EXCAVATION: THE WAR ON DIRT - The Connor Larsen Show Episode 9

I tried to dig out all the big old shrubs and stumps in my backyard, got poison ivy, and spent two full days using the wrong shovel before a friend handed me a pick and changed my life. Which got me thinking: I can't be the first guy to stand in a hole and go, "there has to be a better way to do this."

This week i deep dived moving dirt, we go down the rabbit hole on the history of digging — the giant canals that countries threw millions of lives at, the ancient engineers who somehow moved water across hundreds of miles at exactly the right slope, and the crazy ways people used to do it. Check it out.

🎙️ New episodes every Tuesday. 👍 Subscribe so you don't miss the next one — next week I'm talking myself into tearing out my entire lawn.

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Transcript

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Hey, welcome back to the Connor Larson show. This week uh we're doing a real deep dive. We're back. I I appreciate that. I'm glad people seem to like the comedy episodes, and I appreciate that. And I hope they were fun and interesting, but uh I like getting to learn about something, and I it was I'm glad my life has sort of gotten back to normal where I had time. And um yeah, this week was great. I uh I've been out in the garden and I've just been getting defeated, which is that I think that's the experience of having a garden, is you just go having a people talk about gardens the way like parents, young parents talk, where they're like, I don't know if I'm doing this right. And then they someone who's like a year ahead of them goes, We're all just doing the best we can. That's how it every time I I start a project, I don't know what I'm doing, I do it wrong, I figure out the way everyone has been doing it forever, and I go, Oh, that's why. And then I talk to a person who's been gardening for a long time, and they go, Yeah, that's the you just outlined the whole process. Welcome to gardening. Um so I've been uh yeah, been having a lot of fun out there. June is sort of, you know, I know I've talked about this before, but it's it's the payoff. The I love the long time horizon with gardening. You plant something in the fall, and then to see it really start to thrive in the summer is so awesome. And um, I'm almost done with my Yakasugi garden bed video. The only thing holding me up, I just want to have a nice I want to have a glamour shot. I want to have a video at the end that shows you look how beautiful this bed is. And that means that the fruit um and the vegetables, they have to grow. I can't, if I just show you the bed without the fruit and the vegetables, you'll be like, well, that just that's a called a box, that's called a box. Um, so yeah, I've been out there and I've had a lot of fun and uh fighting poison ivy, which always makes me uh feel like I'm seven years old. Whenever, because I get I think I get poison ivy, and then I go and I run inside and I take off my gloves and I got a shower and I I tell my wife, I go, I got poison ivy. She goes, All right, you know, great, good, go do the go do the process we've done 10 times. Um and then guess what? I usually don't. Although I did get I got got earlier this year. I had poison Ivy. It was pretty nuts. It was like all up and down. You know what? It was actually when I I was so we moved to this, uh we moved to this house a few years ago. And it's the first time I've ever had a garden. I never had uh a backyard or a garden before. And I really think that I I really think one of the worst things about um it's just hard to have a yard and a house, and lots of people I think would love to and then don't. And the worst part about that is I think it I think I've learned a lot and become, you know, I I if I didn't have the option to get into gardening because I was renting like I always was, uh, I never would have found out how much I like this and how much it has added to my life. And I used to live in I lived in East Nashville for years in this place where it was like a little sketchy to be outside. So I didn't really want to spend time outside, and it also wasn't peaceful to be outside gardening. Uh, and now I go, man, I totally there's a hundred percent a path where I could have just only lived in places like that, and I never would have found out how much I like this. So that I think that's a bummer. I think they should. I wish there was a way for more people to get to garden and to get to, you know, plant something in January, or you know, probably not, it's probably not the right time, but plant something in the fall, plant something in March and see it bloom in June. It's good. I mean, you know, I think that would be good, especially for like for kids to, you know, I remember it took me a long time to learn anything about delayed gratification, and this was a this is a great way to learn it. So, yeah, I don't know. I hope uh I hope kids are getting into gardening, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But anyway, we moved to this house and uh they had we talked to the old owners