Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Conversation about relearning the kinship worldview with author, horse-drawn woodwright, and renowned storyteller, D. Firth Griffith. Unshod is a podcast and community that believes to rebel, we must pause, that we live with Earth as Earthlings, that we must approach creativity, curiosity, and compassion in conversation.… but we must approach this ground UNSHOD. This has nothing to do with "saving the world." It has everything to do with leaving the right kind of tracts in the mud.
Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
A World Made By Hand, Intergenerational Wisdom in a Tech-Driven Age with Brian Kaller
What if the tools and stories of our ancestors could teach us more about life and community than the latest tech gadget? Join us for an enriching conversation with Brian Kaller, a prolific writer and deep thinker, as he shares insights from his article "The World Made by Hand." We explore the time-honored significance of inherited tools, wisdom, and story and the dying art of hands-on creation in our disposable society. Brian takes us on a journey through his 20-year experience in rural Ireland, contrasting the cultural shifts he observed upon his return to the American Midwest.
Read Brian's articles, read here!
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Books mentioned in this conversation:
- Stagtine, Griffith
- The Outermost House, Beston
In the cellar of my parents' house sits a series of tools that have served my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, for they were created before the throwaway world was conceived. They were created for a world of carpenters like my great-grandfather, or like the saddlers, like my great-grandfather, or like the saddlers, thatchers, farriers, smiths, cobblers and builders that I could still find in rural Ireland. They were made for a nation of craftsmen, of people who bore in themselves the power that all humans once had to reshape wood and hide and stone into a human landscape. It was a world that humans had known and had made and remade through the ages of the world until less than a century ago. This is the introductory paragraph of an article that is titled the World Made by Hand by today's guest, brian Collar. It was published on resilienceorg. I read it and immediately knew that I had to talk with this fella. Unbelievable article, really an unbelievable network of articles that he's published online for resilienceorg and so many other online papers and journals and such, and Brian was so willingly able to jump on a podcast and conversate and I have to be honest, this one. It lasts for over two hours and at the very end of it only do we realize that it's been that long?
D. Firth Griffith:It is a marvelous episode talking about all things tradition, community. What does it mean to have a world made by hand, and what does it mean that we've lost this? Why have we lost this? What is technology's role in us losing this? Or is it something deeper, something inside of us? We so often talk about this machine that lives outside of us, but something that we question in this conversation is you know, have we made it ourselves? Is it now coming outside of us More in this humanoid world? It is an amazing episode, actually one of the favorites that I've ever recorded.
D. Firth Griffith:Brian Collar he's a former newspaper editor, former Irish resident. Now he lives back in the Midwest, in the plains of Missouri, with his family. He has written articles for resilienceorg, the American Conservative, the Dallas Morning News Front, porch Republic, big Questions Outline and even Low Tech Magazine. He is a thinker, a kind, kind soul, and, without further ado, let's jump into the episode with Brian Collar.
D. Firth Griffith:It's really fun for me. I'll be honest with you. I, uh, I can't do small talk and, uh, I, I love conversating deeply with people and, um, having a podcast is a marvelous excuse for this conversation to happen, because what I found is like if I emailed you and I said, brian, my guy, like what I'm reading is unbelievable, we have to chat, thank you. It's just like, yeah, daniel, but like I'm busy, you know. But but if it's a podcast, you know, now, now the readers, the listeners get to uh kumbaya with us and I still get the selfless pleasure of getting you in a long form conversation. So, thank you, it's uh, it's a blessing having you here really is I thank you very much.
Brian Kaller:I really appreciate that. That's uh I. I find that in our everyday lives we know if it involves us. Yeah, and work trains us to be like that. You know, walking through the community tends to train it. But the conversations I love most are the ones where people actually get into things. And these days especially, there is among many friends of mine who used to enjoy these conversations because everything is political and politics is so divisive and I'm having to adjust to that, being in America again after living abroad for so long, but to some extent it's happening everywhere.
Brian Kaller:Other countries are not immune from the process. People are so on edge and it's so easy to simply shut people out if they say the wrong thing rather than deal with grapple with if they said something that was challenging or that you might have misinterpreted. So I know lots of old friends that in the last several years have stopped being friends, or people who split up or people who, just because there is a powerful disincentive to communicate and a strong implied punishment for saying anything other than what people are supposed to say, yeah, Well, I hope this conversation is explosive.
D. Firth Griffith:I hope we challenge each other, I hope we both learn, but I hope we're better friends after the fact. So if that's a vision, I hope it's true. So you were in Ireland for a while 20 years. So you were in Ireland for a while 20 years Wow. So I'm so jealous. I promise my wife, we're both at least 55% to 75% Irish genetically and very recently landed here in the United States. Not myself, but my ancestors and we've wanted to plan a trip to Ireland for years, and every spring and every autumn we keep telling ourselves next time, you know, next time, we want to either be there for beltonia or belting in the spring, or sauer in the autumn. Um, and it just, it hasn't happened. So ireland, is it worth going?
Brian Kaller:I just I, absolutely I recommend going in may okay, may or June, those are the best months to go, but even then you might be. Even then the weather is very unpredictable. Parts of Ireland, it know, I grew up in here, in this very house in Missouri, and my family are are not huge travelers, but I have a few cousins who made it over and, um, I wanted to get them out to the. Uh see, the cliffs of mower on the West coast, which are these beautiful 300-foot-tall drops into the Atlantic, these windswept shores. We drove all day, had a great time and then almost got out there.
Brian Kaller:Just about Then, right before we got out there, the heavens opened and there were just black sheets of rain. We were at the cliffs of mower and couldn't see anything. The funny thing is that was the second time I'd been there and I'd still never seen. Wow, I've been to the cliffs of mower three times and I've seen them once. Wow, wow. The first time there was, the fog was so thick that as often often also happens in Ireland that I couldn't see where the cliff was and I wasn't going to find out. I understand, wow, the walls and the tourist sites and the everything around it, they just, they were just cliffs and a little sign that said warning cliff is dangerous. They were like, yeah, we're covered.
D. Firth Griffith:Wow wow, that's amazing one day. One day, I hope we can go and and maybe it is a clear day that day. Maybe not.
Brian Kaller:I do recommend May or June, and I do recommend so. Beltania would be a good time to go, and I recommend the West Coast. A lot of people want to see Dublin. Yeah, no, I'm good, but even though they're, dublin is a city.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, I'll fly to Dublin. And I'll run from there.
Brian Kaller:Like a lot of European cities these days. Like a lot of cities these days, but they're having lots and lots of problems. Yeah so Ireland I don't lest anyone in America overly romanticize Europe. There are a lot of problems there too, just sometimes different ones, right? But what I recommend most is the Atlantic coast, got it? So, county Kerry, go to the Blasket Islands, the Aran Islands.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, so that's. County Kerry is where one half of my family is from, and then you're going to have to remind me there's a county in the northwest, although I believe it's not in North. Ireland Starts with a D or a B Donegal. Yeah, the other half is from Donegal, so I guess I'm drawn to the west coast regardless.
Brian Kaller:But that's what I recommend seeing Wonderful the landscapes. It's difficult to live there. I mean, it's the original no country for old men. That's where Yates' phrase comes from, but it's beautiful to see phrase comes from. But, um, it is, it's beautiful to see, yeah and uh, you, I, I love reading the accounts of the people who were, you know, used to live on the west coast or on the islands, and I've read literally hundreds of books, um, by people who lived there. Uh, because they were all very literate people, not just even though they were, you know, poor, dirt, poor, barefoot farmers eking a living out of you know, very rocky soil. They were incredible, astonishingly literate and well educated. Wow, just self educated.
D. Firth Griffith:Keats. I'm sorry. I'm typing in the background because you mentioned Yates and I got him confused with Keats, Because Keats, on his gravestone it reads and I had to look this up because I wanted to make sure but here lies one whose name is written water. That's what his gravestone writes, and I was going to draw a connection between the Irish landscape that you're describing and the poet, but I got the poet wrong, so I'm going gonna stop typing now keats was early 1800s.
Brian Kaller:Yates keats was english, yates was irish in early 1900s there it is but I I read a fascinating, I I've read many, many memoirs that, uh, and bought them, some self-published, some just little you know published that you'd only find in an obscure library over there somewhere of older people, people who grew up in Ireland, in the countryside in the throughout the 1900s, and they're absolutely amazing, amazing. And one of them, one of the strangest, was a memoir of, uh, the girlhood of a couple of little girls who grew up wealthier than most irish at the time and what we would call a middle class. But they would call a wealthy house, a middle class house to us, um, where they didn't have to worry about going hungry or anything and they're raised in part by their grandmother and they would be people who would. She was very well-educated, erudite woman and would read to them and they have these charming stories about playing with grandma. But they would also have charming stories about all the different people who would come to the house.
Brian Kaller:And you began to realize that grandma, that Nan was Lady Gregory, who was Yates' patron patroness, and that the people who would come to the house would be george bernard shaw and you know yates and you know, uh, some of the original revolutionaries of of who started the irish republic and just all of these intellectuals of the time. You know. It wouldn't have surprised me if, like you know, if picasso had stopped by, but she was just one of those people who was in artistic circles and helped to pay for people who were struggling artists. Joyce Joyce would stop by. Who wrote Ulysses?
D. Firth Griffith:Yes, yeah, dubliner. His book of short stories was my first introduction to Joyce. Ulysses is equally as good. Wow, I couldn't imagine it's so interesting.
D. Firth Griffith:So, okay, the reason that I even reached out to you is not far from the topic that we're currently conversating about. You wrote an article for resilienceorg that I was reading. I believe it's titled a world built by hands, or something like this world made by hand, perhaps, and one of the central themes in there that I think throughout the next you know conversation we have here for an hour or two hours, whatever it is, um, I think we're going to constantly gravitate back to it and I imagine we're going to go off in many tangents. This is my expectation. We'll see what happens.
