In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about leaving his home in New York to move to Austin, TX with his wife and three kids. They talk about what it's like moving across the country for a new job, what it s like to be a new parent, and what it was like growing up in a small town in the old days. Joe also talks about how he and his wife met and fell in love with Texas and how they ended up moving across country to start a new life in a new city. They also talk about the struggles of leaving your family and moving to a new country, and how to deal with the changes that come with adjusting to a whole new culture and adjusting to the new job. Joe also shares some of his favorite memories from his time in NYC and talks about what he's up to now in life and what he s looking forward to in the future of his new job in Austin, Texas. And, of course, there's a little bit of science! Joe Rogans Podcast, by day, by night, all day, all night. Check it out! Joe's Podcast by day and Joe's podcast by night! Enjoy, Joe! -JOE ROGAN PODCAST by Night, All Day, by Night! (featuring: -Joe Rogan Podcast by Day, -All Day, All Night, By Night, by Night - by Night - All Day All Day by Day - By Night All Day By Night - By Day, all Day and Night by Night by Day & Night, by Day and Evening, by Evening, By Day & Evening by Day by Night and Evening by Night By Day - by Evening - by Day And Evening, All By Night by Day , by Night all Day, By Evening, , All Day -By Night, Day and All Day! , By Day and By Night By Night! -By Day, We'll Talk About It All Day And All Day Morning and Evening - By Anyday, By Anytime, by Anytime! by Anyday By Night & Evening, We're Gotta Have A Good Night , We'll See You, We Love You, Then We'll Hear You, By Sleep, By Morning, By Late, By Then, By By Night? - And Then, Then By Evening? (By Anytime - Then By Anywhere Else?
00:01:55.000That's gotta be weird, too, to be the last two years of high school, 15 or 16 and 17, and just leave your family and be in another continent.
00:02:02.000But don't you remember being that age and you just wanted to have some independence and head out?
00:02:47.000Yeah, for me it was actually lots of hair and it was brown and then I had my first kid and then overnight it went gray and then I had my second kid and it went white.
00:06:24.000Like, of course, if you're going to have all that green grass, you have to do something about the weeds, you have to do something about the bugs.
00:06:40.000Pete Myers was interviewing you, and you were talking about the prevalence of these pesticides and chemicals that we use all over the world, and he said...
00:06:50.000I think his exact quote was, am I wrong in saying that there's a square centimeter of this planet that's not somehow or another polluted by humans and our chemicals?
00:07:09.000And you think of, you've been to Alaska, and you go to Alaska, it looks pristine, it's beautiful, and you think everything is perfectly clean, but in fact, even the most remote places in the world, like Alaska, are getting atmospherically deposited chemicals,
00:07:25.000including pesticides, that are used at lower latitude.
00:07:29.000And so there really isn't anywhere on the earth that's not polluted, unfortunately.
00:07:33.000And you're explaining the way these chemicals get into the atmosphere and then get distributed all over the world, akin to a still, like a whiskey or a moonshine still.
00:07:46.000If you go back and you look at an old still, the way it works, you would have a heat source, like a Bunsen burner, that's heating up a liquid.
00:08:33.000And they'll be in the atmosphere, they'll move in the atmosphere, and then they'll condense out of the atmosphere when it gets colder, so when it's wintertime.
00:08:41.000And it'll be a little higher in latitude.
00:08:42.000And the next summer, they'll volatize again, they'll evaporate again, and they'll move north again.
00:08:58.000And so the amount of deposition from the atmosphere is far greater than the amount of evaporation.
00:09:04.000And therefore, the poles have the highest concentrations of certain classes of these so-called persistent organic pollutants.
00:09:11.000They're the ones that are relatively light that can move through the atmosphere.
00:09:15.000As a result, and these are also fat-soluble, so they get into the food web, and as you go up each food trophic level, you end up with higher and higher concentrations.
00:09:24.000So the animals with the highest concentrations of these certain kinds of persistent organic pollutants on Earth are these high-trophic level, long-lived animals in the Arctic, like the killer whale and the polar bear.
00:09:36.000That'll have millions of times the background concentration of these contaminants.
00:09:40.000Things like DDT, mercury, a lot of other chemicals, a lot of pesticides, flame retardant chemicals, and so on.
00:09:50.000So when they test these animals, so if the people in these areas eat these animals, are they at risk of being infected by these contaminants?
00:10:01.000Or is it not at a level where it's going to harm them?
00:10:04.000No, it's a really sad case of environmental injustice because you have subsistence peoples, the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, that they're living off the marine environment.
00:10:14.000They're eating bowhead whale and walrus and ice seals and polar bear.
00:10:18.000And every single one of their meals, they're getting in the fat, in the rendered oil.
00:10:23.000They take the blubber and they render oil, which goes on to all of their meals.
00:10:27.000Every single meal, they're getting hundreds of parts per billion of PCBs and pesticides and things like that.
00:10:34.000So it's just grossly unfair when you think about it, because they never used these chemicals.
00:10:38.000They didn't benefit economically from these chemicals, and yet they're subject to some of the highest concentrations in the world.
00:10:45.000And you were also saying that their breast milk is contaminated with it.
00:10:49.000Yeah, actually the way this whole problem was discovered was in the 1980s, scientists in Canada wanted to understand breast milk contamination of women who lived in southern Canada in the industrial and agricultural areas of Canada.
00:11:03.000And so they were thinking, where can we find a reference population of people who have no exposure to these chemicals?
00:11:08.000So they decided to go to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada to look at the Inuit people that live there.
00:11:14.000And they're surprised to find that the women on Baffin Island, their breast milk contained 10 to 20 times higher concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs and mercury than the women who lived in the industrial areas where these chemicals were used.
00:11:30.000So that was the first kind of global alert that actually we're poisoning.
00:11:35.000Our people of the Arctic were poisoning them.
00:11:37.000And that's how the rights of indigenous people in the Arctic to live in a clean environment became part of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
00:11:47.000There's representatives from these tribes who go to the negotiations every time.
00:12:20.000Things like These sites have terrible problems with contamination and typically when the military pulled out of them, they just left everything behind.
00:12:36.000We have sites we've worked in in Alaska where there's just fields of barrels, and you don't know what's in the barrels, and they're leaking, and you test it, and you find there's all kinds of nasty things, flame retardants and pesticides and PCBs.
00:13:32.000When did human beings start using large-scale pesticides?
00:13:36.000So large-scale pesticide use started in the 1880s, and at that time they were based on metals and metalloids, so naturally occurring toxic metals that would kill insects or kill fungal pests, things like that.
00:13:50.000And those are actually quite dangerous, things like lead and arsenic being used in these pesticides.
00:13:57.000They were dangerous because they ended up on the food.
00:14:00.000So you'd buy an apple and if you didn't wash it well, you'd get a dose of lead poisoning.
00:14:05.000That continued until about World War II. And in World War II, we made a dramatic shift from using these metal-based products to using synthetic organic compounds.
00:14:15.000So in World War II, we saw the origin of the organochlorine compounds and the organophosphate compounds.
00:14:21.000And those really became the basis for pesticide use then.
00:14:25.000And then they were broadcast all over the environment following World War II and until today.
00:14:30.000So, in the 1880s, when they were using lead and they were using arsenic, were they combating locusts?
00:14:38.000So, the very first commercial pesticide was actually copper-based pesticide, and it was used in France to stop the mildew that was destroying the vineyards.
00:14:48.000And once it was found that it could destroy, it was called a water mold, once it was found that it could destroy the water mold and save the vineyards, scientists realized you could also use it against the potato blight, which had caused the famine in Ireland in the 1840s and other famines around the world.
00:15:05.000So it became a very powerful tool to prevent famine.
00:15:08.000And one thing I like to look back on is you can think, why did people poison the world like this with these horrible things?
00:15:15.000But really, Their motivations initially were quite positive.
00:15:21.000Ireland had just been through this devastating famine.
00:15:23.000They were trying to stop infectious diseases that were vectored by insects, things like malaria and yellow fever.
00:15:29.000So the motivation was good, but unfortunately the use for public health, instead of just using it for public health, we started using it in the house for convenience for everything.
00:15:40.000It is really crazy when you think that the human species has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and it took till 1880 before we decided to fuck everything up with pesticides.
00:15:51.000Yeah, and we fuck things up pretty fast because now we have a world that is, like you said, anywhere you go in this world you're going to find contaminated animals.
00:16:00.000You go to Antarctica and you measure pesticides in penguins and their eggs and you'll find very high concentrations.
00:16:07.000And are they seeing health effects of the Inuit people and the people that eat these animals?
00:16:13.000Is it having a detrimental effect on them?
00:16:17.000And, in fact, the cancer rates are quite high among the people who are subsistence hunters in the Arctic.
