for this factory farming system to really develop. Because before it wouldn't have, it didn't make sense. But I mean, they were doing cattle drives from California to Chicago. And now you can just kill them in California and ship them, you know, ship them in the refrigerator rail car. So do you see what I'm saying? Like it's like. Well, yeah. Correct me. But just to make it clear is like the only reason you can feed cows grain is because it's cheap because the government subsidizes it. That's the only way. Otherwise, it's not economically viable. Right. But like the whole, the whole process of the industrialization, that phase of the industrial revolution was to create efficient, cheap systems for all kinds of products, all kinds of commodities. Grain was one of them. And then the railroad system had a really big role in that is all I'm trying to say. And just like how, again, we're like creating this distance and the distance just gets wider and wider and wider and wider and wider. And so from my point of view, I think that's important for us to consider is like how, what, what does that distance do and how does that distance. Like if you're not even aware of the ecosystems that your food come from, regardless of like, whether it's meat or plants, that distance probably means that something nefarious is happening. Well, while you're not looking, the industrial globalized systems thrives on that it thrives on the invisibility of all of this. And so I think that, you know, while it's really true that factory farming is is a evil, cruel practice. And we should figure out how to get rid of it. The way the way that people want to get rid of it is just by like banning it or like outlawing it or we're converting everybody to a plant based diet. I think that we are wasting a lot of potential, a lot of land potential by presuming that we should just convert those those corn fields, the corn and soy fields that are being fed to the livestock in a system that is inherently disruptive. Converting that to human food doesn't resolve the issue of that landscape being destroyed to created commodity. So whether you're, whether you're feeding it to people or you're feeding it to animals, to me that the problem is what we're doing to the landscape. It's not about like the direction of like how the of how the food is getting to me. That's the inherently the problem. And so I just think that people need to consider that there's more than one way of looking at all of this. And there's deeper ways that we can kind of mine this these ideas and mine our own understanding of how these systems work. Because it makes sense when you hear when you hear that cows are destroying the world with their farts and all this stuff and they're producing so much methane right. It makes sense on a like mathematical level like oh if they're producing all the methane then like we need to get rid of them. But if you don't have an understanding of how other ecologies work and other ecosystems work. You might not know that you know actually the biggest source of methane on earth are wetlands and wetlands are like incredibly important ecosystems. And so you know I'm kind of doing this in a little roundabout way but it's like it's more that if we can get a little bit more contextual about these metrics that we want to throw around and we want to like leverage our arguments on. We have to consider how do how does all of this fit into this wider web. Am I making sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even at a smaller scale looking at what you said about the symptoms and just addressing symptoms that is a symptom that has gotten an incredible amount of focus. Lately right but at the expense of ignoring other symptoms that are far more inconvenient like the level of consumerism that we have. Because nobody wants to think about going back to a way of life where you know we weren't able to get anything and everything that we wanted at a moment's notice not only in terms of food but in terms of clothing in terms of. Apparatuses for our houses we can order everything that we can possibly think of at a moment's notice you know and in many cases have it at our homes the next day or even the same day. And the level of extraction that goes into this that is harmful to human health into planetary health is incredibly destructive and incredibly pervasive right now. But looking at everything as a system and looking at it holistically and putting our attention into making an impact that is that goes towards the system itself. It's very cumbersome and it's it's it makes you feel very impotent right. So it's very easy to put the micro scope into that one thing that seems to give you a good bang for your buck. Absolutely. I and you know I have a lot of empathy for for everyone right now because when there's so many converging crises of course you want to find the thing that's going to make everything feel OK make you feel like you have some control or some certainty about at least your actions on Earth. I really understand that and I understand you know vividly what it feels like sometimes when I just need to like numb out and how I participate in these systems too and how how impotent I feel you know and I think that impotent leads to you know more consumerism all more of more of the more of the things that we want to move away from. I think that the powerlessness that we all feel often in the face of these these great trials of this age. It's really easy to want to just turn it off and to just go shopping or just go do something or pretend like you're not part of the problem. And so for me it's like I I wish I wish we were more comfortable as a as a society to admit that we're all part of the problem but that we're also not necessarily all to blame and that there's the blame is so diffuse from my point of view. And most people are trying to eke out a good life and trying to do the best that they can and we're part of systems that incentivize incentivize this distance and incentivize this destruction and those systems are more powerful than us as individuals. So I you know I just I have a lot of empathy for people trying to figure out how to make all of this makes sense and also just like live our lives and be happy and like have friends friendships and like love and you know it's it's really challenging. Yeah, definitely. So let's go back to how does death in the garden as a project fits into all of this and where are you guys going from here. Yeah, so death in the garden explores all these ideas and explores a lot more of these ideas and our own journey through these things because we want to help push back against some of these more myopic films. I'd hate to say vegan films but quite often almost all environmental films are very myopic and only do what we're talking about is address symptoms and so what we want to do is offer up a much deeper richer look at the converging crises of our time. All the way from starting with food and having food and food systems and how we relate to death via crux for the rest of civilization and how civilization is. Part of all these problems that we find and how do we talk about civilization and a civilization that