Hi, I'm Mark Madison, the historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and today I'm here with Jeffrey Ryan, author, historian, outdoorsman, who's talking about his most recent book, This Land Was Saved For You and Me, How Gifford Pinchot, Frederick Law Olmsted, and a Band of Foresters, Rescued America's Public Lands. So, Jeffrey, it's great to have you here, and I would like any of you out there viewing this, please do share any questions you might have. I mean, one of the virtues of this forum is you get to ask questions and have some interactivity with our author, Jeffrey. And, Jeffrey, one of the things that's great about this book is there's some lesser-known figures in it that we can talk about a little later, but there's also some fairly famous people like Frederick Law Olmsted that had surprising starts to their career, and I wonder if you want to talk a little about that to kick this off. Sure. I had also prepped a little just quick background info on me before we dive into the first hero that I highlight in my book, and I'll be really brief, I promise. My background in conservation history came through hiking. Here I am on the Pacific Crest Trail hiking from Mexico to Canada in 1983, and then I followed that up with a 28-year hike on the Appalachian Trail with a good friend of mine. We did a little piece of the trail every year. We smorgasborded it, as we would like to say, doing a nonlinear approach, and as I said, it took us almost three decades to complete that. And in doing those two adventures, I really got interested in, first of all, telling the story about how we section-hiked, which is my first book, Appalachian Odyssey, and then the second one was Blazing Ahead, which is about the history of how the Appalachian Trail was devised and built, and that turned me on to the path of America's conservation history. And as Mark well knows very well, I have followed that up with gusto digging deep into the archives of American conservation history. So that being said, I have also hit the road to find the places where the great conservationists were born and raised and practiced their craft. This is Ernest Oberholzer's Island near the Boundary Waters Wilderness, which he was integral in creating. This is Aldo Leopold Shack in Barabu, Wisconsin, where he did much of his writing and, of course, wrote the Sand County Almanac, one of the greatest conservation books of all time. And finally, Gifford Pinchot Estate in Milford, Pennsylvania. He's one of the main characters in my book, as one might surmise. And my initial intent with this book, this land was saved for you and me, was to create somewhat of a conservation family tree, if you will. I wanted to try to figure out the interconnectedness between the different people and the environmental movement. And it got so complex so quickly that even if I put the full team of finding your roots on to this project, I don't think they would have been able to pull it off. So what I figured out was really, for me, the best way to tell the story was in a series of conservation baton passes over a 100-year period. So basically, it goes from Frederick Law Olmstead to Gifford Pinchot to the band of foresters, which we will undoubtedly mention today. So Olmstead's interesting because a lot of people know Frederick Law Olmstead primarily as the co-designer of Central Park and the preeminent landscape designer in American history, but also he had a huge effect on American conservation in general and public lands. So what's fascinating about Olmstead, who's 200th birthday was last year, by the way, he saw the world through the eyes of it from a very young age of someone who was predominantly occupied with an interest in scenery. Scenery had a huge effect on him psychologically and physically. He would go on great walks even as a child and figured out early on that scenery gave him energy and gave him a sense of a ability to pause and consider things in nature. His career decidedly did not start out in landscape design. He in fact dabbled in a number of things including surveying, tried to go to Yale, didn't like it, became a deck hand on a sailing ship bound for China, didn't like that either. He gave that up after a year decided he would become a fruit farmer instead. So fast forward in 1857 Olmstead was in a hotel working on the final edits for his fourth book. Yes, he was an author as well and he got a telegram that the publisher had failed. So he's literally reading the manuscript of his book and finding out that it's all for naught. When a good friend of his named Charles Elliott walked into the room and said, oh my gosh Frederick Law Olmstead, I've been thinking about you. I'm working on this project. I'm on the board of this project in New York City looking for a superintendent. And the next morning or that night rather, he boards a ferry for New York City and ultimately becomes the supervisor of Central Park, which was underway but not being built in the way that the board originally had envisioned. So he teamed up with a cathedral designer from Europe named Calvert Vox and they came up with a plan for Central Park. The big thing here about Olmstead as it relates to my book and about conservation in general is he saw Central Park as an opportunity to bring nature to people. So he's building a resource within an urban environment, bringing scenery, if you will, to the urban environment. He's emphasizing nature. The whole design that he worked on with Vox was to minimize man-made features and offer this freedom and repose which I had alluded to earlier, giving people a way to get away from the crowds and appreciate nature, common theme with Olmstead. So by the time he's done working on Central Park, he's deep in the hole, deep in debt due mostly to the publishing failures. He owes his father several thousand dollars, almost ten thousand dollars, which was a huge sum in the 1850s, 1860s, early 1860s. So he gets a job managing a gold mine in California and after walking in the Mariposa forest and seeing the giant trees, he has an epiphany about how important this natural landscape is and how important that could be to people that will eventually come to see this magnificent place. So he writes a report about it and again details why we need scenery. Importantly, this is in 1864 when he's writing. He's already saying that it's a scientific fact that natural scenery helps our health and vigor and gives us health benefits that are unimaginable to others and irreplaceable. And importantly, nature gives the ability to increase our happiness not just for the time when we're physically there, but because we've been exposed to this, it's an entree to securing happiness in the future. So once we discover the benefits of nature, they are with us forever. And also he says what happens if we don't have access to nature and he talks about softening of the brain and other melancholy and other things that would affect us if we didn't have such places to go to. So importantly, the thing that Olmsted was bringing to the party on a national scale was this fact that we all need nature, we need a place to go to, and he's starting to take that ball and run with it. So he is able to affect the establishment and saving of Niagara Falls area and also does the same thing when he goes to the World's Fair of 1893 and decides that amidst this hustle and bustle, he needs to create a place of repose and he builds an island into the landscape where tens of thousands of people are going a day and need to have that place. And of a more permanent factor, he will go on to become instrumental in creating the managed forest at the Biltmore estate. That's wonderful. Obviously, he's known for Central Park and then in Boston where I studied, he did the Emerald Necklace there where there's a nice national park site in his former office. So Olmsted, it's pretty well known, although this is the first I ever heard of his Yosemite adventures, which is fascinating. But there's also some people in your book that aren't as well known conservationists that were pioneers also, kind of at the base of that tree you showed us. Do you want to talk about some of those, Jeff? Yes, absolutely. And sort of about the same time when Olmsted was writing about the need for Yosemite in that report, and oh by the way, Abraham Lincoln ceded the land to the state of California in 1864 to create a state park. We all know that it became a national park afterwards, but sort of concurrently with the thinking that Olmsted was having was a particularly interesting character. George Perkins Marsh, Franklin Benjamin Hoff will talk about all of these. We're sort of concurrently leading up to this epiphany that we need more natural lands. At the time it was mostly state parks, as I mentioned before. So the first of them is George Perkins Marsh. George Perkins Marsh grew up in rural Vermont. And in the 1850s and early 1860s, he started recognizing what deforestation in particular effect was having on the landscape around him. An avid trout fisherman, he was seeing that clear cutting the forest nearby was causing soil infiltration into his favorite trout fisheries, but it was also causing droughts. So there were these cycles of droughts and floods, and he became very concerned with that and wanted to sort of bring this to the national attention. So in 1864, he publishes a book called Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. And this book took the world, particularly in America, by storm. It was really the first environmental book to talk about the air relationships between man and nature and what the prospects were if we continued doing some of the things we were doing. Stuart Udall said it was the beginning of the consciousness of the land ethic in our country. So to sort of set the stage here of what was happening around Marsh, this is how much virgin forest there was in America in 1620. Fast forward to 1850, you can see it disappearing. It was going at a very rapid clip. And then by 1920, we're just seeing dots of virgin forest left. So this is indicative of the sort of rampant clearing that was going on as the country was being built. And to be sure there was a genuine need to have timber building railroads and housing and whatnot, but there was genuine concern about the rate at which it was happening. And also more to the point, the fact that a lot of the land was being cut and not cared for basically particularly in the Adirondacks, there were tens of thousands of acres of land that had been clear cut and left wanting. No taxes were collected because the foresters absconded. So Enter Man and Nature and some of the points that Marsh was making in that book was the need to restore our forests. He's talking about specifically we have the means to restore the forest we should get to it. The influence of the book was probably, it was second only the Darwin's book on Origin of Species, but up until the fact, up until the publishing of Silent Spring and the Sand County Almanac, it was a critically important book and it's well worth going back there to read it again. So Man and Nature had a tremendous impact in general on the sort of general public consciousness about the need for managed forestry, but in particular I found it really interesting that there were two people in