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Madison Mindset the Podcast
317 ~ Exploring Herbalism With Herbalists: Katja & Ryn
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Hello Magical Human & welcome back to Madison Mindset the Podcast 🪻🌿
In this episode, join me for a beautiful conversation with Katya and Rin of the Holistic Herbalism podcast share their wisdom on making herbalism accessible and practical for everyday life.
episode overview:
• Herbalism is what happens when people and plants exist near each other – it's as fundamental as cooking
• Plants have been our health allies longer than modern medicine and contain complex compounds working together
• Foraging should be approached with deep awareness & responsibility
• Growing herbs is often more sustainable than wildcrafting and helps build deeper plant relationships
• Understanding your body's tendencies (hot/cold, damp/dry, tense/lax) helps match herbs to your needs
• Plants follow humans around the world, creating environmental conditions where certain plants thrive
• Commonwealth Herbs offers online education with video lessons, community support, and lifetime access
Visit commonwealthherbs.com to learn more about herbalism through their online courses and resources.
The Holistic Herbalism Podcast: http://commonwealthherbs.com/podcast
Connect on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/commonwealthherbs/?hl=en
Sourcing Herbs:
US: mountainroseherbs.com
Australia:
New South Wales:
Austral Herbs - https://www.australherbs.com.au/
Queensland:
Mudbrick Herb Cottage - www.herbcottage.com.au
Victoria:
Yarra Ranges Herb Farm - http://yarrarangesherbfarm.com.au/
Online:
http://allrareherbs.com.au/
http://herbalconnection.com.au/
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Hello, magical Human and welcome back to Madison Mindset the podcast. I am your host, madison. I'm a yoga teacher, a mindset and spirituality coach and a lover of all things, life and learning about ourselves and the meaning of this beautiful life we are sharing together feel incredibly blessed to introduce to you the hosts of the Holistic Herbalism podcast, which is one that I have gotten into quite a bit recently. I have a huge interest in herbalism and all things natural healing, so this podcast seemed to fall out of the sky and land in my phone, and it was the best finding of the year, would say, for myself. So I'm really excited to share this conversation with you. It was so much fun to have a conversation. Katya and Rin are both amazing people and really inspirational to talk to, so I learned so much in this conversation. I hope you get something out of it as well.
Speaker 1:Katya and Rin have been teaching together since 2009. They are focused on making high quality herbal education accessible for all learning styles, with curriculum grounded in personal experience, critical thinking and whole person approaches. They prioritize personal relationships with students so that no one feels like they are learning in isolation. Whether you want to learn herbalism as a hobby, a career or a calling. They can give you the tools to integrate herbal practices directly into your life. For me personally, I love learning about herbalism so I can work with it for my own self-care and, as Katya and Rin describe it, as first aid. So I think it's really important that we all gain some kind of foundational understanding about the impact of herbs and their healing benefits. So I really hope you enjoy this episode, sink into it, go and check out Katya and Rin, go and check out the podcast and enjoy learning all about how herbs and humans were made to go together.
Speaker 1:Let's dive in. Enjoy. Welcome everyone. Welcome back to Madison Mindset, the podcast. I'm very excited today because I'm sitting with two superstars in my eyes. I've been absolutely obsessed with their podcast for the last few months and I just had to see if they'd come on and join me, because it's amazing. Welcome, katya and Rin. How are you both doing? Hi, we're so excited to be here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely Happy to see you.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I'm so excited. I'm literally looking at herbal superstars. It's incredible. Personally, I've been so interested in herbalism, but every time I go to learn something, I go oh wow, it's too much. Can't even like where do you start? You need all the herbs and apparently there's way more than just the ones you have in your kitchen and it's like I never have the right herbs. So I'm so glad that you put your podcast out into the world. So thank you for that service. It's beautiful.
Speaker 3:You're welcome, absolutely, yeah, we're always really excited when, when people find us through there and that way they get a sense to kind of hear how we talk and the kind of things we're interested in. And you know what our flow is like. Um, you know, we we teach primarily, but we want people to be there because they not just because they want herbs, but because we make sense to them. You know, and the podcast is a great way for us to be like listen, try it before you buy it. Yeah, yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:You know if. If budget is tight, then just learn it here.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, that's amazing. That's a beautiful service. I'd love to start by getting you guys to introduce yourselves individually and why you started herbalism, why it was such a big thing for you. It's probably a big story, but let's begin.
Speaker 2:You know, like a lot of herbalists have stories of, like my great grandmother and this and that and whatever. I do not have that story. I lived overseas a lot in high school and college and they I lived in places that had tea traditions and, of course, like in the States, we did not. I grew up in the South, and so there was sweet tea or like sun tea, and but there was none of this this, like you know, european tea time kind of thing, like none of that, um, and so when I came back to the states, it turns out that you can't you couldn't at that time buy tea, like it wasn't.
Speaker 2:There was like one european import store in harvard square that you could go and pay like an arm and a tea kettle to buy like a little tin of like good tea, and so I was like this is way too expensive for like a just got out of college budget. I have got to be able to make this stuff myself, and so that's why I started studying herbalism. Over time, though, it grew and grew, and I had a lot of health problems, um, and and like one at a time I started trying to deal with them herbally. It didn't start that way, though, it did not start glamorous, it was just I wanted cheaper tea love it, love it, yeah, fair enough know your ingredients and to know what was in there and why, and things like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, my story is I met a girl, um, as all good stories start, right, yeah, yeah, absolutely well.
Speaker 3:I mean, I I met her through through friends, through a social circle. Um, I had been living in Boston for some years and then suddenly one day everybody I knew in this crowd was suddenly like Katya is coming back. And I was like I thought I knew everybody. Who are you talking about? She had moved up to Vermont for some years and, like, had a whole farm there and everything. But she moved back to Boston and I met her through people and started spending time together and I was like what's with all these jars in your closet? You know what's going on. And she started teaching me herbalism and that was pretty much it for me, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:And now we're married. Oh, that's amazing. Oh, congratulations. That's such a herbal love story. That's beautiful in every way. In every way, that's fantastic. So I would love to know a little bit more. And for the listeners who have never heard of herbalism and like what are you talking about? What is herbalism Like? Where does it come from?
