MEDICAL MONDAY: Sustainable Herbal Medicine with Sam Coffman of the Human Path

[00:00:00] Nobody does it better than Regent Seven Seas Cruises. Enjoy all-inclusive, unrivaled luxury with unlimited shore excursions, indulgent cuisine, personalized service and more aboard spacious, all-sweet ships. Visit rssc.com to experience the unrivaled.

[00:01:13] You've just joined the Prepper Broadcasting Network where we promote self-reliance and independence. The views and opinions expressed are strictly those of the host or their guests. Visit us in the interactive chat room at Prepper Broadcasting Network. Prepper Broadcasting Network.

[00:01:30] Hello, this is Sam Coffman with The Human Path at TheHumanPath.com. In this 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.

[00:02:06] 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 Beret or Special Forces medic in the U.S. Army. I have over 25 years experience both living and teaching survival and survival concepts to civilian and military. I also have over 20 years experience with plant medicine as an herbalist. Well, it's Sunday night right now and I'm back after a full weekend of teaching, so please excuse my voice. I might be a little bit tired.

[00:02:35] I've been talking all weekend, of course, teaching herbology. It's the first weekend of the Herbomedic Level 1 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. That's for those the hottest months here and around San Antonio. And it gives us a chance to catch up on stuff. We're just so busy throughout the year. I mean, 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,

[00:03:02] 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 and tilapia and rabbits and gardens and, you know, there's a lot of things that kind of go neglected a little bit during that period of time when 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.

[00:03:26] I mean, we kind of run sort of like a school year, you know, in a sense, in America from the standpoint of September through, you know, May or June, really, 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 possible on preparedness items locally and online?

[00:03:54] Check out the American Preppers Network Buyer's Club Membership, APN Gold. APN Gold members get exclusive benefits, including access to discounts and specials to the best preparedness stores on the web. Save big by getting APN Gold today online at APNGold.com or dial 1-2-3-4-JOIN-APN. That's 1-2-3-4-JOIN-APN or APNGold.com. 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 things.

[00:04:24] 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. My background as a special forces medic and 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 a prepper, you really need to be thinking about herbal medicine.

[00:04:47] Seriously, not just looking at a list of plants that you can get on any website that are just, you know, hey, for athlete's foot, here's a list of 20 herbs. You know, and out of that 20 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 can increase the effectiveness of them by learning certain things that you have to learn.

[00:05:17] 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 be able to approach medicine that way. And so I teach that, and I teach that very quickly and very thoroughly, and I think anybody can learn that very quickly, you know, the way I teach it at least. So that's why 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.

[00:05:43] 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 I did was I thought, 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 48, but certainly many of them. In fact, I think all of them also in Alaska too.

[00:06:08] So what are the, and certainly in Hawaii obviously, but what are fiber, 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.

[00:06:28] And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to 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.

[00:06:54] But he runs his, he's a celebrity, you know, he's done shows, he's the person who did the show 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.

[00:07:24] 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.

[00:07:51] 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 introduction, sort of the 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 I've got lined up for tonight's podcast. Let me back up for one second.

[00:08:15] And let me just talk really briefly about how important medicinal herbs are in a post-disaster or a end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it type scenario. This could be anything from a local, you know, city, a Hurricane Katrina type event, or even a civil war and, you know, a city lockdown like maybe a Bosnia type situation,

[00:08:32] all the way up to a national scale, you know, power outage, EMP, or a nuclear war or a terrorist attack or economic collapse and lack of any, you know, trucking industry breakdown and no food and water breakdown of all of our power, of our communication grid, internet, et cetera. You know, whatever that situation might be from small all the way up to a global into-the-world-as-we-know-it situation,

[00:08:57] anywhere in between, it is absolutely essential that you understand 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.

[00:09:26] Even if you're stocking up on pharmaceuticals right now, right and left, you know, all the bean bullets and Band-Aids, and you've got all the Band-Aids that you think you'll 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. There's going to be waterborne diseases. There's going to be lots of infections, lots of that kind of stuff. You know, think about post-disaster like a hurricane.

[00:09:53] Everything's covered in seaweed. I'm sorry, 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 rubble. You know, you fall and it's not just you fall or you trip or you lose your balance at all. It's not just a matter of catching yourself on something. You're going to cut yourself right and left. That kind of stuff. You're going to cut yourself off.

[00:10:20] Certainly waterborne diseases and things like cholera, typhus, you know, mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases with stagnant water, with flooding or with tornadoes, with hurricanes, natural disasters of that type. So health concerns are absolutely prevalent and of extreme concern as much as food and water. And you're going to, you have no idea. Everything's unknown how much you're going to actually expect. Food and water, you can kind of predict.

[00:10:49] You may not be able to predict the number of your party, you know, the 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 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, you know. At any rate, my point is that food and water are fairly predictable. Pharmaceuticals and medicine is not predictable as to what you're actually going to face. So no matter what happens, you're going to be in ration mode.

[00:11:18] 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 ration mode. You're always asking yourself and second-guessing yourself to say, you know, do I really need to use this? This is absolutely life-threatening. Do I want to use up this antibiotic, right? And the second thing is you don't have the training probably.

[00:11:47] You know, of 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 are 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. For everybody else, you really don't have the training to do that.

