The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Andrew Millison: "Geomorphology, Permaculture, and The Good Work"

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

On this episode, permaculture expert and educator Andrew Millison joins us to unpack how we can better design our societal infrastructure and agriculture to be more attuned with the water, solar, and "geomorphic" conditions of our surroundings. When critical resources become scarce, it is more important than ever that communities learn to do more with less. By focusing on resiliency and stability through systems thinking, permaculture is a design system which does just that. In a world that often feels beyond our control, how can we use permaculture design to work with the land rather than against it, and regain agency in our local food, water, and social systems? About Andrew Millison: Andrew Millison is an innovative educator, storyteller and designer. He founded the Permaculture Design education program at Oregon State University (OSU) in 2009. At OSU Andrew serves as an Education Director and Senior Instructor who offers over 25 years of experience, and a playful approach to regenerative design. Andrew is also a documentary videographer who travels the world documenting epic permaculture projects in places such as India, Egypt, Mexico, Cuba, and throughout the US. You can view his videos and series on his YouTube channel. To watch this video episode on Youtube → https://youtu.be/52L4Ncs0jLk For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/64-andrew-millison

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. I have often said that in a materially constrained future, a great simplification, we are going to have a simpler society. And with that, a return to living in a more integrated way with the natural flows of the land. With me today is Oregon State professor Andrew Millison, who is an expert and an educator

in the field of permaculture. permaculture is a design system which focuses on doing just that, working with the land instead of against it. Andrew founded the permaculture design education program at Oregon State University, where he is the education director and senior instructor with over 25 years of experience. Andrew also has a very popular YouTube channel, travels the world documenting epic permaculture projects in places such as India, Egypt, Mexico, Cuba, and throughout the United States, which he shares on his YouTube channel. In a world that often feels out of our control, permaculture design offers a way where we can work with the land and see improvements right before our eyes in food, water, social capital. This podcast is mostly so far talking about the constraints that are leading us in the

destination of a great simplification. But increasingly, I want to have guests on, like Andrew, uh, to talk about responses, especially things you can start doing right now in your own community, wherever you live. Please welcome Andrew Millison. This was a great conversation. Hey, Andrew. Hello, Nate. Great to see you. Good to see you as well. The last time we spoke a couple months ago, you were about to head to another trip to India. How was it? It was unbelievable, I've got to say. It's hard to give a short synapsis, you know, a few words without just being like, incredible, mind-blowing, crazy. But it was, it was really, I'll just say like, I felt my brain shift at some point. And I don't know exactly how, but I don't know exactly how, but I'm

I felt like things change inside my head taking in the amount of incredible information that I was witness to. So I'm really excited to share the trip with everybody. It's going to be, it's going to be 14 episodes. Wow. Yeah. So I want to get into that a little bit with you. I've never been to India, but you and I talked about a mutual friend, Van Dane,

Shiva who is inviting me to go there. and like make a movie on yoga of the earth, which is not yoga, the postures, but yoga is in the daily practices of being in community, working with the soil, regenerating the land and like the holistic experience. And I call, I've never been to India. It boggles my mind that there's five times the population in India as the United States. And in many ways, their practices, are ahead of where we are and where we need to be heading in the future. I assume that's why you're going back there so often. Yeah, I mean, I'm going and I'm focusing on, you know,

these very progressive visionary projects, you know, and India has problems that are multiply, you know, multiplied from what we have as well. So, you know, it's it's a mixed bag. But it is, I believe, this year becoming the most populous country on the planet. And so, you know, my feeling is, you know, there's two things. One thing is if this revolution, the ecological, you know, watershed revolution is going to happen somewhere. It looks to me like it's going to be India.

And if it doesn't happen in India, then it's going to be great tragedy. because of the population, water, climate pressures that they face there. But I see a lot of tipping points being reached there that we can speak more about. Yeah, I'm really interested in that. You are the first guest of 70 that I've had on the show, who's a permaculture expert. So let's just take a real brief background. Can you briefly describe what is permaculture? How did it come to be real briefly?

and how did you get involved in it back in the day? Yeah. So permaculture is a design system. Many people think permaculture is a gardening technique or, you know, a set of techniques, but it's really not a set of techniques. It's really a way of seeing. It's a particular lens and it's a particular design protocol. It's a series of steps that you follow in order to, you know,

originally design landscapes, properties, watersheds, faunersheds, faun. farms, villages, homes, suburbs, urban areas. And then as it evolved, it has sort of expanded into social realms. You know, and a lot of people, some people think that permacultures can be used to design everything. I tend to keep it still as mostly a land design and stewardship system. and it was developed in the late 70s, early 80s in Australia by this guy, Bill Molison, and he was a professor and he did all sorts of things. He was a trapper and a logger and a jack-of-all-trades.

And he had a student, David Holmgren. And so actually, the entire design system, as he explained in his autobiography, it came to him in a flash. It was like a revelation that he had. He saw the whole thing all at once and saw how he had to spread this system around the world. And so, you know, when we look at traditional people, and we look at people that are living in place

without import of resources, right, living within their means, and we look at the different patterns and systems that people have used to support themselves, water, food, energy, medicine, housing, materials, you know, all these different things. You know, permaculture is the system in which we would design sustainable human settlements that take care of all the different needs that people have. You know, and so at this point, we're far enough in.

It's a very established system. People have been testing and improving and figuring out the same. protocol and it's a pretty advanced design science at this stage in the game. So is it designed with a goal of being more sustainable or permanent permaculture? Or what, I mean, why would someone choose that and why was it designed? Yeah. So one thing that Mollison recognized was the destructive nature of conventional agriculture, for starters, right?

and the impermanence of conventional agriculture, logging, destruction of watersheds, destruction of water cycle, erosion of soils, extinction of species, how human sustenance, our sustenance was on a large scale degrading the landscapes. And he said, this is very impermanent. We need a system that actually has a permanence to it. We need a system that supports our,

needs that also improves ecosystems, improves water tables, improves soils, increases biodiversity, increases resources as part of the design of the system. So is permaculture synonymous with regenerative agriculture? Well, not really, because regenerative agriculture is the agriculture aspect. So permaculture began as permanent agriculture, but it really evolved into permanent culture. Right. So regenerative agriculture, you don't look at the like architectural planning of a village, a city, a town. You don't necessarily look at like road orientation, transportation, energy systems. You know, it's really farming where permaculture is the whole system. And the agriculture portion is just one aspect of it. So you have a very popular YouTube channel devoted to permaculture practice. especially water. Is there a growing subculture in the USA aware of the importance of land and systems and permanent agriculture and related skills to our future or is it still a pretty

fringe thing? It's definitely growing. And if it is still a fringe thing, that I would say that those fringe people are finding themselves in positions of influence. I mean, I, you know, partly because I do have a lot of visibility out there. I mean, I am contacted by different people in different fields almost daily, whether it's people that are in universities, people that are working for municipal governments, like venture capitalist billionaires who, you know, have some project that they want design help on.

