Healthy Soil, Healthy Planet, Healthy You with Louis De Jaeger
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Cathy:Welcome to late boomers, our podcast guide to creating your third act with style, power, and impact. Hi. I'm Cathy Worthington.
Merry:And I'm Merry Elkins. Join us as we bring you conversations with entrepreneurs, entertainers, and people with vision who are making a difference in the world.
Cathy:Everyone has a story, and we'll take you along for the ride on each interview, recounting the journey our guests have taken to get where they are, inspiring you to create your own path to success. Let's get started.
Cathy:Welcome back to another episode of late boomers. I'm Cathy Worthington.
Merry:And I'm Merry Elkins. Today, we're diving into a topic that's crucial, not just for us, but for our planet and future generations.
Cathy:We'll be speaking with Louis de Jager, a renowned soil preservationist and environmental designer. He brings invaluable insights on how health impacts everything from our food systems soil health I'm sorry. Soil health impacts everything from our food systems to climate change.
Merry:That's right. And this is our chance, boomers and everyone, to understand how our choices affect our environment. Sustainable practices can lead to a healthier planet for your kids, your grandkids, and really for the future.
Cathy:And it's not just about awareness, it's about action. Louie will share practical steps we can all take to contribute to soil preservation.
Merry:So tune in and let's explore how we can make a real difference together. You don't want to miss this one.
Cathy:And stay with us for an enlightening discussion that could change the way you think about the ground beneath your feet. And be sure to subscribe to our Late Boomers podcast on YouTube.
Merry:So welcome to Late Boomers' Louis de Jager.
Louis De Jaeger:Hey. Super happy to be here in LA with you guys.
Cathy:So great. Even though you're in Belgium.
Merry:Exactly. And it's a different time zone.
Cathy:Yeah. How did your interest in saving our soil and regenerating more than a billion acres of land come about?
Louis De Jaeger:Well, I think I I was inspired a lot about my two grandmothers who were daughters of farmers who grew up on the land, who worked the land, and they always told me stories about the farm, how nice it was, but also how they had to fled to the city because there was no future in farming. There was this thing going on in the farming world where they said you have to get big or get out. What happened in America as well, also happened in Belgium. And for some reason it always stuck with me, like one of my grandmothers, she's like a really bon vivant person who likes to eat well and she doesn't really care about the environment too much, and my other grandmother is really the opposite. She like only buys organic, she's very strict about it, we often call her the organic dictator just to love with her, we love her, of course.
Louis De Jaeger:And yeah. So so those two worlds really interested me. And and also maybe a bit selfish reason, I was standing in a supermarket, and I had these two two tomatoes in my hand. And I was, like, wondering, yeah. Well, this one is organic and costs, like, half a dollar more, and this one is not organic.
Louis De Jaeger:So why would I need to buy the organic one? They look exactly the same. What's the difference, and why should I care? And instinctively, we all heard the story of Snow White that you shouldn't get, an apple that's been poisoned and eat it. We know that.
Louis De Jaeger:We tell our children that story. Don't eat the poisonous apple. But we're every doing day. Like apples, for example, they have up to 25 different residues of pesticides on them. And these cocktail effects, they're really not good for your body.
Louis De Jaeger:And so what defines healthy and good food? It's a good soil, and it's something that's whether you're a billionaire or living in a trailer, we all have to eat, and we all depend on that same soil. So it's something that unites us all.
Merry:So it was really just your grandmother's that got you into it. Did you did you plan to go into that?
Louis De Jaeger:Well, my mother taught me how to garden and I really loved that. And when I was like fifteen-sixteen years old, I really wanted to quit school. I hated it, I felt that I was trapped, I felt imprisoned. And I said, look, I don't want to work because why go to work if you plant your food, then you don't have to go to work to make money to buy food. Let's just skip the go to work part and get money part to buy food part and just grow your own foods.
Louis De Jaeger:So that was one of my first experiments, and I I I made this huge vegetable garden. But then, of course, you have to wait. And then my mother, she was like, she's a good trickster, and she was like, okay, Louis, you can, like, quit school, but you have to do something, like constructive. And I like didn't really know what to do, so I went to school anyway and finished it. But but but this way I really started to to grow my my vegetable garden.
Louis De Jaeger:And and so when I was 18 years old, I I really never wanted back to go back to school again. I I I wanted to be free. I I came to you guys, to United States, traveled for nine months, bought a a thirty thirty five year old motor home, did half of the states. And and then I realized that by looking at yeah. Of course, I know the European landscapes, but also looking at the American landscapes that we are really ruling our planet.
Louis De Jaeger:You see this square miles of only one crop. It's so depressing. There are no trees left. All the trees have been cut down. It's so depressing you'd want to drive yourself against a tree, but there are no trees.
Louis De Jaeger:So it's it's
Cathy:Oh, dear.