Speaker 3:Why should we pay attention to it? I'd love to know. Sure, yeah, so we're, we're, you know, from the U? S, and so we say herbalism, and I hope that everybody will cope with us doing that.
Speaker 2:It's fine.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we don't have H's here, we just they don't exist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Don't worry about them. It's rare that we actually say any other. You know, it's usually the Australians that leave out all the letters.
Speaker 3:So I'm happy with that. Skip over a few of them. It's fine.
Speaker 3:Herbalism is what happens when people and plants are near each other. It's I mean, it's as fundamental as cooking or as, like you know, weaving things into cord and baskets and stuff like that. People need to survive in the world and they need to eat, they need to carry things around, they need to heal wounds and fight infection, and plants have been here longer than we have and so they're really good at a lot of those things. Herbalism is not one tradition. It's a lot of different traditions and a lot of different practices that all kind of get grouped together under that term today.
Speaker 3:In the past people would have said, well, this is cooking and this is medicine, and this is art, you know, and this is entertainment and things like that. In the modern world we have herbalism as like an idea of a whole separate practice, a separate category or subject of study, but it's really integrated into everybody's life already. One thing we do with a lot of our students when they're first starting is to get them to identify the herbs that already live in their world. If you chew on ginger tablets or candies when you feel nausea, you've got herbalism. If you drink coffee, that's an herb that counts All right, yes, excellent yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, coffee is a powerful herb. We could do a whole hour on just that.
Speaker 2:He's done many hours on coffee, fair enough.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, I feel like the best place to start is where people already have plants in their life. Now, if it's house plants, if it's spices you cook with, if it's herbal remedies from your, from your grandparents, um, that's, that's where it starts, and even the most advanced and complex kind of clinical practice is rooted in those things and at least the way we practice comes back to those things or or or starts in those things. Even when we're trying to solve a complex health problem. Let's get herbs in your food. Let's get herbs you know, on your skin, in your air that you breathe, you know like all over you.
Speaker 2:I think one thing that's really important about the concept of herbalism and this has been on my mind a lot lately, as things are polarizing more and more into like camps around science and not science and like whatever, and also because we're talking to you in Australia and outside of the US, people held their traditions longer. Not all the traditions that came here got held on to or got remembered in quite the right way. It's not, of course, not always true, but um, and so I like my ideas around how to talk about what herbalism is have been shifting a little um to simply just saying herbalism is just uh, health care's just healthcare. Before we knew what a microscope was, we knew what plants were, and before we understood what a molecule was and how to isolate things with chemical processes, we were still working with many of those same chemicals, just in a more crude fashion.
Speaker 2:And humans have been doing science throughout all of history. Humans like every time that we try something and say I wonder what will happen if I try this, and then we try it and then we say, wow, that was interesting, I'm going to try it again and see if the same thing happens. That's science, and so like these things don't actually need to be at odds with each other. Herbalism is just tools that we've had longer than we have had microscopes. But there was a period of time when microscopes were first invented. All of the herbalists used microscopes. These were not competing tools, they were tools. That was like people practicing these traditions saw a new tool and said, ooh, I'm going to try that. That could probably help me.
Speaker 3:Still happens today. You know people who are getting interested in things like I don't know. The first thing that comes to mind is, like the MTHFR genetic variants and the way that that can change how people's physiology functions and the way that they metabolize or process various things, including food, including drugs and including herbs, and so that's like very, very new information. You know five, 10 years, something like that but some herbalists have found that relevant to the way they work and the kind of herbs they recommend to people. So that's that's like a process or a connection that's been happening the whole time and we shouldn't expect that to change anytime soon. It's again. It's it's humans and all of their knowledge and all of their existing tools looking at plants that they know or that they don't know yet, or that somebody else knows, and they want to learn more about and trying to find all the ways they can to do that.
Speaker 2:So like, just because, just like any tangible item that you maybe own, just because it's old doesn't mean that it needs to be replaced. Some things that you have that are old are like your favorite thing, right, whether it is like your grandmother's teacup or your like mom. I have this plate that my mom always put brownies on, and we had brownies a lot when I was a kid. So she was going to just put it in a yard sale because to her it was just a plate and I was like you can't get rid of that. That's the brownie plate, you know, and and so sometimes old things are worth holding onto. They're still good, they still work, they still whatever. And sometimes new things are great and helpful and we want them and we incorporate them into our lives, and so I feel like you know, herbalism is these things we have this separation between. We can't legally say herbalism is medical care, you know, in the.
Speaker 2:US. We can't legally say that, but in a sense that, but in a sense this is just one continuum of actually all the same desire, which is to care for people who are uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting. And would you both say that? Because what I've heard is you know human beings have been very disconnected from the natural world, so that all this knowledge, that you know why people would say you know my grandmother, my great grandmother used to do this, or you know this is an ancient remedy. Whatever it is, would you say that we have been disconnected from it and that's why it's so challenging for us to get into, or is it just somewhere we haven't looked? What's your opinion on that?
Speaker 3:I would just start by saying that the world is big and there are lots of people in it and there's lots of different cultures and lots of different habits of life, things like that. There are many people on this planet who have a direct, you know, connection to a long, long tradition and there wasn't't a break or it wasn't wasn't lost in the way. Um, here in the U S, a lot of us white people talk that way. We talk like, yeah, there was a tradition in my family line at some point but it broke sometime after they came over to Ellis Island and then we got, you know, americanized and like culturally flattened and, yeah, a lot of stuff was lost. So for people that look like me and Katya and live where we live, yeah, there has been a lot of disconnection and you see that I think manifested in the hunger people have for reconnecting.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah, I think it's also really important, though, to recognize that it wasn't lost to everyone there. Of course, throughout the world there are places where they never even tried to lose the tradition Like they, just they more gracefully incorporated new tools as they came. But in the United States there are many places where herbal tradition never was broken. In many immigrant communities and also in the African-American diaspora, those traditions were not necessarily lost, they were not necessarily broken. And then when we look at like the Appalachian region, so that's like the mountain chain that goes along the East Coast of the United States and that's a place with a really rich history but also a lot of poverty, and so that region also really never lost its root work, its herbal medicine traditions, because most people couldn't afford to go to medical doctors there.
