Chris ‘Topher’ Gardner | Natural Biotechnology, Alternative Energy, & Other Suppressed Systems

00:06 It's the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine. From the Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood. And there's a real argument that the puppet masters of the power pyramid maintain their power primarily by managing the public's perception on resources and instilling the belief that their management and distribution skills are needed no matter how badly they execute because the alternative could be much worse. And a crucial component of engineering that mindset is producing sufficient propaganda that says industrialized corporatocracy produces abundance in a naturally scarce, harsh, and unforgiving world. It doesn't seem to be true, but we've been herded into small apartments and concrete cities, HOA dictatorships in a rental racket.

00:48 So that even if we had the hunch, our ability to even test it is quite limited today. I've come to believe that one of the primary battlegrounds is land ownership and the autonomy to plant your own ever-yielding fruit trees and healing herbs, care for your own chickens, and experiment with a wide range of esoteric and naturalistic technologies from electroculture and cloud-busting organite to vortexing structured water that comes right from the earth and the supercharged benefits of properly cultivated soil. Well, today we're talking to someone who's done all this and more, and that's Christopher Topher Gardner, host of the Biocharisma podcast on a 10-acre plot in rural Missouri.

01:27 He's put into practice much of the wisdom he gained from many of the bright minds we talk about around here, Nikola Tesla, Wilhelm Reich, Victor Schauberger, and many more. His dedication to healing the intentionally depleted and neglected soil resulted in forming his own supercharged biochar company, Black Gold Biochar, where he produces 400 tons a month, aligning the modern need for an income with the needs of the earth and those living on it. He's also mastered the art of constructing several types of dome structures, having built them all around the world, from tropical eco-domes or techodomes to coral domes and several other really impressive structures that conventional particle board frame homes would struggle to compete with on an even playing field.

02:09 And if that wasn't enough, he's also a skilled body worker and massage therapist, having trained in several different modalities after his football kicker career left his body in need of repair. An impressive guy on many fronts, the big bad biochar alchemist, nature wizard, and true master builder. Topher, welcome to THC. Greg, it's my pleasure to be here. Yeah, man, this is going to be a good one. I think we take inspiration from a lot of the same people and mindsets, but you are a lot further downfield in making these things part of your everyday life and your income. The more I've learned, the more impressed I have become and the more behind I feel.

02:47 It's impressive because as I tried to get at in that intro, one of the biggest attack vectors on us, one we don't even realize or we didn't realize until it was too late for a lot of our families who did own land like two or three generations ago, is the taking away of that land, wouldn't you say? Definitely. Definitely. The land crunch is a completely artificial thing. And that coupled with the true education crunch and skill crunch, you end up having, you know, people that are bereft of any land or any skills to work it.

03:24 Amen. And it is just crazy because so many people, anytime there's a show like this about what you can do with land and how it's kind of the only thing we can do, we can go over the Freemasons and the Bilderbergs and the Trilateral Commission and the Skull and Bones once again, if we must. But what are you going to do with that information? This is stuff that if you can just get over that economic hump of getting past that land crunch, as you put it, you can actually do a lot of amazing things. And as foreign as it might seem to a lot of people listening who feel maybe economically behind, if you just go a couple of generations like your grandfather, your great-grandfather, I grew up in Missouri, as you know, and like I have several friends that go out to the family land.

04:10 There's nothing on it, but they just take trips out to the rural areas way outside of the city. And oh, here's grandpa's 30 acres. We just run around on the land and fish, maybe. It wasn't so long ago that people owned land, and now it's mainly corporations who rent it back to us. Well, kind of. I mean, I still see tons of land out there. And I tell people that don't have any money to buy land. I tell them just be very responsible and make yourself available for either being like a landlord or stewarding land. Because one thing that's lacking out there is people that are actually responsible.

04:52 I had moved to an area of the world where when I got there, I got scammed out of all of my money and I literally didn't have money for rent. And just because I was responsible and I was married, and like I just showed up when I said I would show up, that worked into a work-type lease deal for the land. And then I ended up owning that land. I didn't have any money down, but what I did have was a work ethic and responsibility. And when you combine work ethic and responsibility, you would be amazed how many doors open up for you, especially with land ownership. Yeah, they say it's hard to find good people to do good work. So just be one of those good people and things come back to you.

05:35 So you did text me after the Ice Age Farmer interview with Christian Westbrook or Unshadowed, as he calls himself now. He really does inspire me when I feel defeated. He also does make things sound pretty dire, like we're just a few months away from food shortages and the collapse of Western society and grocery stores being empty. And I think that's a big part of why he kind of changed his branding is he didn't want to instill that fear. But it does make me wonder, like, how real is it? I know you and I talked about the Strato Hormoose thing and a fertilizer shortage crisis. I interviewed him six, eight months ago, and everything still seems to be relatively normal.

06:20 But you do think there is going to be a shoe that drops in this regard. Yeah, yeah, I think we're right in that precipice of where you have the fiat currency has lost all its steam. There are the movement, like when I was in university, they told us this like close to 30 years ago. They're like, money moves to where there's young people. The West is old comparative to the East. So all the money, all the debt cycles are moving to the East. I've had clients that flew G8 jets, you know, where their business, you know, for years and years and years was based out of New York and London. And now it's all, you know, Dubai to Shanghai. Like they don't fly over here on this side of the world anymore.

07:03 And so that kind of matches the age over there. So what we have to do is we have to actually get educated to work with what we have because all these extra inputs that we've been so accustomed to are going to be very, very scarce. And we're seeing that in the big ag world, like the big ag world is really the big pharma world. I don't agree with any of their practices, but I can kind of see from like emperor's viewpoint, like how do you feed the slaves? Well, we're going to feed the slaves. We're just going to give them empty calories. The way we're going to do that is we're going to have commodity crops.

07:46 Well, those commodity crops, all of them are pretty much based on, you know, petroleum fertilizers and all the rest of the chemicals that go along with that. And there's a massive shortage of that, especially with all the petroleum-based nitrogen products. So it's something that, like, if the whole Strato Hormuz thing continues the way it is, there's a huge, huge crunch just with artificial nitrogen to be put into the ground next year. There's the one side of me that's like, that's going to be really good for the land.

08:23 You're not going to be giving it some sort of like terrible chemical. But then on the other side of it, it's like, what happens when there's no bread for the circus, right? Usually you have bread and circus together. And so when you don't have any bread for the circus, it's just like, oh, no, like, how are the people going to respond to that? And I'm not thinking that there's not going to be any food. It's just, it's about quality, not quantity. We've already seen the quality of things diminish quite a bit. So the quantity, I think, will always be there. But as the quality drops, the quantity, it won't satiate anybody on any level.

09:02 And then that's when you start to have real problems. Yeah, I think it was Joel Saladin, who I interviewed, who said that he was talking to farmers at a conference who said, in 2026, we're eating 2025's food, but in 2027, there isn't going to be as much because so many farmers are saying, I didn't even plant this year because I got my rate for nitrogen and fertilizer locked in. So the price has gone up so much that I just didn't even plant and I just resold my fertilizer to someone else because the profit margin was there with no risk. And that sort of stuff means huge plots of land that normally feed huge amounts of people just going barren this year.

09:46 So sometimes when we talk about these problems, memories are short and people expect things to have immediate impacts, but we're talking about 20%. 2027's food, which is coming up faster than I realize. I mean, it's already September, but these things are real. And also, sometimes I just think we're not going to get through to people intellectually all the time. People need to see examples. People need to see a practical working situation like you have and be like, oh, I'm interested in that. And then maybe they will get involved in some way. So actually doing physical stuff in the physical world that aligns with these principles and the bright minds that we're going to talk about, I just think is amazing and the only way that we make inroads against the situation we're in.

10:37 And I guess I would want to start with some of your inspirations. You know, we talk about Victor Schauberger, Wilhelm Reich, a lot of these people. Talk to us about some of the people you put on your short list that have been most inspirational to you, whose work fuels some of the experiments and wide range of things you do on the land. Well, Victor Schauberger was paramount. You know, when I started to move down to Costa Rica, I was gifted Living Energies, which is a book written by Callum Coates about the life work of Victor Schauberger. And I literally read that, you know, front to back about a dozen times over the last 20 years.

11:16 And the reason why is it gives you the why, it gives you why, why you should actually really understand hermetic principles when tending to the land. And I had already been looking at dome structures, but when I saw Victor Schauberger's work talking about the egg and storing water in the egg, I had just moved to an area of the world that had all this fresh water, but they were storing it in these crazy cement boxes that had tremendous amounts of algae and mold and all these other things in it. So you had the freshest water in the world that was being doused with chlorine and fluoride and all this stuff.

11:58 And so I was like, on my land, I don't want that. Like, I want to have an egg-shaped water tank. I want to do all this stuff. So I endeavored to learn how to build domes, not only for a domestile, something to live in, but also to store water. And that led me to Cal Earth University, where another inspiration of mine was Nadir Khalili, the gentleman that founded Cal Earth University. I had read a bunch of his books. Like I read seven of his books, and I just loved his Persian way of, you know, he had a very roomy-esque way of talking when he was alive, which I really appreciate Rumi's poetry.

12:37 And I just vibed with him. Like he said certain things that really resonated with me in my life because my dad was a skyscraper builder that was telling me to build domes when I was a kid. And here he was a skyscraper builder in Tehran in 1981. There was an earthquake there and all the skyscrapers are down. But the only things left standing were these beehive domes that were, you know, bakeries that were hundreds, if not thousands of years old. And so to me, there was just like a common sense between like a Victor Schauberger and a Nadir Khalili. That took me to the work of John Worrell Keeley. And Keeley was very big into the harmonics of things.