like the the span of people who are interested in this, at least from who are contacting me, is like, it's really broad. And I'm, you know, I don't want to confuse my own, you know, success with the success of permaculture. I don't know if it's just that my profile's risen so people are contacting me or those people are always around. But at least from where I sit, I am seeing a lot of people a great deal of interest and it's not just the fringe. The same with my work, Andrew.

It seems to me that we're approaching a biophysical phase shift where the cultural stories are about money and technology and efficiency. But Ukraine, Russia, last week, the Silicon Valley Bank, these are like warning shots. across the bow that our system is complex and may be fragile and unsustainable. And I think there is this natural deep human connection to the land and the biogeochemical or, you know, physiological processes of the sun and the rain and the soil. And it just feels kind of like home to us. What do you think about that? Absolutely.

I mean, there is what I would hope would be the natural evolution of our species towards a like a higher thinking organism that actually can live harmoniously with the planet. You know, I would hope that we're getting there. But there's also just the fact that anybody can access this information, that they just have to have a thought about it. and get on the internet and start typing out some words and they will be brought down this rabbit hole that will give them this huge body of information and this whole paradigm really. So, you know, I think there's a lot of different things going on simultaneously. Yeah. So your work and others are

kind of acting as an Overton window to stretch the minds and skills of the scout team of humans that do want to approach that larger, longer term human, sustainable, cultural, evolution. I think that's awesome. So you're known as a water expert, but how did you're starting your education and your practice of permaculture? I think I read that you started in the hot, dry, arid climate of Arizona. How did that affect the way that you approached and understood permaculture? Yeah. So I studied permaculture when I went to Prescott College back in the mid-90s. and Prescott College at the time was probably the only college or university in the United States that had a permaculture class. And the class was held in southern Arizona.

I took my permaculture design course in 1996 with Barbara Rose and Brad Lancaster. And then I took an advance course with Tim Murphy down in the Chiracahu's back in 97. and, you know, in an arid climate, when you learn permaculture, it's all about water. I mean, the patterns of water flow are very, very stark. The landscape is very clear. The atmosphere is clear. You can see the mountains. You can see the watershed.

You can see the patterns. And when you practice water harvesting and permaculture in a dry climate, the ecosystem, the landscape is so responsive. I mean, in an arid climate, things are so responsive to just a little bit of extra water. So it's really easy to see the effects of permaculture in that kind of landscape because it's like the color green on the color brown, you know, and you can watch the green part grow, basically. So. So at various timescales, Liebig's law of the minimum could be financed. and trust right now and in the next decade could be oil, a cheap oil. But in the next century, where humans live, it may be water in many places. I mean, water in the long run is way more

important than oil, yes? Yeah. Well, I mean, it depends where you are for sure. There's a lot of places where we're already there, you know. I mean, look at the, it's interesting when you look at places like, oh, the Gulf states. And, you know, you find out like, oh, wow, there's a whole desalinization grid linking the Gulf states this water grid to supply water to places where there's just is not that water. And, you know, of course, the desalimization is very much dependent on

fossil fuels. It's high energy intensive. I mean, you look at places like India. It's like monsoonal rainfall. I mean, the whole civilization there is dependent on this particular rainfall pattern. And there's lots of places where we can see, you know, the roots of many conflicts between nations, we can see that they start with water. So, I mean, I think, like, I don't think it's in the future. I think it's just in the background. So with climate, and this is going to be a 75 to 90 minute podcast, it could be five hours because I have so many questions for you. But with climate, there's going to be a higher standard deviation of

rainfall as evidenced by this week. There's huge floods in Monterey, California, et cetera. Does permaculture deal with only arid, dry? Like, how do we get more watered? Is it also deal with too much water issues and how to deal with that? Yeah, I mean, permaculture deals with the whole range, basically. Permaculture is a design system. It's a lens. It's like a pair of glasses that you could put on.

And you can basically put those glasses on and you can apply this permaculture perspective to any situation, any climate zone. And so like the permaculture designer's manual is divided into there's the arid chapter, the tropics chapter, and the temperate chapter. I mean, that's kind of a simplification. You might say of the wide variety of climate zones in the world. But yeah, but definitely it's not just dry areas. So it's a design lens. Is permaculture then a one. one size fits all concept, or is there something that needs to be heavily adapted based on the specific land and environment you're working in? Yeah, I mean, permaculture is a site-specific design system, meaning that this lens is a way

that you would look, analyze each individual site and come up with a unique design. So it's kind of like, there's art. There's artistry to it, right? where, I mean, Bill Mollison said, you know, every permaculture is different, you know, and it becomes a unique expression of the landscape and the collaboration between the people on that landscape and the natural forces. So there's like a Bible or a set of design principles globally, but then there's going to be little specific guidebooks that have to be developed locally based on the conditions of that

watershed or area of the planet, yes? Yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, there's the permaculture designers manual and there's a lot of other kind of well-known books, but then there's some really great, very specific books, like the tropical permaculture guide, for instance, that was written by a guy in one of those islands right by Indonesia. I'm blanking on it. So, you know, and then there's specific, a lot of people have written, you know, articles and looking at particular tree varieties in Colorado. And, you know, everywhere you go in the world, you have a different palette of plants.