Speaker 3:Or they just weren't around anymore, right.
Speaker 2:Or they just didn't exist in those areas because they were areas that were kind of like left behind. Actually, I don't even need quotes around that. They were like intentionally left behind by capitalism. Sorry, the powers that take yeah, Capitalism.
Speaker 3:Sorry, the powers that take yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I think it's really important, especially in the US. I'm not really certain how this plays out in Australia, but especially in the US, like kind of middle class white America have these ideas of like oh well, all of our traditions were lost and it's valuable to acknowledge that. Yes, our traditions, many of us, we did lose our traditions, but, on the other hand, not all traditions were lost, Like some people did hold their traditions still and we can just acknowledge that different people had different experiences.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting. So I've heard that a lot and I don't know if it's an Australian thing or if it's, you know, people who listen to the podcast will say, oh, I just feel so disconnected from nature. I don't know what any plant is, I don't know what, and I think herbalism is often, from what I've heard, is tied to foraging. Quite a lot People think herbalism foraging. You need to find the herbs. And I go for bushwalks and things and my partner will point out herbs and go. I've heard of that one that does this or this smells like rosemary. I bet you this would be a great like seasoning thing and I'm just like it all looks the same. I've got no idea. There's probably medicine everywhere. I've got no idea. There's probably medicine everywhere.
Speaker 1:In Australia we are taught from the Indigenous people that there is medicine everywhere and there's one particular plant that my father uses and he got it from his sister and that was passed on a little bit. But it's this amazing herb that literally it's called bush lettuce or there's a fancy name for it, but we call it bush lettuce. And you dry it out, drink it and if you're anxious or got any pain in your body, you don't care anymore. It's not like you're high, it's not a high thing, but it's like you just oh, it's like a softening relaxer. If you're in any kind of pain, you know, physical or mental pain, emotional pain. You're just like what was that thing? I was worried about? Oh yeah, hmm, what was that?
Speaker 3:thing I was worried about. Oh yeah, hmm, it's just amazing. That makes sense. That might actually be a lactuca species, um, which those are. I mean, even cultivated lettuce is like lactuca sativa, but there's around us lactuca cereola is a wild spiky lettuce and, like you say, uh, it's got a sedative effect. It helps you to sleep. It relieves pain.
Speaker 3:It's a handy, handy plant for sure yeah, yeah, there is medicine all around, there is food all around, there is delight all around in the plant world, and I think that you're right that a lot of people don't have that, uh, that recognition for plants the same way they do for for brands, like you might have seen these, where it's like one side is a whole set of brand logos and the other side is a bunch of leaf shapes and it's like how many can you identify Right? And it's it's funny because it's just a reflection of where we spend our time, where our attention is driven right. People recognize brands because they see them all the time, because they're important to them, because it's something they work with frequently. If they were out in the woods all day or out in the bush all day, they would know those plants better, even if they didn't know their names or if they didn't know all of their medicinal uses. They would know them on a level of personal connection and we absolutely encourage anybody interested in herbalism to go with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But there are some issues around foraging.
Speaker 2:Before you say that I wanted to add one thing there. I before we, before you say that I wanted to add one thing there, which is that a lot of people have a lot of fear of plants. You know they're afraid to try something and listen. That's valid. If you are just out and you're not certain that you can accurately ID a plant, that's very valid. But even when it is something that is like purchased, you know there's often fear around just trying the tea I don't know what this is going to do. Will it hurt me? Will it make me weird? Will it whatever?
Speaker 2:And I think that also is a reflection of that disconnection, of just no longer recognizing. But like we can go into a drugstore and see the Tylenol or the ibuprofen or the like, whatever you know all the different things that they have there, and the Benadryl, I don't know, like whatever, and everybody knows what those things do but we don't feel comfortable with plants and we don't feel like it's safe to try something that isn't available at the grocery store. It's okay, cause lots of herbs are available at the grocery store, but um, but. So I think that also is is part of that disconnect, is just that that fear. But the thing is that it is literally just like the brands and the leaves. It's the same. Like you're not afraid to go to the drugstore and just try the allergy medicine because you've had it with your runny nose, but but like we're afraid to try like nettles because I don't know, that's a plant, it could be poisonous, maybe it'll kill me, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, people worry, you know. So when it comes to foraging, it can be a really great way to connect with nature and to to feel that that closeness to it. That's valuable. You know, even above and beyond the like physical action of the plant on your physiology, you know the medicine of it or the chemistry of it. So there's a ton of value in that as foraging and as wildcrafting, which is kind of like a, it means foraging for herbs, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like a specialized word for herbs.
Speaker 3:Yeah um, that's, that's picked up in popularity. Um, I think that the covid spike drove some of that, at least here, because people were like I should be alone, I should be outside. Well, let's look at some plants, you know, um, but anyway it's, it's been on an upward tick for a while.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of influencers that are like foragers and they have these social media accounts about foraging. Yeah, it looks like fun. Yeah, I mean, it looks like fun.
Speaker 3:It can be. It can also be a lot of effort, Like if you've never dug up a burdock root, uh, you're going to need a shovel and maybe a pickaxe and a lot of time and patience, you know to get it all over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, wow, it's really in there.
Speaker 3:It's actually worth saying just as a side comment, that sometimes people think of like wildcrafting as a way to get free medicine. It's free by money, but your time, your energy, those are also finite resources and sometimes people underestimate how much of that it's going to require. But there can be issues of overharvesting and especially for plants that are like endangered or threatened or at risk. These are like grades of ecological sustainability. We're very, very hesitant to encourage anybody to go and wildcraft for those.
Speaker 3:Wow, the best thing is to start wildcrafting for weeds, right and invasive plants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, invasives are the perfect ones.