Louis De Jaeger:Of course, it's only a few parts in The United States. Look. I I I seen a lot of parts with a lot of trees, I I really grew fond of The United States. I love the country. I I love the landscapes.
Louis De Jaeger:I love the people. But but I did realize that we're we're doing we're not learning from history lessons. I talked to people about about the dust bowl, about what happened so many years ago, and I also talked with people, like, only a couple of weeks ago, and they said, well, the dust ball is happening again. And so by yeah. By by Scary.
Cathy:But what about the idea of regenerating a billion acres? Where did you get that formula? What made you think of that?
Louis De Jaeger:Well, like like like I was telling you, I traveled I traveled a lot. I've also been to the desert in Morocco, and and there, I I just saw that we like, wherever we did agriculture, even, like, before nonorganic even existed, like, two thousand years ago, everything was organic. We were already ruining the planet, and we we are turning everything into a desert. And and and global warming also, is is spreading this desert. And one of the coolest things, pun intended, that I found out is that trees cool the planet, and you only need a billion hectares of, a billion acres of land to to cool down the planet with two degrees Celsius.
Louis De Jaeger:So that's basically doubling doubling the Amazon Rainforest. And and because of trees, they sweat. And if you sweat, it's your your sweat evaporates, and that takes warmth from the air, and it's projected super high into the atmosphere. So you're basically literally cooling down the planet, and and that's only one part of it, and there are much more layers to it.
Merry:Well, yeah. I mean, your new book, SOS Save Our Soils, addresses how regenerative food and farming will save our health and the planet. So talk about how our health and the health of our soil is connected to the health of our gut and our immune system and even our longevity as the human Yeah,
Louis De Jaeger:that's such an important part. So, quit school, went traveling, then I started studying again, I went to school back anyway, and eventually started a landscape architecture firm, and now we're designing properties ranging from small gardens to private islands and everything in between. And there, the nice thing is we we see a very broad demographic view. We have, like, billionaires as clients, but we also have regular Janes and Joes and everything in between. Left people, right people, very religious people, atheist people, and they all have this one thing in common, and that's they all want their children to be happy and healthy.
Louis De Jaeger:Like, there's nobody's gonna discuss about that. Everybody wants it. During keynotes, I I I sometimes ask, who of you wants to poison their children? Most of the time, nobody puts on their puts on their hand.
Cathy:Oh, you you mean people did?
Merry:They raised their hands.
Louis De Jaeger:If they really hate their kids, maybe they're too.
Cathy:Oh, dear.
Louis De Jaeger:But most of the time, people have that in common. And and that's that's the nice thing because during any change in history, we want to find the things that everybody agrees on, and that's that's happy and health. And and there, the nice thing is, like the question you just asked, Mary, is that soil and health are, like, super connected. And most people don't realize that. Maybe the first part of that story is that Mary, Kathy, you two, you are no humans.
Louis De Jaeger:Me too. I'm not a human. We are we exist of more nonhuman cells than human cells. So Oh. If you think of our bodies, like, than half of our cells are not even human.
Louis De Jaeger:They're from bacteria, they're from fungi, and these are the ones that actually keep us healthy. So if you look at our gut system, like every inch there is an entire colony living, like a different city living, of all different kind of species that have a special function. So our ancestors for for hundreds of thousands of years, they have kept putting things in their mouths, and there were a lot of hitchhikers that came on the berries or the worms that they ate or whatever. And those hitchhikers, bacteria, for example, they they they they kind of did a trade with you. They said, okay, Mary.
Louis De Jaeger:Let's pretend you're an ancient, like, a cave person. They said, oh, Mary, can I stay in your guts, live there for free, get some food from you, and in exchange, I will get, like, all the b 12 from the food you eat? What do you say to that bacteria?
Merry:Welcome.
Louis De Jaeger:Welcome. Well, that's exactly what's going on. It's a bit scary.
Merry:How about give me sugar and plastic and and all of that? No. So yeah.
Louis De Jaeger:That's exactly how it went. So so they you constantly had these trades going on, these negotiations and say, okay. You can live here. Exchange, you will take all the iron out of the broccoli you're gonna eat. And and before you knew it, hundreds of thousands of years have passed and entire colonies have formed.
Louis De Jaeger:And so these are the ones keeping us healthy. And, also, these are the ones protecting us against disease. As we might or might not know, our gut is full of little holes and it is with a liner of bacteria and this liner prevents anything from going from in our gut inside our body. So any harmful substances like stopped by guards, these bacteria, and they say, no, you can't come in or I'll kick you out. That's what's happening in a healthy gut.