You have a different dynamics. Even though you might be in an arid climate, things are tweaked a little bit more. So, you know, differently from each other. So, you know, when someone, basically, when someone goes and creates a permaculture system in a particular area, then they become the researcher in that area. They're testing out plants. They're testing out different systems. And they're coming up with the pattern language of appropriate systems for that place. And is there a network that people can learn and share and collaborate globally or regionally on these individual.

designers that you just described? Yeah, I would say that there are just, there are many networks. The permaculture system was set up not as a top-down organization, but more of a mycelial network. So there are independent institutes spread all over the world. And those institutes are usually, you know, the place where both social communication and as well as techniques, skills, workshops, resources are concentrated. And there are different levels of functionality depending on where you are. Is that something that could really be improved to help

knowledge spread and get this, you know, one to two orders of magnitude bigger if there were more resources and strategy and how to share information around the world? Yeah. I mean, there's certainly a lot of people who have focused on that and there's different, there's like the permaculture global, which is a website put together by the permaculture research institute, you know, and then, I mean, my, I have my own networks of my alumni and such. And, you know, there's various different organizations around the world. But the point of not having it as a top down organization in its outset, you know, why Bill Molison basically designed it as a mycelial network, part of that was so it could never get taken down. It could never be destroyed by one

particular hub. So there is no one centralized encompassing network by design because if there was only one centralized encompassing network, then there was one potential point of failure. Wow. So it's one of the original pillars of decentralization, if you will, if you will. Yeah. It's been decentralized from the very get-go by design. And some people say it's actually the largest aid and relief organization on the planet. If you actually took all of the decentralized people that are working for disaster relief, refugee relief, you know, helping people in need around the world, that it would, it would surpass the largest any organization that existed out there.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. So you just got back from India. You said you're making 14 videos for your channel. Those are videos of Indian people working on water and permaculture related issues that you're going to share with U.S. viewership. Yeah.

Well, interestingly, the first series that I did, India's Water Revolution, which I published in 2020, which is seven episodes. I thought I was making it for the U.S. population. But once I put it out there, it actually had as much or more viewership from India itself than from the U.S. So this time, I'm not sure that I'm making this for the U.S. population. I'm making it more for the world population. And the main person that I'm working with doing the editing, I edited the first one completely myself, but is a guy by the name of Ashok Mina, who is Indian, and he's in Jaipur,

and he was actually filming with me on about half of the trip. So I'm really happy, actually, that it's going to be edited in India because it's going to have a much more cultural sensitivity and nuanced understanding in the production. So I'm not sure that it's for the Americans, actually. That's awesome, Andrew. Seriously, I mean, this is a species level moment. And I think we get so insulated looking at the bizarro situation in the United States on so many levels. You know, we forget we're only four and a half percent of the world population.

And there's lots of other countries that are adapting and responding to world challenges. So good on you for doing the global story. So some of those videos, could they be? applicable to U.S. watersheds, or is the situation in India really quite different? Well, you know, on a physical level, it's all very applicable. I mean, the watershed perspective can be applied to anywhere in the world because it's how the landscape is divided and it's the basic management unit with which we need to heal the planet with. I mean, that's how we restore the water cycle. that's how we restore the forest, that's how we restore agriculture, everything is on the watershed level.

But it really became clear to me this time around the advantages that India has and the disadvantages that the United States has in just very basic, base level, legal and infrastructure level structures that, you know, It makes it really challenging to do some of the things here. Could you give an example? Like you mentioned legal? What do you mean? Well, so basically, the average Indian village that I visited, right? So I'll give you, I'll give you an example. I went to one of the most wonderful villages I've ever visited in Maharashtra, a village called Pemgiri, right?

Pemgiri, we were actually, my wife and I were the first foreigners to ever enter Pemgiri. Okay, we were told. And they greeted us absolutely splendidly with dancing and parades. And it was a wonderful experience. And in Pemgiri, they have a banyan tree. It is a huge, huge banion tree. It covers an acre and a half. And they say that they believe that it is the second largest banyan tree in the,

India. So I'm like, wow, I'm like, how old is this village? They're like, well, we don't really know how old this village is. You know, the, the, the best, the closest thing we could tell you is that there were texts that 500 years ago mentioned this banyan tree. They're like, this banyan tree was big enough 500 years ago to be mentioned in some sort of scriptural text. So like, beyond that, we have no idea how old this village is. Now, because these, villages are so old, they are working on the old patterns. And the old pattern, which is the pattern that I am promoting, is that land management is based on the watershed. So these villages, the boundaries of their villages are the ridges, mountain tops, hills that divide drainage basins,

one from the next. And so when you go and you look at all these villages in say rural Maharashtra where I was, but it's pretty much everywhere that I've gone, their commons, their land units, the community is deciding what's happening within their area is a watershed. So when the community decides to fix their watershed, to fix their land,

they are fixing their hydrologic unit. And so the results are like complete in juxtaposition with the, the United States where we have an arbitrary grid of property ownership that's just been superimposed on a non-gritted landscape. So the land management units are very typically arbitrary compared to water flow. So that's like when you talk about legal, that's the legal property boundaries is like a huge advantage that you have when you have an encompassing. When your boundaries encompass a watershed. So our cities and villages and counties, et cetera, were made for political expediency or other reasons.

But you're advocating for some sort of a watershed democracy or something like that where, from an ecological standpoint, the most important thing to our forests and our soil and our sustainability is the water. so we should be making decisions based on the watershed that we reside in, yes? Absolutely. And I don't know. It sounds like maybe you watched my video called America's Big Mistake. I didn't watch the video, but you and I have talked about that before. And the former governor of your state, John Kitsaber, is a friend of mine. And he's talked about we need to redistrict our cities based on watershed.

So talk more about that. What is watershed democracy and geomorphology? Yeah. So, I mean, it's not just our cities. It's our cities, our counties, and our states. So watershed democracy was a concept put forth by John Wesley Powell, the early American explorer, Lake Powell, is named after him. And he actually suggested that we divide up states' boundaries in the arid west based on watershed boundaries. the ridges, the waterways, the hills.

So a state would be a watershed basin. And then the counties within that state would be smaller microbasins. So your political administration corresponded with drainage basins, with watershed administration. And so that's, you know, you said that's basically watershed democracy. And then you asked about geomorphology. You know, that's my favorite word. I always tell my student says, it's geomorphic. I'm like, if there's just one thing I want you to learn in this class,

if you'd never come back and you're just here like the first two days of class, geomorphic conforming to the shape of the land. This is, in my opinion, the fundamental flaw of our civilization is that our political boundaries and our land management units, property boundaries are not conforming to the shape of the land. Because if they did, then decisions we made would have an integrated, holistic landscape scale impact instead of a fragmented or fractured impact. And that's where when you go to India and you see actual political boundaries based on

water bed shed boundaries. And then you see people who have gotten together and fixed their watershed and have very rapid positive results, it's like it, it makes me pine for that system when you actually see it functional. Yeah. So is, are the areas in India based on geomorphology and watershed like the political boundaries of communities and such? Well, the village boundaries, yes.

