MEDICAL MONDAY: Sustainable Herbal Medicine w/ Sam Coffman

You've just joined the Pepper Broadcast using network, where we promote self reliance and with the pathods. The viewers and opinions expressed are strictly those of the host or their guests. Visit us in the interactive chat room at Prepper Broadcasting dot com. Hello, this is Sam Coffin with the Human Path of the Humanpath dot com. In the show, I like to help you out with ideas, with concepts, and with information to help you live your life a little more prepared for disaster. Also to help you live your life a little more fully, and to help you be the best possible person even in the worst possible circumstances should those befall us. I am a former Green to Ray or Special Forces medic from the in the UIs Army. I have over twenty five years experienced both living and teaching survival and survival concepts to civilian and military. I also have over twenty years experience with plant medicine as an herbalist. Well Sunday night right now, and I'm back after a full weekend of teaching, so please excuse my voice. It might be a little bit I'm a little bit tired. I've been talking all weekend of course, teaching herbology. It's the first weekend of the erbal medic Level one that we started back up. We usually take July and August off to be able to number one because it's kind of hot. It's very hot in Texas, US for those the hottest months here and around San Antonio, and it gives us a chance to catch up on stuff. We were just so busy throughout the yarmy. We teach sometimes six days a week, six evenings a week, and it gives us a chance to try to catch up on a lot of the things running the school, writing articles, that type of stuff, and just you know, taking care of stuff around the home of course. You know, we have chickens and fish intilopia and rabbits and gardens, and you know, there's a lot of things that kind of go and neglect it a little bit during that period of time we're teaching so intensively, so July and August is sort of a chance to try to catch up on some of our own, you know stuff here at home as well as get stuff set up for the next year. Really, I mean, we kind of run sort of like a school in the year, you know, in the sense in America from the standpoint of September through uh, you know, May or June. Really it sent the way that most schools, most public schools run so back. And I've got a lot to talk about, some pretty exciting stuff here that I'd like to talk about right after a word from our sponsors, and then I'll be right back. Hey. Want to get the best deals ofwffall and preparedness items locally and online, check out the American Preppers Network Buyers Club Membership APN Gold. APN Gold members get exclusive benefits in putting access to discounts and special to the best preparedness stores on the web. Stay big by getting APN Gold today online at APN goold dot com or dial one two three four join APN. That's one, two three four join APN or APN Gold. So I thought about it for a little while as to what kinds of stuff I'd like to talk about tonight. And I want to do a couple of things. One is I want to talk about herbs. I always like to talk about herbs, of course, you know, that's my thing. I love to talk about medicine, field medicine, you know, or what I call ditch medicine in my background as a Special Forces medic and how I've how I've been able to integrate that with herbal and plant medicine, and how important that is for preparedness for anybody who's if you're in a prepper, you really need to be thinking about herbal medicine seriously, not just not just looking at a list of plants that that you can get on any website that are they're just you know, hey, for athletes foot here's a list of twenty herbs, you know, and out of that twenty herbs, you know, maybe two of them might actually work if you use them correctly. But really, you know, serious in depth evaluation and looking at herbs that actually work, medicines that work from plants, how they work, how you how you can how you can increase the effectiveness of them by learning certain things that you have to learn. It's not just like going and buying a pharmaceutical and popping it in your mouth and taking it. It's a totally different approach to medicine. And you have to have to be able to approach medicine that way. And so I teach them, and I teach that very quickly and very thoroughly, and I think where anybody can learn that very quickly, you know, the way I teach it, at least. So that's what I want to talk about herbs. What I want to do is talk about maybe I started thinking about what would be a good topic, and I wanted to talk about the top six herbs. Actually it was going to be the top five herbs, and then there was another one that I just had to put in there because it's such a prevalent one too. What what I did was I thought, what are what are five or six herbs medicinal plants that are very effective and cover a wide spectrum of uses that you could find anywhere in the United States and mostly the lower forty eight, but certainly many of them. In fact, I think all of them, all of them also in Alaska too, So what are the what are the h and certainly in Hawaii obviously, but what are all of what are what are five in this case, six herbs that you can use medicinally that I can tell everybody about that are just you know, they're effective and you could find them, and they're easy to identify, you know, they look they're kind of unique in the way that they look, So I want to talk about that, and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually play a I'm going to finish off with an old podcast of my friend. It's an interview I did on one of my older podcasts, an interview I did last spring with Michael Hawk, who is a friend of mine. We went through the Q course together, the qualification course together, back in my days in Special Forces, and he's probably my best friend, I would say, from my military days. He runs us. He's a celebrity. You know, he's done shows. He's the person who did the show A Man Woman Wild on Discovery. He's hosted a number of other shows, you know, they're kind of survival and tactical type shows on Discovery and a few other channels. And he has some new stuff coming out, and he has a book that is really a good survival book. In fact, in my opinion, it is the best survival book out there. And I've seen a lot of survival books, believe me. So I want to talk I want to kind of bring that up, and I'm I guess I'm kind of plugging his book, not really doing that on purpose or anything. It's just it's a good book. I wouldn't plug it if it wasn't a good book, and so I'm going to bring that up, and it's just a chance to talk to Michael and pull that out here because it's on my old one of my old podcasts, and I'm pulling it out to this new channel because I'm going to talk to Michael again, probably in September, when he's got time and he's back in country and I've got a little bit of time and hopefully I'll be back in country and we can have a chat and kind of take the conversation to the next level, which we'll be talking about some specific skills that I think everybody will really enjoy. So I'll play this one as kind of the part one, kind of the kind of the introduction, sort of a teaser to what that's going to be, and talk a little bit about survival books and survival shows as well. So that's kind of what's what I've got lined up for tonight's podcast. Let me back up for one second and let me just talk really briefly about how important medicinal herbs are in a post disaster or a into the world as we know it type scenario. This could be anything from a local uh you know, a city a hurricane Katrina type event or even a civil war and you know a city lockdown like maybe a Bosnia type type situation, all the way up to a national scale uh you know, power outage e m P or a nuclear war or terrorist attack, or economic collapse and lack of of any you know, trucking industry breakdown and no food and water, breakdown of all of our of our power, of our communication grid, internet, et cetera. You know, whatever that situation might be from small all though we up to a global into the world as we know its situation anywhere in between. It is absolutely essential that you understand that that plant medicine is a self sustainable way to be able to take care of one of the biggest issues that we're going to have any post disaster situation. Medicine is absolutely as much a priority in any post disaster as food and water are. Don't kid yourselves. Hospitals turn into killing zones. Everybody wants medicine. Everyone wants pharmaceuticals. Even if you're stocking up on pharmaceuticals right now, right and left, you know, all all the beans, bullets and band aids, and you've got all the band aids that you think you possibly need, you're still going to be in ration mode. Most likely, things are going to happen that are unexpected. You're going to probably end up with more people than you thought you were that you have to end up taking care of. There's going to be sicknesses going around. It's going to be waterborne diseases. It's going to be lots of infections, lots of that kind of stuff. You know, think about post disaster, like a hurricane. Everything's covered in seaweed as far as in seawater and in sewage everything probably some seaweed in there too, So you know you're in twisted metal and broken glass and building rebel. You know you fall, and it's not just you fall or your trip or you lose your balance at all. It's not just a matter of catching yourself on something. You're going that you're gonna cut yourself right and left. That kind of stuff. Certainly, water born diseases and things like colera, typhus h you know, mosquitoes and mosquito borne diseases with stagnant water, with flooding, or with with tornadoes, with hurricanes, natural disasters of that type. So health concerns are absolutely prevalent and and of extreme concern as much as food and water. And you're gonna you have no idea. Everything's unknown how much you're going to expect. Food and water you can kind of predict. You may not be a predicted number of your party. You know a number of people that you would be working with, or you'd have maybe you're only saving up for your family or maybe even just yourself, and that might number might grow, But most people can be expected to bring or to supply or to have some sort of food and water with them, you know, if you want to want to, you know, at any rate. My point is that food and water are fairly predictable. Pharmaceuticals are in Medicine is not predictable as to what you're actually going to face. So no matter what happens, you're going to be in rational mode. You think you've got enough pharmaceuticals, you think you've got enough medicine. So there's two things you're missing. Probably one of them is you really don't You're going to have to ration what you've got no matter what, all the time, even for people that you know that it was actually meant for you know, you have no idea what to expect. You're always in rational mode. You're always asking yourself and second guessing yourself to say, you know, it's do I really need to use this this absolutely life threatening to do it? You might do I want to