[00:12:11] Now, with botanical medicine, you know, with plant medicine, first of all, it is an unlimited resource if you are able to grow and or identify the plants in your own ecosystem. And it's not unlimited. Nothing is unlimited. But there's an abundance of it. Aside from if the area is unlivable and everything becomes a dust bowl through maybe massive climate change or there's radiation,

[00:12:39] 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 what's the old, I think it's an adage that I've heard that 60% of all of our pharmaceutical medicines come from 40 plants. You know, whether that's even close to being true or not, you know, think about that.

[00:13:08] So we have thousands, hundreds of thousands of species of plants around us. I am always uncovering new stuff. You know, every month I uncover new things as an herbalist. 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 my own testing.

[00:13:33] Now, all of that kind of information and all that kind of, 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 herbalist, you can't go and become an intern. 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. You're not able to do that, which is really too bad. You know, the best that we can get to it is a student clinic that I have and the stuff that we do with herbal medics.

[00:14:03] Which is a lot, but it's not 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, to people that are older than me and have been doing it for longer than I have or things that have been passed down to them and finding old ethnobotanical 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.

[00:14:31] 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 20 years and I have a lot of that information, you know, if you were compared to somebody who hasn't been doing it at all, but in this big scope of things, I know it's tiny smattering just to, you know, an eyedropper full of information that's an ocean out there. So what I'm going to tell you is, I got a little bit off sidetrack there,

[00:14:58] but what I wanted to tell you was just to say that, emphasize and underscore the actual importance of herbal medicine. What I hear a lot from preppers that are kind of more, what I would say, what I call, actually, I call them Walmart preppers. They're preppers that believe that what they're going to do is they're going to hold up in a bunker with beans, bullets, and Band-Aids. They're going to shoot anybody who comes on their property if they don't like them or they think that they're trespassing or trying to take their stuff. And they're going to stay there and they're going to just be, do just fine and dandy with whatever they've got,

[00:15:26] with their MREs 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 that sit there in front of them. And that's about their level. And what they're going to do is they're going to wait for everything to blow over, and then they're going to come back out and we're going to rebuild the Walmarts and the big box stores and create the same mess that got us into this in the first place. There's no self-sustainability. There's no actual wake-up call going on. They're just Walmart preppers.

[00:15:54] And they pretty much shop for all their prepper stuff at Walmart too probably. So that entire mentality is something that I don't even, we don't even, at our school, those kinds of people usually don't last more than a couple hours. They're usually horrible on a team. They have bad attitude. They have no skills. And that's fine. You come to their own school to learn skills. That's not a problem. But they usually have a lot of ego that they carry with them. And they talk a big talk, but when it actually comes down to it, they don't like it being put down on the line because then they show that they really don't have anything.

[00:16:23] So instead of being embarrassed by the fact that they've talked real big, they walk away. And believe me, at my school, it's 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 the right kind of attitude. If you come into our school, you come expecting to learn, and you will learn. And you learn from lecture, and you learn from hands-on, and you learn from scenario, and then you learn in the real world. And we do it, and we've got people that are doing it, and they're doing it really well.

[00:16:51] And 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 that is 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.

[00:17:22] 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.

[00:17:43] Even though pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars every year on doctorate PhDs who do research in the Amazonian 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 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 18 years, and they can make money on it because that, you know, medicine is profit in our country.

[00:18:13] It's a profit industry. That's a whole other bag of worms. A can of worms is 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. It's part of our media. It's part of everything that's been told to us for the last hundred years since allopathy has taken the lead in medicine in our country. Prior to that, allopathy was almost a disparaging term.

[00:18:42] Allopathy consisted of things like mercury and arsenic and bloodletting, you know, and now it's profit. It's pharmaceutical profit. Now, if I'm in a car wreck or I get shot by somebody who shoots me, of course I want our incredible emergency and trauma medicine we have in this country. There's no doubt about it. You know, unless I have to, I'm not going to be using herbs. And if I have to, though, I can. I'm not saying this is going to be as effective. Of course not.

[00:19:13] But the point is I've been spending over 20 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 –

[00:19:39] there's no herb in the world that's going to take care of them any more than there's actually a pharmaceutical that is. You know, all it's going to do is mask symptoms. There's a lot that needs to happen there. You know, if you're 250 pounds overweight and you've been smoking for four years – I'm sorry, 40 years, and you've got diabetes and you want to come to me and you tell me you've got high blood pressure, was there 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 make some lifestyle changes here.

[00:20:06] 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. It works, and it works very well. And that's why I think it's very important, if you're interested in prepping at all, that you take the time to learn this skill. You take the time to teach yourself or to learn from somebody like myself. You know, I've got an online course. I've got a field manual.

[00:20:35] I've got, you know, herbal first aid kits. I've got, 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's got, you know, pharmaceuticals in it. You're able to pull that from the landscape. Now, that's an advantage – a huge advantage over doctors.

[00:21:05] I teach doctors all the time. I teach them survival. I teach them post-disaster survival and post-disaster medicine, not just at my school. I do this at other schools, too. And doctors are wonderful at what they do. You know, I teach surgeons that are absolutely – they are geniuses in the OR. But they couldn't start a fire with a book of matches and a can of gas. You know, they don't know how to do basic survival skills, let alone plant medicine, if they didn't have their pharmaceuticals with them.