D. Firth Griffith:But one of the things that struck me in your writing which, by the way, unbelievable I mean like, just go to resilienceorg, type in Brian Collar and I don't know how many. You have Maybe 10, maybe 20 articles with them, and then obviously you're well published in other online journals and media type websites as well and every single one of the articles and I'm not saying this, I'm not here to compliment you, that I promise but it is an endearing compliment Everything that you're writing I've just really enjoyed. But one of the aspects in this article that really drove me to you, which is when I reached out, was to me you're really painting this picture of this lost world that has only recently been lost Right, like this individual, this girlhood, this memoir that you're speaking about, like Joyce, was only yesteryear I mean, it was a little bit longer than yesterday, but yesteryear is not that far off Right Keats or Yates, yesteryear. Right Picasso yesteryear. Right picasso, yesteryear like.
D. Firth Griffith:I saw this meme the other day where somebody was laughing where um, what man, I wish if you were born in the 1980s, you, you, maybe 1970s, I would have to look it up. You, you may have met picasso, or something like this. It's that very long ago. We can look it up and fact check me. Maybe it's 1960 or something, but not that long ago. Maybe in my parents' generation, which is still obviously I am an incredibly lucky person.
D. Firth Griffith:Wait, have you met Picasso?
Brian Kaller:No, I have not. You're about to drop that on me. My life might have overlapped with his, I don't know. But I was lucky enough that when I was born, five of my great-grandparents were alive. Wow, because they all married young and they all lived a long time, so they all had. The last one died when I was 12, I want to say. But I knew them very well growing up and of course I also knew all four of my grandparents, um, who had fought in. You know who fought, who had my grandfathers had fought in World War II. One grandpa, one of my grandpas, was um, uh, was fought in the Battle of the Bulge under Patton. Wow, and I realized this makes me feel seem very old, but but Well, I'm obviously.
D. Firth Griffith:I'm obviously much younger than you, uh, but my grandfather fought in World War II. He was young, he was 14, and he ran away and pretended like he was not. But no, I'm following. This is good.
Brian Kaller:Before. Yeah, so when I realized that I was in part, I knew was intimately familiar, growing up with people who were born in the 1800s and my daughter in the 19th century. And my daughter if she's, you know, particularly long-lived, she might live to see the 22nd century.
D. Firth Griffith:So a century is not that long a time. No, no, and I mean there's so much to say. Similarly to you, our daughter on my, my wife's side. So we have, um, our oldest daughter eloine is her name um, we have a picture of her and five preceding generations together, because my wife, we got got married young. We had Winnie young, we call her Winnie. Morgan was young, I'm sorry. Morgan's parents were young, her great, her grandparents were young, her great grandparents were young, and so there was, yeah, five generations lined up in a picture, and then you just have a little baby, winnie, when she was just born, and about a year later, the, the, the, you know, the matriarch passed and, unfortunately, and so she never really got to meet her. But, uh, you know, unbelievable. Just looking at this picture it gives me chills.
D. Firth Griffith:But in your piece, the world made by hands, you, you are painting a world of yesteryear that is entirely different in the world that we currently occupy, not only in this moment on this online system, recording a podcast, of course, but in the dailiness of our lives. I want to start there. I read recently that, for the history of mankind, the majority, if not the grand majority, as in the overwhelming 99 point, whatever 9% of human history, the world that you were born into is the world that really you were leaving behind when you passed. I mean, it wasn't changing in 80 years or 30 years or however long you lived, but in our generation, right, things are changing in the day, the month, the year, like even for me. I'm 31 years old. I was born and I remember going. We were homeschooled, but I remember going through school, my school days, and, um, there was no such thing as the internet. I mean, I realized that I'm on the cusp of this, and maybe my family was. I mean, we were homeschooled, raised in a rural environment, so maybe we were behind the times. But, like, I remember dial up. I remember how mad my dad used to get because we would lock up the phone lines, and now we live in a world that I've, you know, I don't even have to speak to the technology of today, so it's changing unbelievably quickly.
D. Firth Griffith:So maybe one place we can start this conversation is what does this really mean, that this change is happening? And we can talk about the yesteryear, what this looked like in a little bit Cause I don't want to lose that. I want to talk about that too, but I also want to talk about the shock that our systems are going through and we can look at it psychologically, we can look at it spiritually, we can look at it culturally. You, you take your pick and I'll follow you the shock that this transition, at this pace, is having and wreaking in us, around us, in our communities, et cetera. So I've built a little bit of a podium. Jump on it and just start and I'll follow.
Brian Kaller:All right. Well, you're right. I mean modern humans evolved what 200,000 years ago?
Brian Kaller:Yeah, perhaps and then hominids before that and then. But so if all of the Industrial Revolution has taken place in the last, say, 200 years, depending on where you started, that's 0.1% of the time we've been around, and there are a number of things that led me to this. I mean, I grew up, obviously, with much, much older people and I grew up watching old black and white movies. That was our common, uh, the thing that everyone in my family could agree to talk about, that, um, cause not everyone was interested in the same sports or uh, but we could all. We all loved black and white movies from the thirties and forties, so I grew up watching those. So I grew up in the, you know, in the 30s and 40s, so I grew up watching those.
Brian Kaller:So I grew up in the, you know, in the 1980s, um, and with that, as my, my pop culture references were of, you know, barbara stanwick or groucho marx or buster keaton or someone like that, um, it's not that I was unaware of the pop culture around me, it's just that in my family, this, those were much more real for me. So I was, and I read things from earlier eras too. So I was. It doesn't seem strange to me, and there's a lot of things that I'm often frustrated at people I talk to in many different, in many different causes and movements and of many different bents from the red tribe or the blue tribe alike in America, that how much they disdain the past and think of it as completely irrelevant to what we're experiencing now, completely irrelevant to what we're experiencing now.
Brian Kaller:Well, that's a very good way to make sure you don't learn anything and that you're not prepared for anything, because I've been trying to get my head around what sort of assumptions other people have about the world, and that's why these conversations are so valuable, because I get to find out. Well, why do you think that? What would be some examples of that? And I find that there's a very strong tendency to believe that this age, that we are unlike any humans who ever lived, this age, that we are unlike any humans who ever lived, and that's an extremely dangerous presumption, because we're not. They had different pressures, they were born into a different social situation, but we're not superior beings, we're not a master race. We don't have to unduly idolize everyone. We can see them as the complex people they were, who sometimes did terrible things in desperate situations. But but there's a very strong fad for disdaining all previous generations and that is a huge disruption from when I talk to people who were older than, say, my great-grandparents' age, than, say, my great-grandparents' age, or, in Ireland, the old elderly neighbors that I talked to, because they were among the last Westerners born into a traditional world, and what I mean by that is for virtually all of human history and prehistory, as far as we can tell, on every tribe we've anthropologists have ever examined, all humans would have lived in fairly small groups, tribes or, you know, small communities, villages without, in a world without strangers. You know, strangers were alarming, where you knew who everyone was and there was everyone, everyone was. When you look at what anthropologists say about, say, new Guinea tribes or Amazon tribes today, it's in everyone's interest to help everyone else because they're your people, you're probably related to them and whatever is good. Women give birth, they would have hunted together, they would have farmed together. When someone died, they would have grieved together. When people were born, they would have celebrated together or had rites of passage, and all of their celebrations would have been more powerful because they were shared and all of their grief would have been lessened compared to ours because it was shared, um, and when people, when people, died, they, they uh, um, had, uh, their people would have had rituals around that that would have passed them to whatever they believed was next and, most of all, they did what humans do, uh, and they passed down stories from generation to generation that everyone was interested in, and that was just what your world was made of.
Brian Kaller:We're storytelling animals. That's what we do, and oral traditions alone can carry things a long way, like Aborigines have stories that might remember the last ice age, but when writing came in, obviously you could step into the mind of other people magically, in a way that would have never been done before and for hundreds and hundreds of years. In Europe and in America, even working class people could be extremely well educated, well-educated. And you look at the speeches that people gave in the 1700s or 1800s, including to poor farmers in, say, election speeches. Lincoln and Douglass would. Lincoln would get up and speak for three hours and then make extended, long arguments andquent uh points that are complicated to for us to read on a page. But the p, his listeners would have processed them verbally and they were farmers let me interrupt you.
D. Firth Griffith:I'm so sorry because you're in, you're in flow, but on audible, on audible, there's a book and then a book. I'm sorry it's. I guess it would be a book, but it's not actually published. It's an acted out, complete re-debate of the Frederick Douglass debates by two actors. They, they come from Broadway, I believe. I believe it. Yeah, I think they come from Broadway. It is unbelievable. It's like 12 hours of these just unbelievably good actors acting out the debates. So palatable, so palatable. But exactly what you're just what you're saying. You have to focus, like you really have to focus.
Brian Kaller:Yeah, and if you read people's writings, we assume that people back then would have been. We assume that people back then must have been mostly illiterate or would have learned in these one-room schoolhouses or even just hidden schools in irish. You know poor irish farm communities where schooling was basically banned for catholics. Um, for centuries people would have, so children had to walk. People had children had to walk miles to school anyway. My neighbors did. But 100 years before them or 150 years, children would have walked to school and visited a place that was in secret, but they went to school every day anyway.
Brian Kaller:And the writings from that time are just astonishing for how erudite and literate they are and how many cultural references. I was reading the diaries of an Irish farmer from the 1930s named Stephen Wren and it reads like he's a poet and his force of words is just amazing. And he would casually talk about the thing that he and his farmhands would read to each other in the evenings and it would be like Aquinas or St Augustine's Confessions or any number of things like that, things that very few professors would take on anymore, you know. So we other people before us would have been able to pass down the knowledge of everyone who came before them and we think of ourselves as the smartest generation. But in a way, I I dispute that the people would say, well, we have this or that technology. Uh, we can make this or that device, and I don't want to, and that's fantastic. I mean, we're using that right now and that's.