has will have 10 billion people very soon how do we disentangle some of the belief systems some of the assumptions some of this trajectory. So death in the garden is going to be a film and writing and potentially a book and a lot of content it already is you know we put a lot of stuff out in the world and will continue over the next over the coming years. Discuss some of these things and put it in an artistic way that has a different perspective and so you know we've been on a brief hiatus with death in the garden the past few months because we've been having to work on some other things and had family stuff coming up but we're about to revamp a lot of stuff and I don't know if you wanted to say anything else about that. Yeah it's like I you know we don't want to we don't want to make promises but we feel really excited about the direction that we're moving and trying to reinvigorate some passion you know it's like I think that like civilization gets to all of us and you know like financial insecurity causes issues for everybody and it makes it really hard to be creative and makes it really hard to to do things and to get out of that in bit and so right now we're just trying to get to a better place and like have just be able to express these ideas a lot more freely and hopefully more quickly to like we've been wanting. I'm actually no I'm just not going to say anymore. That's exciting things coming. Yeah I'm going to give it too much away but but yeah it's it really is meant to be a reflection of our journey but also an encouragement for other people that if they feel like they want to go on a journey of some kind or just just do something different or just feel they feel trapped or they feel like they're they're they're not they feel alien. They feel alienated from the world. I'm hoping that this this project helps encourage people that they can they can like deep dive into these topics to and they can do their own journey and they can go see the world in their own ways if they have the capacity to. And so you know it really is meant to be inspiring in that sense is particularly to young people because I think that you know it's undeniable that young people have a crisis of meaning. I mean it's like I'm I'm an old Gen Z year like I am the oldest Gen Z you can be. And you know I see in my generation like profound malaise and apathy and I see it in myself and I see the ways that I I struggle to to really have like really step into my purpose for being here. And that's a whole nother podcast talking about like the meaning crises but that's that's our hope is that we that that people people recognize that they they belong here on earth and that they they they have a role to play. We have a role to play in all this like unfolding and you know hopefully we can meet some cool people along the way we already have we met you through the through their project basically and you know it's it's been a really incredible journey. And it'll just get even better and better as we go. Yeah, I agree. How do you recommend that young people get more plugged in and they learn more and explore and ask this questions. I think read and more than reading also go out into the world. I think honestly a good play if you care about the world food is at the core of all of it. You know food is the story of civilization food is the story of ecosystems. And if you are a young person who cares go figure out where your food comes from. Go see it. I'm not even saying change where your food comes from again like you're talking before you know we all are as fortunate enough to have the money or the access to foods. But no matter where you're out in the world go figure out where your food comes even if that means you're in a city like well you know can I see the truck dropping off a bunch of. The product at the local store like figure out how these systems works and you're very quickly figure out how an entire global civilization works. And then you could begin educating yourself on a firsthand felt experience I think more than anything I want people to not educate themselves through social media and all sorts of stuff. I think they could be great but I think firsthand felt experiences of going out to the world to whatever capacity you have. That's real knowledge and that's true experience that can help inform you on how to be in the world. And I think that's a great place for young people to start is that go see as much of your world and try to understand as much of your world of how it actually works. And then come up to your own conclusions come up to your own decisions on what you should be doing with your life. But I think you have to understand the world as it is and yeah. And I think part of that also though is understanding that you're never going to be able to understand everything and that we live in a really really really crazy universe. And like the idea that we're going to figure it all out you know while it's an interesting it's an intriguing goal that can allow us to be students forever which is a good thing. Finding the one answer or the one truth or like all of these things is going to be an impossible task. That doesn't mean though that the journey of learning isn't incredibly important. And you know I think probably what I would say to young people you know I'm thinking specifically people like my age and just a little bit younger maybe people who have gone through college and you know went through the school system. Our American school system and I think a lot of school systems around the around the world have a tendency to really like snuff out our imagination and our curiosity and they tell you what to think and what like rather than how to think. And so I think that you know the onus unfortunately is on us to to to reinvigorate like a passion for learning and and I think experiential learning is also incredibly lacking in most school systems. You know I think that that's changing a lot. I think a lot of people are starting to send their kids to like wilderness schools and stuff like that to have more experience based learning but I know I know for me going through the public school system in America. It was it was a perfect prison for me and really stifled me a lot. And so I've had to go on this journey of like realizing that like I'm smarter than I thought I was I'm smart you know because I can I can learn things still. I'm I there's like these sort of narratives that I think get instilled in people which I think is so wrong is that like you go to college to learn and then once you're done you don't really have much to learn anymore like you did the thing. And and also that you know we start to lose our capacity to learn and that's just like objectively not true like it's just like you can be learning your entire life until the moment that you die. And so I think that's what I would say is like learn like open up your mind to the complexity and consider yourself a student always. Yeah, that's just greatly said any book recommendations and you don't have to limit yourself to just one. Hello. I mean it's I know you have a big step. Let's go with an introductory once maybe. I well I would say you know I think the work of