CVS Live Guest - 2022-12-05 - Judson Carroll

Author Streamed Monday December 5th, 2022

There are 206 episodes in the Guest:Solo series.

Streamed September 30th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-09-30 - Tyler Smith

Streamed September 30th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-09-30 - Anthony Stine

Streamed September 28th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-09-28 - Alan Judd

Streamed September 27th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-09-27 - Maria J. Bain

Streamed September 24th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-09-24 - Shounak Das

Streamed September 15th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-09-15 - Bug Hall

Streamed February 25th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-02-25 - Jeff Elsdon

Streamed February 25th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-02-25 - Ben

Streamed February 25th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-02-25 - Mason Carson

Streamed February 4th, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-02-04 - Adrian K.

Streamed February 3rd, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-02-03 - Andre Rose

Streamed January 3rd, 2023

CVS Live Guest - 2023-01-03 - Adrian K.

Streamed December 30th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-12-30 - Joust7800

Streamed December 17th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-12-17 - Will Lawson

Streamed December 16th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-12-16 - Shawn Ruby

Streamed December 9th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-12-09 - Ryan Adler

Streamed November 30th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-11-30 - Will Lawson

Streamed November 18th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-11-18 - Dirk Lafleur

Streamed November 11th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-11-11 - Don Johnson

Streamed May 14th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-05-14 - Joe

Streamed May 1st, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-05-01 - Ben

Streamed April 12th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-04-12 - Joe

Streamed February 10th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-02-10 - Aidan Lisney

Streamed January 30th, 2022

CVS Live Guest - 2022-01-30 - TJ

Streamed December 31st, 2021

CVS Live Guest - 2021-12-31 - Zackery

Streamed September 26th, 2021

CVS Live Guest - 2021-09-26 - Nikola Krcic

Streamed September 18th, 2021

CVS Live Guest - 2021-09-18 - Bill Whatcott

Streamed September 17th, 2021

CVS Live Guest - 2021-09-17 - Nathan

Streamed September 3rd, 2021

CVS Live Guest - 2021-09-03 - Chad Ellis

Streamed March 21st, 2021

CVS Live Guest - 2021-03-21 - Ben

Streamed February 28th, 2021

CVS Live Guest - 2021-02-28 - Nikola Krcic

Streamed February 23rd, 2020

CVS Live Guest - 2020-02-23 - Pykris

Streamed February 22nd, 2020

CVS Live Guest - 2020-02-22 - Aidan Lisney

Streamed January 25th, 2020

CVS Live Guest - 2020-01-25 - Kalen R.