use up this antibiotic? Right? And the second thing is you don't have the training. Probably you know, all the people that are listening to this, I am guessing that the number of medical doctors or pas or nurse practitioners or even RNs people that are trained enough in Western medicine to be able to really understand how to prescribe pharmaceuticals prescription pharmaceuticals is probably a pretty low percentage everybody else. You really don't have the training to do that. Now with with with botanical medicine, you know, with with plant medicine, first of all, it's a it is an unlimited resource if you have if you are able to grow and or identify the plants in your own ecosystem. It's not unlimited, nothing's unlimited, but it's very there's there's an abundance of it. Aside from it. If if the area is unlivable and everything is that he becomes a dust bowl through maybe massive climate change or there's radiation or you know, then you're going to have bigger problems than that anyway, honestly. But assuming that you live in an area where you actually have you know, plant growth, you know, and you can grow a garden, you can grow food, you can grow medicine, and it's already growing for you anyway. You know, there's the what's the the older I think it's the adage that I've heard that sixty percent of all of our pharmaceutical medicines come from forty plants. You know, whether that's even close to being true or not, you know, think about that. So we have we have thousands, hundreds of thousands of species of plants around us. I am always uncovering new stuff that you know, every month. I an't covering new things as a nervalest from from old texts that I'll find and things that I just try and experiment with and check out. And I come across new plants at least once or twice a month that I actually try out and I say, wow, this is okay, this is something to put you know, kind of put through our own testing. Now, all of that kind of information and all that kind of uh, you know, testing and knowing what that is is very scattered. You know, we don't really have access to it very much because herbalism is not what it should be in this country. You can't as an erblist. You can't go and become an intern, you can't become a you can't do a residency like you could at a medical school. You can't actually get to practice. You can't work at a hospital or a clinic. Doesn't You're not able to do that, which is really too bad. You know, the best that we can get to it as a student clinic that I have and the stuff that we do with herbal medics, which is a lot, but it's not as nearly as much as it should be. So unfortunately, you know, what you end up doing is you end up pouring through old texts and working with herbalists that have been working, you know, the people that are older than me and have end up doing it for longer than I have, where they are things that have been passed down to them, and finding all the ethno botanical stuff and finding old stuff from the eclectic herbalists in the last century. Things that you can find, and you start to work with that, and then you go to you know, you go to conferences and to gatherings where you can talk to other herbalists and you read what other people are doing and you put all that stuff together and then you use stuff and you come up with your own empirical data by doing that, and that's how you learn and that's how you grow. So I've been doing that for over twenty years and I have a lot of that information, you know, if you were compared to somebody who's been doing it at all. But in this big scope of things, I know, it's tiny smattering just to you know, an eye dropper full of information. That's an ocean out there. So what I'm going to tell you is I got a little bit of a sidetrack there. But what I wanted to tell you was just to say that emphasize and underscore the actual importance of herbal medicine. But I hear a lot from preppers that are kind of more what I would say what I call actually I call them Walmart preppers. The preppers that believe that what they're going to do is are going to hold up in a bunker with being full oft and bandaids, they're gonna shoot anybody who comes on their property if they don't like them or they think that their trespassinger trying to take their stuff. And they're gonna stay there and they're gonna just be just fine and dandy with whatever they've got, with their MRIs and with their canned foods and their latest and greatest gadgets. And they have pretty much no skills for the most part, other than maybe they do a little bit of shooting at a range on still targets to sit there in front of them, and that's about That's about their level and what they're going to do. They're gonna wait for everything to blow over and then they're going to come back out and we're gonna rebuild the Walmart's in the big box stores and create the same meth that got us into this in the first place. You know, there's no self sustainability, there's no actual wake up call going on. They're just they're Walmart preppers and they pretty much, you know, they shop for all their prepper stuff at Walmart two probably, so you know that that entire mentality is something that I don't even we don't even at our school. You know, those kinds of people usually don't last more than a couple hours. They're using horrible on a team. They have bad attitude. They have no skills, and that's fine, you come to their own school and learn skills. That's not a problem. But they usually have a lot of ego that they carry with and when they talk a big talk, but when it actually comes down to it, you know, they don't like they don't like it being put down on the line because then they show that they really don't have anything. So then so instead of being embarrassed by the fact that they've talked real big, they walk away. And believe me, at my school is not about ego at all. There is no ego at my school in that regard. There's a lot of survival schools that act that way. In our school, we're an open community and we welcome everybody with open arms, but we expect to write kind of add if you come into our school, you come expecting to learn, and you will learn. And you learn. You know from lecture and you learn from Hanson, you learn from scenario, and then you learn in the real world. And we do it and we got people that are doing it, and they're doing it really well, and it's it's constantly a growing community and we're all learning all the time, myself included. There's lots of stuff in my school now it's that it's way beyond my level. When it started, it was all me teaching everything, and now I've got people that are way better at what I'm doing because that's all they do. They focus on one area and they're really good at it. So we've got all this cross training going on between our four specialties. We've got great teamwork, so all of that goes together really well. And the Walmart survivalists, you know, the Walmart Preppers, don't really do real well in that environment. So I'm sorry if I insulted anybody there that's a Walmart Prepper, but you know, you probably you know whatever, if the shoe fits, wear it. So back to herbalism and where I started with this. That particular type of person, the Walmart Prepper, thinks that plant medicine is quackery. They think that it doesn't work, even though pharmaceutical medicine companies spend billions of dollars every year on doctorate PhDs who do research in the Amazonia and everywhere else to go to talk to indigenous people to find out what they use so that they can come back synthesize and or extract. Can one single constituent out of the thousands of constituents in a plant that they can pull out an active what they think is the one active constituent, because that way they can actually patent it for eighteen years and they can make money on it, because that medicine is profit in our country. It's a profit industry. That's a whole other can of worms. I'm not going to open right now, but my point is that there are a lot of people who succumb to the propaganda that plant medicine is quackery or it doesn't work. They succumb to that propaganda because it is part of our culture, as part of our media, is part of everything that's been told to us for the last hundred years. Since allopathy has taken lead in medicine in our country. Prior to that, allopathy was almost a disparaging It was a disparaging term. Allopathy consisted of things like mercury and arsenic blood letting, you know. And now it's profit, it's pharmaceutical profit. Now. If I get hitting it, if I'm in a car wreck or I get shot by you know, somebody shoots me. You know, of course I want our incredible emergency in trauma medicine we have in this country. There's no doubt about it. You know, if I you know, unless I have to, I'm not going to be using nerves. And if I have to, though I can, and I'm not saying this is going to be as effective, of course not. But the point is I've been spending over twenty years figuring out how to and assuming that I can't do anything else, even in trauma, that I only have plant medicine to work with. That's my worst case scenario. Now. In the meantime, I found that herbs actually work better than pharmaceuticals for many, many other things, especially chronic issues, and beyond herbs, just you know, lifestyle and nutrition issues. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that people come to me for as clients that are there there's no herb in the world that's going to take care of them anymore than there's actually a pharmaceutical that is you know, all that's going to do is mass symptoms. There's a lot that needs to happen there. You know, if you're two hundred and fifty pounds overweight, and you've been smoking for four years I'm sorry, forty years, and you've got diabetes and you want to come to me and you tell me you've got high blood pressures. Are an herb for that? Well, no, yeah, there is, but there's a lot you're going to have to do first anyway. So let's just forget about the herbs and let's take make some lifestyle changes here. So my point is that you know people who are down on anybody listening to this who may be down on herbs and think that it's just you know, second rate medicine. Let me tell you something works, and it works very well. And uh that's why I think it is very important. Uh if you that if you're interested in prepping it all, that you that you take the time to learn this skill. You take the time to teach yourself or to learn from somebody like myself. Uh. You know, I've got an online course, I've got I've got a field manual, I've got a you know, herbal first aid kids. I've got on obviously courses here on site that are geared towards post disaster medicine with plant medicine you know, take the time to learn this stuff, and then it's a self sustainable medicine for you and you don't have to ration it and you don't have to feel like you don't have to be dependent on a little bag of tricks. You know that that's got you know, pharmaceuticals in it. You you're able to pull that from the landscape. That's an advantage of a huge advantage over doctors. I teach doctors all the time. I teach some survival, I teach some post disaster survival and post disaster medicine. Not just at my