Alexis Nikole Nelson: How Foraging Became Weird

Summary

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Humans Podcast — Episode Summary

Episode: Alexis Nikole Nelson: How Foraging Became Weird

Host: Hank Green
Guest: Alexis Nikole Nelson (Black Forager)
Date: July 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the history, cultural perceptions, and resurgence of foraging as both a personal practice and a social phenomenon. Hank Green engages with Alexis Nikole Nelson, a James Beard Award-winning food educator and influential content creator (known online as Black Forager), to explore why foraging—a historically central human behavior—became marginalized and coded as "weird," and how Alexis is helping make it visible and joyful once again. The conversation also covers social media, status, race, trust in science, and the challenges of internet influence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The “Weirdness” of Foraging in Modern Culture (00:00–05:50)

• Hank introduces the concept: Foraging, once a universal human activity, is now considered strange or “other.”
  • "Somewhere along the way, the single most normal behavior in the history of animals became weird for us." (A, 01:50)
• Alexis traces the shift to status and class, especially post-World War II, with agriculture, urbanization, and economic aspiration transforming foraging into a mark of poverty.
  • Notable historical nod: Victory gardens and USDA pamphlets encouraged foraging during WWII.
  • After the war, foraging became associated with marginalized communities—Black and Indigenous Americans, the rural poor.

2. Status, Decline, & Medicinal Foraging (05:50–15:00)

• Foraging’s ties with poverty and its stigmatization in rising suburban, “keeping up with the Joneses” culture.
• The persistence of some foraging traditions in families and regions despite social pressure.
• Discussion on medicinal foraging, its historic links to marginalized (often Black and female) knowledge-holders, subsequent “witchy” connotations, and settler medicine vs. plant-based healing.
  • "A lot of them [enslaved women] were the keepers of that information." (B, 07:34)
• Hank notes many modern pharmaceuticals are still plant-derived, e.g., vincristine from the Madagascar periwinkle.

3. The Nature / Science Misinformation Pipeline (11:08–15:27)

• The risk of sharing knowledge about natural remedies online and falling into the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline.”
  • "I see a literal slip and slide into an abyss... the crunchy to alt right pipeline." (B, 11:20)
• Alexis describes her mission to keep followers grounded in science and avoid conspiracy, addressing distrust in institutions with empathy.
  • "It's always like, hey, not a lot of us get the opportunity to become extraordinarily educated in some of these subjects." (B, 12:43)
• Both reflect on the centrality of trust in healthy societies.

4. Lightning Round — Quick Questions, Fun Answers (16:23–21:37)

• Dandelion: “Friend. But it can be very aggressive.” (B, 16:40)
• Mushrooms: “More animal.” (B, 17:05)
• Pawpaws: Overrated wild food; often taste bad or cause illness if cooked.
  • "So many wild pawpaws are so bad... Cooked pawpaw makes people sick. Oh. Like, a lot of people sick." (B, 19:14–20:01)
• Humans: “are the only animal that can gather enough knowledge to try to positively help the other organisms around them. Like, en masse.” (B, 17:50)

5. The Power of Knowing Nature (21:50–23:29)

• Alexis on how knowing plants makes communities care for them:
  • "We take better care of the things we know." (A, 21:50)
  • Her content aims to rekindle this curiosity.

6. Social Media, Virality, and Attention (23:29–33:39)

• Alexis’ journey: From a handful of Instagram followers in 2020 to explosive TikTok success.
  • Dissonance between content that provides value and what goes viral.
  • “If I look at the top top videos on my TikTok list, none of them are things that I feel like are providing much value for people.” (A, 26:38)
• Food metaphor for information diets: Social media as hyper-palatable, ultra-processed information.
  • "We've created like ultra processed hypersalient information." (A, 28:42)
• The struggle between the desire for attention and the mission to educate.

7. Building a Creative Business & Maintaining Trust (34:02–38:09)

• Ask Hank Segment: Alexis asks for advice on starting and maintaining a company as a content creator and new employer.
  • Hank: "It's about communication, and it's about honest communication. And that's the hard part." (A, 35:38)
  • Openness and honesty are more critical than rigid structure in small teams.

8. Knowledge Acquisition: Scaffolding & Pattern Recognition (38:21–43:54)

• Alexis’ mother is the root of her plant knowledge; early exposure helped her build cognitive “scaffolding.”
  • Learning plant families is a “cheat code” for recognizing new species.
  • "Once you learn a certain amount of plant families, you kind of have a cheat code to go about anywhere else in the world..." (B, 40:55)
• The necessity of a trusted non-expert (like a partner) as a sounding board.

9. Land, Race, and Foraging Access in America (44:26–52:22)

• Discussion of how, in the U.S., access to land—and thus to foraging—has long been racialized.
  • Many original laws criminalizing trespass after emancipation targeted Black autonomy and survival skills.
    • "The way that they figured in South Carolina first to stop this was to cut off people of color from being able to forage on land that wasn’t theirs. They made trespass a criminal offense..." (B, 50:00)
  • These restrictions spread north with the Great Migration, and compounded with informal exclusion (e.g., sundown towns).
  • Foraging now sometimes connotes high status, as "access to wild spaces" is limited by race and wealth.

10. Foraging Today: What’s Possible & What’s Next (52:22–62:00)

• U.S. National Parks often still allow personal foraging within limits, e.g., Glacier National Park berries.
• Urban and suburban spaces can be full of forageable food.
  • “You don’t need access to a huge swath of land to do some foraging.” (A, 54:19)
• Stories about local and regional foraging, and Alexis’ love of urban ecology—connection with one’s local environment.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the weirdness of foraging:
  "Somewhere along the way, the single most normal behavior in the history of animals became weird for us.” — Hank, (01:50)

• On privilege and foraging:
  “A lot of that comes back to this kind of commodification of access to wild spaces. And who has access to wild spaces. Who gets in trouble when they are doing things they maybe shouldn't be doing on public lands?" — Alexis, (45:18)

• On the slippery slope from 'natural' to science denial:
  "I see a literal slip and slide into an abyss. And that is my brain's manifestation of the crunchy to alt right pipeline." — Alexis, (11:20)

• On the human relationship to other living things:
  "Humans are the only animal that can gather enough knowledge to try to positively help the other organisms around them. Like, en masse." — Alexis, (17:50)

• On education and care for place:
  "We take better care of the things we know." — Alexis, (21:50)

• On what keeps her hopeful:
  "I think I've always been very hopeful about the human race and our propensity to recognize problems and try our darndest to understand them and fix them." — Alexis, (58:02)

• On every ecosystem’s hidden diversity:
  “Every ecosystem has so much wonder and so much more diversity hiding within it than you think it does... If people were living there before you and the city that you know as you know it, foraging was possible there.” — Alexis, (59:52–60:32)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–05:50: Theme setup — the normalcy and subsequent weirdness of foraging
• 13:17–16:08: Trust, misinformation, and importance of trust in society
• 16:23–21:37: Lightning round Q&A
• 21:50–23:29: Idea that “we take better care of the things we know”
• 23:29–28:42: Social media virality, content, and attention economy
• 34:02–38:09: Challenges in starting a company as a creator (Ask Hank segment)
• 44:22–52:22: Racism, land access, and the criminalization of foraging
• 59:52–62:00: Closing reflections: wonder, connection, and the possibility of foraging everywhere

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Flow & Tone

• The conversation is energetic, thoughtful, and permeated with Alexis’ humor and passion for plants (“Plants are so cool!”).
• Hank’s tone is both inquisitive and self-deprecating, drawing on his own experiences as a creator and cancer patient.
• Both reflect with gentle skepticism and hope on humanity’s choices regarding the environment, community, and knowledge.
• The final moments are an encouraging call to reconnect with the non-human world around us, wherever we live.