particular that had a very direct influence on. The first one is a guy named Franklin Benjamin Huff who grew up in upstate New York. He was raised from an affluent family in upstate New York and went on to medical school and started practicing in upstate New York in his hometown as an MD, which he did for a couple of years until he read Man and Nature and then he started realizing that he had to be taken active role in establishing forestry in the United States. So in the 1870s he got involved. He quit his medical profession in the 1850s. He first actually published the first American forestry periodical in 1862. Unfortunately, there were not enough subscribers to keep it going. Then he joined the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which was a civil war entity department that was created to help bring medical equipment to the troops and he ended up working under Olmsted, interestingly enough. So in 1855 and 65 he oversaw the census for the state of New York and it was during that 10-year period where he put everything together and said, oh my gosh, look at the forests that are disappearing, particularly in his neighboring Adirondack region as I mentioned before and he had read Man and Nature. So therefore by 1872 he had risen to such prominence that he served on a New York commission to review devastation in the Adirondacks and then ultimately came to Portland, Maine, my hometown to deliver a paper on the importance of preserving forests. In that paper he makes some revelatory observations. One is obviously the need for timber is established and well needed. Any efforts to manage forests would not be against forestry quote-unquote, but they were aimed at managing forests a little smarter than we had been and the rate of timber use was unsustainable. Obviously the forest needed to be managed in his eyes and fourth really amazing for 1873 we need forestry schools. There was no such animal back then. So as a result of all of this he was named a special agent to the Department of Agriculture to assess the forests and lumbering operations in the United States and being Franklin Benjamin Huff he took the opportunity to travel all throughout the country and write a 650 page compendium on everything from land use and misuse to preservation of seeds, basic horticulture that's what what growing conditions are needed for various types of trees and oh by the way recommending a forestry school curriculum. Right on the heels of that there was a division of forestry chief position and created and he was named the first one which was interesting to me because I like many have heard that Giverd Pinchot was the first head of a forestry department. It was in fact Franklin Benjamin Huff. It would not be until 1905 when Giverd Pinchot was named the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. So that's one of the lesser known. That's really interesting. It's the USDA is also starting the biological survey around this time. It's really kind of a home agency for early American conservation and yeah like you I'd assume Giverd Pinchot was the first chief of a national forest service and Marsh his homestead which was part of that deforested landscape you showed us and now is reforested secondary growth. It's just in Woodstock, Vermont. It's a national park now called Marsh Billion Rockefeller. So like you people we've both been there. Yeah can go visit it and retrace these steps. Are there other lesser known conservationists that we should talk about? One lesser known conservationist is actually the father of Giverd Pinchot and I mentioned James Pinchot for a variety of reasons. One is I think one of the most interesting facets of this whole story is that the Pinchot family came to Milford, Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. They purchased about 400 acres of land and promptly clear cut it and they had also made money in land speculation and they owned a store and I think at a gut level James was always a little uncomfortable with that for whatever reason and he decided that he would go make his fortune a little bit farther afield. He went into New York as New York was going New York City was going through an incredible boom in the 1850s to 60s and made his fortune importing wallpaper from France. There were a lot of hotels being built and he rode the wave and became a multi-millionaire. After that he was of course very socially connected in conjunction with building all these hotels and other places that needed wallpaper so he became well connected and he also became enamored of the idea of bringing the Statue of Liberty to the United States so during all this activity he meets Richard Morris Hunt of Bennington, Vermont who rose to fame designing the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and also would go on to build several ornate residences in the United States including the Biltmore as we shall see. Here's the pedestal and the monument being built. There's the pedestal today. James Pinchot ended up deciding to retire at age 44 with his millions and bought some property overlooking the valley where his family had first settled in Milford, Pennsylvania and hired Hunt to build this palatial estate which still exists today. I believe it's the only U.S. Forest Service building of its type that's maintained. Most of their other lands are obviously national forests but it's an amazing place and I highly highly recommend going. It's called Grey Towers. James married Mary Jane Eno who also came from a background of wealth and they decided that to do their Hunt designed house justice they would hire Frederick Law Olmsted to be the landscaper so his landscape design is all around that house even to this day and at the time Young Gifford was literally just being a toddler just being born and James retires and happens to get his hands on a book called Man and Nature. This is James' copy of Man and Nature which is at the Milford house under glass. Pretty neat. I think I undoubtedly is a first edition. But more to the point he read this book and he was also taken like Huff had been taken and one of the salient points in here is the improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries so much more the reason for beginning now that really hit James and he decided that he would urge his son to become a forester to help undo that deforestation and do something about it so even before his son enters Yale class of 1889 James asked Gifford how would you like to be a forester and of course Gifford was really a little bit perplexed because he didn't know what one was and why would he and he said later on it was an amazing question for his father to ask that he didn't really understand the the import of until much later here's young Gifford in Yale and he tells his peers that he is going to become a forestry professional it will become his life work he's promptly assured that by a professor that not only does the profession not exist but there is not a single class being taught in forestry in the United States and quite excitedly and this is a nice little insight into Gifford's thinking and self assurance he writes home I shall not only have a I shall have a science to found as a result no competition so on his 21st birthday James and Mary give Gifford his own copy of man and nature just one example of their encouragement to him to make forestry his career and then Gifford goes off to forestry school comes back to the United States and announces that he's here to find the profession of forestry and really no one's ready to listen to what he has to say he's not getting anywhere he's not really gaining traction he does get a few side hustles but no one's really understanding what it is that he's trying to get off the ground or not willing to buy into it until someone else does it first so now he intersects with Olmsted in 1888 Olmsted is summoned by George Vanderbilt to come to Asheville and Vanderbilt is distraught because much of the land that he has purchased has been clear cut and Olmsted immediately looks around and says there's this thing that's starting to get off the ground about managing forests maybe maybe we can get that young man Gifford pinchel on board to manage this now 86,000 acres of forest so in 1892 young Gifford is hired and his first job is quite public and he is able to try to try his hand at proving the viability of managing forests being Gifford he throws his entire weight into trying to get this enterprise off the ground he stubs his toe a few times but as we all know he ultimately prevails so there's some other evolutions you chart in your book that that come after pin show and you promise to tell us a little about the relatively unknown Julius Ward who is Mr. Ward Julius Ward perfect timing um you might remember on an earlier slide when I was showing underneath Olmsted some of the figures underneath including Marsh and I had also mentioned this character Reverend Julius Ward of New Hampshire he was quite an amazing person so he was born in Massachusetts and then became a pastor in Connecticut and Maine but he spent much of his time in the white mountains and was very taken by the scenery in the whites and also taken by the devastation that happened as a result of queer cutting there um he wrote an Atlantic monthly article highlighting the importance of the forest not only to the timber industry but importantly to the tourism industry and he was really one of the first ones to bring that thought to the fore and it really gained traction so he talks about climbing to the summit of mount washington and looking out at this frightful frightful desolation the slaughter of the forest and saying that even youngsters today will be great when when this thing is when this area is reforested it is a devastating landscape to look at from the top of the highest peak in new england but even more presciently he he writes about the effect that queer cutting has on the soil much like marsh he's talking about how when the forest is deforested the whole nature of the soil changes the sponginess is gone it dries up the storms come and the water flows down over it in such torrents that it causes other ecological dam damage and he talks about fresh it's which which is uh what we now call floods and he sends out a warning saying this cannot continue to happen or there will be horrible uh price to pay downstream and lo and behold just two and then the following year three years later there were hellacious floods on the maramaic river as a result of the deforestation that he was talking about and uh one one such event put 6 000 people out of work overnight so now we're seeing uh not only ecological issues but and and economic issues as it relates to tourism we're now seeing issues as it relates to manufacturing which is another thing that happened in the out of rondacks i should add is that one of the reasons that the out of rondacks were turned into a national sorry a state entity was because the merchants in new york city were worried about the effects that forestry deforestation were having on the eerie canal and they were afraid that if the eerie canal did not provide enough competition to the railroads that they would be paying through the nose to bring their goods to market or their raw goods into the factory so that was another interesting thing