13:21 And in reading Keeley's work, that brought me to Dale Pond. And Dale Pond, he coined the term sympathetic vibratory physics, which I studied. Like finally, physics made sense to me. Because when I was growing up, I had all these very, I was odd. I had oppositional defiance. What does odd stand for? Like oppositional defiance disorder, something like that. Because I would ask these questions in physics, and I would be like, well, how could you be in a vacuum and have propulsion? Like I would ask those questions. So when I would read a Victor Schauberger, where in the 20s, he had had a hundred questions for science and he literally asked that question.

14:05 He's like, why is it when you fly towards the sun or get closer to the sun, you get colder if that's the source of heat? Like, duh, like that is a brilliant question. Like all the things that, you know, so between Dale Pond's sympathetic vibratory physics, John Wirrell Achilles' work, and they were all kind of like the naturalists that were hovering around the Nikola Tesla. And Nicola, I love the thematics of Nikola Tesla's work, even though I don't believe the story at all. But like, well, it's just too much work. Do you think they've applied a lot of things to one man that couldn't be the work?

14:49 of one man. Yeah, he's the umbrella. He's like, he's the umbrella for the old world. Very interesting. Not to say that he wasn't a genius and he didn't do certain things. Absolute. But it's just like, I see a lot of things with architecture as a builder, as somebody that has to build buildings. And I'm actually not only an engineer and architect, but I actually am a GC. So I kind of see the process from the idea phase all the way through. There's just way too much time and energy that needs to go into taking something from the idea phase to making it actually material.

15:29 It's just a tremendous amount of energy. And I just don't see it as a viable thing with Nicola Tesla. That like, how many patents do they say he has? Like 1,200 patents? It's a lot. It's like a tremendous amount. So I like this story of it. And I'm not going to like poo-poo it. Like, obviously, a lot of these things were invented. I have built my own, you know, Nicola Tesla pancake coils. But those guys all kind of brought me to the now late John Bedini. Oh, yeah. John Bedini, I bought all of his DVD sets when that was a thing. And I bought his R-charge back EMF

16:11 battery reclamators. And I took all of his courses and I talked to him. I was living in Central America at the time, but I would anytime I would go into town and I could make a phone call and reach him because he was in Idaho. I was like a kid in a candy store with that guy because I was really into hi-fi systems before I left the United States. Like when I was a kid, I would install like these, you know, home theater systems and like build stereo systems for people. And John Bedini blew my mind because he had made these bespoke amplifiers in the 70s and 80s that his like essentially his transistors were crystals.

16:53 And so it was like John Bedini's amps and Morant. Everybody knows the name Morantz now because it's still around, but Bedini was like neck and neck with those guys. So those were like my real inspirations when I was getting into this line of like actually applying what you're learning because all these cats that we're talking about, they all like they actually made the physical stuff. They didn't just like, it wasn't just theoretical, which was exciting for me. The Tesla premise is interesting. You're not the first one to bring that up. And I had to look this up because I knew there was something about the numbers.

17:30 You know, when they tell a fake story, I do think they encode certain things for people in the club to recognize like, oh, okay, there, that is a fake story, just so the thread never gets lost. Because with the passage of time, you could forget that your own group seeded that lie. But he died in room 3327, a 32 right in the middle, and a 33. I always say it's not just a 32 or a 33. You will usually see both numbers in there. And then he died in room 3327 on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker.

18:06 I don't know. It's just very interesting coding with the numbers around his death. And then it gets wrapped up into the Trump's uncle got all his papers and that makes Trump a superhero. It's weird. So yeah, I think there could be something. He could be a catch-all because they just, you can look around, as you know, with the Tartaria stuff and the Antiquitech. There is so much stuff out there. It is more than one man, but they do seem to want to be like, it's maybe a limited hangout. Like we can't completely hide it all, but we're going to say that it was just this one guy and none of it amounted to anything. But you mentioned Bedini, and this is a guy who Aaron Murakami is always going on about. I never obviously got to interview him.

18:47 It's cool that you were a little closer, but the Bedini motor. Can you remind people what was special about the Bedini motor? It was an over-unity motor, right? Absolutely over-unity. And he was the one who pounded into me to never say free energy. So I yell at people all the time in my audience for whatever say they bring up free energy machines. And I'm like, no, no, no. There's nothing for free. Nothing, not a single thing. And I was like, he was very big in the over-unity. So what he had found is pretty much all circuits that we do now. And Tesla was the first one to really show this in earnest, whether it was the actual Nikola Tesla or some patent that was under his name.

19:29 But Tesla showed that pretty much his circuits were open circuits, which means you didn't loop the positive back to the negative. In fact, pretty much everything that's done now shorts itself out. So it needs a battery. The way things used to be wired. wired was that they were pretty much an open circuit and they were dealing with more of like a way of capturing etheric electricity. And so what Bedini showed in his schoolgirl motor was that he created what's called scalar north. And I'm a big magnet nerd, mainly because of Bedini and the scientist Floyd Sweet.

20:09 He was another incredible, you know, just brilliant person with magnetics. So what he did was he forced two north poles together, two north pole magnets together. He forced them together. And what he could show is on a tangential line, you get what he called scalar north. And scalar north was 40 times the power that just the north pole of the one magnet was. And then what he did was he put a wheel over that. The wheel was connected to a coil with a little bit of mechanical force. This is why it's not free energy.

20:50 You actually have to apply a force to give like the, it's just like a flywheel. You start spinning it and that scalar north would interact with the north pole of the magnets on the wheel. Yes. And it would perpetually just keep going and going and going. And then so after it tripped over scalar north, that magnet would cross over a coil and that coil would collect the back EMF. And that whole premise of back EMF was how he would restore the electrolyte balances and batteries. So before he died and like he actually he had one of his

21:30 beautiful like workshops in Idaho get burned to the ground when he figured out how to make solid state supercapacitors. He was teaching people like I was in the midst of taking his classes when he was teaching people how to make their own batteries. That's a big no-no. So when people talk about like Toyota is coming out with this new dry self where they're, I'm like, all this stuff has been done forever. Like he was literally showing you like how you could turn salt into a battery, how salt is a battery. Yeah. One of my premises is that the conventional economic wells have all run dry.

22:10 And so that is why they're, you know, dragging their feet, but slowly tiptoeing in the alternative world. And I think it might even be why we have all the disclosure talk, because they'll never admit that this stuff was around and that they suppressed it intentionally. But they will say, well, the aliens dropped some stuff off and it's just taken us this long to reverse engineer it. You're dead on. It's the Tim Ferriss model. You don't ever enter an existing market. You create a new one. So the way they created a new one is by teaching us, I mean, this is like where the Reese Commission comes in. Since 1918, the whole thing is to make the populace ignorant.

22:50 So if the populace is ignorant, they are literally just, you don't know what you don't know. So if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know that, oh my God, pretty much all the buildings at some point in some of these European countries were all, you know, etherically energized. I won't say powered or electrified. I'm being very specific with words, but they were using systems that we use now, but they're alien to us now because we've been deliberately made to be ignoramuses. I mean, I'm a huge fan of John Taylor Gatto's work because when I was learning about Keeley, I was learning about Tesla and all these cats 20 years ago, Schauberger, I was also reading his work and his work was emphatic.

23:38 Like the people at the top of the food chain knew that education was absolutely necessary to decimate that and to pretty much give us nothing but operant conditioning. Because when we're just in this emotional read and react mode, we're not actually thinking or problem solving. And John Taylor Gatto put it so eloquently. He literally said, like, the biggest problem that capitalists have is capital. And the biggest problem in the United States at the turn of the 20th century was you had so many free thinking people that would out-invent the capitalists.

24:16 So you make this, you're a robber baron and you just invest millions of dollars into this factory and some, you know, podunk farmer thought of how to like fix the problem a hundred times cheaper. You're now out of that capital. Yes, 100%. You literally had all these robber barons that were like, no, no, no. Let's make them stupid. And so. so, all these technologies, none of it's new, man. Like, even what I tell people when I was moving down to Costa Rica in 2006, I was going to live off grid. So, I was going to go, okay, I'm going to be solar and I'm also going to have a micro-hydro system.

24:57 I need some way to capture that electricity. All the people I was talking to down there were saying Costa Rica is where batteries come to die. The choke point for all this. So, I was like trying to find an alternative and I found this company that was selling supercapacitors. This was in 06. Supercapacitors is what you're hearing about now with electric cars. So, I go to Austin, Texas. I put my down payment. The supercapacitors were like the size of a Pringles can. And they were like, one of these Pringles cans was the equivalent to one kilowatt. So, I bought five kilowatts.

25:33 Now, I was like, yippee within six months, that company, it was a Texas Instruments company that was bought by Lockheed Skunkworks, and all that technology went top secret. Yeah, it's a tale as old as time. The Robert Baron thing, I mean, that situation you laid out is exactly the hemp story. William Randolph Hearst got all this redwood land, and then it's like, well, the redwoods cannot compete with hemp. You can grow it every three months. You can constantly, anyone can produce it versus a redwood, which takes like 60 years. So, he's like, Well, I guess we're just going to have to use the law to make me the winner. And that's why we cut down redwood forests and can't grow hemp.