I met Judson on Twitter where his bio reads


Under Construction

Under Construction

These YouTube transcripts are generated automatically and are therefore unformatted and replete with errors.
oh yeah sure and we are live I'm here with Judson Judson how are you doing hey I'm doing great thanks for having me on yeah it was nice to meet you on Twitter and uh you sound like you've got an interesting story but before we get too deep into your current uh exciting projects I want you to go back in time and talk a little bit about how you were raised if you were raised with religion and uh even before you became able to think for yourself rationally before the age of seven were there any Impressions about God and religion that stick with you to this day just go back in time and talk about that and then all the way up to today just with the highlights of that journey of your faith well uh that is cracking a very large egg I come from a very uh very religious background um so and my great-grandparents all founded churches every one of them was the founder of a church uh we have French huguenots we have anabaptists that came over the maypower pilgrims we have Scottish Presbyterians we have Irish Catholics who had to abandon the faith for a while because it was illegal to be Catholic in North Carolina until after the Civil War you couldn't Vote or own property we have Pentecostal Holiness we have just about everything you can imagine um my dad was not religious my mother was and after he left the family when I was five she um became more religious and was uh very influenced by Like Pat Robertson and um Jerry Falwell and you know all that and I grew up you know fairly religious but non-denominational I did not have a strong idea of the doctrine of any church I was involved in like I was uh confirmed Methodist and I remember thinking at the time I don't understand how you know Calvinism and such actually makes sense but that was the church that was offered you know she was actually she went to a she was she grew up Southern Baptist but went to a Presbyterian College and she had huge issues with the Presbyterian Church uh she could again you're running into this uh whole idea of the elect and there are only a hundred thousand people going to make it to heaven and why the heck are you even Christian if that's the case and but really the college she went to was uh while it was nominally Presbyterian it was Hardcore atheist communist and so she came to it as a southern baptist and was really turned off from organized religion thanks to that because the only religion presented to her was Hardcore Communists and I I don't mean like they were just like liberal I mean they were hardcore marxists and uh I uh I went briefly uh when I was about 20 or so to a Presbyterian College and met the same thing so that was one we put on the shelf and it can go back to you can understand uh but anyway growing up she's very related she was a psychologist she brought her Christianity into her counseling she was very successful very um very sophisticated when I say in southern baptist I don't mean like you know Backwoods country people I mean my mother has a you know master's degree and you know we were very uh much uh respected of the community I know many people have the idea of Southern Baptist being kind of Fringe but where we live in North Carolina it's not at all in fact and um when I was 18 well let me back up okay so when I was 15 I had a very liberal uh High School teacher who convinced me to become a vegetarian and start doing yoga I'm a big guy I'm like six four 220 pounds I was growing at that time it was it wrecked my health it made me weak and sick and hungry all the time through actually through that I will back up to this in a minute but I was really interested in all the mushrooms that grow in Western North Carolina because I was hungry and I wanted to get into foraging and my mother introduced me to an old mountain man big fat fellow with a long beard you know and we started talking about forging and he you know was really happy to teach me everything his family were herbalists and they had been practicing herbal medicine and Gathering herbs for sale for like 200 years at that point and I ended up apprenticing under that family so at 15 I started my herbal apprenticeship but we'll say that to the side for a minute I go on this path and I'm kind of in the New Age kind of Realm and all that thanks to this teacher and everything and at 19 I blew out two discs and herniated a couple of vertebrae and was paralyzed for almost two years I was told I would never walk again the doctor said you can have a rod put in your back but we're going to put you on a full disability because this is it for you my mom said nope this isn't going to happen you're not having the surgery come home and just you know try to rehab for a little bit and one day she says to me there's some people praying for you and I really did not understand what she was saying I was taking a lot of medication at the time and the pain was so bad I wasn't sleeping a lot and so I was include it in right and I'm sitting there on the couch and uh suddenly this warmth went up my back almost like a spiral pattern and I was killed in an instant and I can actually prove that because I had scoliosis before then and I grew almost a full inch in the blink of an eye so my world changed I mean you know total Game Changer life-altering experience and I got very into religion and um became a very devout Christian I was a youth minister in um College in a Methodist Church that was a lot of fun if you if you've ever been a youth minister or talked to anybody who was a youth Minister you'll know how much fun that was the kids are crazy and getting in trouble all the time and you're running around 24 hours a day trying to keep them in check I didn't really have time to get involved in the doctrine of the Methodist Church obviously but I'm going to school you know I'm I had left kind of herbalism beside aside for a while and I thought you know I'm going to be like this real you know Conservative Christian guy and I am I mean I was obviously that's my nature but I kind of went a little too extreme as you do when you're about 19 20 years old and I was studying economics in school I was very involved in politics I mean I was an economics major 9 11 happened I could not serve in the military one because I had a disability in my record but two because my grandmother had a heart attack my uncle had a stroke and I had to go take care of the family farm I left College I went there I started working in politics I ended up at Liberty University with Dr Jerry Falwell working on pro-life issues and there I really got to understand um the doctrine of the Southern Baptist Church and the Baptist and the anabaptists that perceived them and and all you know up and having read the Bible at that point like a hundred times from page one all the way through the end of Revelation I thought yeah this this doesn't square with the Bible this this is not what the Bible actually says they say it is they're all you know solofide Bible alone but no actually what they're saying like um once saved always saved that's why that's a big Doctrine in southern baptist is once you've accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior no matter what you do you're going to heaven well how do you square that with Saint Paul who says I continue to work out my salvation and pain and suffering and you know I'm completing literally completing the suffering of Christ you can't Square those two things well you can also ask well if the Bible is the sole Authority why doesn't the Bible say it's the soul Authority you know you can get into a lot of but I mean and honestly it was one of those really trivial things that tripped me up there was a big controversy over gay marriage at the time and uh there was a sermon I think it was Dr follow he said the Bible says that marriage is between one man and one woman one time okay well first of all the Bible doesn't say that the Bible actually has a lot of polygamy in it it was until the Catholic Church where that was the rule but also the Baptist Church believes that divorce is fine when in every one of the four gospels Jesus specifically denounces divorce so I had a lot to reconcile and I sat there and thought one day you know at that point I was uh I grew up on William F Buckley William F Buckley was a very brilliant Catholic Junior right oh yes it would sit all the way like this and he would speak with Sesco Medallion verbosity you know to me he was like you know the smartest guy I ever encountered right and there were other many uh many other Catholic political figures and one day it hit me these guys are really smart they know something I don't know one they speak Latin and two they have had a lot more history and they seem to know a lot more about religion than I've ever been taught why don't I look into what they're looking into and my nature is like when I'm going to learn anything I go all the way back to the original source give me any subject I'm going to find out where did it come from and then I'm going to kind of step forward so I went to the early church fathers and you know the what anti-nicine the whole big library and I started reading it through from like you know Saint Jerome and irenaeus and uh all the way through and by the time I was through about you know the first 100 years I think it's the way you pronounce it there was no doubt I had to become Catholic I became Catholic I continued working in politics that did not go over well in North Carolina I lost all my friends most of my family uh continued doing my thing ran a Statewide newspaper for a while ran into all kinds of trouble and everything kind of got burned out on politics wound up back in the mountains of North Carolina flat broke self-employed actually in great deal of debt that took me a long time to pay off because I had a business that failed but um I'm back in North Carolina and ObamaCare had passed that was our big socialized medicine thing as a self-employed person I lost my insurance and I'm sitting there in the fog because we have like 270 days a year of precipitation where I live and it's beautiful it's like 5 000 feet elevation it's gorgeous but you know it's always foggy and always raining and I'm sitting there thinking well it's time to get back my roots and I'm looking at them I have identifying plants in the yard and I'm remembering from my childhood this herb does this and this herb does that and I went and the first thing I looked up it was really interesting it was kind of almost a coincidence or you know guidance um Maria Trevin was uh an Austrian herbalist who wrote A Lot in the 70s and 80s and she really uh brought the tradition of German folk medicine back to the Forefront and this was herbalists like Father Sebastian the father Johan nape I should say I'm not good with German father Sebastian name father Johann Coons or brother Aloysius these were all these Catholic herbalists and their plants because they were in Germany and Switzerland and Austria were same plants growing in the mountains of North Carolina where I live is very much like uh did well the cat schools or the Allegheny Mountains of uh New York a lot of a lot of similarity with places in Canada a lot of similarity in places in Oregon and Washington and suddenly the whole system of herbal medicine the whole everything I had learned over the years kind of crystallized and I was on some forums talking with some people and they're like you got to write about this you got to teach about this and it only occurred to me like a few years later that like it was an oddity for someone to be writing us an orthodox Catholic on herbal medicine in the year 2022 or 2020 at that point because really the whole history of herbal medicine is Catholic for the last two thousand years going all the way back to like Charlemagne and the benedictines and walliford strawbo and all those guys who got it from the Greeks who got it you know well that's a big you know big synthesis there I mean really there's a huge tradition of a Jewish herbal medicine Egyptian herbal medicine Babylonian but our modern medicine all really goes back to the early Catholic Church pretty cool so uh just to do a just a touch a little bit more on the biography before we dive deep into the herbal stuff um you said you lost a lot of friends and family when you became Catholic in your sort of career kind of Tanked in politics do you want to just touch on uh was there any progress since that time people coming around and sort of realizing that you're not a freak of nature and that you're a reasonable person some people come around eventually or how are things today you know honestly where I live is