that i learned about how the out of rondacks came into uh being saved so how does this story find a solution how do you jump ahead there we go yep there are the white mountains today by the way hugely forested well this kind of brings us to baton pass number two so i i do want to talk about how wilderness areas came into uh into being so gifford pincho um obviously rose to become the head of the forest service he actually spent about 10 years being um the the head of the agency under agriculture um interior though owned all the land so he was in a position of being in an advisory role with no power so he was largely ignored on on on in the terms of forest policy forestry policy so he ultimately was able to convince um tr to move everything over to uh him under in the department of agriculture so he was thrust into a position of being the forestry chief now he had several tens of thousands of acres of forest to manage and he needed to hire people to do it and so uh his father interestingly enough had endowed the Yale forestry school in the early 1900s so it just coincided with having freshly minted foresters to go work for pincho's department so many of those foresters um were famous would become famous in their own right um including Aldo Leopold who was sent out to new mexico in the 19 early 1920s um with a horse and a rule book and um the the the us laws of forestry and trying to convince people that they needed to adhere to a new set of rules um and then also there were quasi famous people like Benton Mackay who was also one of the first foresters that would go on to come up with the idea for the Appalachian Trail so and Bob Marshall was another one uh of Bob Marshall Wilderness fame um many of you may know his name he was uh instrumental in getting the wilderness movement off the ground as well i'll refer to that in a minute but these first foresters said okay um we've come to this fork in the road where we have um state parks we have national parks we have national forests but the one piece that was missing in their mind was um wilderness areas but places that would be left alone quote unquote um untrammeled and so one of the things that made them worry and and rightfully so i believe was the advent of the automobile and that and the egress into public the public realm um Mackay himself was saying in the early 1930s that the function of true wilderness is to provide a refuge um of from billboard pavement and the auto horn um they are all negations of wilderness and the reason he was saying this is because um the the roads the building of roads was starting to infiltrate places like the Appalachian Trail in fact um as we will see in some places it was built roads were built right over the footpath that he had helped establish so it really hit home with him of course as i mentioned the adoption of the automobile was also driving this um let just look at the rise between 1910 and 1930 we're seeing a tremendous growth in automobile ownership and of course people were looking to escape the suburban and urban environment and go out and explore it also sort of uh coincides with the growth of the national park movement as uh ken burn so aptly pointed out but the other thing that was going on were skyline drive so this is a long skyline drive in virginia um these were becoming a quote unquote thing um they at one point there were 12 of them being proposed at at once um one of them of course was skyline drive which was built over 34 miles uh over the top of the Appalachian Trail and then Blue Ridge Parkway sort of piggybacked on top of that but in addition to those there were another 10 being proposed and one was over the masonutton range to the west of Shenandoah others believe it or not hard to believe today were uh proposed to go over the whole top of the green mountains the whole state of vermont over the top of the white mountains in new hampshire and so on and so forth so these first foresters were concerned and Benton Mackay had decided that he would pose the question to some fellow foresters uh in private at the 1934 american forestry association meeting there's Benton in the upper left um harvey broom was very instrumental in the creation of Smoky Mountain National Park Bernard Frank was mostly um he was a forester but he also was well known for what water quality and restoration management in the early days and of course Bob Marshall so Benton Mackay says to the gathered group here the small group that uh hey guys what do you think about starting a um an organization which is against skyline drives and Bob Marshall very aptly said we shouldn't start an organization which is against anything rather we should start an organization that is for something um very smart young man indeed I think he was only in his 30s um and so therefore they asked Aldo Leopold to join them Marshall was one and Benton Mackay um to found the wilderness society which they did in 1934 which brings us to the story of Howard Zahnizer yeah our first non-forester he's got a good pedigree with the Fish and Wildlife Service so tell us a little about Zani well what was really interesting is that when the those first foresters started the wilderness society they were basically playing whack-a-mole with um doing um exactly what Bob Marshall had cautioned against which was they they were trying to halt halt progress on a number of dam projects which they were successful in doing more often than not but they were not creating a wilderness network or a network of wilderness areas um and it finally came to a head um Benton Mackay said after about 15 years into doing this that um they had to they were exhausting themselves on this sort of one at a time approach to trying to get to their ultimate goal what they really needed what they felt that the country needed was an organized approach to establishing wilderness areas and protecting them and um when Mackay became the head of the organization in 1955 um he was getting up there in years and didn't have the energy to really put together this concerted effort so they hired this young man named Howard Zahnizer and you know the joke internally was the guy looks more like a librarian than a wilderness type um and here he is with his son Ed who Mark and I both know Ed um and he's a lovely man spent his his life in conservation as well but what Zahnizer brought to the party was this amazing um ability to communicate he was from a writing a naturalist background he wrote wonderful pieces on birding which was very near and dear to his heart and um also I believe wrote for for Mark's department over there at Fish and Wildlife for a while or its precursor um and as I said they were concerned he wasn't a wilderness man in fact one of them is Ed still laughs to this day said uh Harvey Broom said in private correspondence he found later that he looks more like a librarian than a wilderness man but happily they were quite wrong um Mackay had proposed to focus the work on securing wilderness areas and as I said after he first proposed that it took another several years for them to hire Zahnie and uh get him up and running on it so it took Zahnizer 17 years of non-stop work to try to get Congress and and not just Congress but the timber industry the the forest service the parks service you know there was a lot of internal squabbling about what does wilderness mean does it take away from the lands that we're managing does it pose a threat um those kinds of political conversations were happening um but one thing Zahnie had was patience um unlike many people I I've seen in the political world uh for sure he did not see opponents as enemies he really tried to sit down and work with people what are your concerns um how can we address your concerns in some cases redrafting language to alleviate those concerns and he'd continue to circle around and sit down with people literally hundreds if not thousands of meetings he went all across the country meeting with garden clubs and you know wilderness advocates and you name it and he had one of the neatest things about Zahnie is he had this giant coat where he had a tailor build in a number of pockets so he could have different versions of talking points for the legislation in different pockets and hand them out to the person that to the right person to the right audience and of course not everything fit in his overcoat so he had that giant valise on his side um his son Ed would joke that he would he would try to lift his father's coat to put it over a chair at the end of the day and it felt like weightlifting so 19 hearings 60 plus rewrites of the legislation as I mentioned all sorts of appearances and importantly it was not just people that were on the side of the wilderness act but very importantly and this is a common theme in the book is that most progress was made when people of other viewpoints would sit down and and they just try to figure out a way to make it work um you know what a what a great thing for all of us to to remember um writing articles for newspaper and finding newspapers and finding support wherever and whenever he could find it and as I mentioned he's he's very high on collaboration and believed that even if the legislation was passed if it was not done with a spirit of cooperation then after it was passed the the people who were not happy with it would start working to undermine the legislation so he wanted to make sure that there were enough people on board to have the legislation take effect and last and then importantly he was a man of faith and he believed that the whole substance of our culture um is having a living wilderness in our midst it's important for our happiness arching back to Olmstead our health physically and mentally obviously and it it offers the chance to perpetually renew ourselves in contact with the earth does that bring us up to the present then it does great almost almost so zany died in his sleep in 1864 the tragedy being that he did not live long enough to see the wilderness act passed although he knew it was going to um he had had a history of heart problems and probably no small part of it was throwing his entire being into the passage of this legislation for 17 years um but in july of that year the law passed the house the full house 374 to 1 and uh i believe mark was there when i when i was giving a presentation at the us fish and wildlife headquarters and and um ed zonizer was in the audience and he raised his hand and said the one dissenter was asked after the legislation after the roll call um why did you vote against this and he he said that he admitted to the fact that he didn't really understand what he was voting for or against so he ended up being the lone dissenter um september 3rd 1964 the law was signed into laws we see here with lbj and um hubert humphrey standing behind him who was the sponsor one of the sponsors of the bill and in the center of the photograph is zonizer's wife alice looking on so originally the wilderness act established nine oh just over nine million acres of wilderness in 13 states including the places that you see below and then later on there were additions made to the wilderness system and now has almost 112 million acres and yes some of it was cleaved out within sections of our national parks and national forests and uh bureau of land management