I mean, for what I've seen, I've seen a lot of them. And this has been this way for a long time, presumably. Because it is the natural, logical way to divide landscape from this is how humans have divided landscape for, you know, millennia. Was there something like that that existed when Native Americans were the only ones on this continent? I'm sure that that was the case in, you know, I mean, you could look at. at Native American land divisions, watershed, language, Ecozone,

you know, there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of different things that, um, you can look at, you know, one difference in India, uh, is that agriculture, settled agriculture existed for a very long time. And so,

uh, these village locations, because of the way the client, it is and all that stuff are not nomadic right you had nomadic peoples there but these locations i'm talking about are not nomadic and so it's a little bit different than prehistoric uh i mean i don't like that word prehistoric you know because that's it's kind of like a uh assuming that like history started when white people started right no keeping track of it right um but you know on this continent, there are certainly places where there's long-term established villages. I spent a lot of time when like the Hopi land and the Rio Grande River Valley, for instance. But there's also like a lot of nomadic people moving around. And so it's a little bit different when you're a settled agricultural society versus nomadic society and the like established like, like,

In India, there's been people on the land doing agriculture for so long that like all the space is filled in. Right. There's not a lot of wild areas at this point. I mean, in the mountains, like really high up where things are so wet or very steep. But pretty much all of the land that can be settled has been settled with old established villages for a very, very long time. And so it was long enough for like the land boundaries and land divisions to become very clear, you know, for a long time. Yeah. So two questions there.

Presumably soil health and soil regeneration and along with it replenishing the water table are our primary objectives there. If everything is full, there's nowhere else to go. So you have to take care of your place. number one and number two, when there's a young child growing up in these places, is it natural generation after generation for that young Indian human to learn about permaculture and, I mean, it may not be called permaculture, but how to take care of the soil and how to do the right practices to have proper water table management, et cetera, whereas a young American child doesn't learn those things.

Yeah. I mean, it's really easy for an Indian child to get the watershed concept because it is

their village boundaries. So there's no, there's not a big leap there. There's not a big learning curve that has to take place, right? And I mean,

that's a real advantage in making the shift. You know, because that, that are exist. And I want to say another thing that is a huge advantage there is the continuity of management, the unbroken continuity. So I told you these villages, they don't even know how old these villages are. These villages, thousands of years old, the people that are living in those villages, their ancestors are the people that have been living there. Like they have no

question that that is their place, that their ancestors have been there for a lot of. long, long time and that their descendants will be there for a long, long time. There's no question about the continuity of landscape management. So when they make a change there, it's a permanent change, right? Where here, well, first off, you know, back to native tribes for a minute. Like, I feel like I didn't give a good answer because I don't totally know how Native American people had landscape divisions, in part because there was a great fracturing. You know, like the sacred hoop was broken, right? Many, there was like a genocide, basically.

And right now, the native tribes that still exist are, you know, they had this deep disruption in their history not too long ago, right? So that's probably one reason why I don't know the knowledge might have been lost. I mean, there's there's lots of places where the knowledge is still there, you know, and I've been to a lot of those places and talked to a lot of people. But I'm just saying in juxtaposition in India, you have these villages. I mean, yes, there's been wars. There's been conquering. There was the British colonialism, right?

But it wasn't like a continental wide disruption genocide, you know, of like everybody there. There's a, there's a real continuity in many areas. No, when you say many areas, like the majority of the land in India, like over 50% is kind of managed and looked at this way or pockets? Well, I would say, I would say more than that. I guess what I'm saying many areas, I'm in my mind, I am separating rural and urban areas. Okay. Because the urban areas have a lot, a lot of people, and they've grown very extensively.

And in many of the urban areas, the old systems have been paved over and polluted. And one of the projects I looked at was actually in Coimbatore. It was a wonderful group that was taking that was in the city of Coimbatore. I think coimitories maybe a couple million people. I have to look real quick. It's not like a mega city. It's a fairly big city compared to America, you know, American cities. But they were identifying the old water system that was put in a thousand years ago by the Chola dynasty.

Right. So the Chola Dynasty, they created this series of check dams and diversions and lakes and created a really, really large-scale water management system that only in fairly recent times went into disrepair, neglect with the industrialization of Coimbatore. So this group I was with, the KKPA, that I'm going to put a video about that was just an absolutely wonderful group of people, they basically were remapping, reestablishing the old Kinbohort. canals, cleaning out these old lakes. And when I say lakes, I mean, like lakes, like 200, 300-acre lakes, right? This is in Tamil Nadu, South India. So they get a lot of rain when they get rain. And in restoring, in locating, it's like archaeology, figuring out,

and reestablishing this old system within this city, they are recharging the water table on a very grand scale and reestablishing water sources for farmers. in the area. So even in the cities, we see this restoration and we see this watershed scale management that's been taking place. But I would say, to answer your question, I would say, and like, you know, I've traveled, I've spent six months of my life traveling in India. So I've only been to, you know, it's a huge country. So I've been to a lot of places and I haven't been to a lot of places at the same time, right? But I would say that when you look at the rural landscape, which is really the vast,

the vast footprint of the country, the rural landscape, is segmented by watershets. So I would say it's pretty like, like you could say, you know, I would have to get actual data to give you some sort of percentage,

but you know, you could safely say that like the overwhelming majority of the country is managed by villages at the watershed. scale. Not to give you too much information, but with my right hand, I'm petting my 13 year old black lab. And every time I stop because I want to write down a question to ask you, she like nudges me and I can't, I can't reach my pen to.

So I'm just going to go off free flow asking you questions because my dog is attacking me. So, so let me ask you this, Andrew. I don't know how much you know about my work, but I, I, I generally. forecast what I refer to as a great simplification where the energy subsidy that has supported our lifestyles and the financial claims above it are going to de-complexify just by physics in the coming decade and we're going to have a more local and regional economy with less energy and throughput. And based on what you're saying, India, relative to the United States,

States is a poor country, material speaking, but they may be way ahead of us and we can learn way more from their practices than they can learn for us on what's ahead in coming decades. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I would say, again, it's hard to compare because there's so many people there that they actually are, they're people rich. I mean, as far as labor goes, most of these really large scale. scale water watershed restoration projects and everything I'm looking at are done by hand. I mean, you see things that are done by hand there that are just not done by hand here.