Brian Kaller:That would have been a miracle to them, but we couldn't make it and we can't pass it down. You know, it's an important distinction and unfortunately, with the preponderance of the world's videos on our phone, it becomes very easy and very addictive to simply to do that instead of reading. Now, I'm not trying. I don't want to be hypocritical. I have a smartphone. I need it for my job and I'm very happy to have a laptop and be able to work online. That's fantastic. So in some ways, we're incredibly lucky compared to most people. But there are many other things that we've given up. I don't mean just that we've lost involuntarily, but that we've given up. I don't think we have to give them up, but we have.
D. Firth Griffith:That's my question for you. I'm glad you went there. Clearly, the usage and creation of technology does not negate.
D. Firth Griffith:You know, in your in your article you write about coopers and and and rights and and so many others, millers and which, to us, are just last names exactly, exactly, but they don't like technology didn't erode that, like there's nothing about technology that prohibits somebody from making a shaving horse and shaving down a barrel right, a Cooper right. Why do you think, however, it is not necessary that it has actually happened? Why do you think technology has allowed this to happen? Has it forced it to happen in some secretive way? What's the relationship here?
Brian Kaller:force it to happen in some secretive way. What's the relationship here? Um, I think most of the technology that's made is made for profit, and it's very, very profitable to get people to, to get people addicted to things you know not to interrupt your answer to my question, but I read today 15 times.
D. Firth Griffith:The market of online like video-based media is 15 times larger than the largest the book publishing world has ever been at its height 15 times larger wow, is this the online publishing?
D. Firth Griffith:no, this, this is publishing of all mediums. It went into a little bit of depth hardbacks, ebooks, audiobooks, sub stack, resilienceorg type. You know, journals, online journals, the guardian, the atlantic, the nationalist and or the national, etc. Um 15 times in terms of market. Yes, whatever you want to call it, I want to call it capacity, but market production. You know selling whatever, and so and it's a, it's a very.
Brian Kaller:This is a very thing is something I always want to be clear about. When I'm talking about this kind of thing, I never want to make it seem like I'm just romanticizing what was a very. You know, obviously poverty and a very difficult time for many people. But, um, people had. I am very glad we have a vaccine for polio now. You know that we have treatment for tuberculosis. That's great.
Brian Kaller:But disentangling what we the good things from the bad of technology, we embrace technology in the assumption that for that there were all on a path together, that the world is now on a path, that it's we're increasingly different than the past, and that wherever we must be going, it must be good and that whatever the next step is we have to take. It's no consideration that we, what the possible consequences are, down the road. People assume that well, we took this last step, we have to take the next step. It's our obligation we're morally obliged to. We don't want to be left behind. We're morally obliged to. We don't want to be left behind.
Brian Kaller:You know people use religious language for this stuff and so there's no sense that you know, five steps in this direction might be good, but ten steps might not be, or five steps in this direction might be good, but this next step isn't in the same direction, or any number of other possibilities.
Brian Kaller:So we use this one metaphor to think of one direction that we're all going and we use that as a justification for all kinds of changes to our lives, some of which are good, some of which are not, until we end up with a society where loneliness and mental illness are at unprecedented levels, when you know things like suicide, where that which we used to be incredibly rare are now, you know, I, I've lost friends to suicide, um, and that, uh, where we live in collections of houses that often, that very rarely, are communities anymore. So that when now, in this particular community where I grew up, we make a point of walking around and making sure we checking on the older people and sitting with them and making sure that everything's okay and my parents and grandparents did that before me but even then it's a. You can and of course people have friendships, but too often it creates a pile of threads and it doesn't make a fabric. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, a it doesn't make a fabric.
D. Firth Griffith:You know, yeah, yeah, but you know.
Brian Kaller:Getting back to the, if you ask them to, if you ask them to all do something together, to all immediately drop everything they were doing and do something in an organized fashion. If your neighborhood were, were attacked let's say who you know, who would everyone immediately turn to? Who would know each other? Who would people know? How would people know who to trust? That's a hypothetical Attacked by whom I don't know. But if there were a?
D. Firth Griffith:disaster or something? You sufficiently answered my question, because it seems like we are lulled into particular. How do you say we have these intrinsic needs as humans? Like you said, we're storytellers and so we need an audience, we need a fire, we need community, we need these things in order to tell these stories. Those are the items that surround the story. Obviously, we need the story, we need the oral traditions, etc. We need the storytellers that come from previous generations, all these things that you've mentioned and spoken about Technology to some degree, because I'm still really interested in understanding, like because technology exists, that doesn't mean that the Cooper can't exist, but it seems to me what you're saying is technology has allowed us to believe at least in this friendship, because I think we could talk about it in any myriad of ways, but at least in friendship, thereby community, the thing that we've lost.
D. Firth Griffith:We have this weird solvent of an intrinsic need that we believe is good enough, and so we move forward, but it's not good enough. It's not community, it's not friendship, it's isolation, it's depression, it's anxiety, as you're describing. I saw in 2018, I don't know why. I'm not like this as a person, but all all the things that we're talking about. I have numbers in my head for um, like the, the market of, of online, online media, like that was just something I ran into today. Um, but in 2018, another weird random fact stored in this little head is, uh, 17% of adolescents, which I believe is 12 to 17, maybe nine to 17, 17% of adolescents, and by in 2018, had either tried to commit suicide or attempted the early um processes to. Like, you know, like they, they I don't mean to be too graphic, but they, they strung up a noose and then never went through with it. I was reading that from, uh, this, this one peer-reviewed paper that was I can't even can't remember the nature of the study, but 17%. That's unbelievable. And, by the way, I realize.
D. Firth Griffith:I'm speaking 2018 for a reason. This is not like 2020 or 2021, right, this is just normal life before everything went another direction in in the early 2020s yeah, and this, this is uh, that's astonishing.
Brian Kaller:Can you imagine any other society previous to ours, for all of their faults and for all of their limitations, that happening? No, and people I can't imagine if that would have happened in. When I talk to people in to my elderly neighbors in rural Ireland they were. I say that they were among the last people to grow up in a traditional culture. Because Ireland modernized very recently, so as recently as, say, the 1980s, a lot of people didn't have electricity, cars, radio, television, so they lived in. Their world was each other, and we would think of that automatically as being a world where everything was a world of deprivation, especially with everyone being so poor, living in such desperate poverty on paper. I think that the average.
Brian Kaller:GDP per capita in rural Ireland for a while, in the 50s, was comparable to that of sub-Saharan Africa. I'd have to look up that figure but when I asked them about their lives, so a 70 or 80-year-old in America today would have grown up in 1950s America. They would have grown up in a world of, probably, if in a city, skyscrapers or drive-in movies or televisions, cars with fin tails, the churning of fashions makes us feel like a lot has changed since then. But you walk into a house and you'd see dishwashers and clothes washers and televisions and telephones and all the things that we would recognize. The styles would be different but not much fundamentally has changed. But for them everything would have changed. But for them everything would have changed and it wouldn't have changed in the 1950s, it would have changed in, you know, 1970s, 80s, even 90s, um, and so that their world was each other and it wasn't a world that the world that we would picture in, a world without electric lights, especially with ireland, which is at the same latitude as Alaska, where the winter nights can be 16 hours long and there are no street lights of course. So it's 16 hours of absolute country night about in the dark and bang their legs on things as we might.
Brian Kaller:But no, they had. Uh, they went over to each other's homes and what did they do? They sang and told stories all night and they talked about it as being these golden memories, where everyone would come over and everyone bring a gift and they would walk with lanterns down the country roads to each other's you know cottages and they would gather in and people would bring their musical instruments. It was probably cold, it might have been raining, they didn't care, because once they were inside they would gather around the hearth and everybody would start singing. It's difficult for us to imagine that, because very rarely have most people today for us to imagine that, because very rarely have most people today, I find, just sung together. Most songs aren't even made for people to sing together anymore, for normal, healthy, human voices to simply sing in harmony. Most people can't play an instrument. Now that I'm back in America, I'm learning to play piano, yeah, which I'd always meant to do and never got around to.
D. Firth Griffith:That's awesome. I'm a child of four, second son and my oldest brother. My two younger sisters are not professional piano players but unbelievable trained their whole lives, but I never did it. I never did it. So maybe we can learn the piano together. I learned the acoustic guitar and the violin and other things, but no, that's really interesting what you're getting to, though. Like you know, I'm seeing these traditional communities just literally. Yesteryear, a couple decades ago, living in Ireland, 16 hour nights, no streetlights coming together singing, telling stories around candlelight, et cetera. Coming together singing, telling stories around candlelight et cetera.
D. Firth Griffith:You know, and and I'm questioning, like again, you know really the same line of questioning that I've, that I've held this entire time, which is like, why, like, where did that go? Or maybe a better question is like, why don't we do that anymore? And and and you know, I think it's this illusion that we don't actually depend upon each other.
Brian Kaller:Yes, which is We've become completely dependent, but on different things.
D. Firth Griffith:Right and you write about this. I hope this isn't creepy to you, but I've really dug into a lot of your writings. Oh, thank you. No, thank you. You wrote a wonderful piece.
D. Firth Griffith:I think it was called the lives of others or the others lives, or something like this all the lives, of the lives of others and in it you're really discussing food and meat and you know nourishment and things like this, but in there I wish I could quote it. Um, I'll put the all of the things that I mentioned here I'll put in the show notes so people can read along and and see a little you're. You're writing for what. It is not my plagiarism, my horrible paraphrasing, but you write about it that it would be inconceivable to previous generations that you didn't know that animal, that farmer, the nature of their relationship, et cetera. We just are exporting our survival to people that we believe, as you write, have our best interests in mind, right, like we're just exporting that as an idea. Like when people discuss, you know cause?
D. Firth Griffith:My wife and I we farm full time or, uh, hand hewn, uh, uh, timber framers part-time, we breed and train draft horses for horse logging and things like this, and so we kind of live in this community that you're talking about. I'm drinking coffee right now because I've been outside since 5 am getting some things done because the rains were coming and we haven't had rain since March. Horrible drought here in central Virginia, just everything is.
Brian Kaller:We're getting just the opposite in Missouri.