26:16 It is crazy. And another thing you were talking about is the structure of the egg being a better structure than like kind of conventional skyscrapers or conventional buildings. And it's like, I never really thought much about structural fragility in our system because we know the destruction and rebuilding cycles of war. You know, that's a big economic engine. Blow a place up and then rebuild it. We know that economically, we're always on the debt treadmill, can never get enough money to actually live comfortably and take a break. And the body, they want us constantly sick and in need of services. If you're well, then you're not spending money in the big pharma system.

26:58 So, they want you sick, not dead, because then you're also not spending money. They want long lives of sick people, ideally. And you can apply that same logic because it's a template applied to many different things and apply it to structures. And it's like, yeah, building to fail or building to need never-ending maintenance, just like a car, got to get your oil changed, got to get your tires rotated, got to constantly needing services. Well, your house, it's like this part of your house is going to last three years, this part will last five years, the roof might last 10 years. I bought a brand new build three years ago, my roof already has a leak. Oh, no, because building is not what it used to be.

27:36 And I knew that going in that I had a C-level build. I was like, We'll deal with these problems as they come up. I want the land, I want the spot, it's fine, we'll figure it out. But it is just when you compare even just conventional building from the 80s and 90s to the building that happens now. I see these HOA neighborhoods go up in like six months, 100 homes. You think they did a good job? Probably not. You sell it and you move on. You know, someone else's problem now. But the other thing I just wanted to comment on was the flywheel and the magnets. Like a lot of times, people will shit on the interviews I do regarding not free energy, but over unity or abundant energy. And it's not that complicated because there's an account I follow. I think it's Third World Technology.

28:20 I could be getting it wrong, but it's these guys like out in the desert and they do the flywheel thing. They take one big magnet on the ground, they put magnets that repel each other on every part of the flywheel, or think about like a windmill or a pinwheel, and then they just spin it and the magnets repel. And we all know magnets don't like go bad. They keep their repellent or attracted quality. So you just imagine once you push it over, it just keeps going and the magnets repel each other and keep repelling. And then they pump water out of the ground with that. It's not that hard. Like my kids can understand that. They've played with magnets. So yeah, it's not even that exotic sometimes, but these are the simple things.

29:04 And I think a lot of people, if they really consider trading off modern living for living a little more rustically, but with more control over their own situation, they'll find it way more fulfilling. Another thing I want to move on to this because there's so many things that you have experimented with or tried. I've seen you test out, I think it was on your Instagram, what some people call Amish air conditioning or digging underground to use the Earth's natural heating and cooling systems to create cool. cool airflow that doesn't require any power. I think you use the term geothermal heating and cooling. I've been more curious about that. Tell us a little bit about it. How does it work? Does it work all that well?

29:46 Can you really heat and cool a home or something like that? I know some people say cold cupboards. You can just like make a refrigerator that's underneath the earth and it doesn't need to be powered. That kind of stuff. Yeah, I've been playing with different ways of using earthen mass as essentially a battery. Mass is a battery, just as a magnet is a battery. A magnet is just a dynamic battery, whereas mass in and of itself, you could just think of the weight in and of itself as representative of energy. So I've been building with, it's called super adobe, which is just another fancy way of saying earth bags.

30:26 So the walls of a lot of my structures are anywhere from 16 to 24 inches thick. And that whole thing is about thermal gain. So when you have mass and you have, say, sunlight is the prime driver for the heat that's hitting that, it takes about 12 hours for the energy to transfer from one side to the other because all that mass stores that thermal input and then slowly redistributes this. And there's all these different types of Russian stoves and rocket mass heaters. Like all that was my entree into construction. So I've been into like using mass as like a slow release time vector for some energy input.

31:10 And all the geothermal is, is saying, okay, there's no more mass than what's in the ground. And if you dig low enough, depending on where you are, you can just put essentially an airway, a passageway. And, you know, air always wants to flow from high pressure to low pressure. I mean, that's a constant anywhere you are in the world. I mean, every weather system we see is exactly that. There's a high pressure to low pressure move of air. Well, when you have something called thermal stratification, if you go down into the ground low enough, like here, you have to go about four feet and four feet down in the ground.

31:50 It's a constant 63 or 64 degrees. Well, guess what? If you have a top of that pipe that is in an area that's say 90 degrees, now you have thermal stratification. And this gets back to Victor Schauberger's work. Like Victor Schauberger said, electricity is temperature differential. He's the only scientist I've ever heard to define what electricity is. He's like, it's temperature differential. And pretty much every, you know, little device that we have, every cell phone, every doodad we have has something in it called a thermoelectric converter, which means you have a temperature differential from one side to the other, and then you have a ceramic plate with two dissimilar

32:39 metals in it, and you'll get voltage from it. Well, voltage is potential, and you could just think of potential as movement. So a geothermal line that's in the ground, like you have a four-inch pipe, like the last thing that you brought up was, I have 150 feet of just a four-inch, you know, wide PVC pipe that's four feet down in the ground. Well, I have thermal stratification. So I have this electricity. I have this potential, this movement of air that's that's constant. Like you need no battery. It's literally working on that principle that Schauberger brought up.

33:19 And it's the way all of nature works. And even when I was in the tropics and we couldn't like dig down deep, we would do other things. Like, you know, when it came to earth and building, you're looking at how you could keep a cool, the cool side of your building, which would be the north side of the building. If you had some sort of water fountain in front of it, you could use like a little room that had no, you know, thermal gain on the north side of your building. With just a little bit of water movement, that little area would be 20 degrees cooler than the whole rest of your building.

33:55 So that in and of itself could act as your root cellar. You know, and everybody and their brother that's lived throughout the world has had a root cellar. You had a walkout basement or whatever, and that's working on the same principle. It's like you go deep enough into the ground and you don't have too much intrusion from what's above, you have a consistent temperature differential. And like you could just ask the people in Iceland and Greenland, like their whole country is run on geothermal energy. Where it was in Costa Rica, like they had all these active. active volcanoes and stuff like that. And you had the European, you know, electrical companies coming in and doing the geothermal there, you know, to sell those electrical credits back to wherever.

34:41 But it's a very common practice that I think is just kind of new to the North American lexicon. Yeah, I see some time-lapse videos on Instagram that can be really inspiring. Where, in like a two-minute video, it just shows a guy digging down a big chamber, some storm cellar doors like Wizard of Oz, and you go down there and you store all your fermented foods and your canned foods. And I think about doing that sometime when the kids are older and I have more time and I've done the basics of what I want to do. Like, just with an acre of land, it's so much. Just take one little section and start digging down and then like put some shelving in there and like make it the thing.

35:23 It's crazy. I've thought about like, you know, I can't control anyone else's life. I got myself to a good place. I wish I had some of my friends that I could pick out from the other places that I've had to move away from and bring them here. And like on a weekend, we smoke some weed and we try to build a shed. None of us have tried to build a shed before, but there's enough room here that we could just fuck around and try to build a shed. And it would be fun. It's not as fun to do it by myself, but these are the things I sometimes think about. And so here's a fun one. You also texted me after the Guy Anderson interview recently to say that the urine therapy thing is real. You use it to heal the cuts on your hands from construction work. You refer to it by its proper name, Shivanbu, Shivanbu, Shivanbu.

36:08 Shivambu. It's obviously an Indian term. I guess it's in that wide range of Ayurvedic/slash Tantra, all these terms, like they have different categories of energetic or esoteric arts. And apparently they save a little space for urine therapy. Yeah. It's even in the like Rosicrucian alchemists way of looking at, you know, I lean more towards like the hermetic, you know, Rosicrucian Christian way of looking at things in the sense that God

36:45 made this place perfect. Once again, the only thing that hasn't worked out for us is that we've been engineered to be ignorant. And then through a lot of failings of our own, then we're willfully ignorant. Agreed. So like the only thing that we have to overcome is our, as Michael Jackson said, you're, oh, you're so ignorant. I'm so tired of people being ignorant. Once you realize like you're the problem, and like you're like, okay, nobody else is going to do this for me. Like you have to like take back the sense of, you know, projecting authority outside of yourself.

37:23 So once you take that back, you start to understand like, oh my God, the world's abundant. The most abundant thing that there is in this world is the human body to me is the pinnacle of nature. And like you talked in any line of like, you know, long, like whether it's Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, pretty much a body will heal itself if you get out of the way. Yes, I've said that all the time. A lot of times, people in the hospital, it's like, well, they just didn't kill you before your body healed itself. Or they'll say, some medicines work for some people and not others. Well, it's like, well, maybe the medicine didn't work.

38:03 It's just like this person's body healed itself while they were taking your pills and this person's didn't. The pills are irrelevant. It's just the natural process and you happen to be taking a pill at the same time. You totally get it. So with Shivambu, it's very simple. It's just like your kidneys, you know, filter out the blood plasma and the blood plasma comes out of your body. And it has something like, I'm in the world of like talking to lots of like terrain theory people and they don't use the term stem cells anymore. They call them pleomorphic cells. Well, there's no higher concentration of pleomorphic cells in the world that are genetically matched to you other than in your own pee.

38:47 So I have to take responsibility for this. I had people, I waited 10 years. The two healthiest men I knew, like pro athletes, like to this day, they're like, you know, Adonises. They were telling me from my early 20s, no, use your P. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. And it wasn't until one day I was doing concrete work and my hands were just like all busted up. And the next day I had six massages scheduled. And I was like, I cannot miss out on that money. What am I going to do? And so I just like, I grinned and buried it and I was like, okay, I'll try the she-bamboo thing.