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Recommended Listening Segments

• [03:02–05:50]: Alexis on the status decline and racialization of foraging in 20th century America
• [21:50]: “We take better care of the things we know”
• [50:00–52:22]: History of how post-emancipation laws criminalized foraging for Black Americans
• [59:52–60:32]: Alexis’ core message about the abundance of hidden edible biodiversity everywhere

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For more on Alexis Nikole Nelson’s work, look for her cookbook, ‘Happy Snacking, Don’t Die,’ and follow Black Forager on social media.

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Transcript

[A]

This is humans. Humans, Humans, humans, humans, humans. I'm Hank Green. I often think about how this show is a chance to take something that seems really like a background, normal part of our lives, like social media or math or stand up comedy, and then zoom way into it or way out from it so that we can see how super weird that thing actually is. But there are some things that are actually the opposite of this. There are things that have been deemed super weird by our current world that are actually extremely normal when it comes to the history of humans or just the history of living things. So for a little while, everything on Earth was what's called an autotroph, something that makes its own energy from natural sources like the sun or chemicals around hydrothermal vents. But then there's the second thing that started to happen. Organisms that get their energy by figuring out how to find, consume and digest the autotrophs. And this is very normal. It's just how animals do it. We go out into the world and we either eat the plants or we eat the animals that ate the plants. Now, humans do this kind of foraging very rarely. Mostly we get our food by going to buildings that contain food that has been grown by humans specifically, specifically to send to the buildings so that we can get it from the buildings. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. This keeps a lot of people fed. But all that food came from plants and animals that are descended from wild ancestors. And very importantly, not all of the food that we used to forage ended up in some form at the grocery store. Some of it is still out there, growing through sidewalk cracks, hanging over fences, carpeting the woods at the edge of town. Completely edible, completely free, and almost completely, completely invisible. Somewhere along the way, the single most normal behavior in the history of animals became weird for us. And my guest today has made it her life's work and one of the most joyful corners of the Internet to make it normal again. Alexis Nicole Nelson, known to millions as Black Forager, is a James Beard Award winning food educator who has turned Eating youg Lawn into must watch Entertainment for nearly 10 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and and YouTube. She first foraged at the age of 5 when her mom pointed out onion grass in the garden. And in 2020, she turned a lifetime of plant knowledge and a theater degree's worth of showmanship into one of the fastest growing accounts on the Internet. Her first cookbook, Happy Snacking, Don't Die, comes out this September. I want to talk to her about how foraging became weird. Who made it Weird. And why? What it's like to ride an exploding algorithm into a life that you did not plan. And what happens to a person's brain the first time they realized the weed in the sidewalk is food? Alexis Nicole Nelson, thanks for coming on. Humans. How did foraging get weird?

[B]

Oh, my gosh, Hank, what a wonderful opening question. Cause as you just mentioned, foraging, if you go back far enough in anyone's lineage, you're gonna find a forager. It's the reason we're all here.

[A]

I mean, even when we were doing agriculture, we were still doing foraging.

[B]

We were still doing foraging.

[A]

It was not like we just swapped one day.

[B]

Well, agriculture was definitely, I think, the first nail in the coffin. And for a while, it was the one nail in the coffin. People were still foraging. They just didn't need to as much. Yeah. Because instead they had this really nice, pretty reliable, you know, still have droughts, still have pests like locusts, but pretty reliable food source, which then you could just supplement with all of the cool wild things that you would find or. Or trap or fish. But I like zooming in specifically on the 20th century, because even here in the United States, you still saw foraging being a pretty important part of a lot of households day to day. Granted, a lot of people were moving into cities. So for those people, foraging was already on the decline. We saw a little uptick during World War II with rationing. A lot of folks were encouraged to try to rediscover wild weeds that were edible that they may have started to forget about. George Washington Carver's last published work was a pamphlet for the USDA to hand out to women across the country to supplement their victory gardens with foraging. So it was like the patriotic thing to do, but also it still kind of had the connotation of being something that poor people and people of color were doing more than anybody else. Like black folks, especially in the American south, indigenous folks all across North America, and a lot of poor folks, especially in, like, Appalachia and my neck of the woods, were still foraging. And a lot of people's livelihoods were still dependent on aspects of foraging, like the American chestnut, which is a whole other tragedy that we may not even have time to get into today. But after World War II and with the rise of the American suburbs and the rise of this idea of keeping up with the Joneses, suddenly foraging became a very othered activity. It was something that went straight back to being so heavily associated with poverty that if you were trying to fit in in a lot of these new ticky tacky house, white picket fence communities. Sure. You couldn't be in the ditch going and gathering cattail hearts, or else like, Martha down the street's gonna gossip about you at the next hot dish brunch or what have you.

[A]

So it really is. I mean, as is so much a status thing.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. It was the cool thing to have the refrigerator and to go to the grocery store to get all of these cool new processed foods for your family. And so it really. It fell out of fashion even within the communities that kind of had a stronghold on it, because those communities were already being othered. The last thing that you want to do is add a whole other reason for people to feel prejudiced towards you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So, you know, a lot of people just stopped doing it. Now, some things stood the test of time. My dad's family's from Mississippi. Harvesting pokeweed to make poke salad in the spring has still lasted through my dad's family. That was another early forageable that I learned about as a kid. But you definitely don't see folks going out and at any time during the growing season being like, aha. And it's lamb's quarters season, and I know exactly where it's growing. Yeah.

[A]

Which would have been a normal. A super normal thing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And also I kind of get the impression that as agriculture was happening, we kept foraging for medicinal herbs.

[B]

Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

[A]

And this almost has, like, a connotation that has escaped the status barrier where it's like, ooh, this is like, I'm kind of a mystical knowledge.