incredibly remote the actually the closest town near me has a year-round population about 70 people wow and they're mostly Church of God or primitive Baptists and a few old Presbyterians I think I am the only person at my Parish who speaks with a Southern accent yeah I'm like uh you know the priest will get up there and he's like you know he greets everybody they're like how you doing father and you know like hey how y'all doing you know it's just two different worlds you know it doesn't mix how many people at your Parish on a typical Sunday on as you know in the summer no we are a huge summer destination we have ski slopes so some people come up with a winner but you know they don't always go to mass but in the summertime we may get up to 300 people I mean it's just a little you know a little Parish uh a lot of uh folks from New York and New Jersey and uh yeah it's pretty cool what's the name of your Parish St Bernadette's okay in the wintertime we may have 15 people shot from us on a Sunday so that's Saint Bernadette de Subaru oh from Lourdes yeah lures yeah uh yeah um I'm trying to remember the full name of the church and I'm just blanking on it but anyway if anyone wants to look at it it's Saint Bernadette's in Linville North Carolina l-i-n-v-i-l-l-e and uh you've been happy with your priests that you've had Earl coming through there absolutely I was confirmed there um his name is Father Gober he's now moved on to a much bigger Parish he'll probably be a bishop at our state eventually and he sent him Winston-Salem now is which is you know you would never have heard of the town in Canada but he used to be the tobacco capital of the world and um he's a great guy you know uh german-american priest uh actually taller than me believe it or not and he looks like uh Glenn Miller so they they know about your herbal Endeavors uh the parishioners well to a point uh uh actually you know like I said uh father govers moved on and a new priests come in I've actually been off the mountain a lot trying to take care of a family member so I haven't gotten rid of the okay I mean I haven't gotten no to know the new uh priest uh but the local folks uh are very uh aware of my herbal medicine I teach a lot a lot I take people out in woods and show them plants which is very important because if you get into herbal medicine just out of books and you go out in the woods and try to pick things you probably gotta poison yourself yeah but uh yeah it's cool you know um the uh the church in Boone North Carolina which is um maybe 30 minutes away it's a college town um we got a great new priest there he's brought in some Latin Aladdin mass at least once a week and a lot of people very very open to herbal medicine pretty cool so I know you have a website but do you have one or more books that you've published I think you mentioned in 2020 you started writing a book is that right uh yeah I started a little before then uh first one was of course published in 2020 I've been actually published nine books now wow yeah so they're all on Amazon among other places or all in Amazon if you want to check them out John Carroll Johnson yeah two Judson carols on Amazon one um wrote books about a hundred years ago and he was a Freemason so that's not me wow but yeah the first book I wrote was actually uh with a lady from Austria we co-authored it it was the herbs and weeds of Father Johann kunzel he was a uh Swiss priest um around 1900. it was a great herbalist he actually went to court and proved that he could help people more with his herbs for diabetes than the doctors could at the time and that was a landmark Court decision that legalized herbal medicine in Germanic countries really when our government in America was trying to stamp it out yeah so and like I said it all comes full circle had I not become Catholic I wouldn't be where I am as an herbalist had I'm up State herbal medicine at 15 I wouldn't be where I am as a Catholic you know if you ask the average uh layperson of any worldview about herbalism if that's the right word they would probably say it's most likely a pagan Endeavor and the last thing on their list would be to say it's Catholic so are you one of many now that's pushing the narrative the other way towards the truth of the matter that the Catholics picked it up and perfected it I hope there are many um honestly uh you know every day I pray to Saint Hildegard from benjen because she was the greatest herbalist ever lived is that right oh yeah I mean she actually got her information directly from conversations with Jesus I mean she said she got her information from the voice of the living light wow it's due in 1100 A.D about 1080 to 1100 was describing cells cancer viruses in ways that people would not understand for hundreds of years until they got microscopes I mean she was doing like nuclear physics in her works I mean understanding that you know all matters vibration vibrating in a circle certain frequency and she believed that just by looking at uh certain quality of light or a difference in the color spectrum you could influence mood I mean that stuff our scientists just started getting to this stuff in like the 70s and 80s you know she she was brilliant and I mean her stuff is very hard to read it's it's very um well it's very much a product in the Middle Ages you have to understand the mindset and everything is she approved by the church can we read her with the police okay so they're all of her writings are are good to go you know I don't know you know the church obviously fully endorses her theological writings doctrinal writings her passion plays her music I think they well shall we say they stay a little agnostic on her medicinal writings okay but she was getting everything from the same angels and Saints and God himself so I'm good to go with it you know yeah did you give her a lot of credit in your writings your own writings huge huge yes I've done so much work on her writing so there'd be much more to come there's a lot that I'm just barely beginning to understand through a lot of prayer about what she would I mean okay you want to talk about New Age stuff right new age people are all into crystals and Crystal healing you know what Saint Hildegard actually valued crystals as well because of their effect on light and what we were saying just a minute ago about you know the quality of light and the vibrations that are not all woohoo stuff they're actually physics I mean if God made everything he made it out of a source and he differentiated it into what we see as matter but the physicist looks into it and he doesn't see matter at all he sees something more akin to music you know light and sound and actual wood or or a stone are not uh that far apart when it comes down to the physics and she understood this in like 1100 A.D amazing you know I often I often say uh sort of half joking that the 12th century is the the height of civilization and Christendom because uh Saint Anselm and different people that are around at that time and uh it really is a high point it's it's sometimes referred to as the enlightenment it's sort of uh the enlightenment before the Enlightenment and it's uh sort of a Catholic Enlightenment that happened during that time so you don't hear too much about the the 12th century 11th and 12th centuries but I think they're very important yeah absolutely no the more I read the more I'm absolutely amazed I probably one of the most controversial figures in all of history was a via fastest bombastus paracelsus Von hoenheim we're just going paracelsus for short right he was the uh he's in medical terms he's the father of Toxicology uh he's the hero of all the Alchemists in the world but it turns out that a lot of his Works were actually plagiarized a lot of people kind of put their name on his work he actually died a faithful Catholic he said in the 1500s he said I would not burn with Luther and he's buried in a Catholic Cemetery so his father was a uh physician in the town and I uh I'm sorry I cannot remember the name of it but anybody can look it up it's in Germany there was this little sort of a resort town where people would go from Miracles and pilgrimages where centuries before a little Paris had been founded by a priest who was actually killed by robbers and and uh Ravens look at the people to the robber robbers and you know assault them out that the whole Patriots of that church was actually from Saint Hildegard she gave them their crucifix ah and so from you're talking from 1100 to 1400 something and I mean you see Saint hildegard's influence just going through through the and but we could back up uh way before that we can go to um Abbott walletford strawboat he was the tutor to the children of Charlemagne the great the Holy Roman Emperor he wrote the first Christian herbal an herbal's a book where you know you have all the herbal medicines and remedies he wrote it entirely in Latin and in poetry oh and he had a phenomenal sense of humor actually if you can get a good English copy of this book you will find this guy was intelligent he would he knew his herbs he knew his gardening he talked about mulching and composting and you know orientation to the sun this is 700 A.D and he had a great sense of humor he made jokes all throughout the the book wow what about the venerable bead was he on your radar at all or not yeah you know I have not really dug into him yet uh that has one on my list okay uh why do you bring him up but I just know he was I know he was 8th century and I don't know that much about him I was hoping you could tell me but you haven't looked into him too much yet next time yeah but there are a lot there are a lot of gems to discover in uh the Middle Ages uh the Early Middle Ages I don't know what we call that but um just After the Dark Ages I don't know what do you how you feel about that term the Dark Ages some historians are rethinking that that maybe it was dark in a different sense meaning that just we haven't discovered the the richness of it yet or something well yeah it's a lot of pre-literate uh peoples at that point but uh uh you know obviously there was a lot going on yeah yeah in order for the 11th century to Blossom like that there had to be a lot of a lot of stuff uh yeah well I mean even you know the first uh or Patriots saint of our herbal medicine is actually Saint Viagra who was I don't know if he was the first or second one of the first like the first 10 Saints in Ireland after St Patrick okay yeah so then we have Saint Gertrude and Neville in Belgium um this is you know this is going way back I mean basically when um you know say uh Saint Benedict of a nurse uh inertia when he wrote his law for the benedictines he said first care for the sick that was primary and at the same time you had Charlemagne the great uh writing his capitulaire saying wherever there's going to be a monastery there's going to be a free hospital and a physic Garden where they're growing all the herbs to care for people so literally as the Catholic Church moved from ancient Rome up through you know the Germanic countries and into Central Europe I mean I've got wonderful books up from Poland and Ukraine talking about the monasteries that were founded there hundreds of years ago and how they actually would combine the uh the Greco-Roman herbal medicine with the native herbs in the central European countries and then you see it moving to Ireland and then you eventually see it moving to uh France and England uh hit great peaks in France which were almost essentially destroyed by the French Revolution um they it Institute guilds where only licensed doctors could practice and get you know really got rid of like all religious especially religious oriented but all folk medicine in England you see it really flourish in the Elizabethan period you have John Parkinson you have John Gerard who was a neighbor of Shakespeare and had this great botanical garden with the the Queen of England as its Patron and you can just imagine Shakespeare and he's sitting in this Garden you know Shakespeare's writing Midsummer Night's Dream and and he's writing about the properties of uh oak bark as an astringent to stop diarrhea you can go from you know the base to the sublime you know do you think do you think are you of the opinion that Shakespeare was Catholic you know I really think uh at least if not a practicing certainly educated okay because have you seen the some of the recent attempts to uh baptize him as Catholic like just sort of to piece the story together are you aware of that movement yeah you know I love Shakespeare and I've read him off and on since like seventh grade I mean huge influence in my writing probably one of my favorite all well okay my favorite author of all time uh so when people say Shakespeare was this or Shakespeare