Louis De Jaeger:But because we're like putting a lot of poison on our food, pesticides, for example, but also like the stuff we put on our non sticking pans, the PFAS, all those stupid stuff, it like is killing all these microorganisms. And so then you get this liner that goes away, and if you, for example, remove the liner of your ponds, the pond will leak, and the same happens in your gut, you'll get a leaky gut for example. And that's just one of the chronic diseases. In the Western world, up to one in every three persons has a chronic disease right now, and most of the time it's because of gut dysbiosis, an imbalance in our gut system, and that is caused by eating poison, eating toxic stuff. And you might say I'm eating an apple every day to keep the doctor away, but if you if it's full of pesticides, then you're actually, like, inviting the doctor right over.
Cathy:Oh, dear.
Louis De Jaeger:So Yeah. And and I I'm talking about apples, but it's every food. Every food that's not organic. And and so so so that's the basic thing. And and this way then yeah.
Louis De Jaeger:We we get a lot of chronic disease. The good news is we can turn that around. Well,
Merry:about that. Would you talk about regenerative farming and how it's different from organic and traditional agriculture and how the food is different?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah, 100%. Because that's where we want to go. And of course, it's very doomy and gloomy if you know that all our microorganisms in our gut are going away, which is terrible, because these are the ones that are keeping us healthy. A lot of doctors who are like very much into the new studies that are coming out, they know that most of the diseases in the future will treat via the gut. And that's so that's the one of the most important things in a human's life where everybody's agreed agreeing on health.
Louis De Jaeger:But the second thing is happiness. A lot of people pay a lot of money for happiness to go to Disneyland, to go to the movies, to to to to eat fast foods, to take drugs, the illegal kind or the legal kind. But 90% of our happiness hormone, serotonin, is actually created in our guts. So our guts are the reason we are happy and there's something called the brain gut connection. And that connection makes sure that we're actually happy.
Louis De Jaeger:So if you eat shitty food, you're gonna feel shitty. If you eat good food, you're gonna feel good. So that's why we need to go into regenerative agriculture.
Cathy:Excellent. That's a really good explanation. And you really have traveled the world. So what is the most surprising thing you discovered about the global food system? And does any country have it right right now?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah, there are some countries who are culturally they have it built in that they're eating a more healthy diet. But like fast food is spreading all across the world. And one of the most important things that I found out of course is the connection between a healthy soil and healthy gut. So that's one thing. But another thing and that's that's something I really don't like, what I found out is that they're out there to get us.
Louis De Jaeger:It sounds a bit I know it sounds a bit, nutty
Cathy:if you say that a little bit elaborate a little bit on what you mean. Yeah.
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah. But the the best scientists in, on this planet are paid by companies. They're like, if you Google the 12 companies that control all the food in the world. The best scientists are paid to make us addicted to their food. For example, soda drinks, they the sugar level, they really test it to like the milligram, you know, if you have too little sugar, then it won't be addictive enough.
Louis De Jaeger:If you have too much sugar, you'll have the sugar dip and you won't take another drink. But if you have just the sweet spot of that sugar, then you're gonna keep on drinking that beverage. So they oh, yeah.
Cathy:Definitely. Diet drinks are very addictive.
Louis De Jaeger:Definitely. The the diet sugar. Yeah. And and it's not only the the beverages, but it's even with yogurts. You know?
Louis De Jaeger:They're they're they're doing it with everything. They they really are looking for the sweet spot on how to make it addictive as possible. And, also, they use ingredients that humans are really not supposed to eat. So first of all, the basic ingredients, they're most of the time not organic, so it's full of pesticides. And then they add all these other ingredients that humans really should not be eating.
Louis De Jaeger:It's really bad for us. And the thing is, yeah, there's there's this huge hoax that said, okay. People should, like, stop eating butter, or or stop eating, like, healthy vegetable oils and and and and start to eat all this synthetic stuff because it should be healthier. But the simple is still the best, with with a lot of food. And and the moment you need, like a chemical degree to be able to read ingredient list, and then you know it's something is not right.
Louis De Jaeger:And a very handy tool, a very practical tool is called the YUKA app. It's y u k a. If you scan a product with it, then then it gives you, like, a score from zero to 100, and then it immediately flags, like, all the the ingredients that that you you're not supposed to eat. Oh, you take your cell phone, you take your smartphone, you, like, take a picture of the barcode, and it, like, instantly gives you a score from zero to 100.
Cathy:Interesting. I'm gonna get that today.
Merry:Yeah. I'm gonna get that too.
Cathy:Why not?
Merry:On this note, I mean, if you could change one or two things about the global food system immediately, what would it be? And how would you fix it?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah, well, it's so you have two parts of the food system, you have the growers, the farmers who are growing it, and you have the processing industry. Those are like two important factors. The processing industry, they really are the boss, you know, they control everything. And they are like cowboys, know, they they they do whatever they want. You only have a few products that are prohibited in Europe.