[B]

I'm a cool knowledge keeper. And mysticism and herbalism. And, you know, and unfortunately, I do think in a way that attitude also set us back, but in an ethnobotanical and ethno botanical, pharmaceutical way.

[A]

Ooh, tell me more.

[B]

Oh, my gosh. Well, how far back do we wanna go? If you go back to right before the Civil War in the United States.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

There was a really heavy association of municipal plant knowledge with enslaved women. A lot of them were the keepers of that information. A lot of families would honestly trust women working on their plantations more than they would sometimes trust like the doctor who wanted to put leeches on your leg.

[A]

I did a scishow once on how George Washington died, and, boy, the doctors weren't part of it getting better.

[B]

No, they were not. No, they were not.

[A]

Oh, God.

[B]

And a lot of these folks were like, I don't know. When she made me a tea, my fever went away. And you want to cut me open.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Without any anesthesia, because that's not a thing yet.

[A]

And you also don't know about germs?

[B]

Nope, nope. Not at all.

[A]

Not that I do, but, like. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And that is association. That kind of witchy, predominantly female association. As we were moving into rapidly modernizing medicine, moving into the 20th century, really made a lot of folks just not take any of it seriously. And so I do think it's taken a really long time for folks to be like, oh, maybe we do actually need to look at all of the different actives and even some of the what we consider to not be actives in all of these places and start getting a better idea of how these mechanisms do or don't interact with the human body. So, once again, if we survive, that'll be a cool thing to watch science continue to do.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. The medicine that I took for, like, my chemotherapy medicine, of the four main chemotherapies I took, three are directly derived from natural substances, two from bacteria, but one from a flower.

[B]

Ooh, wait, which one?

[A]

It's called vincristine. They've literally got greenhouses full of these Madagascar periwinkles that they crush up and they derive the chemotherapy drug from. Now, today, it's still done that way, and then they put it in you, and it hurts you very badly.

[B]

It hurts you real bad, but it hurts the cancer worse.

[A]

Way more. Yeah.

[B]

And that's the difference.

[A]

That's the difference. But, yeah, there is all of this very interesting knowledge, and I worked on this when I was in undergrad. I worked on a traditional Japanese herb that had immune modulation effects.

[B]

Wait, which one?

[A]

Hey, it was from pine bark. Really?

[B]

Which pine species? Okay, we may not have time to get super detailed.

[A]

Yeah, I don't know if actually this is the Japanese one, but it was Pinus parviflora was what we were.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so cool. Plants are so cool.

[A]

I say pinus because I wouldn't want to say pinus.

[B]

No, Though it is tempting. Every time. Every time. The species Pinus strobus. I just want to say penis strobus every time because it just sounds silly

[A]

to say we have a good time here. So there was a different kind of othering that went along with the medicinal knowledge. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about this until I was prepping for this interview, but you're, like, a big advocate for nature and for natural food, and there's a really tight parallel between that and a different thing that sounds very similar, that it happens on the same Platforms that you occupy that leads people down to the raw milk and then to the avoiding vaccination and then denying chemotherapy or denying other medical treatments.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

And I am very curious how you imagine your place on these platforms talking about natural food.

[B]

I think in my mind I see a literal slip and slide into an abyss. And that is my brain's manifestation of the crunchy to alt right pipeline.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which I think about all the time.

[A]

Good.

[B]

It's like you don't, you don't need to go down that way. I'm like the single person in the red rover line sometimes in a conversation,

[A]

just sticking your hands out to the

[B]

side as far as they can possibly go.

[A]

I will be strong for you, America,

[B]

because yeah, in especially the foraging space and ooh boy, golly, especially if you want to talk about anything medicinally active in plants that a person can isolate on their own. It is so easy to have an interest in that. Plus and often like sometimes justified wariness or like lack of understanding or sometimes distrust of people working in the sciences and let those negative feelings overtake your curiosity and push you down the slip and slide into the abyss of science denial and medicine denial.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And part of that for me is having a lot of very like honest and frank conversations with people who follow me, because I do. I always want to understand where people are coming from and I always want them to know that my conversations with them are never coming from a place of condescension or a place of shame. It's always like, hey, not a lot of us get the opportunity to become extraordinarily educated in some of these subjects.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And that's okay. And that's how it's always going to be. But like, let's chat about where some of these fears are coming from because sometimes they're from understandable places. And let's talk about how you can still maybe have some of those worries, but also have some trust in a lot of scientists, a lot of doctors, medical professionals who honestly just want to keep people healthy and make the world a better place. I always imagine it must just be like really exhausting to be that worried about that many people.

[A]

Wait, about that many people? What do you mean?

[B]

So right now I'm not sure when this is going to go live, but right now, right when we're recording, I just made a post talking about a really popular kind of myth going around about Alpha Gal and Lyme disease and other tick borne issues. And the thing that I think made me really sad was how many people who were Very vocal in the comments. Are just like, well, I don't trust anybody at the CDC or anyone in the government or anyone who works in a standard medical facility. I'm like, dang, that's a lot of people who are working really hard to not trust to make the world a better place to not trust.

[A]

Yeah. I saw somebody criticizing me on social media yesterday and they were saying, Hank Green's the kind of guy who thinks that doctors are good people who are trying to help. And I was like. And you're like, yes, yeah, I am. That's. You got me figured it out.

[B]

Literally. Yes, I am alive. Because. Yes.

[A]

Anyway, you're not. Not critical of the systems of our

[B]

world, you know, no, we have plenty of reasons to be critical of a lot of systems.

[A]

But I do feel as if that stuff travels so much further and so much more easily that even criticisms that are not very good or, you know, that are not nuanced or just are made up can travel just as far. And that really does just make trust disappear. And trust is, you know, if you study human societies, trust is it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, we can't do it without trust.

[B]

It's the thing that's kind of binding us all together. It's why, yeah. Religion be important because it help people have system they can trust.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Throughout whole society.

[A]

And then. And then beyond that, you have that sort of national story of the nation together, which I like. You know, I go in for it.

[B]

It's one of those things where I'm like, yeah, shouldn't that be what we're like, striving for? Despite the fact that so many people have been disadvantaged and taken advantage of and are hit? But like, shouldn't we still have that shining goal for all of us that were like slow motion ROCKY music playing Moving towards right.

[A]

Moving towards. So, Alexis, I want to talk to you in just a second about why we take better care of the things we know. But first, I want to do our first segment. We're going to have two segments in this episode. I think this is the first episode where we have two segments.

[B]

New thing, New thing.

[A]

Our first segment is going to be the lightning round. I want to ask you a bunch of questions. I hope that these will be relatively easy for you. Probably they will be sometimes hard, but I'll start out with an easy one. Dandelion. Friend or foe?

[B]

Friend. But it can be very aggressive.

[A]

It can be.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It can be pawpaw or acorn.

[B]

Acorn.

[A]

Most overrated. Wild food.