was that they said well he was bacon or he was you know okay I'm like I I'm like uh why why do we need to shine a light into this mist why can't we just take it as it is because if we take it as it is it's brilliant okay but I mean you know I totally respect other people that have a different review a different uh opinion that's the word I'm trying to get out and I know a lot of people who really get into trying to uh trace the roots yeah and the back story uh what's your opinion I don't have a strong opinion I just saw I saw a video like a lecture that was you know a couple of hours long and this guy was very passionate and Englishman was very passionate about proving that Shakespeare was Catholic and I I'm very skeptical so I just sort of listened and I saw that's interesting whatever but I try not to jump to conclusions you know I think I'm the same I would say you know when I say educated Catholic it doesn't mean that he was a practicing Catholic if I look at uh well I'll just I'll put in an herbal framework um so the greatest herbalist of uh England was John Parkinson he was King Henry's personal physician is that where we get the disease name from I'm not sure okay yeah no no wait a minute um probably not yeah no I think not I think that was a later yes it's a later physician uh yeah okay we can come back to that if you want to but uh I I can't remember his first name so his daughter wrote a book and uh it's on the tip of my tongue she wrote a book about how kind of ironic it was said his like great great great great grandfather would have been the king's physician ah really okay she's aware of him yeah if memory serves that's the same family of parks oh really okay yeah so John Parkinson was King Henry VII's you know personal physician he was one of the few Catholics who did not denounce renounce the faith who was not beheaded he was that well respected wow he wrote two books um one on herbal medicine one on plants in general because he was a great botanist and if you read his Works he was so educated his Latin is impeccable he got he can pack it up to like uh to Burnham montaneus like the first uh um botanist in Germany who had really laid out everything and then Linnaeus and all he knew his stuff like crazy and he had a good mind for chemistry he could show you exactly what these herbs did when he used them one generation removed uh John Gerard becomes the great herbalist and he was excuse me he was the uh neighbor to Shakespeare John Gerard was Protestant and uh from a lower middle class family his writings are delightful if you love Shakespeare you will absolutely love George writings his Latin was flawed his uh identifications of plants were often quite um off he believed there was a tree in Ireland that would drop seeds that when they hit the water would become geese so we literally went in one generation from you know Oxford educated Catholic really top-notch Thomas like uh what we the South we would call Carpetbaggers uh you know after this our civil war we had Devastation all these people just like came in and like took over property for pennies on the dollar and set themselves up as noblemen right so it from one generation of Catholic England to Protestant England you could almost say there was a hundred IQ points dropped now I know why you're not too popular among your Protestant friends no I I absolutely um my uh great-great-great-grandfather was uh Lord Cheshire which makes my great great et cetera et cetera et cetera grandfather um you know King Richard Lionheart and King Edward oh no way yeah so Richard Lionheart was he in Scotland I no I know he was the King of England and I know he fought the Crusades he was at the time would have been I believe ruling Scotland but probably not by okay um Accord because there's a king there's a king Richard that I descend from allegedly okay he was in Scotland uh King Richard I don't know if it's Lionheart might not be well mine is for the house of Wessex so you go like from an arrow with to Arrowwood to you start getting into names that make sense like from way in the Conqueror so we're getting like like mine would be I think 10 Generations down from waiting to conqueror but as a Carol we're also careful in uh Scotland or careful and so uh actually you and I are probably related so probably for sure for sure for sure yeah so I have a great interest you know in uh especially pre-protestant English History yeah I'm not a big fan of the current monarchy I do love to learn about that the house of Wessex and of course in Ireland the uh the carols hurricanes that in Scotland and uh we have so much uh shared lineage and Heritage there's so much to learn about uh the history of Great Britain and you know England Scotland Ireland Wales and the whole the whole you know because there's so much import from Scandinavia from Continental Europe and there's so much mixing and matching and shifting alliances and uh the drama of it it's like a big soap opera with a lot of Bloodshed obviously oh yes absolutely it's scary it's scary to think about it was fascinating yeah you know we have more Scottish in North Carolina than there are uh right now in Scotland are you serious people have actual Scottish Heritage because you know the the Scots Irish England moved half the population over to Ireland and then they got the heck out of there and they came to North Carolina I see okay yeah we have uh uh mix everywhere you turn ah interesting so uh do you think that uh Charlemagne was a good Holy Catholic believer like he was devoted and he wasn't just just kidding apologize what uh Abbott strabo wrote about him I have to think he was really um yes fervent and you have to think well I mean he came from a pagan household and he obviously was probably not fully catechized uh his mother was a devout and his father was not you know he'd uh uh converted on his deathbed um but when you come down to just pure influence and Legacy I mean probably the most pivotal figure in the last 2000 years we wouldn't is it safe to say we would not have universities or hospitals without his influence yes without him and without the benedictines to start with and then the other orders yeah okay the first um Medical College in the well modern medical school in the entire world was founded in Italy I am blanking on the name anybody can look it up just look up first medical school in the world I think it's in Salerno actually it was founded by a Catholic a Jew and a Muslim no who found himself yeah Shipwrecked the scoring Legend I mean you know okay Shipwrecked in the area and they started trying to help each other with their wounds and they said well we should start a school and within a hundred years it became an official Catholic University and is one of the oldest universities on the face of the Earth wow so uh we won't shine a light on The Mists of that Legend because it's too beautiful to ruin you know I do uh my family did a lot of uh genealogical research and that's why I know uh quite a bit about my some of the famous names that are allegedly on my timeline uh we've got it going all the way back to Adam and Eve if you can believe that sweet uh it goes through it actually does go through Charlemagne oh awesome okay yeah and uh if you look into if you're interested in this sort of thing you can look into the genealogy of the presidents of the United States and many of them like the majority of them do go back to Charlemagne and they go they go down through Lucy de Ross r-o-s and she's my ancestor allegedly and my last name is Ross r-o-s-s but if you if you're interested there's online there's a lot of there are a lot of resources for the genealogy of the presidents of the United States and the majority of them do go back to Lucy de Ross so maybe maybe you're connected there too we actually are because uh my like great great great grandmother was a Russ r-u-s-s okay and uh that was related to the same family okay cool it's interesting it's very very interesting stuff really a quick question uh just for I ask a lot of my guests this if they're Christian are you do believe in evolutionary young earth creationists like myself ah I believe [Music] things change over time yeah so do I I believe in a natural progression I do not believe in evolution as the origin of the species okay yeah uh because the reason I ask is because you know looking at my family tree I take it with a large wheelbarrow full of salt because there's so much incentive to hook your hook yourself up to a famous timeline okay there's there's so much proof that uh fraud took place in these genealogical things especially in royal families that was just something they paid for they paid for a nice story so I take it with a bucket full of salt but looking at that that when I was an atheist that did start me looking into religion the reality of religion and thinking about the big family that is humanity and eventually I became a Christian and then I became Catholic and then uh you know I uh you know I'd never believed in Darwin's evolution but I embraced firmly uh the the traditional Christian view of uh creation okay so um that's sort of my uh that's my connection to this whole talk about the genealogical side I want to go back just to the herbs for a little bit just to talk about my least favorite family of plants which is the allium family do you know about that oh my gosh I'm allergic I cannot live without onions and garlic so what uh what is connected to that is it a huge family of plants is it like does it yeah it's not that big uh and of course it is a subset of the lilies family oh it is yeah is it related to The Lily the beautiful lips all the um these are my favorite lilies are my favorite yeah so they're they're both bulbous plants they grow from bulbs you know I'm probably mispronounced that I mispronounced most things but they do grow from bulbs uh the alliums uh include well we can go from chives to garlic chives to onions um garlic shallots leeks um ramps or rampsons and you know they're wonderful plants if you can tolerate them they are antibiotic antiviral antiseptic uh lower blood pressure reduce cholesterol oh I do have low blood pressure by the way so that's probably another reason I don't like it and uh you know I I okay so I'm parkasian and creole as well I've got a big spicy thing going on uh like I had a Huguenot grandfather and I had a little Cajun Creole come in so you know we got to put that stuff in everything I cannot cook without garlic and onions in fact I just took a bunch of onions and put a little olive oil and breadcrumbs on them and roasted them down the oven and just ate them whole I used to eat a lot of I mean I used to eat a lot of it till the age whatever 35 40 or whatever then just suddenly I was having bad reactions to it yeah so how did you present how did your reaction present uh sort of like weird feeling in the head headache sore throat bad breath uh digestive problems and then I can't sleep at night and have weird dreams usually have wet dreams like sexual dreams and stuff like that right yeah they used to say that in the old herbals they said the alliums uh stirred up passions is that right oh that's been documented for uh that goes back Discord as the assessment documented for over 2000 years absolutely do you know about ayurvedic food how they avoid they avoid the alliums yeah I uh well I studied traditional Chinese medicine for about 10 years and like I said I practice yoga and uh ayurveda for about five wow so I came back to my roots and you know my roots being Celtic essentially we love the outcomes I gotta tell you but um you know what do you eat have you had a lot of antibiotics in the last 10 years well uh in the past 10 years no no when I was in my early 20s I had strep throat and they pumped me full of some kind of antibiotic pills okay probably the only one of two times where I was on antibiotics oh that's good that's good uh what about uh fermented foods do you eat a lot of sauerkraut pickles yeah I like uh I do like sauerkraut a lot maybe you can sort of diagnose me because I really my my favorite thing to eat is rice with green vegetables like broccoli is my favorite oh yeah anything that's in the Cabbage family cabbage broccoli cauliflower are they all related oh yeah all those those are the uh brassiere ACA or the cruciferous vegetables are they good for you oh they're wonderful for you yeah and so if you're doing that I'm not worried at all about your uh sensitivity to alliums that's probably genetic okay yeah you tend to go one One path or the other if you're eating one year no it's just if you had been um eating a lot of garlic and onions for like all your life yeah and then suddenly you've had a severe reaction to it all I would want to know is why that reaction came about yeah and see it could