school. I do this as other schools too. And and uh, doctor are wonderful at what they do. And I want to teach surgeons that are that are absolutely they are their geniuses in the o R. But they couldn't start a fire with two with them with a book of matches and the can of gas. You know, they don't know how the basic survival skills, let alone plant medicine if they didn't have their their pharmaceuticals with them, you know, not and even pharmacuts. You know, even surgeons, you know, you gotta have you have to have a sterile environment to do surgery. You know if you think that, you know a lot of people get wrapped up in things like suturing. You know how important souturing is and closing up wounds. If you are actually thinking that you're gonna suture a wound in a post disaster field medicine, and I'm talking about wounds that are the kind of wounds that a layman could even suture in the first place, you are dead wrong. You have no idea what you're even doing. And you shouldn't even be near a needle and suture. You shouldn't even be near it. So that's just you know, I mean, you have to keep a wound open in an environment like that. It's just unclean, it's stupid. You're you're gonna you're gonna end up was infection, ended up with gangree and the anaerobic bacteria. You're gonna end up with an amputation or death. So that you're gonna end up with. So I can treat that. I can treat that with herbs, I can treat that with charcoal, I can treat that with a lot of different things can work with that, you know, with wounds and wound infections and saluli. This even you know, I think things that are very serious infections. But the first thing to think about is just you know, what is actually practical and how does field medicine really work, how does hygiene? You know, what what is that all about? So a lot of people get wrapped up in this concept that western medicine and allopathic medicine is the only way to go, you know that it's the only thing you can this the only thing that's going to work in a post disaster environment. I'll give you another example of this. You know, during during after Haiti, you know, a lot of surgeons went down to Haiti, you know, teams of medical teams, Western teams that had surgeons and went down to Haiti and they were they were putting on external fixation on a lot of broken bones. You know, with no concept of what they were really doing. These are surgeons, good surgeons, but they just didn't have an actual concept of what post disaster medicine needed to be. So external fixation on these bones. Now there's no post operative care after they leave, you know, there's no there's no hygiene or hygiene terrribles. So we've got people with infections, you got people with all you know, osteomilitis now and long term problems because there's no follow up whatsoever. You know, this is a totally different approach. It's it's the it's the it's the ditch medicine approach. It's what I was trained for in the military, and it was trained very well. You know, the training. The Green Beera Medics School, the Special Orson medic School is in my opinion, the best field medicine school anywhere in the world. So taking that and then saying to yourself, well, this is great for what do we do when we don't have any pharmaceutical medicine. That's what happened to me. That's how I got in that plant medicine. And now it's spent all this time looking at just plant medicine and how to work with that. So that's the first thing. I'm just you know, I gave I gave everybody kind of the hard sell on here on why you need plant medicine, and I hope that sticks for people. So not let me actually talk about some herbs and and again this isn't just you know, don't think that you're going to take these herbs and going to and you'll be good to go take the take the herbs, throw them into your backpack, and you're good to go. It's it's not just about the herbs. This isn't a matter of taking a herb and applying it one for one with a trade with a pharmaceutical that you would give in the same instance. There's a lot you have to learn about how you prepare a herb and how you administer a herb. It's not rockets science, it's not it's not difficult to learn, but there's just things you got to learn. You've got to learn how to get the herb to the tissue that's actually infected, and it's not necessarily through the gut to do that unless the gut's what's infected. So you have to learn or or not just infected but affected, you know, some sort of a problem with that tissue and tissue state and how to deal with tissue state, and how to how to create a homeostasis in the actual flora of tissue, whether it's mucosal tissue you know, on the inside of your body, or whether it's even you know, if it's epidermis on the outside of the body, or if it's you know, anything in between. So let me actually get to the herbs here because I'm running out of time and I want to I want to talk about these six herves. And so what I did was, I thought, I kind of went through a bunch of herbs that are that are available anywhere in the United States and that are easy to identify. And I could have gone with a list longer than this, but I figured, you know, five would probably be about enough as much as i'd have time for. And then when I got five with that, you know, there was a sixth one I really want to put in here because it's really important. So it's actually the top six herbs that I would choose across the United States as good as not just good, but great post disaster herbs to know how to identify and to know how to use. And I'll tell you a little bit about each one, a little bit about the identification of each one, and a little bit about the use of each one. Again, I'm kind of shorten of time, but i'll but I'll do what I can. So the first one, the first herb on our list is plantain, and I'll give you the I'll give you the common name of it, which is plantain, and I'll tell you. This isn't the plantain that's like a banana, okay, it's it's a plantago species, a plun tago genus, and it's all the plantago species. There's probably two hundred or more plantago species around the world, and I couldn't tell you how many exactly in the United States, but there's a lot so plantain. The two that most are most well known are the are the what we would call giant plantain and the lands leaf plantain. There are many others that you know down here. We have what's called red seed plantain. I won't bother giving you all the different species and mean I could slant Silata and plantago mages are the two that are the two that I just talk about, but there are many many others, and they're all equivalently, not exactly equivalently, but for the most part, they're all interchangeable. So the way we identify the plantain is very easy to identify. It grows in a what we would call a rosette on the ground and then it usually sends up a stalk and that seeds come off the stalk, and it can be it can be small. You know, the ones that grow here. The red seed plantain is pretty small. That is the rosette. And when I say rosette, that's a that's a cluster of leaves that grow in the circle and then the central stalk comes out from that. So in that rosette, if you look at the leaves, it's it's usually fairly long or oblong, or it might be land shaped, you know, like big thick, kind of spear shaped, like a big leaf of grass even And if you look at it and turn it over and look at the back and look at the veins, you'll see that they have that the that the veins are parallel, there'll be one in the center. It'll always be an odd number because you'll have one in the center running at the center of the leaf, and then you'll have one or two or three or even four on either side of that that run parallel. So it might have three veins, or might have five veins, or might have seven veins, depending on how big the leaf is. So they can range from being a pretty small kind of oval to oblong to even land shaped leaf, and then all the way to being pretty big. I was just over in Europe and Germany, and then the plantain over there was gigantic. You know, it's very very big, huge leaves like as like you know, almost a small shrubub. So that is plantain. Now what what it looks like. So if you should identify, like all of these are going to be and it is used for many, many different things. Plantain is a is one of those I always talk about. Herbs are on a spectrum between power food and poison medicinal plants. So on the power food side, you know, you might have something like alfalfa or asparagus, you know, things that are that are a little bit medicinal but they're really more food. Although up to poison, where you have something like datura or foxglove that actually is medicine but in very very small amounts what we call dropwise dosage as inerbos. Plantain is one of those rare and well let me say this before I get back to plantain, is that most herbs that are very effective, that are very strong, that you would use for things like acute illness, are usually up nearer the top of that that spectrum, in other words, closer to the poison side, maybe halfway up the spectrum all you know, and up to maybe three quarters of the way up the spectrum. Things that aren't going to poison you by any means in a larger dose, but that you wouldn't take necessarily for a long point a long period of time. They might build up liver toxicities and other types of things you know, might have alkaloids in them that are they're fairly they can be toxic over long term, but they're also very medicinal. Well. Plantain is an exception to that in the sense that is a very potent herb, but it is also actually an edible. It's really a power food. You can eat it, but it is extremely vanessile as well. Plantain has some very interesting features to it. It is an astringent in the sense that it can even stop or slow down bleeding, but it's also very mucilogenous what we call it demulson, so it's very soothing to the mucous membranes. This is important. This isn't just something like, oh, I've got a lot of the sore throat, let me take something that you know is going to help that sore throat. This is important to be able to help the tissue that is damaged. So, for instance, if you have strep throat, I think everybody would agree strep throat would be a very serious illness in the field. It could be potentially, well, you can you can fix strap throats. You can you can give your body herbs that will allow your body to heal strap throat very simply if you work with the tissue itself. So we're not talking about just taking an antibiotic internally orally that go through our god comes out and you know, eventually filtered through a liver, gets back to our bloodstream. We're talking about taking an herb and putting it as much as we can into and working with the tissue. That's actually so in the case of plantain and the mucosa around a sore throat like a strep throat, we are going to rejuvenate, We're going to help and we're going to help balance the natural flora and the lymph and all the stuff and mucosal lymph, all the stuff that's around that that area of illness, and we're going to work with interface between the herb and that actual tissue. That's damage. That's a big thing. That's how you that's how you work with