and they were like, yo, we don't care. We're not, they're lovely people, but they don't, they were like, we don't like, we're not outside people. And they had um a giant azalea bush that was beautiful, like the size of this table. I mean, it was huge. And uh then they had these weird, they weren't even trees, they were like horrible shrubs that had grown to tree height, and because no one cared about them, they were covered in like snail seed and uh rows of Sharon and all, you know, all these sorts of I don't know if rows of sharon, that might be a good one, but it was just they were just covered in weeds because it was just like, yeah, whatever wants to grow there can go. It was they don't we don't care. And uh so it was uh it was gnarly, it was a mess, and I didn't like them, but I didn't know anything. When I moved here, I knew nothing and about anything. I mean, it's it's that one of the coolest things about uh moving into the house was just learning all the things I had to learn. Like, you know, how to it's funny, I look at all the curtains I hung up the first uh the first week we moved in, and they're all terrible. And I took them all out and did them properly because I was like, you can't have not straight, the bar has to be straight. Um so I learned all this stuff, and one of the things, but I didn't know anything in the garden. So I but I was also embarrassed to say that. That's a weird, it's like cars. When you're a guy, you're like just you just lie about knowing cars. Like whether they didn't, this was a few years ago, but my wife's car was making a noise, and I said, Let me take a look. And then I did, and I was like, I'm literally just taking a look because I don't her car is like a new car, it's just a computer. There's nothing, you know, I can check two things, and if it's neither of those things, kind of kind of stuck. You know what I mean? It's not like older cars, you can do some stuff with the new car, they go plug it into a computer and then take it to our computer. And you go, I didn't dunk, can't do either of those things. Um, but you feel like you have to, and that's how I felt about the garden. I was like, I should know this instinctively, which is insane. Um, so I was like, I'm gonna get rid of it, I'm gonna move this azalea, which is crazy. Uh, but we did end up making that whole area garden. So I wasn't I wasn't moving it just to move it. I was like, we're gonna make this whole area garden, which we did, and I'm really happy. Um so I dug it out, I dug the azalea out just by hand with a shovel, and I didn't, it was, you know, massive. So I had to get under it, and then I mean it took me like two or three days, and then I finally got under it and put the sh popped the shovel under it for leverage and then tipped it over, and uh eventually got it out, and it was like, you know, again, the size of this table, and we put it back in the in the back of the yard, and um, I felt terrible. I thought we had killed it, but it's back, and it's you know, it's uh there's definitely some heat stress and it took some damage, but it's coming back and it'll get back to where it was. And yeah, that was really cool. That was interesting to learn. And then these other trees, these horrible uh shrub things, they were that's how I got got with poison ivy because I was digging them out and they're I'll see if I can put a photo up. It was just this monstrous, you know, 10 or 12 different things growing in together. One of the things was poison ivy, I later found out. Um, but again, I didn't know anything about I was just digging out, you know, in a circle around the thing because I had to get the roots which had spread all over. And uh, I mean, dude, it was it was a lot, it was a lot of a lot of labor with a shovel. And I was using the wrong shovel, I think for like the first two days. I was using a transfer shovel instead of a pointed shovel, and I was like, what are you doing? But that's again, I had to learn all that stuff. Um and now I, you know, this we just finished a bunch of garden projects and I finished uh putting up a fence for our garden area and we ran irrigation, and this year we had all these sort of like little victories that felt really good. And I like that's part of what I like about the garden is is learning how to do all this stuff. Um but anyway, so what's what why am I rambling? You're asking. You're saying, what is the point of all this? I was thinking about the shovel, and just I was just like, there has to be a better way to do this. Because I also dug out a big garden walkway from my uh from one of our gardens to the other like raised garden bed area. And I was doing it with a shovel. And then my buddy, my buddy Max was like, I told him what I was doing, I didn't tell him I was doing it with a shovel. And he goes, Oh, I got a pick you can use. And in my head, I was like, What would you even? That's how dumb I was. I was like, What would the point of that be? And then I started using the pick and I was like, Oh my god, this is light years easier to use the pick to break up the dirt and then scoop it out. I mean, I've been I just every