lands um the idea being that these places will be largely left whole to the extent that they can be um untrammeled meaning uh no permanent roads certainly visitation is encouraged but uh in the in the spirit of leave no trace just today to give a sort of roster we have 423 national parks um 803 wilderness areas 154 national forest plus grasslands and of course you can find out more about it in my book much more about olmstead and pin show i didn't even get to the creation of our national parks and and more about the headwinds and challenges facing all of these people well known or not and um another one is the whole question of preservation versus conservation what do each mean um what was the arc of each one of those movements and where are we with that today well jeffrey that was a tour de force thank you you gave us the history of the american conservation movement in about 50 minutes which was quite impressive and uh you know you cover a lot of people both known and unknown you cover a lot of the movement from the forest service through the wilderness system up till today what message do you want readers to take from your book well a couple of them i think um you know as as with most historical deep dives we find really amazing surprises like um franklin benjamin hoff who really i think sort of encapsulates this whole idea of follow your passion um here was this guy who was essentially a a lone lone voice in upstate new york saw what was going on and decided that he would dedicate his career to it give up a medical practice for it um it's pretty inspiring and then of course we have the the pillars the the giants of of any any sort of progression and history that get a lot of the acclaim but i think i my heart is really with um the interplay between the people and these sort of unknown grassroots building coalitions that seem to be disparate and they were all headed toward something really wonderful and then the second thing is i think um not to not to harp harp on it too much but i think the idea of meeting with people with different viewpoints and you know that's we're starting to come back to that again which is wonderful i know a lot of the agencies are are really taking that on trying to get local voices at the table um around not just meetings but operations putting offices on the ground in proximity to places that are being managed so they're accessible and you know pincho had a very famous adversarial this whole thing was building up as this horrible meeting with the timber harvesters in the west and he was sent out there by rosevelt to go speak with them and sat in the audience for two days listening to his name being dragged through the mud to be to culminate in his being introduced as the most evil man on earth and walks up to the podium and basically says you know i'm a forester just like you are and my interest is trying to make sure that we have a viable industry and um you know i'm not here to put you out of business if you have that idea that's not correct and um you know a lot of people stood and applauded i'm not saying you got a standing ovation by any means but i think it's really instructive to to take into account of course zonais are lived and breathed in on daily basis so i think those for me are the two pleasant takeaways um you know it's not always a straight line and it's not always it's not always easy but i think i think the end result is something where we can all be happy with like to think that that's a positive note i one other thing that's striking even in your brief presentation is the disparate backgrounds of these folks so marsh is a diplomat uh julius or it is a a theologian right um leopold during his most famous period as a professor zonais are is you know writing radioscripts for the biological survey for a federal agency um they're all coming from different backgrounds and all instead was a renaissance man i mean he was a fruit farmer a merchant marine uh uh a very highly regarded author and went on to create a company that designed 6 000 landscapes in the united states and canada um unbelievable really um everything was leading him toward what he became and he had that faith that that's what was going to happen and uh that's also an interesting lesson from the book yeah and the importance of place comes out right um you know the the silted trout streams of vermont and the denuded forests of the the white mountains and and uh leopold saw the the impact of the dust bowl and and settlement in the southwest that's really important was it helpful to you to visit these places or had they changed so much that you you you couldn't see it with their eyes oh my gosh no they they have um thankfully largely unchanged um and i i i think we've talked about this before but the the impact for me of being in those places gives me and i've always felt strongly about the getting a sense of where people operated um you know the furrow cabin i've been to many times uh kifford pincho estate more times than i can count um although leopold shack twice um i've been to zonizer's birth place um i've been to urnist oberholz resign one twice for a couple weeks and i just think it's really important to wake up in the places where they operated and listen to that white-throated sparrow or or walk on the shoreline and get an idea of what it was that made them such advocates for the for the for nature um you know those of us who feel passionately about it i think share that common thread of places that were were seminal in having us understand how important it is like this place in my slide is uh it is right behind the house where i grew up in main um one of my favorite places to go is this tidal creek that um constantly changing with the tides and i've been out there since i was eight years old tramping around in those woods and it's a very special place to me unfortunately someone in 1947 decided that this should be a 58-acre nature preserve um who knew you know it was a marvelous playground for a young man so maybe that's the final message huh jeffrey find your special wild places or natural places and then go out there and do your best with whatever your skills are to to help preserve them i think that's one message we definitely could take from your book wonderful thank you well that was a quick hour we're out of time here but thank you so much this was really really fun and we want to thank the national archives for sponsoring this and all of you who took the time to tune in thank you thanks for having me it was wonderful


Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this Christmas piano lesson, we are going to learn Feli Snavidad by Jose Feli Siano. A popular song around the festive season I am sure. And I am going to teach it to you in a slightly different way than it is normally taught. I am going to teach you the song in five ways. We are going to do some very groovy genres. It is a groovy song. It is a wishing song. So we will do the lesson as follows. We will first start off with the melody. I am going to teach you the tune. It is on G major. One sharp. F sharp. I will teach you the melody. Then we will go through the chords. And then we are going to develop solo piano arrangements on five genres as well as one bonus one. So do stay tuned till the very end and get yourself a copy of the staff notation which is available on our Patreon page. Along with the staff notation, you will also get MIDI files, you will also get backing tracks and not only for this lesson, you will be getting supplementary resources for pretty much all that we have been doing and will ever do on YouTube. And it will be awesome if you could consider hitting that subscribe button and turn on that bell icon for regular notifications. Let's get cracking. First off, the melody on G major. So I will just play you line by line. Get your keyboards out. It might help. And stay tuned till the very end because the chords are going to come in, the rhythm patterns, the genres. So do stay tuned. You might want to pause the video and get your keyboards out and play along with me as I am teaching. So first let's do the melody with a simple pulse in the left hand and a good note to play is G. So let's just look at G major. G A B C D E F sharp G. One sharp. Namely F sharp. E F sharp E D C B A G. So let's just look at the melody first. We need to note that the melody starts not at the one beat but a bit later. So one and two and three and four and one two three four and then a long gap. So Feliz starts at one two Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad. Let's just do that package one two Feliz Navidad Feliz Navidad. If you read music, you can see the notation Feliz Navidad Prospero año felicitando. One more time and you can look at my fingers. I am starting with my index finger on D that would help. And then Feliz Navidad. You can use your pinky for that A Feliz actually pinky for both the top notes G and A. So let's do that together Feliz Navidad. And if you want to count this one and two and three and four and one it's starting at the end of the beat number two of the bar which seems to have four beats and two and three and four and one two three four wait Feliz Navidad two three four wait. So it's pretty much the same rhythmic figure. So we are going to fill those gaps with our left hand with a lot of interesting rhythmic options. 1, 2, 3, 4, wait, 1, 2, 3, 4, wait, so now moving to the third line, you can probably cross over your index finger, or you can use the thumb for both notes. Up to you really, the fingering is pretty easy for this melody. Let's do that again and I'm just maintaining a simple pulse and it's about the right time to introduce you to the chords, but without us actually playing the chords, let's just do the roots of the chords. So even if you are a beginner watching this video and if you don't know how to actually play a full on chord with inversions and patterns, you can get by by just playing the root. So I'll just walk you through the roots, that's a C which is the 4 chord of the G major. Eventually form a C major throughout our over our lesson, Feliz Navidad to C, D, Feliz Navidad back to the tonic, E minor, added an E minor, Feliz Navidad C, Prospero D, Feliz C, 2, 3. Let's do that whole story again. Feliz Navidad C, 2, 3, 4, D, Feliz Navidad 2, 3, 4, E, Feliz Navidad C, Prospero D, Feliz C, 2, 3, 4. And then the next increment or the next pattern would be just to play a pulse in the left hand, this will be a good opportunity to start working on the hand independence before the genres come into play. So 1, 2, a good way to develop the pulse is move your head to the melody while you're playing it. You may not even want to play anything but maybe do an iteration just with your head counting the pulse. 1, 2 and exactly what this head is doing, you're going to transfer it to our left hand with what? The chord roots of each of the chords. So C, D, maybe E, Feliz Navidad C, Prospero D, you can stop there. 2, 3, 4, stop like it is in the original. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, Feliz Navidad C, D, Feliz Navidad C, D. So that's about the pulse and for those of you who know your chords or at least the chords without inversions, just the root positions of the chords, at this stage you could probably play the root chords, the root positions of the chords in a block shape or in a block style and just follow the pulse and a D, E minor, C, D, G again, C and D, G. This is where inversions will help you because otherwise you have to keep staring at the left hand in order to figure out where exactly to go, which is the next chord root. So if you master your inversions, Feliz Navidad C, now D, nothing in common, you can probably play G major like this, sounds better, Feliz Navidad C, Prospero D, G. If you don't like blasting the chords so aggressively on the pulse, maybe you can do it as minims, which is one chord every two counts, Feliz Navidad, E minor, C, D. So this is a good way to kind of prepare us for what's to come, the five plus one genres. So I hope that's cool, let me finish off the second part of the song as well, we've not yet said we want to wish you a merry Christmas, which is a very important part of the song. So let's do the B section as we call it, so it starts at the end of beat one. So what's happening there, the figure is, you don't play at the one. So a lot of these off beats and it in fact starts at an off beat, it starts at the end of beat one and even Feliz Navidad, if you remember earlier, one and two, Feliz it started at the end of the two and now I want to wish you, I want to wish, that's what makes it very interesting if you ask me, I want to wish you a merry Christmas and I want to wish you a merry Christmas and the rhythmic figure is the same, so if you can just kind of get this into your system, with a snap, it's pretty useful to snap at the two and the four, not I want to wish you, it feels more like a hard rock song or something, so to get the groove into our system, it's always good to sing it and snap it or clap it at the two and the four of the bar.  Okay now let's bring the melody into the right hand and my general strategy to develop hand coordination, especially when you're doing melody in one hand and chords with a pattern in the other hand would be, first focus on the foundation, which is the chords with rhythm, whatever rhythm you're going to play and sing, make sure you sing the melody before you actually bring it out there.  If the pulse is tough for you at this stage, just go back to the semi-brieves with chord roots, G, C, D, G and C, D, G, okay I've added some interesting chords at the end, I've added an E minor, A minor, D, G which serves as a nice cadence to kind of resolve back to the tonic, I'll just walk you through that, so the chords are G, I want to wish you a C major, I don't want to wish you a C major but that's the chord, G, I want to wish you a merry Christmas, C major, D, I want to wish you a merry, that's G major, now E minor, I want to wish you a merry Christmas, that's an A minor, from the bottom D of my heart, it's a nice progression, what is that progression in the key of G, very popular pop cadence, even in jazz music we use that, it's a 6, 2, 5, 1, pump, pump, pump, pump, knows every jazz song, knows every pop song seems to have this sort of motion, so that's about the melody, I hope you can now play the melody with the chord roots or block chords, if you need some time maybe you should pause the video, practice it a bit and then watch the genres, so now let's focus on the genres, so the first style or the first genre we are going to learn on the piano is the march and how it works is just like people marching, left, right, left, right, now if you want to get a nice marching pattern without the melody in the right hand, this is what you do, you play the root of the chord in the left and you play the actual chord in the right and you go march, left, right, another way to practice the march would be um pa, um pa, um pa, you can say um pa, okay but now the challenge is I have to play the tune there and I have to still create this marching feel, so to do that I'll have to convert that entire pattern to one hand, how do we do that, I'll play it once and then let's see what's going on, there we go, you see that so the left right nature or the marching nature ended up being a chord, I'm taking a chord let's say G major here which is the first chord, actually C major is the first chord and if you go first note which is the root and the upper two notes, the remaining two notes will be the pa, um pa, um pa, so this would be at beat one for now, that would be at beat two and then beat three and beat four and to get a nice marching style it'll be good to do the um like the word um, um, longer, legato and pa, choppier, staccato, so um pa, um pa, um so don't do um pa, um pa, um pa, no one's gonna dance if you play it like this, so um pa, um pa, so a nice ideal, so the ideal way to play is with a combo of legato and staccato feel, so legato staccato, legato staccato, instead of saying legato staccato it's just easier to just say um pa, face navida and as always let's follow the process of singing, getting the pattern then bringing the melody in the right hand, feliz navida, feliz navida, e minor, feliz navida, prospero anio felicida and goes on till the b as well, i wanna wish you a merry christmas, i wanna wish you a merry christmas, i wanna wish you a merry christmas from the bottom of my heart and if you have a song you want to play over the season which i'm presuming is feliz navida, since everyone wants to play this you might as well grow as a piano player rather than playing it in one standard safe way, so these are gonna be five plus one very scalable technique, so you can play it pretty much for a lot of material, okay let me play the melody now, remember sing and then play, so i finish singing now i'm playing feli navida and e minor, feli navida, prospero anio felicida, one more time slow it down, feli navida and e minor, the second time he goes it's a nice variation feli navida, prospero anio felicida, that's the first time, feli navida, prospero anio felicida and it works for the whole thing, i wanna wish you a merry christmas, i wanna wish you a merry christmas goes on, so that's the marching pattern moving on, so the closest rhythm i think will follow up after the marching style would be kind of a spanish style, so it's what i call or what we all tend to call as the flamenco technique, so let me play you the flamenco technique, it's pretty easy it just adds one extra chord, so let's see how that goes, as you can see the music is getting very groovy at the moment, there we go, so what's going on here, one and two and three and four, so that offbeat is at the end of the three, one and two and three and four and one and two and three four and one and two and three and four and one and feli navida, prospero anio felicida let's speed that up, feli navida, oh, oh, feli navida, feli navida, prospero anio felicida and as always we now try and attempt the melody, the same melody and as the genres go forward you'll find that you need to work a bit more on your hand independence, so you can also watch a few of my other lessons which just focus on the problem of hand independence, we leave some videos in the description, at this stage you may even want to consider do I want to play the melody higher or lower, maybe you like it, you have a good vibe playing the melody one octave high, chords one octave high, chords one octave low, where it used to be, you never know, so you have to decide your preferred octave, that might also help, I'm just going to stick with what we started with feli navida if you know a song on minor, this flamenco technique will work pretty well flamenco is more on minor but I'm just calling it flamenco because of the rhythm pattern, right, so I hope you enjoyed that genre flamenco, let's now move into style number three, so for this genre we are going to need to do something to the melody at a global level, we are going to need to swing the melody, so what that means is so that's swing, what's happening here is if the beat was divided into two units, one and two and three and four and the ands are going to get displaced ever so slightly to the swing feel, so what was once this will now be that, so one and two and three and four and one and two and three, so one and two, feli navida that's the swing that's your swing feel as opposed to feli navida, that's your straight right, so straight and swing it's a nice strategy to maybe take a song which was one straight and then try to swing it like I don't know that seems pretty straight right, so so you can pretty much swing anything and it gives you a song of very drastic change if you ask me you know you know okay I'm not going to go on and on with more songs this is a Christmas lesson remember, so to establish reggae that's one thing you need to swing and then we come back to our good old marching technique, our first marching technique and it's actually going to be made easier because you're not going to play anything at beat number three, what was the march again, just that right, while for reggae you're just not playing the beat three, let me show you and I'll give you a variation as well, the variation now because we've created that room right, so one and two and three and four and one and two and three and of the three and on of the four two and three and four and one and two and four okay let's start with the basic reggae and then the modified reggae, keep it simple if you want don't do that offbeat pattern, lot of Bob Marley songs just pretty much go pretty much that, so you don't have to do that additional swing hit which I gave you, so that's about reggae let's now move on to genre number four I'm just going to call this the dance genre, so if you want people to dance or if you want it to sound like it's played in 2023 maybe this pattern will help you out, so the pattern goes and there are two variants depending on your skill level on the piano, the first version would be what we call as the thresio, thresio means three hits so it's a very common salsa rhythm which we use very often in dance music, so the pattern goes one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and and the challenge here is to go one and two and three and four, what's very important is the end of the two needs to be staccato two and three and the on of the four can be legato one and two and three and four and one and two there we go one and two still four four just the feel has changed to thresio moving on you a merry christmas now the thresio to be a bit more dance here than this instead of going one and two and three and four and one and I can do one and two and a three and a four and a one and I can do 16th notes which divide the beat into four units there's a lot more off beats in there right there we go maybe sing it one and a two I want to wish you a mess this would be a more 16th note thresio you see the the voice and the piano at least the right hand of the piano and my voice whenever I play or at least work on solo piano arrangements I try to equate the right hand with my voice whatever comes out of my voice if ever it does it has to also go here or vice versa they are they're the same thing the hand is an extension of your voice so if you think that way practicing the piano becomes very process driven and I think process driven is a lot more fun than result driven result in the sense you want to play felice navidad but you don't you don't ask yourself how should I play felice