Speaker 3:Because they're abundant, because nobody's going to yell at you for digging them up, right, you're not going to get in trouble. Ones because they're abundant, because nobody's going to yell at you for digging them up, right, you're not gonna get in trouble. Uh, because many of them do have great medicine or other other positive attributes to them and we're definitely not going to run out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I also feel like forage, forage for um relationship, like forage for finding the plant in its natural surroundings and then meditate with it, like just hang out with it, observe it, but don't take it. And then like maybe you can take some seeds and grow them in a place where you like steward the land, or maybe you can just get it at a plant center and grow it yourself. Plant center and grow it yourself. I really advocate for growing over foraging because, first off, when you grow plants, you appreciate people who grow plants and you appreciate the price of store-bought plants. When you try to grow enough of a plant for you to make into tea, then you start to realize that's why it's so expensive to buy good quality stuff, because it's actually a ton of work. And so if somebody wants to start off growing a plant, catnip and calendula are my two favorites because they are like almost nobody's allergic to either one and they're abundant. If you just have one bucket and you like it doesn't even have to be a pretty, um, and they're abundant. You, if you just have one bucket and you like it doesn't even have to be a pretty pot, whatever it can be a bucket, it's fine, and you grow one plant in there, you will get a lot of calendula flowers or a lot of catnip, so you get a lot for a plant that is pretty fault, tolerant and patient with you as a person who's learning to grow plants.
Speaker 2:But, um, but yeah, like there have been people, there's a plant I don't, I don't think it grows in Australia, but it grows in the U S called ghost pipe and, um, it became very popular because it helps with. It can help with anxiety and it can help with, like, overstimulation. Now, listen, there are lots of plants who can do that. It doesn't have to be ghost pipe, but ghost pipe is a plant that's at risk and you have to handle it in a very specific way to make the medicine. And and so people think, oh, I know how to identify ghost pipe, I'm going to go harvest a lot and make money selling it. But then they don't process it properly. And then somebody said they had like 50 pounds of dried ghost pipe, which is like I don't know. They took all of it from an entire forest or something to get 50 pounds.
Speaker 3:Tiny little thing. When it dries, it loses like 98% of its weight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it doesn't weigh anything, and so the point is, when it dries, you also can't use it anymore. It has to be tinctured fresh, like immediately, like you'd pick it, you put it right into the alcohol and so, so, like that's a big problem with foraging. Okay, so ghost pipe is probably not a plant that is applicable for y'all, but but you can think of other plants that are like this right, that are like susceptible, like they're at risk, they're like struggling to survive because of habitat destruction, because of climate change, because whatever. And then somebody goes and just like picks all of it and they and it's not even usable because they didn't handle it properly, and so yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So foraging, I like I don't think it's never appropriate, but gardening is always appropriate and and you can forage just to take pictures and for the joy and delight of seeing a plant in nature, for building that connection, and that could that. That's just, I think, a little better.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, the overarching idea here is just you need to know the plant before you go grabbing at it. Right, like there are some plants that are really really giving and and renewable in that sense you know. So, like a pine tree, catnip, catnip something out of those, we're not going to harm that organism at all. Right, we can gather a basket full of what we're looking for, take it home, have all we needed for the month or the year, and the plant isn't damaged in any particular way.
Speaker 2:I mean assuming that it's a large, mature, strong tree.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean here it's really good because the pines are so tall that you can't take anything off of them, but in the windstorms, like a big branch will come down and that's your pine. Like you get all the needles off of that and then, perfect, you have a lot. So that's ideal. So there's just a lot of variability between species, like what they can handle and what kind of conditions they can grow in and how much of a particular niche they need to grow at all, like the ghost pipe thing, or like was this a really special year that had the perfect kind of weather for this plant to grow really strong? But you don't know that next year is going to be a drought year and the plant is maybe going to almost die out, and so it can't like it can't actually handle the pressure of harvesting.
Speaker 2:There's just, there's just a lot of things to consider and if you think about it, it's really just like humans. You know like if you have a friend and you're just always asking for favors but you never show up with a cake, um, like eventually your friend can't handle being harvested anymore, you know, um. And so if you think about a plant more like you think about a human. Then you realize like, oh, this plant actually has plans, like this plant has a life that it wants to live and I could be a part of that life, or I could not be a part of that life, but if I'm going to be a part of that life, I could not be a part of that life, but if I'm going to be a part of that life, I should be a very polite house guest and only take a little bit and not stress the plant out, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, I absolutely love it.
Speaker 2:Okay, good, I don't want to make anybody feel sad about foraging Like please forage, use your phone to take lots of beautiful pictures and then and then sit down and have a nice meditation or do some yoga with your plant, or whatever.
Speaker 1:No, I'm absolutely. I love this so so much because it's it's so important to understand what we're doing. And like even for myself, like I've seen, like so many people out there in pretty dresses, foraging with pretty baskets, and it makes you go like, oh, I just want to do that and I think people just don't understand. I was always worried about identifying the plant and being like well, yeah, I could eat something that kills me and that wouldn't be fun, so I was always worried about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a huge problem.
Speaker 1:But it's just so important to have this conversation because I think people are getting more and more into the idea, especially people who listen to our podcasts right around this world, that are interested in natural healing and mindfulness and you know all of these things it's so important to keep in mind, like the safety and security of nature and of yourself and having that respect, because I haven't heard it explained that way and I think it's so valuable that people hear that, because things that get trendy on social media often destroy the reality of a situation. So I'm really glad that we could have that conversation, because I also felt pressured to go and forage. I was like, oh, I need to go and figure out how to forage, and now I'm not stressed about that at all.
Speaker 1:So I'm really happy that we could have that conversation because the only plant I can identify is the bush lettuce and it looks like a common weed that people pull out and they they pull it out of their gardens all day, every day, when they're gardening, and they keep pulling it out and throwing it away and it's like, no, that's good, that's a good weed, we love that one.
Speaker 2:Like take that one see, that's also the perfect way to forage, because then you just go to all your neighbors and you say, can I weed your garden for you?
Speaker 2:and they will be like that sounds great and then you just take all the bush lettuce and here the plant, the plant that is that is called ground ivy and some people call it creeping charlie or ale hoof. It's actually possible. You have it in australia because that's like one of the um colonizer plants. You know that came from from europe, um and um. It grows like crazy in people's gardens and they're always weeding it out.