39:27 This might sound disgusting, but I essentially peed in a Pyrix dish and I added water so it was diluted. And I just soaked my hands for an hour in it before I went to bed. And I woke up and my hands were completely healed. Wow. Now, as somebody that like I get microabrasions and abrasion abrasions on my skin all the time because I'm, I do concrete masonry. Like I build with ferrocement. When you build with ferrocement, you're cutting metal. Anyone that's ever cut thin metal, you're always cutting yourself. Well, I also make money giving deep tissue massage, right? So you can't be a bloody mess doing that.

40:11 And so I just started constantly applying it to my skin. And it was just like, this is utterly miraculous. Like just the other week, like I took, you ever see those tools that you'll add to your drill to like actually drill into the ground to dig a hole and auger bit. Well, I accidentally grabbed the auger when I was drilling down into the ground. My hand slipped off. And like I literally cut all it was actually this finger. I can't even tell now. That's how well it's healed. I cut from the tip of my index finger all the way down to here and this big flap of skin came off. God damn. I didn't even worry about it. Literally. My wife's like, oh, we got to go get stitches.

40:54 Like, no, no. Just wait till the next time I have to empty this bladder and we're going to be fine. Well, what I did was I took gauze, I peed on the gauze, and then I put it over that, and then I wrapped it with two big band-aids to make a splint with my finger so I wouldn't bend it. And like within four days, it was operational. Like I had nothing wrong with it. I have like no, you see a little bit of a scar, but that like there was nothing. Like I tell people this all the time. My guys are getting cement burns on themselves all the time with the cement because it's so caustic. It's very alkaline. I'm like, just rub some pee on it. And so now it's a joke. Like people are like, guardrail, just say pee on it because I will, because it works.

41:35 So to me, it's like everything I'm trying to do, I'm doing because it works. I'm not doing it because it's theoretical. Like, and I had a lot of resistance. I kind of feel like an idiot. It would have saved me a lot of pain if when I originally was exposed to it, that I actually went ahead with it. Yeah, you're kind of like a chaos permaculturalist, just taking what works from various different areas. And if it works, you keep it. Otherwise, you throw it out. So, yeah, I think that's really interesting. It's also nice to know with the auger thing that even very advanced people make stupid mistakes that I would be prone to make. It's very inspiring to know that, you know, that shouldn't keep me from engaging.

42:16 But do you have you ever drank it? Are you just a soaker? No, no, I drink it. And also, like, now that I have a biochar company, like, I'll add the urine to like you can actually seed your biochar with your own urine, which I recommend to people. We have other things. We have like humic acids and other mixtures that you can add to it. But a lot of times when people are just starting out, I'm like, the land wants to know you. And the way the land gets to know you is through your emanations, right? So your urine has all your genetic material in it and it will inform the bacteria because urine is sterile.

42:56 But what it will do is it attracts all the bacteria that are necessary for whatever the signaling is. Yeah. So say you have like something wrong with your kidneys or you have something wrong with your bladder or whatever. It's all encoded in the urine. So it's crazy. Nature is always rushing to help you. This is like the exact opposite of what we're taught. It's always rushing to help you. And one of the ways we signal nature is with our pee. I mean, you see dogs do it all the time. And so like, we're literally like, okay, here, give that to the carbon. The carbon will then proliferate all of that bacteria profile.

43:41 And that bacteria profile then informs the plants of what nutrients you need to heal your condition. Yes. I just love that. And the intelligence of nature mixed with an animus perspective that everything is conscious and the whole idea. I mean, I get ragged on a lot for being anti-Christian, but the idea in the Bible of being stewards of the land, I mean, that's probably my biggest takeaway from the whole Bible: is like, we are here to, here's the system. The system's pretty good. It has various energy flows, and those flows can be captured, rerouted. That's our job. The tree works. will grow the fruit, but you got to plant the tree.

44:23 Put the trees where you want them, and we'll do the rest. And yeah, it's that relationship, that reciprocal relationship, that the reciprocal part, you know, Todd Elliott, the cunning farmer that I interviewed, I mean, he really had a perspective that everything in his farm he thinks of as kind of conscious and he has an altar out there next to his guardian tree. stuff i've been thinking about doing myself haven't gotten to actually doing it but yeah the next level in that kind of thinking is to say that you can urinate on the land and it can read your bioprofile and then grow a plant that can help you with any deficiencies that it detects in your profile i mean it is mind-blowing

45:01 that to me is super theoretical i haven't seen that happen but you seem a lot closer to it than me yeah i mean it's very well known like if you have a carbon substrate what makes carbon so beneficial in the ground as like everybody's seen black soil and they associate black soil with like good soil fertility yeah sure and everybody's seen like a soil or i should call it clay pack or whatever with no carbon in it there's like it's either red or yellow or white ground and you don't get the same sense of like there's aliveness there well what that aliveness is in that black soil is all the bacteria

45:42 and i think the bacteria are just little alchemists they're taking one thing and they're transducing it into another but you have to tell the alcohol you have to give the alchemist an order you have to you have to give it a signal you know and so a lot of that signal has to do with what emanates from our own body our consciousness is one of those signals you know our urine can be one of those signals there's so many different things that will actually give the order will give the marching orders to those little fellas to go do what they need to go do yeah it's one of those things like i said in the intro this may be true we may have a hunch about some of this stuff but like many people listening it's been stripped away your ability to hear this information and then today go and practically apply

46:29 some of it has been stripped away that is the big attack that to me is the big conspiracy in terms of practical effects on your actual life so let's get deeper into biochar it is your bread and butter it is your passion it is contained within the name of your podcast biocharisma biocharisma essentially and we know this from the first time i ever heard it was tara preda talking about the amazon and the amazon is so supercharged because the indigenous people of that area made this and used it and then supercharged the amazon and i also have questions about getting stoned in college and watching planet earth and you

47:09 see the diversity within the amazon and you just think like all these different species thousands maybe tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of different species exist nowhere but there and it's like it's kind of a chicken or the egg thing like how does a new species emerge it's not adaption from something else it's new it's different how does that happen it does seem magical and it seems like another one of those things where you set the qualities for biodiversity and it just emerges where is the first one of this species versus that it's bizarre we don't even think much about it but talk to us about biochar and what you do with it i think it's pretty amazing because

47:48 you actually have fulfilled your need to make an income and aligned it with like literally fixing the earth and helping others who've got the mindset to want to fix it but don't have the tool you provide them that tool it's pretty great yeah like to get back with what we started with with having no money and not having any land i was renting a piece of property from a landowner that had a thousand acres and he just gave me two and a half acres to live on as long as i did a work trade with him and i told him i was like i really want to grow cacao do i have permission to grow cacao on your property and he's like yeah go for it so i invested all my

48:29 money in buying brazilian golden cacao i went all across costa rica i found the chocolate guru of costa rica he brought the plants in from brazil speaking of the amazon and i planted it and within a few months i had leaf cutter ants just decimating my orchard and i did not have money to lose at the time like it was literally like my wife was like what are you doing spending all of our money on cacao and i was like i want the best cacao and i want the best coffee and so i was really heartbroken and i had got hired by new chapter organics to build a super adobe structure for them and the guy who hired me was a permaculturist in our area, E.

49:15 Tai Huban. He's a brilliant man. And he said, He said, you should look into terra preta. So I started studying the Amazon, the histrionics. And I think it was like on the like Discover magazine or National Geographic Magazine. They showed a cross cut of them digging into the ground. And it was like the whole biography of how they figured out that this, all these like clay urns that they were finding in this terra preta, like they figured out like, oh, these clay urns are purpose-driven. Yeah, not decorative. Right. And the second I saw the crosscut, it reminded me of some of the rocket mass heaters that I had been building.

49:56 And I was like, oh, and I had been, you know, I'd been studying at that point four years in deep permaculture, like reclaiming two big pieces of land and like literally volunteering 30, 40 hours a week, you know, pruning, digging, terracing, like the whole thing. Like I was full immersion in this stuff. And so I'm looking at it and I'm like, oh, they did a chop and drop system. So they would dig like, you know, a canal. And in that canal, they put these urns that reminded me of my time in India because it looked like a tandoori oven.

50:35 And they would have an airline in and an exhaust out. And then what they would do is they would plant the whole side of the canal that they just dug with light-demanding trees or plants that would grow really quick. Like within six months, they were to maturity. They would cut them and then all that biomass would fall over the urns. And then all the berm that they created from digging, they would just throw that dirt on top of it. And then they light the tandoori. And they would do that like every, you know, 10 or 15 feet. And they would do that for miles and miles and miles. And then once all that biomass cooked down and turned black, then they would just plant it in place.

51:18 They didn't move it. Interesting. Yeah, because they already have the hole dug essentially, the trough. Right. It was such an efficient system because down in the tropics, a lot of people don't know. And this is something all of us gringos had to learn. The tropics does not want to grow European vegetables. I'm learning that now. Yeah, yeah, because the canopy that was once in Central America and South America, that canopy is there because it derives its nutrients from the ocean air. It doesn't derive its nutrients from the soil. So in those areas, you have very bauxite-rich soil, which is paramagnetic.

