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Welcome to Inside Personal Growth Podcast. Deep dive with us as we unlock the secrets to personal development, empowering you to thrive here. Growth isn't just a goal, it's a journey. Tune in, transform and take your life to the next level by listening to just one of our podcasts.

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Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen and the host of Inside Personal Growth. And I have a dear, dear friend joining us from San Marcos, California just to hop, skip and a jump away from here. And Michael Johnson. Hey Michael, good morning to you.

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How you doing? Good morning, Greg. How are you? Fine. Let's see this official sign. We're not military guys, believe me. Everybody, those of you listening on, YouTube, which is a really big bulk of my folks, we're going to introduce you today to a really interesting documentary, that Michael has just completed called the Prairie Prophecy.

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And he's a documentary filmmaker. And Michael, I'm going to let him know just a tad bit about you so that they know who the heck you are. So he's an award winning documenting filmmaker and media strategist with over 30 plus years of experience creating content that drives real world impact.

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And that's why I really love Michael. He is really trying to help change the world in the way that he can. And I think we're all trying to do this in some way, at least the people that listen to my show, I think you are. So this, particular podcast should be particularly important for you.

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His work has earned Emmy awards, tellies and numerous film festival honors. But more importantly, his documentaries have influenced policy, raised millions for public television and shaped educational curricula. His films tackle complex social and environmental issues with remarkable results.

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His documentary Green Energy A Natural Solution helped secure public approval for California's largest infrastructure project, a $2.2 billion sustainable energy initiative. First people, Kumeyaay became part of a country wide countywide fourth grade curriculum after running on PBS for nearly four years.

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He's the founder of Perennial Films, currently developing Nature's Genius, a six part series addressing humanity's most pressing ecological challenges. And today we're going to be talking about his latest project which is called Prairie Prophecy, which spotlights revolutionary environmentalist Wes Jackson, the Land Institute's groundbreaking work in sustainable agriculture.

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And the film premiered actually here in Encinitas. For those of you listening around the country here had a few premieres and there's going to be more. So we will actually do our best in the show notes, to have you guys check those out where those premieres will be.

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Because Kelly, Michael's, assistant partner, however you want to call her, keeps him on top of this. Yeah, producer. So I hope you all enjoy this podcast about Prairie prophecy.

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I just, watched the documentary in late August, at the La Paloma Theater in Encinitas and just was really in awe with how well it was done and how the message, resonated, with the audience.

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So, Michael, you know, it's great to have you again. It's been way too long. I was just talking with Lisa and we said it was last time you and I did a podcast, was with the Purple Couch.

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Oh, that was with my son. That's been a long time. So there's been a lot of gray hair that has come since then. But we've known each other for well over two decades. Decades. And what would have surprised our younger selves most about you becoming the executive producer of, of an environmental documentary, because you basically have been around, you've done a lot of things, but you've always had this passion for the environment.

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Yeah, well, I, you know, by my design, I'm, I'm kind of been, I've been consistently, in the role of executive producer and producer. That's been kind of what I, my, my main forte.

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I did some writing as well, but, what surprised me most was being the director on this thing. I've directed a few things in the past, but I've never directed a feature length documentary before. Not directed much in fact. So the biggest surprise for me was, how much I enjoyed the process of directing.

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I really, really loved it. Well, you did an awesome job and you picked quite an unusual subject and your funding was really quite unusual as well as how you came up getting the funding. So what drew you to Wes Jackson's story and his vision?

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I, know I go back to the days that we went to the Claremont Colleges up, near Los Angeles, and I heard Wes speak. And even then he was quite compelling because he was one of the speakers at that event. But what is it that.

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Hang on, I'll have to edit this. What was it about his vision, his story? Was there a particular moment or insight that made you think this film needs to be made? Yeah, well, I didn't know who he was before I met him.

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We had been working on that other series you were talking about a moment ago, Nature's Genius. And, central to that series is trying to answer the question, how do we learn to live as though there's only one planet to live on. We also knew at that time, 2015, that, humanity's kind of greatest challenge is that we don't have a sustainable way to continue to grow food for ourselves.