be because you you know had been on antibiotics and it killed your gut Flora I see yeah or uh you were eating a lot of pasteurized food and again you weren't getting a lot of the probiotic bacteria and uh um fungi you know through pickles and sauerkraut and kefir and kombucha and yogurt and buttermilk and you know all that or I would be looking at a severe life trauma okay uh or a actually um a vaccine um you would get in the flu shot I'm kidding I'm just kidding this is actually a common side effect for like a flu shot or you know something like that okay well a vaccine what it does is it triggers a an auto an immune response right so most times it's gonna like 99.9 of the time it's going to be just fine but every now and then it can just throw like a you know something funky into the mix and you don't know what's happened and then you know I'd just be saying um well there are actually some herbs you can use to detox the lymph system but uh it sounds to me like you know you just don't have a genetic makeup that makes you particularly fond of allium so if it makes dining out Impossible by the way oh yeah oh yeah I mean absolutely you know how many times you know how many times I've gone to a restaurant and said I'm allergic to and it's not going to kill me but I just don't like I don't enjoy it three days of hell right so I just say is there garlic in this no and then I buy it I eat it and there's garlic in it because they don't understand that that mixed spice they put in there has garlic in it and like everything has garlic in it the sauce that they put in has garlic in it well see you know I worked a lot as a chef and caterer and like I said I could not do anything so uh what are some of your favorites you've already said allium family but what are some of your favorite herbs uh you know like the humble herb that is just underrated like I don't know parsley or whatever or like um like I like for example I like um the Italian herbs like I like um oregano is what my favorite my wife is Greek and we get Greek oregano that's very very powerful yeah I think that's I think that's pretty good for your uh system too right interesting um well I'll just start there uh um oregano is uh excellent antibiotic okay what is an antibiotic by the way it kills little bugs yeah yeah kills germs basically okay uh it also has some antiviral properties okay uh several herbs do um I use a lot of verbs antivirally um the oregano is great especially as the essential oil but if you're just putting in your diet every day you're gonna get all the effects of it it's just going to be over time time and so I can be you know uh like a strong dose when you're sick right well I do have the I do have the the liquid um oregano oil yeah that's great it does burn a little bit but I dilute it I dilute it and I just chug it back and if I'm sick with a sore throat I gargle that yeah and uh I don't know if it works but it is because it's hard to know with medicine like how would I be feeling if I did this intervention or if I didn't do it like I don't have a time machine to do a double blind on what my experience is right no it's been proven uh you can look in the Physician's Desk Reference for herbal medicine that's actually what doctors use to look up herbal medicine um oreganol is the essential oil of the oregano and it kills germs it kills viruses it's wonderful stuff and it tastes phenomenal I use oregano quite a bit it's amazing yeah I mean the culinary herbs are really where you want to start because there's a reason our ancestors use these for so on they not only made food taste better they kept it from spoiling and they kept from getting sick so oregano of course the garlic parsley parsley is a phenomenal herb um basil uh you know those are all great if I was thinking about mint family those oregano and basil yeah they sure are and all the mints all the mints are good just be careful um if you're pregnant I'm not pregnant yes of course but for pregnant women be careful with the mint family because they can cause miscarriage uh the only documented death in America related to herbs was a woman who tried to cause an abortion with Penny Royal oil Pennyroyal is a very specific very strong mint and within an hour she bled to death at a very orifice of her body so we want to be very careful with certain members of the family members of the sage family which is also very uh safe but some of the sages can go from like sausage seasoning to psychedelic drugs you have to be a little careful with the sages they're as far as just the most humble orbs obviously dandelion okay okay my Greek wife obviously eats dandelion uh leaves things yeah she loves it I find it a little bit bitter but she puts a lemon and oil olive oil well I love to get a big old bunch of dandelion greens I should have a bunch of them and throw them in a pan with some bacon grease and of course I'll add some onion you know cook them down and put a little vinegar over them and oh my gosh isn't that not good that is phenomenal isn't it I would imagine I would imagine it's very good for you I should try to uh uh get into a little bit more because I was a little bit cautious when my wife uh served it up to me well dandelions are not native to North America no they were brought here as food and Medicine ah basically by every single European subgroup who settled America they brought dandelions wow and they're they're of excellent liver tonic uh they're what we call a blood cleanser which is just sort of uh like spring tonic just kind of gets you you know people used to spend Winters inside around the wood smoke and they're eating salted meat and they weren't getting a lot of food uh I mean fresh vegetables a lot of vitamin C so when we talk about spring tonic that's basically what we're talking about is something that kind of perks you up and helps cleanse your body from all the salt and smoke you got through the winter you know but uh they're very good for the immune system dandelions are antiseptic to the urinary tract so they're excellent for you know all the urinary tract infections and all that but um especially as a liver herb they're phenomenal they're really good but they also just are very nutritious and you can take the flowers and make a wine out of it you can make dandelion wine if you don't want to make an alcoholic you can cook it down with sugar or honey and make a dandelion syrup absolutely delicious so as far as humble herbs that would be you know one of the main ones amazing would be one in that category um St John's Ward St John's Wort grows wild throughout America and Canada and it's antiviral anti-inflammatory um actually it kills nerve damage it's been shown to heal uh nerve damage over time um wonderful herb um I can't think of anything more humble than the dandelion but maybe uh red clover uh wonderful it has estrogenic properties great for women going through menopause and uh yeah I mean herbs are herbs are fun herbs are really uh interesting to get into it's an endless Fascination what about uh I I like drinking tea I don't drink coffee okay so what is Bergamot because I drink Earl Gray okay all right that's that's a complicated uh question actually and there's because the common name Bergamot is different from the Latin name we would use there is a Bergamot which is a citrus fruit and you often find this uh combined with black tea oh really yes they put the skin the skin or I believe it is the skin yeah I believe it's a zest and but the Bergamot in American and Canadian herbalism is Monarda monard is a member of the mint family which you may know as bee balm have you ever seen bee balm a beautiful flower absolutely this is one of the most beautiful wildflowers you will ever experience it has all these little um how do you spell beep bomb b-e-e-b-a-l-m and it has all these little Petals of the flower going off like a Medusa's head it's purple right purple or female usually purple or red and it's a gorgeous flower and uh the hummingbirds love it it's the main hummingbird right you know down that flower and it is in the in the mint family it's very strong and has a great uh properties uh antiviral antiseptic and for reducing fevers oh oh um you know can you talk a little bit about gin and what goes into the classic Jane recipe do you know anything about that I've written so much about this I've actually got a couple videos I love Jim uh first of all um Jen uh okay so let's go back to Catholic Corporal medicine for a minute when the uh European countries were colonizing um the Western Hemisphere I guess we would say well they were colonizing North and South America and all the islands they suddenly encountered a whole lot more malaria than they had ever had before now malaria had been present before that point there had been outbreaks of malaria in Rome it had been an issue well they get to Peru specifically and the Jesuits find out about a plant called chinchona okay chinchona bark is the source of um I'll get back to it a minute this was called the Peruvian park it was called the Jesuits Park uh for most of the history of the world okay the English would not use it because it was called the Jesuits bark this was the source of quinine okay okay because we know it now yeah and that was the most powerful anti-malarial substance of the time yeah I was drinking I started drinking uh the tonic water during the past couple of years for obvious reasons exactly so quinine which comes from chinchona bark became the most popular herb in the entire world it literally was a game changer you know malarial fevers could be once a day once every two days every three days you go back to uh Sir Walter Raleigh who now to the first colony in America right here in my home state north North Carolina when he fell out with the British royal family for apparently hitting on the queen or something they had him beheaded right so uh he requested he to beheaded a specific hour because he knew his fever from malaria was going to present at that time that's how you know specific and predictable these fevers were so when they had an herbal uh remedy they could know exactly you know this really works because I mean if he was gonna be at 3 P.M today I see I took a gin and tonic I didn't get the fever right so tonic water comes from the Jesuits discovery of chinchona bark the Gen component comes from the British discovery of combining juniper berries which are very high in vitamin C and some Citrus to help Stave off scurvy put those two together and you've got a wonderful antiviral cocktail amazing and it tastes pretty good too oh it tastes wonderful and you know you can you can do your own craft Gins I love to do this you uh okay so if you're going to do commercial distilling you put everything sort of in a little box where the steam will run through it from the alcohol and then out in those you can make infused Gins you can literally just get some vodka and you can put in um well you can put in juniper berries which are antiviral they're uh they help get rid of kidney stones where do you buy this stuff that you're gonna prepares what's that where can you buy a juniper berry oh you can get them online uh but you can probably just look around and find them I mean literally oh throughout Canada you have uh my native Virginia Eastern red cedar and then I have an herbalist friend up in um Ontario is it Ontario yeah I think she's in Ontario anyway she sent me a list of like five or six native uh junipers okay and then you have all these ornamentals that have been running as ground cover they just have those little blueberries on them okay and yeah you can Harvest them they're they're delicious yeah do you ever get a good deer roast or you know some good venison elk moose whatever throw some junipers in there and a little parsley and roast in the oven and take care of all that if there's a little gamey taste you'll get rid of it and give you a really good yeah good cool good stuff but yeah you can uh put in with that gin you can put in um uh cucumber peel which has diuretic quality you can put in borage which is a flower that tastes like cucumber but was actually added to beer for a couple of thousand years to um boost the spirits increase the mood get rid of depression and uh increase battle furor it increased the uh you know the the other bravery going into battle liquid courage liquid courage yes it says to give courage you can put in rose petals which are antiviral and uh anti-inflammatory you can put anything into gin cool they tastes good okay so vodka is a neutral enough alcohol that it'll take on whatever yeah I just go with you know you know 40 80 proof so you drink on average you drink about 40 ounces a day of alcohol is that right no I don't think so but I'm just kidding you know when I was a new age atheist uh you