D. Firth Griffith:I'll take some. I'll take some. It hasn't been this dry in decades.
Brian Kaller:I wish I could deliver it.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, in decades. I mean it's interesting we were building this great wetland and pond area at the bottom of this massive hill. Here at the we call it the wildland, our farm, if you will, for lack of a better term. We had two neighbors stop by because they thought there was a wildfire, because the dust being raised just by driving a machine across the land was like flumes of smoke that you could see from miles away. That's how dry it is. I've been up all day on my feet since five outside doing some random things in the woods and things. I'm drinking coffee because I don't know what else to do. I'm really excited about this conversation. I want to be here. I can't remember why I'm necessarily speaking about that Now that I get lost into the drought considerations.
Brian Kaller:I um, and it would have been good, though. Where are you?
D. Firth Griffith:If you, I don't need, you don't need to get too specific, we're in dead central Virginia, so about four hours south of DC. If you were to just run away from that area as fast as you possibly could, you'd get to us in about four hours.
Brian Kaller:Did you grow up in the country?
D. Firth Griffith:I grew up in the country, but not the Virginian country. I was born and raised on about 30 acres outside of Cleveland, ohio. This last rural remnant of what is today actually doesn't exist. I don't say this happily. There was a little community. It was called Weymouth and it truly was what you discussed. Every one of our neighbors had been there for 100 years, maybe more. The little local cemetery, everybody cared about it. It was ancient. Ohio was founded in 18,. Our area of Ohio was settled in 1818. And the cemetery bore, like 1818, 1819, 1820 residents in its earth and the I mean everybody. Like every Saturday, people would come out from their homes and go to the local cemetery and clean a grave for no other reason than they just cared.
D. Firth Griffith:And I have this map. It's displayed in our house. It's an aerial map, one of the first aerial maps taken of the township of Weymouth, this little community that I'm describing, that I was born in and you know all of the land. There was maybe five, 10 houses, you know, like a true, you know Midwestern type community in a rural setting. And then I saw a very similar map recently and there's about a hundred houses, you know, and, uh, even the land that we left, at 30 acres that I was born and raised on, you know, to move to Virginia for reasons we can discuss.
D. Firth Griffith:Maybe, if it gets to it, um now has one, two, three, four, five people living on it Right. So one land that I grew up on now has, you know, five different communities of people on it that I don't think see themselves as part of the greater community. You know they're just individual people building houses and such and and and that's that. That, that decadence that we see. You know it's like in our lifetime, in 31 years, which is a blip of time, I mean it is a wink even in, you know, the people that are alive today, 31 years, like that's quite young, it's unbelievably young to some large degree and we've seen this much change in this one lifetime.
D. Firth Griffith:we named, named our son, our middle child, weymouth His first name's Weymouth In honor of that place. It's a very special place. That's a lovely gesture. I think so. I hope so.
D. Firth Griffith:I love to study Celtic mythology. In one of your essays you quote from the Tanpo Kunya, which I don't know. We could talk about that one maybe. I love the Cato Reade of Cooley, but I love and this is not necessarily Celtic in origin, obviously you know we have Norwegian and Viking, scandinavian, that is, rus, even those cultures which obviously came from the Vikings or maybe they came from the same stem. However, you want to see that they have the same tradition but they have, like, the name son of. You know the father and I always think our son is. There's a figure that is in the Ulster cycle of Celtic mythology, right around the Tan. Actually, it probably predates the Tan. I mean it's probably within that same storyline, maybe like a prelude into the tan is, uh, satanta. If you ever looked into the story of satanta, it's amazing I, I've heard the story, yeah yeah, and he has all these different names, but he's.
D. Firth Griffith:he's born as a tanta, and then he's called kukulin um, when he slays coolullen's dog and he becomes the dog of Cullen in little mythology, that's fun. But he's also called Satanta, max, sultan, son of Sultan, satanta, son of Sultan. And so instead of naming our son, you know Weymouth, son of Daniel. You know his name is just Weymouth. He's son of Weymouth, like that which flows through my blood, the 30 acres that I was born and raised on and the community that I ran around in my childhood, just endlessly. Oh, my gosh, everybody's yard was my yard, you know. That whole thing, you know, now lives in his bones and so he's not somebody McDaniel, he's just Weymouth.
Brian Kaller:That was more or less the reason that we named him that Part of the story of Ireland is the story of just generations of people trying to devote themselves to their own people and to their own communities and to hanging on to the past in a very good way, because, in the face of a lot of difficulties, because you know people would tell me about, say, this Irish song or this. You know they sit around and play the fiddles and then they'd say, oh, they do Irish dancing, what most Americans know as like river dancing, and this one old lady would say, well, these people had been the dancers of, you know Boris and Osiris or you know whatever. You know Karakashanan or Kishkaragan or any of the different towns that would be around there, as far back as when the dancers returned. And I said, what do you mean? When the dancers returned? Oh well, during the times when the English conquered the land, they tracked down and the, the english conquered the land, they, um, they killed they, they tracked down and killed the dancers. And I'd say they killed the dancers. And well, yeah, it was a symbol of rebellion. And I would read stories of people who would uh learn who, old men who would be writing this memoir and I'd be reading it. And he lived, he was a child a hundred years ago and his um or you know, and his dancer was an elderly man who still had like whip marks on his back, and so things like that are what bring people together and that makes people very strong.
Brian Kaller:Right now we live in a world where, again, I keep saying, while we're grateful for all the different things technology brings us, and we don't want to give those things up, we have created a world in which there's a we're. All. All of these technologies are controlled by a small number of corporations and by a very small elite of people and I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe there's any one tiny group controlling everything, but it's in their, without even anyone planning a conspiracy or intending for there to be one. Their job is to do whatever makes their companies. They're hustlers. Their job is to do whatever makes their companies money.
Brian Kaller:I'm sure that they believe they're doing good, and maybe occasionally they are, but their job is to make people more and more dependent on these things and have less and less contact with each other, to the point that we that work for us is no longer having a trade, a craft that you learned as a child from a father figure or that was passed down through your family, where you're a stonecutter and you're from a family of stonecutters and you all meet at all. You and all the other stonecutters in the neighborhood meet at the stone cutters pub after work and you all go back to your you know and that's you know. People weren't forced into those identities, but they also didn't have to spend adolescence having some agonizing search for identity either because they already were someone by the time they were in adolescence.
Brian Kaller:They were already someone. By the time they were in adolescence. They were already someone, and someone who was respected and useful, which is what most people at least. They commit suicide because they commit suicide are looking for and can't find. They clinging to the undersides of corporations like fleas in the hopes of being transported somewhere better in life before being dislodged and being you know, it ends up in a world in which we're all completely dependent, and the most dependent, non-self-sufficient human beings that have ever lived. And the one thing that this machine, that I don't want to blame any. I'm very skeptical of blaming everything on one abstraction like the government or capitalism or anything like that, but this whole machine, its greatest enemy is people's families and communities. So those are the things that unconsciously, inadvertently or consciously it has to try to break up as much as possible.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, I'm pausing because I think that's a huge point, because to some degree we have, you know, a crisis of friendship, whatever that is kinship, camaraderie, community, family that's what I mean by friendship. So let it all be nestled into that word. But also, today, we are unbelievably connected. Yeah, right, and so while there might not be a conspiracy theory that somebody, as you're saying and I agree with who is controlling this narrative to colonize us all into some, you know, new world order or something like this I don't know, I'm making that up. Imagine it sounds conspiratorial. I don't believe in that, like you while at the same time, it does seem that our slavery or servitude, like you were saying, as fleas on the corporation's back, to hopefully be brought somewhere before we are disposed of. I love that phrase, I'm going to steal it right from you, thank you it does also feel like we are being pulled into a new narrative. So, while it's not conspiratorial, it does feel like we are being pulled into a new narrative. So, while it's not conspiratorial, it does feel like we are being pulled into the new narrative. And so my question is what is this new narrative? And maybe, because I believe, at least our listeners, the grand majority of them. But regardless, you and I here now, in this moment, can perfectly agree that the new narrative is not a good narrative. Let's just put that on. It's just duh. Let's just accept that in terms for this discussion, this conversation.
D. Firth Griffith:Maybe the next question is how do we resist that narrative? How do we not allow that narrative to infuse the new era of storytelling? You see, like you were saying, stories are what's handed down, right, everything like that's. That's that idea of traditional societies. How do we not? You know, especially as parents, right, you have children, I have children of differing ages, of course, differing stages, of course, but how do we not allow this new story to infuse the new generations, so that maybe we could regulate the machine's influence over society?
Brian Kaller:It's incredibly difficult and I'm not the one to pontificate to others about how to do it right, because I don't feel like I did it right. I was very proud of how I raised my daughter. I raised her mostly myself, which is a long story, but it was in the Irish countryside and she and I we made a life together and I walked around and saw, visited the neighbors all the time and we built a garden, grew some of our own food and had chickens, ducks for a a while, a beehive, and we would learn things and I would teach her. We would go horse riding together. We would. I would teach her, you know, or have other find people to teach her how to, um, you know, shoot a bow arrow. We would go and pick mushrooms together, you know, and figure out which were the edible ones, and you know it was a great life and I knew that and I would tell her. You know, when you get to be a teenager, I'm sure you'll find, I would try to find, you know, other kids to play with. It was mostly elderly people around us. It was a country, so it was a long walk to anywhere, but we would.
Brian Kaller:I figured when she became an adolescent she would become drawn more to people her own age, and I told her that. I told her you know, don't feel bad about that, it's fine, you do what you, you know, um, I don't expect you to be a teacher and doing and only hanging out with your middle-aged dad, but but, uh, what I did not anticipate was, um, that, um, she, uh, she had uh problems that uh, as a, as a teenager. That I won't go into detail, but it was a very difficult time and in some ways still is, but it's a very difficult world out there for teenagers. While I was very pleased to have given her the most what I hope would be an idyllic childhood and a space of innocence in which she could be a child, that it left her with a gulf between her and other people that she had to bridge, I think, as I did, and yet. So the best thing that I could recommend, the thing I wanted to do, and never succeeded in doing, was to have a community of people who would be like-minded enough to stay together, which is difficult enough. It's difficult enough getting two people to stay together at this stage, but that's getting a whole community is even more so, and they would have to all agree on, to give up, at least around their children, the kind of say, give up technology together or they're all going to raise their children in this way.