51:56 And paramagnetic soils don't hold nutrients. In fact, they're almost devoid of bacteria. So all the bacteria and all the things, the way they gather their nutrients, it's the inverse is as you go to like either pole, then more of your nutrients come from the ground, right? But near the equator, they don't. That's probably why there's so much biodiversity there. So you have all this nutrient uptake from this, from the sky means you don't need carbon in the ground as soil. And even you'd have these massive trees, like we would cut down all these different types of trees for construction. Their root balls weren't in the ground. Like here, you have a hickory tree out in your yard.

52:39 Its taproot is as deep as it is tall. Like you can't push a hickory over. So it's a totally different type of landscape. And I found, oh, okay. Well, I figured out how they made the biochar. They called it terra preta, which just means black earth. I was like, I'll just modify one of my, one of my rocket mass heating systems and I'll make my own. And it worked perfectly. I was like, yay, this is great. And I had this carbon in Costa Rica. They called it carbon. And I was like, this is different than carbon. This is like carbon carbon because it was like, this had the diamagnetic charge to it.

53:18 And because all my learning from Bedini, I had learned from Floyd Sweet and Bedini how to test for diamagnetism, how to test for paramagnetism. And I could show my friends and like the people in my local community, I was like, look, this is diamagnetic. This is paramagnetic. They're very, very different. That's ferromagnetic. You could see the diamagnetic biochar had a totally different energetic and receptivity profile than just say the regular carbone, which was just charcoal. And it all clicked for me. And the good news was I gave it to my cacao trees. I just top dressed the soil and they all came back.

54:01 And my leaf cutters never came back. And anybody in southern Costa Rica will tell you, leaf cutters only come to eat those things that are unhealthy. So. So, if the trees come back to health, the leaf cutters won't even smell it. They won't even try and go get it. Yeah, it's like they're part of the cleanup crew. I think about this all the time. We have a lot of Florida vultures eating roadkill and stuff. And it's like vultures get this weird gothic, like they're the death eaters. People think of them as negative. It's like there'd be a lot of carcasses laying around if it weren't for this species that is willing to absorb that death and take it and take it in as nutrients.

54:40 And a lot of insects are the same. They're here, they're like little machines here to deconstruct the things that aren't working. So, if you can build up the resilience, like you can think about it that way, build up the resilience of the plants and trees, and then they're like, Oh, we're not going to go to that one. That one's doing okay. It's a really interesting system we have. It's totally true. And that was the thing for me. I got to see it in real time. And I saw had so many of my friends' farms where we were all struggling. Like, none of us were doing well, like when it came to it, because it was just like we were deluded. A lot of us had moved there for you know, food sovereignty. And that's why I was trying to give you a pep talk yesterday.

55:20 It was like, dude, we all, our eyes are bigger than our stomach, man. When you take on the project of land management and trying to grow food, it is tough. So, it's just the small wins, always register the small wins, even just doing composting right just to compost correctly. Just doing that's a challenge, right? So, I'm always trying to tell people always register the small ones, just get the small systems in place, and then the bigger stuff will start to take care of itself. I started making the biochar, I was making it on a small scale, and I was figuring, hey, everybody will like to make it themselves.

55:59 So, I invented this rocket retort, and the rocket retort was just a modified rocket mass heater that instead of having the uppipe in it insulated with some sort of insulator, I just used biomass to insulate, and it worked great. And it was a real retort because most people that were making biochar were just making like really bougie charcoal. I was like, You're making charcoal, like with a top-loading updraft gasifier-that's charcoal. Like, you get like 10% biochar. I was like, if you want the diamagnetic stuff, so I was sort of like an anthem to all my friends, like bugging them with this stuff.

56:36 But they saw it was starting to help their stuff grow. And then I got some bigger clients. And then, right before COVID hit, this gentleman who was a client and a friend, he bought this massive piece of land and he was going to have the world's biggest durian farm. And that was like, I mean, you're talking millions of dollars of investment. So, he hired one of my good friends as his farm manager. The farm manager brought me in to like do the biochar thing. And he was wanting like 40 tons a week. And I couldn't do that. My operation was so small then. Like, I was like, if I could make a yard a day, I was doing great.

57:18 And a yard, for those of you out there, is only like 850 pounds of biochar. And because my system that I had at the time, I had to have dry biomass, which is near impossible in the tropics. So, COVID hit, everything like flipped on its head. And then, my family, we didn't feel safe down in Central America anymore. We saw that it was pretty much the pin cushion for the world's banking elites. So, we're like, we're going to move back to the States where, you know, people like, you know, believe in gun rights and, you know, they actually have land ownership things and things like that.

57:57 So, we came back here and we kind of put this Venn diagram together of like, okay, where can we be close to ranchers where there's wood, where there's all the natural resources of fresh water? And we landed in your birth state of Missouri. Like, we just ended up here because it has all those things. And where we are in southern Missouri, there's a timber industry here that's flourishing. And that timber industry has a lot of waste. And so, my biochar company, you know, I was always like going to all the local carpenters in my area in Costa Rica and getting all their wood waste.

58:38 And so, what we did here was we just like tacked on our kiln next to a big mill. And we just have whatever the tailings are from the mill is, we go ahead and throw that through a chipper shredder and we cook it. And that was the birth of Black Hole Biochar. Love it. Now you're making all kinds of many, many tons worth and shipping it all over the place. And it's great because the number one thing people say is our. our soil is depleted and you are providing the medicine to fix that problem. I just, I do think it's a great way to make a living and feel good about it.

59:16 But I really want to, we got to talk about the domes. Yes. You know, as we're getting close to the end here, I know you have several different types. And I've felt for a long time that building codes actually hold us back. It makes building a specialized thing that we've been forced to outsource to someone else on top of permits and all the rest of it. Construction is super shoddy these days anyway. Like I mentioned with my damn roof, the idea that you can, you have to go by this template because this is the only safe template. And then it's like full of problems. There's many different ways to build. We used to talk about good bones.

59:52 You just want a house with good bones. There are no good bones in any modern construction anymore. But your structures are built super sound and resilient. And I want to hear more about them. And also not just that you build them, but like, is this something that people can hire you to do? Is this a service you offer? You go to people's land and build them. What's the cost? Like these sorts of things. Yes. I've been a builder since 2008, professional builder. I mean, I had done like remodeling. And my dad was a contractor/slash architect when I was growing up. So I always kind of had it in my field.

1:00:29 The good bones thing is a real thing because when we renovate old homes and stuff like that, you'll see like the old oak or the old timbers that were used were much better than what you can purchase today. Yeah. Now it's compressed sawdust, essentially. Yeah. And those sawdustes are usually, you know, affixed to each other with a really toxic binder. Love to hear that. I'm raising my kids here. Damn it. So I grew up in, I've just had about 48 of my 50 years in very humid, terribly wet places. Like I grew up in South Florida. I went to school in Michigan. Then I moved back to South Florida.

1:01:09 Then I moved to southern India and then southern Costa Rica. And now I'm in southern Missouri. So I've always been in wet, humid places. And Costa Rica freaked me out because we had earthquakes there too. So not only did you have like termites that would eat any wood that there was, even the hardest of woods that you could do, but post and beam structures would fail under lateral stress, which is sheer strength. So I didn't have any money. Like I said earlier, when I moved there, but I needed, I needed a domicile. I needed a place to live. And I was reading a Nadir Khalili book about earthbag building, and his story was very compelling to me.

1:01:52 And I saw this when I was a little kid with my dad, I saw this 60 Minutes interview where this old man on a barrier island in North Carolina, he couldn't get insurance because of how many hurricanes had hit the island and he needed a home. So he built a ferrocement dome and it worked because another storm hit and his dome was fine. And I was like, wow. And my dad, I remember my dad being like, that's the way. And so I took that to heart. And so the first building I built for myself was a dome and people liked it. And I built clients of mine, these beehive domes. After a while, the beehive domes were kind of off-putting to me because they were so heavy.

1:02:34 And like I said, I was building in tropical areas where there's like, you don't have roads. So I have all these delays and it was just like so arduous. So I moved more towards like the ferro cement domes, which are these down there, which is a Japanese star dome. And even where I went to university, I went to Cal Earth University to learn how to build the super Adobe domes. They said, oh, if you can build it another way, do it. Because we all know in construction, weight, weight is a killer. Yeah. And so I've just built this 450 square foot bathroom, but it took 52 tons just to do the walls in Super Adobe.

1:03:20 That's a lot of weight. But the thing is, that thing will last forever. Like, this is where mass. It's like the, I could tell the people of the past live longer just because the buildings they built were reflective of that. Today, if you build a building that lasts 50 years in wood, you're like, you've done a good job. That's good enough. Yeah. Yeah. Cause people aren't, people aren't living that long. I think in the United States, it's 76 years on average. So, but if you're living 500 years, right, back in the day, you're building your place out of stone. You're just like, you think they live 500 years? 500 is a little, a little on the heavy side. Well, I'm just saying, like, who knows how long people, I really think people in the past were. were bigger and they live longer. To a degree, I agree with that. Yeah.

1:04:05 Well, you just can't build doors the way they do. Like, in some of these massive structures, the doorways are just way, way, way, way too big. And this is a point I'll bring up to anybody. The hardest thing to do in reality when you're building is to have a doorway set like perfectly plumb and straight and do what it's supposed to do whenever you have a tremendous amount of mass. You have these massive doors in some of these old structures that were given like just crazy, stupid, short timelines with the way they built these things. And I'm like, no, that's not right. Even like the structures like we were talking about earlier with the pyramids, like those buildings didn't have any doors.