know hippie whatever I worked at a vegan restaurant and everyone convinced me that I must have parasitic worms because everyone was just obsessed with their diet and they're just obsessed with these demonic ideas of forms yeah and uh so they convinced me to take this cleanse so I took this cleanse on my own I prepared it myself uh I didn't Source the materials I just bought what I could buy so it's I want I want to get your honest scientific opinion about this and it really made me sick like I tripped out it was psychedelic for me after the day 14. but you start out slow and you build gradually okay so you may have heard of this but the ingredients are cloves black walnut and wait for it wormwood oh boy so I got really sick so what do you think you know I love wormwood actually I um I use the old Swedish bitters which were probably formulated by Saint kildegard okay but they captures a tiny little bit of wormwood in there okay and if you read her uh writing she was always uh recommending vermouth I kept thinking vermouth this goes in a martini right no it was old German for wormwood wine it was wormwood infused wood I like a little removed but especially as a vegan okay first of all as a vegan you're you're in sort of a fat deficient environment and you're going to metabolize uh many things very quickly things tend to hit like when I was a vegetarian um I read in a book that I should take large doses of nutmeg for my back pain when I hurt my back okay it's a good idea what we're talking uh psychedelic stupor uh with the worst migraine and burning lungs I thought I was gonna die it was like hell on Earth uh if I had had a little fat to help slow the absorption of that nutmeg hey you know I would never have that much nutmeg again trust me I'm a little I'm loathing to put a little in my coffee these days to tell you the truth it was so awful but wormwood has Fusion is a it's t-h-u-j-o-n-e okay it is a slightly psychoactive component okay okay when you think of the old artists like Van Gogh and all who are said to drink absinthe until they went crazy and Drew all these psychedelic pains and then cut his ear off and well truth is he was drinking paint thinner he was such a bad alcoholic and the absinthe of the day was like 80 alcohol so the thus zone of the wormwood was probably not what was making him crazy but still if you take enough though Jean you're going to end up like I was with nutmeg it's not going to be fun you're not going to have a good time you're gonna get really really sick and uh these days people will try to get Fusion or wormwood essential oil and try to make a bootleg at synth and they usually end up in the hospital because it will cause heart arrhythmia it would cause shallow breathing it will totally screw you up what about the black walnut and the cloves anything in there okay so black walnut is anti-parasitic okay really good for getting rid of worms which you probably never had in the first place because most people in the modern world don't have uh intestinal parasites I know about it if you did probably yes you'd know about it if you did but that's a big uh what I would call fake herbalist or fake natural healers really try to convince people they have parasites there was this guy he was the herbalist for Michael Jackson and he was a total fraud oh and he was the one that really propagated that stuff in the 80s yeah he was he makes us all look bad he was just a real fake he wasn't Catholic anyway um now walnuts real good Wanda has many many uses it's great for dandruff okay it's great for eczema as a wash it's great it's a good bitter that can help uh with liver inflammation small doses yeah um when I was a kid they actually said let the horses eat the Walnut leaves because it would get rid of worms okay okay yeah they said the horses know what they're doing I don't know if they did or not but you know that was folk folk War at the time and uh it never seemed to hurt him uh well it's a very good uh vermicidal and can help lower fevers as well in very small doses and if you were to say sprain an ankle or have a bad bruise yeah if you soaked in the wash of it it would reduce that inflammation and really help ah what about clothes closer anti-spasmodic okay uh the wonderful for diarrhea they will stop the intestinal contractions okay I actually had to take some yesterday because I woke up in the next upset stomach for no apparel reason I got some clothes and I was fine how did you take the clothes though I just took four of them tuned up swallowed them okay okay whole like the whole not ground up no just I just ate them this way I usually do things I'm not I'm not very uh specific or fancy in the way I do things I'm a very pressure when they're whole the more hole they are the fresher they are right yeah and and clothes are great for numbing out any um sore tooth okay or if you've had oral surgery the clove oil will take care of that is it always I want to ask you is it always the oily part of these plants that it goes and does the Magic No no really just that would be the case in Clove and a few other I can think of um uh oh there's so many components uh but no it's it's not always the oily part now uh with the mint family we talked about the mint family when you're making kind of a tea of a mint or Sage you want to put a saucer or something on top of your cup okay because there's volatile oils will evaporate oh okay so with your aromatic herbs yes uh very much very much yes with the aromatic herbs you know there are people a lot of people in this world that are addicted to Beetle nut do you know what Beetle nut is oh sure I do is it related to the one that made you sick that you ate too much of the nutmeg no uh no no it's two different plants um it has a simulative it's uh um really I think it's related to the cola nut which say you originally made uh Cola like in sodas so it's related to cocaine yeah it's related to cocaine or a a High um caffeinated highly caffeinated oh I see okay like caffeine and cocaine are related no I'm not sure about that uh you find these different alkaloids in different plants okay like we can go to uh Chinese ephedra or what they call Mormon tea okay you probably even have Mormon tea up in Canada it's uh uh a weedy little plant kind of in the horsetail family and it contains an alkaloid which is very similar to caffeine um which they used to put in diet pills and such and it increases the heart rate increases the blood pressure uh the many stimulant herbs there are many sedative herbs there may narcotic herbs literally if we were to walk out um in your backyard probably or in a in a park in your area I could point out an herb that's going to help with pain I could plant herbs can help us sleep I could plan herb it's going to give you a little bit of a pep you know a little bit of a boost uh that's one of the fun things about being an herbalist you can stand on the corner of the park with little baggies full of stuff and like yeah if you wanted to yeah no actually one that I know grows in your area is Indian pipe or ghost pipe okay it is a um oh what a call it's not parasitic saprophytic it's a safrophytic plant okay it has no chlorophyll it's white ah and it grows in the woods just feeding off of other plants it's sort of a mycological uh cooperation with other planets okay and it's totally legal not endangered and you take a bite of that and it's like taking a dose of morphine really ah that sounds interesting what about Ayahuasca what is that is that one plant or many plants mixed together ayahuasca psychedelic drugs uh no that's one that's uh it's a Vine that goes in South America you know many plants like that too and my advice is to stay away from yeah of course um yeah I was talking to someone the other day and we were talking about Saint Hildegard again you know she was the first person to ever um document hops for growing beer Ah that's why she's one of the patron saints of beer brewing uh hops is a bitter and it's a preservative of the beer before then they made a beer of using three herbs which was called Groot g-r-u-i-t if I remember correctly all of those herbs have a psychoactive component and this beer which was very popular before 1100 A.D or so put people into a frenzy uh rape and pillage kind of mindset and so when she came up with hops the church got very much behind it and helped pass the Pure Foods I mean the pure Brewing act in Germany yeah so uh because it would calm people down hops is a sedative oh it has a slightly estrogenic property so if you think about like all the soccer hooligans now right just imagine them with Groot so oh wow this past you had these big brewing companies open and they started selling name brand beer well before then mostly women made beer at home and they would make beer and big cauldrons and they would wear pointed hats as an advertisement and they would hang a broom above their door when the beer was ready so let's think about that for a minute so when the commercial breweries came about they portrayed the witch as telling you a brew that would make you insane and crazy and have visions right there's actually that's the history of where we get our idea of the modern witch but getting back to uh Ayah Huska and all that I'm not even sure how you pronounce it I've never heard it pronounce my native speaker but the vine that is very psychedelic they had very similar um herbs in England and in Germany and and throughout Europe they had Mandrake yeah Mandrake is a member of the datura family which is so hallucinogenic that it said that you are not allowed to pull it up by yourself or it will scream at you and you would die you were supposed to chain a dog and train the dog to draw pull the plant up while you have your back turned to it okay it appears in the Bible too right um the story of Jacob the story of Jacob uh Leia wanted to sleep with the Madrid yes they traded mandrakes for bedtime with Jacob yeah I'm not sure if that was the same plant though because this one would have been really harsh oh we have like an American Mandrake which is a totally different family that goes to the same name it's actually our may apple okay is it related to ginseng it's like a root it's not related but they grow in the same place yeah and the American Mandrake will if you wanted a um if you were constipated okay and you really need a nerve to get you over it but you didn't mind if it hit you in the gut like a freight train right yeah Drake which is often drawn it's like a little person under the ground yeah this one the witches used to use to make people have hallucinations to think they were flying or cat had a spell cast on them oh wow or you have like the Belladonna which was used by um Lucretia Borges one of her favorite poisons oh same family uh similar herbs used like down in Haiti to uh people put people in a hypnotic State uh to make them very uh they're in a catatonic hypnotic State they'll do what they're told but they have no will if they're out that's a zombie ah or in America we have the the Jimson weed okay yeah all the same family and uh not a fun plant to wow what about DMT the DMT molecule it's found in a lot of vegetables apparently it is it is uh considered to be like the base molecule okay so they they think going back tens of thousands of years every plant probably contained okay but to extract it and make it usable is very much something you have to do in a laboratory I see like right now I use um mimosa as an antihistamine herb I take the blossoms and I take the leaves they have a slightly narcotic effect meaning that it just lowers the respiration and they have an anti-mast cell effect which reduces basically when you have an allergic response your body produces histamines histamines have to connect with a mast cell this is one of about five herbs I use that reduce mast cells so the histamines are less effective and over time that reduces allergies if you were to take the root of that plant into a laboratory situation you could absolutely extract DMT but I don't tell people how to do that uh what about the nightshades I've heard uh like I love uh Peppers of all kinds especially I especially I love the Cuban pepper I don't know if you know that oh yes yeah I love the Cuban pepper i stuff it with feta and roast it in the oven until it's like charred and then eat it on Rice I eat everything on Rice uh so talk about the nightshades and talk to me about rice is rice used in medicine okay well okay we'll start with the nightshades which are very uh much related to the the solanaceae family and so we can get from tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and potatoes okay back to Jimson weed Belladonna really oh really okay that's why Americans would not eat tomatoes until Thomas Jefferson popularized really because