navidad should I play it with all these bells and whistles or should I just play it to please someone no should play it to primarily please yourself so you should find a process which works for you and a process which also helps you learn other songs which I hope you will after watching this video so let's revise the two dance forms once more first the slow eighth note variant of the thresio let's try the fast one think come to think of it the a section you should play the slow thresio and the b section you should play the fast thresio let's see how that works felice navidad slow thresio chorus so I think that works well or you can flip it around so tell me what you think in the comments after you've tried this out and also which pattern you have ended up preferring or choosing for this Christmas season or maybe you can do one pattern this Christmas and another one next Christmas if you want and you can always share your performances with me I me and Nathaniel school we have Instagram account so you can always tag either of our channels or both and we'll be happy to go through it and even share it we we love to share our students performances so you can record it tag us it'll be a lot of fun to listen to you playing this piece as well so let's move on to pattern number five I'm going to teach you probably a genre you've all heard and arguably the world's most influential genre the blues so let's try and play felice navidad in a blue style and I'll give you two patterns two simple base patterns which I think will serve you well so one pattern would be you take every single chord in the in the music and let's simplify our chord progression to just G major C major and D major chords because that's what blues does it just does one four and five we don't need the six and the other minor chords in this in this rendition so if you are on G major instead of playing G major in some pattern you go the blues way and play this sort of a pattern so it's one five intervallically from the chord and one six intervallically from the root of the chord so that one five of G would be G D G E sorry one five would be G D one six would be G E and then you repeat that one five one six one five one six and of course without stops this is your pattern this could be used in twelve bar blues or it's in this case going to be used in felice navidad why not so felice navidad now here navidad I want to go to C there because that's my chord so go to the root what is one five one six of C C G C a that's a bluesy rendition and because it's blues we tend to also swing the music so instead of going actually that's also nice so if you play blues which is traditionally swung make it a bit faster and play everything straight don't swing it tends to become rock and roll or you can go back to the blues maybe for the B section or the same A section I'll give you another blues pattern which is more of a bass line that's intervallically one three five six five based on each root so this will test your independence I presume a little bit so I don't know which one I like better so might as well use both in this blues version so one is a very traditional piano blues pattern the other is more a bass guitar pattern which is brought to a piano piano players played very often as well so I can't finish this lesson without one more genre from my part of the world so I'm going to just call this an Indian style or an Indian rhythm style and to generate anything which sounds Indian or maybe eastern you know stuff you might find from the Middle East or India the subcontinent in general we use a lot of triplets the time feel is generally triplets so what happens with the beat it gets divided into three units two three four one two not it has one and a two and a three and a four so so if you get that vibe we are not going to play all those triplets you know I'll also hurt your hand you know which none of us want so what you can do is just break up your chord one and two and three and four and don't swing it you might think that Indian feel is like swing it's not really swing because there are a lot more permutations than normal swing so this could be a good pattern that you can consider playing you can go one and one and a two and it's like a thresio but a triplet version of the thresio one and a two and a three and a four and a one and a two and a two and a three and again you have to work on your independence this this could be a good pattern to work with one and a two and a one and a two and a ta ta ta ta ta ta ta one and a two and a three right guys so we've covered Feliz Navidad in five plus one genres I hope you enjoyed the lesson and I hope you found the lesson useful do consider getting the staff notation on our patreon page it's available as a midi file as well as a downloadable pdf and you can also consider hitting that bell icon and hitting the subscribe button for regular notifications we have a lot more Christmas tutorials we've put it in a playlist so do check that out in the description you can learn a bunch of songs so if you have any song requests it's probably all in that playlist and we'll be doing a few more Christmas lessons as well and you can learn in-person classes with Nathaniel at any given point maybe you want to sign up for a course sometime soon or in the new year you could consider filling up a form in the description and our course advisor will reach you you can also visit our website nathanielschool.com for course details thanks a ton for watching the video and here's wishing you and your family merry christmas and a happy new year cheers


Hello friends, welcome back to another episode here on the channel. I hope you're all doing great. And for anyone new to the channel, my name is Lee, also known as Osiris. In today's episode, we're continuing on with our VGC Series 9 content. So today's team is from a player who goes under the username Sletang. And I really hope I am not mispronouncing that. I'm pretty much sure I am. So big apologies there, but I'll put all the socials on the screen now. You can have a look at the tweet. Big shout out to Miguel as well for kind of pointing me in the direction of this team. This team in a Series 18 actually got to a score on the doubles rank ladder of 1950, which is pretty high, finishing in the top echelon of players and also topped out the showdown ladder as well. So the team is pretty strong. It's real privileged to be able to kind of feature it today. Hopefully you guys enjoy it and big shout out to the creator of the team, obviously, and Miguel again for pointing us in the direction. But the big thing is, if you can see behind me is the physical tap of Fini, which I think is super interesting. Got the life orb there, the ice punch, play rough and waterfall. So not your conventional tap of Fini that you kind of seen in the format at the minute with Carmine and kind of Sloan games down, setting up and all sorts of shenanigans with muddy water going for a way more physical set, especially with the life orb. So it's going to be interesting to see how that kind of functions. You've got the support from the right. You obviously redirection from the the indeedy as well. And then you've got the tailwind kind of set up and swagger combination there with the tornadoes as well, which works perfectly with the misty terrain from tap of Fini really nice team really looking forward to getting into it. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and other news as well. Obviously, I've had a haircut for the first time. I'm pretty excited about it in like a year and a half. An official haircut. Obviously, Tash has been doing like her best to kind of keep my hair in check. But today I managed to get to the barbers and actually have a haircut, which is which feels really nice. So win, win. Other news is players could throw players cut for emails went out. I did qualify. So we'll be doing some coverage around that. Obviously got the job has set up the X nine draft league as well. So have videos coming on that. I'm going to do an overall kind of look at everyone's teams and like preparation match for round one, which will be coming next week. So keep an eye out for those very excited about that though. And we'll continue with the series nine content. Thank you so much to everyone that suggested teams. If you've got rentals and things like that will make sure we get through them. If you've got rentals, you'd like to see featured on the channel. Drop them down below and I'll make sure to get them as soon as possible. But with that, friends, let's get into today's episode. Let's get into our first battle of today. Okay. First up today, we have a thunderous ocean foo incinero, tapu phony, landers and metagross team. So pretty solid looking team overall. You know, you've got the intimidate fake out support from the incinero going to support most things on the team, especially you've got that kind of combination between the thunderous and the ocean foo as well. Imagining that that is going to be the single strike variant dark type. And primarily going to be thunderous is going to be like the main kind of Pokemon that's looking to probably max on this team. I mean, you can't discount like the metagross as well. But just generally quite a solid team overall. I think like right you helps us out a bunch because it disrupts the the the thunderous and that lead there. Till wins a nice option for us as well. Because we can kind of get tornadoes in get the full protection, put a bit of pressure on the ocean foo, get our tailwind kind of set up. If we want got to be a bit careful around the opposing incinero coming in, but we do have the faster fake out. So we don't need to worry too much about that. I think tapu phony as well is super nice. And then we'll round off with banded ocean foo, which does pretty well against like metagross, landers and the opposing ocean foo. If we're in an advantage advantageous situation with their speed control that point. So let's see. I mean, we've got plenty of speed control options on this team. I do like it. You know, you've got the trick room of the stack attack and you've got electro web with right. So you've got tailwind with the tornado. So you've got plenty of options to kind of make sure that you're kind of ahead of the game almost.  