1:04:51 There's a reason. Doors are really difficult to do right, let alone build massive doors that could like be on hinges that fail and all the rest of it. It's just like, I believe it. I've tried to hinge up a door from Home Depot and I can't even get it to work out exactly right. Even putting a damn doorknob on is hard to align both sides. So that's like a six and a half foot door with all stuff that you could buy. Imagine you're the fabricator of all of it. Like you're, you're the one that's honing the wood. You're the one that's chopping down the tree that's big enough to give you the slabs and you're drawing the wood long enough, clasping that together, bolting that all together, getting that to be true and weighted perfectly, right?

1:05:35 Let alone then you're forging the hinges, you're setting the pins, you're doing, you're fixing that and all. No, no, no. Like, God love how easy standardized things are, but they're standardized in a way that they're not built to last because we know economics is built on waste. Yeah. Planned obsolescence. Yeah. The more trash your country makes, the better your economy is rated. So the planned obsolescence thing we know is right there in alignment with the whole, you know, making everybody an ignoramus. They did both of them at the same time because they work perfectly together. If you make everybody ignorant to the past, then they won't question why things are so shitty now.

1:06:19 Right. Let me ask you this. So you've been through many different types of building. Have you, I'm sure there's different types for different environments that are better, but for the most part, have you settled around a central construction type? And is it something that people listening could get you to come build for them? And how much would it cost? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I build for private clients all the time. Usually I only take on a project or two a year because winters, it's hard to build in. And my crew is local, so we don't travel that far. So I would say like average construction cost, like finished construction cost in Missouri, like this is like, I'm in the Ozarks.

1:06:59 Sure. So it's, it's not ritzy at all. Like you could get finished construction for around $200 a square foot. We're right in that ballpark. And what's your average dome size? Well, I build all different sizes. I built anywhere from 42-foot diameter to 20-foot diameter domes. A lot of times I build multiple domes in one area and then connect them. Interesting. So basically, a thousand square feet is a pretty good size dome to just to use nice, easy round math. 200 grand for a 1,000 square foot dome is pretty good.

1:07:34 I mean, I'm going to try to have my editor actually go to your Instagram and pull up while we're talking just some of the pictures and the videos of them because they are not rustic structures. I mean, they look very, very nice. Yeah, yeah. So I've made like everything from like the cheapest foam dome that you could do, which is probably close to like $80 a square foot all the way up to like full masonry, you know, ferrocement. Some of my clients throughout the years have been very electrosensitive. So I've used my biochar in the concrete to cancel out EMFs. That's a damn, that's a really nice thing to do. One, it makes your concrete stronger, but two, it reflects microwaves, which is important.

1:08:19 I know you've also done organite flooring. Yes. Like epoxy flooring that's organite. I mean, that's that's fucking sick. Yeah, yeah. We just, we just did that. We just poured that. In fact, I think Monday, this last Monday, we finished pouring our first organite floor. So we're all wondering what the weather is going to do because sometimes these domes have a way of modifying the weather. And it has, it goes back to like, it's very interesting. Like, you know, the pyramid in and of itself, like I said, is that incommensurate geometry. The reason why pentagrams and pentagons. pentagons are used by magicians is because they have that incommensurate geometry.

1:09:00 It's essentially the phi ratio triangle of 108.3636. Well, that phi ratio is the part of all phylotaxis, which means it's like connected to everything in nature. It's like God's thumbprint. It's like this is like created by God. So man's closest corollary to that is if he times that by three, that's how you get the pentagram. The pentagram is three of those triangles, you know, rotated at 72 degrees from each other, overlaid, and you get the five-pointed star. Don't be evil now. Don't be evil. Well, it's not inherently evil. It's just inherently.

1:09:37 You can build me a demon house. It's inherently powerful. Well, when we build the domes out of these things, because that's what the star dome is, it's essentially all these five triangles that are overlapping each other. But now it's in a hemisphere. It acts like an array. It acts like an antenna array. And so, like, here, wherever I've built them, the weather patterns have turned more to the wet side. And in fact, when I was going to quit building them, I got a very, very distinct message. I don't know from what. I thought it was God. It was probably God because I really trusted it.

1:10:18 It was very brief and just stern with me. And I was going to quit building them because it was such a difficult proposition when I was doing it back then. And I was essentially told to shut up. I was like, why? Why do you want me to build these? And he's like, the domes bring water. We need water. Ooh, okay. And the second I heard that, I trusted it. And so I finished building the one dome in our area that was the first star dome down in southern Costa Rica. And subsequently, then we got hit with one of the biggest rainstorms ever in southern Costa Rica where we got, I think we got 100 inches of rain in one week.

1:11:00 Wow. Yeah, it blew out all the bridges. It blew out everything. And after that, I was like, okay, I'm listening. I'm not going to be petulant anymore. I get it. And since moving here to like, we just had the wettest July that we ever had in Missouri's history this last July, followed by like the driest August. So who's to say it could just be super El Niño? But maybe, you know, I haven't been here long enough to say for certain, but everybody that comes over to my farm is like, your farm is so much wetter than my farm.

1:11:37 And I'm like, yep. That's awesome. Well, I guess we can add you to a long list of guests around here who are doing things in accordance with their fate or will, fueled from messages from the divine. Even your name, Gardner, it's in the wheelhouse of what you're doing. But the amount of people just talking about these things is already low. And then actually doing things with that knowledge is a further fraction still. So kudos to you, good sir. This has been great. I'm lucky to know you. You are doing all the things I romanticize about while doing basically nothing. I'll have to at least start by becoming a biochar customer or something.

1:12:22 I want to send you some biochar. I offered it to you and you were such a good guy. You're like, no, no. I know it takes a lot to ship. I mean, it's heavy. I didn't want to burden you with that. And well, I'm sending you some anyway. So just we'll figure it out after we're off here. Okay, okay. I love it. Because, you know, the sandy soil, it's got its challenges. But give people any links, anything you want to leave them with before we land this plane. Yeah. So if you go to blackgoldbiochar.com, that's my website, my commerce website. I also, if you guys like reading it all, I've just started to dip my toes into writing again.

1:13:01 I've written some fiction novels that I haven't published or anything, but just kind of like, if you liked this conversation, my sub stack is a lot of fun. I put out a lot of theories that I have. And then my Instagram is at biocharisma. I do have a podcast called the Biocharisma Podcast. I interview people, hopefully, like Greg, which I really appreciate. But like all the people that are pretty much in the alternative space of looking at things like Dr. Tom Cowen, Dr. Andy Kaufman, Dr. Jennifer Daniels, like, you know, Owen Benjamin, like all these people that have kind of been outcast for whatever reason, I tend to flock towards.

1:13:42 And then I also have, I can now put on my mantle. I am now an event producer. Last year we produced the Elementals Gathering here in Missouri in Mountain Grove, Missouri. And it was a great success. Like we did really well with it. And this year, I'm going to have another great lineup of speakers like Alex Zek and Tom Barnett and Tom Cowen and Chris Crutchfield. Just like a whole bunch of killers that are going to be in that lineup. But my main interest right now is the biochar because of everything that's going on with the food industry. And that's like pretty much like everything that I've learned up to this point is best applied through the biochar company.

1:14:28 I love it. Man, such an impressive life and just being willing to dive right into everything. When we first met, I could have sworn you were younger than me. And now I'm embarrassed that you've been able to do so much. I think it's your voice. You got a little, you got a soft-spoken voice, and I think it makes you sound youthful. Man, just incredible range of experiences all around the world and all that good stuff. I mean, you are well on your way to truly building back better in the sense that no one else ever could. The way that the people who said it was an empty platitude, but you are a living example that we need. And it's awesome. It's just been great. It's awesome. Much appreciated. And take care, man. Thank you, Greg.

1:15:12 So say we all. This is the way, praise be to he. Topher, gardener, really bringing it. Another guy whose true will and purpose is baked right into his name. A gardener in many senses of the word. And this really is just some of my favorite stuff these days. He is a guy who has a strong permaculture base, but can take it a lot further with all sorts of esoteric exploration and testing and trial and error. And I love hearing about his results. I think I said what I meant to say backwards there at the end. But yes, I really thought he was younger than me and he had done all this from pro football to being so far downfield on everything that, at least in my head, I want to do.

1:15:56 But no, he's 50, which is hard to believe, but at least it gives me nine more years to do a true side-by-side comparison. And I'm going to catch up, I promise. You know, we started this one talking about the need for people to go in this direction. And the need is only growing. One of my San Diego friends showed me a screenshot of $8.99 a gallon gas. I think that's crazy. I also think it's a boomer thing like talking about the weather to constantly be talking about gas prices. But when we get to $8.99, how can we not say something? I think the national average is around seven, which is also crazy.

1:16:37 And we know it's about more than just affordability for the individual. I mean, yeah, obviously it erodes the individual's income for doing the same work, just trying to get there and back home. But the whole trucking and distribution network runs on thin margins and high volume. And a couple of dollars a gallon throws off all the math. It's not good. Not only is the fake fertilizer price shooting up, but now the cost to get it where it needs to go is also sky high. And it's not easy, but it is simple. If you stay entrenched in the conventional system, it's pretty clearly going to squeeze everyone more and more over the next handful of years.

1:17:18 And maybe it never goes back. But a lot of these people I interview, Topher, Joe Saladin, Mark Shepard, another faded surname. Actually, I had to look this up, but Saladin, that is a name that I didn't know much about, but in Arabic, it means lofty, honorable, and majestic. And he is quite a majestic man, quite honorable. And his goals don't seem lofty now, but when he just started, they certainly were. And then there's another language that's spoken in the Philippines that is Tagalog Tagalog, Tagalog, I guess. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing it.