time I think about how much work uh I did because I was being stupid, it's it's pretty amazing. Um so that got me thinking. I was like, I bet that this, I'm not the only guy to have this sort of uh arc of you know being dumb and then finding out there's a better way and being amazed. And I've you know, that's one of the things about getting older that's fun is you're like, well, if I'm thinking this and then you look it up and it's like a million people have thought this before you. That's that's how I think that's why all like you ever notice how every piece of cliche advice is like great, but it just you have to you basically have to get to the age where it matters. Like when people are like, enjoy high school, and then when you're in high school, you're like, shut up, and then you get to be 30 and you're like, Oh, it was what a good point that was. But it doesn't work, you can't do anything, it doesn't work when you're 18. Um that's how all advice feels, where it's like it's almost tragic where you can tell anybody, you can go, hey, listen, you're 12 right now. If you save 20 bucks a week instead of buying Pokemon cards, when you're 30, you'll you'll be able to buy a home. And they go, shut up. And you go, ah, you know what? That's what I would have said at 12, too. I can't really tell this guy. Um, so I started going down this. Uh basically, I this episode is about digging, and I'm calling it the war on dirt. That's this episode is the war on dirt. It's all about uh I just was I got really down this rabbit hole of you know, for a long time, moving dirt has not been like, you know, now it's kind of like a metaphor for doing nothing when people are like, oh, you're gonna grow up to dig ditches for a living or whatever. And it's like, well, that, you know, that's a way of saying you're not gonna do anything. But for a long time, uh digging ditches was like a serious national pursuit. Like I was thinking, I was thinking about this, and then I started doing research. All the big projects for a lot of these countries have been digging canals. Canals were like the big uh way that we that was like the major project. And you know, I know there's the Panama Canal, the Suez, the the Erie Canal. Those are the big, those are the top three canals in my book. Um but I didn't know that much about them. And then you look into them. I I had read uh or watched a like a podcast, you know, style video about the Panama Canal, and I knew it was oh, I read a book about Teddy Roosevelt, and that was it, it was a big part of that. So I knew it was a big deal, but you forget it's like millions of people worked on it, and thousands of people died, and the French tried to build it before us but couldn't do it because uh bec mainly because they were French, and then no, they're just because they actually part of the reason they couldn't do it is what I'm gonna talk about in this episode, which is the technology, it like digging technology has come, you know, really far, but really late in the game until like the 1800s, it was kind of just better shovels. That's what was so interesting doing all this research was for a long time, you know, you just had to get like everyone you ever met and be like, we got to dig this big ditch so that we can connect these two waterways and it'll change the whole country. And there's so the the big four, I was looking into it. Apparently, China's got a grand canal, they got a great wall, they got a grand canal. And they like everything with China, the numbers are just insane. Like in America, you go, a million people live in the city, and China goes, we call that a village. That we have 40 million. Um, so the Grand Canal of China was like 1200s, I think. Let me let me uh check my handy-dandy research. Oh, six hundreds. So it's in the six hundreds, and it's 2,500 uh kilometers, which so it's like what are like 1200 miles or 900 miles, something like that. Uh and three to five million people were forced to work on it, and they say like a million, they say between hundreds of thousands and two million people died digging this canal. And it lasted six years, so six years with m hundreds of thousands or millions of people working on a canal, like just digging for six years. You couldn't get anybody to dig for two weeks now, like it, you know, it's just a crazy number. Um, and then the actually the emperor, his name was Emperor Wendy, it says, which is a very funny Emperor Wendy, not that tough. Um, they said it basically caused his downfall. Like the people got to the end of it and were like, dude, this guy, he just made us build this crazy canal. We're not, let's overthrow him. And then the next guy, the problem is all the all the research I was reading was like, take this with a grain of salt, because it's the guy after Emperor Wendy who wrote about it, and he's like, Yeah, that guy was bad. You don't want to be that guy, which of course, you know, that's what he's incentivized to say that. But pretty amazing. And then the next uh the next big they're also saying um that part of the I just got really into like you know, canals are one thing, but there was also all these different things people did to move dirt. Like they looked back at the pyramids and they said that uh there was they would move these 9,000 pound rocks and they would put them on sleds and drag them across the desert. And they figured out that if you put wet, if you poured water on sand, it slid easier on the sled. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. I also thought, what a great job if you could get it, right? Everyone else is pushing a rock sled and you're just pouring water. That's I think that's gotta be the sweet gig if you're on an Egyptian uh sled crew. But so then I go, I was reading about the canals, and then I started reading about all the aqueducts, or in in uh in Persia they had uh they're called like what are they called? Quotas or something? Some funny name. Umats, q-a-n-a-t's. And these were really cool. They're basically they would uh go into like mountains, because there's no water where they were, and they would dig a tunnel. It's basically a big aqueduct, which I didn't know what that was until I did this research. So I feel weird being like, you know. Uh it's a big tunnel for the water, and it has to be the exact right slope so that the water, if it goes too fast, it'll erode the tunnel. If it goes too if the steep slope's not steep enough, the water will stop. But they would dig these for like hundreds of miles, and you can still see them. And then the water would just flow perfectly at the same slope and then show up in your village, and these, and then they would dig every like 10 miles or however long, they would dig down a hole so that you could get in to like ex, you know, get more dirt out and then dig horizontally and keep going. And um, it was awesome. I mean, very cool that they I just think that's I love thinking about old people, ancient people doing that and being like, I mean, that just must have felt that must have felt like you were on the cutting edge back then. And when it worked, you must have spent the whole next you know year being like, do you guys are you seeing this? I brought all the water. And then they had the Roman aqueducts, which were really interesting. Same, same idea. Just uh the thing about them that was so remarkable is they had to be perfectly, they had to like I think the slope was one centimeter per mile or something, but it's like a standardized rate, and they worked amazingly. They like traveled across like hundreds of miles, and um, it's one of the big advantages the Romans had over everybody, and no one could none of the other people knew how to do it. And then in like when the Roman Empire collapses, they actually lose the ability to do this. Like the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages were so bad as far as like disease and war. It's you know, that's one of those. I should do an episode on that someday. There's a really interesting um that like there's a thousand years there in the middle where we kind of lose progress. Like the Roman Empire in the year 500 is way more advanced than France in 1100. I don't know why France keeps catching strays in this episode, but uh so there was like, you know, they they actually you think about technology and progress, and certainly in our lifetime, it does seem like everything is getting crazier and building on itself, but that wasn't the case. They actually went backwards in time and sort of lost, they didn't know how to build the aqueduct, they didn't have the engineers who could build them, so they just didn't, they struggled to get, you know, water, they struggled to move water around the way they wanted to. That's sort of you know, moving dirt and moving water, or mud, as some people call it. Uh, it's sort of been a civilization civilizational problem. And that's like I liked learning about that in this episode. That was a fun, uh, a fun part of it. So they have oh, this blew my mind. This blew my mind when I was reading about it. Uh China invents the wheelbarrow in 200, and then the West didn't get the wheelbarrow till like 1200, which feels it feels impossible that there were a thousand years where we could have just been like, what's that? And we didn't, we just saw it and we're like, that's that's their thing. Um but yeah, they didn't have I thought that was the craziest thing I learned in this, that the wheelbarrow came so late in the game. Because you think about moving dirt, and the name of the game is like get the dirt out of the ground and then move it somewhere and then put it down and then and then repeat. And for a long time, the like put it somewhere, we just didn't have good steps. I mean, you know, that was I spent like a day digging without a wheelbarrow and then was like, I gotta get a wheelbarrow tomorrow, but I knew they existed. That was my advantage. Um but I loved, I mean, that's such a that's one of those I love history has these like things where you you read them and they're they seem impossible. So like they were saying that the wheelbarrow gets invented in 1200, but they start building the cathedral of Notre Dame in like 1160. So theoretically, there was a guy working on the cathedral