herbs, and that's that's not the only way to work with us. But that's a big cornerstone of how you can actually be successful working with herbs and not just think you've got a list in some book that you get it says, wow, you know for sore throat, here's a list of twenty years. Just start taking these herbs and swallowing them. And but you know that isn't going to do any good at all. You have to know how to work with them too. And again it's simple, but you've got to You've got to learn some simple things. So plantain, that's how we would work with that as a muciologynous or amulson. So that's what an emulson does to some degree is it helps restore the balance to mucosal tissue. Is what we call a mucosal vulnerary. A vulnerary is an herb that sews and protects and helps an area become more balanced and have more of a homostasis in terms of what the natural for four of is that that areas so that it can restore itself back to its natural tissue state. Now, plantain is also very interesting that it contains some interesting constituents that do some interesting things. One of those is called bikolin and it is a constituent that breaks down the ability of biofilms ability. So this is going to be I'm gonna have to keep this real brief. But basically, when we have bacterial infections in our body, bacteria tend to form biofilms. In other words, they group together as a species, and not just one species, but several species. An example of a biofilm would be the plaque on your teeth. Plaque is normal on your teeth, and at first it's caused by Gram positive bacteria that form biofilms, which they usually do, and eventually if you don't clean that plaque off, it gets inundated. Also with a lot of other type of bacteria, some Gram negative and other types of bacteria that excrete very acidic, you know, have a very cidic excretion that will is low enough on the pH scale to be able to actually erode the enamel or on your teeth. So plaque is an example of a biofilm. Well, biofilms exists in our body all the time, and especially when we're sick, and especially with something like a strip rube infection, there are biofilms and they but biofilms behave more. They behave differently than just a bacteria by itself, and they are very difficult to penetrate. So a lot of times biofilms are a problem for Western pharmaceuticals to be able to get through to be able to do what they. Need to do. Biklin is an erb is a is a constituent that I'm not going to get into the physiology of it or would be here all day just on one thing, but it is a constituent that helps break down biofilms. So what that means is it's a good adge of a nerve or it's a good helper herb synergist as such with other herbs that are also more antibacterial. It also has another constituent called alcobin that is that is very good liver protector, so it protects the habo sites that protects It's something that a lot of people who are listening to this and know a little bit about herbs might know about milk fitle and how milk thistle helps their herb. You know, milkhistle God has claim to fame for people who would give mushroom poisoning and they would take milk thistle and they would get they would recover from milk from mushroom poisoning very quickly. So it's something that you would give to people to help your liver be able to metabolize and or deal with toxins like that like a poison. Well, alcabin doesn't too, so plantain is actually a liver protection as well. It is a very good vulnerary and a drawing and what I call a drawing herb in other words, it pulls for things like infections, toxic infections, especially in other words, things where there's a toxic a toxin involved, like like the venom from a spider by like a b brown or cruse bite that's become ulcerated, like even snake bites, being able to try to pull the poison out. Now a lot of people think, oh, that's just quacker. You can't pull poison ot Well, you absolutely can. There are different ways of pulling poisons, toxins, and bacteria out of the body. I use charcoal a lot first for certain things that are on the skin, for instance, wound infection, staff infections not works very well. But there are a lot of herbs that do that as well, and plantain is one of those very good anti toxin clears. Clear toxic heat is the way that the Chinese Eastern medicine would talk about it on an Eastern light as an energetic medicine, and clear's toxic heat. We can kind of understand that toxic heat is related to poison generally of some type. So many things that we can use plantain for. It's also it's a it's a respiratory spectrant, a relaxing inspectrant, which means that if you've got a dry, non productive cough, it's it's a greater for that. There's more, you're you know, sooth mucous membrane in general, you could use it as part of a urinary tract infection herb to help soothe the the mucus or the the the urethra ucosal layer lining of our urinary tract, either lower or even upper. More than that, but that's not like I said, I'm gonna try not just spend the entire hour on one. Or let's move on dandelion. It's another one dandy line. Everybody knows, Daniel, I don't need to describe to you how dandelion looks. If you're listening to this, I'm sure you know what dandelion looks like. Most people try to get it out of their yards. They spray herbicides on it and all kinds of stuff. Dandelion extremely useful medicinal the belief of it is a good bidder and the good digestive bitter, which is good for things like this basic indigestion. You're having problems digesting food, You're having you know, heartburn. Heartburn comes from a number of different things. I realized that gas reflex can come from a number of different things that might be a chronic problem. You might have gerd or you know, gas for esophageal reflex disease caused by any number of things. So it's not just a cure all for any kind of re acid reflux, but in general general indigestion and what we would call dyspepsia. It's good for that. The leaf is as a bitter, and all bitters are. All bitters help stimulate digestive enzymes, both in the pancreas as well as some from the gallbladder. But more importantly really for dandeline is a root. The root is what has a more medicinal quality to it. Dandelion root works very well as a couple of different things. It's a decent diuretic. It's useful with something like a urinary attract infection because when you have a urinary attract infection, we want to dilute the We want to have a diuretic, at least a mild diuretic, because the old phrase is the solution to pollution is solution. Well, that's what we're doing. We're flushing that out. There's a lot of more we can do for a UTI than that, but that's one factor of a UTI or kidney stone. Same thing with a kidney stone. We want a couple of different things to happen. We want a diuretic. It helps flush that out, but we also want something that helps relax the urt or relax the ury throat so that that stone can make it out, so a smooth muscle relaxing. Now, dandeline is not a smooth muscle relax and it's a diuretic. It's also but it's also good. It's a good kidney and liver what we would call a tonic er. It's a little bit of a blood cleanser in that it helps stimulate liver activity and gall bladder activity. Which helps our So when we eat food, most of that most of those nutrients go into come into the liver and are filtered first through the portal vein into the liver. We have certain cells, we have specific cells that do that. They're called cup for cells or if they're basically phagocytes, that they eat and diet and get rid of toxins, and the liver takes what's what comes in there and either gets rid of it in one way or another, tries to metabolize it, tries to store it if it's you know, and takes care of a lot of other things. Right. It regulates our blood sugar, many things that our liver does well. If the liver is overstressed because we were eating bad food or eating toxic food, or you know, even poisoning some type, we need to be able to help deliver do its job better. When we do that, we take the stress off of a number of other organ systems and concepts that exist in our body. For instance, again, blood sugar we take we take the stress off of stuff that has to happen maybe at a cellular level, by helping the liver do its job. So dandelion is one of those herbs. Danduliin root is one of those herbs that does that pretty well. It helps people as in that sense. I know people who have had really bad problems with sugar cravings and addiction to sugar and sweets have been able to get off of that very easily by taking by drinking dandelion root tea, you know, whenever they have a sugar craving. So it's one of those herbs that's just kind of overlooked in terms of its general efficiency to kind of help nourish what we call a trophil restorative herb, help nourish, deliver, help nourish the kidneys, and help the urinary tract a few other things as well, but that those are the main things with dandeliin Okay. The next one I want to talk about is is the artemesias, the wormwood and the mugwort and all the different artemsias. There's a whole bunch of them, and it's a very powerful herb. It's a very good anti infective herb. It's an anti parasitic herb for both protozoan as well as helminthic parasites. It goes well in the formula for all those, not just necessarily by itself, but it works very well for those. Is a lot of things that's good for now. Identification of this is a little different because there's so many of them. There's a lot of different artemsias, and they're all generally fairly interchangeable. They all could be identified mostly from the smell. It's that they've got that sage smell that used in things like smudsticks and say in we call it sage like Mountain States desert sage. It's got a bunch of common names Artemisia, and there are several of them, but they all kind of have a similar sagey smell to them. A lot of times they're kind of gray leaves, that grayish bluish gray type leaves. A lot of times they have fine hairs and almost look dusty. There are, like I said, many different species of Artemesia. The most well known ones are sweet annie Artemsia annual. There is the one down here that we use, which is the vulgaris, the Artimia volgaris, which is mugwort, and there is Artemesia a cynthia. It's kind of the standard wormwood that people know of but if you were to put all those together, all of the different species that exist in the United States together, you would find them in every state in the United States. So it's very it's very you know, so it's definitely ubiquitous. And I'm sorry and give you a better definition than that, but this is one of those where you go more by smell sometimes and you go by how it looks necessarily, although we could talk about that more, but without getting into more botany on how it looks, I'm just going to say that much now. The Artemisias are, like I said before, they're good anti infectives. They can go in even an antibacterial formula. They work very well on the gut. They're a bitter. They're actually kind of an intense bidder. So they were the same thing I said about dandeliine of being a bitter and the stuff I put with that, but they're a little more intense than that. They work