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That's what's known as the problem of agriculture or the 10,000 year old problem of agriculture. So I knew those kinds of things and I knew agriculture was going to be a thread throughout that other series. But we, all these different people came to the Claremont schools for a big conference there.

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People from around the world, people whose names many people would recognize. People like Bill McKibben and Vandanashiva and a ton of people. And Lois Jackson was there. I didn't know who he was. And looked on his Wikipedia page, before I went to interview him to find out more about him so I could ask questions intelligently or try to at least.

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And so he was going to give us about 20 minutes of time, in an on camera interview setup. And so we had found a nice little library to fill me in up there. And he came in and he did what he normally does, which is to ask the interviewer a lot of the questions first.

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I think I've seen him do this a bunch over the years. Now, it seems as though he really wants to kind of gauge who is who he's talking to before he really gets into talking to them. That was kind of an interesting phenomenon. We connected a little bit, I think as well, because I was born in Kansas.

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I was born in Lawrence. My dad taught sociology at KU there. So I think that was a connection because he's from Kansas, still lives in Kansas. And anyway, so we got to know each other for a few minutes before we started the interview. I started the interview and then I interviewed him and my mind was just kind of melted.

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He blew us all out of the water with, how he answered the questions. Very thorough, very eloquent. He did this incredible job of mixing, hard science with, you know, the creation stories we've all grown up with.

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He does this amazing blend of that kind of stuff to be able to help us find meaning in things. And I just remember when he left the room, a few people came along the way while we were interviewing him to, to have him join them for something else that was happening.

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Like, like Wes, we need you. And he, he would wave them off and say, no, I'm here with, I'm, I'm gonna Stay here with these guys. Which was kind of cool. So we had him for longer than 20 minutes. We had him for about an hour. And, at the end of the interview, after he left, it was just kind of quiet in the room.

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And I do remember my, one of my producers, Bob Sly, was. He'd been running audio, and he was kind of just kneeling on the ground and he had his head in his hand kind of. He said, I don't know, I've been doing this a long, long time, but is it my imagination or is that the best interview I've ever experienced?

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I don't know about you, but I, have chills on both my arms right now with you just even asking that question. So, yes, I think that's the best interview I've ever experienced as well. And at the end of that interview, at the end, that interview, Wes had, what I always say is, made the. His first big mistake in his life, and that was to invite me to the Land Institute, a mistake because they haven't been able to get rid of me ever since.

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Well, that wasn't a mistake, but that was a. That was a blessing that would happen here. You know, I listened to him speak at the conference, and he. He obviously has a different perspective about the way he sees the world.

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Right? And so he draws an audience in. Yet his depth of knowledge is so deep that sometimes I think he loses people, a bit. But you've been able to do something quite unusual, and that's find Wes at his essence and put a documentary together that the general public can understand.

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So for listeners unfamiliar with Wes's work, how would you explain his approach to agriculture and why is it considered prophetic? Because, you know, there's a lot of people listening to this show today that are going, I know nothing about perennial farming.

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It's like. It's like crazy. And, on another note, I, happened to have an author on yesterday for a pre interview that wrote Omnivore's Deception.

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Now, when you look at crops that are being grown, what I didn't know what came up to me was that 80 billion animals are killed each year to feed us. The number of 80% of the crops that are grown are basically to feed those animals.

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Okay. So when you start to put the dots together between what we're doing in agriculture to feed the animals, to then have somebody kill them so people can eat them, really gives you more of a, thrust toward really becoming vegetarian and Vegan.

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Right. Like Dr. Greger. Right, so which your daughter has done and is, is, is doing. But you know, this all kind of leads together because when you look at how much water we're using and the way we're depleting soils and how are we feeding these animals and. But Wes's way of doing perennial farming is the key.

