Jul 31, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min · 12 segments
For almost the whole of human history, wood was the main act. It was the fuel that cooked food and smelted iron, the material that framed every house and hull, and the first bulk commodity ever moved…
So Mark, I think like nerding out on this, I like to take these, you know, vast, expansive timeframes and really try and understand things in as multifactorial a way as possible.
Our short guts, our small jaws, our big brains are enabled by our ability to use fire to cook food.
about a million years ago, but even going back further in terms of understanding the ways in which not just fire, but trees have shaped us and the specialist of trees.
If we go back into our phylogenetic order, if we work our way back from species into genus, into family, into order, the primates, I mean, we are derived of an arboreal species.
There's birds that fly in the sky and they all have adaptations that flow as a result of this.
But primates are cool little guys that hung out in trees, developed grasping, often opposable thumbs, very complex binocular vision, very important to be able to judge distances between branches when the consequence of falling a few meters was a broken limb and Before we had, you know, primate hospitals, that usually meant death.
Trichromatic vision, being able to spot, you know, red fruit amongst a green backdrop of foliage.
So there's so much about the human experience, which is determined by this relationship.
So maybe as a way to get started, let's nerd out a little more and talk about just what the heck is a tree.
Because to me, it's like this way to store photosynthetic energy beyond just these annual yearly cycles.
absorbs wavelengths sort of calibrated to our star so our star is putting out wavelengths of light energy is coming out from fusion in the sun that energy hits the earth and over a long period of time Organisms developed to, well, you could say use the energy, but organisms developed that dissipated heat.
These little things starting with single cells or even less were just ways of dissipating heat.
So Mark, I think like nerding out on this, I like to take these, you know, vast, expansive timeframes and really try and understand things in as multifactorial a way as possible.
Our short guts, our small jaws, our big brains are enabled by our ability to use fire to cook food.
about a million years ago, but even going back further in terms of understanding the ways in which not just fire, but trees have shaped us and the specialist of trees.
If we go back into our phylogenetic order, if we work our way back from species into genus, into family, into order, the primates, I mean, we are derived of an arboreal species.
There's birds that fly in the sky and they all have adaptations that flow as a result of this.
But primates are cool little guys that hung out in trees, developed grasping, often opposable thumbs, very complex binocular vision, very important to be able to judge distances between branches when the consequence of falling a few meters was a broken limb and Before we had, you know, primate hospitals, that usually meant death.
Trichromatic vision, being able to spot, you know, red fruit amongst a green backdrop of foliage.
So there's so much about the human experience, which is determined by this relationship.
So maybe as a way to get started, let's nerd out a little more and talk about just what the heck is a tree.
Because to me, it's like this way to store photosynthetic energy beyond just these annual yearly cycles.
absorbs wavelengths sort of calibrated to our star so our star is putting out wavelengths of light energy is coming out from fusion in the sun that energy hits the earth and over a long period of time Organisms developed to, well, you could say use the energy, but organisms developed that dissipated heat.
These little things starting with single cells or even less were just ways of dissipating heat.
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