[00:21:33] You know, and even surgeons, you know, 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 suturing is in closing up wounds. If you are actually thinking that you're going to 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.

[00:22:02] And you shouldn't even be near a needle and suture. You shouldn't even be near it. So, that's just – I mean, you have to keep a wound open in an environment like that. It's just unclean. It's stupid. You're going to end up with infection. You're going to end up with gangrene and anaerobic bacteria, and you're going to end up with an amputation or death. That's what you're going to 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. I can work with that, you know, with wounds and wound infections.

[00:22:31] And salivitis even, you know, 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 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 – it's the only thing that's going to work in a post-disaster environment. I'll give you another example of this.

[00:22:55] You know, during – after Haiti, you know, a lot of surgeons went down to Haiti, you know, teams, medical teams, Western teams that had surgeons and went down to Haiti. And 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.

[00:23:25] There's no hygiene. Hygiene is horrible. So, you've got people with infections, you've got people with, you know, osteomyelitis now and long-term problems because there's no follow-up whatsoever. You know, it's a totally different approach. 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 Greenbury Medic School, the Special Forces Medic School is, in my opinion, the best field medicine school anywhere in the world.

[00:23:55] So, taking that and then saying to yourself, well, this is great, but what do we do when we don't have any pharmaceutical medicine? That's what happened to me. That's how I got into plant medicine. And now I've 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 everybody kind of the hard sell on here on why you need plant medicine, and I hope that sticks for people. So, now let me actually talk about some herbs. And, again, this isn't just, you know, don't think that you're going to just take these herbs and you'll be good to go.

[00:24:25] Take the herbs, throw them into your backpack, and you're good to go. It's not just about the herbs. This isn't a matter of taking an 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 an herb and how you administer an herb. It's not raucous science. It's not difficult to learn, but there's just things you've got to learn. You've got to learn how to get the herb to the tissue that's actually infected.

[00:24:51] And it's not necessarily through the gut to do that, unless the gut's what's infected. So, you have to learn, 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 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.

[00:25:19] So, let me actually get to the herbs here, because I'm running out of time. And I wanted to talk about these six herbs. And so, what I did was I thought, I kind of went through a bunch of herbs 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, I thought, you know, there's a sixth one I really want to put in here, because it's really important.

[00:25:43] 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 short on time, 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 common name of it, which is plantain.

[00:26:10] And I'll tell you this isn't the plantain that's like a banana, okay? It's the Plantago species, the Plantago genus, and it's all the Plantago species. There's probably 200 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 are most well-known are the, what we would call giant plantain and the lance leaf plantain. There are many others. There's, you know, down here we have what's called red seed plantain. I won't bother giving you all the different species. I mean, I could.

[00:26:40] Cylantulata and Pluntago magus are the two that I just talked 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, you know, what we would call a rosette on the ground, and then it usually sends off a stalk, and the seeds come off the stalk. And it can be small. You know, the ones that grow here, the red seed plantain is pretty small. That is the rosette.

[00:27:10] And when I say rosette, that's a cluster of leaves that grow in a circle, and then a central stalk comes out from that. So, in that rosette, if you look at the leaves, it's usually fairly long or oblong or 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 veins are parallel. There'll be one in the center.

[00:27:35] 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 it might have five veins or it 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 the plantain over there was gigantic, you know. It was very, very big, huge leaves, like, you know, almost a small shrub.

[00:28:05] So, that is plantain. Now, what it looks like. So, it's easy to identify, like all of these are going to be, and it is used for many, many different things. Plantain 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 a little bit medicinal, but they're really more food. All the way up to poison where you'd have something like datura or foxglove.

[00:28:32] There actually is medicine, but in very, very small amounts, what we call drop-wise dosage in herbalism. Plantain is one of those rare, and 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 near the top of that spectrum. In other words, closer to the poison side. Maybe halfway up the spectrum, you know, and up to maybe three-quarters of the way up the spectrum.

[00:28:57] 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 period of time. They might build up liver toxicities and other types of things, you know. You might have alkaloids in them that are 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 it is a very potent herb, but it is also actually inedible. It's really a power food. You can eat it, but it is extremely medicinal as well. Now, plantain has some very interesting features to it.

[00:29:24] It is an astringent in the sense that it can even stop or slow down bleeding, but it's also very mucilogenous. It's what we call a demulcent. So it's very soothing to the mucous membranes. This is important. This isn't just something like, oh, I've got a little bit of a 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 fix strep throat.

[00:29:54] You can give your body herbs that will allow your body to heal strep throat very simply if you work with the tissue itself. So we're not talking about just taking an antibiotic internally, orally, that goes through our gut, comes out, and, you know, eventually filtered through our 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 infected. So in the case of plantain and the mucosa around a sore throat, like a strep throat, we are going to rejuvenate.

[00:30:22] We're going to help, and we're going to help balance the natural flora and the lymph and all the stuff, the mucosal lymph, all the stuff that's around that area of illness. And we're going to work with interface between the herb and that actual tissue that's damaged. That's a big thing. That's how you work with herbs. And that's not the only way you work with herbs, 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 that says, wow, you know, for sore throat, here's a list of 20 herbs.