Speaker 2:But it's also such an important herb, um, in terms of, like lymphatic movement in the head. So if you have a sinus infection or an ear infection, or also just if your brain is really stagnant and you're feeling like cause you know there's lymph in your head too Well, technically it's glymph with a G, but like it's like still the same kind of fluid that needs to move around and your brain can get stagnant too. So this is like such a fantastic herb and you really can't buy it. You really have to harvest it somewhere, but it grows in everybody's gardens. So you just, you just tell all your friends I want to come when you weed your garden and then you take all the ground ivy with you or, in your case, the bush lettuce, yeah, Perfect.
Speaker 1:I really want to know what the real name for bush lettuce is, because it's been. It's a very old plant in Australia. It's used by all the Aboriginal people, so it would be interesting to know what the technical name is, because I'm pretty sure that's just the nickname.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I will definitely look it up as soon as we're done here. Beautiful, beautiful, because now I'm very interested also.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's my favorite, for sure.
Speaker 3:I know almost nothing about australian plants. You know, like we hear about eucalyptus. Uh, after that I'm stuck.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah I mean, I know that y'all certainly have a lot of european plants that came over. You know, I'm sure that you have, like plantain, not the banana but the the green um, spiny leaf um, I'm certain that you have that because that has traveled everywhere. That the ships went yeah dandelions.
Speaker 3:I presume dandelions yeah, yeah, yeah probably burdock, probably mugwort, you know things like that so they're.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I'm sure that, I'm sure you guys have mugwort, yeah there's plants that are world travelers now.
Speaker 3:They follow people, they go where people go and people go all over. So there are a lot of plants that have become global citizens. At this point, that's amazing.
Speaker 2:And there are plants that just live in all kinds of different places. There's a plant called Solomon's Seal that I had a Korean friend and she was like, oh, you're an herbalist, and she was telling me all about this plant and I was like you know what that sounds like? That sounds like Solomon's seal. But I was like, oh, that, like I don't think that plant grows in Korea. Oh, no, it doesn't. It's like super popular and so it's just like. That's also true with Chinese plants. Also, many of the plants that grow in China also grow in the US and we're not, like they're considered native here. They, they I mean people have been moving between the continents for much longer than we give them credit for, but but they're not, they're not considered invasive or like naturalized or anything. They're considered native here and native in china too or, you know, like wherever else. So a lot of times, yeah, the plants are the same, even though, um, nobody put them there on purpose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, isn't that funny. They're so intelligent, kind of following people around. It's like their own little.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just amazing yeah, and you know humans make a particular set of environmental conditions, especially like packed soil, you know. So, like the plantago the plantain that she was talking about a minute ago, that one, it loves to be where people are. You see it growing on walking trails and like bike paths and stuff like that, and it can handle all the traffic all day long, but it it likes the kind of compressed earth that we create just by being people. Yeah, so, yeah, or in a city, you know, in a city the environment is hot, dry and salty and a lot of the plants that can live in in cities are also plants that would have grown on, like, uh, rocky cliffs on the coastline you know where it was a similar type of exposure and it's the like.
Speaker 3:Plants are native not to a geographical location, they're native to a biosphere, to conditions of sunlight and water and salt and soil quality and things like that. And wherever they find those, they're going to grow and thrive.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I love it. You guys make it sound like humans are not destructive on this earth, which is nice, because that's another thing I hear a lot. It's nice to hear that. You know like, yeah, there's this. You know it is all right. You know like some plants love the compact soil. You know it's like okay, it makes it sound a bit nicer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, we have. We have the power to create environments where many things can grow we like. Not all stewardship is leaving stuff alone, right, or not all conservation is leaving stuff alone. That model of conservation is pretty firmly established. But it's also like really validly challenged this idea that there were these virgin forests in the North and South Americas before the white people showed up. But they weren't. They were heavily shaped by human intervention.
Speaker 2:They were managed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, where we live up in the Northeast region, there would have been controlled burns for millennia. That people would do, and they would also maintain trails and clear out things. But the environment that the Europeans walked into wasn't naturally occurring. Quote, unquote unless you include humans as part of nature, which is probably the better way to do it.
Speaker 2:And if you think about, do y'all have beavers in Australia?
Speaker 1:No, never seen a beaver.
Speaker 2:They don't even sound real. No, no, no, they're real. You know they're like just platypuses, but in North America we never see platypuses.
Speaker 1:anyway, they're gone. Well, they're not gone, but they don't come around people at all. No.
Speaker 2:Never see them, beavers you have to be very still and quiet to see a beaver, but you will see evidence of beavers in lots of places and they also were hunted nearly to extinction but then they've been coming back. But it turns out, you know, people get mad about beavers because they cut down trees and flood areas and stuff like that, but actually beavers are amazing at wetland management and water management in general, and they're way better at it than humans are, which doesn't mean that humans are not good at anything, it's just, in this particular case, beavers are really good at water management and beavers can prevent forest fires and beavers can prevent drought and beavers can all this kind of stuff. And so the places where they hunted beavers out, now they're starting to reintroduce them because they are part of the ecosystem. And so when we just think about how can we be part of the ecosystem instead of moving mindlessly through the world that we live, in we don't have to be destructive.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Our impact? Yes, okay, we have an impact, but all creatures have an impact. But that impact can also be collaborative with the nature that we live in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And I mean, even in the middle of any any like metropolis city, you're going to find wildlife, you know you're going to find foxes and you're going to find raccoons and bats and like plants growing out of the sidewalk and it's all there. We just sort of decide not to count that as nature. We decide to draw this firm line and say, like, there's nature over there and there's civilization over here, and never the twain shall meet. But it's never been like that and the more we believe it is, the more problems we create.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I absolutely love the perspective that you're putting into this, because I'm all about the mindset shifts and I've had a big one right now, so that's amazing. I would love to. Yeah, I would love to get into self-care to some degree, because I love talking about that. And if someone who's listening to this is going, yeah, I'm definitely not going to have as many jars as you guys do, you know, I'm definitely not like. I'm not like I'm not going to be able to do this, you know, but I do want to take care of myself and get a better understanding of what herbs to use.
Speaker 1:I think people know about you know your turmeric and your ginger and things like that, for you know inflammation and I think that's getting to the point where people know that. But I and I think that's getting to the point where people know that but I would love to know if you guys have a few suggestions that are really easy that anyone can do, whether it's a tea or just something that I know you use the term first aid a lot. So even if there's something that if everyone could know this thing or these few things, it would make a big difference Like is, what are those things I would love to know.