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And I want you to kind of explain why it's so prophetic. Yeah, well that speaks to the other thing that I think kind of blew us away is I have been looking for, who in the world is working on addressing what they call the 10,000 year old problem of agriculture, even though it might be 12,000 years, we don't really know.

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Is a he the first person I came across who was working at it, working on it at a systemic level. And what he would say is he was working on the problem of agriculture, not problems in agriculture. Meaning he doesn't, he thinks we need to wholesale change, because it's broken at its foundation.

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If you look at, to distill it down to, kind of the simplest way to talk about it is what we did, what we humans did a long time ago was to start to grow food for only ourselves. And we started to. We planted annual crops that need to be dug up and planted every year.

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Those annual crops, when they get dug up, exposes the soil to erosion, whether it's wind erosion or rain or something else. And excuse me, our topsoils then blow or wash away. And that's the essence of the problem.

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Annual crops in a monoculture setting is the problem. So that doesn't really happen in the natural world. So what Wes did as a geneticist, MacArthur genius, and geneticist, who has long studied, so much other stuff in culture, all of our creation myths, scripture, Shakespeare, Dante, you name it, poets, you just had synthesized all of this stuff.

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And he had an epiphany at one point when he was walking out on the Kanza prairie there in Kansas. He had taken a group of students out and he was, he had the question on his mind, how is it that nature can do what it does year in and year out without any planning on the part of the human, without any intervention.

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And he saw that there was no low soil erosion or not any soil erosion beyond natural replacement levers or levels. There was no chemical fertilizers, no other kind of inputs needed, for the prairie to grow the way it grows. So his epiphany led to what he called the Natural, systems agriculture, basing our agricultural practices on the way nature works.

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And what he would say as the lofty goal is to, grow food in a field that would resemble something like a never plowed native prairie. Now that sounds pretty audacious. I mean, it is audacious. A lot of people think it's crazy. But the answer to the annual crops in a monoculture setting is to domesticate perennial crops, plants that don't need to be dug up every year and they can grow year in and year out, in a polyculture setting.

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So much more mimicking how the natural world works. So then you can plant legumes next to a plant that needs, the nitrogen fixed at its roots. So you're not applying topical fertilizer, et cetera. The soil stays in place. You don't have to plant it all the time.

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So you're not driving your equipment over the land all the time, you're not applying inputs or you're not driving your equipment over the land all the time. So that's the answer. If annual monocrops are the problem, perennial polyculture is the solution. So.

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Interesting. Started working on that. And that's, And that's the difference maker. Well, and I think it's referred to as regenerative agriculture in the prairie. And that's a new. That's a new, new name. Yeah. He's kind of a father of that whole movement, once called sustainable agriculture.

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I think he coined that term back in the 70s. But, now we think of it and talk about it like it's like regenerative agriculture is the common term. Yeah. And it is taking hold. It's slowly getting there. And I say slowly because you document in the film kind of how slow the process is taking, but you are creating awareness, which is the key.

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Now you've positioned this documentary as both an environmental story and a human story. And I love the part where you had, you know, he walks up to the tree of life. Right. And he does this several times during the movie. And just depending on how people believe, both, spiritually, that tree of life can mean a lot of different things.

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Right. And he does. And you are very sensitive about how you approach this, not to alienate certain religions or people. And I love the way he did it. How did you balance those elements and which was more challenging to capture, the human side or the environmental side?

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Well, yeah, it was tough. I, I gotta say, it was the hardest I've been. Granted, I'm a first Time feature length documentary director, but I produced a lot of them over time and. Excuse me. Yeah, it was a challenge for everybody on the team.

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I mean the, the challenge was, was translating all of this conceptual and abstract data or knowledge, into a visual storytelling medium. It's when you're, when you're in Wesson's presence, you're, you're just always engaged in hanging on his every word practically as you witnessed.

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Because he is he practically never puts together a sentence or a paragraph that he didn't mean to say exactly the way he said it. He's very, he's witty, he's charming, he's fun, he's funny, energetic, all these things. But how to capture that on film, that's part of what took so long is I always think of documentary filmmaking as kind of an ever emergent process.