for 40 years, and then someone showed up with a wheelbarrow, and he was like, You gotta be kidding me. He's like, I did all this, I did all this stuff, and we had a we had one of those. And I I mean, you know, uh hats off to China for figuring it out before, I guess, but um, you know, you tend to figure stuff out when your emperor is making you build canals. I'll say that. That's an advantage, right? Uh I don't know. I was just I thought that was amazing to think about. And then I also started thinking about uh, you know, Notre Dame and these old beautiful buildings. You know, we I was talking to my friend and he was saying that all the old buildings are beautiful, and it's a shame that you know everything today looks like crap. Like I there's a bunch of new apartment buildings going up on my on the street I drive home from. And yeah, they look terrible. They look like, and they all have like a vague. There's all these apartment buildings that have names that just are meaningless. They're like the trees. The the whole place is called the trees, and then there are no trees. It's an insane, you know, the the bats at water, and you're like, what are you saying? Um it's very corporate speak, but I I was also I was thinking about, you know, I at first I was all fired up. I was like, Yeah, he's right, all the old buildings are beautiful, and then I realized, well, all the old buildings we kept, all the ones that are still around, sure. That's like that's the only problem. I I mean, A, I think buildings probably were nicer back then because it was so much more work to build them. You know what I mean? Like if you were like, listen, if we're gonna dig this out by hand, we're gonna make it look nice. But now you just go, yeah, I don't know, take a take an excavator, dig that out, and two days later we'll have a subway. We'll have a subway, and then when you start a subway, you don't even hire people. Confused teams wander in and start working there. And they all only work there for a day. Everyone is new somehow. That's what I like about that's what I like about Subway. Every employee is new all the time. You can never go like, hey, are you? And they go, I just started. I can't help you. Also, this is a gas station, so it's incredible that you expected me to help you. Um but anyway, back to all this stuff. So the wheelbarrow shows up late, late in the game. For a long time, it was like shovel, then some guy found the pick, and they were like, Oh, that's great. Uh and then the my the other thing that kept coming up in this research that was funny, it basically human history is like we're doing something hard, and then we look at like a horse or a cow and we go, I bet we could make him do that. That was the other they had a thing called the the big uh the big achievements they said were the Fresno Scraper, which is I think. I've opened for him. Um, but the Fresno scraper was it's basically like a it looks like a dust bin and it's attached to horses and you flip the handles down and it picks up the dirt because the horses are pulling it, and then when it gets full, you pull the handle back, it picks it up, and then it carries it like on skis to wherever you want to dump it, and you put it down, and then you do it again. So it's the whole dig, move, dump, repeat cycle. So that was a big deal. This guy, some Scottish guy named James, and then something Scottish. I want to give him credit. We're not giving we don't give Scottish people enough credit on this podcast. That's a common uh complaint we've been getting. Oh, what was his name? James. Well, I can't find it and I don't want to slow down too much, so his name says James William Wallace. Um, but if you Google Fresno Shovel, you can find that about him. Uh but yeah, so that was pretty interesting. And then they said I was reading about this, and they go, if you really want to know about people who move dirt and water, you gotta read about the Dutch. And I was like, Are you sure? And then I looked into it. The Dutch are pretty cool. The Dutch basically built, they have reclaimed an amount of land equal to the state of Maryland from the ocean, which is just a wild sentence. Basically, they would build a dike, which is I think, you know, pretty funny word. Uh they would build a dike, which is a wall around an area that was full of water. So you you'd like build a wall with all the water in that area, then you drain all that water out, they would pump it out using windmills or some other very Dutch thing, mostly windmills. And then the rain would come, and as long as you're pumping the water out, it stays, it stays no salt water in there. So you get that out, then you rinse it essentially with you know through rain and pumping it with water, and then eventually you can grow crops there. And they figured that out, and then they just kept doing it for I mean, there's a really cool map you can see of how much land the Dutch have reclaimed, and it's essentially the the land area that is equivalent to Maryland. So they've it's like something like 17,000 kilometers, which is pretty amazing. I thought a very cool I also just