[00:30:50] Just start taking these herbs and swallowing them, and, 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 learn some simple things. So plantain, that's how we would work with that as a mucilaginus or a demulsant. So that's what a demulsant does to some degree is it helps restore the balance to mucosal tissue. It's what we call a mucosal vulnerary. A vulnerary is an herb that soothes and protects and helps an area become more balanced and have more of a homeostasis in terms of what the natural flora of that area is so that it can restore itself back to its natural tissue state.

[00:31:20] Now, plantain is also very interesting. It contains some interesting constituents that do some interesting things. One of those is called bicholin, and it is a constituent that breaks down the ability of biofilms' ability. So this is going to be – I'm going to 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.

[00:31:46] 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 a very acidic – you know, have a very acidic excretion that is low enough on the pH scale to be able to actually erode the enamel around your teeth. So plaque is an example of a biofilm. Well, biofilms exist in our body all the time, and especially when we're sick, and especially with something like a strep throat infection.

[00:32:16] There are biofilms, and 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. Biofilms is a constituent that – I'm not going to get into the physiology of it, or we'd be here all day just on one thing – but it is a constituent that helps break down biofilm. So what that means is it's a good adjuvant herb or it's a good helper herb, synergist as such, with other herbs that are also more antibacterial.

[00:32:46] It also has another constituent called alkypin that is a very good liver protector. So it protects hepatocytes. It's something that a lot of people who are listening to this and know a little bit about herbs might know about milk thistle and how milk thistle helps the herb. You know, milk thistle got its claim to fame for people who would get mushroom poisoning. They would take milk thistle, and they would recover 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.

[00:33:15] Well, alkypin does that too. So plantain is actually a liver protectant as well. It is a very good vulnerary and a drawing – 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 toxin involved, like the venom from a spider bite, like a brown recluse 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 quackery. You can't pull poison out. Well, you absolutely can. There are different ways of pulling poisons, toxins, and bacteria out of the body.

[00:33:44] I use charcoal a lot for certain things that are on the skin, for instance, wound infections, staph infections, and that works very well. But there are a lot of herbs that do that as well, and plantain is one of those. Very good antitoxin. It clears toxic heat is the way that the Chinese of Eastern medicine would talk about it. On an Eastern light, as an energetic medicine, it clears 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.

[00:34:08] Also, it's a respiratory expectorant, a relaxing expectorant, which means that if you've got a dry, nonproductive cough, it's a great herb for that. There's more. Soothes a mucous membrane in general. You could use it as part of a urinary tract infection herb to help soothe the urethra, mucosal lining of our urinary tract, whether lower or even upper. More than that. But that's enough. Like I said, I'm going to try not to spend the entire hour on one herb. Let's move on. Dandelion is another one. Dandelion.

[00:34:37] Everybody knows dandelion. 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 leaf of it is a good bitter, a good digestive bitter, which is good for things like just basic indigestion. You're having problems digesting food. You're having heartburn. Heartburn comes from a number of different things. I realize that. Gastric reflux can come from a number of different things. It might be a chronic problem.

[00:35:07] You might have GERD or gastroesophageal reflux disease caused by any number of things. So it's not just a cure-all for any kind of reflux, 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 dandelion, is the root. The root has a more medicinal quality to it.

[00:35:36] Dandelion root works very well as a couple of different things. It's a decent diuretic. It's useful with something like a urinary tract infection because when you have a urinary tract infection, we want to dilute. 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 more we can do for a UTI than that, but that's one factor of a UTI. Or kidney stones, same thing. With a kidney stone, we want a couple of different things to happen.

[00:36:04] We want a diuretic that helps flush that out, but we also want something that helps relax the ureter, relax the urethra so that that stone can make it out, so a smooth muscle relaxant. Now, dandelion is not a smooth muscle relaxant. It's a diuretic. But it's also good. It's a good kidney and liver, what we would call a tonic herb. It's a little bit of a blood cleanser in that. It helps stimulate liver activity and gallbladder activity, which helps our –

[00:36:28] 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. They're basically phagocytes that eat and get rid of toxins, and the liver takes what comes in there and either gets rid of it in one way or another, tries to metabolize it, tries to store it, and takes care of a lot of other things. It regulates our blood sugar. Many things that our liver does.

[00:36:58] Well, if the liver is overstressed because we're eating bad food or we're eating toxic food or even poisoning of some type, we need to be able to help the liver 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 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. Dandelion root is one of those herbs that does that pretty well. It helps people in that sense.

[00:37:27] 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 drinking dandelion root tea 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 trophor-restorative herb, help nourish the liver, help nourish the kidneys, and help the urinary tract. A few other things as well, but those are the main things with dandelion. Okay.

[00:37:57] The next one I want to talk about is the artemesias, the wormwood and mugwort and all the different artemesias. 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. There's a lot of things it's good for. Now, identification of this is a little different because there's so many of them. There's a lot of different artemesias, and they're all generally fairly interchangeable.

[00:38:26] They all can be identified mostly from the smell. It's got that sage smell they're used in things like smudge sticks and we call it sage, like mountain sage, desert sage. It's got a bunch of common names, artemesia. 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, like 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, artemesia annua.

[00:38:56] There is the one down here that we use, which is the vulgaris, the artemesia vulgaris, which is mugwort. And there's artemesia absinthia. 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, you know, so it's definitely ubiquitous. And I'm sorry I can't give you a better definition than that, but this is one of those where you go more by smell sometimes than you go by how it looks necessarily.