Brian Kaller:You know, I talked with a few a couple of friends of mine who are they're climate scientists, and they created a new. They bought a little bit of land in the hills of Wales and while they work again like myself they work online. They're not Luddites, but they wanted to walk there and practice what they preach, so they created a little homestead, they grew their own food, they keep animals and they helped a few of their friends build homes on the land too. So they have a little bitty mini village where they're all raising kids together. And that's, I think, the real solution. And we can't do these things alone. You can live a life, you can find a life like this and live it alone, but the whole point of trying to live a more traditional life, part of it is finding a community, and that's very difficult to do, even for people to have the language to understand what you're talking about Right.
D. Firth Griffith:It's very difficult to do. Well, it takes the understanding of dependence, and I think that petrifies a lot of people, right, because I've been known to say that these communities often fail because Walmart, amazon, target, these things also exist. And so, while you want to depend upon each other, you don't have to, and and if you're not unbelievably dedicated, when push comes to shove, walmart's there for whatever you need, want. Maybe it has little of what you need, but you get my point. And so it's this illusion of dependence or lack of dependence, right, that I that I think is so detrimental. Like I'm thinking, we currently, um, you know, we, we, we live.
D. Firth Griffith:We moved from Northeast Ohio, the town, you know, the township of Weymouth, to a little little area here in Nelson County, central Virginia, and there's 109 of us that live in the city and I'm using air quotes because it's a city and then people always say it's a one, one stop light or one stop sign. We don't even have that. There's just there's one intersection and you can go whatever way you like. There's not even a stop sign. There's 109 of us, the old, forgotten area of virginia. When people arrive, they're just like I didn't know places like this still exist.
D. Firth Griffith:It's like, yes, yes, one of our neighbors Is it in the Appalachians it is, yep, yep, exactly where you think it would be, just nestled into the little outlying hills of the Appalachians. And one of our neighbors. He owns about 8,000 acres. He's the original land grant from George I. Another one of our neighbors, our second boat of jamestown, another one of our neighbors are pre-revolution american revolution. Their house was built in 1714 just ancient, and they're still here. They're still here for good or bad, positive or negative for them, for us, whatever it is. I mean, it's just like that's the idea. Right, push or shove, they're still here. And so that's the little community we live in. And they were recently.
D. Firth Griffith:There's one building in the center of town, if you will. There's just one building at an intersection, surrounded by fields of farmers and forests and little tributary streams to the James River, the great river that flows through the community out into the Chesapeake Bay. Many, many, many miles days traveled down river, but they were cleaning out this little post office. It's called the local store, the general store, and it just runs as a post office now and the original owner, who descended from the original builders of hundreds of years ago he was coming to the end of his life, dear friend of ours passed two years ago now and really like the mayor of the community unofficial and official mayor of the community and he was cleaning out some ancient drawers, as you would imagine, in a two, 250, 200, 250 year old building, before they sold it to another neighbor who was willing to keep up with with with the building and keep it operational. Um, because his family had more or less moved on and he was passing and whatever.
D. Firth Griffith:He didn't want it to go to an outsider, so they were selling it from one neighbor to the other. But he was going through a lot of the papers and he came up to our house Maybe this is about two and a half years ago Now. He came up to my house Cause, you knew, I loved history. I studied history in college and we had talked a lot about history and he, to some degree, was the historian of the, of the area.
D. Firth Griffith:And, uh, he brought me, handed this, me, this ancient, ancient piece of paper Well, not that ancient, but it just it had the appearance of truly time, time worn time scene. And, uh, it was dated 1903 and it was signed by the postmaster of the general store. Uh, and it was a railroad kind of like you would sign like uh, what's it called If you ship a package in an international customs was like a customs form, you know that kind of thing, but obviously not for international. And it said uh, I so and so the postmaster of this community, uh, hereby, uh, acknowledge that the beef rate, the, the, the, the beefs on this train, which were heading about 20 miles, 30 miles downstream to the town of of Scottsville, were raised by an honest and kind gentleman in whom I call my friend their good meat, or something like this.
D. Firth Griffith:It literally was the regulatory stamp of approval on these on a trailer and it was like the dude is good, you know, he's a kind guy, he's a friend of mine, this meat is good, right, and I have this framed in our house because today I mean like, imagine that a hundred years later, just about you know, just a little bit more than a hundred years later, from 1903 to two, 20, you know 2023 or whatever, 2024, the different world we live in like. But the funniest, the funniest part about this is like, not that that postmaster is still alive, but that postmaster's friends who grew up around him are still alive, right, these elders in our community and, uh, I, I and I. That to me is relationship, that to me is friendship, that to me, is this kinship that you and I are discussing, but it depends upon dependence being.
Brian Kaller:Each person was somewhat, much more self-sufficient than we would be today, but because of that they could do more for each other. They could stand by themselves and therefore they could help each other.
D. Firth Griffith:So now we're just blowing up the idea of dependence. I love it, right, because that's what you're saying. Right, they were dependent upon each other because they were self-sufficient, and so speak more about that.
Brian Kaller:Please let me interrupt you well, a lot of the older people that I would talk to in ireland said would they would, they would work in teams, they would work uh, they would work with people who that they'd known their whole lives. Because the people that all the neighbors would come by to help harvest the hay or to, you know, to plant, to harvest the potatoes or whatever it was, and these were people that you might have had your first communion with, you might have played with or swam in the in the creek with his children, or, you know, sat in a one-room schoolhouse with, or they might have gone to you've gone to each other's the wakes after each other's family members passed, and so you could. They would work together smoothly as a single organism without so much of the. It's not that had.
Brian Kaller:One person said that it was a nation in those days, before everything modernized. It was a nation without leaders, but not without leadership, because everyone was a leader. You know, because everyone was a leader. You know, because everyone would simply would take part, and that's how democracy is supposed to work. Also, democracy would have a very different meaning for us today when we know the people that we know interact with our icons on a screen. You know it wouldn't have as much meaning. It would. Fundamentally it wouldn't. It wouldn't be the same thing as it would be with elders in a town hall. You know where that? Like in the Norman Rockwell painting, where people would stand up and speak and each person would take their turn making a point, or when the Lincoln Douglas debates. Neil Postman have you ever heard of Neil Postman? Yeah, in the.
D. Firth Griffith:Lincoln-Douglas debates Neil Postman have you ever heard of Neil Postman?
Brian Kaller:Absolutely. Technopoly, yeah, yes. Great book, yeah, yes. I love Neil Postman.
Brian Kaller:He made this point that, no matter how much we might want to, we might say we believe in democracy, it's not going to be the same thing if we don't do it, if we don't practice what democracy has always meant. And if the language has changed, if the way we interact with other people has changed, it can't function in the same way. Not that it could never be revived. I believe it can certainly. But it would be very difficult to do. Because I'd meet them training their pony on the road. Or it got to the point where, after we had lived there for a while and we got to know the neighbors one by one, we'd be able to see the calf, a calf wandering down the road into our garden and just shoo it away and then flag down, martin, down the road and say one of your caps is loose again, martin. He's a regular Houdini, that one. Sure he is, because we'd know just whose it is. But we'd meet these people the next morning.
Brian Kaller:I was working a job in the city, so I'd have to go commute every day. I'd wait for the bus in the wee hours of the morning. I would meet them sometimes coming down the road in the village. They'd stop for a cup of coffee or something. They had been up all night delivering a calf these people were. I is as modern as ireland has become. I think there is still a an annual spring televised event called lambing live, which is my favorite name for a television show what an amazing use for television.
D. Firth Griffith:You know talking about like technology, like yes yeah, yeah, that's it.
Brian Kaller:That's a good point because we can. We can how we use these things. I I'm I never want people to get in to believe that I'm falling into the trap saying that technology is evil, especially not when I'm doing a video podcast, right, um.
D. Firth Griffith:But uh, it can be overused, it can be wrongly used, right yeah, lambing, lambing tv is well used but but speaking, you know, speaking as a farmer, it you know, I have a lot of conversations like this, because so much of modern agriculture. I, I don't care where it is. I imagine it's pretty similar in Ireland, maybe not in these still rural remnants that may still exist, but here in central Virginia, in the middle of nowhere. We're about an hour away from the closest gas station, you know, for instance. So, like I mean, we're really out there and I love when people visit, they're like, where can I get a bite to eat? I'm like in the field, I don't know nowhere else, maybe in the woods if there's, you know, turkey tail mushrooms or reishi or lion's mane or something, talking about wild foraging mushrooms.
D. Firth Griffith:Um, but all of the laws that are constructed to allow city folk to drive through the rural landscape as if it is a city hurt farmers more than I think anybody truly actually understands. So, for instance, okay, your domestic dog In the state of Virginia, this is law. Your domestic dog is allowed to come on my property. And if I don't want it to come on my property and it can do damage, it doesn't matter. You as the dog's owner are not liable for that damage. And if I don't want this dog on my property, I have to fence it out, I have to put a perimeter fence around my property and I say no dogs, so your dog is my problem. Okay, but to some degree that is what the rural landscape should be right Like these animals are not under our ultimate control, like you were saying about the calf that gets out like, yeah, there's animals that do that.
D. Firth Griffith:I can't stop them, they're very good at it. There are a few dinis, as you say. I love that. But in in Virginia and most agricultural states across the entirety of the United States, the opposite is true for farm animals. If my cow gets on your land, it's my fault. If my cow does damage on your land, I'm liable. If my cow gets on the road and causes you $100,000 of damage, I'm liable for that. You're not liable, I am.