Speaker 2:This is a popular herbalist party game and it's like usually we call it like the desert island game. Right, like, if you were, if you were standing on a desert island, which like five herbs or whatever would you take with you? And those were all the only herbs you can have, right, so, like. So it's funny because, like, all herbalists kind of have an answer for this, and so my answer is ginger and chamomile. I think that I can solve nearly any, well, I can improve nearly any problem with ginger and chamomile Amazing and chamomile amazing. And if that's all you had, uh, that would help you with, uh, anxiety, but also depression and also sluggishness, physical and emotional, right, and also crampiness and also wound care. Okay, that's the chamomile, not the ginger, because ginger would hurt. If you put it like, well, it would probably sting a little bit. Yeah, and hold on, I interrupted my list there Digestive discomfort, muscle spasms, like from a sports injury or something like that.
Speaker 3:Right right.
Speaker 2:And probably more than oh, headaches, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:So just to interject, right? Somebody who doesn't know anything about herbs might be like that's a crazy list. What are you talking about? Like these problems are not all in the same part of the body, they're not all the same kind of tissue, like how could anything touch all of those at once, right? So when we think about herbs, we think about their, their qualities and their actions. It's like the first set of things you want to know. So, for instance, ginger is warming, it's a little bit drying and it's relaxant to the body.
Speaker 2:Like really strongly relaxed or effectively relaxing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So any place where there's what we'd consider a cold pattern of things slowing down, getting stuck, not functioning as effectively as they should be. They're slow, they're quiet. We want to wake them up. Ginger can help us to do that. That's most obvious in digestion. You know you eat food. It kind of sits heavy in your stomach. It takes a while to move through. You Feel a lot of discomfort in your belly while it's happening. Right, you take ginger. It heats up your digestion, it helps you to break your food down more completely, moves things through you more smoothly not necessarily faster, but smoothly, right. You feel more comfortable. And then on another part of your body, if you have like a tense, tight muscle with some stuck blood, like a big bruise you know you can see under there it's uncomfortable you take ginger, put it on that. It warms that up, it moves the blood around, it releases tension and that's impeding circulation and it allows the body to heal that part faster it's really, if you think about, like a heating pad or a hot water bottle.
Speaker 2:Uh, if you put that in an area that is sore and crampy, after a little while your skin will get red. Part of the reason that it helps relax tension or spasms in the muscles is because it is increasing the flow of blood to that area. That's what happens. That's why it's turning red, because more blood is going there, and so you can think about ginger as like a hot water bottle, but it's on the inside of you and it's moving the blood around.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so this is just sort of a way to understand like herbs can act in many different parts of your body. They don't do one thing and maybe for modern people it helps to know that they're not one chemical. There's not one active ingredient quote unquote in St John's wort or chamomile or ginger or any other plant, even plants that have a very powerful chemical, like coffee, right when it has caffeine. That's not the only thing in coffee, and one way to understand that is that if you take coffee and you take tea, they affect you a little bit differently. Right, coffee is a little bit more likely to amp up digestive movement, maybe even get you some belly rumbles or stuff like that. Tea is less likely to overstimulate you and more likely to help you to stay focused and centered on your work. And it's because, like, the coffee, apart from caffeine, has some some uh components that stimulate liver activity and digestive movement very directly, whereas the green tea has some components that actually calm you down and help you to focus.
Speaker 3:So I always say, like, if I'm going to go and do a bunch of yard work or heavy labor, I'm going to drink coffee. If I'm going to do like write a paper or do a bunch of research. I'm going to drink tea. They both have the powerful compound, caffeine, but everything else in them shifts the way that they work for you, you know. So that again, to just draw back herbs can operate on many different parts of your body at the same time. So that again, to just draw back herbs can operate on many different parts of your body at the same time, they can be helpful when applied in different ways for different problems. They're not really the way we think of drugs that like the ideal drug is like one active chemical, maybe some binders to make a capsule you can swallow, right, but one active chemical going to one point in your body and doing one job. Herbs are a thousand chemicals doing a thousand different things that can overlap and that can touch different areas.
Speaker 2:Also, to make it a little more confusing herbs don't always work the same way for every person, because the flip side of herbs being a thousand different chemicals is that humans are also many different things. Yeah, but we can categorize humans in a pretty simple way. For example, if I were to ask you, do you tend to run hot or cold? You probably have an answer for that yeah cold, yeah right, if you're the first person to put on a sweater, or the last person, in fact, you don't even own a sweater, right? And then, if you think about, well, am I damp or dry? And for some people that's a little bit more challenging.
Speaker 3:Not for me, though.
Speaker 2:Not for me either. I know, right, he's really dry and I run damp, and sometimes it's simple. You can just say, oh, this person has a tendency towards holding extra fluid in their body, even if it isn't edema, right, you can just be a person who tends to be puffy without having full-blown edema. Versus, you can be a person who is just sort of always a little bit dehydrated and like always kind of has to remember to drink water, right, and so okay, if you imagine that that's a really good example of, well, hot and cold is too. And then the other one is tense and lax. If you're a person who is always really tensed up, or are you a person who is just like very loose all the time, like just a lot of laxity in your body, right, and like as a yoga teacher, you probably can even think about students who are like, oh, that's a tense one and that's a lax one right, yeah, you can see it yeah, okay, so that's enough categories, if we take those six categories.
Speaker 2:By the way, those categories are the foundation of things that people may have heard of, like in Ayurveda, the, the dosha. You can distill it down to like these six categories are the least common denominator, the lowest common denominator for the doshas or in TCM, the like you know, you'll hear things called metal or you'll hear them called wind or whatever.
Speaker 3:Or the like ancient Western systems of the four humors, humors sanguine and phlegmatic, and all of those Right.
Speaker 2:So all those systems are built on top of these six categories and if you are very familiar with these six categories, you can actually communicate with anybody about a traditional system that you're not familiar with. Because even if you don't know the words, you don't know what the doshas are and you don't know that what pitta is or kapha or whatever it doesn't matter, because they know what qualities that has. And so if you say something is hot and damp or hot and cold, they can match it up with right Okay. So if you think about a person who has a lot of dryness versus a person who has a lot of dampness, and then you think about an herb that is very astringent, like well, for us that would be uva ursi or I don't there's like Agrimony Oak bark.