And we just, we don't have the demographics in this population to be able to do what they've done people-wise, you know, in the kind of low energy system. but they're the advanced the advanced situation there in their capacity for community effort their capacity for community wide cooperation I mean I feel like that's the thing that can really teach the world because like you look you're like wow yeah you had you had like 3,000 people show up to dig these structures. Like, you have to have a pretty harmonious social system to be able to pull off some of the

kind of things that I'm looking at. So that's another thing. I guess I get pessimistic about the United States because I come back here and I'm not saying India is not socially fractured. I mean, there's like, I'm not even to get into it. I mean, people, anybody that follows, you know, knows, knows about the deep, you know, divides and rifts in Indian society. society. But it's not that far back that Mahatma Gandhi was walking the earth and did the salt march and they had the charka and everybody started spitting their own thread. Like it's not that far back that they had really massive, massive communal cooperation to put off the British colonization. So,

You know, there, there are only a couple generations back from like a nationwide, you know, communal effort. So they have that memory. Yeah. There's a cultural memory of that, yes? Cultural memory, exactly. Where like in the U.S., I mean, you know, when we look back, we start talking about the civil war. That's people, right now, people are, you know, when you look at the political discourse, there's a lot of discourse about. you know, like a lot of people are upset that the civil war, you know, turned out the way it did, right?

And so like a lot of the fracturing in our society, you know, like we have that. That's pretty recent in our cultural memory as well, that we were actually literally at war with each other. So, yeah, it's tricky. So let me ask you a really hard question. Jason Bradford is a mutual friend. He and I teased around this. Van Dane Sheva is a mutual friend. And she and I talked about this.

My core thesis is that energy surplus has enabled this moonshot of consumption and population in the world the last couple hundred years because there's a 10 to 14 to one energy input for the whole growing and processing and packaging and delivering and storing our food. And it used to be back in the day, our energy systems were a food's, a calorie source and not a sink. So as fossil fuels decline, a lot of people think that the natural gas fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides and the energy for tractors and all that is going to mean less food for the world. But Jason and Bandana have suggested that, yes, while that may be true, if we substitute, human labor, which you just mentioned there's a lot of in India, for some of these fossil inputs, and we instead look at resiliency instead of efficiency, and we maximize the nutrition per acre

instead of the dollar profits per acre, that the sustainable human population may be a lot higher than people think, with a big asterisk, human population doesn't just eat food. we also do other things like watch TV and fly and whatever. But what are your thoughts on that from a, from a water and soil and permaculture perspective of substituting fossil, mechanized fertilizer agriculture for permaculture practices with more human labor? What are your thoughts on all that? Yeah.

Well, well, first off, I'd like to say, I don't actually know Vandana Shiav. I've met her a couple times, but I wouldn't necessarily, she's like a mutual friend. I think if you told her, if you mentioned my name to her, I don't think she'd know who I was. Okay,

fair enough. But I know, I know of her. I'm actually going to be interviewing her. Great. But that's, that's another story. So maybe she will,

she will become a friend, hopefully. But, um, she's a global treasure, I think. Yeah. I have a lot of respect for her. And I've watched a lot of her stuff and heard her speak a couple times.

Um, so I, I saw firsthand, And the proof that well-done organic agriculture can be more productive than chemical agriculture. And I saw this in India because right now the Pani Foundation, who I did a couple of videos before, they had the Water Cup founded by Bollywood Star, Amir Khan, who's like, you know, he's very, very famous Bollywood Star. and the Pani Foundation had a competition where about 8,000 villages worked on their water problems through watershed restoration

and at least 1,000 of those villages fixed their water problems. Okay, like permanently fixed the hydrology of their watershed so now they have abundant water. So then the Pani Foundation, they had the next iteration of this competition, which is they call it the Farmers' Cup. and the Farmers Cup, which I was just there for the last four days of the competition,

I visited four villages that were participating. Farmers groups in those villages were participating in the Farmers' Cup. And they had the opportunity to talk to over Zoom, and it happened a lot during the pandemic, to educate themselves and talk directly to some of the top experts from universities, natural farming experts in India and in the world one-on-one group to group educating these villagers. And so many of these groups, they had, I don't know how many groups they had competing. They had, I need to find out, many hundreds, maybe thousands of these groups competing.

And they were using what we would call best practices of organic agriculture. there they call them SOPs or standard operating procedures or practices. And so they use these SOPs to the letter from what these experts in organic agriculture, university people were telling them, and widely these pharma groups, widely across these farmer groups who moved from chemical agriculture to organic-based agriculture, you know, bio pesticides, the neem tree, all these different plants that they have are pesticides, caldung fertilizer, furtigation, using good soil conservation practices, cover cropping practices, appropriate irrigation, how much water do you apply, when do you put on irrigation, when do you do

a bug treatment, when do you thin the plants, when do you thin the fruits? And across the board, they slayed chemical agriculture in their productivity levels. And I did not expect this subplot of investigating these farmers groups. The subplot was like, oh my God, well done organic agriculture beats out chemical agriculture like many fold in these cases. And they don't have chemical residues. They have higher prices for their goods. the people are healthy, the water's healthier, the soil is healthy, all this stuff.

So it was very, yeah, it was very convincing it. And I have, I'm going to be sharing that in my video documentation, you know, some of these stories. But a lot more human labor, uh, required like the hours of human labor per X amount of agriculture would be two X, five X. I mean, a lot more than, than we use in the. United States, yes? Yeah, but all of these groups actually ended up having decreased labor costs because they were

extremely efficient. They were heading off problems before they arose. And they also formed cooperatives between farmers. And that was another one of the purpose. So every one of them had, well, no, not just farmers cooperatives. Even when I went and I, when I went with the Isha Foundation, which is Sad Guru's foundation, I went and I went all over and looked at their agroforestry project in the Caverie River Basin, the Covary Calling Project, where they've produced 84 million trees that have been planted in Tamunadu and Karnataka, the southern Indian states. And even single farmers there who were using organic methods and interplanting agriforestry trees,

saw a reduction in labor when they stopped using chemicals and started using integrated organic practices. So I actually think that that runs contrary to what we are told in, you know, Western agriculture. For sure. Yeah. So of the things you learned in India and what you were just mentioning with this this competition what practices uh two part question what practices that you discovered and observed might be transferable right now to places in the united states and what in the intermediate term what sort of things um could make our agriculture more sustainable more resilient healthier and by the way the thing you didn't mention that was implied is it probably improved social capital a lot because people are working together and they're talking to each other

and getting their hands in the soil instead of on their iPhones, etc. Yeah, that was that was huge. And you'll see a lot of that in the videos, you know, the social capital that has been built is very evident in the celebratory nature of the whole thing. So, you know, one thing that was very ubiquitous. I'm going to tell you like general themes because there's lots of specifics, but general themes, bio fertilizers from cow dung and cal urine, you know, was like exceptionally potent fertilizer.