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Things are always emerging. You had a, you set out with an outline for what you think you're going to do. As you interview people, you refine that outline, you refine your questions. Little by little you are led down different paths to find, find out whether or not this or that might work in the film. But energetically the way, energetically, pardon me for interrupting, the way I saw him during the documentary, it's as if he's tapped into as he answers questions a much higher source.

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Right. From a spiritual standpoint, I mean I don't want to get too airy fairy with people, but the reality is that's the way it appears. In other words, the data that's being transmitted, however it's being transmitted, plus his intellect, he has a great way of bringing both of those together, both the human side, and the intellectual side for people to understand.

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And I think you did an awesome job of capturing it for all my listeners. There's going to be a click to in the show notes, for you to see a trailer of this. And then I want you to go out and get this and there are a few people that are profiled in the book, or I should say in the documentary that have written books, one of them with Wes.

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And I'm going to highlight that podcast I did which will be in the show notes below as well. Go out and get that book if you want to learn a little bit more. Because you did a good job of capturing that author's perspective as well who Wes co wrote the book with.

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So look, you want to distribute this out there and I say why PBS specifically? Could you have pursued streaming platforms or theoretical or theater releases? And what made public television the right home for this story?

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Yeah, that's a great question. Public television is kind of where it's at for these kind of audiences. We have a constituency of people who are kind of ready to hear this kind of stuff. They're not afraid of the hard questions.

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They're not afraid to look at climate, change as a real phenomenon. I mean there's a number of us who kind of have this wishful thinking perspective about it's not real, that it's a hoax, et cetera. And people on, I'd say most of the people who watch PBS kind of understand the science behind climate change, or at least the basics of it.

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PBS is great because we can, I have an hour and a half version of it right now, 93 minutes. It'll get cut down to an hour version to better fit in their slots. Some of the kind of more artful stuff around how we set this up will not be in that version but it's shaping up to be a solid hour documentary.

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It'll run for three years. The big bonus is that there's a little bit of a halo effect when you air something on BDS that you've passed some level of vetting, that your program is of sufficient quality to warrant being shown on pbs.

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So there's that factor, there's the factor of getting it in front of the eyeballs of the people who are most receptive to the message. And then it allows us to retain the, we retain all the rights to everything. So we don't give up any rights to a Netflix or a stream, some other streamer.

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And it gives us the flexibility to partner with like minded organizations to deliver the film to the desktop. So imagine something like the Nature Conservancy, that's just an example I use. You, you, you reach out to them separately and make an appeal that we have something that we think that their constituency would have find value in.

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So we, you open up a window between you know, some random Thursday and the end of the day Sunday or something like that and say that this, this film will be available to all of your all of your supporters for free for a suggested donation of some nominal amount, like 20 bucks or something like that.

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About two and a half percent of the people who watch wind up donating and they wind up donating around 20 bucks, because it's kind of an open, amount you can, a flexible amount you can donate, and then you split that donation amount with the organization that you partner with.

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So it's really not about making money for us. It's about making enough money to continue keeping that little engine going. That, that does that. Now, what that does for you and why you can do this with PBS is because you retain the ownership of the, program and they don't, they don't limit, your use of the program and these other means for these other means, which is good.

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So people who are listening to this podcast, if they've got an interested, Interested in underwriting, your underwriting model is interesting. So essentially you're asking companies or individuals or sponsors, you know, you're asking companies to sponsor the message rather than, you know, interrupt it.

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Right? So, yeah, how do you ensure that this doesn't compromise the film's environmental message? I mean, I know you're looking for sponsors. Anybody listening right now? Hey, look, if this, topic interests you, take a look at that trailer.

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We'll have some links to some of the, downloads, PDFs as well. But if it does, in essence, you've got different ways for our listeners to get involved. Right?