[00:39:22] 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, artemesias are, like I said before, they're good anti-infectives. They can go even in an antibacterial formula. They work very well on the gut. They're a bitter. They're actually kind of an intense bitter. So the same thing I said about dandelion 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 bitter. There are times where you need an antibacterial bitter.

[00:39:49] 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 are in the gut. And that includes friendly bacteria. It'll kill off as well. So it's an antibacterial, antiparasitic. It is also good externally for pain in the joints, whether that's, you know, 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,

[00:40:17] it'll help, 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 helps with vascularization if you put it on externally. So in other words, it's a little bit of a warming herb in that regard. And when we say warming herb, 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, capillary and venules,

[00:40:46] arterioles, increase the blood flow to an area. And I've always said, if you can just keep an area clean, an 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 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. Your body's going to heal if you can do that. So this is one of those herbs that helps you do that. Okay, moving on. Sorry if I kind of seem like I'm jumping through these pretty fast.

[00:41:16] There's a lot we could say about any of them. But again, we don't have time for all of that in a short show like this. I'm going through six of them. So the next one would be yarrow. I picked yarrow because I feel like that is also another herb that grows in every state in the United States. Most people know what this looks like. But if you don't, the scientific name for it is Achillea millifolium. And the millifolium means thousand leaves. And so if you look at a yarrow plant and look at the leaves, it looks like a very fine fern kind of, you know, like the way that you would think if a fern leaf looks. But very fine, very tiny, fine leaves coming out.

[00:41:46] It's got a very big head of flowers on it that you can see usually, you know, they're 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 in 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 plant, wild varieties are much, much more medicinal. Yarrow is one of those that's just got so many uses. We could talk for hours on that alone too.

[00:42:12] But in general, it's most known as a, what we would call a hemostatic herb or something that stops bleeding. In fact, there's, you know, there are stories, and I don't know if this is true, but the stories that I've read that Native Americans would usually pick their, 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 open wounds as well as closed. It is a very good at stopping bleeding, as I mentioned before, and it is a good healer.

[00:42:42] It definitely has antimicrobial properties to it. Internally, it's very good as an antiviral. 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 in your skin, which is very important. All your eliminative channels are important. We don't, we, this is something that gets ignored in orthodox 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.

[00:43:09] You know, we have the term kind of saying, sweat it 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 Yara is good at that. It's good for the urinary tract. Urinary tract infections, it works well in there. It's a little bit of a diuretic as well. It is good for, traditionally, in fact, some of its original uses,

[00:43:38] trace it back far enough, was used in helping with what we would call dysmenorrhea or problems with menstruation, painful menstruation, or spotty and irregular cycle menstruation. It is also useful for what I would say breaking up blood clots underneath the skin, the same way that Arnica is good at that too, what we would call bruises or even hematomas. 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 other herbs, you know,

[00:44:05] like Artemisia that we just talked about and Yara together make a very good poultice for something like a really bad strain. Or I just, I give the example of a dislocated shoulder. You dislocate your shoulder, which is not an uncommon injury in the field, and you, you know, you reduce the dislocation and the shoulders back in place. But there's a lot of soft tissue injury around that, you know, your rotator cuff. And so that would help a lot with that. The next one I'm going to say is what I call the Berberus genus. And so this is part of the, most of these are part of the Berberidicea family,

[00:44:34] which is named after a constituent called Berberine. This includes plants like Oregon grape root or Oregon grape. We use the root of it normally. You don't have to, you can actually use the stalk for that too. We use the leaf for some things too, actually. But Oregon grape, Algarita down here in this area. Barberry with Texas barberry is Japanese barberry. If you counted all of the Berberus genus or all the Berberus species together, you would find them in every state in the United States as well. So that's why I picked this one.

[00:45:02] So these are, 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 Bicolin with the plantain. Well, Berberine containing plants also have one of their own. It's called MHC or a methoxyhydenocarpin is what that stands for, which is also in its own way prevents pathogenic bacteria from defending themselves.

[00:45:29] So it's another good adjuvant or synergistic herb to go with herbs that are antibacterial. And it is bacterial and antibacterial itself. I use Algarita here. We use this in Herbomedics teams when we go to Nicaragua or places where there's going to be bad water. It's the herb of choice. So these Berberine containing herbs are the herb of choice. When you get bad water, you start to get dysentery, traveler's diarrhea, protozoan infections like Giardia, Cryptosporidium. This is something you would definitely see post-disaster in your water supplies.

[00:45:59] Anything in the gut really is what you use most of the Berberine containing herbs for. And that's from one side of the gut to the other, from the 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 the example of strep throat. If you can get it to the back of the throat, that's good. So here's the deal though with Berberine containing herbs is 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 and take it,

[00:46:26] that it's going to get to the rest of your body through your bloodstream is a false assumption. It's not going to happen that way. So 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 Berberine containing herbs are very important for gut health.