So like, and this is something where, I mean, we have a big problem with factory farms polluting, you know, like nitrate pollution, you know, from excess.

cattle manure and feed lots and all this stuff. Like we could really be connecting the dots between animal animals, animal manures and the need of fertility needs and the answer there would be decentralized cow ownership. Well, then you wouldn't be shipping stuff everywhere. So partly there is there's cows, people, there's small scale animal husbandry that is mixed in all over the rural landscape so nobody is far from a manure source basically. So that's one advantage there. And the,

what's fed to the animals is probably better for the manure than all those giant factory farms. Yeah. And people are doing basically, they're growing crops. Funny, they grow corn there. They grow corn for animal feed. You barely see corn like in a dish, you know, kind of thing. But they're growing animal feed. and then they have animals foraging. You know, so they don't like, like nobody has a weed whacker. Like there's no mowing. There's no weed whacking, right?

There's like the animals are managing the landscape in that sense, you know. The other thing was just incorporation of trees and perennial plants on property boundaries, on margins, like as hedgerows, right? So boundary plantings of trees and other perennial plants has a great effect on retention of soil moisture from blocking the wind, partial shade, all the organic matter material that comes off of a tree incorporates into the soil, the changes in soil underneath trees for water retention. you know, then of course the yields that you get from hedgerow planting. So, I mean, I really saw that like just we, when you have a one-dimensional annual agriculture or crop agriculture landscape, there's so many advantages to adding a three-dimensional element to it tree-based agriculture, at least just on the margins.

There's so many residual positive effects that people seem to have from that. So those are two just like real basic ones that are pretty easy wins. Here's my view. I think people like you are going to be rock stars, movie stars in the coming decade, because these are the skills. This is the knowledge that our country is going to need. In your opinion, you're kind of a scout leader, scout team figuring this stuff, out on your own, you know, this is your passion and this is your vocation and you're a teacher

at Oregon State. What is it going to take for more people in our country, leaders, politicians, civic engagement to wake up and do some of the things that you've been talking about. Are we going to have to hit rock bottom and, oh, my God, there's a crisis or could there be a groundswell of movement in this direction? What do you think? Well, you know, a wonderful thing is happening. It's an unavoidable, unescapable thing. And it's the passage of time that's seeing the baby boomers retiring, you know, opening up positions to the upcoming generations. I'm a big follower of like Peter Zine's demographic models. I don't know if you've seen his work.

The end of the world is just the beginning. But, you know, he just talks about this demographic. graphic shift that's happening. And I'm witnessing this because I love millennials. I love Gen Z people because I'm seeing these young people coming up and finding themselves into into sort of influential positions. This is like really starting to happen now. And they're going, we don't need to do that anymore. Like, okay, let's let's take a rethink at this here. You know? So I mean, I'm I'm very optimistic. I guess I work with young people. at the university.

But now that, you know, I'm almost 50 years old and like a lot of people that I'm working with these days are like in their upper 20s, low 30s, and they have a different mindset. And I'm like real optimistic that we're going to see that the generational shift that is going on, you know, that the baby boomer retirement peak began in the year 2022, you know, according to Peter Zion, right? That when this wave comes, that we're going to see like a lot of transformation of institutions because the old guard is just leaving.

I actually agree with that. And until recently, I was also a college teacher. And what you just said resonates with me. But Oregon State is kind of a unique agricultural learning hub. If you're a young person and you read the tea leaves, about it, the biophysical phase shift, and you want to go to college and learn something that helps your future, there really aren't a lot of universities that are really diving into the level of your work. Is it possible that we will have more holistic undergrad or forget what you call it

17 to 21 year old education of humans for a future that they will face? Is that possible to scale in universities where universities teach permaculture and have a mandatory six months on the university farm or something like that. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, that's certainly growing in different places, you know, and like OSU has some cool stuff going on, the organic growers club run by this guy James Cassidy, really great, you know, programs and that kind of thing. But I think that there's a different trend going on. I call it the university of YouTube, right? And I think that people are out there educating. This is why I'm putting my, this is why I'm like putting it out there. Because people are out there educating themselves independently. You have millions of views on some of your videos. Yeah. I have like almost 25 million views on my channel. I mean, there's, you know, some of this stuff has gotten pretty far. out there and it comes back to me in very interesting places and ways that I hear about

some of the ripple effects of putting this information out there. So I'm, you know, I'm feeling optimistic and that that just like feeds me to do more of it because I'm like like this India series and I'm putting together now, you know, I'm like this, I want this to just rock everything else I've ever done, be a whole other level, you know, let's keep on taking this to the next level. But I think that education, just like social media and YouTube is like surpassing mainstream media, surpassing Hollywood figures. I think that the free education that people can get there is just kind of lapping the pace at which universities move at.

And so, you know, universals have to have to catch up in a sense, you know. And it's kind of funny actually coming for me because I do work at a university and I am, you know, also actively working to transform the university curriculum as well. What do you teach at Oregon State? I teach permaculture. Okay. So I teach in the horticulture department. I was not hired as a permaculture teacher.

I was student activism is what got me into the position that I'm at. So the students said, we want to have a permaculture class at Oregon State University. And one student in particular got signatures and she said, and this guy right here, Andrew Millson, he's going to be the teacher. Wow. And I had to make my own way and support my position by creating a whole online program. So, you know, yeah, go ahead. How long have you been doing that? How many years have you been teaching permaculture at OSU?

Since 2009. And do you, so 14 years, do you have former students that 10 years after they graduate? are in touch with you and giving you feedback or checking in, and are they still using the skills that they learn from your class? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a different, there's some people that like went the permaculture route. And they're like,

I'm doing permaculture, their permaculture teachers, they have landscape companies, you know, a lot of my students end up doing that kind of thing. But I also have students who are like, oh, hey, yeah, I work for the NRCS now.