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It's everything from watching on PBS and seeing it there. And. And would they be making a donation as well if they were a viewer? Or is it just the sponsors who are sponsoring it that are putting up the money to underwrite that?

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Let me, Let me back up just a second. Okay. Yeah, sorry. Got you off. I'll back up for a second. Just to finish off the, this virtual screening program. The value of that is that you can get your film again in front of the eyeballs of people who are in a position not only receptive to the message, but in a position to maybe make a difference.

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So we didn't make this film to make a bunch of money on the back end of it. We made this film to affect, positive change. So getting the film in front of people who are in a position to make, a difference, is kind of key. So PBS allows us to do that now to pay for some of this stuff as well.

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We do, as you mentioned, need to do underwriting. We had the film Underwritten. So getting the film made, we had to raise money to do that, and now we need to raise money for the, for the, the PBS screening. And it's a little over $600,000 that we're after.

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The entities that contribute money for something like that will get a little commercial spot kind of at the beginning and at the end of the film. And it will air every time that that film airs over the course of three years. So there's a lot of great, there's great bang for the buck if you want to, if, if, if someone's inclined to want to contribute, they would contribute to a nonprofit.

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So they would get a tax write off. And the kind of entities that, that we think would be interested would be like minded organizations. Could be Whole Foods, it could be General Mills, it could be the Bar. Could be any number of different kinds of organizations like that Dr.

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Bronner's. So that's graph of that. If a listener would like to screen this film, for their organization or their class or whatever they have, we're open to whatever we can do to help them get it seen by their, by their folks.

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So that, that form can, it can take any number of forms. In some educational instances we just allow them to see it for free. Other cases where we ask for a donation. And those, those donations ultimately would be a write off.

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But yeah, that's how that works so. Well, it's interesting and I think we'll put enough of the materials that you have for download in the show notes here so people are listening. It can reach out to you directly. They can reach out to you and figure out ways that they could get their corporation interested in this or if they're individuals, how they can help propel the cause or do a showing.

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All of those, all of the above. Right. So you say in those materials that will be listed here in the show note, that you're reaching 90 million households through PBS. But how do you actually measure whether a film like this changes minds or behaviors?

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Do you know that? That's tough. That's tough. I mean you really kind of wind up with more anecdotal information over time because you don't really have control. And, and there's kind of two components.

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There are, there's the. So for people who are working in and around, you know, growing, growing food, growing crops, processing food, delivering, making food, whatever, all that stuff, there's there will be, there'll be something of value for, for them and then for the general public.

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It's also educational in all kinds of ways. I, I mean I think, I hope, in that one of the things that Wes does is he really takes the long view on humanity. And, you know, if humans, if Homo sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years, some say a little bit less, some say maybe 300,000 years, and it was only 10, 12,000 years that we moved off of being pastoral people and hunter gatherers to being agriculturalists.

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Wes, in taking the long view, would say, you know, where, where, where did we come from? What kind of a creature are we, and where are we headed? Those kinds of questions may not be exactly how you'd phrase it. But that analysis of, of like, what's in our DNA almost, why are we wired to do what we do is very helpful in, this kind of developing greater personal awareness around our role as being a part of and not separate from nature.

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Kind of deny that all the time. We forget that all the time that we're actually things that we do or we do them because they come naturally to us. So reintegrating people and helping them fall back in love with the natural world and realizing that the interdependence of it, the deep connection to it is something that might be valuable to any number of people.

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You meant Bob Jensen's book, the Inconvenient Apocalypse. And, you know, they, they end that. I tried to kind of mimic the, the flavor of the. The close of that book in the film because both Wes and Bob Jensen, Robert Jensen, neither one of them really talked much about having a ton of hope and optimism, giving what's good and what's coming, because what they'll talk about is the.

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We face multiple cascading ecological crises that are now kind of accelerating. So we have. We have a very. We have what looks to be a very challenging future to navigate. So. Yeah, and I don't know. There's no rope. I want to ask you this question because it is.