00:16:23.000And that's really how I got involved with this kind of work, is that people reported very high cancer rates, also high rates of developmental disorders that could be due to these chemicals disrupting development in the womb.
00:16:35.000And so there are groups that bring together teams of scientists to work on this.
00:16:40.000I was brought in as an ecotoxicologist to work on some aspects of this.
00:16:45.000But yeah, there's quite a few health problems associated with this.
00:16:48.000And are these subsistence hunters, are they free of all the other problems that many Inuit folks have in terms of like cigarettes and alcohol and a lot of people that have been introduced to some of the vices of the Western world?
00:17:01.000No, Ian, it's the same kind of problems also with these communities in Alaska.
00:17:04.000There's high tobacco use and a lot of problems with alcohol.
00:17:08.000How do they parse whether or not it's a contributing factor, you think?
00:17:12.000It's a contributing factor, and it's very hard to parse it out.
00:17:15.000And actually, this is a justification the government often uses to say, well...
00:17:20.000It's not the contaminants from this military site that's causing the problem.
00:17:23.000They'll say, look, the cancer rates are no higher in this village that's next to the military site than they are in this village that's away from the military site.
00:17:31.000But you can't actually solve the problem with epidemiology.
00:17:38.000The villages I work in typically are no more than 800 people.
00:17:41.000And so how can you do a proper study of a rare health effect when you have a small population?
00:17:48.000So I'm sure it's contributing to the health problems, and unfortunately people use the fact that there are these other issues that cause health problems like smoking in order to justify not doing anything about the pollution.
00:18:00.000So when you go to these villages, is it uniform that most of them are using cigarettes and alcohol?
00:18:44.000In fact, when we fly into these villages in small airplanes, there's typically a state trooper searching through, looking to see if anyone's bringing alcohol in.
00:18:57.000So is there any where you can study that has this issue with the pollutants but doesn't have the issue with alcoholism and is there a village that's figured it out and has avoided the alcohol?
00:19:32.000I just was wondering if there was a place where you could examine only the contaminants if somehow or another these people had figured out how to be free of the worst advice.
00:19:57.000And we're working with migrant farm workers there.
00:20:00.000And so if you think about the pesticides that were common when we were kids and a little bit earlier, these organochlorine pesticides like DDT, They were pretty safe to handle.
00:20:13.000And the problem was that they were destroying wildlife, causing species to go extinct.
00:20:17.000It's why the bald eagle almost went extinct, why the peregrine falcon almost went extinct.
00:20:22.000It was from DDT. And so countries, including the United States, phased those chemicals out.
00:20:29.000They were replaced by the organophosphate chemicals, pesticides.
00:20:33.000And these were developed by Nazi scientists during World War II. They're very similar to the Nazi nerve gas poisons like tabin and sarin.
00:20:43.000And those chemicals are incredibly toxic, but they break down faster in the environment.
00:20:48.000So we ended up doing a trade-off where the organochlorines would end up as residues on food and consumers would end up with two unacceptable levels.
00:20:59.000Like if you go back into the 1960s, The average American had 12 parts per million DDT in their body fat.
00:21:06.000And that's the toxic level of DDT, and that was the average.
00:21:09.000So really terrible consequences for health.
00:21:13.000So in order to prevent that, we switched to organophosphates.
00:21:16.000But then that caused another problem, because then we're asking the farm workers, instead of using this relatively safe chemical to use, to use something that's quite dangerous.
00:21:25.000A lot of people get killed during application.
00:21:29.000And the farmworkers are some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
00:21:32.000They're typically migrants from Mexico or other parts of Latin America.
00:21:38.000They don't have the right protective equipment.
00:21:40.000And then they're spraying these chemicals that are incredibly poisonous.
00:21:44.000So I also work on that, on health effects of pesticides in the border region, both with migrant farmworker communities and with some of the tribes there.
00:21:54.000Are they absorbing this stuff through the respiratory system?
00:22:02.000Some pesticides, like DDT, you actually get from food.
00:22:06.000If you go back and look at World War II photos where the army was spraying refugees and soldiers with DDT powder, That's actually pretty safe.
00:22:16.000You're not going to get DDT poison by having it on your skin.
00:22:19.000And they were doing this for what reason?
00:22:21.000To kill the body louse because lice transmit typhus.
00:22:25.000And so to prevent epidemic typhus during the war and after the war, we used massive amounts of DDT. To spray the people down?
00:22:34.000In fact, the very first time a typhus epidemic was stopped in its tracks, It was in Naples in December 1943 to February 1944. Military just conquered Naples.
00:22:45.000Neapolitans had been living in caverns by the tens of thousands under the city during the bombardment.
00:22:51.000And so, of course, if you're crowded and dirty and you're living in a cavern with thousands of other people, there's going to be body lice.
00:22:57.000And that caused an outbreak of typhus.
00:22:59.000So, the U.S. military set up these de-lousing stations where we literally sprayed the DDT powder on every single person in Naples and stopped typhus in its tracks.
00:23:25.000So their immune system is compromised.
00:23:26.000And the Irish died, over a million Irish died during the famine from typhus and from relapsing fever, both of which are vectored by the body loss.
00:23:35.000So that's why we're using DDT during the war.
00:23:38.000Typhus is actually something that they've discovered recently in Los Angeles in the homeless community.
00:23:47.000People were terrified because, you know, there's some of the areas in Skid Row that are literally thousands and thousands of people in these areas are homeless.
00:23:55.000I mean, it's the craziest scene you've ever seen.
00:23:58.000It's just tents and garbage and it's horrific.
00:24:02.000And apparently some of the people have tested positive for typhus.
00:24:18.000So the DDT that they're spraying these people with, they shielded their food somehow or another, right?
00:24:24.000They're just spraying them physically with it.
00:24:26.000Yeah, they actually weren't worried about shielding food back then, but if you were sprayed down with DDT, even if you had some food there, that one exposure wouldn't be that big of a deal.
00:24:35.000So the toxic levels of DDT coming from long-term exposure?
00:26:07.000And arsenic was actually one of the—it's a metalloid.
00:26:10.000It's one of the metalloids that was used in fungicides, still is actually in many places.
00:26:16.000So you can also get it from agricultural use.
00:26:19.000And it's also in background levels, high in background levels in some places like Bangladesh, parts of Alaska, parts of Arizona, Navajo Nation, for example.
00:26:27.000So there's places in— In the world where the natural levels are unacceptably high, and then that's where you get in your drinking water.
00:26:35.000So people are usually exposed to arsenic through water.
00:27:16.000But if you go back, say, 20 years, oftentimes they weren't.
00:27:20.000You may remember the protest movement led by Cesar Chavez.
00:27:24.000In Southern California for the migrant farm workers and the great boycott in the 1980s.
00:27:30.000And what that was about was the spraying of these incredibly toxic chemicals without protective gear, without proper training, and people were getting exposed to really high levels.
00:27:40.000But even today, if you're a farm worker with protective gear, and you're in a place like, I work in Yuma, Arizona, where there's agriculture all year round, and those people are getting exposed to aerial applications and handheld applications of pesticides all year round.
00:27:57.000So even if you have gear, you take off your gear, you go home to your family, you're right next to the spraying.
00:28:02.000You're still going to be breathing it in.
00:28:44.000So if you think about spraying down a field with a nasty pesticide where you kill all the arthropods, all the insects and the spiders and so on, you're not just killing the pests like the grasshopper that's eating the food.
00:28:55.000You're also killing the insects that eat the grasshopper.
00:28:59.000You're killing the wasp that parasitizes the grasshopper.
00:29:01.000So you're losing that biological control.
00:29:04.000And so integrated pest management combines biological control of using animals to control the pest animals with minimal focused use of pesticides.
00:30:12.000That's where the shark's going to get you.
00:30:14.000Everyone's trying to get to the middle at all times.
00:30:16.000And so that causes the whole thing to be this boiling mess where all the animals are trying to get to the center and it makes it look coordinated.
00:30:23.000But really, it's just everyone's trying to get away from the edge.
00:30:27.000Is that the same thing with birds, when they're flying around those beautiful clouds?
00:30:30.000Well, if it's a massive flock of birds, like you see with starlings, where you have thousands of them.
00:30:35.000But it's different with things like geese that are migrating or cranes that are migrating, where they're going for that aerodynamic position in the group.
00:31:29.000And they then communicate where that food is with something called the waggle dance.
00:31:35.000But it's remarkable because it's kind of an abstract language.
00:31:39.000They do the dance on the vertical honeycomb.
00:31:44.000And they transpose the angle from where you have to fly relative to the sun to the vertical honeycomb.
00:31:52.000So they act like the sun is completely vertically above the honeycomb.
00:31:58.000And let's say they had to fly 10 degrees to the right of the sun to get to the flower.
00:32:02.000Then they dance 10 degrees to the right of the vertical of the honeycomb.