Oh, yeah, I work for the USDA. You know, oh, I just got, actually, it wasn't one of my students, but I just, someone just got in touch with me. Oh, I'm going to do the keynote presentation at the Washington State Municipal, uh, wait, stormwater conference, right? So like permaculture people. Oh, yeah, a permaculture person is, is organizing the Washington State Municipal Stormwater Conference, you know? So it's like, yeah, it's definitely, they're all over there. So you should, you should feel some pride in that, I think. I mean, yeah, I have moments where I'm like, feel like really satisfied about what I've done.

But like, for the most part, I'm more driven about what I'm going to do because like nothing is really enough given the, I feel the same way. The challenges that we face, you know. I feel the same way. What are you going to do, Andrew? Well, you know, people asked me that recently. I'm actually like, what I'm doing right now is like what I was going to do like five years ago. So I think really like I'm going to keep on, keep it on at this point. I have a lot of plans to go other places in the world, more places in the world, besides the places I've already gone, document these systems, document people that are doing, you know,

revolutionary large scale landscape transformation, cultural transformation that are like healing the planet, basically, going to these places and showing in a fun and interesting, but also a technical fashion what they're doing here. So they can be replicated. So I feel like right now I'm like a amplifier. So like my job is to identify an,

and amplify the good work that people are doing and then put it forth in a fashion that it can be replicated or learned from at least. You are a permaculture and water catalyst and diplomat. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm going for. So for people listening to this episode who may not have thought about this or know much about permaculture,

and they're like, holy crap, this makes a lot of sense. I actually think this makes sense for my community to get conversations and maybe a group of people thinking and doing this, learning together, starting this in their watershed. How would you advise them to get started? Well, you know, they always say, where do you start doing permaculture right outside your own back door, you know? So, I mean, periculture is a, it's a grassroots activation. So the point is, it's like nobody, you know, you can start permaculture on your, on your apartment balcony. You know, you can start growing food. Like, you can start recycling your organic food waste under your sink in a worm bid and creating

organic, perfect, beautiful worm castings, organic fertilizer for your like tomato houseplants. I mean, there's no, there's no, there's nothing too small. So, you know, so people, that's the thing about permacultures. Everybody can be activated to doing it in their own lives. And then, you know, reaching out and connecting with other people that have common interest, creating a study group, watching videos together, going and doing like a perma blitz.

We're like, okay, we got five people that are, interested. Let's all go work on my place and we'll transform this whole side yard. You know, then we go another, you know, we go and work on your place. It's like, it's really conducive to community building. And like, like, it's, it's a ground up, you know, organization, a ground up movement. So there's nobody that like is, is, is, is, uh, nobody should be priced out. you know and and even if you're like a renter i mean there's so much land available like there's so many people out there that would like someone else to grow a garden on their place you know um young people i know i was just talking to some young people that came by my house the other day who'd

recently moved to town and they were like talking like oh yeah and we put out a thing on like the next door website about oh we're looking for some people that would like like us to garden their space and of course this is corvallis so it's you know kind of garden heaven but they were like we were absolutely overwhelmed with responses there was so so you know in the same way that that things are being passed from the boomers you know down the generational shift it's like there's a lot of people out there that have property that would like someone else to take care of the property wouldn't be awesome if there was some sort of a networked crowdsourced campaign where financially wealthy people in small towns and cities across the United States could donate some land within the

village or city limits to young people to turn into a permaculture hub for the city. And then the social capital and the food and nutrition and the skills and everything could just kind of spread out from that. Is something like that possible? Is that desirable? I think stuff like that's already happening. You know, I'd have to kind of like go back in my notes and think, oh, think of different projects. But I mean, I think stuff like that is fully already happening. Yeah.

Um, awesome. So, uh, I know you are a busy person. If you don't mind, I'm going to ask you some, uh, personal questions, um, near the end. I, I mean, I'm respectful of your time. I, I have so many questions for you. I garden. I grow, uh, actually, I grow two. many potatoes. My girlfriend grows around 2,000 bulbs of garlic and we grow hazelnuts. I have 200

hazelnut trees. To be honest, the podcast and my job are making me less resilient in my gardening. But for the last 20 years, I've had lots of things that I've planted. For me, it's not about being sustainable as much as it is being with the land and the soil and it calms me down and it gets me away from the technology and I'm just under the sun and and getting my hands dirty and getting physical exercise and it makes me healthier to do that. But, you know, I'm blessed to have a little bit of land here that that we do that on. So, Andrew, given your lifetime of work on sustainability related issues and given what you've mentioned as the challenges that we face as a nation, as a world,

Do you have any personal advice to the listeners of this program at this time of global ecological crisis in addition to learning permaculture? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say like find, find yourself. Like, who are you? You know, what is your greatest potential? Like, what are you going to be, you know, what's going to make? you happy and how can you contribute and can you can you simultaneously contribute to the world and like fulfill

your heart's desire i think that's you know that's the goal and you know like like for you Nate it's like well you could be just a farmer and you'd be very happy there but then you might not be exercising your full gift to change the world so but for some people just just making a beautiful farm and feeding their community, feeding their family, like that's kind of their highest, you know, potential other people.

Like, some people ask me, sometimes are like, how come you don't have a farm? You know, shouldn't you have a farm? Like, if I had a farm,

then that's all I would do. Right. You know? But I have other, other, like, you know, like God's gifts kind of thing.

Like, what is your thing? Right? So I have, like, just, I have certain ideas. and visions of things I want to do and certain skills that can do that. So, you know, like, like don't do what you think you should should do. Do what's like really fulfills your heart

and uses your abilities. I love that. I tell my students the time is now not to minimize your impact, to maximize your impact, which is very aligned with what you just said. So do you change that advice that you just said with your students. I imagine teaching 18, 19, 20-year-olds who are aware of climate change and the economic difficulties, they are probably more anxious today than they were 10 years ago when you started teaching this. How do you change your advice to your students? And at the end of the semester, when you're sending them away, what are your parting words to them? Yeah, well, you know, there's there's a thing that people keep saying like the jobs that your kids are going to have don't even exist right now. Like you can't even imagine, you know? So I'm like, don't get too fixated on like what you're going to do. Like fixate on developing yourself, you know, developing your potential, developing like knowing what's best for you and how you can best contribute. And the job. stuff will unfold.