Louis De Jaeger:It's much more. So so if you're living in The United States, you have more chance of being poisoned by all stuff you shouldn't be eating. So that's one part. The other part is is is the farms. The farms, they use a lot of stuff that's like Snow White, you shouldn't eat a poisonous apple.
Louis De Jaeger:They use a lot of pesticides that you shouldn't eat. And a first instinctive reaction would be it's the fault of the farmer. But it was never the farmer's choice to start using pesticides or start using GMOs. Was the lobbyists that started to push certain things via the governments. And the strange or funny thing, maybe it's all sounds a bit like conspiracies, but there are no conspiracies, like all these things are just public documents, you can see it, there are books written about it, there's a lot of scientific evidence about it.
Louis De Jaeger:So yeah, farmers have been pushed in a certain direction. So what are the most important things that need to be fixed is one, if you have a healthy soil, then you'll have healthy plants. It's as simple as that. And I compare it with having a leak in your roof. What do you do when you have a leak in your roof?
Cathy:Fix the roof or replace it. And
Louis De Jaeger:then fix the roof or replace it. But the problem here is first you take a bucket to like not ruin your floor because you have to wait until somebody comes to fix the roof. But what happens now with soils is we just get a bigger bucket and then there's like another guy saying oh I have a better bucket, oh this bucket is even bigger, that's an aluminium bucket, and that's one in the color pink And then oh, now I have this self driving bucket that will empty itself. I was like, Oh my God, and like everybody's like raving about how cool this bucket is. But nobody's talking about fixing the roof.
Louis De Jaeger:GMOs, for example. It's crazy invention. I love the invention. It's ingenious. But they're like saying oh my god, now I have this crop that can grow on a horrible soil.
Louis De Jaeger:Like fix the damn soil. Come on. It's like, fix the true problem. A healthy soil produces healthy plants. And there's nothing you can sell to a farmer who has a healthy soil and healthy plants.
Louis De Jaeger:And it's the same with a human body. Like, I have a grandmother that I told about and 85 years old and she's been healthy for all her life. She's been eating organic. It's not that she never had the flu, but that's also a natural thing. It's not bad to have the flu.
Louis De Jaeger:It's just like a system upgrade you're getting. Like the pharmaceutical industry, they hate my grandmother because she doesn't buy anything from them, you know? And if everybody would be like my grandmother, then yeah, the pharmaceutical industry would collapse. And that's the way it should be. Everybody should be healthy.
Louis De Jaeger:And I'm not saying we don't need medicine for very special occasions, or if you're like having a terrible situation. I love what the medical profession is able to do nowadays and replace hearts and patch up things and broken. It's incredible. I'm all for that. But you have to know where you have to draw the line like you don't need like a painkiller if you drunk too much the night before you just have to like, don't drink too much the night before.
Louis De Jaeger:Or if you have a sore throat, you don't have to go to the pharmacy and buy like some pill for it, just eat some raw ginger, for example. You know, there's there's there's various degrees in what you really need, like a lot
Cathy:of things can be solved by having good tea, for example, a herbal infusion. Have a question about farming. Can farming really help stop climate change?
Louis De Jaeger:Or is that just wishful thinking? Well, if we plant 1,000,000,000 acres of trees, and those can be for tree, then you cool down the plant with two degrees Celsius. So the question is, yes, it will help a lot. But I like to compare it with something Eric Thunsmaier said. He says that imagine that your floor is full of water, not because of a leaking roof this time, but because the faucet is on.
Louis De Jaeger:Instead of like trying to wipe it clean, first you have to close the faucet, you know. And that's the thing with the greenhouse effect. If we keep on putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, then of course, things will get worse. So we can use the trees to cool down the planet, but we also have to close the faucets, we also have to massively change from fossil fuels to renewable energy, for example. And also to stop plowing the fields because fossil fuels is not the only thing that's warming up the climate.
Louis De Jaeger:Every time you plow your fields, the carbon that's in the soil, it's C, like pairs with O2, oxygen. So oxygen and carbon they form CO2. So they have these beautiful images of NASA that show that every time, every plowing season, you have this massive amount of co2 that goes into the air. So it's tackling all this stuff. And it's really about fixing the roof for our human body and for the farming world.
Louis De Jaeger:And the question you're asking, I think, Mary, you asked it like, how would you fix it? So first of all, like fix the soil and grow food in a regenerative organic poison free way. If you want more details, I'm happy to elaborate, but then it will get pretty nerdy. And the second thing is with the food processing industry. First of all, I love food processing, know, I love to eat good peanut butter or chocolate paste or even a pizza I get from the freezer.
Louis De Jaeger:It's super handy and convenient. I love it. So it's not about that pizza that you buy in the freezer, the instant pizza, you can have a very shitty pizza with like a lot of artificial stuff and a lot of things that you're not supposed to eat. But you can also have like an organic one with the best ingredients of the world all coming from regenerative farms. Those are two pizzas, they use the same machines to make those pizzas, they just use better ingredients.
