Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We have an awesome return guest who initially I had met through a company that I was working with that this guest was also working for but now Dr. Mark Maryweather Vorderbrugan is the chief herbalist and chemist for the rest of the day.

I think it's fantastic to have you back and especially after 2020 which was quite a wild year for all of us and I think a lot of your skill sets really came to the forefront.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me and again congratulations on crossing the million viewer mark.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, if you're listening to this podcast the time or release, we did just go past a million on YouTube.

So thanks to everyone who who helped contribute to that. But yeah, I mean the last time we talked you have a background in chemistry, you have a background in and I don't even know there's just there's too many things.

So maybe a brief little primer on on your background would be helpful to listeners.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So as you said, my my training as a PhD chemist, master's in medicinal chemistry, PhD in physical organic chemistry, not making molecules, but figuring out the molecules.

That one would use to accomplish a certain job. My true passion and love though has always been plants in particular wild plants.

They're edible and medicinal uses because the the chemistry involved in them is absolutely fascinating.

I like to remind people there's more to plant chemistry than caffeine and aspirin.

You're right. Right. Yeah, I mean most and or all of the compounds that we use in modern medicine at some point come from plants right in some capacity.

Very much so, especially before 1864, all of them did. Right. Right. And what was the inflection point in 1864 then?

Laziness basically. No, so that's when the chemists first came up with a compound that they found was bioactive in the human body.

It was a sedative and that led them to go, well, if we can have this power, you know, from something created outside of nature's leaf factories, what else can we do?

And in the long run, if you look at the economics of it, it's much easier to just build one molecule than grow, harvest, dry, extract, store, and you know, compact a bunch of different plants.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the raw, you know, sort of capitalist look at it. I suppose that's correct. Right. It's just easier to do.

Exactly. So if you have lots of people that need medicine, it's easier to just supply them with stuff from a factory than, you know, train them to grow it themselves.

Yeah. Make sense. And I guess that sort of brings us to, I like the framing of this week, everyone, we're sort of talking about, you know, herbal medicines and remedies, things that you could even grow at home through the context of the immune system.

And so that's what today's episode is all about and you're calling it the game board. So could we explain that Mark?

Yeah. So I like to explain things in a way that it relates to something people already know. And the immune system, it is you against them.

You know, the invader, the enemy, so it's, you know, good guys versus bad guys, but there are rules to that battle.

And like a game, we know those rules, you know, the game board is you, but the way the pieces move, the way the viruses, the fungal, the bacterial, the parasitic worms, you know, move and act and attack, it's all controlled still by the laws of physics and chemistry.

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