[B]

Paw. Paw. Don't come for me. Wow.

[A]

Are mushrooms more. I'm gonna move on. We gotta move on. It's high in the ground. Are mushrooms more plant or more animal?

[B]

More animal.

[A]

Best season to forage?

[B]

Mid fall.

[A]

Best smell.

[B]

Common milkweed flowers.

[A]

Do you think there are aliens?

[B]

Can I say I hope there are aliens? Just because it keeps things more interesting. And I would unfortunately, find the universe extremely more boring if there aren't.

[A]

Yeah. What did you waste too much time worrying about five years ago?

[B]

Five years ago. My views on TikTok.

[A]

All right, and finish this sentence with the first thing that comes to your mind. Humans are the only animal that can

[B]

gather enough knowledge to try to positively help the other organisms around them. Like, en masse.

[A]

You gotta make me cry.

[B]

We're capable of such good things.

[A]

Yeah. We don't just help each other. We do actually sometimes help other animals.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, and other animals do that, but not, like, you know, systematically.

[B]

I watched a kid in my neighborhood help an earthworm cross the sidewalk yesterday in the rain. Like, we have this capacity to learn, and we very frequently use that information to help. So.

[A]

You said pawpaws were overrated. And this is a surprise to me because it seemed to me like that's one of your. Well, you're a fan of. But you said it quickly. You were ready to go.

[B]

I can be excited about something and also not like eating them.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Okay. Pawpaws. Very exciting. We love a large native fruit, especially one that looks so tropical. All of the rest of the members of its genus and family are more tropical plants. It is a remnant of getting pushed up here during different climate changes and then never making its way back down. The giant sloths loved them. The mammoths loved them. There are some named cultivars that we have created over the last 100 years that are a delightful eating experience. So many wild pawpaws are so bad.

[A]

Sure. It's like finding a crab apple, you know?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah. Just because apples are bad doesn't mean apples are bad.

[B]

Yeah. And it's like, sometimes you find a crab apple that you're like, dang, that's a good crabapple. The unfortunate part with pawpaws is if you cook with them, and we literally do not understand why this happens yet, and I'm going to bully someone into making this, their dissertation. Cooked pawpaw makes people sick. Oh. Like, a lot of people sick. And I did not used to be one of those people, and neither was my fiance. And one year, we made pawpaw bread in the same way you make banana bread. Just as we had every year prior. And we both thought we were gonna die.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

And we don't know why it happens. And every year, people. If I post about pawpaws, people will be in the comments and being like, I know you said it, but say it one more time. That people should not cook them, because I didn't listen to you last year and I cooked them and it was bad. Tastes great. The stomach cramps are insane.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And there isn't any ethnobotanical history of cooking or drying to preserve them like they were a treat that was enjoyed fresh while they were in season by, like, all of the different bands and tribes within their native growing range that we have any information from. Yeah. So it feels like people knew from the jump.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But people get so excited about something that's like a banana and, like, a mango, but from here. And I tell them, you can treat it in a lot of mango ways. Make a lossy. You know, if you get one of the ones that doesn't taste bad, taste like, I'm not even gonna. That we're in polite company. So I'm not even gonna say the kind of bad that it tastes like, but just not great. It's almost kind of fun loving something from a purely botanical standpoint and not from, like, a food standpoint. I'm just like, oh, man, one of my favorite butterflies needs you to survive. And your leaves smell like bell peppers when they're crushed. And so many things love eating your fruits, and I'm just not always one of them.

[A]

Yeah. Things don't have to be edible for me to enjoy them.

[B]

Exactly. Which is another thing that I'm trying to ease into my content little by little. Like, what if we actually also thought things were cool without immediately being like, so how do I eat that?

[A]

So there's a quote I love from you. A follower told you that recognizing a plant on a walk made their neighborhood feel cooler and happier. And you said, we take better care of the things we know. Is that kind of the whole thing you're doing? Yes.

[B]

I've been caught, and now I just run into the sunset. Yeah. That's the whole point. I get that. I'm a forager who lives in Ohio. I don't have access to the same plants that a lot of other people around the world have access to. But I'm just hoping that in showing people how much biodiversity and abundance is around me, someone who lives in, like, downtown Columbus, Ohio.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

That that will get them curious about what could be hiding in plain sight around them. And I think tapping into that little bit of curiosity, something that a lot of us adults especially get a little out of practice with, I see it much more with like the kids in my neighborhood following around behind me when I have my basket, wanting to know everything that I'm gathering and what I'm gonna do with everything. Whereas, you know, the other adults in the neighborhood are just like, and there's Alexis and there's her basket and I hope she's having a good time.

[A]

Every neighborhood has a weirdo.

[B]

Every neighborhood has a weirdo. And I took it upon myself to be that for my neighborhood.

[A]

That's an important thing to remember. Every neighborhood has a weirdo.

[B]

And if you don't know who the weirdo is in your neighborhood, I am very sorry to tell you it is you.

[A]

So you got big on TikTok during a moment when that was happening to a bunch of people, including me. I had already been a famous Internet person to some extent, but TikTok was wild. It was the pandemic. We were all trying to figure out how to live a life with a lot less physical interaction and a lot of people were doing that along with us. And there was just all this excitement around this new platform. You had like 200 Instagram followers in 2020 and.

[B]

Yeah, and I knew like all of them and they were all other followers.

[A]

You were making foraging content then. Were you making like very similar to what you're making now?

[B]

No, not at all. It was very blog adjacent. I had finally stopped white knuckling Tumblr and I was like, I'm going to just pretend that I'm still there. I miss her.

[A]

Uh huh. She's still doing it. She's still, she's still got, she's got a little juice there on Tumblr.

[B]

Oh yeah, I'm back on occasion.

[A]

It's my brother's favorite social media platform.

[B]

And so I was just, you know, a lot of beautiful high contrast, top down food photography and plant images. I was like, if I just take all of these pictures as if they are going into Bon Appetit and then I write my little essays underneath. This'll be great. And I just get to keep track of all my favorite recipes for me. And if other people wanna follow along, that is great.

[A]

And then you did something where that changed. Did you have like a first hit?

[B]

Because we're friends here, I'll tell you about my actual first viral video. Cause what I normally tell people is. Yeah, you know, around early April of 2020, everyone's been inside for two weeks, everybody's stir crazy. People are dousing their bags of groceries with disinfectant when they get home because we didn't know how this particular novel coronavirus worked yet. So I was like, oh, well. A way that we're stretching our groceries is by me going and foraging all of these different leafy greens that are in season around my city, neighborhood. Come along with me and I'll introduce you to five of them. And that video did good and fine. It did get like 40,000 likes, which at that time was crazy for me. But I did have a video that went viral six months earlier than that, unfortunately.

[A]

Oh, for bad reasons.