D. Firth Griffith:And so so much of a farm's technology, infrastructure, finances et cetera goes to liability regulation, not the production of food, because there's still people who drive. Like, even out here there's people who drive. They'll be going to the river or something to go on a weekend of boating or something down the James, and they're coming down from Alexandria, dc, richmond, charlottesville, these very uppity cities and they're driving down these roads as if they own them, as if it's an urban environment where, like the worst thing, they're going to swerve, to hit, or maybe not even swerve and do hit is like a turtle or a squirrel, right, but you got a 2000 pound, you know, corriente, michona bull, on the road and they're going to die, not the bull, maybe the bull, but maybe the people in the car as well, right. And so, like what I'm trying to say here is this idea of community that you're getting to, and I realize that you really realize this, but I want to make you know, help our listeners understand. This connection to the community that you're talking about is not some philosophic or utopic understanding of just like humans, you know, coming together and being humans. Again, it really comes down to the daily operations of our lives. We're not constructed as humans, that is to say, you know, over the last 200,000 years we have not adapted to a condition where we have to live outside of the community, right, and so, as we drift outside of this community, this new human form, like you're saying, and in modernity, this lack of tradition, this lack of community, the lack of a world built by hands, all of a sudden, our operations. They don't seem to be fitting anymore right Like animal agriculture.
D. Firth Griffith:It's unbelievably hard. I mean, just today we received the first, you know 16th inch of rain that we've received since March and we spent hours making sure there were no trees on fence lines, you know, because then the cows are getting out of the road. We spent more time today, when you look at the total hours of animal husbandry, because we've been working on other things forestry projects, horse logging, etc. And, uh, we've spent more hours making sure that our neighbors aren't going to be mad that the, you know, urban passerby going 80 miles an hour down the rural landscape when the speed limit is 35, um, you know, aren't going to have their, their, their days ruined. You know, for instance, and and that that that is a traditional idea, trying to yet live. So animal agriculture in this way, in fields and pastures, not corrals and feedlots, is a traditional understanding of human habitation and earth habitation, etc. That is not really actually thriving in the community-less, machine-dominated and technological world.
Brian Kaller:When I most people I see that interact with animals these days it's only pets and even then they tend to treat them as the babies as babies that they're often instead of having children, that as babies that they're often instead of having children. And I often would see new riders try to control horses, as they would be used to controlling a machine.
D. Firth Griffith:That's not how it works. You know this.
Brian Kaller:Yeah, there's a wonderful. I quoted a writer named Henry Beston, I want to say, from a book called defined by us. They are neither beneath us nor above us, but they are other nations moving according to senses that we have lost or never attained, and living in a world that we will never know. Wow, similarly bound by God to the exalted earth. Wow, I'm I'm paraphrasing that. I'm sure I didn't get that precisely right, but that's, that's the general idea and, um, it's a beautiful book, if you ever pick it up it's called the outermost house.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, by henry best outermost house yes, yeah, by henry beston. I have that pulled up right here.
Brian Kaller:That's unbelievable but yeah, it's, it's you. We never had anything big. My daughter and I would ride horses. She became a very accomplished writer and um, we would have, um, we never had more than just chickens and bees, and even then, but we, it was, we had, it was, it was. It was a quite a learning curve, yeah, but but I'd see, my they, they were. Even then we would have adventures, as my daughter and I would put it.
Brian Kaller:We would look in the go and count them every night as a ritual before bedtime, before I went and read her story, or eventually she would read to me and we, one night, we, we had one fewer than we were supposed to have, and one night we had one fewer than we were supposed to have. And so we just took a torch and flashlight and just wandered through the woods and we were trying to find it everywhere, we were looking up in the branches, and finally we got back to the coop and she was almost in tears and I was consoling her, and then we were about ready to give up and I was just hoping that she'd show up the next day when I saw a little hole where there wasn't a hole before, and there was a really deep hole and it went down into a tunnel that went underneath the chicken coop. And so I just asked my daughter to get a broom handle and I reached down the hole and I'm like, is this a fox hole, is it a badger? And I poked down it and I heard this, and this chicken had started scratching and kept on scratching until she had dug a tunnel, wow, under the coop, until she was underground, and then presumably panicked when she remembered that she was a bird. Wow, um, and I, I, so we finally, like you know, I had to get the gloves and, like fish, you know, fish her out of the tunnel she had.
Brian Kaller:Took for us, right, how long have you been digging?
D. Firth Griffith:that I wonder if she was broody, just really broody, like one of the more broody chickens occupying a world we will never know. That was the end of that yes, yes I'm not not listening to your story. I promise I'm entertained by it, but but that that phrase is just unbelievably potent the more I chew on it. Yeah, because it's not that we couldn't know it, we just won't know it. Obviously, I don't know. I should read the book to really understand it.
Brian Kaller:It's a beautiful book, and the older people I talked to would talk about their families and how their people would have very close relationships with their animals and until just the last century or two, animals were what transported us, they were what hunted for us, they were what pulled our plows. Irish farmers might have falcons that they would use to hunt doves, or they might work with their dogs to train their dogs to herd the sheep and keep them from straying, or something like that, and they, their relationships, could be very respectful and very loving and without contradiction. They were also their. Their flesh and their blood was also food, right, and and there's there's no contradiction there, because it has to be that way. That's how nature works.
D. Firth Griffith:Right? Yeah, no, it's interesting. It seems like the same thing that's going on here is the same thing we're discussing about communities in the human sense. So one might ask why? Why in modern agriculture do we not have these relationships? And I wonder what you would answer. But the thing that I'm thinking through here is just the reason that humans today don't have communities, because we don't actually believe that we need to depend upon each other, because somebody else is raising the food, somebody else is producing the technology, somebody else is producing the barrels, somebody else is producing the barrels I don't have to work in my community to do so et cetera. Maybe they're plastic buckets instead of barrels, but you get my point.
D. Firth Griffith:It's that illusion that we're not dependent on each other. I think the same illusion exists in animal to human relations. Right, us as a mammal, them most likely cattle, goat, sheep, et cetera, pigs, all mammals. So the mammal to mammal connection is that we don't actually depend upon their you know, proper occupancy on the land. Rather, just they're raised in slatted floors or they're raised in CAFOs or pastured CAFOs or whatever it is is, and they are here for us to consume and to do nothing else. So we don't actually have this relationship with them. And so it seems to me this, the same foundational oopsie, this illusion of a lack of dependence that is causing both havoc in the mammal to mammal, but also in the human to human relationships all around. It seems to me like it has a similar source. What do you?
Brian Kaller:think. I think that you're really onto something, because if we can't either way, it would involve us Having those relationships, would involve us, in a sense, having the modesty to accept our own limitations, our own role in the relationship. It would involve us having to accept that we can feel any way we want to, we can imagine ourselves to be anything we want, but at the end of the day, uh, the cow's gonna cow, no matter how, no matter what I, what, what ideas we have, or how, whatever. Uh, you know it's gonna. Things are, people are gonna have to be.
Brian Kaller:Um, we're, we're all flesh and blood and we're not going to get away from that. We we've become very accustomed to living in this computer world of abstractions, where we all are in favor of slogans or ideologies that, for us, are, have become abstractions and not practices. Well, for many of us, and we Right. Well for many of us, and we we're in favor of communities that are, for many of us, are online, they're fandoms or they're, you know, they're people that group around, you know, around influencers yeah, dare we bring them up?
D. Firth Griffith:well, it's interesting, there's. There's so many things. You know it as often happens in these, in these conversations, the latter, you know, half or quarter of the episode to me is so juicy because we finally have this, this shared space, you and I. I feel like this part is juicy and you bring up so many good points, like the idea of limits, for instance, do a whole conversation on that, but to to me, this world built by hands, it's a world of limits, like communities, knowing your neighbor. There's a world of limits there, and and, and that's, to some degree, is an aspect of this very virtuous and very good in the true, like Aristotelian sense, just like the good aspect of of these conversations, that that that I think technology like you're describing here ultimately destroys, ultimately destroys that, you know, when it comes down to influencers, when it comes down to like books and book publishing, even to speak about it, it's so interesting. I just I, just in May, I came out with a book that we self-published.
D. Firth Griffith:Um, we shopped the book around for about six months and I'll never forget. So the book is. It's to some degree about agriculture, the past 10 years of what we've been doing here short stories, creative sciences and everything in between. We shopped it around for about six months and I'll tell you, I uh, we had, uh, you know, two agents and you know down to one agent and then we looked into publishers and things and we had all these responses. We had responses from, from publishers that like would have been an absolute privilege and honor to work with, unbelievable privilege and honor to work with who literally said they read the whole manuscript. Um, we were querying on a whole manuscript which is unique in the non-fiction side of the world. But that's what we were doing and, uh, they said, uh, you know, this is one of the best written manuscripts from an you know an editing perspective we've ever seen. This is wonderful, we have very little work to do, but we need you to cut out all of the best written manuscripts from an you know an editing perspective we've ever seen. This is wonderful, we have very little work to do, but we need you to cut out all of the story. We just want the science, you know. And I said, well, that's interesting. I'm not interested in that. Obviously, right, we are a storytelling species. I I don't believe that science is bad, but science in the absence of story is kind of like what you're saying, this technology in the absence of humanity, like that's. You know, there's, there's good sciences, there's good technology, but it has to still be contained within the community of story and such. So no, I'm not interested in taking this story out and then another publisher and I bring this up.
D. Firth Griffith:This whole story comes, you know, to this fulcrum of a point and they said this book has the ability to do what another book they published, which is an honor and a blessing to be compared to that book too, and a massive book, massive, massive its reach. They said this book has the ability to do what that book did in its time, but we only publish authors with 30,000 Instagram followers or more. And I said, well, I have 1800. With 30,000 Instagram followers or more, and I said, well, I have 1800, and and and I'm not entirely sure that it's that I haven't looked at in a long time. But then I joke, and this ruined my chances of publishing with them. Um, I joked. I said, well, listen, you know, today you can buy Instagram followers, like digital marketing companies sell Instagram followers and the way it works is pretty simple you just you buy it and then the digital marketing company pays real human beings to just follow you. That's the way it works. And then you know they get paid 10 cents, 25 cents, $2, whatever it is, I don't know the specific and I said, well, listen, you know, can I just like, resubmit the query? Let me just go out and buy 30, 30,000 Instagram followers and I'll just resubmit the query under a different name. We'll call it my pen name and then we'll just publish the book.
D. Firth Griffith:They did not like that. They did not like that one bit, but like it's just, it's calling out this, this unbelievably fake idea of all that technology is created around us. Okay, so we can create within technology, but technology right now is creating something else, and I'm not talking about AI. I'm talking about that in a book publishing world. Technology has infused that world, which doesn't make any sense. I mean, like technology infusing that world doesn't make any sense. That world relying upon technology and book printing, that makes fine sense, right, and so the direction of the control is the interesting thing. Humans speaking to computers is one thing. Computers speaking to humans is entirely another thing, right, that's the AI conversation that is petrifying. That book publishing is under the influencer's arm.
Brian Kaller:I was. Ironically, I'm trying to get a book published as well.
D. Firth Griffith:Oh, God bless you. I have all the faith that you can do it.
Brian Kaller:by the way, I was trying to talk to agents and the agent I was talking to if I'm not giving away too much was giving me the exact opposite advice. I wanted to make it mostly about fairly, about a fairly about a compilation of the putting together stories about traditional Ireland and based on my conversations with my neighbors, and he wanted me to make it put in more of myself and more and make it more personal and intimate and have something more about my, my, my personal life with my daughter. And I said, and I I hadn't, I had been resistant to that idea cause I didn't want to make it about myself, but I'm willing to, to work with him to make it more, to make it more marketable you know and more appealing to people.
D. Firth Griffith:Well more intimate. I would I? I would buy that book regardless.
Brian Kaller:Personal lives are complicated. I'm not a person who wants to put all of their personal business online or in a book, but I'm I'm reluctant to doing that, but but I'm willing to do it to a little bit to make it if that makes it people connect with the book more.
D. Firth Griffith:Here's a question for you. Here's a question for you. Recently I've been thinking and now we're totally off topic, but I think it does fit, I'm more just curious. So, in the publishing world it's so interesting. Like you know, when I self published this book, there was a number of like real authors, you know, who've traditionally published their books that wanted nothing to do with it, like they wouldn't touch it with like a 39 and a half foot pole. It wouldn't touch it, um, cause it wasn't published, it didn't have a professional developmental editor. You know, like we, we hired the best we could afford and, to be honest with you, it was wonderful.
D. Firth Griffith:I mean the, the, the editing process of this book was so wonderful because what we, what we, what we talked about in the very beginning, was, um, we want to make no decisions based upon no final decisions in the text, based upon the marketability of the book. I'm happy to make it more marketable, absolutely, but we're not going to change the book's flow, style, theme, character, right To fit the market. And so, rather, what the developmental editor and I got to do was we sat down and we got to say what did you mean when you said this? Do you believe you said it, you know, and it was almost like therapy. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I mean, I learned so much about myself, I learned so much about the book, I learned so much about my own. Like it was wonderful, truly like therapy, and it was a really rewarding exercise. But the question, it's so interesting as a self-published author most authors do not see me as an author it's really interesting At the same time. Like Alexandre Dumas, count of Monte Cristo, what else did he write?
Brian Kaller:Did he write the Females Couture? Yeah, else did he write um.
D. Firth Griffith:Did he write the female skater? Yeah, yeah, both of those books were published in, uh, the paper like he. He published them as um weekly. He would release a chapter like once a week in, like the x, y and z gazette, you know and then a lot of dickens, that's right they were, they were, they were blog posts.
Brian Kaller:Yeah, bleak.
D. Firth Griffith:House. Yeah, exactly, exactly, and I wonder how much. And so the first question is did the authors of those days see Dickens and Dumas as bad authors or not authors or not authors? Or is it really just like this modern age, where this delusion of dependence and all the things that we've talked about? Has that just pushed us away from the idea of like the true storyteller, that in order to be a true storyteller, you have to go through these main channels?
Brian Kaller:I don't know. I I was I'd. This is my first time ever publishing a book. I still write a newspaper column which appears in Ireland, and I do the blog posts, and I used to. I was writing for magazines much more regularly, for a variety of different kinds of magazines, but I've the last few years have been quite disruptive for all of us and for myself. I had the need to life got in the way and so I left Ireland and came back home to this house where I'm helping take care of my two elderly parents. My daughter's grown now and is living her own life, and my you know my parents needed a hand. So I'm back in the house I grew up in.
Brian Kaller:So life, life takes twists and turns, so I've been hoping, I've been meaning to start writing a lot more and there are a lot more things I want to write about, but I never want to set myself up as an expert in homesteading, crafts, things like that. I dabbled in a lot of things. I would grow food and I kept, you know, chickens and bees and I would learn how to, you know, preserve and make wine and beer and meat and and make these things and and every, every fall, we would pickle and you know dehydrate and can, and you know we, we do the homesteading stuff, but there are many, many people who do it a lot more than I can um and we would um. So I just I talk to people and I get I interview people who know what they're doing a lot more than I do. And this particular year especially, I'm trying to grow, turn our backyard into a garden here in Missouri, and it's been an exercise in humility because I'm learning to grow in a completely different climate, and it's been one disaster after another. So I but I have been trying to.
Brian Kaller:There are a lot of things I plan to write about, and before I left, I was writing about what's Everything's happening in Ireland right now, which is a lot. I happened. I was writing about a lot of the unrest that's taking place there and then, as I was writing something about it, the dublin right. I had temporarily moved to dublin briefly, uh, in the apartment, and then the dublin riots broke out right outside my I when I was in the middle of it.
Brian Kaller:Wow, so, and so a lot of things have a lot of unexpected things have happened, and I think that the coming years are going to bring a lot more, and I never want people to think in terms of preparing for the big one, like, think of homesteading that way. Whatever you form environmental or economic or that you think that might take, I never want people to think of there as being a big one. But life throws you curveballs, you know, and it's good to know a variety of self-sufficient things in order to be prepared for anything right right, yeah, like telling stories and that's why I can, that's why community is also great, you know because you can help each other.
D. Firth Griffith:Yeah, just the power of telling stories, that has to be included. I think you know to grow tomatoes is fine, to grow tomatoes to share with others is wonderful, but to like tell a story while doing it you know around a wonderful meal or even just to tell the story of the tomato, it does change things. I have hope for book publishing. I don't mean to bash it in any way, because obviously your agent is exponentially better than the ones I was working with um, I don't know.
Brian Kaller:He hasn't gotten to be homeless yet, but we'll, we'll find out. I'll put him to the test yeah, yeah, you keep us.
D. Firth Griffith:You keep us posted um the. The book that you're trying to get published, you're saying, is about, uh, old irish communities and stories and things a lot of the things I've been putting on resilience are bits and pieces got it.
Brian Kaller:They're columns that I published and I'm now incorporating into the got it. Well then, I'm gonna love it, so I hope so. Um, it's been. Uh, I, I, I put together a lot of different interviews and a lot of the conversations. A lot of what I base this on are just casual chats that I would have every single day with people all on the bus to the city and back. The same elderly people would ride the bus with me every day. The same ones would be um, you know, passing through um, uh, walk their cows down the country road past our house, and so we'd know everyone, we'd know everyone's names and we got to sit and chat with them. And uh, occasionally some of them, let me sit down with um with a video camera or with uh with a tape recorder. Wow and um, and as we were in the 20 years that I was raising my daughter there, um, there were fewer and fewer of them because, one by one, they would pass on, but the things that they would tell me would be just astonishing. They would just casually bring up things like I would, just occasionally.
Brian Kaller:I was an investigative reporter for newspapers before I moved to Ireland, I didn't think of myself as easily shocked, but I would just occasionally just stop them in conversation and say wait what? Say that part again. Go back and explain that whole thing. I was talking with one of my neighbors. He said well, you know, that was back during the bank strikes, when there was no money. I said well, you mean, people didn't have money was tight, these people didn't have enough to live on. And he said no, I mean there was no cash. And I said do you mean there was no? People didn't get enough cash. No, I mean all the cash was in the banks. There was no cash in the country. And I said when was this? Was this in the country? And I said wow, when was that? Was this in the 1800s? No, 1970s, yeah. How long were the like days? No, up to a year. Yeah, well, the longest one was technically six months, but there was. It was disrupted before and after, so it was really more like a year. And I said, hang on, sorry, there was no money, there was no currency in the country for up to a year.
Brian Kaller:How did people function? How did people get paid at their jobs? How did people buy things? And I would keep. Every question would lead to more questions. And there was a little bit of cash circulating around, a little bit of paper money, but very little compared.
Brian Kaller:And it turns out what they did was just because everyone in their communities knew everyone else and because everyone bought, grew, slaughtered, made, fixed most of what they needed, and because one person could do what another person couldn't do, they would barter, they would trade, they would have a favor bank and when it came to something that they couldn't do, they couldn't fall under any of those categories. They would write checks and I said to whom? Well, to each other. And they were. Well, how did they know? Everybody just kept a book, checkbook, and everybody would just write, and they were basically IOUs but the.
Brian Kaller:So I actually looked this up and it looked up old newspapers about this subject and the very, very few economist papers that have ever been written about this remarkable. This happened three times in the 60s and 70s, and in the longest one there, when the banks all closed down. There were five million irish pounds in circulation in a country of three million people, right, so a pound 60 for every person, wow, by the end of it, a year later or several months later, five billion pounds had been circulated in checks. Wow, and you would think that if everyone was just writing checks for a beer after work, that absolutely everybody would go bankrupt. There'd be massive fraud, right, everybody would be bouncing checks, and that didn't happen.
Brian Kaller:At the end of the bank strikes, I think there was something like what was the actual figure. It was something like one bounce check for every 4,000 people in the country and they would describe to me oh well, these people would take in a little bit of currency and all the other businesses would hear about it. So they would bring in basically little bit of currency and all the other businesses would hear about it. So they would bring in basically basket loads of checks and try to exchange them. So checks were written against other checks, checks were written in exchange and you had checks upon checks upon checks. So Ireland became, as one of my neighbors put it, the Czech Republic for a while.
Brian Kaller:But it also shows you they were worth something because everyone believed they were worth something, which is all money is these days.
D. Firth Griffith:Anyway, right, but it, but it, it exactly right. And it also extends into this idea that life happened without it. Right, let's pretend that there was, you know five, or that you said, uh, three million breaths, not pounds, but just breaths for three million people, like we would die. Right, like you need more than one breath. Yeah, like, if we, if we actually limited to things in life that matter actually matter, right, right, death occurs, but when we limited currency, now, you know, obviously, the communities, they had to be there. Like you know, you weren't going to be shipping internationally. Like globalism can't interact with this. There's, there's limits to my statement here, and maybe those are good limits, but for now they're just limits. But like, life moves on, you know, know, like, out here, very short little story that has none of the potency that yours does, but just to share, like, even in the modern world, this happens. There's a property, just very much you know, contiguous to our land here, that was for sale the fine little house on it, 54 acres of gorgeous forest, and when it went on on the market, as all things that do go on the market around here, we're interested in it. We're curious, especially just curious, to see who purchases it. We were looking at the land and it was really at the time land where we are, pre-covid era is unbelievably cheap. Unbelievably cheap. We obviously live in the middle of nowhere and so this is kind of the reason, and it was unbelievably accessible for us to purchase this and for a moment we considered it and then it didn't work out and right at the last moment, right when we should have been considering it, somebody else put in an offer, etc. Well, just so happens that. So we run a 400 acre wildland or farm. We need a, a lot of help.
D. Firth Griffith:The people, the family that moved in, are retired diesel mechanics and air force engineers, I believe. And the second they did when they moved in is they built a garage, huge garage with car lifts and every tool you can imagine in a mechanic shop. And the guy loves being a mechanic. He loves it, but he, but he goes. Second, I met him. He said listen, I never want to work for a dollar in my life. I'm retired, I don't want to do this. If you ever need help, you just let me know and just bring a pack of beer. I'll drink. Whatever I drink while I'm working on, the vehicle is mine, that's my payment.
D. Firth Griffith:And then it progressed on to like pork chops and pork sausage and pounds of ground beef, which we obviously have in abundance here and now, like, when the tractor breaks, you drive it, drive it to his house, which is just down one of our little farm roads, you know, just little farm trail, and his house sits way back there in the back, about a mile and a half off the road, with this huge mechanic shop, you know, or like we had a brush cutter on a tractor that recently broke and he's like, yeah, cool, let's fix it. You know, bring him the beer, bring him the pork chop, whatever it is. And it's just like the guy doesn't want any money, he just wants a friend and a good beer, right, and in exchange for that I don't have to actually have any money, I just have to have a beer and a pork chop, which I'm going to have anyways, just have to have a beer and a pork chop, which I'm gonna have anyways, obviously. And uh, you know, and I have a lot of food issues and uh, and so he brewed up some, uh, we grew some russet potatoes and we made some potato vodka together and then we harvested some, some, some wild medicine and made some vodka tinctures, you know, as medicine, as medicine, and like, and he raises bees and you know our, our landscapes here, you know, in, in, in the method of agriculture that we practice, there's just wildflowers everywhere and and, and quite often I'll, I'll call him and I'll say you know, mr So-and-so, no reason to expose his privacy, but, mr So-and-so, like, all of your bees are in my fields, you know cause the whole field is just buzzing of honeybees, you know.
D. Firth Griffith:And he's like oh good, thank you. You know. Then in the autumn, or the spring I'm sorry, the spring when they harvest the honey, you know, he'll bring over a gallon of raw honey and he's like this is your honey. And I'm like, no, like this is literally yours, like this was produced because of your land, right, and that's that connection.
D. Firth Griffith:And we don't agree about a lot of things and we don't agree about a lot of, you know, health things, and I care more about the food I consume and he doesn't, but like that just doesn't matter, right? We actually depend upon each other. He needs a friend, he needs something good to do, he loves working on machines and all I do is break machines, you know, and all we need is a pork chop. All we need is a field of wildflowers and the community works, it's, it's, it's dropping the idea that dependence is a bad thing, you know, I think, I think that was a huge learning moment for us, that we don't have to own the world, we just have to befriend it. And as you befriend it, you, you I mean this happens that this story, as you're discussing, right, the monetary, the currency, goes away and, and what happens? Life continues on, not as it did before, of course, or maybe as well as it did before.
Brian Kaller:Maybe that could be argued, maybe it, you know, is better, like when the power goes out and you're like, oh my gosh, let's play a card game we, we have, um, we wonder how people could get by on so little back then, but it's because we need to spend a lot more, because we have, um, we have armies of, you know, people today have armies of therapists and teachers and the entertainment, and you know, lawyers and security and this and that, that, that all of which has skyrocketed in the last several decades. People, I mean secure security, lawyers, therapists these are all things that or caregivers for the elderly, or, you know, care centers for children. Now, I'm not don't think for a moment that I'm looking down on people who need to use these things, because sometimes these things are necessary.
D. Firth Griffith:Because sometimes these things are necessary, but to some extent they are the fact that they've skyrocketed and that is because we so often have to now pay other people have to make so much more money in order to pay other people to do what everyone just used to do for each other as part of being human right, right, you know? Yeah, like, um, like, even on the farm here, my parents, they live with us, they live in a house on the property and, uh, what I would do without my mom, I don't know with our kids, you know, because a lot of farm work, it's dangerous and so if we know that there's going to be a dangerous situation coming up and we can anticipate it, off to grandma's house, they go. And then even my father, who is very in shape but getting up there in age you know he's definitely not 30 and Sprite, um, you know he took off work this week cause we have we have a huge fencing project and a forestry project trying to open up a little bit of land during this drought to reduce hay and other off-farm inputs, keep the cows healthy, goat sheep as well. He took off work this week. We worked for 12, 13 hours a day just getting the work done, communally, relationally. Unbelievable time, time, a day I'll never forget, practically unbelievable right. We've worked together our whole lives, as all children and parents have in in many different forms, even if it's just playing together our whole lives and so that relationship is had right. But also like the conversations we had, wonderful, the, the, the, the drama of the day we shared. You know like my hands are just complete blood. It's horrible. I have so many blisters and uh, but we both have these blisters and we're going to talk about it for a while.
D. Firth Griffith:Like all of these other things. But also like I don't have to charge more for the meat, right, because the fencing was built in community. Does that make sense? And I understand, like you're saying like pay a fencing company to do it, pay your farm workers I'm not saying don't do these things. Just like you're saying don't you know the daycare and and child services, nannies, etc. Like if you you know the negative thing in the slightest, but the occupancy, the busyness of those people's lives universally, across the board in our countries. That's the issue when there's so much opportunity that exists. Like our neighbor, the diesel mechanic, yes, right. Like if your life could depend upon relationships, as you're saying, in this community fashion, all of a sudden all of the other tertiary things in life truly become tertiary Technology and these other bills, etc. You know they still exist. It's fine, like I love conversating with you on a digital platform, love this, but like it's tertiary, it's not even secondary.
Brian Kaller:Yes, so I realize we've been talking for two hours and it doesn't seem like it.
D. Firth Griffith:I was gonna. I was gonna say, if I don't know if you expected this, I didn't. Um, I I wasn't actually, but I appreciate your, your enthusiasm, let alone your patience regardless I, I'm happy this is uh.
Brian Kaller:This has been fun. I would love to do it again sometime we got to do that.
D. Firth Griffith:We got to do that. Let's um, let's wrap this up, um, for just the listener's sake, but let's, let's do a number of these things, especially as the book gets published, um, or comes out, and whatever medium it comes out hopefully the medium that that you desire and you vision for the project, um, let's definitely do it again then. I mean, all I got to do is log on to resilience and read another one of your articles and we'll just have a whole other two hours of conversation, like I even saw today. I was, you know, I got inside as I sent you that email. I got inside from the forestry work we were doing and had about an hour to have dinner and kind of prep for this art. You know this.
D. Firth Griffith:This, this time together, I just wanted to reread some of the things and I got on and I noticed you. You published a piece with resilience and maybe even on other platforms. I was just looking at resilience on july 6th that I have not read yet and I was like oh, I can't open this because if I open this, we're just going to talk about this piece.
D. Firth Griffith:So even if we just do another one on this piece, you know we'll talk about that one next time yeah, it looks odd and it's long. Well, I guess it's not that long. It's pretty long, though. I mean it's just like there's. There's a lot of content here. Man, milton's paradise lost, pilgrim's progress, what else is? I'm just skimming it. This is so bad. Little Little Women.
Brian Kaller:Gulliver's Travels extremely impoverished um backward schools which even back when they were hidden schools, hedgerow schools, that people would study, not only study ancient the, the right ancient greeks and latin, uh, greeks and romans, classics. They would read them in ancient g, greek and Latin, as well as in Irish or English. That would be a whole other conversation.
D. Firth Griffith:I'm going to cut you off because I want to do that. One Nations of the Learned the article is titled. If you want to check that out, let's do this again, brian, wonderful. Thank you so much for your time.
Brian Kaller:Thank you so much for this opportunity. Thank you very much I appreciate it. Yeah and um, this it's been, um, it's been fun. I love doing this and, uh, I'd love to, I'd love to come back sometime Wonderful.
D. Firth Griffith:Well, I'll, uh, I'll stop recording, stay around, so it uploads. Um, okay, I appreciate you All right.
Brian Kaller:Thank you, me too.
D. Firth Griffith:Well, we made it. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you've enjoyed the content or the conversation and you want to join the content and conversation, I beg you, I plead with you, to allow us to create a two-way conversation and it's not just us speaking at you, but join us online on Substack. It's free, doesn't cost you anything at all. It's the Wildland Chronicles on Substack. It's a link in the bio. You know what to do Click it, join it and all of these episodes are posted there, with some further discussion topics and a way for us to discuss and comment and critique and further these thoughts together, which is, uh, I have to be honest with you the only reason we do this. I have no interest in talking at people, uh, with people, so us, we'll see you there.