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It revolves right around you baking a documentary like this. You know, you look at the current political climate around environmental issues. You look at this current administration. Were you concerned at all about, you know, the film being perceived as partisan rather than scientific?

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You know, in that sense, it. Where we stand now as a country, not as a world, but as this usa. Now that doesn't mean this film won't go into all these foreign markets. I'm sure it will.

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It should. It should get everywhere. It should be in China, it should be in India. It should be everywhere. But given this environment in which you and I live, did you have any concerns? I had both concerns all along the way. I Mean, I have people in my own family who don't believe in climate change.

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It's kind of inexplicable to me, but, there are a lot of people who have been susceptible to the kind of propaganda that's been put out by organizations like the Heartland Institute and the Heritage foundation, all backed by, you know, big Oil and things like that. So there's a lot of disinformation out there that's polluting the conversation.

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But that was a constant concern. And I also was including this kind of, oh, we'll call it religious, kind of element by talking about the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, the, stories that come out of Genesis. But if you look at that, if you look.

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If you think about, the Book of Genesis and how many people have. Are aware of it globally. I mean, we're whatever 8 billion people. It's 4 to 5 billion people probably share that, those stories. I wanted to handle that delicately so that I didn't alienate people, religiously or politically.

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There's nothing about this that is kind of really religious or political. It's kind of trying to be straight down the line. So, you know, I, I've screened it. I've screened the film for people who are on kind of both sides of the aisle, and I, I feel like the results.

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The feedback that we got is that we kind of walked that line pretty well. At least that's my hope, as it goes out to a broader audience. But that's what we've been hearing, is that, people haven't bristled at anything necessarily.

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In a negative way. No, I would say based on my doing it at La Paloma, it wasn't offensive in any way. I didn't take it that way. What I do question, though is, and I think you would too, is how do we move people out of the, They're just apathetic chair.

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You know, they're just. They're thinking someone else is going to do it. You know, and. And this is not just about environmental issues. This is many of the issues that we face right now. Right. And what would you hope, after people watch this documentary that they could do individually to actually make a difference in how they eat, where they buy their groceries, what kind of foods, knowing that they're buying more perennial crops, they're buying organic, they're buying from local farmers.

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What would you just tell people who are just like the general folks going, wow, I really believe in what you're doing, but I don't really know how to make much of a change. Yeah, well, there are. So I was about to say, that there's nothing really prescriptive in this film.

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I've been frustrated by seeing environmental docs over the, over the documentaries over the years where they, by the end of the film, they kind of try to wrap things up with a neat little bow. They started off with a little bit of doom and gloom. They talk about people are working on some things to help solve that stuff. And then they kind of wrap it up in little bow.

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And I'll use an example for Kiss the Ground. This is not exactly accurate, but there's some facet of Kiss the Ground where it feels like you're talking about the dangers of ruining our soil, that soil is going to go away, et cetera. And you kind of come away from that experience with this idea that, well, people are composting and you can compost soil and, you know, problem solved.

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I'm way oversimplifying things. That's pretty simple. It's a fine film. I like that film a lot. But a little incomplete. And, And I, I. Yeah, just a little incomplete. So the, the proscription here, you'll hear it a couple of times in the film is, right.

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Right at the beginning, one of the characters says, People keep coming up to Wes, saying, wes, you know, what. What can I do to work on all these problems you keep talking about? And his answer is, you know, grow a tomato plant.

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Take care of a tomato plant. And that idea is similar to Michael Pollan's. You just mentioned Omnivore's. What's the deception book? Deceptivores An Omnivore. An Omnivore Dilemma by. By Michael Pollan. I think he's.

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He may be quoting Wendell Berry, the poet and essayist Wendell Berry, who would say, Michael Pollan will say, eat food. Like real food. Not all this process of eat real food. Mostly plants, not too much.

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That's his kind of prescription, right? Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Not many words, seven words. And Wendell would say, cook at home with real ingredients. So that's not. That's another thing. We tend to gravitate toward what's convenient, and those things are often processed and whatnot.