Louis De Jaeger:So I'm not against buying cakes, I'm not even against buying donuts. I love donuts, but you can make a donut that's gonna ruin your health, but you can also make a donut that's going to be super tasty, but that's with a whole flour, that's going to be with whole sugars. So it's with everything you can make, you can make a shitty version and you can make it like a regenerative version.
Merry:You know, you ought to come up this is so far out there, but with a cookbook on exactly how to cook things and what ingredients, I think it would be really popular.
Cathy:He's he's he's probably overloaded with stuff already. My god. But
Louis De Jaeger:it's a good idea. I love the idea. I'm gonna find somebody who who can partner up with me to do that because that would be cool. Like Yeah. Like, how how how to how to keep your shitty diet but but but become healthy of it?
Louis De Jaeger:Like How to make
Merry:a healthy doughnut? Yeah.
Louis De Jaeger:Like like like doughnuts, pizzas, fries, whatever, but, the healthy version of it. That's, like, incredible. Yeah. You could create a food brand out of it.
Merry:Go for it.
Louis De Jaeger:The donut that will make you lose weight.
Merry:So we were talking about the agribusiness, and we know it's so huge globally. So what role can we as people, individuals, take in transforming our planet and our guts?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah. So you have two options. Option one is you become an activist. And I'm not talking about chaining yourself to a building. I'm talking about talking to your neighbors, about creating a local action group, about being a citizen lobbyist, We need to raise our voice against the paid lobbyists for the industry, because the lobbyists are against our interests, we are for our own interests, and start writing letters to politicians, start meeting them, start to create groups, and just be part of democracy because politicians, they are our employees.
Louis De Jaeger:They're paid by us, we pay them to defend our rights. That's how it was supposed to work. So we just have to remind our politicians that that's the case. You know, like we are becoming lazy and bad employees. We're like, oh, we're just gonna watch Netflix and drink some cola and and and lay on our lazy sofa and just let our employees do whatever they want.
Louis De Jaeger:That's that's happening right now. So we also have this responsibility. We can't be 100% angry on what's happening in the political world because we're not, like, including ourselves in it, we're like, Oh, we're just gonna like ignore it and just complain about it. No, we have to take part in it in a very peaceful way and just like, talk with them and say, Okay, it can be as simple as going to the local mayor and saying, Oh, nice, I see that we have like five acres of land here. I know some people who want to start a farm, an organic farm, could they like use the land for in a very cheap way?
Louis De Jaeger:Stuff like that can be very easy. So that's the difficult way to make a change. But it's like the most impactful way. I think that anybody can do is vote three times a day. It's super cliche.
Louis De Jaeger:But we all vote three times a day with everything that we eat for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. And it can be as simple as I know that it's difficult to change people's diets. So the funny thing with my organic dictator grandmother, she produced my father, raised him like organically and with all strange diets, and now my father is like against all this organic stuff. So he's like, even though he read my books and like knows how bad it is, he's like, keep on doing it, like he's still rebelling. It's very funny, actually, but also tragic.
Cathy:It's terrible. You have role models. He has role models all over. What should people eat if they want to see the world become a healthier place in the future?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah. So it's hard to change people's habits. So I tried it with my father.
Cathy:Yeah.
Louis De Jaeger:It's hard. So we have to start very easy. And it can it can actually be very easy. I remember the time when I was in America or times when I was in America because I'm there from time to time. If I walk in Walmart, for example, you have like 12 different peanut butters or even more item.
Louis De Jaeger:I don't know exactly how many. A couple of them are organic. Even in Walmart, you have this this glass jar of very delicious organic peanut butter. Most Americans buy peanut butter. So instead of buying the non organic ones, buy the organic one, it's like only one step.
Louis De Jaeger:It's a super simple step. And if everybody would only just buy one organic peanut butter instead of the other one, then nobody would be producing non organic peanut butter anymore because nobody would be buying them. So it's all demand, you know, it's all demand. So if we have, for example, like one big action, and it's like, who cannot afford organic peanut butter? It's like maybe half a dollar or $1 more or maybe $2 I don't know, but it will it will not break your bank.
Louis De Jaeger:So let's say if all Americans agree, okay, from tomorrow on, we're only gonna buy organic peanut butter, the organic peanut butter revolution, then something strange is gonna happen, and and the entire peanut butter world will collapse and say, oh my god, what's happening? Blah, blah, blah, blah, Now we can only produce organic peanut butter anymore. But that's like a simple action that will make an amazing impact. And now I'm only talking about peanut butter, but then you can start by apples, like only buy organic apples anymore. And so little by little, can like, like I said, keep on eating exactly the same like you would do otherwise, but by the organic version, instead.
Louis De Jaeger:And you don't even have to go to another supermarket because most supermarkets carry organic food.