every time I read about this stuff, I love, you know, I'll I'll start doing something in my backyard and I'll think I'm the only guy who's ever attempted this. And when you do something that you didn't see on YouTube or, you know, get AI to tell you to do and you come up with something, you you really feel creative. That it's funny being a comic because I go like comedy's, you know, it can be creative, but it can be just as derivative as uh any sort of construction project. Where it's like anytime you're really going off script and doing something new, it feels good, it feels creative. And I love thinking about you know, I feel crazy when I tell my wife I'm gonna build a solar-powered time-lapse camera. But these people were going like, we're gonna see that ocean, that's gonna be our farm. And you know, the guy's wife was just like, oh my, this guy is I love him, but he's so stupid. Uh and then they went and did it, and it's a whole they I read this. The Dutch had a quote that said, I think God invented the God made the world, but the Dutch built the Netherlands because that's how proud they were of reclaiming all this land. And I like that. I think that's such a cool. It's also just one of those things, as like a modern person in 2026, you just don't really, I don't know, have room or or I guess the charitable interpretation is just have time. But there's a lot of stuff where I find out about it, and then I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't know because it's all it's all very interesting and you know, to me, very admirable that people did all this stuff. And, you know, instead, I don't know about that. I know about like what I know Jake Paul thought Mike Tyson. You know, it's just a it I think we all have that feeling of I should be focusing on better stuff, and then when there is better stuff and you learn about it, you're like, that's a little embarrassing. I didn't learn about this earlier. But anyway, that's you know, that's a tangent. Um, James Portius, that's his name. There you go. Scottish immigrant blacksmith. This is a big podcast for them. That's I was looking at the analytics, mostly Scottish immigrant blacksmiths who listen to this. So if that's you, thank you. Um and then they were saying, so I'm you know, I'm going through sort of how do we get to modern digging? And it goes, there's a bunch of stuff, but it's shovel, pick, then people make animals do it, kind of a same thing as the Fresno scraper. They're having them scrape it out. Then they start doing the stuff with the manipulating water, where they go, all right, we're gonna build the tunnels and do all that. So this is the this is the craziest water manipulation one they made. In the in the 1800s in California, there's all this gold, people go out there, and they pretty quickly get all the easy to get gold. And then they're like, Well, how do we get there's more gold, we just can't get to it. And then some guy, I wish I knew his name, just a lunatic, they build, they go up high in the mountains and they build a tunnel that comes down so that you have like incredible water pressure. And then they would mount that to nozzles, and they have all these little, you can look them up. It's called hydraulic mining. Hydraulic mining. And uh, but they would essentially use the water and just blast, I think 11,000 gallons per minute. They would blast just every I mean just the mountains, just the hillsides, they would blast them with water, and then everything would run off, like dirt and you know, trees and everything, and then that's how they would, and then they would mine the stuff that's running off the the slurry of the entire mountainside they're blasting. They would comb through that for gold. But it's a I mean, it's like an insane. It's like uh it's like if your dog was barking and and then your your wife's at work and your dog is barking, and then you she comes home and she goes, Where's the dog? You go, Oh, he was barking, so I drove him to Maryland, and we don't have a dog anymore. Like it it's just you go, hey man, I understand you accomplished one of your goals, but at what cost? And the cost of this was apparently like catastrophic. There's that is actually sort of the beginning of environmental regulations. There was a big uh lawsuit because all the farmers who lived below these mountains where they were blasting this stuff, they were like, What are you doing? And they did like real damage. I mean, they blasted basically entire hills into rivers, which filled up with sediment, and that you know, it all it's all a pretty delicate um balance. So you can't dump entire hills into rivers and you can't just blast mountains. It's like a sentence you feel like you shouldn't have to say. You can't blast the land at 11,000 gallons per minute so that you can look through it for gold. But that's what people were. I mean, I you know, I love America and the in the the old west, but you can imagine you can imagine there were times where like you think you have a bad neighbor because he like you know parks like vans in his front yard or whatever. This this is a bad neighbor, a guy who