00:32:07.000And they can dance for hours, but of course the sun is moving, but they move their dance to coordinate with where the sun would be.
00:32:13.000They know where the sun would be internally in their brain, and they transpose their dance for that.
00:32:19.000But they don't just communicate the angle to fly, they also communicate how far to fly.
00:32:24.000And it's really about how much energy you need to fly.
00:32:27.000Because if there's a headwind, it takes more energy.
00:32:29.000And if there's a tailwind, it takes less energy.
00:32:31.000So the intensity of the waggle dance tells the other bees how much energy you need to fly there.
00:32:37.000And then when the workers leave the hive, they know the angle to go and they know how much energy to expend to get there.
00:32:44.000But bees can also navigate by polarized light.
00:32:46.000So if the sun is completely covered up with clouds, they still know where the sun is by the polarization of light.
00:32:51.000They still do the waggle dance based on that.
00:32:55.000And they can also navigate by landmarks, and the landmarks actually will take precedence, so you can screw them up.
00:33:00.000You can have a landmark out there, and then they do the waggle dance, and then you move the landmark, and when they come out, they'll follow the landmark and go to the wrong place.
00:33:10.000So they fucked with the bees to find out whether or not they could do that.
00:34:36.000I've seen the leafcutter ants, when they take it and they fill it with concrete, and they show that there's areas that they have that are specifically designed to ferment the leaves.
00:37:41.000You can easily find a colony because they clear all the vegetation from their path, and the path will be several inches wide, and it's working its way to whatever tree they're working on and back.
00:37:52.000You see these columns of millions of these ants marching along with flowers or leaves, and that poor tree is naked.
00:38:00.000There's another weird one that happens when some of them get infected with cordyceps mushrooms.
00:38:06.000It's different ants, but I think it's in the Amazon, where they realize that this ant is infected with these mushrooms, so they take it far out of town so that when it explodes and blows spores up in the air, they're not there.
00:38:38.000That's a dead ant that has this cordyceps mushroom.
00:38:43.000There's many types of cordyceps mushrooms, but some cordyceps mushrooms, they grow on caterpillars, and they're actually beneficial for humans for physical endurance.
00:38:56.000My company, Onnit, actually, we sell a product called Shroom Tech.
00:39:01.000That is a cordyceps mushroom-based product that has B12 and other adaptogens in it, but it's a great workout supplement, and it's based on the cordyceps mushroom.
00:39:10.000But it's not the same cordyceps mushroom.
00:39:16.000And the way we get it, they farm it off of caterpillars, which is crazy.
00:39:23.000And the way they found this is high-altitude herding populations were noticing that their cattle were eating these mushrooms, and they were more active.
00:39:30.000And so then they're like, well, let's try it.
00:40:14.000Yeah, if I remember correctly, Sigourney Weaver didn't know that those things were going to pop out of people when she got to the spaceship, right?
00:40:35.000Our planet, Fungus, and it's a clip from Netflix, so these spores grow in this time-lapse, and you get a chance to see how this parasitic fungus infects, and it's a murderous fungus.
00:40:49.000I mean, it killed the ant, and then it infects his little body and grows out, and I guess it's just hoping there's other ants nearby so it can get them.
00:42:13.000Just, you know, people will sequence them to figure out, we don't know what this is yet.
00:42:17.000You look at insects, and here are insects, you would think we would know all the insects.
00:42:22.000But when scientists go down to the rainforest, they'll set up a net under a rainforest tree, fumigate it to kill the insects, collect all the insects that fall out.
00:42:31.000And a lot of times, 30-40% of the insects are new to science.
00:42:35.000So, you know, we know most of the mammals.
00:43:14.000The Amazon is such, well, any of the rainforests are so fascinating in that they do have this insanely dense population of life.
00:43:23.000I have a friend who went to Guyana and he stayed in the rainforest for a couple of weeks and filming this, my friend Steve Rinello, this television show, Meat Eater.
00:44:05.000If you're there when the cicadas are out, and oftentimes they're emerging on these prime number years, so some years will be low, some years will be very high, it can be deafening.
00:44:16.000You can have to shout to hear each other when the cicadas are out.
00:44:19.000And then you get to hour, hour and a half before sunrise, and you start to get the howler monkeys going off, and they have their morning chorus.
00:44:27.000And then half an hour before sunrise, the birds are starting their dawn chorus.
00:44:32.000And then everything quiets down about an hour, hour and a half after sunrise.
00:44:36.000And it's pretty quiet until evening again.
00:44:39.000And it depends which rainforest you're in.
00:44:42.000So if you're in Africa, same thing goes on, different species.
00:44:45.000So if you're in the Amazon, you're going to hear the howler monkeys in the morning.
00:44:48.000If you're in Africa, tropical Africa, you'll hear the colobus monkeys in the morning.
00:44:55.000What's a real bummer is that there's people that want to chop that shit down just to grow crops or make it for cattle graze.
00:45:03.000Yeah, it's particularly tragic because that's where most of the world's biodiversity is, is in these rainforests.
00:45:08.000They're the most valuable habitat on Earth in terms of supporting life.
00:45:15.000And also, what's interesting is how many pharmaceutical drugs that can benefit people are derived from plants that they find in the rainforest, and they believe there's so many more to be discovered if we get there before they chop everything down.
00:45:29.000Yeah, and it's not just before we chop everything down, but before we lose the indigenous knowledge of what plants are good for what.
00:45:35.000You know, the shamans who know From thousands of years of practicing what's good for what.
00:45:42.000And a lot of that knowledge is already gone.
00:45:45.000But if you look at, most people don't realize how much of our medicine comes from plants.
00:45:48.000And if you look at Western medicine, which I think of all the medical traditions in the world probably has the least drugs coming from plants.
00:45:56.000It's still about half of our drugs are derived from plant products.
00:46:00.000And you go to traditional Chinese medicine, it's almost all of it.
00:46:03.000You go to traditional Indian medicine, it's almost all of it.
00:46:06.000So, yeah, there's an incredible knowledge base and an incredible diversity of species that we have to protect for our future.
00:46:13.000We have no idea what drugs might be incredibly valuable in the future from the rainforest.
00:46:18.000It's so interesting, too, if you talk to people about where drugs come from.
00:46:21.000Like, where do pharmaceutical drugs come from?
00:47:04.000How do they find when they have a spot where this particular plant grows?
00:47:09.000Do they just take it, extract it, and then use it to make pharmaceutical drugs in a compounding pharmacy or through some scientific method?
00:47:19.000What happens to all the other plants that are in those areas and is there a risk that as they're extracting the plants they use to make these pharmaceuticals that they're screwing up the whole ecosystem of this area and there might be other plants that can do different things that they're now dooming to death because they're focusing on this one drug that's really good for arthritis or whatever?
00:47:47.000What I'm getting at is we're monkeying with these environments.
00:47:51.000And so the most efficient way to find drugs in the rainforest would be to find what the locals use, what plants do they use for different things.
00:47:59.000And there's probably a good chance that...
00:48:02.000And then once that's done, unfortunately, the history has been that pharmaceutical companies then take those plants back to the lab, and then that's the end of the story for the locals.
00:48:11.000And really, that resource is coming from them.
00:48:14.000They should get some economic benefit from that.
00:48:17.000There are some small companies that are trying to do this now.
00:48:22.000They're trying to feed money back to the communities where they come from.
00:48:25.000But if you want people to protect the rainforest, they have to have an economic incentive to do so.
00:48:30.000And one of those incentives can be around pharmaceuticals.
00:48:33.000I used to work in a rainforest in Western Kenya, and there were many problems associated with people girdling trees because a lot of the medicines come from the bark.
00:48:46.000So they would cut the bark completely around the tree within reach.
00:48:49.000All the bark they could reach, they would cut out.
00:48:52.000And then you have this 500-year-old tree that dies because it doesn't have the bark anymore, which it needs for moving nutrients around.
00:49:00.000So, yeah, it can, of course, damage the forest, but I think one of the most important things is not just taking that resource in a responsible way for the environment, but also in a responsible way for the people who live there, who made these discoveries over thousands of years.
00:49:16.000Yeah, so how do you incentivize pharmaceutical companies to bring in these folks that live in this area and incorporate them and actually include them in the profits?
00:49:29.000Because if they don't have to do it, especially when you're going to a place like the Amazon, which is notorious for them taking advantage of the indigenous people and having these horrific abusive relationships, I'm sure you're I'm aware of the guy who got murdered in the Amazon just the other day.
00:49:46.000He got shot by this tribe and he was actually one of the people that's trying to protect these uncontacted tribes and just leave them alone.
00:49:54.000Unfortunately, it's hard for them to recognize whether or not this is a guy that's there for the oil companies or the cattle companies because they've had these horrific relationships with these companies that are trying to exploit them and their resources.