You know, like that'll come from there. Hopefully, you know. And the other thing I say is work backwards from like, how do you actually want to spend your day? You know, how do, like, what's your ideal day and like work backwards from there? Because some people are like, I want to be a landscape architect. And they think of like landscapes and they think of being outside. They think of like planting trees.

And then they actually are like sitting in front of. the computer doing AutoCAD, right? That's kind of happened to me. So, you know, really think about, like, how you want to spend your day. You know, like, you're like, I want to be outside all the time. Okay, then don't become an engineer. You know, and you may, you may or may not sacrifice income, whatever, but none of that matters. Like, like, you know, I mean, I don't want to be too cliche, but it's like, follow your heart.

Your heart knows what you should do. Yeah. What do you care most about in the world, Andrew? Yeah, I care most about goodness and about, you know, amplifying goodness, really. I think like that's what it comes down to. Like we very well might not fix the world's problems. You know, like this could be just an exercise right now in like our own, the own, our own experience that we're having.

So like I think like whenever I have some sort of decision to make, you know, a lot of times I'll sort of drift off to like the moment of my own death. You know, and hopefully hopefully I'm lying there. and all my family's surrounding and, you know, the angels come down and like, you know, like when you're reflecting on your life,

you're looking back. And like, regardless of what happens with the planet, it's like when you're reflecting on your own life, at the end of your life, when you had this flash and you see everything that happened before you, you know,

everything that happened since you were a baby, all flashed. You're like, did you do the best you could? did you like spread goodness were you kind and loving to the people around you did you like help the earth did you help the species were you a beneficial aspect of the world

you know and the answer should be yes so you know work backwards from there right and make sure that at the end of your life when you cannot look look back make sure that like you've got your boxes checked and that like you're good with, you know, with the earth and with the universe and with your family. That's one of the most beautiful answers I've gotten to that question. Thank you for that.

I also value goodness. And I hope that you and your work can pass the baton of that to lots of young people. In addition to a wand, a baton, if you had a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing that you would do to improve human and planetary futures? Yeah. I think that if I could induce one thing, it would be that like every human gets to have some sort of like, you know, God, oneness with the universe experience. right like you know hopefully at some point everybody's lives whether it's you know caused by the

death of a loved one or the birth of a baby or something that like like they have some moment where they realize like where they sort of shed their dramas and their worries and they just like recognize their connection that we're just you know they're just like part of this fabric and so it's like If I could like blink an eye and, you know, wave my wand, it would be like everybody sort of simultaneously sheds the illusion, whatever illusions that they're in and just like sees their life and themselves and, you know, creation for what it is. So the shift from me to us, me to we. Yeah.

Yeah. And even like, even like not even identifying with their own body. You know, but just like having a moment recognizing that we're just made up of vibrating particles, you know. When you, when you first started that, you paused and you said, I would wish every human had, and I thought you were going to finish the sentence with a hectare of land to do permaculture on. I don't know that that's everybody's thing, you know. I'm like, I'm like less and less judgmental about like what someone's truth should be because I've met so many people doing so many extraordinary things that are so impassioned by what they're doing that I'm like, oh, should everybody be agricultural? Well, you know, civilization was built on surplus. It's like you have some people that are super impassioned about farming. They can grow more food than they can eat than they can eat, you know. So there's a lot of room. for people to do many other things, right?

So, you know, I just want people to like, I feel like, you know, sometimes I have fantasies that like, you know, somehow like when AI or whatever becomes sentient, it's going to be like some sort of evolved, evolved entity that will see, like, beyond what we're able to see with our, you know, human dramas and everything like that. I'm like fantasizing. I'm like, what can cause the shift in human consciousness? Like, what can cause like the moment that we all see ourselves in the world, you know, in like a moment

of truth and clarity? Widespread ayahuasca use, maybe hitting rock bottom and having a gut check as a culture, maybe YouTube channels like your own where people learn and experience and and have awakenings. I can envision many different possibilities, but I'm with you there. Yeah. So this has been a fantastic overview of you and your work and your knowledge. I've recently concluded my podcast by asking my guests who are mostly first time guests,

that this was kind of a general overview of permaculture and water and your work in India. If you were to come back in six months and take a deep dive, on one thing, like what is most passionate to you that could just take a deep dive down one particular rabbit hole of a topic special to you? Do you have any speculation on that? Yeah, well, I mean, right now, being that I just got back from India two weeks ago, um, there's just so much that I could say about the particular things going on there. You know, I spoke like very generally, but like there's so many stories that hold all of these, you know, deeper lessons in them of like what different groups of people are doing and like

the level of impact, you know, that they're actually seeing in like the scale of large scale transformation. So I guess I guess it would be a little more storytelling and getting a little more specific to kind of open the open the window a little further into what you know into some of these possibilities that I've witnessed you're a great human being and I'd love to have you back and maybe we'll do just that how do people when will those videos be out on India and how do people people find your those videos and your channel yeah well you could certainly watch the first season um by going to Andrew Millison YouTube Andrew Millison.

You can go to my website's Andrew Millison.com. It's A-N-D-R-E-W-M-I-L-I-S-O-N. And then also, if you just type in, you know, Oregon State University permaculture, you could certainly get, well, permaculture design.

dot Oregonstate. dot edu is how you get to my OSU stuff. And when my YouTube channel I have a playlist called India's Water Revolution. So that's the last season. And that would be a good starter just to see what I did three years ago. This, we're going to put out the trailer. Actually, we're making a little trailer. We'll probably have the trailer out within, probably by the end of the month or thereabouts. Right now it's March 13th. So probably by

April 1st or so we'll have the trailer out. And then, I don't know, there's a lot. There's a a lot of moving parts to really putting these together, a lot of map animations and graphics and things that are like not that easy to come by. So definitely over the next six months, you're going to see these episodes sequentially popping up for sure. But you could busy yourself in watching my other videos while you're waiting. Awesome. Thank you so much for your work and foresight and evangelizing the importance of maybe a different way of doing agriculture in the United States and globally. And let's stay in touch. Awesome. It's great talking to you, Nate. I really appreciate you. Having me on and wish you the best of luck and look forward to

talking again soon. Thanks, Andrew. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of the Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the Great Simplification for more information on future releases.