more strongly for that, and they are an antibacterial bidder. There are times where you need an antibacterial bitter. You need something to work on stuff in the gut and you need to actually you know, you need to be able to maybe kill bacteria that or in the gut, and that includes friendly bacteria it'll it'll kill off as well, so it's an antibacterial, anti parasitic. It is also good externally for pain in the joints, whether that's soft tissue injury, dislocated shoulder, or something of that sort that's trying to recover from soft tissue injury and tearing ligaments and connective tissue. So for the pain for that as well as to help swelling as well as to help healing, it'll help, it'll it'll speed up tissue healing as well. You know, it's a little bit of a tissue proliferative. It'll help inflammation, which also helps, and it also helped a vascularization if you put it on externally, So in other words, a little bit of a it's a little bit of a warming herb in that regard. Then when we say warming irves, that's an energetic concept, but it relates to vascularization, so increasing what we would call peripheral vasodilation. We also call those things counter irritants. So they increase the blood flow, the micro blood flow to very small vessels capillari and venuls arterials that increase the blood flow to an area. And I've always said, if you can just keep an area clean and injury clean, you can keep inflammation somewhat down after initial inflammation. You want inflammation at first, but after that, if you can reduce inflammation a little bit, and if you can keep keep the area clean, assuming that it's an open wound for instance, and you can increase vascularization in the area, you're good. That's what you need. If you got that, you got everything is your body's going to heal if you can do that. So this is one of those herbs it helps you do that. Okay, moving on. Sorry if I kind of seem like I'm jumping through these pretty fast. There's a lot we could say about it anyone, but again we don't have time for all of that. In the short show like this, I'm going through six of them. So the next one would be yarrow. It picks yarrow because I feel like that is also another herb that goes in every state in the United States. Most people know what this looks like, but if you don't, the scientific name for is Achillea millifolium, and the millifolium means thousand leaves. And so if you look at a yarrow planet. Look at the leaves. It looks like a very fine fern kind of you know, like like the way that you would think if a fern leaf looks, but very fine, very tiny fine leaves coming out. It's got a very big head of flowers on it that you can see. Usually, you know, generally white. But you can buy yarrow. You know, you can buy hybrids of yarrow that are colored, you know, yellow and different colors, but generally it's white and the wild, and that's the one you want. You want your wild plants. You don't want domesticated varieties. If you can at all help it, the wild plants. Wild varieties are much much more medicinal. Yarrow is one of those that's discussed so many uses. We could talk for hours on that alone too, But in general, it's most known as a what we would call a hemostatic or something that stops bleeding. In fact, there's you know, there are stories and I don't know if this is true, but but the stories that I've read that Native Americans would usually pick there if they could, they'd pick their battle spots based upon their proximity to yarrow, so that they, you know, would have something to be able to work with their wounds with afterwards. So it's anti inflammatory on wounds, and that's the open wounds as well as closed. It is a very good at stopping bleeding as I mentioned before, and it is a good healer. It has definitely has antimicrobial properties to it internally. It is very good as an anti viral. That's kind of a misnomer that term, but basically helps your body cope with virus. It's very good in cold and flu herbs. It's a diaphoretic, which means it helps you sweat. It helps open up your eliminative channels and your skin, which is very important. All your elimited channels are important. We don't this is something that gets ignored and orthodox in medicine, but it's very important to help your body heal faster, especially when you're sick with something like the flu. So having a diaphoretic really helps you. You know, we have the term kind of the same sweated out, you know, or you're going to sweat out the fever, that type of thing. And it's true. It's an old it's an old saying and it's true, but you know, it gets kind of put off as folk medicine and quackery, you know, but it's not at all. It's part of how you take care of your body and how you help your body heal faster, and you need that, especially in a post disaster situation. So yaar is good at that. It's good for the urinary tract, urinary tract infections. It works well in there's a little bit of a diuretic as well. It is good for Traditionally, in fact, some of its original uses, the trace of back far enough was used in helping with what we would call dysmenterrea or problems with menstruation, painful menstruation or spody and irregular cycledminstruation. Is also useful for what I would say, breaking up blood cloths underneath the skin, the same way that arnica is good at that too, what we would call bruises or even heemotomas. It's very good at helping that. So if you have a really bad soft tissue injury with bruising and inflammation, it goes well on the skin for that as well. With with other herbs as you know, like artemesia we just talked about, and yarrow. Together we make a very good poultice for something like a really bad strainer. I just give the example of a dislocated shoulder. You dislocate your shoulder, which is not an uncommon injury in the field, and you know, you reduce the in dislocation and the shoulders back in place. But there's a lot of soft to institu injury around that, you know, your rotator cuff, and so they would that would help a lot with that. The next one I'm going to say is what I call the Barberis genus, and so this is part of the Most of these are part of the berber Dca family, which is named after a constituent called Berberine. This includes plants like oregon grape root or organ grape. We use the root of it normally, you don't have to. You can use the stock for that too. We use the leaf for some things too. Actually, but orgon grape algarita down here in this area Barbary with Texas Barbara's Japanese barbary. If you counted all of the Barbaros genus or all the Barbaras species together, you would find them in every state in the United States as well. So that's why I picked this one. So these These are plants that contain another constituent that's very interesting called berberine, and it's again it's one constituent out of thousands in this plant. There are other constituents in there that are also very important. I talked about bikolin with the plantain. Well, berbering containing plants also have one of their own. It's called MHC or a methoxy hydenylcarbon's what that stands for, which is also in its own way, prevents pathogenic bacteria from defending themselves. So it's another good adjuvant or synergistic herb to go with herbs that are antibacterial, and it is bacterial antibacterial itself. I use Algorita here. We use this as in herbal medics teams when we go to Nicaragua or places where there's going to be bad water, it's the herb of choice. So these berbering containing nerves are a berb of choice. When you get bad water, you start to get dysentery, travelers, diarrhea, protozoone infections like Giardia, cryptosporidium. This is something you would definitely see post disaster in your water supplies, anything anything in the gut really is what you use most of the berbering containing herbs for. And that's from one side of the gut to the other, from their mouth all the way down to the anus. There is really good and that includes the gums, the oral mucosa. If you can get it even I gave you example of strep throat. If you can get it to the back of the throat, that's good. So here's a deal though with a berber and containing herbs if they don't really travel well into the bloodstream from the gut. So to use it for something and expect it by eating it or by taking it in however you're going to prepare it and take it. That it's going to get to the rest of your body through your bloodstream is false assumption. It's not going to happen that way. So you want you have to get it to the mucosa or it has to be in the gut. Now. It also some does actually make it in this bloodstream a very small amount, and you could get to the urine and comes out and is excreted through the urinary tract. So it works okay to put it in as part of a formula with other herbs for something like a uti, but not just by itself, so the berber and containing herbs are very important for for gut help. The last one, then that I'm going to talk about is a cactus actually is prickly pear cactus, which is the Opuntia species, and there are many of those species out in the Apuncia genus as well, and they're all again, all states in the United States have a puncia, even the far North ones have it. It is a wonderful herb for so many reasons. Let me just talk through a couple of them. One is the petals on the flowers, the flower petals on the tunas what we call the tunas or the fruits of this tack cactus. If you aren't familiar with prickly pear, then the identification of it is. And I just realized that I didn't talked about the gentification of bear bears. I'll go back to that one second. The identification of the prickly pear is that you know these flat cactus pads usually and that are offset from each other by about ninety degrees as they grow on top of each other. I think everybody probably who's listened to this no what prickly pair is, I'm pretty sure. So you obviously have to strip the needles off to be able to get to the inside of it. But the petals, the flower petals that grow on what we call the tunas or the fruits that come out once a year, those are those flower petals are incredibly good mucoastal vulneraries. Remember I talked about plantains and nucastal vulnerary, something that soothes, protects, and helps restore a homeostasis to the nucastal tissues. Tissues, well, the flower petals of the Apunci species are possibly arguably one of the best new coastal vulneraries in the United States of any earth. That's one thing they're really good at it. And that again, that could be anything from the oral mucosa to the urinary tract to even respiratorym or mucosa certainly the upper respiratory tract to the gut obviously, So it's good for all of those areas of the body. Whether you take it, and that's whether you take it and get it directly and put it just on the tissue itself, on the mucosa itself, or whether you ingest it. However, you take it. The other part of this that I want to talk about, and there's more than just two things, but I'm just going to touch on the top two is the actual inside of the pad itself. And to get this, you need to filate the pad. You cut it down the center. You need to scrape off the needles, and the best way to do that is just to put it between two flat rocks and scrape