00:50:07.000And so they shot this guy and killed him with an arrow.
00:50:10.000Yeah, and usually it's the other way around.
00:50:13.000Usually it's the gold miners who are killing the environmentalists.
00:50:17.000So I don't know the answer to your question because I don't know how to motivate businesses to do the right thing.
00:50:22.000I think we have a long history on this planet of businesses doing the wrong thing when they get the power and not thinking responsibly about how to do what they're doing sustainably.
00:50:32.000And also, I would worry that, I mean, I don't know if this is a good worry or if I'm being ridiculous, but that if they did hit some sort of a windfall, if they found some area of the Amazon where they have this plant that you can make pharmaceutical drugs out of and it's incredibly valuable,
00:50:51.000and so there's an enormous amount of profit for this village, You don't want a situation like you have in these Native American communities where a tribe allows a casino to come in and then it sort of bastardizes what the reservation used to be or the tribe used to be.
00:51:11.000Running around driving Mercedes and making all this money off of people gambling, but the original way of life is gone.
00:51:17.000Now, obviously, with Native Americans, there's a lot more complicated problems that go way back from, you know, the genocide, the fact that they were taken over by the settlers and all the treaties that were broken and all the various injustices that were done to them.
00:51:33.000You've got this whole weird casino culture.
00:51:37.000I don't want to live in a subsistence jungle tribe in the middle of the Amazon, but that's how they live and they love it.
00:51:48.000They thrive that way and that's the only life they've ever known.
00:51:52.000If we all of a sudden gave them money And you go back and now they're wearing Under Armour t-shirts and they have iPads and they're partying and playing music and they have internet connections and their way of life is gone.
00:52:06.000The argument is, is that good or is that bad?
00:52:14.000I think it's awesome that there's people that live off the land the way they've lived for thousands and thousands of years.
00:52:23.000When you see those photos of those uncontacted tribes, there's one incredible photo of these folks that are pointing their bows and arrows.
00:52:31.000It's either a drone or a helicopter that's taking photos.
00:52:34.000And I'm like, wow, what a weird convergence of the past and the present.
00:53:32.000I think part of the answer, though, is can the technology be integrated in a way that fits with the culture, and can they make it part of their culture?
00:54:24.000There's, I think the guy's name is Commander Maurice Vidal Portman.
00:54:29.000He was this English explorer slash pervert who would go to these islands and dress these guys up and take pictures with them and do all kinds of weird shit.
00:54:41.000And weird sexual stuff too, like measuring their penises and their balls.
00:55:03.000Some stories that they passed down about what happens when white people show up in boats.
00:55:08.000So when that poor fuck got out trying to bring Bibles, they probably had this story about white people showing up in boats that ruin your life.
00:55:18.000And it's probably a part of their history and their lore and their legends that they passed down.
00:55:25.000Yeah, so you can certainly understand why they wouldn't want anyone coming in anymore.
00:55:29.000Well, yeah, and they think there's only like 39 of these folks left.
00:55:33.000They're the direct descendants of people who left Africa 60,000 years ago.
00:57:57.000When you see those guys with the painted bodies pointing the bows and arrows, those folks are probably living exactly the same way people 10,000 years ago lived.
00:58:06.000It seems like they don't have any metal.
00:58:08.000It seems like they're using the natural materials to make their bows and arrows, and they're covering themselves with pigments that they make from plants.
00:58:23.000You're kind of reminding me of our discussion earlier about the indigenous people in the Arctic.
00:58:28.000And when European explorers first got to Greenland and Baffin Island and places like that, the locals basically didn't have any heart disease because their marine diet was so protective of the heart.
00:58:41.000All of these omega-3 fatty acids, all of the wonderful things you get from fish.
00:58:45.000And so here they had one of the healthiest diets in the world, and then now it still has those healthy elements, but it also has unhealthy elements because of the way that we've polluted the world.
00:58:55.000So it's kind of the same sort of change where things are dramatically different than they were not very long ago.
00:59:03.000It's crazy that we have them a double whammy too, right?
00:59:06.000They get the pesticides and then they get all our vices as well.
00:59:11.000And the Native Americans, same thing in terms of the vices.
00:59:19.000When you think about alcoholism amongst Native American populations and also Inuits, Eskimos, there's so many different folks that have problems with all these things that we've brought to them.
00:59:34.000And it ruins our understanding of their health.
00:59:38.000Because as you were saying, the low instances of heart disease, that was confusing to people because they're like, wait a minute, folks don't eat any vegetables.
01:00:19.000You were also, in your book and in the podcast, you guys brought up Fritz Haber.
01:00:27.000He's a guy that I've talked about on this podcast multiple times because I listened to a Radiolab podcast where they...
01:00:34.000I think the podcast was called Good and Evil, but it was basically highlighting...
01:00:41.000People that have done amazing things but also awful things.
01:00:45.000And he's like literally one of the best examples because he was being...
01:00:50.000He was going to be awarded the Nobel Prize for this method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere at the same time he was wanted for crimes against humanity.
01:01:18.000So, the backstory of this is that the two greatest physical chemists in the world before World War I were Fritz Haber and Walter Nernst, both in Germany.
01:01:28.000And Germany had the best chemistry in the world, the best physics in the world, the best biology in the world.
01:01:33.000It was the highlight of science around the world.
01:01:36.000And Haber and Nernst were racing each other to see who could be the first one to extract usable amounts of nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer, to make ammonium.
01:01:46.000And they were playing around with incredibly high pressures, incredibly high temperatures, and Haber got there first.
01:01:57.000And that really averted world hunger because before nitrogen could be extracted from the air, the air is 80% nitrogen.
01:02:05.000So before we could pull that out of the air, fertilizers came mostly from caliche deposits in northern Chile.
01:02:12.000They had to be, the old bird droppings and things that had to be, they were accumulated over millions of years, had to be shipped to wherever you wanted to do your farming.
01:02:20.000And also, even people, they would use remnants from battlefields, human corpses, for fertilizing.
01:02:26.000So we were in a situation where the world was constantly hungry.
01:02:31.000People were starving every year because of a lack of food.
01:02:36.000So that initiated the Green Revolution, the mining of nitrogen from the air, the making of artificial fertilizers.
01:02:44.000And so that was done a few years before World War I. And when World War I broke out, the Kaiser first assigned Nertz to develop chemical weapons for the German military, and he failed.
01:02:58.000He was unable to make effective chemical weapons.
01:03:02.000We don't know whether he was unable because he was one of the two greatest chemists in the world.
01:03:07.000It seems unlikely to me that he couldn't figure it out, or whether he just didn't want to do it, and so he purposely failed.
01:03:13.000So when he failed, Haber had just succeeded in his assignment for the German military of making an effective antifreeze for the German military vehicles that were operating in the winter fighting against Russia.
01:03:27.000And so they had this problem that had to be solved and Haber solved it of making antifreeze.
01:03:32.000So the Kaiser assigned Haber the task of developing chemical weapons for the German military.
01:03:37.000And he started working with chlorine gas.
01:03:40.000And chlorine gas, because it's heavy, so if you release it, it'll stay near the ground.
01:03:48.000And in fact, his assistant was my great-grandfather, James Franck.
01:03:54.000And Franck and other scientists would put on gas masks, and they would expose themselves to these These chemical weapons and figure out how effective the gas masks were, how effective the- They self-tested.
01:04:09.000They self-tested, and it was incredibly dangerous, as you can imagine.
01:04:13.000So through these tests, Haber figured out that you need a slight, slight breeze to deliver this weapon.
01:04:20.000If you could see grass bending in the wind, it was too strong of a wind.
01:04:24.000And so then they went to Belgium, to the battlefront in Belgium, And wait until the wind was just right.
01:04:31.000And then they released the chlorine gas from cylinders, thousands of cylinders.
01:04:35.000Then this gas just started marching its way slowly towards the British lines.
01:04:40.000And it was mostly British colonial troops, Algerians and And British soldiers.
01:04:45.000And at first, the British soldiers started firing their weapons into the gas.
01:04:54.000So the soldiers on the German line said they'd never heard so much gunfire in the war, as happened when that gas was coming to them.
01:05:00.000They tried to stop it by shooting machine guns and everything they had.
01:05:35.000After that victory at, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, Y-R-P-E-S in Belgium, where that battle took place, after the victory there, he and his colleagues celebrated at their home.
01:05:48.000And his wife went outside with his service revolver and shot herself in the head, killed herself, in front of their son, Herman.
01:05:56.000So she was completely opposed to the use of development and use of chemical weapons.
01:06:54.000You know, speaking of pollutants and war and chemicals, there was this area that we were talking about once in the podcast that's the size of Paris and France that is uninhabitable because of munitions.
01:07:36.000I flew out there with a couple of other biologists.