they believe devil food the devil's food they believed it was the Apple from the Garden of Eden oh no way yoya and yes it would absolutely if you survived you would have terrifying hallucinations uh you may not survive it and we have like horse knittle you've probably seen horse now it grows all up through Canada um forms like little tiny uh tomatillo type tomato fruit okay yeah with a jagged little leaf and it's covered in Thorns yeah yeah okay that plant uh is excellent for nerve pain you can take the whole plant and make a strong tea of it and it will deaden out the nerves it helps poison ivy rashes take it internally you'll probably go insane have hallucinations and die so that's the family that is the same family Tomatoes potatoes eggplants and uh Peppers right wow I love peppers I am a pepper head I eat Habaneros I you know we have the Carolina Reaper don't even touch it and go near it there's that ghost one there's a ghost pepper of something yeah it's the ghost pepper that has been hybridized to be just like this freakish thing okay which if you're even in the room with it you're gonna start watering is awful but I love I absolutely love Habaneros and all those kind of things wonderful for uh again for nerve pain okay because if you take capsaicin from even a cayenne pepper yeah and you put it on an area that's hurting it can be a muscle it can be a backache it can be you know nerve pain shooting your feet that nerve kills your brain it's hurting through a chemical signal it only has so much of that chemical stored if you put on capsaicin yeah it just basically wears it down every time huh and it increases circulation and it relaxes muscle so just from the heat of the the topic and heat the irritant we call that Aruba patient and so that's how you can use them uh but some people do have allergies to them and you know they can't use any of the family well I I love tomatoes and I love peppers and I eat every day I have cayenne pepper in the powdered form on top of my meal uh is there if I feel okay I can continue or should I try to moderate myself no it's wonderful for you okay I use it every day too like I said I'm part Creole and cajun I mean okay you know and I ate a ton of rice too so I'm telling you we're keen yeah in fact I have a friend who who was a great chef he was actually the chef on The Love Boat you remember that show and we're watching right now we're watching the new Love Boat it's called The Real Love Boat where they're doing like a reality dating on The Love Boat so yeah we used to watch the old one in this in the 70s and 80s yeah I was born in 70s so yeah I know the love worked very well yeah well my friend uh Fabio abruzio he he lives just down the road for me here in the mountains of North Carolina and he was the actual Chef on The Love Boat no way yeah I didn't help yeah I'll go down and help them out in the restaurant sometimes he always says to me you love us to be part of Sicilian because you love with the peppers and the AGA plant I love eggplant when it's properly prepared my problem is I don't know how to prepare it I don't know how to prepare it but when it's well when it's done nicely and it's soft and it's just oh it's amazing but I don't know how to do it I don't know how to do it you know I'll tell you the craziest recipe this is actually in my new cookbook uh omnivores guide to home cooking okay this I I got from Fabio a little bit and from my uncle my uncle uh was a big big Scotsman big Scotsman I mean taller than me outweigh Me by 100 pounds the man loved mayonnaise I'm telling you he would just get a spoon and a jar of mayonnaise and he was in heaven right but he would take he when he discovered eggplant Parmesan you decided to figure out how to make his own recipe and he came up with this crazy idea first of all you take the eggplants and if they're freshly the peel on if they if they're not just kind of peel it off in ribbons so you get like stripes okay then slice them into like what half inch pieces and salt them and press them put some paper towels or towels over them press them a plate get that bitter water out of there then this is the crazy thing he would do he would spread each one with mayonnaise and I like to make homemade mayonnaise I love it snowman's or whatever right I make my own because I don't want garlic in it well there you go let's see I make my own because I want garlic in it and some lemon but anyway he would just think plain old store-bought mayonnaise rub it down put uh bread crumbs on it pop under the broiler and brown them up on each side or he'd put them in a pan and fry them in olive oil and those slices then he would put with you know a good marinara sauce some Parmesan some mozzarella everything you wanted an ice eggplant parm put some breadcrumbs over pop it in the microwave when it came out the mayonnaise gave it such richness it's crazy I mean it's the least like the least Italian thing you could ever imagine right creamy the whole thing well I A friend of mine made fish that way I'd never seen mayonnaise baked in the oven but he coated his fish with mayonnaise and maybe some breadcrumbs and it was delicious it was delicious yeah oh man that's good stuff I used to think that you know my mother would warn me like don't leave the mayonnaise out because it's going to go bad and kill you so I thought well you can't give any heat to mayonnaise ever so I never thought of cooking with it but you can yeah you can yeah that's actually yes that's that's very much part of uh like 1950s 60s 70s American and probably Canadian culture okay but uh you know it's really it's mayonnaise is originally a French sauce it says scoffier you can have it hot you can have a cold okay I love sauces gravies and all that do you have escoffier's uh a cookbook no I don't have any cookbooks you don't have any you gotta have mine no um seriously I'll send you a free copy thank you very much but uh no scottier wrote his cookbook in like 1830 he's got 700 sauces holy smokes oh yeah and like 300 egg recipes I mean I love eggs I love eggs oh yeah so uh was that Fabiano guy did he appear on the show in the seven in the 80s no he was just like the actual cook on the old Princess Cruise Line uh okay okay that's really interesting wow so he's like a friend of yours yeah yeah we got a lot of uh really unique people to come to the mountains of North Carolina people that want to do dude we got a lot of really rich folks we got a lot of really poor folks we got a lot of people that just want to escape and not be recognized anymore and I think that was kind of his deal cool he always said you cannot take the mountains out of the boy but you can't take the boy out of the mountains was he his little guy he's like five feet tall curly dark hair you know swarthy yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah what is he Sicilian or something no he's uh from um oh what was it Mont Blanc okay yeah he's from like way up in the Alps somewhere but uh he spent so much time down uh the men like the Mediterranean and the round Sicily that he's got like strong Southern Italian accent it's yeah yeah we got a bunch of folks a lot of Italians a lot of Mafia folks too tell you it's true Al Capone used to have like a a whole branch of his Empire here all the hillbillies would distill for him and he'd run it up through uh Tennessee up to Chicago and across the Great Lakes wow amazing you're a great source of information I can't believe how much you know about um medicine and herbs obviously and these sorts of things is there a side of you that dabbles with conspiracy theories where you think big farm is trying to kill you not kill you but uh trying to kill the industry kind of try to kill the cottage industry of real healthy lifestyle and healthy food is like because there are a lot of conspiracy theories where big Pharma doesn't want us to cure cancer they don't want us to be healthy they don't want us to be thriving uh it sounds a bit too dark for me to to buy into that but um when they make their pills are they using Granny's uh you know hunches and just putting it in a synthesized form or is it really divorced is it divorced from your your expertise completely oh gosh whether you you just uh open a whole can of worms um right so you're Canadian I'm an American I don't have will not claim to say anything about the Canadian Health System okay but I can tell you in America the leading cause of death is medical uh malpractice error yeah uh over prescription and abuse yeah more doctors kill people than gun violence car accidents Etc that's not a dispute you can look it up they don't do it intentionally I'm sure they don't they they want to help people they take the Hippocratic Oath the problem is like if you have a head cold and you go to a doctor he feels compelled to give you something to take home and he's going to give you an antibiotic on the justification of this will prevent a sinus infection or a bronchial infection meanwhile the American Medical Association the CDC Etc saying please stop doing this you're creating superbugs you're creating antibiotic resistant bacteria they can't seem to help themselves I I don't know if it's the doctor I don't know if it's pharmaceutical industry pressuring them I don't know if it's a patient who just thinks they're getting ripped off if they don't get something to walk out of the room with I can't I can't I cannot answer that question I can tell you that I think in 1914 it could have been 1916 we had the Pure Foods and drugs Act passed it was passed to prevent uh patent medicine patent medicine would have been your grandmother's cold your grandmother's cough syrup do your grandmother's cough syrup or or someone think it would cause snake oil you ever heard a snake oil steak oil is is oil of Echinacea oh really yes wow echinacea a wonderful antiviral many qualities yeah one thing it does better than anything else it protects and helps by propagate hyaluronic acid if you were bitten by a rattlesnake tomorrow the rousix Venom its main thing it does is break down hyaluronic acid hyaluronic acid is like the mortar that holds your cells together it does that because if it turns you into mush it can digest you easier echinacea protects hyaluronic acid I see okay so snake oil is actually very effective herbal medicine far more effective than anything modern medicine has to offer for a snake bite put that aside what did the same law do it outlawed uh raw milk oh yeah Carolina I cannot buy raw milk I mean I would literally arrested for trying to buy wow well in America right now the Amish kids don't have asthma yeah the kids right down the road have asthma the Amish kids drink raw milk and the kids down the road drink pasteurized milk I don't see a huge dark conspiracy where someone was sitting back thinking I'm going to do this to Outlaw this or whatever what I see is business interests come in like the bear aspirin company wanted to sell aspirin after they stopped producing chemical weapons and killing Jews they had to Outlaw or support put some money in some politicians Pockets to get rid of willow bark tincture which contains the same salicin which you make aspirin I don't know that the bear company did that I'm not disparaging them I'm just giving them as a hypothetical now they own Roundup they bought out Monsanto Roundup seems to disrupt the entire gut flora and make us more susceptible to many uh allergies um what would we call it uh hypersensitivities hyperspicitivity yes to like gluten intolerance it's everywhere now yeah yeah because you don't have the gut Flora because you just ate the poison that kills the same stuff on the plant you know they it's it's literally something that kills the same stuff that lives in your intestines that helps you digest food and supports your immune system I can't prove it some like some doctors say they can prove it some say they can't but I can tell you that um right now in Europe they have identified the leading cause of liver failure as acetaminophen really yes and they are trying to outlaw essentially Tylenol put it in its generic form I'm not disparaging the company yeah but they say hey drink all you want just don't take any Tylenol I don't know if that's wise or not but in America the petroleum industry is very much behind the acetaminophen industry acetaminophen is essentially a petroleum byproduct and they put more money into politicians um campaign funds and behind lobbyists than just about any other industry other than the pharmaceutical industry wow so do I see a dark conspiracy um probably not I mean no I don't think uh the companies that made the covid vaccine had anything in mind other than trying to help people not get covered do I think that there can be some very bad outcomes uh from Good Intentions the road to hell