it off. Scrape it off. If you're interested in this, I've got a video, by the way, on my YouTube site. It's the YouTube Slash the Human Path, and I've got a video on how to boil water in a prick repair cactus pad, and in that I show how you scrape off the needles as well. So it very the simplest way is the best. You don't have to do anything complicated. Don't need to burn them off, you don't need to do anything like that. You just scrape it off with two flat rocks. To do that, you can filate the pad in half and you can scrape out that gun that's in the center. Now it's edible. These pads are edible. They're they're you know what we would call no polys or no politos is a classic meal in Mexico where and it's and it's actually used for people who have diabetes. And the reason is very high in inulin, and it's very good at doing a couple of different things. Versus, it's an excellent soluble fiber, so it wash just kind of sponges out the gut and cleans it. Secondly, the inulin helps lower the blood sugar spikes when you eat food with it, so it's good because of the bulk of it itself. It keeps the your seeming index of food that you eat instead of jetting your your blood sugar up really high, it keeps a much more level and consistent over time as you digest that food. And third it also is a good It is good at keeping the free fatty acid counts down, which supposedly can't lead to higher insulin levels as well. So in general, it is used in folk medicine, and folk medicine is good by the way way, folks, it doesn't mean it's just because it's folk medicine, it doesn't work. It usually is. Folk medicine works better than most any other kind of medicine, and so you find this as folk medicine in Mexico because it works for people who have diabetes, so it's you know, it's part of their diet. It's not that I'm not saying that if you have type one diabetes that you can just eat this pad and you don't have to You're not going to need insulin. I'm not saying that at all, but certainly for type two and for people even with type one that need to try to keep their glycemic index level. I mean, that's what it's all about. They're trying to keep they are always constantly monitoring that. It helps a lot, so it's good for that. But what I wanted to get to was when you scrape that inside of that pad out that mucilagenous gunk, that good is in there. It's good for a lot of things, but one that's best that it is very good for is that it's good as an aloe. In fact, in my opinion, is better than alovira for anything on your skin that's burns, that's you know, stuff that you know, chafing, that's the things that can become little problems that can become big problems. Think about in a bug out situation, in a post disaster and you have to bug out, and now you've got you've got been walking for ten miles, let's say, with your bug out bag, and just because you're not really wearing the right clothes to do that, you end up with really bad chafing on your thighs. And you laugh and say, oh, yeah, a big deal. And so maybe that is only a big deal. Now let's add to that the fact that you're going to be out there for another two weeks and the chafing gets worse every day and doesn't have a chance to recover. And you're dirty. You know again, this is post disaster. Your pants are dirty, maybe you fall into some mud, desist sewage in it, and now all of a sudden, that chafing. Because that skin is worn away, there's no homeostasis of your own internal flora or your own external flora on your on your epidermis there. Guess what, it's very susceptible to infection. So now you've end up with let's say cellulitis or or some kind of a staff or bacterial infection on your skin itself. That's a showstopper. You're not going to get up, you're not gonna be walking. So things like something as simple as a opuncia or a prickly pair cactus pad, and something that I think is better than aloe in my own experience in using it for years and years and years, I would put it. I would rate it it higher than aloe for things like that. That's good to know. Now, the thing that's even better about it than aloe is that you can take all that gunk and you can dry it, dry it in a food dehydrator, and you can powder it up, and you can reconstitute it without with water. You can't do that with alow. You can, but it doesn't work very well. I've done that many times, and it's very difficult to do that and get it to where it doesn't just you know, it tends to go bad, it starts to smell. It just is not good. And part of the problem with doing alloy is you have to make sure you don't get that the juice that's kind of between the leaf and the gel. You've got to drain that juice first. But even doing that right, and even if you have purely pure aloe it doesn't have the discoloration in it all, and you dry it, it's very difficult to get it to last very long but prickly pair lasts. You can put that in a mason jar and keep it in the shelf dried like that and powdered or put it in your first aid kit. Doesn't weigh anything hardly, right, It's just some powder. And then you can reconstitute that with just water. And you've got dried alo that you that you carry around with you so you don't have to carry around the liquid because the liquid doesn't keep as well. Now I mentioned I kind of went back and so I was going to talk about barbars. You can tell I do these podcasts just all once. I don't really spend a lot of time editing. And I'm sorry if that seems maybe a little unprofessional or not like it's you know, a slick or as smooth as some people. But that's kind of how I do it. I just, you know, I talk. I'm sitting in here right now in a room with a chicken in a clothes basket right in front of me. That's cooling off because it's been so hot down here. In the chicken we have about I don't know, thirteen chickens or something like that. My wife takes care of all the chickens and ducks, and they get really hot and overheated. So we had to bring this one in because she was lying on her side she was so hot overheated. So now she's sitting on a little bag of ice cubes in an air conditioning room and gave her some water and she'd recovered within about ten minutes. She's doing fine now. Of course she's being pretty quiet, so you at least I'm not hearing any clucking in the background. So I'm just telling you this. This is how I do my podcast. I just sit down and I usually talk. And so the last thing I was going to tell you about with these herbs is the barbarus. I forgot to tell you how to identify that, and it's not really easy. Each species looks a little different. But the one thing I wanted to tell you is that the leaves have you know, they have spiky It has a spiky edge to it that looks a little bit like what you think holly would look like. It's like holly in different different shapes, but generally the leaves come out to little spikes, and those lot of spikes are usually an odd number because there's a pointy spike at the very tip of the leaf, so that's one, and then you'll have one on either side evenly, usually symmetrically down the rest of the leaf. So with something like ord and grape, they're kind of usually a fat or leaf and they've got that spike. With something like algarita, it's a skinny leaf and it's got that and they're very blueish colored. But that was one thing I wanted to tell you. That's the identification. The other thing about the identification is that the parts of these plants that are usable, that are medicine have berbering in them, and burbering is very yellow. So when you cut a root open of one of these plants, or you cut even the stalk open down near the ground, you're going to see that the stock is very yellow and the root is very yellow. And that yellow is like a die. It'll come off on your hands. It's water soluble and it'll wash off very easy, but it's very very bright yellow. So that's the identification. Those are the six herbs. And I'm going to go now and plug in the little teaser here with Michael Hawk to kind of finish off this podcast. Hope you enjoyed listen to it. I'm gonna do that, and I'm going to say goodbye now and we're going to finish off with that, and then i'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next week, and I hope you enjoyed this. Thanks for listening. Bye. Hello. This is Sam Coffin with the Human Path at the humanpath dot com and in today's podcast, I have a special guest. I'm very pleased to announce this is an old friend of mine. I first met him when we went through the Special Forces eighteen Delta or Metic Qualification course together. He was already tabbed at the time, but he was coming through the same time as me and became good friends. And it's been a long time since those days. But I'm really happy to be able to welcome Michael Hawk to the podcast. Michael, welcome and thanks for joining us. Oh same, Thank you very much man, it's so good to be chatting with you again. It's funny you mentioned the Q course when we went to the medical course together, because I get to bust you out a little bit now with. He fan based. But so y'all know, everyone kind of respected and at the same time was scared of Sam because it was so brilliant going through the medical course. It was almost like he was never studying, but he always did. But he was just so smart that everybody was impressed with him. And and that's why whatever he entered the room, we always would say, Sam, and it's kind of stuck ever since. So wait, good to be chatting with you. Yeah, those man, those are I think we had a special class too. There was something about that class. But yeah, let's what I wanted to say is that Michael is, you know, obviously very busy, got a lot of stuff going on, and I wanted to just introduce so what he's got going on and talk. I think I've had a few people ask me in emails because they know that that Michael and our friends about his Green Gray survival Man, which, in my opinion, and I'm not just saying this because I'm biased, even though I probably would be, but it is, in my opinion, the best overall survival man. Know that you can buy anywhere, and it's about half the price of a lot of other ones that have half as much information. So that's one question I want to ask him. We want to just find out what's going on and then He'll probably be back around in the next month or so and we'll get into more detail, but for here, just a short intro and kind of find out, Michael, what's going on in your life and what are you doing, and what's coming up? What can we look to expect from you? Oh? Well, right on, Well first, let me back up and also pay some respect so people hear it from another voice. But you know, I've been Sam's friend for about twenty years or so, and over that time I've been able to watch him in a variety of backgrounds. And for anyone who works with Sam or is interested in studying with Sam, you should know that Sam is as good as it gets in whatever he chooses to do. And that's one of the reasons I've always admired and respected him. He has chosen to make this way of survival a lifetime study. And frankly, there are people who are good, maybe even as good, but there's no one better at pure survival than Sam. So you've heard it from me. Now moving on the book thing. Thanks him, and that's