Speaker 3:You got oaks over there, yeah maybe yeah, they're here.
Speaker 2:They're here, sometimes not a lot um anything with tannins, like in red wine, you know, has tannins in it. Oh yeah um, even black tea has tannins like tea.
Speaker 2:Black tea is the greatest like if you let the black tea sit in there for a really long time, like half an hour if you let it sit oh yeah yeah, some people will be like I cannot drink this, and I will be like this is delicious, because I have a lot of dampness in my body and so drinking something that is extra drying actually feels really good to me. But for a person who's already dry, that would feel extremely uncomfortable. Yeah, or for a person who runs really hot, taking a ton of ginger probably wouldn't feel very good, but for a person who's cold all the time, taking ginger is like oh, I'm finally getting a little bit warmer, you know.
Speaker 3:So this does get back to the desert island thing, right, yeah, it would be difficult we could try to do it to get five or six herbs for anybody who might show up on our island, right, if we were to do that, we would need to try to cover our bases. I need something to warm people up, to cool them down, to bring moisture, to take away dampness, right? All of those, all of those elements. But if you knew you were going to the desert island and you could choose the herbs you bring with you, it's best to figure out what's going to work well for you personally.
Speaker 3:It's best to figure out what's going to work well for you personally, right, do I need something to warm up my digestion? Do I need something to cool down my heart, cause it gets really hot and agitated and I can grab my mother warts and I can take that and that helps to, like, release my tension, cool my heart down and I can feel better. You know, um, so you know, for me it would be great on my desert Island if I had some seaweeds with me, and hey, maybe they grow in the water there, right? Because seaweed is cooling and moistening and relaxing pretty much universally. And so, as somebody who runs dry and tense and usually on the hot side, it matches my body's needs really really well.
Speaker 2:Going back to the ginger and chamomile, though, if you take those two herbs and combine them, because ginger is not heating Right- I mean, chamomile is not heating.
Speaker 2:And so if you think, ok, I only have two herbs to do all the things I need to do, and you think about modern humans, most of us are are tense, even if we are not tense.
Speaker 2:Most of us are are tense even if we are not tense, right, like I am a person who runs lax, like I have a lot of laxity in my body, but everybody has too much stress and that, and that creates tension, even if, um, we are not a person who is just naturally really wiry and tense. Um, and so if you think about that and you think, okay, I only can have two herbs to do everything I have to do, well, if I have to work with a person who is already really hot, then I'll probably just work with the chamomile for them, but if I have to work with a person who is really cold, I'll put them together and basically, the only thing you can't do with those two is oh, oh, somebody needs a lot of astringent. Okay, well, they're not astringent, so we can't do that, yeah, but, um, but you could get a lot of work done with those two plants alone. Plus they. They're really well suited to my own body in particular yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:What would your two really be today? Right, and also these answers change, right, I can imagine they do yeah yeah, yeah, uh, I'm gonna need a bitter.
Speaker 3:You know, my best friend is centauri, um. This is this herb called centauri centaurium erythrea it's latin on that one and uh, it's really, really bitter. But it was one of the first herbs that I really worked with when I was first learning herbs from Katya, and there's a practice we ask a lot of our students to do, which is to choose an herb and make a quart of tea of it every day for at least a week, but better a whole month. So I did that with Centauri and it was like a complete overhaul of my digestive system, um, and probably other benefits for me as well.
Speaker 3:This herb is cooling, it's a little drying, it's a little tonifying, um. So I'll often combine it with some moistening, relaxing herbs when I when I drink it. Uh like, say, catnip and Linden together makes a really nice little formula, um. But Centauri is like where I go when my guts are bugging me, and over the course of my life I've had a bunch of different troubles in the GI tract. So I'm very attached to that plant, even though most people taste it and they're like why would you ever consume this at all? Because it's just like straight bitter, really nothing else on top of that. It's great stuff. I feel really good about it. So if it was just me, I would bring Centauri and I would bring Catnip yeah.
Speaker 2:See, I would like to propose Blue Vervain.
Speaker 2:You've been on this kick lately, so Blue Vervain is also super bitter, but it is also mentally relaxant, especially when people feel like they um, they feel like they're under pressure to to like, be perfect, that's right, like that's not really, but like when, when you feel like, ah, there's a lot I want to do in the world, there's like a lot of work that I wanted to do and I need to do it really well, and I like a lot of work that I wanted to do and I need to do it really well, and I it all needed to be done yesterday.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, the first two were probably true, but the third one is not true. It didn't really have to be done yesterday, and it it like. And you start, you know, you start to pile that stuff on you and you feel the tension even just happening, like as you're like, no, it's not good enough, no, it has to be more, no, it has to be faster, it has to be whatever. And I feel like that's so common in our society right now, just because everybody is like nobody really has time to relax. Everybody is always having to be productive, like in every minute.
Speaker 3:And we fill our brains with information about all the most terrible things everywhere in the entire world and we feel responsible for all of them at the same time, and so it can get really overwhelming. But Blue Vervain is really good at going into your mind and saying these things you don't have to hold on to.
Speaker 2:That will allow you to focus on the things you can actually do something about and these things you can't control and that doesn't make like, that doesn't make them good they're still bad, but you can't actually control them and you need to find a way to be okay with not being in control. And it's kind of amazing to have a plant just walk up to you and say, no, it's time to be okay with that. And you're like, really I don't know if I can, and it's like you can.
Speaker 1:I want that day.
Speaker 2:I want a plant to walk up to me and say that that's fantastic and it's also really beautiful and it's growing in our yard in a lot of places that I'm really excited about.
Speaker 3:It's, yeah. Blue vervain is like this spindly candelabra with these like blue violet little torch flowers that grow up at the top of it.