[B]

Just for annoying reasons mostly. There were two individuals who made a trending TikTok sound that essentially during the primaries was please don't make me vote for Joe Biden. But them repeating that over and over and over again over a dance beat.

[A]

Uh huh. I remember this.

[B]

Yeah. And I just danced to it. And that got like a million views like that. And I was pissed. And I still had to vote for him. So it wasn't even worth anything.

[A]

Well, isn't that the way of almost everything that pops off? Like if I look at the top top videos on my TikTok list, none of them are things that I feel like are providing much value for people.

[B]

No, never. And every time I'm like, I'm just gonna throw something up because I don't wanna lose the good graces of the algorithm. And it takes me five seconds to put it together. The algorithm's like, oh, this? Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Delicious.

[A]

I saw one of these from you just today or yesterday, which was, somebody better do something about this climate change thing or I'm gonna give the Lorax a gun. And I'm like, that's what you need if you're gonna get 2 million views.

[B]

You gotta do that, unfortunately. And I'm like, but it can't always be this.

[A]

It's so interesting to me because you and I both are trying to do both of the things. Like we're trying to capture the attention. Like, of course we are. And we're trying to, once we have it, do good things with it. And I think that like, you know, in terms of the bulk of the views in aggregate, most of my content is doing good work. But in terms of the ones that go the farthest that reach the most people, those are never the ones that are doing good work. Maybe very occasionally.

[B]

And it makes me a little big sad. I get big sad in the back of my head for just a second because I'm like, oh yeah. That is what this application is prioritizing. Oof.

[A]

Yeah. It's kind of what people want, but it's what people want in the most. Like the same way that I want a peanut. M and M instead of a peanut, you know?

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. Just the most base part of yourself that's just like me need calories and me need not boredom, please.

[A]

Me need not boredom. I think about the information environment through the food metaphor often.

[B]

Same same here. Very frequently.

[A]

Yeah. Like we have these ultra processed foods and the real problem isn't so much what they're made of, it's how like much you want to eat them.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And how they're like designed to make you keep eating them.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And that's what the information environment is like where it's like we've created like ultra processed hypersalient information information. Yeah.

[B]

I love that we're starting to use the phrase hyper palatable foods instead of like ultra processed. Because that's really what it is.

[A]

And people don't wanna hear that though. They wanna think that there's like some chemical that got put in the food

[B]

that we can consume.

[A]

That chemical is the problem.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

The problem is that it tastes too good.

[B]

It tastes too good. It tastes too good. And like, listen, I am a forager. I probably eat a lot more roughage than the average American. But I also ate a brown sugar cinnamon pop tart this morning. Cause I was craving one and I have been for the last week.

[A]

That was gotta be one of my lightning round questions was what's a food that you recently ate that would make your audience gasp?

[B]

That one. So we got the answer to that anyway. Oh man. Hyper palatable foods.

[A]

I'm not surprised that you ended up on this very similar metaphor. But it's weird to be engaging in it. And also your first viral video kind of being this, you know, vacuous attention object. Just attention holding object for a brief period of time before you move on to the next attention holding object.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Do you sometimes feel like the attention is a goal in itself? That can happen to me.

[B]

I love attention. Did stand up comedy theater kid. Theater kid.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Love a little spotlight. Love some little eyes on me with approving glances.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

But also I had been working in corporate marketing before, just completely transitioning into doing my own content, working on my cookbook, et cetera, et cetera. So I was kind of getting this view every single day, this constant feedback loop of just purely attention grabbing content versus Content that's actually trying to tell some story, or in the case of when you work in corporate marketing, trying to tell a story to hope that people buy the thing that people at your company have spent so much time trying to make and get them to buy. And I do think that sometimes my goal is attention because in that space I saw the importance of having to punctuate all of these story posts with an attention grabber. When I was doing the weird marketing summit circuit, I would talk to people in terms of audience builders and community retainers.

[A]

Oh, boy, this is so great that we independently arrived on this same thing. It's one of the biggest pieces of advice I ever give to creators is I'm looking at your channel and the only thing you're doing is building audience. The only thing you're doing is trying to get views. If you think that a video where you try and deepen your relationship with your audience is a failure because it doesn't get as many views, you are going to fail.

[B]

Exactly. And maybe not fail in an immediate sense.

[A]

You won't have the lifespan. It's so hard.

[B]

I think you burn out faster when that's the only metric that you're chasing. On social.

[A]

Yeah. You want to feel some obligation to the people you want to actually be. Have that connection there.

[B]

Exactly. You want to feel like you've built this group of folks that you can have productive, enlightening and inspiring conversations with, but you are also trying to make that little group bigger. So absolutely, you know, give the Lorax a gun. I was like, well, that's gonna lasso in couple thousand more people across the channels.

[A]

Yeah. Gonna get a million views and 1/1,000th of them are gonna become people who are interested in what I'm doing. And like, that's the saddest marketing funnel that you could ever imagine. But that's what we're dealing with.

[B]

That's what we're dealing with. It's the name of the game.

[A]

They're there to replace the thousand people who are falling out and moving on to some other thing.

[B]

Yeah. Or the thousand people who are stronger than me and leaving social media.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Every time I see someone in real life and they're just like, oh, I miss your content. But I got rid of my social media, I put a hand on their shoulder and go, do not miss me.

[A]

Yeah, do. Yes. Move. Move on with your life, please.

[B]

Forget this place.

[A]

Forget me. Go on, go on, go on without me. I absolutely hear you saying that both are the work.

[B]

Yeah, both are the work.

[A]

But, like, you are also, to some extent, following your nature of love in a little spotlight.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[A]

I want to ask you how you got all of this knowledge in your head, and I want to talk a little bit more about American history of foraging to cap off our conversation. But first, I want you to ask me your question for Hank. It's our second segment. Everybody ask Hank a question.

[B]

Ask Hank a question. So my question for you, as another content creator, talking to someone who has created not only a lot of content, but also a lot of company around a lot of that content. How do you start and maintain a company without accidentally ruining it? I just hired my first. First employee, shout out to Lexi. I'm scared.

[A]

What are you afraid of?

[B]

Ruining my interpersonal relationship with my friend who works for me now with Lexi.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. This is always hard. Yeah.

[B]

I don't know. I could trip and fall and mess up a tax form, and then the IRS will steal me in the night.

[A]

Okay. They'll fine you. As far as I can tell, that's what happens. I've paid some IRS fines.

[B]

What if I'm a bad boss? Yeah.

[A]

So what you. I mean, basically what you're asking is how be good boss?

[B]

How be good boss?

[A]

You know, I have worked very closely with close friends. I've hired and worked with close friends. I've hired and worked with people who I know because they were fans, which is even more fraught, and you have to be even more careful with that.