important to me, and the reason why it's very simple. The book is not a technical book on all the different plans, and it's not getting into the weeds on every single fine technique and step for starting a fire in every way that exists. What it's for is that good one over the worldview on everything to do with survival, And what to me makes it truly special is the fact that outside of the way that it's written, is written exactly like I speak, but the fact that it touches on all the things that most of the other survival books neglect, and as you mentioned, it's got more stuff for less money. Many of the survival books, anyone who's read more than one can tell you, they repeat a lot of information, and what they don't address are the realities that a true survivor faces, the harsh decisions. What do you do with the wounded person? You know, what do you do if you got if you really got Dan Greenston and you got to do an amputation? You know those type of things. What do you do? What are the real pros and cons of cannibalism? No other book addresses those things, yet it's a very common and known, documented reality for everyone who's ever been in a survival situation. So I'm like, you know what I get out there? I live with myself. I do it let me put down those hard won and hard learned, you know, true dirt time experiences, so that when people enter into reading the book with a mind towards getting some skills and getting some dirt time themselves, hopefully it will put them in a better and more correct frame of mind for what survival is all about. So yeah, I'm real tickled with a book. And it's been even the best reviews by people like Kirkus and The Guardian in the UK, so you know, it's not just you and me saying it's so a lot of venerated sources saying it's a good book. So it is, and thanks for that plug. Yeah sure, Now I think people are reason I want to know how you got the dirt time on cannibalism, and we're not going to let them know quite yet. Oh only you would focus on that too. And for the record, I have no dirt time on cannibalism. I just speak about the difference because some people say, well, why not eat your own pinky or something, And then I go into well, because the trauma, the loss of blood and the potential for infects negate auto cannibalism all by itself, and then I start talking about you know, okay, what parts of the body do you eat and what parts are good? And hey, you know, if the guy is still alive but he's dying, wants to go ahead and make peace with him and get his approval, and you'll feel better about it. It will taste better, so that that kind of a thing. You all right, good? Yeah, it's so. The big question I think burning in most people's minds who have read that book or are waiting for it, is when is it being reprinted? It's not in print right now? Right? Oh, no, it is. And that's a very interesting story, and I'll actually take a second and talk about it. When the book got started, a guy, a publisher who was actually just into survival skills, had seen me on an early Discovery show called Science of Survival I shouldn't be Alive, and he asked me to do a little booklet on fire and he liked it when I wrote it, and he asked me if I had more to say, and I said yeah, So I wrote some more and he said, well, write more, and so I just wrote whatever I could think of, and lo and behold, he published a whole six hundred and seventy pages or whatever. It is. It's a big, fat book. Now because it's so fat, they asked me to abridge it so they can make a pocket version, you know, or a cargo pocket version. So I actually found the abridging process harder than the writing process because it's like what do you cut? So some of the big chapters that I cut were like the medical chapter and the chapter on the extremes of like warfare and coups and riots and what do you do? And so that said the publisher had two books. Well, the way that it works in publishing, for those who don't know, is it's all driven by what the book, what the brick and mortar stories will carry, in other words, what the actual bookstores will put on their shelves. So the bookstores figured they had the small version, and so that's all they needed. So they actually stopped printing the fat book, which killed me because that one, to me, obviously was the better book. So the demand on the black market went up to like two thousand dollars. People were willing to pay for the old book, and so finally the publisher decided that even though the stores wouldn't carry the big book, they would break protocol and reprint the Big Book anyway, So they started with the limited run of three thousand books that I had to back. I said, guys, I know this will sell. If you don't sell them, I'll buy them. So I actually had to sign a contract to that effect and then reprinted the big book and the first day it came out, they sold twenty nine hundred of them. So how Yeah, it's really really a nice story. So now I went in the bookstore the other day to grab one because believe it or not, I'm out and they don't give them to me. So I went to get one and they didn't have the little book on the shelf. They actually had the big book on the shelf, which really really pleased me. Now it's soft cover, so it's not as good as the original one, which was a really well bound cloth hardcover. But I think what ends up happening is you get more book for less price now, and I think, and now they've told me that they'll just keep on printing them as long as there's a demand. So it's a good little book and it's a good deal. Yeah. When I first I think, I mean I knew you had written it, of course, and I've seen it out there, but I didn't. I didn't get it. I was just, you know, as me as it is with my wife, I'm always so busy. And I was walking through I think it was a Barnes and Noble and I saw a bunch of them sitting out there and they were like fifteen ninety five and I went, oh, my god, are you kidd me? I mean, I've paid twice as much for things like the Sas Survival Manual soft cover and things like that. This is a hard cover. And I said, well, of course I was going to buy it anyway, you know, obviously, just to support Michael. But I went and bought it, and I took it home and I actually started reading it and I was I was absolutely amazed at how much information that was in there. And I thought, you know, this is exactly it. He's just nailing it. Because if I was going to write a survival manual, this is how I would do it. Let's get everything in there. And the medical stuff is so important, and it's so lacking in most people's but you know, survival manuals, and they just totally they bypassed that and that's and it's probably one of the most important things that you can think about in a survival situation, especially with a group of people, because somebody is always going to be hurt, injured, Attitude problems, you know, the the mumble stumble grumble tumbles, you know, adage, all that stuff that goes into you know, having to take care of people, and attitude is a big part of that. And you get into the attitude and attitude is really a medics uh you know, point of view and it needs to be and I think that's where you're coming from on it too. Yeah. Absolutely, So that's really cool And honestly, that's probably to me personally, a bigger compliment than even Kirk is giving me a great reviewing. Okay, so listen here here's the delio for the folks who are listening and interested in tracking. I am getting ready to leave here shortly. I got to go to the airport and jump on a plane and go to Germany to have I guess the biggest European outdoor convention for distributors wholesalers are is going on, and it just so happens that I am buying my brand back from Smoky Mountain Knife Forks. So Smoky Mountain Ife Forks started by making a knife or two for me, and just like the book, they said, hey, do you have other ideas. I'm like, yeah, man, I got lots. So now I have about twenty eight creative, diverse, survival and special products, mostly knives right now. And they just had a change of leadership over at Smoky and so they don't want to make some of the other things that I had in a pipeline. So I said, look, I'll just go ahead and buy the products back and take control of the brand again. And they're like fine. So that's why I have to go to Germany because I got about one hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory I gotta sell real fast. So from jumping on a plane now, so I only got a couple more minutes to talk. But about the product line, you can go to a Smoky Mountain Knife Work and look up Michael Hawk and see what I've got available right now. Also, you can check out my brand website which is still being developed. We don't have the storefront completed yet, which is Michael Hawkknives dot com. Or you can just go to my website and see some of the other things that I have, you know, fun stuff you know, like coffee. And I got a really cool survival hat that does sixteen different survival things. And what's cool about the hat is it's made by Door Hats, which Butch Door makes ten thousand dollars hats for Larry Hagman and all the people of Dallas and all the big wigs in the industry, and so he makes these handcrafted survival hats for me. So for about two hundred bucks, you get a hat that does sixteen different survival things. And by the way, it happens to be a high quality hat made by a guy who makes ten thousand dollars hats. And that's just because he and I had the same a Kito instructor, Carl Geis, and we got connected and it was just a good match. And so that hat, to me kind of represents what the Hawk brand is all about. I use a little slogan, I say, you know, we have new solutions for old problems. But you know, the reality is, as you well know, Sam from our Special Forces days, unlike our beloved Seal brothers who get given a mission and millions of dollars to accomplish the mission, normally they give us a mission and give us a rubber band and say hey, go win the war and we'll see you in ten years. And so here we're always having to improvise, and so we have to be very creative and out of the box thinking for our problem solving. So, you know, all the things that I've come up with. I've created boots that stop jungle rod. I've created a watch that will no kidding, catch food, start fires, signal and navigate two different ways each sam two different ways each, okay. And what's cool is, you know, just like with my hat, I'll have the two hundred dollars version and then you can get the two thousand dollar version if you want that one. The watch, I have one hundred dollars version and then one thousand dollar version and one thousand dollars watch is being made by MTM Special Operations Watches, and they make a very high quality, high caliber, you know, fine functions, Swiss type watch. So I've been really blessed with the opportunities to take some of these needs, these create you know, needs that we've experienced from dirt time and come up with these creative solutions and then find wonderful people who actually are the real experts at making them who turn these into a reality. And what it means basically is for people who are into this way of life or this field of study, is here's a whole new set of tools that they can