01:07:40.000Everyone else on the plane were munitions people.
01:07:43.000They were going out there to look for unexploded ordnance because the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands during World War II as the only American soil taken over by a foreign power.
01:07:52.000And that's how the war in the Aleutians happened.
01:07:56.000The reason why there's a road from the lower 48 to Alaska is the U.S. Army built the ALCAN, the Alaska-Canadian Highway, to get the military up there to fight the Japanese.
01:08:05.000And so when I flew out there the first time, the military was giving the island back to the Aleut tribe from whom they had taken it.
01:08:13.000And they had to find the unexploded ordnance, all these bombs and things that were left there.
01:08:18.000So we were told, look, when you're doing your biology out there, please let us know if you find the ordnance.
01:08:25.000We had GPSs with us because we were doing the science.
01:08:28.000We found a lot of unexploded ordnance and just marked everything with GPS, gave it to the military so they could go out and clean.
01:09:07.000But you'd also find bombs, not just from World War II, but then afterwards in the Cold War, this particular island, Adak, became a very important Navy site.
01:09:19.000And during World War II, Adak Island actually was the largest community in all of Alaska.
01:09:24.000There were 65,000 GIs stationed there.
01:09:30.000That was a staging ground for the American armada that then attacked the Japanese fleet and fought together Japanese out of the Aleutians.
01:09:39.000So given that there were 65,000 soldiers there during the war and after the war was a very important Cold War military base, there's just incredible stuff there.
01:09:49.000We found these bunkers that That, you know, you could go in.
01:10:19.000So when the tribe went back to this island, you have 120 people maybe go back, and they get to choose from housing that used to house 65,000 people.
01:10:30.000It was the farthest west McDonald's in the world.
01:10:34.000It's not there anymore, but there was a McDonald's there that was the farthest west in the world because this island is just a couple of degrees from the hemisphere.
01:10:43.000Creepy as McDonald's that they set up a McDonald's out there.
01:12:43.000Like these people who live there and they're not even sure who those people were.
01:12:47.000What was the movie that came out a few years ago about the guy who found the gold city?
01:12:56.000It was a few years ago about a traveler from England, from Great Britain, that had come down to the Amazon and he found this lost tribe and there was all this gold there and I think the original guy had lost city of...
01:13:19.000Sounds like a Harrison Ford movie from a long time ago.
01:15:11.000So, this is actually kind of an interesting movie about this guy who goes down there and the idea is there was a city that existed and then by the time he had returned...
01:15:21.000I think the theory is that European explorers had given these people diseases and smallpox and the like and it wiped out like enormous swaths of the population almost instantly within you know 10 years there was nothing left and then the jungle just overtook whatever civilization they had and then when you know we're going back and looking at it through lidar that's what we're seeing we're seeing hundreds of years later that there's very little evidence And that's
01:16:08.000One year, 2 million people in Mexico, indigenous people, died from typhus.
01:16:13.000And, you know, these were people who were, you would say, they're epidemiologically naive to the disease.
01:16:18.000So people colonized the Americas from Asia, you know, whatever, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 years ago, and they hadn't experienced these diseases in that entire history.
01:16:30.000So when yellow fever came over, when influenza came over, when all of that, it just wiped out these populations.
01:16:36.000And so that's why Europeans were able to conquer the Americas so quickly because the people were dead mostly before the battles could even take place.
01:16:45.000Most of the population had been wiped out.
01:16:47.000And this happens even more recently, like St. Lawrence Island, where I do a lot of work in the Bering Sea.
01:16:54.000In the 1918 influenza epidemic, the Spanish flu epidemic, that wiped out most of the island.
01:16:59.000I think there were something around 18 villages.
01:17:23.000I mean, we're all very upset about COVID, rightly so, but COVID is a very small disease in comparison to what happened to the Native Americans.
01:17:32.000It's nothing compared to these other diseases.
01:17:49.000Malaria has actually killed more people than any other disease in human history.
01:17:54.000And the origin of that is when, about 10,000 years ago, when people started agriculture, then people were clustered around water sources because you need water to grow crops.
01:18:05.000So you have a relatively dense population of people around water sources.
01:18:08.000The mosquito that vectors malaria is called anopheles, which in Greek means good for nothing.
01:18:13.000And it was actually named before it was discovered to be the vector of malaria.
01:18:17.000And so malaria has been an epidemic proportion disease for humanity for about 10,000 years since the origin of agriculture.
01:18:26.000Then as people moved around, the malaria moved with them.
01:18:32.000In around 1828, I think it was, two French chemists extracted quinine and cinchonine from the cinchona plant, which came from Peru.
01:18:43.000And the indigenous people of Peru had already been using this plant to treat what they called relapsing fever, which is malaria, a fever that comes and goes and comes and goes.
01:18:54.000And the first European to use it was the Spanish viceroy's wife was treated with this to cure her of malaria.
01:19:06.000So Jesuits brought cinchona bark from Peru to Europe, but it took a couple of hundred years before these French scientists were able to extract two of the four active ingredients in the bark, which is quinine and cinchonine.
01:19:20.000And they then were able to use that to diagnose malaria and also to treat malaria.
01:19:25.000And once there was a treatment available for malaria, then not much happened in terms of how it led to separation of people until it was discovered that Anopheles vectors malaria.
01:19:37.000So Ronald Ross made that discovery in India in the 1890s.
01:19:40.000Once that discovery was made, it was quickly realized that there's a disease reservoir.
01:19:45.000So all of these diseases have a reservoir.
01:19:47.000Typically, it's animals that carry them that can infect people, but also people who can infect other people.
01:19:54.000Even with COVID, some people, maybe half, people don't get sick, and they serve as a reservoir for the disease.
01:20:00.000So once scientists realized that there's a reservoir for the disease, they actually discovered in Africa that children act as a reservoir for malaria.
01:20:07.000So they get a more benign form of malaria, typically.
01:20:10.000And in sub-Saharan Africa, the people also have genetic resistance to malaria because many people are heterozygous for sickle cell genes.
01:20:22.000So they have One normal copy of the sickle cell gene and one mutation for the gene, which gives them resistance to malaria.
01:20:30.000So when the colonists realized that native children were the reservoir for malaria and there was a treatment for it, they segregated the European population, the colonists, from the Africans.
01:20:44.000And they even destroyed indigenous huts that were too close to the European colonists' homes.
01:20:49.000And that was the origin of modern segregation, modern in the late 1800s, early 1900s, of segregation in Africa, in colonial Africa.
01:20:59.000It started with trying to separate the source of malaria, the African children, from the European colonists.
01:21:07.000But it also plays out in many other places.
01:21:09.000So even before it was known that mosquitoes vectored malaria, you can find cultural differences.
01:21:17.000You go to malarious regions where there's mountains, and you'll find that the people who live in the mountains have a different language than the people who live in the valleys, and they have a different culture, and they separate from each other.
01:21:27.000And the only time the people in the mountains would interact with the people in the valleys was in the non-malaria season.
01:21:33.000They wouldn't come down when there was malaria.
01:21:35.000So there you have a disease that's basically culturally separating these people from the mountains and from the valley.
01:21:43.000Also in America, it also entrenched slavery.
01:21:46.000So when the Europeans first colonized America, they first enslaved the indigenous population, and they had indentured servants who were Europeans.
01:21:54.000But both the Europeans and the indigenous population were getting wiped out by these diseases.
01:22:00.000They didn't have resistance to them, to the yellow fever, the malaria, all of these other ones.
01:22:05.000And so when they started bringing over African slaves, black African slaves, these were people who had natural resistance to malaria because they had the sickle cell gene.
01:22:14.000And they also had acquired immunity to yellow fever because they typically would get it as a kid when the effect is less pronounced.
01:22:22.000And then they'd have resistance to it for the rest of their life.
01:22:25.000So the resistance of the African slaves to these diseases entrenched slavery because they were the valuable workers.
01:22:32.000So that really made this continent spiral down into slavery.
01:22:37.000It also led to the cultural separation between the North and the South because In the South, there was much more malaria than in the North in the United States.
01:22:45.000And so that meant that the working population there, the slaves, they were more valuable because they had the resistance to malaria and to yellow fever.
01:22:57.000And so it drove a lot of the cultural divide in this country.
01:23:49.000How did they figure out that these two extractions from plants, did they have an origin of how people figured out that that would treat malaria?
01:23:58.000So the origin actually is going back to what we discussed before.
01:24:00.000It was the indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes who were using this plant to treat febrile illnesses.
01:24:13.000Yeah, it's amazing when you think about it.
01:24:16.000I've spent time with shaman in rainforests, both in Africa and in Latin America, the real deal, you know, where they have thousands of different plants they use for things, and they know every single plant, they know every single treatment.
