About 2000 years ago, Plato ran his school in Greece. Plato's academy, and it was right

next to an olive grove. Well, long after all the students were gone, the olive trees persisted.

In fact, as late as the 1970s, one of those olive trees was still growing. After it was

hit by a bus, they put part of it in a museum, but part of it remained. Until in the middle

of the night, someone chopped it down for firewood. Hey, it's Aurov, and this is a special

archive episode of Akimbo.

I'm fascinated by olive trees. It's a recent fascination. Here are a couple things that

I learned. The first one is, if you take an olive pit, even one from an olive right off

the tree, you can't use it to grow a good olive tree. Something will grow, but it'll

be a feral tree, a wild tree. The way trees were before we figured out how to optimize

them for growing olives. All the olives that you've ever eaten come from grafts. One

put on to another live tree. It takes a lot of patience. It takes years and years before

that work pays off with an olive worth eating. An olive tree can grow for two thousand years.

It turns out that over time, olive trees get more and more productive. Not every year. Sometimes

you'll have to wait three, four, or five years for a bumper crop, but it'll come. It'll

always come. And not surprisingly, California olives, black olives are the fake kind. They're

not actually black. They're sort of colored. And they're not actually fermented. They're

pumped with oxygen and a few other things in solution to hurry them up. Because after

all, that's the California way. That's the modern way. That's the human way we like

to hurry up. We're really quite good at emergencies and at short term, emergencies. What we're

terrible at, what human beings are terrible at is visualizing a future, anything in the

distant future, like an olive tree. It's really difficult to think like an olive farmer.

...