[B]

Is the thing I'm the most afraid of.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, definitely do like Peyton, who manages all of my social media. Started as, like, a, you know, Peyton.

[B]

I love Peyton. Yeah, we ate pizza together in Maine. Love Peyton.

[A]

She was, like, in my Twitter mentions for years before I met her first in real life. And so figuring that out, really, it's about communication, and it's about honest communication. And that's the hard part. It's hard with friends. It's hard with not friends. It's hard because you and I both, and also most creators, got into it because we want to be liked. And that means that you'll put off the hard decisions for too long. You'll put off the hard conversations for too long. And I've done that a million times, and I'm still not as good at it as I should be. But that's the thing. That's a. That's, like 100% the thing. Because you're. You know that you're trying. You know that your staff is trying. Like, nobody on a small team is Just sort of like punching card and not doing any work, you know?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like everybody's trying. And so in that situation where it's really small, and this is much different than if you've got like a 80 or 200 person organization and like there's lots of. You don't have to think about that yet. There's time if you're going to someday, and I don't suggest you do, but if it ever happens to happen, you have time to figure that out. But for right now, it's really about everybody being on the same page all the time. And that's much easier when you're talking about fewer than five people. That's the sort of group where you can really all be on the same page all the time and you don't have to start building structures around being on the same page. So instead of structure, what you have is honesty and openness.

[B]

Such a good answer. It's not the magic wand answer that I was maybe hoping for, but it

[A]

makes so much stuff better because as we were saying earlier, it's all based on trust. Everything's trust. Yeah.

[B]

It's almost like good things are work. It's almost like good things are work.

[A]

Right. But I will say the process of building a organization is also creative work. It is not just the sort of boring structure stuff that you think of. When you think of business school, you're always trying to figure out some problem and the solutions are often non obvious.

[B]

You mean I'm not going to turn into an Excel spreadsheet when I fill out my first 1099?

[A]

You should get good at spreadsheets because they are one of the most amazing tools that humans have ever created.

[B]

That's why I hired Lexi. Complexity knows all the codes and all of the secret words to whisper to Excel. I don't. I'm scared.

[A]

All right. You hosted Crash course Botany for Complexly. You have won awards for your science communication. Somehow I don't actually know why you know these things.

[B]

Who are you? Who are you?

[A]

How did you learn this stuff is there.

[B]

I just open my head and it's just a computer the whole time.

[A]

Yeah. Okay.

[B]

So I guess my weird kid origin story is from a very young age. The hobby that I shared with my mother was plants. Whether it was the plants that she was putting purposefully into our yard when I was growing up or the weeds that were coming up and me learning them as we were pulling them alongside each other as I got older, me and my mom would take walks around the neighborhood on nice evenings. And she would quiz me on the species of plants growing in our neighbors yards. Cool. Much in the same way as when you start a child really early on a musical instrument or start a child really early in dual languages, you form a lot of pathways and recognize a lot of patterns that other people might not or like, may not recognize as quickly. And I do have to contend with this frequently. I will frequently gut check things with my fiance and be like, if I describe the plant like this, is that enough information for I beat every science

[A]

communicator I know who has a partner. And also many comedians I know who have partners. Their partner is the sounding board. It's so weird to have this relationship where you're like walking up to this person all the time and you're like, so Katherine, I want to tell you some facts about chickens right now and you need to tell me which ones are the best ones.

[B]

Yes. I was like, so, Jeffrey, I'm going to say some words at you and when I'm done, you need to tell me where I lost you. And he's wonderful about that. And so for me, I think I had the foundations laid by my mother inadvertently. I think for her, she was just like, well, I know the thing that me and this small child have in common and we are on a long walk. She also had a ton of books on plants in our house, mostly on ones that you would have in gardens, garden variety plants. We had a couple books on a bunch of different rows, species and varieties. And I just inhaled all of those books by the time I was like 12 or 13 years old. And what's really great about that is once you learn a certain amount of plant families, you kind of have a cheat code to go about anywhere else in the world and be like, ah, I see all of these tells for this plant family and this plant. So I already know a little bit about you and it will not be hard for me to go and find more information about you. And that helps a lot both with knowledge acquisition and keeping it all filed away in little organized cabinets up in Ye Olde Noggin. Don't ask me anything else. If you ask me anything from any of my like Ochem or Diffy Q that Nope, that's gone. That's absolutely gone.

[A]

Look, I think it's doing something in there, you know, that's always my perspective is like, I don't remember any reaction mechanisms, but I feel like I know what an orbital is.

[B]

Yep. Like if someone asked me to explain the two different chemical reactions in the two types of photosynthesis. Like, I could not give you the exact. No numbers for anything, but I could explain to you what's going on. Yeah.

[A]

You know that there's chemical reactions happening, which is huge. You know, that's huge. If you need to. It's on the Internet, you know, and you don't. That's the other thing. You don't need to.

[B]

Oh, man. So, yeah, so that's just. I like to joke that the plant knowledge saves so easy because everything else saves so not easy.

[A]

Well, yeah, I think that what it is. And I've talked about this on the show before, but it's scaffolding. Like, you just have a lot of scaffolding built up around plant stuff. And so there's always, like, a niche that a new fact can hang off of.

[B]

Exactly. And it. Yeah. Makes it really easy to recall things. And it's a really cool party trick when you're hiking in the middle of the forest in Japan with one of your friends, and you're like, I know what genus that guy's in. And she's like, you've never been here before.

[A]

Yeah, I don't need to have been.

[B]

Look at its leaflets. How can you not know?

[A]

My son was talking to his grandmother. He said, he's a know it all, of course. And he said, what's a famous kind of tree that isn't a tree? And his grandmother didn't have an answer. And he said, a palm tree.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then he said. He said, they're monocots. And I was like, whoa, they are monocots, buddy.

[B]

They're just big grass.

[A]

Do you know what monocot means? And he said, yeah, it means that they have one Cottledon. And I was like, oh, that's very cute.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

That was only cute for people who know botany. But it's called a cotyledon, so clearly he's read that word. But he's. Yeah.

[B]

Oren.

[A]

That's so.

[B]

That was very good. Oh, my God.

[A]

I was like, I'm not even gonna correct you.

[B]

That's great. No, there will be a biology or a botany teacher in the future that will just be, like, happy that he knows it already and will, like, very surreptitiously pronounce it correctly right after. And then we'll be good.

[A]

I think, honestly, that his biology or botany teacher will be annoyed by him from day one. We'll find out. We'll find out. We really need to, in the greenhousehold, be very clear about the words. Well, actually.

[B]

Which is. But it's when you're nine, sometimes he doesn't know.

[A]

But I'm like, we have a family reputation to keep intact here. Okay. So we were talking at the top about the sort of status that became tied with not foraging, and the lack of status that became tied with foraging, whether that was people of color, formerly enslaved people, or just people in poverty. And this all makes sense. You know, it just. It sucks, and it feels like a thing that would happen. Interestingly, it now seems like foraging is kind of like a cute little fun thing that, like, wealthier white people do like, sort of.