Speaker 1:I feel like I've seen that or I can picture that really well, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:It's also a like native European plant. It may have came over here. So it's really possible it could have come over. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that was so, so helpful. I'm so excited to learn more about plants before I get. I ask you the final question. I need to ask you a question before that, which is, if someone's listening and they're like, okay, I can't forage and I don't know how to do it, so I'm not going to do it, I don't want to garden, like I'll do my best, but I can't garden everything. Where do you get herbs from then? Like, where can can you get them? That's a good place. I don't know if it's if it's because I'm in Australia, but I've got a lot of listeners in America and Europe, but just in general, what can people do? Where can we go?
Speaker 2:Well, okay, so in the U S, we usually direct people to mountain rose herbscom Because they are really committed to sustainability, really committed to high quality, and they have a large selection. Now, just because they have a large selection doesn't mean that they never run out of things, but if you're looking, for something, they probably will have it, or in a month or two they'll have it.
Speaker 3:You know, if I, if I moved to Australia, I would be looking for the like, the habits and the commitments of some herb company that I was going to order from, and I'd be looking for things like that, where they're, where they're committed to sustainability and that that means that sometimes they run out of stuff because they're not going to just go and find the cheapest supplier or whatever supplier is available.
Speaker 2:They've got these standards for who they're going to buy from and also that they test um cause there's nothing wrong with importing herbs from other places, Um, as long as the practices are fair and the people that you're importing them from are getting paid a fair wage. Um, but there are heavy metals and other kind of pollutants that are like in question, and so it's important to have a place that lab tests to make sure that there isn't contamination in their, in their end product.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you know you're you're analyzing your supplier and trying to figure out what their degree of attention to these kinds of things is, as as one of the steps you take when you evaluate if you want to buy from them. But I would also just point out that there's a lot of herbs at the grocery store. I mean you mentioned ginger and turmeric earlier. In grocery stores you can often get culinary plants like basil and sage and rosemary and thyme and oregano.
Speaker 2:Parsley, and did you say garlic?
Speaker 3:Garlic. I mean garlic is one of the most powerful herbs on the planet. It's one of the most important in like most of the major medical traditions throughout history where people could bring garlic. Like before writing, people were moving garlic around the world and saying this is critically important stuff. You've got to have it, you know. Wow, you can just eat that plant. Yeah, yeah, it's an important plant.
Speaker 2:And you know it's like oh, it's for spaghetti sauce, no, no, no, it's really important, yeah. But also, you know, we have I think this is funny we have kind of a large Australian student body, and I don't really know how that happened, but it's pretty exciting, and so we do have a list of Australian herb suppliers that people like, and I do not have it off the top of my head, but I can send it to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes, that'll be helpful. Yeah, amazing, amazing. Well, I'm not surprised. I want to come and study too, which is literally my final question, which is what can people do if you'd like to learn more? Obviously, your podcast is a beautiful free resource for anyone who needs that, but anything else you'd like to share about teaching us, if someone's really like, ah, I want to, this is the stuff. What do I do?
Speaker 3:yeah, so, yeah, so that podcast is the holistic herbalism podcast. We should be on any of the you know platforms or apps you use to get it. If not, let me know and we'll get on there. But yeah, so that's our podcast. And then we have an entire online school.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if you are just beginning and you do not know anything about herbalism, that's okay, we got you. And if you are wanting to build a career and work clinically as an herbalist, we've got you there too. So, and all the steps in between, we are really kind of obsessed with rigorous study and rigorous education, but we also understand that, like, when you get home from work at night, you're tired, and what people have the energy to do at night after work is get some food and sit in front of the television, and so you know, it's really hard to weed through a lot of books and try to like, weave all of that into a structure that becomes a full-fledged practice, and so instead, we made all of our courses online and they're all video. So, instead of watching whatever television show you were watching, you just watch herbalism instead.
Speaker 2:And since this is a podcast, um, your people probably like podcasts, and so for every video, we also have an audio file so that you can listen to it. If you want to go for a walk in the woods or in whatever nature is around you, um, or if you just have chores to do or kids to chase around or whatever, um, and then we have printable stuff that if you're a person who learns best by seeing stuff on paper, you can print it out and help that um build your notes Um we were trying to recreate the in person class experience because for about a decade a little more than that we we would teach group group people come in for a long weekend once a month, for a year or more, and we would teach them herbalism that way.
Speaker 3:But as we, you know, moved online, we were able to like expand the amount of content that we could we could give, because you can only lecture for so long. So we're able to expand that way. But we we wanted to people people to not feel like they're out there on their own Right. So we've incorporated a bunch of ways for students to contact us and a couple other faculty members directly. Like you're watching a video lesson, you can click a button, open a discussion thread, type in a question and we'll answer you like within 24 hours. You know, there's a community space where people can go and discuss and like share what they're growing and what they're excited about.
Speaker 2:It's not on Facebook.
Speaker 3:It's totally private, Separate from Facebook you know, and we do a week, we do twice a week, a little more than twice a week. We do these Q&A sessions with our students live, so they can talk to us directly that way and kind of get their questions answered. We don't want people to just be like out there on their own. Self-study is valid, but it's also actually quite difficult to do in a rigorous and complete way. So we're trying to like navigate that where people can take things at their own pace. They can take as long as they need to be like we don't have a time limit on your course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's all lifetime access.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but they also aren't alone and they can connect to us in a bunch of different ways whatever's convenient for them. To each other. Yeah yeah, that's incredible, amazing. It's all online at commonwealthherbscom and please go there and check us out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll put all those links and the places you've brought up in the show notes below for easy access, but thank you so so much for your time. I understand it's probably up in the show notes below for easy access, but thank you so so much for your time. I understand it's probably late in the evening for you guys. So I really appreciate, um, that you're here and that you gave your time and energy, because I've learned so much and I know that the listeners will have as well, and I'm sure they'll leave us some comments and go and check you out on Instagram and everything like that. But thank, I just want to say thank you for your time and your energy. I really appreciate it and I can't wait to learn more.
Speaker 2:Oh well, I'm just really excited to know you, like to get to know you, and thanks for writing, thanks for popping up and that's wicked cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this was fun.
Speaker 1:Of course, of course, absolute pleasure. Thank you for your time. Bye, thank you, wicked cool, yeah, this was fun. Of course, of course, it's absolute pleasure. Thank you for your time. Thank you.