use that actually are designed just for what we do, special lots and survival skills. So I'm real tickled about all that. But their gift, that's great. So you're heading over to Journey to do that. And then what aside from your product and you you used to say a few minutes about what you got coming up or are you able to talk about are allowed to? Oh? Yeah? Absolutely? Real real tickled about that too, and thanks for asking. So I get back from Germany in a couple of days, and then I have a couple of days home with the wife and the little man, and then we go off to continue filming our new series or Travel Channel. So we have a show that hopefully we'll be starting off in the fall. It has a working title right now, I'll Get Lost, but we don't know what it's actually going to be. The concept is very similar to our Man, Woman Wild show that we used to do for Discovery, but in this one, we get blindfolded and then we get dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a helicopter. And a reason we use a helicopter is because obviously if you get dropped off by a road or a river, well you know you're just gonna follow those out. So we're like, okay, drop us in the middle of nowhere and the real and then we have to figure out what we think we are, and then we have to take a guess at what direction we think we need to go to get out. So we'll be given a small backpack with some things. Most of the things will look pretty crappy, but we're going to get a little mcguiver and improvise, and so the concept is to teach people a little bit about survival along the way, but the main focus is going to be navigating. We're oute planning train association to pace counting and all those, and then reading the environment. We're going to be looking for local flora and fauna that might give us clues that specify where we are so we can then pick a better direction. But what makes the show to me special and makes it so that we'll resonate with viewers is that every one of us has gone somewhere new with someone that we care about. And had a difference of opinion on how to get there, and so you're sure to see some fireworks when Grout tells me, I think we need to go north and I'm like, no, Hunting, we need to go south, and then one of us is going to be wrong, and ten miles or ten clicks later, you know somebody is going to have hell to pay or picking the wrong direction. Right, And yeah, that's a good idea for a show. And it's just so simple and what we want to do. And whereas the other show is a little bit more death and drama, we want this one to be a little bit more fun and challenge. So hopefully people will want to get out in the wood where their significant others and say, okay, let's just go out here and let's just kind of figure out how we get out and hopefully we'll teach them, like the other show, real genuine skills that they can use and keep the show real. You know, that's I think the our brand got established as the type of show where, you know, we didn't do a lot of backflips off of hilltops and you know, repelling down waterfalls on you know, little vines and stuff like maybe some of the other folks out there. Do right right no this and it's such a fundamental skill. And I'm going to do a quick plug for one of our classes coming up because you brought this up in ten days now we can for this weekend we have our annual land navigation course. It's a one day course. It's seventy five bucks. It's on four thousand pristine acres with a spring fed pond or a lake, not upon a lake, and a lodge, an old lodge, and you get in the morning, you're doing class what Michael was just talking about their pace count. You learn how that you learn compass navigation. In the afternoon you'll learn all about map reading, Terrain Associations US, all topographic maps, no GPS crap or anything. And in the afternoon you're going to be out there on a land navigation course with as a team trying to find you down to partners, trying to find the points that we put out for you. That class. We need some more people in it. We're actually kind of just kind of short, so between the San Antonio or the Austin or the South Texas area, this is well worth coming out to. I guarantee you you will learn more in a day, in one day of land navigation than you would from going out there for a week by yourself and trying to figure it out. Or even if you have the skills, you're a backpack and you know it, we'll still push it. Well, it's intermediate. We have some advanced points out there for you to find too, So it's a great course. But I think the idea of what Michael's talking about is absolutely that's right on the money, because that is one of the most fundamental concepts. If you want to learn survival, you need to learn how to terrain, associate, You need to learn how to read a map. You need how to learn and learn how to read the stars, the moon, the sun, and figure out science and civilization and little tricks of the trade. And Michael knows a lot of them. I mean, you're gonna watching his show, You're gonna learn a lot of that stuff as to how you can just figure out generally you know where you are in what direction you need to go, and. And that I can't say enough on that, because you know, the one thing that everybody forgets about survival is you know, it ain't about survival, It's about getting home. That's the real thing, and getting home means navigating, so it's probably next to fire. It's probably one of the more critical skills that you need because the surefix for any survival situation is getting out of it. So and then a lot of people don't realize like Sam and I are Green Berets, and the entire world in the military considers that the US Army Special Forces and nicknamed Green Rays because of the hat we wear, the best navigators that there are. Because our land navigation course is considered the most difficult navigation course in the world by all the special operations communities are none and the reason is that we do it in North Carolina and the terrain is very subtle, so you have to go long distances through thick terrain in short short amount of time under a heavy rucksack load. But the reason why ours is so difficult because there's no other skill where you can put someone to the test both physically and mentally, because they have to do so many things on their own. You have to read the map, you have to convert it from a map to a magnetic or compass bearing. Then you have to do your route selection. You have to do your own case count and you have to do all that in your head on the move. And if you can do all that, then you can do anything. And that's one of the reasons why our course is so tough and the skill is so important, and why should come on down here to take that course from Sam. Yeah, well said man, it's true, and I tell you that is the one. I mean, there's a lot of places where people drop out in Green through the Q course that's collection and an assessment course. And of course, as you know as well as I do, in the medic portion, we lost you know, a lot just during that. But then the biggest, one of the biggest ones there is the biggest hurtles is the land. Of course we lose you know, fifty to sixty percent of the people going through. There, I think absolutely. And so there you go. So it's a good course and that's what the upcoming show is. Now for those who are interested, I actually have a show right now that's out on the Outdoor Channel, which is a small channel, you know, mostly for hunters and fishermen. But if you do subscribe to it and get it, we have a show on Wednesday night at nine called Elite Tactical Unit And what's really cool about it is, you know, not only am I the host of it and the executive producer, but I also have another Green Beret from History Channel's Warriors, a fellow by the name of Terry Schapper, and he's out filming a show for Animal Planet right now. And then I had another SAS friend who worked on that movie Proof of Life with Russell Crowe. These were my two team leaders. And then we had fourteen active SWAT officers from around the country and we put them through a competition where they do realistic missions and whoever are the two slowest guys or perform the lowest, then they do a real shoot off with ammunition and guns, and then the losers go home. And then the winner was one hundred thousand dollars for his department ten. Thousand dollars for himself. But what's cool about it is that we show a lot of how these guys operate without giving up any secrets for the bad guys, and we tell some of their stories. And what makes the show very special is the fact that we're using a technology that hasn't been available until recently. In essence, when the guys go out there, they're wearing laser equipment, so when they get shot, you know, we see the lights and we hear the alarms, but they also get shocked the same as with being hit with a taser through them a little shop pack stracture their gut, so when they take a hit, they scream like. A little girl. And so what that means for us is not not only is it more entertaining and keeps it more realistic for the guys because now they can't John Wayne their way through, but what's really neat about it is from a production perspective, we can get our cameramen right in the action without worrying about them getting hit by simmunitions rounds or something like that. Likewise, we don't have to cover up the face of all our operators for safety, so we can actually see them sweat and see their eyes when they're looking and focusing on the mission. So it's a really high adrenaline and realistic show that also honors you know, what those guys do and you know, and I'm very proud of it. So if you got a chance to watch Outdoor Channel, look up Elite Tactical Unit and check it out. Yeah, that's a great show. I'm glad you brought that one up too. Excellent. Mike, Well, I think you probably got to run, I know, and we're gonna this was this was just the introduction. I really am looking forward to being able to talk to you some more. I think people would really love to hear some uh you know, some some information some you know, how do we have? I would love I would love to come back again real soon and talk a little more about some dirt skills and stuff like that with you. That'd be great. Let's plan on it, all right, Sam. Well, thank you very much for having me, and all the best to all your listeners out there. All right, thanks, Mike, we'll see you, okay, all right now, good man, good, We're good. So yeah, hey man, just stay in touch and have a good to have a safe trip out to Germany. Yeah yeah, yeah, Like I said, it's a last minute thing. Man. We're up there now, right, yeah, we're oh yeah, let's cut that off. So yeah, that smoky mountain thing, dude, it's insane, dude. The uh, the guy hired a big executive from UPS, The guy who actually coined the phrase you know what can Brown do for you? Or whatever? Been with him for a couple of years. They've grown almost five million dollars every year that he's been with them, and all of a sudden his. Today's broadcast has come to you through the courtesy of the Prepper Broadcasting Network. See our hosts, show schedules, archive programs, and more at prepper broadcasting dot com. Thanks for listening.