01:24:28.000I actually hired one when I was working in Kenya in 1992 to teach me the plants of the rainforest because I had a translation book.
01:24:36.000I was working in a part of Western Kenya.
01:24:40.000The tribe is called the Luya tribe, and I had a translation book from their language to English.
01:24:46.000And so I had them teach me all the plants in their language, and then I could figure out what it was.
01:24:51.000And that's how I was able to work on the plants that I was working on there.
01:25:45.000And so the United States conquered Cuba in the Spanish-American War.
01:25:48.000And as we took over Cuba, many of our soldiers were getting yellow fever.
01:25:52.000So, the United States military set up the Yellow Fever Commission of four scientists who went to Cuba, led by Walter Reed, and they very quickly figured out that Aedes aegypti, another species of mosquito, was the vector for yellow fever.
01:26:08.000Once they figured that out, there was a guy named Gorgas who was hired to solve this problem.
01:26:15.000And what he did is they went through Havana and they broke open every pot that held water, because these both Aedes aegypti and, which vector is yellow fever, and chikungunya, and what's the other one?
01:26:32.000There's another nasty tropical disease that's affected by Aedes aegypti.
01:26:35.000Anyway, that mosquito and the Anopheles mosquito, they breed in stagnant water.
01:26:40.000So they started breaking open all of the containers of stagnant water.
01:26:43.000Anything that was too big, they screened.
01:26:47.000In the space of a couple of months, they completely got rid of yellow fever from Havana, which had had yellow fever every single year and killed thousands of people every year.
01:26:57.000And they got rid of almost all the malaria, about 80% of the malaria, by getting rid of their breeding habitat.
01:27:02.000Once they accomplished that, Gorgas then moved over to the Panama Canal Zone.
01:27:06.000So the French had tried to build the Panama Canal, but they had so much mortality from malaria and yellow fever that they gave up.
01:27:15.000And so the United States bought the rights from the French.
01:27:18.000The French wanted to get out of there and get what they could out of it.
01:27:24.000Gorgas went through, got rid of all the standing water to get rid of malaria, yellow fever, and that made it so that we could finish the construction of the canal.
01:27:31.000And then, of course, we backed these Panamanian rebels to steal Panama from Colombia because it was part of Colombia, create the new country of Panama so that we could have exclusive control of the canal zone.
01:27:43.000Once that was accomplished, this is all between 1902 and 1910, Then we started eradicating these standing water sources in the United States and by doing that and treating them with what are called callicosides, which are pesticides that kill larval mosquitoes.
01:27:59.000So through drainage and through using pesticides, we got rid of malaria from this country.
01:28:05.000Well, if that was possible in America, why do we hear all this talk about genetically modified mosquitoes and using that to treat malaria in Africa?
01:28:14.000Is it just the span, the scale of Africa is just too massive?
01:28:18.000No, the problem is that the mosquitoes very quickly evolve resistance to the chemicals that we use.
01:28:24.000So things like DDT was very effective for a few years, but then the mosquitoes evolved resistance and it's no longer effective against malaria.
01:28:33.000And so in the United States, we were able, through our infrastructure, through our ability to To drain the water and to cover water and treat water, we were able to get rid of it.
01:28:48.000But not only the resistance, but also like you're saying, the infrastructure is hard and you have much more of it there.
01:28:56.000You go to Africa, it's the origin of malaria.
01:29:27.000So there's a gene that relates to the shape of the hemoglobin and its ability to carry oxygen.
01:29:34.000And a mutation in that gene, a sickle cell gene, it causes the, if you have two copies of that mutation, one from mom, one from dad, it causes that you get this sickle shape, and those people are anemic and typically don't live.
01:29:46.000But if you are the heterozygote, if you have one sickle cell mutation and one normal, you have a normal ability to carry oxygen, but the parasite, it's a...
01:30:01.000Now I'm having one of these brain freezes.
01:30:02.000The parasite that causes malaria is an amoeba-like parasite.
01:30:06.000It's not able to penetrate the hemoglobin if you have that gene.
01:30:10.000So these people are protected from malaria.
01:30:14.000And so it was a mutation that was a random mutation that had this huge selective advantage for the people who lived in these malarious regions.
01:30:22.000Then those are the people that were brought over as slaves to the New World.
01:30:26.000And so, of course, they have their genetics they bring with them.
01:30:30.000And once there's no longer malaria here, it's not an advantage to have that gene because there's no malaria to get sick with.
01:30:36.000And if you're a heterozygote and you marry someone else who's a heterozygote, one quarter of your children will have sickle cell anemia.
01:30:42.000They'll have both of the mutations that leads to this pretty terrible anemia condition.
01:30:52.000So it's more common among African Americans, like you're saying, because it's a mutation that arose in Africa.
01:31:00.000But it's relatively rare to have the disease because you have to have two people who each are carriers to have children together before you'll get someone with the disease.
01:31:13.000Relatively rare now in comparison to the past?
01:32:15.000We don't have anyone with the disease, but if you have that gene, you have to then get your spouse has to get tested to see if they have it as well so you know if you might have kids with it.
01:32:25.000That's a really tough call if you both have it, but you both love each other.
01:32:47.000I grew up with a guy who had it and he died from it.
01:32:51.000He was a guy that I used to do martial arts with.
01:32:53.000It was a real bummer because he was this really dynamic, super powerful, athletic guy and then he would get really sick and then he would come back and he'd be okay again and then he'd get really sick again.
01:33:08.000When you're talking about eradicating malaria in the United States, how they did that, is it 100% eradicated or are there occasionally cases of malaria in America?
01:33:19.000No, you can still get cases because there's still a lot of malaria in Latin America.
01:33:24.000And so you can get these mosquitoes coming over that are carriers of it.
01:35:04.000My friend Dave Foley, who was on news radio with me, who's the nicest guy in the world, like couldn't be a sweeter guy, was on that because his family was going to Africa and he had to meet them there.
01:35:14.000And so he was taking this anti-malarial drug.
01:35:16.000And I guess you're not supposed to drink when you're on that stuff either.
01:35:24.000Well, we used to make these black and tans there in the rainforest.
01:35:27.000You could get Guinness Stout in Kenya, and you can also get Tusker, this Kenyan light beer, so you could make black and tans out of that.
01:35:34.000And so did you do that while you were on Methlequin?
01:35:37.000Yeah, and I'll tell you a funny story.
01:35:42.000We would do about one supply run a month out of the forest to get stuff, and it's a full day to get to the village and get what you want and get back.
01:37:07.000Maybe Dave was on another medication, but we were at this party.
01:37:11.000It's one of these weird press parties that they would have, these press junkets where the actress from the show would mingle with the press and people would be drinking alcohol.
01:37:19.000They would come by and just ask you questions.
01:37:21.000They would have tape recorders in your face.
01:38:52.000Yeah, so I was there for three months the first time, and the second time two and a half months, and I was getting a little uncomfortable taking it that long.
01:39:29.000It's great if you're in an area that has, like for camping, if you're in an area that has a lot of mosquitoes.
01:39:35.000I don't know how bad it is for you, though.
01:39:36.000It's one of the things I wanted to ask you.
01:39:38.000We were actually talking about it just before, because we were talking about doing podcasts outdoors, and Jamie was like, we're probably going to have a net to try to keep the mosquitoes out.
01:39:46.000And I'm like, what about a thermocell?
01:39:47.000But then I said, well, maybe ask Frank how bad this shit is for you.
01:39:52.000Thermocells, it's a small device, and it is a lifesaver.
01:39:56.000Especially, I've used them in Alberta, which Alberta, the mosquitoes know, somehow or another, they only have three months to live, and they fucking go ham.
01:40:39.000And so actually, it relates back to the World War II era we were talking about before, because...
01:40:48.000There were two important things going on with preventing malaria before the advent of DDT. There were the chrysanthemum-derived pyrethroid insecticides.
01:40:58.000So these are naturally occurring from the flower.
01:41:29.000And then the supply of quinine that was in storage, most of it was held in Amsterdam, and the Nazis seized that.
01:41:37.000So the Americans didn't have the plant anymore, they didn't have access to the plant or to the extracted drug product for treating malaria.
01:41:46.000And at the same time, there was labor unrest in Kenya, and so the chrysanthemum crop from Kenya was basically nonexistent at that time.
01:41:54.000So the U.S. Army prioritized we need to make a synthetic version of quinine to treat for malaria, and we also need synthetic insecticides because the pyrethroids are not available anymore.
01:42:07.000So they ended up going through thousands of chemicals looking for the right thing, and they settled on a chemical the Germans had actually developed called atabrine.
01:42:16.000And the soldiers didn't like it because it caused what they called the atabrine tan.
01:47:10.000And they're the most used insecticide in the world now.
01:47:13.000So first it was the things like DDT, the organochlorine insecticides, were the most used in the world up until they were banned in most of the world in the 1970s.