But I think what does thunderous do? Does it just go for an airstream into tornadoes? Like it makes sense to kind of do that. But at the same time you want to you want to try and prioritize getting rid of the right you. So freeze up the the electric type stabs that you've got access to. Especially when it comes to something like type of finny we're not seeing the incinero switch out. So it looks like it went for the taunt and it's. It's a it's a it's a prankster to prankster thunderous. I always get caught up always get caught up by this. Okay, we can't taunt. That's pretty. That's not ideal. That is not ideal. And we can electro web, but it's probably better just to bolt switch out onto the thunderous. Maybe switch out into Urshavu here. They don't want to bring finny onto the field just yet. Like you could argue that it's not a bad idea to bring finny onto the field, but kind of finny is going to be our main kind of attack an option on the team. I think it's better that we kind of preserve it and get it in fresh. And so I'm going to bring in tornadoes again. There's not much chance that the thunderous goes for something like an electric type attack here, but yeah, just disregarding the fact that we've got Raichu out on the field and gone for a thunderbolt. Okay, the position that we really need is this next turn is to switch Urshavu out for Raichu and then have that fake out tailwind that we want to try and take advantage of the other option that we got potentially is is. Just go for a wicked blow into the tornadoes here and maybe pull Raichu onto the field because the only attack and presence that that thunderous is going to have is thunderbolt. If you can disrupt that Raichu's got the sash so it can kind of come in and once we get rid of the taunt then it frees up tornadoes to have way easier time. Like it's not going to worry about these like taunt pranks the taunts or anything like that. We can get a tailwind set up and so prioritizing getting rid of it is going to be the best thing to do. Okay, a taunt coming out again into the tornado slot which makes a lot of sense. Wicked blow now going to be able to take down this thunderous and the likelihood is like I'm surprised that the Metagross hasn't maxed here honestly. Expecting us to maybe go for like a wicked blow into that slot prokka weakness policy but we just see an iron head come out and it is enough but it kind of paves away at the same time for us to get tornadoes onto the field and we have that active fake out again. So see it's all going to be down Finney I feel at this point I can never really like to lose like any Pokemon early on in the game especially one of your big hitters because it puts a lot more pressure on onto something that you've got kind of sitting in the back to come in but I mean Finney is not going to be in the worst spot. Just a Metagross with a weakness policy scares me a little bit you know we've got the fake out again into the considerable and then we can we can definitely get a tailwind up but the question is like at this point is the tailwind like super necessary but we still don't know what my point has got in the back and they could come in and be even more disruptive. The concrete can't get over the Thunderbolt the previous turn but never mind it happens doesn't it happens. Thunderous probably didn't really have too many other options so just went for it just to click buttons didn't want to switch out or anything like that. We're going to see the Metagross Max here. Interesting to see what it goes for Max Quake maybe boost special defense makes a lot of sense but are they going to attack into the Raichu or the Tornadus here so you get that fake out into the Incineroar get a tailwind up which is great and Max Quake. Okay so special defense boosts that's not really the worst case scenario for us to be honest because I think the big thing for us is like we know we've got the physical finish so then boosting their special defense would normally be a bad thing but in this situation it's actually kind of kind of good for us that Metagross kind of tying itself up with these Max Quakes and I think what we'll do just with Electro Web I don't want to vault switch out because I want to as I say I want to get finish kind of onto the field fresh and we'll just protect Tornadus this turn and it might prevent the Incineroar going for something like potting shot into that Tornadus slot which you would maybe expect maybe. Like a potting shot here wouldn't be great from the Incineroar into Raichu we kind of need the Raichu to go down so Steel Spike coming out okay into Tornadus defense boost not ideal and I'm probably going to see the potting shot. Oh it's not okay that's perfect that's perfect so Raichu going to go down and that pays away for Finny to come in and we can start that Swagger span and so Swagger boosted boosted Max Geyser that's going to be interesting so we'll get a missy terrain up on the field which is what we need for this Swagger spam and we should be in a good spot like the one thing that would worry me like I hope the Incineroar stays in and snarls we'll go for the Geyser into the Metagross we'll go for a Swagger into Tapu Finny plus two waterfall and then after that in the next turn we've kind of got the momentum swing where we've got the tail wind up we've got the rain up and we've got a plus two attack boosted Tapu Finny potentially plus one if we see like a potting shot into it because we're not like we're not taking anything down here we've got the option where we could take down Incineroar could be an option but I kind of would like to just start concentrating a little bit more down onto the Metagross this this turn so Swagger come on that's like that's the worst that is the worst yeah doing very like minimal damage it's one drawback with Swagger as well you know he's trying to get the combination going and Swagger is not the most accurate of attacks so the defense boost as well for my opponent not helping us out a massive amount either as you see Max Quake coming we take that pretty well but at the same time it's not we're not in there most ideal situation that extra damage on the Metagross there would have been really really useful as we see snarl come out which is which is fine and now the Metagross is finished its max turns so I think that like that the best play here is obviously gone after the Incineroar the Incineroar hasn't got protect very unlikely to anyway Metagross has got protect so make more sense for my opponent to kind of go after I got trying pivot out trying read just bold positions protect the Metagross this next turn especially knowing that the Swagger combinations there so just got to hope that we kind of hit the Swagger this turn we can get rid of the Incineroar I'm pretty confident we'll get rid of it regardless of Swagger hitting and not it's just like nice to spend a turn with Tony this where we're not kind of wasting it we do hit there we go and there's an attack boost that we need but getting rid of the Intimidate Abuser as well my opponent said the field it's also going to be kind of a nice nice option for us going forward so as the guys that into the Incineroar going to be more than enough to take it down we've got one more turn of our max turns left and my opponent done to the last two Pokemon so as are we to Einhead do take that just about and the Citrus Berry coming in quite handy there for tornadoes so in a position where we can go for that tailwind if we need to this next turn because obviously it's just pitted out and kind of surprising Metagross didn't protect there potentially but it's fine either way either way either way okay poison jabs always an issue on the Urshifu we'll go for the Max Starfall and you can kind of hope that maybe maybe the Urshifu Sashed but we need to tailwind regardless here but if it hasn't got access to poison jab then we're sitting in a really nice spot you know the argument the other argument is good go after the Metagross here but I do worry about poison jab being on the Urshifu more than anything so it is Sashed which isn't great but if I can't see tornadoes sticking around this turn unfortunately and we could blow where we going tornadoes and I guess the one drawback here of not having something like muddy water is we can't just chip the Urshifu and then after the Metagross the next turn so Einhead coming out not amazing we'll take should take another Einhead we're probably better off going after Metagross here probably we're better off going after the Metagross the previous turn and then dealing with Urshifu and it's gonna be it's gonna be very close to like what the Urshifu does yep it detects so that's good so if we can get the Metagross here then we're in an amazing spot the one thing with the Metagross is it hasn't protected yet we get it with a crit okay I don't know if that matter or not did it matter we got the rain boost with plus one considering that they are they got the plus one defense so it kind of mitigates one of our boosts but we're in that spot now and actually we're not going to even risk a play rough because play rough one of those moves as well can kind of come back by to you suck a punch coming out not going to be enough unfortunately for my opponent and but chat do the calc on the Metagross on an average Metagross would we have got it I don't know if we would have the crit definitely came in handy finish going down as well but what a way to end our first match of today's episode it's a very good game to my opponent an exciting one at least we got to see the finish in action which is what it's all about so I guess they're very good game to my opponent hope you enjoyed it and without further ado we'll jump into our second match of today's episode okay next up today we have a polygon to talk all Venus or Zapdos of Regirock and Grimstone team looks pretty nasty you've got the whole team kind of running through with a trick room theme to it you know supported by the polygon to their talk all and Regirock going to be the kind of prime Pokemon that going to take advantage of the trick room environment particular probably looking at something like curse Regirock either left over as weakness policy options on their drain punch and it looks it's a hard team to break down because you've got the screen support from the Grimstone as well it makes things very difficult but the one thing you could say that we have going for us a little bit is the stack attacker with a trick room if you can get a trick room set up we wouldn't be in a horrendous position to say the least but at the same time we don't want to lead stack attacker out and then lead talk all because the eruption is going to do so much damage to us you know I wonder I wonder what they're going to lead they're going to leave Grimstone yeah Grimstone I don't see talk or leading so we could potentially set a trick room up they could lead Regirock could be a possibility and it's quite easy for my opponent to kind of bring in P2 as well and kind of utilize P2 in this match thing we want Finny think we've got to bring Finny and it's what we want kind of with it I think we'll kind of round off with Urshavu Urshavu feels like a good option to get rid of P2 if it is real disruptive kind of force and keeps reversing our trick room or just prevents us from setting it up or whatever so I think Urshavu is a nice option to come in and especially if we get the trick room up and we can remove something like talk all then you know Urshavu is still going to underspeed or outspeed and trick room things like Zaptos and Venusaur especially if there's something in effect so yeah my opponent leading out the pretty passive lead but one that's you know it's not going to trouble us too much but it gives us enough issues to kind of start thinking about things a little bit especially with stacks do we go for the trick room here or do we just go for like a gyro ball into Grimstall and go for like a spanning force and just allow my opponent to kind of counteract maybe a trick room trying to be set up or just get some damage onto the field because they're not really threatening and threatening a knockout early on and I think I don't want to pull the trigger too early on on maxing here I'd kind of prove fair you just get some damage with expand force onto P2 and get a gyro ball