That's

awesome.

Yeah, like a little thumbnail sketch.

My dad was raised like super Catholic, like parochial school, you know, all of this stuff.

As a result, I wasn't raised anything.

He'd had enough of that.

It was just him and me for like the first six years of my life for the most part.

Why do you think that is? I mean, is it because we have so much of it? It's just the most common thing we always come across? Or is there something particularly special just about regular courts that lends itself to be able to do all these things?

If Nicholas wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so of all of the techniques in this book, this is the one that I have like the longest personal history with.

So here's some like old school Nicholas lore.

I have been a crystal collector my whole life.

When I was in, I think the eighth grade, I got myself, I tied for first place in the book B, you know, thinking of like spelling B, geography B, but it was read a bunch of books and then remember all the things about them.

We broke the book.

My best friend and I, they ran out of questions.

I think people would be interested.

So can you talk about lead and how that, the magic of lead?

Yeah.

Very early on in the kind of conceptual part of this book, I knew I wanted to include metals.

I thought it was going to be plural, metals, um, but there, there really wasn't space.

I was either going to have to do a kind of quick and dirty rundown of too many in a single chapter, or I was gonna have to leave out a lot of the ones I was excited about.

And I, I opted for the latter because if we look at the, the idea of magic, the idea of, of witchery in general, a big part of what it serves is bringing power to the powerless, helping people who feel displaced, disempowered, disenfranchised, people who are being subjugated, and, and leveling the playing field for them in one way or another.

And in all of the mineral resources that are out there, the one that embodies this concept the most often in the historical record is lead.

And so I would love to hear more about amber.

That's an amazing title.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So, um, this one was my ninth book, and it was something that I had worked on a little bit off and on over the years, and it really started from this place during the kind of peak of the, you know, intense COVID era when I think people's sense of personal safety, their sense of security in life was so upended that more than ever before, people were coming to me asking for things related to protection, to their psychic, their social, their emotional, their physical wellbeing, um, and kind of ensuring a sense of security there.

And so I started working on this book, um, in, in probably about 2020.

I, I was slated to go on tour when my sixth book came out, Crystal Basics, and obviously that didn't happen for all the reasons we can anticipate.

What is it about the crystals that create this energy field, this ability to do the many things that they do?