Cathy:I know it is amazing. It is amazing how many have converted to that. It used to be they were really hard to find, and now they're in every market.
Louis De Jaeger:Oh, yeah. And it's because of the demand as well. Because people realize food is making that good to poisonous. Yeah.
Merry:Yeah. So tell us the seven truths about the food we eat. Well,
Louis De Jaeger:the first truth is that most most of the food is poisoning us because of pesticides and of all the faulty chemical ingredients that are in it. The second truth is that if you treat food as medicine, you won't have to have medicine as food. Because that's the way it should be. Like, I always say farmers are the pharmacists of the future. That for me is really the gist of it.
Louis De Jaeger:I know people that spend 300 to $500 per month on medication. I don't know. Do you know people like that? It's common in America, right?
Cathy:Yeah, it is.
Louis De Jaeger:That's crazy. 300%.
Cathy:The weight loss drugs now that people
Louis De Jaeger:are
Cathy:spending, like upwards of a thousand dollars a month. A thousand?
Louis De Jaeger:That's just insanity. All that money you can spend on like, incredible restaurants that serve you amazing food. And people say, well, like organic food is more expensive, or like healthy food is more expensive. Well, if you're there spending $1,000 per month on weight loss supplements, that's really expensive. And then another truth about the food that we eat is like performance, we want to sleep well, a lot of people are struggling with sleep.
Louis De Jaeger:A lot of people are also struggling about like staying mentally awake, they want to like focus and then they think they need to drink an energy drink to focus. But if you eat good foods, top athletes know that They eat the best food out there and their performance is much higher. And it's the same with humans, our performance is much higher, it's all performances are much higher, but also our sleep it's much better and you get much more clarity. I think you probably have noticed that, I've noticed that if you eat too much junk food, you feel dumber, you know, you feel just like little daze in your head. Lurky.
Louis De Jaeger:A little foggy. Yeah. So so we if we buy an expensive car, we buy like a few additives to put into it to make sure it drives well, the motor gets treated well. But we are Ferraris, we're even crazier than Ferraris. We deserve the best fuel there is.
Louis De Jaeger:So that's that's another very important part.
Cathy:Yeah. So you have designed private islands for billionaires. How did that come about?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah. So we started out with designing very small gardens actually. I remember like when I just started out, was like with a suitcase full of gardening books, I went to clients and just like consulted a little bit. And then little by little, just did bigger and bigger projects, started making films about it, writing books about it, giving keynotes about it, also did a lot of actions, a lot of campaigns as well. And yeah, the more the more noise you make, the more people notice you.
Louis De Jaeger:And also, the more you share your vision, people can like relate to that vision. So for example, with a larger property like an island, a lot of the time these people have read my book and they say, Oh my god, this vision is exactly what I believe in, I want you to like, make this vision a reality. So it's like a very slow process of doing 1,000 square feet and then one acre and 10 acres and 100 acres and then a thousand acres. And yeah, it's it's an organic process and it's building building trust.
Cathy:So when you're designing an island, you're putting in all the apparatus that they need to farm the food there. Right? Yeah,
Louis De Jaeger:don't work alone. I have a fantastic team I work together with, for a company I founded about eight years ago. And it's always the same process. First of all, we get to know the client very well. Because if I'm going to design your garden, Mary, or your garden, Kathy, it's going to be an entire different garden because you probably both have different personalities.
Louis De Jaeger:Everybody has a different personality. And so we really need to get to know who you are, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what are the things you like to do, you don't like to do, What do you think is ugly? What do you really think is beautiful? What are your financial means? How handy are you?
Louis De Jaeger:Are you gonna do stuff yourself? Or are you gonna delegate a lot of stuff? Do you want everything to be like very neat and rows? Or don't you mind like a little bit of chaos? And so we really need to get a bit inside of the heads of our clients, which is very nice.
Louis De Jaeger:And it's psychology and also like dream together, really do some dreaming exercises to think okay, well, like, imagine there are like, limits, what would you do with your gardener, with your place or with any place in the world. Then little by little we form a vision and then that's the psychological part of it. But then of course you have the biological part of it and the climatological part of it because then you go to the site and we're gonna design a different system in LA than in Colorado, for example. If you're high up in the mountains or in New York or in Florida, which where you have a yes. Poultry is growing with amazing coconuts and hurricanes as well.
Merry:And lots of humidity.
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah. So then you have to like what you do with the persons, you have to do the same with the land, like what kind of soil do you have? What kind of climate do you have? What kind of influences do you have of maybe pollutants or winds or maybe noisy neighbors? Like how can we make sure that there is less view on the ugly house next door, to give you an example.
Louis De Jaeger:And then it's like putting these puzzle pieces together and make sure they're very much in harmony with each other. And it's the same process if you're like doing a small garden or if you're doing an entire island with landing strip for an airplane or boats that need to dock and roads you have to make.