[B]

I wouldn't say.

[A]

I don't know if I want to say wealthy, I want to say. But I do want to say higher status.

[B]

Yeah. A lot of people with an elevated socioeconomic status now seem to like partaking

[A]

in foraging, which is nothing wrong with it.

[B]

They like paying a lot of money to go to restaurants that partook in the foraging for you. And a lot of that. I honestly think that a lot of that comes back to this kind of commodification of access to wild spaces. And who has access to wild spaces. Who gets in trouble when they are doing things they maybe shouldn't be doing on public lands? Because a lot of times people of

[A]

color, it's not okay for some folks, and it kind of is for some.

[B]

Oh, yeah. And so much of it comes down to race, Comes down to people calling rangers on some people who are doing an activity that they can't immediately identify.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Versus this kind of inherent trustworthiness that a lot of people, especially people in outdoor spaces, tend to give to people who, quote, unquote, look like they belong there.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

So now it's become cool and neat. And also, because a lot of places technically do not allow you to forage, the people who can forage are frequently people who own land or have family members or friends who are also landowners. And that here in the United States, especially at this point in time, comes with a degree of socioeconomic status that many people do not have.

[A]

Yeah. I don't know if you've ever done this, but I was in England visiting my mom's friend who was, like, the exchange student when she was growing up in her house. And so, like, yeah, it's really cool.

[B]

That's.

[A]

And they have a house that's, like, in the south of England. We, like, went for a walk, and I was like, whose land is this? And she was like, oh, that guy's. And I was like. But, like, we didn't go through a gate. This isn't public land. And she's like, we don't do that in England. You can walk on any farm you want to.

[B]

Oh, yeah. All the free to roam countries. How does it feel to be living my dream?

[A]

I was like, that's very weird, or not like that at all. What was different about us? Why did we go down this other road where we decided to say, no, we can't. We can't have people just walking around anywhere.

[B]

What a great question. You want to dive?

[A]

I can make a guess.

[B]

I would actually love to hear your guess first because I'm so sure that you were gonna hit a bunch of the nails on the head.

[A]

Yeah. So here's a thing. I know as a Montanan, we have really good and lax voting laws. So it's very easy to vote in Montana. And I did this series called how to vote in every State. And I kept finding that there were all these states that were nothing like that. And I was like, well, what's different about Montana? And I was like, well, we're pretty rural, so, like, it's harder to get to the polling place for a lot of Montanans. And so it makes sense that we would do that. And then I found some other rural places, like, it was still quite hard to vote. And I was like, what's different about these places? And it was all places where there were more black people.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

And so we're just making it harder on everyone because we're scared to enfranchise black people.

[B]

Yup.

[A]

So that makes me think that there's something similar going on there where, like, England was a more sort of culturally homogenous place. It was able to have sort of a more high trust vibe around people just walking on other people's lands because everybody kind of looks like the default and looks like they kind of belong there.

[B]

You really hit the nail right on the head. In fact, when the United States was originally formed, one thing that a lot of founding fathers expressed a lot of frustration with was restriction of access to land that specifically belonged to the crown. So upon starting the new colonies, they were like, we are not gonna do that. Like, trespass on public property is not going to be a criminal offense. People can do what they want. And the US Was that way until immediately after slavery. And what you find starting in South Carolina and then extended, spanning outwards until it covered the rest of the country were lawmakers and like, these are in minutes from a lot of their congressional meetings.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Saying, okay, so we still need people to be working on all of these plantations. Unfortunately, because we took bad care of them. They didn't say unfortunately, but unfortunately because they took bad care of them.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Those people usually had at least a passable knowledge of foraging, trapping, and hunting within that area. So suddenly you had a group of people that were relatively good at being self sufficient because they had to be. And so it was very hard to convince black folks to come back to plantations as sharecroppers. And the way that they figured in South Carolina first to stop this was to cut off people of color from being able to forage on land that wasn't theirs. They made trespass a criminal offense instead of just possibly a civil one at worst. And so suddenly you are having to make this decision about whether or not going and say, catching a trout in the same stream that you've been catching trout in for the last 10 years that happens to run through the property that belonged to the person you used to belong to. You have to determine if being in jail for a number of days and really not being able to take care of your family that way was worth the risk of going and having access to that food. So very quickly that worked. And it spread throughout the rest of the American south. Also during the Great Migration, as a lot of northerners were also feeling racist, but in different ways. Yeah, those laws spread up here. Here too. You pair that with the, you know, advent of sundown towns and this loss within the black community of feeling especially safe in rural outdoor spaces and bada bing, bada boom, you have disenfranchised a lot of people of color from wanting to do this activity. And suddenly it's a cool thing now for often white, often wealthy landowners to be able to participate in. Because whether or not they think it is this, it is a little bit of like a flaunt of wealth and access. Right.

[A]

It's not necessarily how they're thinking of it. It's just like now it has. We've moved past the part where we had this negative status tied to it, and it's like, well, wouldn't this be like a lovely thing to do? And in many ways it is a lovely thing to do. It just has context that we should also be aware of.

[B]

And it would just be lovely if everybody got to do it. Yeah, like, I love that. A lot of our national parks honestly have much more lax foraging rules than I think a lot of people expect them to. I was just in glacier last summer. We were there during peak berry season.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

It is crazy how many pounds of berries you are allowed to gather for Personal use every day.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the farmer's market in Missoula, it's like, like full of five pound bags of huckleberries. Yeah, all of those bags are foraged.

[B]

Y' all love huckleberries out in Montana. And I get it. They are very good. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, what a great word. Even huckleberry.

[B]

Ugh.

[A]

I wish they tasted honestly as good as they sound.

[B]

I know, I know. If you make a huckleberry syrup.

[A]

Yes. Oh, Morgan's mad at us.

[B]

Morgan's mad at us.

[A]

I don't like a huckleberry on its own. Morgan, our producer, has popped into it.

[B]

Morgan, I will bring you eastern service berries.

[A]

Oh, we have serviceberries out here. They're probably not as good.

[B]

They're not as good? Yeah, they're not as good. I had some.

[A]

I had one once before I knew what it was. I just put it in my mouth, which is exactly what you say not to do. But it looks so much like a blueberry. I was like, it's got to be fine. Look at this bush. This bush looks just like a berry bush.

[B]

We don't have any crowned berries that would hurt you here in North America. So, you know, you have the crowns on the service berries. You have crowns on blueberries as well.

[A]

Gotcha.

[B]

Some people might, though, get a little confused because there's kind of like, a puckered end to pokeberries and those guys you should not be snacking on, you know, so much.

[A]

Next time you're out here, we gotta go forage together.