[35:49.6]
A lot of us don't cook. I'm not a great cook myself. I don't. I don't always follow this kind of stuff. But when you Start to dice up carrots and celery and onions and whatnot in it. And you're always working with that. You're thinking about the quality of that, of the food you selected, the supermarket of the farmer's market, wherever you got it.

[36:08.1]
And you're thinking about, where it came from. And you're aware that it, you know, it keeps you connected to the fact that most of the stuff came out of the ground or grew off of a tree or something. So you're at least connecting the dots better. So that's some of it. But he also has some messages for younger people around.

[36:26.5]
You know, we. We don't need more people and stuff necessarily. And so maybe we should start to focus on what can we do to. What can we learn from nature that's kind of self healing and, self repairing, self regenerating.

[36:42.2]
How can we. How can we learn from nature and apply what we learn in how we live? And some of that has to do with, Oh, I just. Just my TRA. Thought, Yeah, it'll come back to me.

[37:00.4]
Okay, that. Well, that, actually. Anyway, Anyway, it's, It's. It's, Learn, learn, learn. Abilities to repair and things like that. Repair. Other big. Repair, renew, recycle. Yeah. In other words. Yeah, and recycle. I mean, I look at the world and this.

[37:16.3]
The stuff that gets discarded by, the modern American that's out there today, you know, and it just is pathetic to me. The amount of containers, the amount of plastic.

[37:32.3]
I mean, that's another whole issue. Other old topic. Yeah, it just really makes the hair go up on the. You know, my. My head, you know, it's just. It's just crazy. So, look, you spent years immersed in this subject. This wasn't like overnight.

[37:47.4]
I think you said the saying. Well, you said 15 years from your little speech. 11. It's been 11. 11. 11 years. Okay, so, look, you can't dive into a, topic like this or a problem like this and immerse yourself and not have changed your own relationship with food, land and environmental issues.

[38:11.1]
From Michael Johnson's standpoint, what's shifted for you, as a result of your 11 years of working on this project. Boy, that's actually. That's a hard question to answer. Well, I know when I go out to breakfast with you now you're eating vegetarian, so it's.

[38:32.8]
Yeah, I eat. I've been that way for quite some time. And Wes is not necessarily that way, by the way. But, yeah, I do Eat mostly plants. I mean, that's something that definitely developed over the last 11 years or so. Excuse me. And, but I grow, I grow some of my own food.

[38:52.4]
I've got, I don't have a big backyard. I've got a classic Southern California tracked home, smaller home with a small backyard. And but I've got planter boxes out there. Yeah. From the very beginning, 2015, I, I started to grow stock.

[39:08.2]
I haven't always consistently done it, but, yeah, I grow some of my own food now. And it's very simple, it's very enjoyable. Get your hands in the dirt. I have a worm farm. And, so that's. Has it gotten you to slow down? Have you slowed down? No, no, no, no.

[39:25.9]
This is, this has been, it's been quite the journey. I mean, I've, I've, as you know, I, I, I'm not a sleeper. So if I don't, I don't, if I don't sleep, that means I get to, I, I can work more. So I have a little bit. Well, I think, I think, you know, people's perspective.

[39:43.2]
You know, you looked at Wes and this is kind of to sum up this interview, you now have a man who's in his 80s. He, he's been working on these ideas for decades. Okay. What do you think his legacy will be?

[39:59.0]
And how does your film, all of your film, everybody that was involved, contribute to Wes's legacy? And then I'm going to add to this to the perpetuation of a world that is not destroying our soils and living in more harmony and balance with the ecosystems that God, created.

[40:31.9]
What was the first part of that question? So the first part of the question is he's in his 80s, he's going to be here forever. He's been working on this. What do you think his legacy and your legacy will be as a result of contributing this film? I don't know what my legacy would be.