is paid from with good intentions and with certain industries uh indemnify themselves and say uh you can't sue us first of all pass the law saying you can't sue us and then we'll do our job you can run into some trouble yeah I do but uh no I'm not uh I don't uh demonize all industry I think most doctors are very good people trying to help people I think they're using tools that are um limited if you go back to King's Medical dispensatory of 1898 you will find that on 90 of all medicines used by doctors and pharmacists only a hundred years ago are plant-based now they all come out of a test tube and doctors are told that herbal medicine is you know new age I think doctors had a few more arrows in their quiver they might come out with better outcomes yeah so uh one thing that fascinates me about being a human or you know because I mean I'm a human being and I'm a creature of God and he designed us so that we eat food and we drink water and other beverages um and we're taking sunlight and air and all these sorts of things but when it comes to the food uh you know my main beverage is water I love drinking water but with food in Canada we have the food guide the Canadian food Garden it keeps changing like every 10 years or whatever and they just keep improving it improving it right like which proportion of meat vegetables and carbohydrates whatever and of course they don't want us eating sugar that's probably good advice but I'm just I just love eating sugar but um when it comes to what I'm asking you because you seem to be in touch with all this stuff what I'm asking you about is my intuition like for example when I discovered that I made the correlation like I eat garlic or onions and I get these cluster of symptoms so I just cut it out and the symptoms went away so it seemed to work okay and then I accidentally eat it I get the same cluster of symptoms so it's it's like a bottom-up sort of uh empirical science sort of thing right um but when it comes to like hey what do I what am I attracted to what do I want to eat or my wife asks like hey like what are we gonna have for dinner whatever because I'm the cooking the family I'm the one that makes all the meals um it's it's very intuitive it's like it's driven by my desire like a wholesome desire and some nasty desires like sugar sugar sugar sugar sugar uh salt salt salt so I have to moderate that those demons like they want me to eat sugar and salt but um and fat I love fat but I know what the healthy appetites are right so when it comes to intuition my question for you is how is it possible that like I'm maintaining my body weight pretty well I'm sleeping well I've never been sick my whole life long other than a few you know colds and flus whatever um I had strep throat the one time from stress um but I how is it that like I'm a complete [ __ ] I don't know anything about about food science or nutrition but somehow I'm I must be getting the balance kind of right just intuitively can you talk about how that's possible and what's going on like is my intuition that powerful or is it just the grocery stores are full of basically good stuff it doesn't matter what I eat or like what is it well okay oh how far do we back up 40 000 years old let's just start with my great-grandparents um they all live to be almost 100 years old and one to 101. and they basically ate everything they say you're not supposed to eat now okay butter yeah a butter pork fat they raise their own Hogs they had their own cattle they had but they had a huge variety of food uh a huge variety of food and sugar was not as big a part of the diet as it is now I mean if you look at historically we already eat a lot more sugar than our ancestors were just a couple of generations ago and it's because of all the processed food they're basically everything you buy that's like ready made from the grocery store has sugar in it if you're if you're cooking from scratch you're gonna have a lot less sugar and you're probably gonna be a lot more balanced blood sugar now when your blood sugar is in Balance you get weird cravings and you tend to like binge on carbs or binge on sugar or you know fat is actually very good for you I love the Western A price foundation I was the biggest biggest honor actually of so far was I was endorsed by Sally Fallon who wrote the nourishing Traditions cookbook okay she actually sent out an email saying you know you need to read this guy and I was like whoa you know Western a price is is phenomenal but uh fats natural fats animal fats especially very good for you protein is very good for you vegetables are very good for you fruits very Foods in their natural state are very good for you it's when we try to take things and put them um shelf stable make them last forever you know you got to put in a lot of chemicals to make them last and a lot of times that's not really good for us you know and the fats go rancid and but uh with the exception of things like uh sauerkraut that's pretty natural process so yeah sauerkraut is naturally fermented it's preserved by lactobacillus and other I mean our ancestors live so long it unless they got killed in the war or ran into an epidemic like the swine flu or something they live so long because they were eating naturally preserved foods and Fresh Foods did their tomatoes taste like tomatoes did it did they taste like water and cardboard like today like a Cherokee purple tomatoes I go I go black cribs I grow tomatoes that taste like tomatoes that's the best thing I mean a lot of times I would just literally sit take a salt and pepper shaker and put in my pocket and I'll go out and work in the garden I'll grab one I'll just but no um that wide variety of foods I think is probably more important than a lot of things okay because if I think about my great grandfather would be 101 or my other great grandfather who would have been 96. um they hunted they fished they trapped they had a big garden and they had livestock and if I go to the grocery store now okay so I've got a cookbook The encyclopedic cookbook from 1940. and it lists 101 varieties of apples you can expect to find at the grocery store in 1940. I can find four okay I can find four varieties of apples and ditto through the meats the fish the vegetables our ancestors were just simply eating a greater variety of foods yeah and I think the bigger variety of foods you eat the beer spectrum of nutrition you're getting yeah makes sense I think it's really that simple if we do what you know the government wants us to do and get down to like soy burgers and not dogs or whatever they're trying to Cricket forms on us we've reduced our entire diet down to like three things so yeah and soy is not the best thing for you I mean it's got it's full of estrogens it's a way it's processed it's full of a lot of industrial chemicals actually but imagine if we did get down to like four or five things in our diet which is not far from the average American diet now we got corn syrup and corn chips white bread I mean you know we're really down to just like a handful of things when the the market gets disruptive when the supply chain runs out our shells are empty oh yeah I got uh I want to show you my pajamas that I'm wearing but I have uh I bought some of these for uh the apocalyptic end times oh yes sprouting seeds excellent these are organic I think uh but I was gonna ask you about wheatgrass because I was in the habit when I was a hippie of chewing on wheatgrass that I grew myself from hard winter wheat I don't use wheatgrass but I do use hard winter wheat make some excellent bread make some excellent pizza to you can actually pop it like popcorn and it's it's pretty cool um you can do that with garbanzo beans okay chickpeas okay okay yeah you can pop them like popcorn they're awesome how do you do it stovetop like that griddle or like a snow pop and a pot just like it would popcorn you put a lid on it just shake it or yeah they they are like uh I don't know how many varieties of chickpeas there are but there's some that are specifically for popping okay and I think they were developed in like a in Iran like 3000 years ago oh yeah a little hard to find but they're so good and and then you can actually literally ground grind them up like the same way you would to make anything else with chickpeas you know hummus or you know flatbread and but they're lighter they're fluffier you can actually grind popcorn once it's popped into a very light uh like a Masa type dough to make a tortilla cool I love this stuff uh we started talking food you'll never get me off well you know I take I Love Popcorn so I I make a bunch of popcorn and once or twice I've done this it's pretty good but it's kind of labor intensive I make a whole big thing of popcorn and then I actually just cook it down to a mush and then I filter it through a sieve and I get this creamy very light and creamy uh corn mush yeah uh and uh you know there's butter in it and stuff like that and uh it's good but you kind of feel guilty because you got this huge quantity of popcorn and it just goes to a little pieces another trick I do is I eat my wife gets angry but I uh I put like a tomato sauce on my popcorn oh really yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so um yeah one of the best things is you do like a Hot Tomato just heat up hot tomato sauce like you would put on a pizza on your pasta I have garlic free that I make yeah and I I like to put cheese on the tomato sauce I love cheese and tomato sauce and then I put my popcorn on top of that and I just eat it like that it's a strange thing to do but it does taste good yeah you know I don't know I've never tried that I do um uh Curry uh I get a Thai curry mix okay the powdery put on yeah put the powder in the popcorn okay yeah yeah make it real hot you know do you eat uh nutritional yeast or do you think it's not good for you you know I I don't um I have no issues with gluten I mean I have no food allergies whatsoever that's good so I don't get into a lot of that kind of stuff the one thing that I do is similar is uh celery salt oh yeah celery salt is almost a natural MSG okay yeah a very chemically uh uh similar okay there was a guy uh back in the 1940s his name was George L herder George Leonard herder and he wrote the most wonderful cookbooks ever written in the United States he was they were called The Bull cook it's the old Camp Cooks of the the old Wyden camps and all that crazy guy eccentric I mean I love his stuff I mean he was either had the best sense of humor or he was lunatic he was also an orthodox Catholic believe it or not but he was great he was conservative he used to go hunting with John Wayne and Ernest Hemingway yeah he wrote one time in one of his books called The Bull cook that the secret for selling beer and wine was to take a little celery salt and put it on cheese and serve it along with it and it would enhance the flavor of the beer or wine wow I tried it it blew my mind and since then I have literally I make my own celery so I take celery leaves and just put in the salt and as the salt dries the leaves out it flavors it with the celery I can put it on anything and it just like UPS the flavor like MSG because it's very similar actually it's a chemically it's like one like molecule off of monosodium glutamate wow which so is nutritional yeast which is why that made me think of it wow if you want to find a really great flavor enhancer celery salt wow it's gonna try that I'm going to try that so it gets infused and and then I discard the dried leaves yeah I I keep them I love celery leaves I literally put celery leaves and almost everything I make okay I can eat them with a dry crumb crumple them up yeah cool very cool I'm a celery fanatic I love celery yeah yeah it's not like when it gets caught in my teeth but yeah you can actually take the strings out just take your vegetable peeler ah oh is that what you do yeah well if you want to get fancy I don't do it that's the old French way you just peel those little strings right off yeah I see okay run through your food meal and get everything very the worst the worst is those banana strings those little tart strings on your banana that's disgusting it's just like oh it's Nails on a chalkboard when they get stuck to your teeth oh I do yeah so I'm gonna have to leave you here but we'll have to we'll have to have you back because your uh wealth of knowledge and uh Charming Man and uh I appreciate it I appreciate meeting you and uh I mean there's so much more to discuss I've got a million questions for you so we'll definitely have to have you back okay hey I appreciate it anytime just uh let me know and I'll I'll schedule it or you schedule it just uh shoot me an email God bless you and please pray for me and mine okay we'll do we'll do take care bye-bye