[00:46:54] 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 Opuntia genus as well. And they're all, again, all states in the United States have Opuntia. 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,

[00:47:24] or the fruits of this cactus. If you aren't familiar with prickly pear, then the identification of it is, and I just realized that I didn't talk about the identification of Berbera, so I'll go back to that in one second. The identification of the prickly pear is that, you know, they have these flat cactus pads usually, and that are offset from each other by about 90 degrees as they grow on top of each other. I think everybody probably who's listened to this knows what prickly pear is, I'm pretty sure. So you obviously have to strip the needles off to be able to get to the inside of it,

[00:47:51] but the petals, the flower petals that grow on what we call the tunas or the fruits, they come out once a year. Those flower petals are incredibly good mucosal vulnerabilities. Remember I talked about plantain as a mucosal vulnerability, something that soothes, protects, and helps restore a homeostasis to the mucosal tissues? Well, the flower petals of the Opuntia species are possibly, arguably, one of the best mucosal vulnerabilities in the United States of any herb. So that's one thing they're really good at.

[00:48:17] And again, that can be anything from the oral mucosa to the urinary tract, to even respiratory 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 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.

[00:48:45] And to get this, you need to fillet 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. 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 prickly pear cactus pad. And in that, I show how you scrape off the needles as well. So the simplest way is the best. You don't have to do anything complicated. You don't need to burn them off. You don't need to do anything like that.

[00:49:14] You just scrape it off with two flat rocks. So once you do that, you can fillet a pad in half, and you can scrape out that gunk that's in the center. Now, it's edible. These pads are edible. They're what we would call nopales or nopalitos. It is a classic meal in Mexico, and it's actually used for people who have diabetes. And the reason is it's very high in inulin, and it's very good at doing a couple of different things. First, it's an excellent soluble fiber, so it washes, kind of sponges out the gut and cleans it.

[00:49:44] 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 your glycemic index of food that you eat, instead of jetting your blood sugar up really high, it keeps it much more level and consistent over time as you digest that food. And third, it also is good at keeping the free fatty acid counts down, which supposedly can lead to higher insulin levels as well.

[00:50:11] So in general, it is used in folk medicine, and folk medicine is good, by the way, folks. This doesn't mean 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 part of their diet. I'm not saying that if you have type 1 diabetes that you can just eat this pad and you're not going to need insulin. I'm not saying that at all. But certainly for type 2 and for people even with type 1

[00:50:39] that need to try to keep their glycemic index level, I mean that's what it's all about. 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 mucilaginous gunk, that goo that's in there, it's good for a lot of things. But one that's best and it's very good for is that it's good as an aloe. In fact, in my opinion, it's better than aloe vera for anything on your skin. That's burns. That's stuff, chafing.

[00:51:07] That's things that can become little problems that can become big problems. Think about it in a bug-out situation in a post-disaster. You have to bug-out and now you've been walking for 10 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, 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

[00:51:33] and the chafing gets worse every day and it doesn't have a chance to recover and you're dirty. Again, this is post-disaster. Your pants are dirty. Maybe you fall into some mud that's actually got 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 epidermis there. Guess what? It's very susceptible to infection.

[00:51:55] So now you end up with, let's say, cellulitis or some kind of a staph or bacterial infection on your skin itself. That's a showstopper. You're not going to get up. You're not going to be walking. So things like something as simple as opuntia or prickly pear, 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 rate it at higher than aloe for things like that. That's good to know.

[00:52:21] 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 with water. You can't do that with aloe. 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's just not good. And part of the problem with doing aloe is you have to make sure you don't get the juice that's kind of between the leaf and the gel.

[00:52:50] Well, 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 at all, and you dry it, it's very difficult to get it to last very long. But prickly pear 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. It 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 aloe that you can carry around with you, so you don't have to carry around the liquid because the liquid doesn't keep as well.

[00:53:19] Now, I mentioned, I kind of went back and said I was going to talk about burr bears. You can tell I do these podcasts just all at 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 as 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, and the chicken, we have about, I don't know, 13 chickens or something like that.

[00:53:45] 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 and overheated, so now she's sitting on a little bag of ice cubes in an air-conditioned room, and we gave her some water, and she recovered within about 10 minutes. She's doing fine now. Of course, she's being pretty quiet, so you're at least not hearing any clucking in the background. So I'm just telling you, you know, this is how I do my podcast. I just sit down and I usually talk.

[00:54:14] 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 shapes, but generally the leaves come out to little spikes, and those spikes are usually an odd number because there's a pointy spike at the very tip of the leaf.

[00:54:44] 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 organ grape, they're kind of usually a fatter leaf, and they've got that spike. With something like algorita, it's a skinny leaf, and it's got that, and they're very bluish 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 berberine in them, and berberine is very yellow. So when you cut a root open of one of these plants

[00:55:13] or you cut even the stalk open down near the ground, you're going to see that the stalk is very yellow, and the root is very yellow. And that yellow is like a dye. 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 listening to it. I'm going to 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,

[00:55:43] and I hope you enjoyed this. Thanks for listening. Bye. Hello. This is Sam Coffman with The Human Path at TheHumanPath.com, and in today's podcast, I have a special guest that I'm very pleased to announce. This is an old friend of mine. I first met him when we went through the Special Forces 18 Delta or Medic 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.

[00:56:12] Michael, welcome, and thanks for joining us. Oh, Sam, 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 Medic course together because I get to bust you out a little bit now with your fan base, but just so you all know, everyone kind of respected and at the same time was scared of Sam because he was so brilliant going through the medical course. It was almost like he was never studying, but he always did,

[00:56:40] but he was just so smart that everybody was impressed with him, and that's why whenever he entered the room, we always would say, Sam, and it's kind of stuck ever since. So anyway, good to be chatting with you. Yeah, those, man, those were, 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 what he's got going on and talk.