off into the Grimstall remove that from play and I'd imagine the P2 maybe goes for the trick room here so we kind of call my opponent bluff almost a little bit a little bit you know expand force doing some nice damage there and yeah the P2 going for that trick room so taking full advantage of that which is which is nice you know setting the trick room up for us where they're going to have to spend a turn this next turn reversing the trick room as well it's a shame that we've gotten DD out on the field because we could have almost went for we could have almost went for the trick room trick room play where we keep the trick room in effect but we need to kind of try and get rid of the Grimstall at the same time to be able to to really kind of build that momentum and with expanding force is not really an option so something to think about with indeedy kind of see the stray one running things like dazzling gleam for this particular situation it's always a nice option you know and then you could go for that trick room trick room lock them into that play where they go for the trick room this next turn because you know for a fact that they are locked into going for it here but I mean we we get rid of the Grimstall pretty well and we'll get another expanding force on obviously helped out a little bit now by the the reflect of the Grimstall eventually got a but actually not even reversing it gone for the ice beam so if our play had panned out it wouldn't have really helped us too much where we would have just reversed it for my opponent so putting the advantage back into their favor almost so yeah probably not not a bad situation to being with our trick room up right now and Reggie Rock big big Reggie coming in I think what we'll do we'll try and get rid of the P2 I like the idea of going after P2 I don't really want to do we help in hand boosts a gyro ball as well that we just got for expanding for I feel like expanding force makes a bit more sense because at least we get like that just consistent damage and a max steel spike we need to go for to boost our defenses of course we didn't max what are we doing okay well we didn't need to we get a crit there we get pretty lucky we'll get another defense boost which is phenomenal for us the crits huge there I can't believe I didn't click the max button and the curse it's not what we want to see it is not what we want to see but it's not it's not terrible because we can potentially win this race to to get our defenses boosted up even quicker and expanding force going to be kind of something that will hit our outside of that and like the single target that we've got here I've been boosted by the psychic train makes for a good attacking option okay venus or coming in now we need to double into venus or here now we need to go max steel spike we've only got two of them left and expanding force again the venus or my protect here but the likelihood is like most venus us don't generally carry protect and they normally up for sleep powders at fourth move so you're pretty safe in this is a situation kind of clicking into this attack problem is as well we've only got we're gonna got two two steel spikes to take advantage of to boost our defenses we can get three defense boosts for sure with knockouts so you got to hope that the venus or isn't isn't sashed so we can kind of sneak another a beast boost this term which would be which would be ideal but we'll see we'll see we'll see it might have been better just go and help and if we're going down that route really relying on it heavily we go down and we get help in hand where we don't knock it out with indeedy but I still think it's probably better to remove the venus or what we got the opportunity to take away the option for them to have something like sleep powder to kind of fall back on in this situation because you put the stack attack into sleep here and things get pretty bad for us oh it's venus or maxing we should have followed me the max quake is gonna just destroy us max quake is actually gonna destroy us I'm not even kidding okay it's not ideal it's not ideal I didn't think for a second they would max venus or but it makes a lot of sense you know dang okay we need this expanding force ooh drain punch okay well that's not so bad so so bad it's not so bad the light screen helping out my opponent massively here spawning force doing zip okay the vine lash will take that all day long will take that all day long I swear we'll take it yet okay so the residual damage not ideal of course but the max quake would have been way way way way way way way way way way way way way way we've got one more steel spike we can go for do we go into the Reggie rock here and just go expand force as well because we do have issue few I think yeah we'll go for that and then we'll go for the expanding force into the rock and see so yeah the drain punch isn't ideal but I mean the defense boosts that we got okay so max guard ideal trying to stall out this trick room if we can get the Reggie rock here they have got a defense boost so it makes it a little bit more tricky especially with the reflect up as well they're probably gonna go for a drain punch again get some health back and there's a weakness policy which isn't brilliant like I will say yeah this might knock DD out no okay the defense boosts helping us out massively they're not gonna get a great deal of health back but they are have we got one more max turn and pretty sure we have span and force Venus or gonna be able to take that and yeah the Reggie rocks in range now at least the trick group and we got one more turn a trick room I think we might have one no no no that's trick room gone that is trick room over and okay well let's go to Venus all and let's go for a follow me follow me the Venus all attack first I don't think the Reggie rocks gonna be slower than stack attack and that's the problem so I think yeah and a drain punch at this point probably get us all that may not you know Venus was definitely gonna be able to get the indeedy max by lash coming out once again that's fine I don't think one curse is gonna be able to put Reggie rock underneath like the speeds bracket yeah the drain punch coming out but we take that with us defense boost which is which is phenomenal now we get ocean fuel on the field ocean fuel be able to deal with both both of these with that ban and stack attack is an incredible job this game to kind of shut things down although we're not really able to get the Venus all just yet and but at the same time I still think we bring in ocean fuel we get rid of the Venus all and then we've got then we got tap if I need to come in and like what you got to think of is if you get rid of the Venus all this next turn which we will and the Reggie rocks got like two options now you can get rid of the stack attack which makes a lot of sense or can go for a drain punch into ocean fuel which is probably the more appealing turn which then opens it all for us to go for a body press which would be the end game for us and be able to pick up the knockouts so it's going to be pretty tough for my opponent regardless of what they do here as we'll just wicked blow into the Venus all because they haven't got the Sun we don't need to worry about the venu ocean fuel definitely going to be able to outspeed and pick up the knockout here and if ocean fuel sticks around on the field it's going to be able to get those those critical hits into the Reggie rock the next turn which is you know makes it way more manageable so there we go wicked blow into Venus all we still got the residual damage to kind of consider as well you know but I do feel like the Reggie rock probably goes after ocean fuel here yeah to get that get that big fat health back it's going to get a lot of health back as well you know it's going to get a lot of health back and be interesting to see how much this this body press does needs to do a lot I don't know how many defense boosts we've got in total three yeah not not enough not enough it's going to come down to wow it's going to come down to Finney Finney versus Reggie rock and the residual damage stacking up the one thing you can say is that like the drain punch isn't really going to be very effective against Finney and we do have a way to to flinch the old Reggie rock so might be a wincon for us and and in there somewhere and amongst the RNG and yeah so got no options other than to click this this waterfall button hope we get a flinch if you get one flinch I think we might be all right be interesting to see how much this waterfall does though maybe what other options this Reggie rock has not going to it's not going to another one's not going to get it Oxlide avoid we avoid okay that's that's super super useful for us reflect wears off now we get it there we go okay so the reflect was the reason the reason why and yeah so I forget about that but then we go Finney coming in ending off the episode on a high after stack attack of doing all the work very good game to my opponent really nice team actually to face as well some curveballs in there obviously along the way but a good game to but what a great user name as well and so hopefully friends you've enjoyed today's episode will hop over now remind you of the rental code for today's team so here is today's rental team friends hopefully you give it a try and I'm sure if you do you will definitely enjoy it big shout out to Slatang and apologies if I'm pronouncing that handle wrong I'm sure I am but do check out their socials there'll be linked down in the description below you can check out the post from the team and see how it got on and also drop them a follow because I'm sure they are going to have more juicy and amazingly put together teams in the future they've been smashing sword and shield recently by looking at their results so pleasure to be able to feature a team from them and it's been a lot of fun really enjoyed today's episode so I hope you have as well friends if you have leave a comment down below let me know and thank you as always for tuning in looking forward to getting into next week as I say we've got the the X9 draft League kind of beginning so we'll have content ramping up with that we've also got a flinch squad over on our Patreon draft League that's running at the minute so we cover matches from that which is very exciting and we've also got players coming up as well I believe we're going to get information on the 7th of June so a few days time so once we do I'll update you all with what the structure of that is going to be it's going to be exciting actually playing it for once and no spoilers that I won't be commenting this time but kind of the email kind of spells it out so it's going to be very exciting to see how I do in this one obviously in a format that I think is quite diverse I prefer it to the previous format so I'm looking forward to it and it's going to be nice to kind of follow my progress and hopefully it's something that you guys would be interested in following as I progress hopefully through players Cup 4 so I'm going to end it there thank you so much as always for tuning in have a great weekend take care of yourselves more importantly than anything else and I'll see you all for another episode very soon so until then friends take care of yourselves and bye bye