01:47:21.000And then the organophosphates became the most used insecticides in the world.
01:47:26.000Those were the ones derived from the Nazi nerve gas weapons.
01:47:29.000And those reached their peak around 1999. They were the most used.
01:47:33.000And now it's the neonicotinoids, which are the synthetic version of nicotine.
01:47:38.000So nicotine is lethal if you have too much.
01:48:19.000I don't know if it's speculative or what, but they believe that there's something about the particular frequency of cell phone signals that might disturb bees.
01:48:31.000They might be able to hear those signals or perceive those signals that disrupts their natural understanding of the world.
01:48:37.000You could imagine it because you have animals, like we were talking about before, they're using the magnetic field, they're using polarized light, they're using...
01:48:44.000They're using so many different signals.
01:48:46.000Like you can take a homing pigeon and you can put it on a turntable and cover its head so it can't see anything and fly it from the United States to Europe.
01:48:55.000Let it go and it will fly right back to where it came from.
01:48:58.000So can you imagine being more confused than that?
01:49:14.000I never read that it was killing them, but I read that it was disturbing their sense of their ability to communicate and perceive the world.
01:50:18.000Yeah, so I already have kids, I'm not having more kids, but what about young people, young men who are doing this?
01:50:24.000I don't know anything about it, but you have to wonder.
01:50:27.000Well, I've read people talking about, like, Sheryl Crow was speculating that she got a brain tumor from doing press on a cell phone all the time.
01:51:50.000And then it's got this bufotoxin on their head, and then the native marsupials eat it and they die, and now they're extinct or on the endangered species list.
01:52:00.000And in fact, the cane toad, it doesn't even eat the cane grub.
01:52:03.000It was brought over to eat because they're up on the stalk and the cane toad's on the ground, so we don't learn.
01:52:09.000Even with natural animals, what are you talking about when they were using, instead of pesticides, using spiders and bringing them into air?
01:52:18.000Yeah, and in fact, if you're talking about invasive species, so species brought from one place to another, if you're on islands, like the Hawaiian Islands, invasive species are the number one cause of extinction.
01:52:29.000If you're not on islands, they're usually number two or number three after habitat loss, other things, but on islands are number one.
01:52:36.000The highest extinction rate, known extinction rate of anywhere in the world is in Hawaii, in the Hawaiian Islands.
01:52:41.000And it's because the Hawaiian Islands, they rose out of the sea from nothing.
01:52:44.000So the species that are there are typically there and nowhere else.
01:55:19.000But invasive species, we really never have learned our lesson in terms of bringing them to places where they don't fit into the ecosystem, whether it's what's going on right now in Florida.
01:55:30.000I think they just extracted and killed something like 5,000 pythons from the Everglades, and they didn't put a dent in it.
01:55:38.000And the Everglades, there was a study where they went and they were tracking the populations of deer and raccoons and all these different animals over the past couple decades.
01:56:33.000One more thing I wanted to talk to you about is glyphosate.
01:56:37.000And I've read some things about the dangers of glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is a very common pesticide.
01:56:46.000But one of the things that I read that I don't know if it's true, that there's an issue, some people believe, in animals eating plants that have been sprayed with glyphosate.
01:56:58.000Like say if you eat a cow, That's been grazing on grass or grains that has been sprayed with Roundup.
01:57:06.000That you could potentially develop gut issues because your body is reacting to the toxins that's in the animal flesh from them eating this glyphosate sprayed plant.
01:57:19.000I don't know the answer to that question, but it is the most common herbicide used in the United States.
01:57:29.000It would have been banned in this country, but for political reasons it wasn't because of pressure from the company that makes it.
01:57:37.000When do you think it would have been banned?
01:57:39.000It was slated to be banned at the end of the Obama administration, beginning of the Trump administration, and then that was pulled off the What was the evidence that was indicating that it should be banned?
01:57:51.000So evidence of harming children and especially animal models in the laboratory showing toxic effects on animals in the lab that relate to things in children's health.
01:58:03.000So that's why the Europeans banned it.
01:58:05.000So the Europeans banned it because the children were getting it in what way?
01:58:28.000Like if we go back to the story of DDT, DDT would have been a wonderful public health tool if we had just used it for that.
01:58:37.000We probably could still use it today against malaria and yellow fever if we had only just restricted its use for these public health emergencies.
01:58:45.000And you have a spot treatment here because you have an outbreak of malaria and a spot treatment here because of Yellow fever, but we couldn't stop ourselves.
01:58:52.000So we put it in wallpaper for nurseries so that babies wouldn't have flies on the wall.
01:58:58.000We put it in paint and we covered everything with this paint.
02:00:51.000We've delegitimized it by calling it a pest.
02:00:55.000So they spray glyphosate to keep these unwanted plants from growing.
02:01:00.000And the plants that grow, why don't they react in a negative way?
02:01:05.000Yeah, so there's a few reasons for it.
02:01:08.000So some of the crops are actually genetically engineered so that they can handle the herbicide.
02:01:12.000So they are not damaged by the herbicide.
02:01:14.000The pest is, and then they out-compete the pest to grow that way.
02:01:19.000Some species are less damaged by others by these herbicides.
02:01:23.000And there's actually really interesting history that deals with warfare with this stuff too, because the herbicides were first developed at the beginning of World War II. And the idea was, back then, we have plant hormones.
02:01:39.000They cause the plant to grow in the way that they're going to grow.
02:01:42.000Is if you could make an artificial version of that plant hormone, you can make it grow too fast so that it dies.
02:01:49.000And this was proposed to be used during World War II as a weapon to kill the rice of the Japanese.
02:01:55.000So you could wipe out their food supply so that they starve.
02:01:59.000And then they're obviously less effective at fighting if they're starving.
02:02:02.000After World War II, it was actually used by the British and the Malay Peninsula, and then we used it at a massive scale in the Vietnam War, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, in Operation Ranch Hand, where we sprayed 20 million gallons of defoliants over the rainforest.
02:02:18.000And what we were trying to do is we were trying to wipe out the food supply of the Viet Cong, so starving these people, and we were also defoliating the forest so we could see the Viet Cong forces from the air.
02:02:30.000And that led to, have you been to Vietnam?
02:02:34.000So if you go to Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, there's actually kind of a city within the city where these people lived who were kids.
02:02:41.000When we were spraying there, they have all these deformities.
02:02:44.000They have missing limbs, they have deformed limbs, they have tremendous health problems.
02:02:48.000And these were kids who were in the womb when their mothers were sprayed with this by the US military.
02:02:55.000They developed these horrible deformities.
02:02:58.000So, you know, this kind of warfare, environmental injustice thing, it extends even to herbicides which were used in war.
02:03:04.000And because of that, at the end of the Vietnam War, we actually signed a declaration forbidding the use of herbicides in warfare.
02:03:16.000We forbid them in warfare, but we don't forbid them for our own consumption, for the crops that we eat.
02:03:22.000Right, and so we're not using the same chemical.
02:03:26.000Well, there are actually two chemicals that were used in Agent Orange that are still in use today in herbicides, but the process for creating them creates a less toxic compound now.
02:03:37.000The problem is that we're using so much of it.
02:03:40.000And so it's sort of like the DDT problem.
02:03:42.000You could get sprayed with DDT. It kills the body loss on you.
02:03:55.000We have a global decline of amphibians going on.
02:03:58.000Amphibian species are getting wiped out around the world.
02:04:00.000And a lot of it has to do with pesticides.
02:04:02.000So amphibians are aquatic herbivores when they're larvae, and then they're predatory terrestrial animals when they're adults.
02:04:10.000So they're affected by everything in the water, they're affected by everything on the land, and their development is screwed up.
02:04:16.000So you end up with males becoming females, you end up with all kinds of thyroid diseases from these various pesticides.
02:04:23.000So what exactly is Roundup doing to us and these genetically modified plants that accept the Roundup, that don't have an issue with glyphosate, that are able to thrive when they're being sprayed by glyphosate?
02:04:40.000What problems are we having digesting those things?
02:04:43.000Well, a lot of the concern is around the development of the brain for the child.
02:04:47.000And so the child in the womb and then the young child growing up.
02:04:51.000So a lot of these chemicals are neurotoxicants.
02:05:10.000So the main concern is with children's development.
02:05:13.000And of course, if you mess with a children's brain, it's permanent, right?
02:05:18.000This is like the lead problem, where I talked about this actually in the very beginning of the book, in the preface, that Thomas Misley Jr. was working on this engineering problem of how do you make it so automobile engines don't knock?
02:05:32.000And they were knocking, it lowered the power, it lowered the efficiency.
02:05:36.000And he figured out if you added tetral ethyl lead to gasoline, you could make this internal combustion engine that wouldn't knock.