1:17:57 But in that language, Saladin means touch or to explore by feeling with the hands. And that's right over the target, too. I mean, that's exactly what he does. But the point is that in recent years, I've probably gotten a bit further away from here's another history lesson on the Rockefellers and more into here's examples of people thriving because they have separated themselves from the dependency on the system that is slowly chipping away at everyone who's shackled to it. And I think the thing that holds us back the most is fear. We are afraid we've been given these archetypes from the system of a poor farmer struggling.

1:18:37 You don't want to be independent because you're only going to fuel your own demise, your own slow death. But the reality is actually the opposite. And so, the best medicine for the fear of taking that leap is the examples. So, that's the usefulness, I think, in a lot of these guys. And you can see that phrase, you will own nothing and be happy, only getting more and more true as people get deeper into the system with expensive condos in the city and higher HOAs. I actually looked into condos a little bit the other day because there's a lot I like about our house and our space here, but I don't love Florida that much.

1:19:18 And the fire ants and the mosquitoes, they're just beating me up. I can't keep the chicken coop mosquito-free no matter how much I try. And these birds getting picked apart at night with these vampiric mosquitoes, it doesn't seem good. So, yes, there's a lot I don't like. And my wife was on a trip with her friends in Denver, and I was like, Well, you know what? I love Denver. Maybe we could get like a small condo there and go there when the summers are getting bad. But the average monthly HOA for a condo there is $500 a month for just a basic place, and then it gets as high as $1,200 for some of these like really nice places. And that's not even counting the cost of the actual place and the taxes and everything else.

1:20:01 So, you're just burning that money right off the top. You will never pay that off. That's a forever cost. So, it's just disheartening because that's not going to happen. But I was surprised with how rough it is and how high that cost is. And I know people who are truly stuck in their condos, they can't save enough to get out when they keep getting hit with special assessments and just general life maintenance costs and $8.99 a gallon gas. And we all know how insane the healthcare system is, but obviously, I got a front row seat to that recently. But if most of the people I know had to go through what I went through, they would be economically shattered.

1:20:43 I'm beaten up, but I will make it. And it's another reason why you can't live in these polluted cities, stepping over mentally unhinged homeless people just to order preservative stuffed pizza from a walk-up window, chugging Celsius to get through the day. Look at the cascade of benefits from the lifestyles of someone like Topher. He's far less likely to have a medical crisis because he's living on fresh food and fresh air. Sure, he might get a bad cut, but you piss on it and you get back out there. Damn it. I kid. And I do constantly feel a little inadequate and embarrassed because I'm trying to move in that direction in life. It is kind of all public, but I feel like I take one step forward and two steps back.

1:21:26 Everything out there is overgrown. The medical crisis I had meant I wasn't getting out there at all. And it's just like worse every day that I don't give it some attention. The animals eat everything that does grow. The weather's brutal. And me and my wife are largely alone. And we got the two kids to manage. They don't want to be out there as long as we would be able to be out there. And I can't call my buddies and say, hey, let's mulch the yard next week and then we'll do yours the week after. I do know this guy, Pete, who runs the channel Green Dreams, puts up big numbers. He's a great guy. And he has an awesome local nursery that only focuses on edible plants and trees.

1:22:08 But I've spent a lot of money with him already. And he was out here helping me plan stuff out. And he brought a crew of guys that had some small equipment. And they did in a day what takes me like 15 days to do. And that's if I don't have to work. He asked what equipment I had. And it's like, I got this shovel and I got this wheelbarrow. And he just could not believe that the work that we had done was done by hand like that. And yeah, it's probably crazy. But even that equipment is like $1,000 here, $1,000 there. And then where do you store it? So I'm just kind of wondering how to proceed from here, honestly.

1:22:49 And I'm venting just to let you know that even though it's the right direction, I'm struggling. And I don't want to present the situation with rose-colored glasses or anything like that. But I do love that phrase. It's not easy, but it is simple. I just don't see another path. We won't vote our way out of this. Nobody's coming to save us. The same nefarious corporations will increase market share and decrease quality until we're all broken dead. But there will be pockets and networks of people doing things the old school way. And not even just old school, but look at the systems we talked about today.

1:23:26 The stuff they never wanted us to know about. You can have a Tesla tech, geodomed little community on a few acres of land and live a pretty fulfilling life. People stuck in the smart city condos are eating. this sort of content up, just dreaming of getting out, afraid to actually do it. If you do these things and decide what part of the system you want to make a business out of and document it all through the digital platforms, I think most people would be happier and would enjoy the independence. Is it biochar, compost, electroculture antennas, cloudbusters, water vortexing products, hempcrete building materials, grafting trees, selling cuttings?

1:24:09 Who knows? There's so many options. I bet if I did start making cuttings and finding the right way to ship them correctly, there are people who would get a kick out of knowing their eventually huge mulberry tree came from Carlwood Farms, right? Maybe. I actually have about a dozen people I barter with for their yearly plus subscription: organic tea companies, dressmakers, where my wife gets something every year or two, and several coffee people who send me bags of organic whole bean coffee for our Espresso machine. And one of them recently was like, hey, we also started making and selling this soil amendment. And I hesitate to say names because I don't want anyone to get in trouble for associating with me.

1:24:52 But it is an algae that works as a microbe food biostimulant, boosting the soil microbiome and indirectly increasing plant yields. So I said, sure, I don't really need any more coffee. Let's do that. Just another example. You can position yourself as part of this transition. And if you find yourself drawn to one aspect of it or another, or a single product or service, do that. And hopefully it's something people need over and over again. Otherwise, there's just a lot of people who will slowly watch this movement grow without them while they worry every day if they're still going to have a job that they don't even want or enjoy.

1:25:32 When you go independent, you get to control how hard you work and how much you produce and actually get to enjoy the full benefits of it, pass or fail, not just some shavings off the corporate block. I occasionally hear people say, well, it won't be for everyone. And even though I struggle with what I'm doing, I kind of disagree with that statement. No, it is kind of for everyone. Eating is for everyone. Breathing is for everyone. If the system you depend on is corrupt and broken, you can't just say, well, farm life ain't for me. Because if that's your best solution for the next 50 years, it probably will kill you, give you cancer, drain your income, and your shitty job will replace you with software as soon as it can.

1:26:15 You know, I never like these if-we-all just arguments because we never collectively do anything, right? But these corporations need to grow 10% a year or they're considered failing. And every person who does make the choice to live like Topher or some of these other people and create value in this growing network of independent naturalists, I guess, is one more person who's not feeding those beasts and is instead thriving on a growing number of people looking for ways to divest from the system and looking for people and products and services to help them do it. Sometimes I think I should just start wrapping copper around wooden dowels instead of fighting the YouTube algorithms.

1:29:11 Nobody does it that way. All the digital marketing books say that I'm an idiot, but we're still running this test for a little while to see if it costs me money or not. So use it while it's available and help me help you. All right. Well, I'm glad I've gotten to know Topher. He was very persistent in courting me, and I'm glad he didn't give up because now he won't be able to get rid of me. Good dude to know. Now, as we do, let's talk about the last show. And boy, what a show it was. Kurt Metzger, geez. Not the best timing, obviously, with the elephant graveyard thing and his very vocal defense of his friend Joe Rogan.

1:29:51 I do not fault him for that. Loyalty is a great quality in a friend. We should all hope to have friends that care about us enough that much to support us when we need it. But on top of that, he is a polarizing guy. I love him, but I've always really liked having wild characters in my life. When I'm the less outspoken one in a friendship, it makes me feel very good and very normal. And that is rare. But look, THC has a horrible history on YouTube. They remove shows, they give me strikes. I'm surprised I still have a channel, but they put all kinds of weird limits on the channel too. Like one example, if you look at other shows like a Danny Jones or something,

1:30:32 and you look at the show notes and the way that links are displayed, they have these nice little clean graphic buttons. I spent half a day trying to figure out how to do that, only to find out that I'm not allowed to do it when I have as many strikes as I have. It isn't a technical thing. It's just not allowed for me. So are these little paper cuts they give me, you know, making my links look less appealing to click on? It's so stupid, but we know it all works. We know that these are the little things that affect numbers and in aggregate, it starts to make a real impact.

1:31:10 It is dumb, but it all works against me. While the competition is only growing and their talent agencies and managers have YouTube relationships that keep them from getting in the same kind of trouble, blah, blah, blah. But nobody shares an audio-only show ever. You need to have video and you need these clips to circulate or you just don't grow. So I'm lucky enough that some people in this space who do have those resources and do get bigger numbers than me actually like me enough to help me out in one way or another. Danny Jones having me on helped a little bit. Professor Jang liking me and doing two shows with me has helped a little.

1:31:51 The war mode guys and the shows we've done together also helped. And I feel like I actually resonate with them most because they got out of their shitty jobs doing this and they're also regular guys who can talk about other regular things. And they also don't do ads. And Kurt being cool enough to come on has also clearly helped. Just look at the view count of my last few episodes. Jason Quid, 13,000. Jordan Crowder, 12,000. Ethical Skeptic, 10,000. Guy Anderson, 21,000. People like the alphabet. Lance Baker and Matt Dragonstone, 19,000. And all those shows had much more time to cook. And Kurt Metzger, 48,000.