[40:48.8]
I don't really care about that so much. I do hope the film affects, positive change in some way. But I think Wes's legacy will live on primarily through the Land Institute as they continue to pursue developing perennial polyculture. They had some great success with their, Kernza, an intermediate wheatgrass, that can replace wheat.

[41:12.5]
They're working on a number of different, other crops, sorghum, silkium, sunflower oil seed crops. Rice, they have perennial rice growing down in China now, in collaboration with the Chinese, that is, that produces the same amount per acre as annual rice.

[41:30.3]
And that's kind of taking over. So perennial rice is kind of a big deal globally. So there's all these things that are happening. But I think his legacy will primarily live on through, the work of the Land Institute. It's quite possible that there will be something, called the West Jackson Institute, maybe created that will help keep, this stuff, alive and these ideas alive and help them, take root, all over the place.

[42:02.1]
I got a quote from John Cobb. John Cobb, the white hidden philosopher who headed up the, actually the Cobb Institute, but also he was the one who put on that conference at the Claremont School some years ago. He's a big thinker.

[42:20.7]
He's a minister as well as a theologian and a philosopher. But he said that, in a couple of hundred years, if humans are still around in a few hundred years and anyone there is interested in history at all, that everyone will know Wes Jackson's name.

[42:39.9]
And that's because Wes Jackson and his group will have solved the problem and we have a way to continue to feed ourselves. It's that dire. There's a book out called 60 harvests left, that, we don't have that many more years ahead of us because we've been losing 30 million acres of topsoil a year due to land degradation that's been going on for decades.

[43:02.8]
The public is largely unaware of all of that. So if we can. If we can, you know, if people can buy Kremsa or support the Land Institute or support, even financially support any of these organizations that are, working to develop perennial grain polyculture, we stand a chance.

[43:23.0]
Well, we could. We could slow the decline of the soils and, maybe even start some repair. So if that. If that works and John Cobb is right, Wes Jackson's legacy will be found in the fact that we're still here hundreds of years from now, 200 years, because we have.

[43:42.1]
Because we have a sustainable way to continue to grow food for ourselves. Well, I love the fact that you do that for all the listeners. Now, if you've made it this far in the interview, the website is Prairie Prophecy. It's going to be linked below. There'll be a link to, the actual trailer.

[44:01.4]
There'll be a link to the brochures about underwriting. There'll be a link to the book. What is the title of that book again? I've heard the Apocalypse. Inconvenient Apocalypse. Inconvenient Apocalypse. And there'll be a link also to the podcast that I did, with, Robert.

[44:21.8]
And so, Michael, I thank you for being on the show, sharing a little bit about this again for everybody. Go to prairie prophecy.com there you can learn about who Wes Jackson is. You can see the documentary film, you can see, the fact that this currency now is being used in beer that saves the world, which is very cool.

[44:45.1]
And, actually, it didn't surprise me at all that Yvon Chouinard was, a subject that you got, plugged in there and is quite an advocate. So, again, for all of my listeners, thank you for listening to this. About this.

[45:00.3]
This is not, a book. It's actually better than a book in an hour and a half, which is what the current length of the documentary runs. You're going to learn a lot. So go look at it, go find it, wherever it is.

[45:15.5]
Go to pre, Go to a preview. Do whatever you can to support this. Michael, thanks so much and namaste to you, and thanks so much for having me. Greg, you're. You're quiet being on your show. Thanks. You're staying at it, and I can't believe how productive you are with doing this podcast sometimes.

[45:36.2]
I can't believe you. It's a great learning resource. It is. Yeah. I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot from the people you've interviewed, by the way. I know you're one of the people that's, pretty consistent at listening to some of the stuff. So we appreciate you.

[45:51.8]
We appreciate all the work that you put in with your team, to get this documentary completed and, to much success into the future. Okay, thank you so much, Greg. Have a great day. All right. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Inside Personal Growth.

[46:09.5]
We appreciate your support. And for more information about new podcasts, please go to inside personal growth.com or any of your favorite channels to listen to our podcast. Thanks again and have a wonderful day.