blasts the earth, and you're like, what do you? And he goes, I'm looking for gold. What's your what's your problem? There's no HOA out here. This is Fresno. Um but yeah, pretty, pretty amazing that they just did that. And then uh and actually this the Nobel Prize, Alfred Noble comes up again. He everybody I think at this point knows, because it's like a fun trivia fact, that he won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing dynamite, which is pretty cool, uh, pretty crazy. But dynamite is a is I guess it was you stabilize nitroglycerin. I'm reading it. You know I don't know how I'm just reading it to make sure I don't get it wrong. You stabilize nitroglycerin and then you absorb it into diatomaceous earth. Incredible name for a baby, also good in the garden. Um, and then that you can blow stuff up. And that's that was sort of the real unlock for people who it's it's pretty amazing that it wasn't until like the 1870s that mountains that you could do anything about mountains. For a long time, uh, if you had a mountain, that was just the end of the conversation. You weren't like we have to figure out what we're gonna do about this mountain. You were just like, we can't we gotta go around this mountain. Um, and there's you know a lot of interesting history about armies that diverted or that you know couldn't uh couldn't survive crossing a mountain. And then as soon as dynamite is uh as as soon as they get it, it's pretty amazing. There's this tunnel they're building through the Alps, and it starts in the 18, it starts 1857. Ten years in, they've made like 20% progress. Then dynamite comes out, it drops, and uh they finish it like three years later. So immediately that was what I thought was cool about this episode was there's in the last 150 years, there's these crazy jumps. Like uh, they were saying a mini excavator can do like basically if you time it out, you know, it takes 30 seconds to scoop and then 30 to dump, and then it can so it can do whatever it is, a hundred cubic yards of dirt. A person working really hard can do about a cubic yard of dirt. So if you get a mini excavator, can do what a hundred people can do. So then dynamite can do what a hundred people blasting gunpowder could do. So it's just these exponential jumps where all of a sudden they can do crazy stuff, but it's pretty late, like the Civil War started, and then midway through it, a guy heard about dynamite. I always, it's just when you think about time like that, it's pretty interesting. Like I always remember that um people say Cleopatra was closer to us than the pyramids, which seems insane, right? It seems like she in your head you go, like, well, Cleopatra and I don't even know who the other guys are, toot in common. They probably hung out, and then you look at it and you're like, oh, they were you know 4,000 years apart. But yeah, so the uh the mountain thing, pretty amazing. Uh and just they used 61 million pounds of dynamite at the Panama Canal, and they also use this other thing that was I thought was real cool called a steam shovel, which it's the craziest thing I've ever seen. It looks like it looks like okay, there's like treads, you know, like a regular excavator, and then there's what looks to be like a fishing shack, and it's a boiler room, like a train would have. And so there's four people working, two of the guys are just shoveling coal into this boiler, which creates steam, which the steam then powers the scoop, essentially. But it it looks like a houseboat on top of treads that's on fire, and then a guy who's not concerned about anyone else is pulling levers that are pulling the scoop. And they, I mean, it didn't turn. There was no steering wheel, they just would it could only go forward, so to turn it, you would put wood under certain parts of the tread, and then that because that was blocked, it would turn. I mean, just it seems like such a nightmare working on any of these canals, and they're pretty amazing because they all kind of change the world. I mean, the Panama Canal, it makes it what's amazing about it is you you go in the Atlantic side, and then to by the time you get to Pacific side, there's all you know, a canal is just I didn't know any of this, so I'm I'm repeating what I've learned. A canal is you know, you're connecting two waterways and they're almost never at the same height, so you have to have locks that fill up gradually so that you can gradually make the height the same. So you start out like 270 feet higher than you end up. By the time you're in the Pacific, it's like you've gone over a mountain, and uh they do it through these locks, which are really cool. But I just am kind of blown away by you know, humans have done these incredibly ambitious things. Like they just they just decided they were gonna carve through a country so that we could connect two oceans. I mean it, you know, you could be sad about it and say when there's money involved, there's nothing they won't do, which is you know true, especially when it comes to like uh yeah, money. Uh but it's also I do think it's it's there are cool moments like that where you're