Merry:Must have been a real learning process for you. What did you learn from these billionaires?
Louis De Jaeger:Well, the most important thing actually that I learned from any client, whether they're no matter what bank they can have is that everybody wants to make a difference in this world. And everybody wants to do something good. And that gives me a lot of hope. People that come to us, and I personally I really don't care if you want to do a small garden or an entire island because every square inch helps. And of course, it's cool to do something very big.
Louis De Jaeger:I'm not gonna deny that. But we've done garden simple like residential gardens that have really made a big impact. For example, one of our clients, she has a lot of friends and they come over to the garden, put a food forest in my garden, and then they go and do something similar. Just the willingness of all these people to just like be part of that change in their own means, like their own starting situation. That's just so inspiring to see.
Louis De Jaeger:It's really a privilege to be around people who also try to move things in a big way or in a small way. It's always inspiring, you always learn something from whether it's a school teacher or whether it's somebody who owns a couple of offices. I learned so much, it's really a nice exchange and most of the clients also really became people you're close to because you're like on an adventure together. You share laughs, you cry together. If a tree dies, for example, which is very normal, like if you plant stuff, there's always a percentage that's going to die.
Louis De Jaeger:So yeah, it's it's a
Cathy:Oh, I really love the journey. How do you usually recommend that people contact you if they want to be part of your mission? Or how can they help? Or what can they do? And also with the name of your company that you founded.
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah. Yeah. So the company is called Comensalist.
Cathy:Oh, yeah.
Louis De Jaeger:C d o m m e n s a l I s t. And they can contact me via that website or via louisdj.com, my website. What would I recommend people to do is, of course, they can call me and my team to come over anywhere in the world, we're working globally. But before doing that, I always say, well, you can do everything yourself. It's only a matter of do you have the time and energy and willingness to experiment or learn or are not afraid to fail.
Louis De Jaeger:Because I always try to empower people to do a lot of things themselves. Of course, they can call us and they don't even have to go to the place and we can do everything and coordinate to where it's get to make the plans and invite all the contractors and make sure everybody does what they need to do, manage budgets, coordinate everything. We can do it so you can just like, keep on doing your life. That's a possibility. But I always try to empower people and say, why do you call us?
Louis De Jaeger:Why can't you do it yourself? And I really try to empower them and say, well, this is not that difficult. This is not that difficult. But it's always a matter of priorities, you can change the oil in your car, it's not hard to do, but I'm not doing it. I'm giving it to a garage, you know, that's a bit of thing.
Cathy:It's it's priorities and time and all of that. But it's it's very interesting because if people maybe will hear this, they maybe wanna join your mission. And the word that comes to mind for me when you talk about the things you've accomplished is entrepreneurial because you somehow innately had that entrepreneurial spirit that you started with a little garden and you got bigger and you started traveling and you started talking and you have a TED Talk. And it's really interesting. Where do you think you got this entrepreneurial streak like this?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah, I think it's something that that is somehow in my DNA. I always like as a kids Did some little enterprises from, like, selling jam on the street or baking pancakes and selling them or or or, like, making drawings and selling them or playing harmonica. And and and and and so that's something that I always, like, love, like like like giving something valuable and get something back. I think maybe because I have entrepreneurs in my family. One of my grandmothers had a hotel in Bruges.
Louis De Jaeger:My grandfather that I never met because he died before I was born also had a couple of companies. My dad is an architect, so that's something that's he's taking me because he built schools, he's taking me on to this building sites from like when I was really a little kid, really must have like come over on me because he was an architect of buildings, now I have an architecture firm for landscapes. So that's very obvious. Yeah, I think it's like an amalgamation of all these influences that just like having the spirit of like, I can't watch too much documentaries because I want to fix everything. It's just like wanting to fix everything on steroids.
Louis De Jaeger:Like every person has this inside of them. Everybody wants to fix stuff. But I think for me, it's just like a bit higher. I want to fix everything, which is sometimes unhealthy.
Cathy:Well I see.
Merry:So so I have a question regarding Los Angeles because Kathy and I live in Los Angeles. And as the world knows, there were terrible fires here that devastated huge parts of this city, and it filled the soil with lead and other contaminants. And last week, the LA Times, our newspaper, actually reported on this situation. So what would you advise us in this city to do to regenerate our soil? And how long do you think it'll take?
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah, it's a major thing, soil pollution, and it's everywhere. And the more we start to measure the more severe we know it is. PFAS for example, it's a component that's been used in non sticking pans, so we're eating it every day. It's one of the biggest carcinogens out there. It's also going into the soil.