[00:57:08] I think I've had a few people ask me in emails because they know that Michael and I are friends about his Greenberry Survival Manual, 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 manual 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,

[00:57:38] 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, 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 20 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,

[00:58:04] 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. And 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,

[00:58:34] the book thing, thanks Sam, and that's important to me. And the reason why is very simple. The book is not a technical book on all the different plants, and it's not getting into the weeds on every single fine technique and step for starting a fire in every way that exists. It says, what it's for is that good one over the world view on everything to do with survival.

[00:58:58] And what to me makes it truly special is the fact that outside of the way that it's written, it's 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,

[00:59:28] the harsh decisions. What do you do with the wounded person? You know, what if you do if you got, if you really got gangrene sitting and you got to do an amputation, you know, those types of things, what do you do? What, what are the real pros and cons of cannibalism? No other book addresses those things yet. It's a very common and no 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 it myself. I do it.

[00:59:56] Let me put down those hard one 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 the 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.

[01:00:23] 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 every single want to know how you got the dirt time on, 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, 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,

[01:00:52] because the trauma, the loss of blood and the potential for infection 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's still alive, but he's dying, why don't you go ahead and make peace with him and get his approval. And you'll feel better about it. It'll 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,

[01:01:21] 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, when the book got started, a guy, a publisher who was actually just into survival skills had seen me on a 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.

[01:01:51] And so I just wrote whatever I could think of. And, and lo and behold, he published a whole 670 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, uh, a bridging process harder than the writing process. Cause 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.

[01:02:20] And what do you do? And, um, so that said, uh, the publisher, um, 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 they, that's all they needed. So they actually stopped printing the fat book, which killed me because that one to me obviously was a better book. So, um,

[01:02:50] the demand on the black market went up to like $2,000. People were willing to pay for that, that old book. book. And so finally the publisher decided that even though the stores wouldn't carry the, the big book, they would break protocol and reprint the big book anyway. So they started with the limited run of 3000 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 they reprinted the big book. And the first day it came out, they sold 2,900 of them.

[01:03:19] So now, um, yeah, it's really, really a nice story. So now I went in the bookstore the other day to grab one. Cause believe it or not, I'm out. They don't give them to me. Um, so I went to get one and, uh, 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 soft cover. So it's not as good as the original one, which was a really well bound cloth hard cover. But, um, I think what, 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

[01:03:49] there's a demand. So it's, it's a good little book and it's a good deal. Yeah. When I first, I, I think, I mean, I knew you had written it of course and I'd 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 life. 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 1595. And I went, Oh my God, are you kidding me? I mean, I've paid twice as much for things like the SAS survival manual, soft cover and things like that. And this was a hard cover. And I thought, well, of course I was going to buy it anyway, you know, obviously just to support Michael,

[01:04:18] but I went ahead 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 you, 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 is just, they just totally, they bypass 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,

[01:04:48] because somebody is always going to be hurt, injured attitude problems, you know, the, the, the mumble stumble, grumble tumble, you know, adage, all that stuff that goes into, you know, having to take care of people and attitudes, a big part of that. And you get into the attitude and attitude is really a medic's, 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 has given me a great review. So thank you.

[01:05:17] Okay. So listen, here, here's the dealio for, 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 to go to Germany to have a, I guess, the biggest European outdoor convention for, for distributors, wholesalers are, is going on. And it just so happens that I am buying my brand back from Smoky Mountain Knife Works. So Smoky Mountain Knife Works started by making a knife or two for me.

[01:05:47] 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 28 creative, diverse, survival, and special ops products, mostly knives right now. Um, and, uh, 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 the 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. Cause I got about a hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory.

[01:06:17] I got to sell real fast. So I'm jumping on a plane now. So I only got a couple more minutes to talk, but, uh, about the product line, you can go to a Smoky Mountain Knife Works and look up Michael Hawk and see what I've got available right now. Also, you can check out my brand website, which is, is still being developed. We don't have the storefront completed yet, which is MichaelHawkKnives.com. Um, 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,

[01:06:46] and I got a really cool survival hat that does 16 different survival things. And what's cool about the hat is it's made by door hats, which, uh, butch door makes $10,000 hats for Larry Hagman and all the people of Dallas and all the big wigs and in the industry. And so he makes these handcrafted survival hats for me. So for about 200 bucks, you get a hat that does 16 different survival things.

[01:07:15] And by the way, it happens to be a high quality hat made by a guy who makes $10,000 hats. And that's just because, he and I, uh, had the same Akito 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, I use a little slogan. I say, you know, we have new solutions for old problems, but, um, you know, the reality is, as you well know, Sam, from our special forces days, uh,

[01:07:42] unlike our beloved seal brothers who get, uh, 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, okay, go win the war and we'll see you in 10 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 run. I've created a watch that will no kidding, catch food, start fires,

[01:08:12] 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 $200 version and then you can get the $2,000 version. If you want that one, the watch, I have a hundred dollar version and then a thousand dollar version and a thousand dollar watch is being made by MTM special operations watches. And they make a very high quality, high caliber, uh, you know, fine function Swiss type watch. So, um,

[01:08:42] I've been really blessed with the opportunities to take some of these needs, these, you know, needs that we've experienced from dirt time and, 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 is basically, it's for people who are into this, um, 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,

[01:09:10] special arts and survival skills. So, um, I'm real tickled about all that, but there you go. So that's great. So you're heading over to Germany to do that. And then, uh, what aside from your, your product, can you say a few minutes about what you've got coming up or are you able to talk about, uh, are allowed to? Oh yeah, absolutely. Real, real tickled about that too. And thanks for asking. So, um, I get back from Germany in a couple of days and then I have a couple of days home with, uh, the wife and a little man. And then we go off to, uh, continue filming our new series or travel channel.