like, wow, that must have been incredible to be the guy who had the Panama Canal and idea and then saw it open. And and it's I think it saved something like 10,000 miles round trip, which is such a that doesn't even feel like a real number. Um but yeah, so they were doing that. The mountains came. I like that, and then uh the excavator, right? The excavator, I a lot of this episode made me feel like I was six because I was just watching excavator videos and being like, that's awesome. And there is something I'm sure people have it, I'm sure all sorts of people have it, but especially little boys. I have a like a cousin who just is he's if he sees a truck, cancel your plans. That's his whole day. Is he just and I don't, it's weird because you're like, is that instinctive? But like he doesn't know, you know, trucks haven't been around long enough for it to be an instinct, I think. But there's something about little boys who are seeing dirt being moved around, where they're like, that's awesome. I wonder if we've been doing, I wonder if that's what it is. We've been doing it so long. We've been moving dirt and thinking about moving dirt for so long that that's why when little boys see like an excavator or a big machinery, they're like, what the but anyways, I was reading about excavators, they're very cool. I would definitely I would like one if my my wife is listening uh for a Christmas gift. I would like like a uh 10-ton excavator um to build like a skyscraper. But the either so the first excavator was built in Japan after the war, and they built it and it's like a mini excavator. I mean they didn't they didn't know that, they just built it, and then because I think I think probably we saw it and then we're like, that's mini, because that's that's what happened. All the Japanese built trucks, and then we're like, they built a tiny truck, and they're like, we just call it a truck, and you're like, enjoy your tiny truck. Um but so they built this thing, and then apparently again, like a 20-year gap between it being implemented in Japan. And then I was reading, and you know, if someone worked in these fields and knows more than me, please tell me. But they were saying that excavators didn't really come into use in America until the 1970s, which is like just a mind-blowingly late. I mean people were listening to the Beatles being like, I wish there was an easier way to move this dirt. Penny Lane, sure, but how am I gonna move all this dirt? Um, and I love again that we, you know, it's it's like the wheelbarrow and the excavator. There was just an Asian country where they were doing something, and somehow we were like, I don't know, that's just their thing. I don't really see a use for it or whatever. And then it ends up being awesome. Um, but yeah, so that was I thought that was uh pretty fun that they they invented the excavator, and then we um we made it pretty awesome, I think. And uh yeah, very fun. I hope uh I don't know. It was an interesting episode. I really liked it. I'm gonna try to learn, you know, that's the thing I never used to know much about any of this stuff, just sort of the practical, sort of like the physical underpinnings of society. You know, like one of the things I liked learning about, I didn't do a podcast about this, but I was trying to figure out um sort of the water system. Like, you know what I mean? You just turn on, you go like, you know, to turn on water in your house, but then I was thinking about it and I go, I'm kind of an idiot about where this actually comes from and how it works. And um, you know, I know it comes from the city, what does that mean? And you know, again, these things that we just kind of take for granted that are foundational to being alive now. Um, so I like learning about those. I hope that it's fun uh for you guys as well. And yeah, I really appreciate everybody listening. Every time I put an episode, I'm really I'm thrilled people like it. So um thanks for listening. My uh comedy special. We're starting to edit it now. It should be out sometime this summer. It went great. I am very grateful for all that. Um, once again, having Aaron and Dusty on it was awesome. And uh hopefully I'll be back with some more content, some comedy stuff. I think me and Dusty are gonna record some Dusty and Connor Reacts, and I should have some sketches out and some more stand-up. So come see me live in Nashville if you want, or I'll be on the road. I'll be in Austin, Texas with Dusty Slay, opening for Dusty Slay at the Comedy Mothership uh June 19th through 21st. So if you're in the area and you hear this, please come on out. And um yeah, I like it. I hope you enjoyed uh hearing about the war on dirt, and I'll be back next week with an episode. I think I think it's gonna be about why I don't want to have a lawn anymore. And I just want to, even though I love cutting the grass, I kind of just want to turn it all into like a crazy wildflower garden bed. But we'll see. We'll see how it goes. And um either way, I had a great time uh researching this one. I hope everybody likes it, and uh I hope you have a great week. See you guys next week.