1:32:33 Ladies and gentlemen, we do good as a podcast. That is great. But no doubt, the YouTube counts are low. And I don't even care that much. It's not an ego thing. But guests who I might pitch on the show, that's the first place they're going to look. And they see that and it doesn't look good. And then they might not think of it as only one part of the larger thing we do. And in this case, it's right there. Plain black and white. Clearly, Kurt brought in some new eyes. So I know the diehards would prefer when I just have obscure researchers on who do deep work and I've read the book and it's all super dense and unexpected.

1:33:11 I like that too. But every once in a while, I got to do a little networking. The platforms like YouTube and Spotify want to monopolize the funnels through which people get this kind of content. Podcasts, YouTube shows, whatever. And they want to shut some people out and pump up others. others. The ones they pump up, they generally have some kind of leverage over, even if it's just being part of an agency or something. But it's a beautiful thing that some of the individuals who have some of these various benefits or are just friends with others in comedy who do really, really well, they respect me enough to collaborate here and there.

1:33:51 And that's keeping me relevant and introducing tens of thousands of new people to what we've been doing quietly outside the club for 15 years. It is important and it's part of the job that I've neglected a lot. And I'm just trying to make up for lost time, largely motivated by having a family now and seeing the numbers kind of plateau a little bit while others are growing. And in some cases, not naming names, doing a much worse job. So I am thankful for Kurt. He is fully aware that he gets the eyeballs and he brought them to us. So if you care about THC and me, then maybe cut Kurt some slack. He is who he is, but he did us a solid whether you see it that way or not.

1:34:34 The numbers don't lie. Nor does our plus rating system that keeps me honest and I can never hide from, and that's why I like it. And this show with Kurt settled in at 3.4. Oof. Wow. It's hard to remember a show that was under four, and that's quite a bit under, and it hurts. And I see a lot of the comments that are kind of addressing me directly and saying that they seem to sense a little FOMO or that I want to climb the social podcasting ladder or this comment here, which is not so bad. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I hope Greg realizes he doesn't need the frat boy click status.

1:35:19 It's a badge of credibility in his line of work at this point. Well, that's a compliment, really, but I do just want to ease the concerns of some of the listeners on some of these things and the examples that they used. When I mentioned a couple times that Joe Rogan has followed me for over 10 years and still does, it's really not me trying to suckle up to the teat or humble brag. I'm just objectively saying that given the content of this show, that is interesting, isn't it? Does he listen to maybe mine for guests or just to keep tabs on the conspiracy world? I don't know, but it's just an insight into his interest that he doesn't share on his own show.

1:36:03 I mean, he's known as conspiracy guy, but like conspiracy 101, conspiracy light, right? It's interesting that he would listen to this, or he might. I don't really know. The thing about podcasting is you can't really tell who's listening, but you can kind of get a sense of it by looking at who follows you through social media. It's also funny that Big Boy from Outcast has followed me for years, and apparently, one of the guys from Slipknot, though it's not really my thing, and I don't know who. And also, Travis Barker follows me on Instagram, which I didn't know until the clipmakers used a clip of us talking about the skanking rabbit and the way its ears and arms are positioned like a hidden swastika.

1:36:46 Now, people say, oh, this guy doesn't know about skanking. Yes, I do. I was a ska punk kid, but that doesn't change the fact that, yes, the arms would be placed like this, but the ears could be placed any which way. And they happen to be placed like a swastika. So that clip went kind of viral. And a lot of people were like, this guy's the dumbest fucking idiot ever. This show sucks. What a moron, blah, blah, blah. And then I saw a comment that was like, interesting that Travis Barker follows this account. I was like, oh shit. So I went and looked and he does. And several of these people mentioned, it's not like they follow tens of thousands of people.

1:37:22 Some only follow a couple hundred. And I'm in that club. And so they seem to have a genuine interest in THC topics, even though some of these people live and work inside the system at a high level. That's curious. It's not like an ego boost for me. It's just an interesting thing. I look at it as almost like a longing for a more independent or alternative life from some of these people, but they're pot committed. Who knows? But when I see it, because of the nature of the content, how can I not be just a little intrigued by that? Anyway, I see terms in the comments like I'm trying to rub elbows with some of these folks or get into the click.

1:38:04 And I understand how a person could see it that way, especially since I not only lost my best work friend in Gordon, but also moved away from all my real world friends since moving to Florida. And yes, I am just another victim of the adult male loneliness epidemic. It's a big club. But I promise you, I'm not classic. clout chasing or trying to climb a social ladder or really do anything but keep THC relevant in a crowded space that's trying to push us out, largely due to the corporate takeover of podcasting. Hypothetically, imagine Tucker asked me to come on because he has a credibility issue and he wants to bring me on because he sees that my audience considers me authentic and he wants some of that to rub off.

1:38:51 What I would get is someone who has the full benefit of the corporate cartel and entire system pushing 100x the level of usual eyes onto THC for a day. And some of those people check out the archive and become plus members and actually boost me and all the great people that we've covered. So yes, I would do it, even though I know I'd get shit for it. And I agree with those who would give me shit because I've just been stubborn on every other aspect that helps a show grow from ads to moving to video. And it's only hurt me. The least I can do is take the networking opportunities that do come to me, right?

1:39:33 I don't really believe in that if you're not growing your dying philosophy because we aren't a publicly traded company. But I'm telling you, we need some outside attention to get back to where we were just even a few years ago. And those who do invite me in, maybe we should just cut them some slack because they absolutely do not have to do that. They could just say, fuck that guy and poach my guests and let me drown in the digital sea. That's the alternative. So I totally get people who rated that show low. I'm just hoping that they can see the other side of it as well. Consider it like nine out of every 10 episodes is me doing the same old thing for the OGs.

1:40:14 And then I have to save one for trying to do some sort of networking and bring new eyes to THC and throw a wrench in the suppression algorithm with people who have eyes that follow them wherever they go. It's just what it is. So I'm still the same guy. I joke about the situation a bit, but just trust me a little bit, okay? I think I've earned that. If you want to see me keep this shit viable, this sort of networking is a part of it. If you want to criticize all those who have the eyes and the systems resources, but don't throw me a bone, well, of course I support that. But this is also why it's better that I just go on other shows. And then 10 out of 10 THC interviews can be the same old thing, but I have to be invited.

1:40:59 Even if you think I do a much better job when I'm doing my traditional thing, I also sometimes, I guess, have to be reciprocal. But that's how I feel about all that. I felt the need to explain myself a bit more clearly and completely. And hopefully that makes it better for me and not worse, right? Maybe I'm digging myself a bigger hole. We'll see. Now the meetup calendar, hiresidemeetups.com. Make local events to find other THC listeners who might want to help you build out the network that jives with the things we talked about today. Here's what we got. Next on the list is October 3rd, Edgewood, Washington at Acorn Brewery, also October 3rd.

1:41:37 Cobden, Illinois, Feather Hills Vineyard and Winery, October 4th, Urbana, Illinois, Riggs Brewing Company, October 11th, St. Paul, Minnesota, Black Stack Brewing, also October 11th, Hudson, New York, Upper Depot Brewing. I think that one's new. And then North Coat Point, North Coat Tavern in Auckland, New Zealand, October 26th. And then we have the Trails Cafe once again in Los Angeles on November 8th. And Quartzite, Arizona, November 13th, Quartzite Improvement Association. That's the Truth Expo. Go if you feel inclined, but it's not free. And then Raleigh, North Carolina, the Raleigh Brewing Company, November 14th.

1:42:21 So pretty stacked calendar. I love it. Good stuff. RSVP on the site if you plan to go. It's helpful for the host to know how many people to expect. And it's just good manners. If you don't hear about an event near you, but are event curious, just go make your own. It's low pressure. It's free. Give me a two-week lead time. I'll call out the events. People will hear about it. Expect to meet a handful of cool folks in your area and see what you can do with it. Well, that is the show. Big fan of this one. I hope we're back. The plus people will keep me accountable, that we know. And I'm very thankful that they do. And I'm thankful for every member that I have because it is all I have.

1:43:00 Take care, you and yours. I'm out of here. Your move, Titans of the corporate takeover of everything, abundance obscurers and scarcity system supporters. Your fucking move. I know it sounds illogical, but it just keeps happening. I see you're getting kind of skeptical. skeptical No need for deeper examining The boss just said to mark it down And you gotta listen to the boss Buy the flowers, ring the doorbell Tell her we're sorry for her loss Cause it looks like we got another suicide with their hands tied behind their back Another

1:43:44 case of calling it in on life after saying they'd never do that Just one more unfortunate accident seem to inconveniently die I used to ask myself the same thing How normal is this, honestly But now when the man nods my way I just nod back modestly

1:44:27 It's not a threat, it's not a bribe per se But I got the message somehow And no matter what the wife racks up There's always money in the bank account So it looks like we got another break in here Random robbery that just went bad The victim was supposed to testify soon But now they won't be doing that Just one more unfortunate accident At a very untimely time Can you believe how often inconvenient

1:45:10 folks tend to inconveniently die This is bigger than either of us The machine keeps chugging along There doesn't seem to be any way I know to write this kind of wrong But if you're having second thoughts If you wanna quit, you should We can always find another guy with benefits this good So it looks like another situation where the accelerator's stuck

1:45:49 It's rare to happen on these cars today, but sometimes it's just bad luck Just one more unfortunate accident At a very untimely time Can you believe so many