[01:09:40] So we have a show that hopefully we'll be starting off in the fall. Um, it has a working title right now, 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 the reason we use a helicopter is because obviously if you're going to get dropped off by a road or a river, well, you know, uh, you're just going to follow those out.

[01:10:10] So, um, we're like, okay, drop us in the middle of nowhere and the real, and then we have to figure out where 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 do a little MacGyver and improvise. And so the concept is to teach people a little bit about, uh, survival along the way. But the main focus is going to be navigating route planning,

[01:10:40] train association, you know, 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, uh, to me special and makes it so that will 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,

[01:11:09] you're sure to see some fireworks when Ruth tells me, I think we need to go north. And I'm like, no hunting lead to go south. And then one of us is going to be wrong. And 10 miles or 10 clicks later, you know, somebody is going to have hell to pay for picking the wrong direction. Right. Yeah. That's a great idea. Good, good idea for sure. And it's, it's just so simple. And what we want to do in, whereas the other show is a little bit more depth and drama. We want this one to be a little bit more fun and challenged.

[01:11:37] So hopefully people will want to get out in the woods with their significant others and say, okay, let's just go out here and let's just kind of figure out how we get out. Um, and, 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 did do a lot of, uh, backflips off of, uh, hilltops and, you know, repelling down waterfalls on, uh, you know, little vines and stuff like, uh, maybe some of the other folk out there do.

[01:12:08] Right. Right. No, this is, 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 10 days. No, weekend after this weekend, we have our, our annual land navigation course. It's a one day course. It's 75 bucks. It's on 4,000 pristine acres. With a spring fed, uh, pond or lake, not upon a lake and a, and a lodge, an old lodge. And you get in the morning, you're doing class. What, what Michael was just talking about their pace count. You learn how to, you learn compass navigation. And in the afternoon, you'll learn all about map reading,

[01:12:37] terrain associations. I saw 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 your, you're 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, we're actually kind of, just kind of short. So if you're in the San Antonio or the Austin or the South Texas area, this is well worth coming out to. So I guarantee you, you will learn more in a day in one day of land navigation than you would from, from, from going out there for a week by yourself and trying to figure it out. Or even if you have the skills,

[01:13:07] you're a backpacker and you know it, we'll still push it. It's intermediate. We have some advanced points out there for you to find too. So it's a great course, but I think that 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 to learn, learn how to read the stars, the moon, the sun and figure out signs of civilization and, and little tricks of the trade. And Michael knows a lot of them. And you're going to watch in his show,

[01:13:35] you're going to learn a lot of that stuff as to how you can just figure out generally, you know, where you are and 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 sure fix for any survival situation is getting out of it. So, and then a lot of people don't realize,

[01:14:05] like Sam and I are green berets. And the entire world in the military considers that the U S army special forces nicknamed green berets, because of the hat we wear are the best navigators that there are because our land navigation course is considered the most difficult navigation course in the world. And the reason is that we do it in North Carolina. And the terrain is very subtle.

[01:14:35] So you have to go long distances through thick terrain in short amount, 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 pace count.

[01:15:03] And you have to do all of 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 you should come on down here, 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 and green in, you know, through the Q course, that the selection and 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 big, one of the biggest ones there is,

[01:15:33] is the biggest hurdles is the land map course. We lose, you know, 50 to 60% 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 nights at nine called, Elite Tactical Unit.

[01:16:02] 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 14 active SWAT officers from around the country. And we put them through a competition where they do realistic missions.

[01:16:31] 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 wins $100,000 for his department and $10,000 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 this show very special is the fact that we're using a technology

[01:17:00] 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, we see the lights and we hear the alarms. But they also get shocked the same as with being hit with a taser gun. We have a little shock pack strapped to their gut. So when they take a hit, they scream like a little girl. And so what that means for us is not only is it more entertaining and keeps it more realistic for the guys because now they can't John Wayne their way through,

[01:17:29] but what's really neat about it is from a production perspective, we can get our cameramen right in the action without worried about them getting hit by some munitions, 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 sweating 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 what those guys do. And I'm very proud of it.

[01:17:57] So if you've got a chance to watch the 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 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 information, some how do we do this. Well, tell you what, I would love to come back again real soon and talk a little bit more about some dirt skills and stuff like that with you.

[01:18:27] 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. Good, man. Good. Yeah, we're all, yeah. We'll just cut that off. So, yeah, that Smoky Mountain thing, dude, it's insane, dude.

[01:18:55] 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 them for a couple years. They've grown almost $5 million every year that he's been with them. And all of a sudden his.

[01:19:27] 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 PrepperBroadcasting.com. Thanks for listening.