[B]

Yeah, we should go hiking.

[A]

Oh, man.

[B]

Especially now that I know that Costco has sand cherries. Yeah.

[A]

Just in the Costco.

[B]

Just in the Costco. This is the thing.

[A]

You don't need access to a huge swath of land to do some foraging. Certainly there's things that it helps with, but yeah, we do a ton of. Ton of foraging. And we also have, like, great, great neighborhood foraging in Missoula.

[B]

Oh, I can only imagine.

[A]

Great pears, great apples, great cherries all over also. Okay. Apricots and plums. I'm just not that big of a fan, honestly.

[B]

I think a good plum is amazing, but most plums are not good plums.

[A]

A dry plum is not amazing. There's so many dry plums.

[B]

Like styrofoam water.

[A]

It does make your mouth feel funny, too. It can sometimes. All right, Alexis Nicole Nelson, I want to say thank you also for your cookbook, which I would like you to give me a recipe from that you are excited about putting in. Happy snacking. Don't die.

[B]

Well, since we're talking about service berries, I would say that the serviceberry hand pies are one of my favorites to make and to eat. Because I love a quick and easy pie dough. Oh, yeah, and I love a hand pie. Just a little guy you can take on the go.

[A]

I got a cherry tree that is producing like crazy now.

[B]

You could easily adapt the recipe to use cherries instead.

[A]

Man, I love my cherry tree. I take such good care of it. It's got aphids right now and I'm so mad.

[B]

Oh, no, it's okay. Ugh, those dastardly little guys. I hope the ladybugs find them soon.

[A]

There's a whole ecosystem thriving on this tree now because of the aphids. If the tree didn't have any aphids, there would be no predators on it at all. But now it's got aphids and there's like just an explosion of all kinds of different weird bug eaters on it.

[B]

All the little parasitic wasps and all the ladybugs all hanging out and waiting.

[A]

Yeah, the ladybug larva. There's all kinds of moth larvae that are eating them now too.

[B]

I'm sure the jumping spiders have been doing little drive bys and just yoinking one and then running away.

[A]

Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to take care of a tree.

[B]

It is fun to take care of a tree. I'm training the jumping spiders in our yard to go after the spotted lanternfly nymphs.

[A]

Oh, you're training them. This is interesting.

[B]

Grabbing the lanternfly nymphs with a little pair of tweezers and making an offering to the jumping spiders.

[A]

Yeah, and they'll learn.

[B]

They're smart. They are smart. Last year I captured one of our praying mantises and fed it only nymphs for a week and then re released it into the yard. And I was like, tell your friends, please.

[A]

I feel we're so weird. Like, this podcast is about how weird we are. We are very weird. And this is an example of how weird we are. At the same time, the aphids in my tree are farmed by ants.

[B]

Yeah, they want that sweet, sweet honeydew.

[A]

They are 100% doing that. And the way that I control them is to keep the ants off the tree. That's the only way to control the aphids because otherwise the ants will fight the predators, protect them. Exactly.

[B]

And it's like, get out of here, gang. Go steal a sugar cube from a picnic blanket or something. You guys gotta go.

[A]

So we are we are weird. There are other animals that are also weird. But humans being the only animal that straight forgot how to feed itself is nuts.

[B]

It's crazy.

[A]

It's amazing.

[B]

So wild.

[A]

But we are also the species that could teach itself how to do it again, one TikTok at a time. After all of this work, are you optimistic about us?

[B]

Yes. But maybe not as optimistic as I was before I was a content creator.

[A]

Aw. Yeah.

[B]

I think I've always been very hopeful about the human race and our propensity to recognize problems and try our darndest to understand them and fix them. Of course, we see there are some people out there who are just like, well, actually, what if I only fix the problems that were important to me and made a butt ton of money doing so? And that's, you know, like who I presume to be your arch nemesis, who as of today is a trillionaire, which I think is a thing that shouldn't

[A]

exist as of the recording. Who knows what will have happened when this comes out?

[B]

And that's true.

[A]

It's a real mess out there at the moment, but I guess I feel that way all the time. Yeah.

[B]

I don't know. Maybe before this comes out, someone dressed like an old timey robber will break into a safe in his house and steal a bunch of gold bouillon. Who knows?

[A]

Much more likely is the stock market crashes, but hopefully that won't happen. That's not good for people either.

[B]

No, it's not. Except maybe I'll be able to afford a house on land then.

[A]

Yeah. Is your current house on water?

[B]

My current house is on an itty bitty, maybe, maybe fifth of an acre plot in the middle of downtown Columbus.

[A]

Oh, I see land.

[B]

I wish it was on water. Then I could just be a seaweed farmer and throw my phone into the ocean.

[A]

Oh, man, you're not gonna throw your phone into the ocean.

[B]

No, I'm not. Cause it's littering. Well, I think about it all the time, and then I'm like, I'd feel so guilty if I did that. So I guess you get to live another day.

[A]

Well, Alexis, our last question that we ask all the time. What is something that you've learned from this work that you wish everyone on earth knew?

[B]

I have learned that every ecosystem has so much wonder and so much more diversity hiding within it than you think it does. When I was first getting started, the comments that I would get the most frequently, both from people living in really large metropolitan areas and people living in, like, drier, more southern areas where I cannot forage or even, like, look at a ton of plants because of where I live.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I've been very lucky to get to travel both around the country and around the world to get to confirm in person that that just isn't true. And also when people say I live in a place where foraging isn't possible, especially talking to my friends in the desert, I just love to remind people if people were living there before you and the city that you know as you know it, foraging was possible there. I promise you, foraging was possible there. Hunting was possible there. Like, people were feeding themselves where you are living. And it might be a really cool adventure to figure out how.

[A]

I think it provides a connection that feels kind of unquestionably valuable.

[B]

Yeah, it really does. Even when you're, like, living in New York City. The wonder and the whimsy I saw this past spring, both online and irl with the Bryant Park American woodcock, the timberdoodle doing his little dance and how delighted.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Just random people walking by on the street were about this little bird. Cause it reminds you that even in the middle of New York City, you are within an ecosystem.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[B]

You are behaving within an ecosystem. You are living within an ecosystem. We are sharing our lived spaces with so many other living things.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And sometimes we do just need that reminder.

[A]

It's a good planet. Alexis Nicole Nelson, thank you for joining us on Humans.

[B]

Oh, Hank Green, thank you for having me on humans.

[A]

Alexis's cookbook, Happy Snacking, Don't Die, will be out in September. Thanks to all the humans who helped make this episode. Morgan Levy is the show's supervising producer, and Greg Rippon is our engineer. Peyton Mitchell manages our social media. Andrew Huang composed the music, and James Barnard designed the artwork. You can and should follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

[B]

Let's do it one more time.

[A]

Humans.