Louis De Jaeger:Of course you have the lead problem which in LA is a big problem. The good news is you can solve this with phyto remediation, difficult name for plants that actually are designed or it's just those plants do this automatically and you design the right plant mixes to go in the fields and then they will suck out all the heavy metals and then you remove the plants. Even with PFAs, forever chemical, you can plant hemp for example and this hemp will get out of the PFAS and then you can even process the hemp to take the PFAS, a forever chemical, in its original fluor form, so it's not forever anymore. So you can do a lot with plants. Most of the contaminations you can remove with plants, but we have to and that's a very difficult thing to grasp as humans.
Louis De Jaeger:Some situations you can solve it in a couple of years, but some situations are maybe gonna take sixty years to fix to like, get all the pollutants out of the cell or even longer. And that's difficult for humans. Of course, can like take the earth, remove it and like dump it into place. Yeah. Like, just remove
Cathy:the problem. That's what that's what they do do here. They take six feet. I know. They shake six feet off the top, but but apparently, that leaves like, if they just take the part where the house burned and all the metal from the house went into the ground, but it leaves the the yard where the pollutants came.
Cathy:It leaves all that vulnerable, and people are wondering, can I plant an avocado tree here, or is are the avocados gonna poison everybody? Yeah. Yeah. Well, as soon as soil is the original soil, we've got all the battery, when the fire came all the batteries melted, all the cars burned up, everything.
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah, and that's something that we as designers, we always do like a very due diligence check that as soon as we have the slightest, people that there's some soil pollutants, we always test for it. That's like before you you you start a food forest or an edible garden, that's like one of the first things you you always do is you you you test it for heavy metals or if it's PFAS or PFAS inside of it, you test it for it. And I know these these tests, they cost some money, especially PFAS, a couple of €100 or dollars. But then you know that you feel safe. Otherwise, it's always like, oh, now I'm eating my own apple.
Louis De Jaeger:And is it, like, safe? You don't feel like 100% comfortable eating it.
Cathy:But Even though you've grown it.
Louis De Jaeger:Yeah, so test it, you need to test it and when you test, you have a negative result and there are pollutants and then you have to devise a plan or with phyto remediation, with having plants or worst case remove the land but then there's a question okay, then you're gonna remove the problem. And another thing is growing containers just because once you cover the soil and you cover it with plants, then pollution is like a little bit contained, you just cannot eat what there is. And then you for example, in containers above the ground and then you use healthy soil, of course, that you buy. So there is always a solution. But yeah, we humans are pretty good at screwing things up.
Louis De Jaeger:So again, we should fix the roof. And in this case, literally, like just don't use pollutants to build. Yeah, it's not hard.
Cathy:Yeah. Well, that's easier said than done. But
Louis De Jaeger:yeah, of course, it's it's difficult.
Cathy:Louis, what would you like our audience to have as a takeaway today?
Louis De Jaeger:That we have more power than we think we have. I always like to repeat the quote of Margaret Mead that says never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world because it's the only thing that ever has. And every time I hear or even say this quote, get goosebumps because it's just so powerful. Like, history has only been changed by just tiny group. If you look at the Clean Air Act in USA, it's just because a small group of people were like saying, I don't like that my kids have to breathe in this poisonous air of factories.
Louis De Jaeger:Let's do something about it. That's what happened. And then they of course, it took decades to really lobby and make sure it happened, but it happened. And so that's one thing we have the power. The second thing is, yeah, be voracious in it.
Louis De Jaeger:But be patient at the same time. Like, it took decades or even sometimes centuries to like, stop things, for example, slavery, it took so long. But even if you know it's gonna take a long time, you have to do it anyway. And I like the quote of Wes Jackson that said that if you're solving a problem that you can solve in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.
Merry:Right. That's food for thought. Pardon the pun.
Cathy:Yeah.
Merry:Thank you, Louis. Our guest today on Late Boomers has been Louis de Jager, renowned soil preservationist and environmental designer. He's he's also the author of SOS Save Our Soils and a documentary filmmaker. You can learn more about Louie on his website, louisdj.com. That's l0uisdj.com.
Merry:And you can buy his book too. Thank you so much, Louis.
Louis De Jaeger:Thank you. Really nice to meet you, Kathy and Murray.
Cathy:Me too. We wanna thank our listeners for listening to our late boomers podcast, and we're on a drive to increase our subscribers. So please subscribe to the late boomers podcast channel on YouTube. Listen in next week when you'll meet another exciting guest, author Amy Bernstein. You can listen to Late Boomers on any podcast platform and check us out on social media.
Cathy:And thanks again to Louis Deager.
Cathy:Thank you for joining us on late boomers, the podcast that is your guide to creating a third act with style, power, and impact. Please visit our website and get in touch with us at lateboomers.us. If you would like to listen to or download other episodes of late boomers, go to ewnpodcastnetwork.com.
Merry:This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and most other major podcast sites. We hope you make use of the wisdom you've gained here and that you enjoy a successful third act with your own style, power, and impact.