Daniel Quinn is really important. If your goal is to at least start thinking about the world a little bit differently. You know there's a lot of books that I've read since reading Daniel Quinn's work that had I read it then before I might have just like gobbled it up and like believed everything that I read. And now I have a lot better discernment because of reading Daniel Quinn's work. So Ishmael is is obviously the his his one of my favorites. Yeah, his seminal text. I also think anybody who's interested in food and this conversation about vegetarianism veganism and death and how agriculture actually works. The vegetarian myth by Lear Keith I think is probably the only book you really need when it comes to so much of what we're talking about. I think it says everything in a beautiful poetic way and it's a fantastic book. Yeah and you know other things that we've sort of touched on but didn't really deep dive into stuff that I'm really interested in is the the way that our society has been built around like machines and and what does that mean for us. How does that impact our physiology our psychology. How does it impact how we treat each other and treat the world like Lewis Mumford is an incredible resource for that but also Morris Berman has some really excellent books as well. You know I I tend to gravitate recently towards books that were written in the mid the mid 20th century because I find that there is an interesting point. There's an interesting point of view of people who are live during that time and who were witnessing more of the transition but they were able to see that they were able to see like modernity coming. Whereas I think often a lot of environmental books that have come out more recently or books that are trying to discuss civilization. There is a tendency to take civilization as it is for granted and not to question so much like how we got here and why and where are we going. And so that's that's sort of what I gravitate towards. And they're also just written better like people are harder back then. But for modern ones I will add to that civilized to death. I think that we don't tend to think about it because we talk to Chris all the time but you know it's a it's definitely such a great resource as well. Oh absolutely. Civilized to death out of percent. Civilized to open my mind so much to understanding the ways that the enclosure movement has has worked not only on communities but just on society as a whole. You know this idea of being a part of a human zoo that we have like created this enclosure that we don't really like to live in and that we feel trapped in and that that causes us all these like neuroses and problems and stuff. That has been a very very informative idea in my mind. So yeah I'd absolutely recommend that as like a modern text that critiques civilization. Yeah I mean God there there are so many. I'm saying don't even get her started but I'll just add one more. I personally really like Paul Kings North and so does Jay. Oh yes yes his book Confessions of a recovering environmentalist. I think is really beautiful because one of this sort of oh I'm sorry I have another one after this too. But I think one of the things that you'll find if you dive into these topics is that there is like a sort of like a progress oriented group. You can call them Technotopian if you want. And then there's like a more romantic oriented group and the more romantic oriented group are like wanted to have more connection to the land. And I have a real discomfort with the quantification and mechanization of the world. And I would say I lean more in that direction for sure. Obviously there are caveats to both world views and there are there are good things and bad things but I definitely lean more in the like romantic way. And I think Paul Kings North is definitely more in that that realm as well. So if that if that resonates I think that people would really like that. But if you want a little bit more understanding of the difference between those two world views the Wizard and the Prophet is like the best text to try to understand this. And it's written by Charles Seaman. And it's about it's about two different scientists from the early 20th century. One representing this this movement towards this Technotopian rendering the landscape legible turning everything into numbers and and and mechanizing and manipulating nature. And then the other and yeah it's I can't ever pronounce his last name so I'm not even going to try. But the other is is as the more romantic conservative kind of worldview and it shows the the negatives of both but also really kind of presents it in a really neutral way. And it's just a really really valuable text if you want to kind of understand more also the history of agriculture. Norman Borlaug is the Technotopian within this book and he's he's the guy who like he created the Green Revolution. He's the reason he's one of the reasons why our food system our industrial food system is the way that it is. And so if you want to understand the food system kind of have to understand Norman Borlaug one more the alchemy of air that one is really incredible if you want to understand the history of nitrogen fertilizer. I think that's amazing. The wizard and the semen is one that I haven't read but I am going to throw in one more introductory one as the relationship with the ecology and how you interact with the world and that's braiding sweet grass. Yes. So yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. That's the book that you if you want to fall in love with the world again. That's the book to read. Yes. Absolutely. So where can people find you? So people can find us. We're going to try to I think start posting more on Instagram again. We haven't in a really, really long time but we're death in the garden on Instagram death in the garden dot substack dot com is where we have our writings and that's also where we host our podcast. Where are this is we're going to start a YouTube channel. So you'll be able to find us there in the new year. Eventually and then death in the garden dot org and then on any podcast platform just put in death in the garden and you'll see our little cow skull white logo. Yeah. And I think that's I think that's all. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. So excited and Twitter is also or X. Yeah. It's death in the garden as well. It's like death underscore the garden. And then also our production company is archetype media, which if you go to archetype media dot com, you can see our show real as well. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here today and for lending your amazing voices to our audience. I hope that everybody goes out and checks you out. And I know that I have learned so much from you and I hold you and really, really high esteem dear friends and very, very smart. And I know that your heart is just looking to do really great things in this world. So thank you for all that. Well, thank you. And likewise as well, I've learned so much from you too. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on this episode of ancestral health today. We hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes.