Why I Torched My Wife's Garden Bed | Connor Larsen Show Episode 3

I charred a garden bed i built for my wife with a Japanese technique called yakisugi. This episode i got very into old preservation techniques and learned cool stuff about ancient Tokyo's firesfighters, an 800 year old korean book, Venice's wooden foundations, and 1,400-year-old earthquake-proof temples. Old people figured out a lot of stuff. 

Thanks for watching! Here's where to find more of Connor: 

🎟️ Come see my live taping at The Lab at Zanies in Nashville 5/21/26 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, welcome back to another episode of the Connor Larson show. Uh, thanks everybody who listened. This is this is my first episode uh after posting stuff, right? So I recorded a few in the bank, but this is the first one uh where I've gotten feedback, and the feedback was incredibly nice. So thank you. That I really, you know, it's sometimes it feels crazy doing anything in stand up or you know, whatever space this is, to put it out there. You go, who is gonna like this besides me? And then you always find out way more people like it, and that's very nice. So I'm glad you guys liked it. And um, yeah, we're early. This is you know, baby's first step. So send it in there, whatever you got some feedback, send it in there. Some some people's feedback better than others, you know. Some people go, I'd like to hear about this. Some people go like, your hands are weird, and I don't like looking at them. And you go, well, that's not not much I can do. But no, seriously, thank you for all that. And I'm really excited about today. I got a good episode, I think. I'm doing so. This episode's gonna be about uh a cedar garden bed I'm building within a it's called a Yakasugi method, which basically it's an old Japanese method of uh charring. Whenever I say old Japanese method, I feel I've like about to say ancient Chinese secret. Like that's that's almost that's what caught me up there. I was like, hmm. Um but it is, it's an old Japanese method, and you take the uh you take the cedar. Hold on, I got my headphones wrong. That's an incredible. Sorry, I had an issue with my headphones, uh, where you char, you take a flamethrower, in my instance a roofing torch, and uh you burn up the cedar wood, and that makes it last a lot longer. It also makes it look beautiful, in my opinion, and uh it sort of led me on this crazy rabbit hole of Yakasugi and all these other traditional methods to preserve things. And then I just I always have a soft spot for Japan. I love Japan. I think they have such a cool, they seem to have like an obsessive culture. You know, when you look at them, there's like all the old stories about you know, a sushi chef, it'll he'll work in a sushi restaurant for 20 years and they won't let him touch the rice till you're 10. And I love I love stuff like that. That makes me so happy. Just the dedication and care. Um, so this this led me down a fun rabbit hole for that. So, all right, I'll start at the beginning. It's uh it's spring here in Nashville, it's very beautiful. And every spring I tell my wife, I go, I'm doing this for you. I pick a project, I do it, and then most of the time she's like, That's for you. And I go, No, no, no. I have decided this is for you, which is a great method. My dad used to do that all the time. He would do something he wanted to do, and then he'd come home and he'd tell my mom, he'd go, I did this for you. And she'd go, You bottle model airplane for me? And he'd go, yes, and I'm gonna build it too. So you're welcome. It's a great idea. If you're married, try it out. But last year I built her garden bed and um it was good, but we built it out of like uh just big box lumber from Home Depot, you know, crappy stuff. And we can already tell it's gonna be two to three years, we're gonna have to get a new one. Um, it's starting to rot and stuff. So this year I was like, all right, let me do this smart. And I went down this rabbit hole, I was looking at different ways to do it. I found this great video. It's a YouTube channel called Tending the Garden, and it's this like foreign Swedish guy, but he uh he built a Yakuzuki bed, and I was like, I won't do that. So I did. I went to the I went to the lumber yard and I uh got all the lumber and then I charred it. I'll actually have a video for showing all this stuff. I'm gonna make a video about how I built it. But you burn it and then you let it sit for a day, it gets all this charcoal on it, and then you scrape it off, and then you wash it, and then dry it for a day or two, and then apply tongue oil. That's where I'm at now. So the video will probably come out about a week after this, uh, because I have to give it like 10 to 14 days for the tongue oil. Uh, tongue oil sounds like a scary thing, like a a pervert sells you, but that's not what it is. Tongue oil is tongue oil is from the tongue tree in China, and I guess it's it preserves the wood. It also makes it, it's very cool. I love the way the wood looks after you burn it, scrub off the charcoal, and then apply the tongue oil. But yeah, so they do this forever, and it's um it's funny. It's like a it was a very cheap thing in the beginning. It's like all cool stuff. It was cheap, then it became trendy. It it people call it yakasugi in Japan. I guess people over here call it uh shusugiban, which is like a mistranslation. Um, but the New York Times was like, that's what it's called, but that's like I guess Shusugiban is a the first two words are Chinese and the last one's Japanese, which doesn't make any sense. So if you say in Japan, they're like, what? Um but it means like burned cedar, essentially. And it was this old method, you know. So Japan is like, I didn't know this until I did this sort of research. Japan is the third most heavily forested country in the world. It's weird because to me as a westerner, I just think of like Tokyo. I just go like, it's all it's all incredibly it's like New York City, you know, but that's that's like one part of the that's like thinking New York City as Arkansas, you know. So uh it's heavily forested, they have all this, everything's built out of wood because they don't have a lot of metal. You gotta, it's like interesting to think about if a country doesn't have a lot of metal, they just gotta figure out some way around it. So they and they were also, you know, super, you like couldn't go to Japan for a long time. They would turn away the white devils and be like, no, you can't come here. Um, which that was a fun part. Like I was watching that show Shogun recently. It's like it was kind of Japan just decided, like, yeah, we're not gonna meet everybody, which is a pretty bold it didn't really work that well, but it's an interesting thing. Um so they they do all this stuff and they're they're burning like merchants and people who couldn't afford stone and stuff would burn the wood, and that would make it weirdly, if you burn it, it makes it a little more fireproof because fires were a huge problem in Tokyo. Uh, it was funny. They were they had a thing they said uh Tokyo had 49 like great fires, like fire to like burn down the whole city, like the Great Fire of Chicago. We had like one of them and it burned down the whole city. Tokyo had like 49 in 300 years, it just kept happening. I also found out uh firefighters in Japan in the old days, they wouldn't uh they didn't have like water, you know, there's no hydrants. So they would just take a pole and yank down buildings, hoping like they yanked down material would stop the fire. Which that's gotta be such a bummer as a, you know what I mean? You're like, oh good, the fire department's here, and then you're like, oh wait, that means they're gonna they're gonna destroy my house so that my house doesn't get destroyed by the fire. Um, so anyway, they had to figure out all this stuff, right? And they learned that if you burn wood, it kind of becomes fireproof, it becomes pretty rot resistant, and it'll last a long time. And I was trying to figure out you know, why wood burning it? And essentially, if you create a layer of charcoal, if you make like a dead layer, it stops rot. You know, everything is aging because you know, the wood is alive, so stuff gets in there, little fungi, or the water causes it to rot. But basically the core problem is, you know, either oxygen or sugars or something organic and alive in the wood is breaking down. That's like the that's the decay process. So weirdly, if you kind of kill the stuff in there, if you make it like a dead thing, like a burned wood, there's nothing to the organic process is sort of impeded. So, you know, you can't really do anything with that, which is like a very interesting way to sort of weaponize the things you're like, you're always like, all right, you know, we're getting older, things get destroyed, things break down over time. I like the idea of flipping that on its head and using that against them. So I got I went down this rabbit hole. There's so many cool, like old ways to do this. Um, the Yakasugi thing, big in Japan. They have these temples from like 400, 500 years ago that are still standing, just wooden buildings, way longer than anything else we have. And uh a lot of them also are built without nails. That's the thing with Japan, they don't have any metal, so they just have to they had to be like, well, how are we gonna build stuff? And they ended up with like Japanese joinery, which is you know, just half-lap joints or other, I mean, way more complicated than that, but all these different joints that work to fasten wood with no nails. You know what I mean? There's no external fastener binding the two pieces of wood together. Instead, they just fit like beautifully, which is a really cool again. This goes back to just I love Japan being kind of an obsessive culture. You know what I mean? They're like, we're gonna get this down to like a millimeter so everything fits, and then those things last forever. There's a great uh Instagram channel called Taku Woodcraft, and it's a guy, and he just builds these awesome, elaborate like joints, and I love I find it very soothing. It's a very good like ASMR sort of all the sounds of all that stuff, but anyway, so I looked into uh all the different methods, and there's a bunch of cool ones. There's like um, so there's there's uh Yakasugi, which is Japanese. They also found that like Leonardo da Vinci in his notes just came up with this. He was like, ah, the best way to preserve wood is to burn it. Anyway, I'll just go discover like 50 other things. So just independently in his notes, there was like a great idea that he didn't really do much with. And then uh, I guess Vikings used to burn it. They also say, you know, going back to the whole organic versus dead thing, it's like if you put tar on uh wood, that's what that's kind of the same process, right? You're smothering it in this substance so that nothing can get in there, nothing living can get in there and live and break it down, right? So, like, and all these things are sort of forgotten to us because you know you have like the tar heels of North Carolina, but like I, you know, I love sports, I like to read. I couldn't have told you, I would have been like, oh yeah, tar's something. Um, so that was a fun thing to read about. I also read about the city of Venice in Italy, the way they built the city. Like, I think some most people know it's like a floating city, it's an artificial, it's like an island that they built up. But one of the ways they did it was they took these huge, like 16-foot uh big pieces of lumber and they sunk it into the clay. Like though there's there's clay and then water, and they sunk them in there, and then so you're basically smothering the wood, again, not letting any, there's no oxygen, there's no organic processes going on down there. So then after that, uh the wood's in there, and because it's in this very like mineral-ridge water, and it the water is slowly seeping into the wood, uh the calcium and all this stuff in the water eventually um gets into the wood and like petrifies it. So then you have this wood that's like much more like stone than wood. It like really becomes structurally stronger than steel, and that's why it's able to last so long, and you know, Venice is like an ancient city. But the interesting thing is if you they tried to do some stuff like some modern excavating on it, and if you uh if you expose that wood to air at all, it um it like rapidly starts to go. So you can't, they're sort of in this weird position where it's like these older people found this great idea, but you can't really, you can't do anything to you just gotta kind of live with it and be like, okay, let's see, you know, they built this stuff a long time ago, let's see how long it lasts. I mean, Van is everything you read about it is like it's all it's all gonna disappear someday, and that is a bummer, but it's also um it's pretty cool that they did it. I mean, I, you know, hats off to the the Venetians, right? Pretty cool. Um so I was reading about all these different old techniques for preserving stuff. One of the coolest ones, I thought, was there's a thing called uh the Tripitaka Korean. Koreana? I'm reading it off a thing. Koreana. That's probably not it, but that's the whenever you read about other cultures and then you gotta talk about it on a podcast, you go, no matter how I say this, no one's gonna be like, is this guy a native speaker? Like that's the whatever. So there's this cool thing. They also oh the other thing I was gonna say, the uh they had bog oak, which I'd never heard of, but I, you know, you know I love trees. Uh bog oak is when like a tree, like an oak tree will fall into like a bog, like a a gnarly swampy area. And again, no no oxygen, nothing living in there. And so those trees will last forever. They say the tannins turn the wood like black and petrified. And then there's so there's some trees they found in like peat bogs. Um peatbogs, great baseball player. No, there's some uh there's some trees they found that are like the tree rings, like 7,000 years old. I mean, very cool stuff, but older than the pyramids, they found some. Um but anyway, the trip to the trip trippitaka Koreana. Uh it sounds like a great appetizer. That's not what it is. It is uh this book, it's like the best version of the Buddhist canon we have. I think it's 82,000 wooden blocks. Um, that they this happened in Korea, hence the name. And they it took them like six years just to preserve it. So I think this happened in the 1200s, and they so they carved all this stuff in, and then they uh they soaked it in seawater for like three years. So, you know, like you got the salt attacking all the organic stuff, kind of killing the the thing, and then they dried it for a while, then they uh they boiled it in seawater, then they dried it for three more years. Like a s I love a six-year anything that takes six years to preserve, I love it. Um so they do all that, and then they it's been perfectly preserved for 800 years. I mean, they still have it, they it's the greatest source of like ancient Buddhist canon that we have. And uh they tried to, in the 60s, the president of Korea tried to uh to he was like, we're gonna put it in a modern concrete building because it'll be better. We'll improve on this. And immediately it started getting busted up. They started, they did real damage to it, which was a nice, like uh that's one of the things I liked about this episode was you started to learn old people, you know, ancient peoples, older people, they they had some stuff figured out. I think we all have this mindset of like everything we do now is better because quote unquote, you know, we're smarter or whatever. But a lot of the stuff uh that they figured out, it works as good or better. That was a very cool part of the episode to learn about and to be like, yeah, there's some wisdom in ancient techniques. I think a lot about that a lot with uh just my own life, you know, trying to live a good life. There's a lot of there's a lot of cliches and sayings that end up being very true, uh at least in my experience. And it's, you know, it's sort of it's very much like a young person's thing. It also might be like a modern person's thing to just discount stuff people say, ah, what do you know? But they end up, you know, it's like I'm 33, I'm married, and I think happy wife, happy life is profound. Not like, I mean, the way most people say it is my wife's mean, therefore my life is bad. You don't want to, you know, you gotta keep your wife, like your wife is some is like Bowser or some evil thing that you gotta keep happy. That's not how I think about it. I just think if you pick a good person to spend your life with, your chances of having a happy life way higher. And that's, you know, I think my wife's right. I think she's the best, and I I'm very happy about that because I think if you mess that decision up, it can be it's pretty miserable. You know what I mean? There's sometimes there's like uh I've been out at, you know, I've done shows on the road and seen you know, super rich people who are paying for the VIP package to meet, you know, whatever headliner, and you see them and like one of the two is drunk and surly and mean, and they're just ruining this experience that the other one spent a lot of money on, and you just know you go, no matter, no matter what, I don't care if you're staying in a five-star hotel, that's it's no fun to be with that person. And on the flip side, if you're with somebody you like and who's nice, you know, who cares if you're just go get like a you know, even getting lunch at a crappy restaurant is pretty fun if you like the person you're with. So I think a lot of stuff like that, especially stuff that seems stupid when you're or you're not just like not stupid, but just like, yeah, duh. But as you get older, you realize, like, no, there's some real profound stuff in here, you know, like health is wealth. Like when you're 20, that doesn't mean anything. You go, I'd like some actual wealth. You can have you can have my health. But then you get older and you go, no, no, no. Like, if I had, I would so much rather be healthy than be sick with a little more money. You know, that stuff is it really I don't know. I was thinking about that a lot during this episode. Um, but yeah, so I love uh I got really into this, and the the Japanese part of this episode too was very fun because they have so they have Yakasugi, um, which is very fun. And for me, I really get it. It was fun getting to actually build it. And I hope you like that video too. I'll link that uh in this. But they also have they just have a culture of you know, the older people figuring stuff out that's really impressive. Like they have a lot of old Japanese temples that have stood for, you know, a thousand years with no nails, and you're like, how? And it's just really careful and really uh thoughtful techniques. They had the thing I got really into is they have these, you know, they have the pagodas, which I feel like when I say pagoda, you're picturing the the Japanese temple. And uh a lot of those are really old, which is crazy because you know, Japan is a uh sorry, I got something going on with my, I got like a cough or something. Um Japan's a nation of earthquakes, you know what I mean? It's got it's it's the ring of fire, it's that whole uh plate with all the earthquakes that's they're all going around there. And um, so a lot of stuff has been knocked down forever, and and they've changed the way they built. So a lot of the pagodas, they have a thing called a uh Shin Bashira. Again, not a flawless pronunciation, but whatever. It's so they when they build these things, they have you know uh all these beams that support the outer part of the pagoda, and then they have a big central beam that actually hangs off the ground, it doesn't bear any weight. And it's very confusing when you look at it, like what's that for? And it the what it does is when an earthquake comes, everything sort of sways, and that central beam stops. Like when the things are swaying before they get too far, they kind of they go into the central beam, and that sort of diffuses the force. And so some of these temples have been around for you know a thousand years in a country that gets hit with earthquakes all the time. You know, you think about America, we're 250 years old. There's some buildings that are 200, 300 years old, but they look like you know, they look like they're about to go down. So to do that two or three times is crazy. And uh it was just such a fun. I really I'll try to put some photos in this episode. And uh, if you're watching it, hopefully you like them. But there's so many cool I don't know, I left this episode just being like, man, people really did some cool stuff in the in the back in the day that you just don't, you know. I don't want to go on like a rant about schools, but I feel like this is cool stuff that I would have loved to have learned, and instead I just learned, you know, whatever in school. I learned crap that I was like, I like learning. I don't know how you guys are ruining this for me. This is anyway, there was a temple called the uh Horyu G. There's no H-O-R-Y-U-J-I. Uh and they built it in the year 700 with trees they cut down in 592, according to this. And they're still it's still there. I love that's like that's the greatest flex of all time. You build a building, you go, that'll be there 1500 years from now. That's think about, you know, I watch these buildings in Nashville get built all the time, and you go, if it rains, that's coming down. That is one of the crappiest, it's funny. I live on a street where they're building, you know, big developments, and uh it's they just the speed at which they go up and the way that you see like they're just flimsy looking. They don't look like they're gonna make it. Um, and so when you read about a thing that is 1,500 years old, you go, man, it's funny too, because they have there's a documentary I'm trying to find that I read about in the research for this about the last temple carpenter um in Japan. But essentially his whole thing was, you know, he didn't just go like what wood should we build this with? He was like, if the with a south, the part of the building that faces south, we need to build with logs that face south. Like it's that level of um care. And I just think it, man, it's just it was very fun to read about all this stuff. Uh they have a so I also found out they have a thing called the uh Icy Grand, not Icy, whatever. Isei. Let's go with Isei. Isei Grand Shrine. And it's uh they've rebuilt it. It's like the the holiest site in Shinto religion, and they've uh rebuilt it every 20 years ever since. And I, except for like, you know, I think during World War II, they took a season off or whatever. But they've pretty much for a thousand or more years, they rebuild the their grand site. So it's like I love the idea they're building like a they're building like a new Vatican every once in a while. And they so they have like a site where they build it, and then they have like a site next to it, kind of like stadiums, you know, where they as they're knocking down the old one, they build a new one. Um and they've been doing it every 20 years, and it costs them, you know, hundreds of million dollars. And they it's part of this idea of like uh it's permanent because we're always renewing it, as opposed to, you know, you build it once and then you just gotta preserve it forever. They're like, well, the way we preserve it forever is we just keep rebuilding it every 20 years. And uh Yeah, I love it, man. And everything I learned about this episode, it made me want to go to Japan. And it also just made me want to get it, I want to find more of these projects to do. You know what I mean? I read a thing about Winston Churchill, his favorite hobby when he wasn't fighting Hitler was he liked to build stone walls, which I think, you know, I don't know how that would, I don't really even understand how you would do that, but I think I might try to get into that because it's a fun, it just seems like a fun arc, you know? And I like reading about all this stuff and thinking about, you know, what could I what could I integrate into my own life that uh sort of, you know, touches on this stuff. But yeah, so that's that was uh that was my deep dive this week. And I really enjoyed it. Um we got a it's a fun time right now in Nashville, it's Nashville Comedy Festival. Uh so I was doing shows for that. I was uh I did some shows with Emily Catalano, a very funny comic from LA, and then some of the showcase shows, and you know, this is always a fun time of year in Nashville, kind of hustle and bustle, and the the festival gets going. So it's been nice to I do that, and then I do the I get to go work in the garden. And man, it's fun. Like once, I'll tell you this, I didn't realize once spring is here, like it's on you. You gotta, it's it's just you gotta keep up. Everything you planted is very demanding. They're not there's no like, hold on, give me a second. It's just well, I think we planted a lot of stuff and we're trying to trying to keep it all alive. And it's it's fun, man. You gotta like think of new, you have to come up with ways to deal with stuff. That's what I realized. Like, I have this problem, I don't know how to fix it, uh, and then you figure it out. And that's very satisfying. It's you know what it reminds me of? It's like when you play Zelda and there are puzzles and you solve a puzzle, I like that. That's a like when you organically get to the solution yourself, because I feel like you don't do that a lot in in modern life. You know, in most things there's a problem, and then there's a you Google, what do I do here? And they go, This is what you do. This is the standard response. And what's so fun about all these projects is trying to figure out okay, I have this problem, how do I solve it? And you get to use your brain, which you don't get to, you know, most of the stuff in my life, it's like you're filing your taxes, you don't go like, I'm gonna vibe my way to the solution. You go, okay, I gotta, what are the rules here? Um, so you kind of get to be that's a big thing. I I never really was a handy guy until I got older. And uh being handy and trying to do stuff and trying to figure out these, you know, not digital problems, but real physical problems, um, it's a lot more creative than I thought. And you get a lot more, I feel like guys who invented new types of screws are creative. They don't they never get credit for that. Like people with tools, I think get painted as you know, blue-collar not creatives. But I know a lot of guys who uh I've met people who do carpentry or do whatever that are way more creative than comics. A lot of comics are just narcissists. They just go, I like that they say my name and people clap. Um but a lot of this stuff, there's such that's what a kind of a thing I've noticed too that I really enjoy is when you're looking at construction or anything, you know, carpentry, it all builds on itself. So there's these things people figure out, and then they just it just gets kind of codified and becomes part of the language, and then that gets passed on, and then it gets improved. And then so you know, what there's that's part of the reason I think if you're like not a handy person, there's such a big learning curve because you're like, well, what's a six penny nail? What is that? And then you learn, oh, okay, that's they called it this for that reason. Um, and so there's sort of a there's like a lore angle to it, which I I think that's what I like. I think that's probably what this podcast is becoming is like, you know, the lore of a cedar garden bed. Why, why do people use cedar? Okay, because it's this wood that is very rot resistant because of the way it grows. And then why do people burn this? Because, okay, it makes it last longer. You know, it's just fun to learn. I think we're in a weird time where people just Google stuff or AI stuff and they just tell you, like, here's the answer. But you never get, you know, you don't really understand why. Like I lived in, I lived in apartments or houses my whole life. I didn't really understand until I got older, like, how does the plumbing work? Where, you know, okay, there's a main water line, stuff's branching off that. You know, there's all these things that I find really fun to learn. I like learning this stuff, but you don't really, I don't know, modern life seems to have such a uh they put a premium on, you know, quick, quick, quick, just give me the answer. And I think that I found things are much more satisfying for me when you get to kind of get an overall view and then you see how things fit into that, right? So you have you kind of get like a mental model of the whole thing, and then anything new that comes in, you kind of know how it fits. Like that's how I in the beginning, you know, with anything, you're just kind of memorizing, it's like flashcards, you're memorizing like this means this, but you don't know why. And then as it gets longer, as you go on, you go, oh, this means this because of this thing. I mean, that's what I've learned with the garden. In the beginning, we were just like, they'd go plant it an inch deep, and you'd be like, I don't know why I'm doing that, but I'm doing that. And now, you know, you understand certain things need to be planted deeper, certain things need to be direct sown, certain things need to be transplanted. And a lot of times there's a good reason, you know, this thing has a it's got a big taproot, so you can't transplant it because it'll rip it up, and then you won't get, you know, the the growth you want. Um, or this thing needs to cold germinate, this thing needs to be tricked into thinking it was outside in the winter so that it can grow in the spring. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff, and in the beginning, you're just guessing or just be following directions. You're like, but then as you as you go goes on, you understand enough to be like, okay, I'm doing this because of this, which means I I can, you know, you gotta know the rules to break them, sort of thing. That's stand-ups a lot like that. In the beginning, they tell you, you know, just do this, and you just follow, you just hold on for dear life. And then as time goes on, you understand why you're doing it, and you go, you know, I could still accomplish the same thing doing this. Or or I can uh I can surprise them by they think I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do the exact opposite. That's a very fun thing. I don't think that works in plants. I don't think you can be like, I'm doing the exact opposite, and it'll work, but um, yeah, man, I really hope uh I hope you like the video of me building the thing too, because that was such a satisfying part of it. And getting to burn stuff is with a little torch like that, very fun. My wife got in on it, she started burning stuff, and uh yeah, watching your wife burn with a torch, just just torch uh wood, you know, I I fell more in love with her. It was great. It was what a what a fun. I was like, look at my DIY wife. This is this is awesome. She's doing it. Um so yeah, I'm gonna keep making stuff. You know, if you got suggestions, drop them in there. I love uh I love getting inspired about something and then going to learn more about it. And I mean, I got so far down this rabbit hole. I might have to do a whole nother episode just on cedar wood because there's all these different cedars all over the world and they're actually not the same tree. And um, you know, it was very fun to learn sort of the shared things and the and the things that aren't shared, but why does every culture call them cedar? And you know, what's the role of these different trees? And they every culture gets like falls in love with these trees. That's one thing I think we're we're missing out on is you just don't have as many reasons to care about trees today. Like when I you ever read old like American history, you know, and they make you read uh like the road not taken in middle school or whatever those, you know, all those books and poems, everyone's always talking about the tree. They'll be like, there I was walking under a hemlock tree. And now, like, I don't think most people have any idea what tree is around because I don't know, they're just not they're not as crucial a part of the landscape as they um should be or could be. You know, I think I don't know. I really find it a great part of my life, and I, you know, if you're on the fence about getting into this stuff, you go like, eh, is that is that just for, you know, I don't know. Is that just a thing you have to be into from the beginning of your life to get it? I don't think so. I've gotten so into it, I didn't really I mean my dad's a big, he's he's got a great garden, he does a lot of garden stuff, but that was sort of his thing. I didn't really um understand much of it. And having gotten into it as I get older, especially, you know, with how crazy everything is, with you turn on the news and they're like, another bad thing. And you're like, all right. Uh I think a garden is a great, it's a great thing in that it just reminds you like the time horizon of life is a lot slower. You know, most things happen like that's our garden this year is so much better than last year. And last year I was so I was kind of like worried. I was like, ah, this tree is not looking good. My wife was just like, yeah, we just planted it. It's like the tree's freaking out, trying to, you know, trying to figure out what's going on. It's got transplant shock, all that stuff. And we planted some trees that I think will be beautiful in like 20 years. And it's fun to have something to look forward to 20 years from now. Um, and when you're it's like the opposite of your phone. Your phone, you look at stuff and they're like, this is gonna be a problem for you tomorrow. You know, there's a lot of they they make you try to, they try to make you panic, they try to make you feel like the walls are closing in and stuff's getting bad. And when you just go out there, you know, I know this is just a long way to basically say touch grass, but it's true. If you can find something that connects you to like a slower, older uh part of life, I think it's been I think it's great and it's a lot of fun. So, okay, I hope you liked this episode. Uh, I got all sorts of good stuff coming out. I'll have another episode of Dusty and Connor React with my buddy Dusty Slate coming out soon. I got new stand up clips. I'm taping a special here in Nashville May 21st uh at the lab at Zaney. So, yeah, thanks everybody who listened. I hope you guys like this stuff and uh, you know, get as involved as you like. I love the comments and the feedback was very nice. So, all right. Thank you very much for listening.