02:05:44.000He got lead poisoning in the development of this.
02:05:46.000Some of the workers died from lead poisoning when they were developing this gasoline.
02:06:37.000Because if you look at the lead pollution in the United States and then you put on an 18 to 20 year delay because those boys have to grow up into young men and the men are the ones who are doing the crime.
02:08:08.000So for pesticides that are on the surface of the plant, you can wash them, right?
02:08:14.000And so you can clean your food, or if it's something like a banana that you peel, you can do that.
02:08:20.000The only problem there is that a lot of pesticides are so-called systemic pesticides.
02:08:25.000They're actually taken up from the plant's roots and the plant's circulatory systems, delivering it throughout the plant.
02:08:31.000This was actually a technology that was developed by Gerhard Schrader during World War II. He was a Nazi scientist who invented sarin and tabin and all these nerve agents.
02:09:16.000So strawberries are a good one if you're going to invest, you know, if you have a limited budget and you want to get one thing organic, strawberries would be a good one to get organic.
02:09:24.000And then other things wash well before you eat.
02:09:27.000So strawberries have a lot systemic or a lot on the surface?
02:09:29.000So they have a lot on the surface and they have high pesticide residues compared to other crops.
02:09:52.000And so, you know, the pesticide industry would argue, look, we're not starving anymore.
02:09:56.000You go back to before we had these modern pesticides.
02:10:00.000And there was mass starvation, and there was also much more disease.
02:10:04.000Like, you go back into the 1800s, you could expect you're going to lose, if you have 10 kids, you're probably gonna lose three or four of them when they're kids to disease, maybe half of them.
02:10:15.000And now we live in this world where, you know, your kids can make it.
02:10:19.000They're not all going to die from disease.
02:10:22.000So there's great things that have come from this, but at the same time, we are overusing these pesticides and we're relying too much on them, and then we end up with these problems.
02:10:32.000There's great things that have come out of vaccines and great things that have come out of all these pesticides and herbicides and all that stuff.
02:10:37.000But knowing that this is doing damage to children today and the fact that this is illegal in Europe now and should have been illegal at the end of the Obama administration if not for political influence, how is that tolerated?
02:10:51.000Well, it's horrible, right, that we have corporations who have that kind of clout.
02:11:53.000And so, if you go back to the Incan Empire, a single farmer, Incan farmer, pre-contact, would have a few acres of land, they're growing potatoes.
02:12:03.000They would have 200 varieties of potatoes on their land.
02:12:06.000And then you go to Ireland at the time of the famine, one variety of potato, you know, the whole country.
02:12:11.000It's 95, 90, 95% of the nutrition of this entire population of 8 million people.
02:12:18.000Well, of course you're going to have a disaster.
02:12:20.000And so part of it is we have to go back to a kind of agriculture that's much more diverse, rotating crops, all of these other things, and then we could use these chemicals but use them in a very smart, targeted way.
02:12:31.000It's just so disturbing that this is used all over the United States on crops and we know it's damaging.
02:12:41.000I don't know if there's evidence of this, but does it make sense that if you ate a cow that had been eating grain, that had been sprayed with glyphosate, that you could potentially develop issues from eating that meat?
02:12:55.000Yeah, and so it has to do with how long is it from when the spraying occurred until when the cow eats the plant until you eat the cow.
02:13:03.000Because you can look at how long does that molecule last before it breaks down.
02:13:06.000So this was the big problem with the organochlorine compounds is they would persist for decades.
02:13:11.000And so that's why you go to a woman in 1964 and she'll have 12 parts per million of DDT in her breast milk.
02:13:20.000Yet, if cow's milk, if you go to the grocery store, and the cow's milk had over four parts per million DDT, they couldn't sell it.
02:13:27.000So the average woman was producing milk for the baby with three times the amount of allowable DDT in food.
02:13:35.000And that was from eating, from eating animals and eating the crops that had this thing on it.
02:13:40.000So we have shifted to pesticides that break down in the environment much faster, which is a good thing because there's much less residues in our food.
02:13:47.000But we actually use more pesticides now.
02:13:50.000So when Rachel Carson published her book in 1962, that led to the emergence of the environmental movement.
02:13:55.000It led to the major environmental policies in the United States, which were passed between 1968 and 1976. And, you know, that's remarkable.
02:14:04.000You think back to President Nixon, you think of Watergate, right?
02:14:10.000We had the National Environmental Policy Act in 1968, Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, all of this, all the major environmental legislation, they were all passed by a democratically controlled Congress, and they were signed by a Republican president.
02:14:27.000So the environment was politicized after that.
02:14:29.000Why don't we still live in a world where everybody cares about the environment and children's health?
02:14:55.000But the idea that we're doing this with our food supply is very disturbing.
02:15:00.000But is there, other than these bringing in bugs, how would you do that with a monocrop?
02:15:07.000If you have thousands of acres of corn, say, how would you deal with the issue of plants that you don't want there, or weeds, or whatever they're trying to kill?
02:15:32.000Yeah, but there's plenty of other crops that we need too.
02:15:35.000So instead of having 10,000 acres of corn here and then 10,000 acres of soybeans here...
02:15:40.000And then 10,000 acres of wheat over here.
02:15:43.000You make this a more diverse chest-like board of crops so that you're not creating this situation where the pests can just explode in their population.
02:15:52.000Right, but if you have a farmer and, you know, his company or his family's business has been growing corn, growing corn for animal feed or for, you know...
02:16:04.000Corn syrup or whatever they use it for.
02:16:07.000If that's your family business, now you have to diversify your family business.
02:16:10.000You have to start growing soy and alfalfa and all these different things just because of this roundup issue?
02:16:18.000Well, but you go back to that farmer's grandfather and he was growing a diverse set of crops.
02:16:31.000You work really hard and you barely make any money and you get subsidized by the government if you grow certain crops like corn.
02:16:39.000But if they're already in a tough spot, and then they have distributors that accept a certain amount of their corn every year, and this is what's valuable to them, how do you get that guy?
02:16:51.000I mean, how do you say, hey, buddy, you know, you got to stop using Roundup, and instead you're going to grow wheat, and you're going to grow asparagus or whatever?
02:17:01.000It is a tough sell, but every time that there's a challenge like this, it also creates opportunities for how do you improve your market.
02:17:08.000We actually had a farm when I was a kid.
02:17:10.000We had an 80-acre farm in Alaska, and we lost money on it every year.
02:17:15.000It's a very tough thing to do, especially in a place like that where there's a three-month growing season.
02:17:20.000We were the only Jewish pig farmers in Alaska.
02:17:23.000And we had hay, and we had potatoes, and chickens, and geese, and ducks, and pigs, and it was great.
02:17:31.000But I understand it's a tough life, and it's a tough way to make a living.
02:17:36.000And we need to have policies that help people, that help people to do their farming without polluting the food supply, without polluting the world, and in the process make a more productive, diverse economy for them.
02:17:52.000Was there a suggestion when they were talking about possibly outlawing glyphosate?
02:18:00.000Was there a suggestion for other ways to go about removing weeds and unwanted plants and that maybe there could be a workaround?
02:18:08.000Or was it just a political decision to shut it down?
02:18:11.000Yeah, so the decision to ban it was based on the toxicity and the effects on children.
02:18:17.000You're also bringing up another really important issue, which is this concept of regrettable replacements.
02:18:22.000So, for example, we were talking about DDT, and when DDT was phased out because it was showing up in food supply and women having breast milk with unacceptable levels of DDT in it, then that was replaced by the organophosphate chemicals.
02:18:36.000But then we talked about how they're toxic.
02:18:38.000That led to a lot of poisoning of farm workers, transferring the risk to farm workers.
02:18:42.000Those have mostly been replaced by the new nicotinoids, these artificial versions of nicotine.
02:18:46.000So we also have this history in our human history of replacing something with something else without thinking through the consequences.
02:18:54.000And in the process, that's why we call it a regrettable replacement.
02:18:58.000We keep substituting one thing we don't know what it does for something else we don't know what it does.
02:19:02.000So I don't know the answer really to your question, but I think that we need to be supporting our agricultural industry, diversifying it, using integrated pest management, minimizing the use of these pesticides, And it's not just for our own health, it's also for the health of the environment.
02:19:23.000So if you go to Kodiak Island, if you go to the southern tip of the island, there's all these deer where their antlers are completely messed up.
02:21:22.000Obviously, the politicization of our regulatory process is a huge part of it because that shouldn't be political either, right?
02:21:30.000If something is not safe, it should be regulated.
02:21:33.000And so I think the drivers of this, we need to get out of this thing where the politics are driving decisions that are public health decisions or environmental decisions.
02:21:48.000The thing I keep finding, which is repeated, but it might be because there's been multiple lawsuits about this, which causes lots of websites to pop up, but it's saying it's found in up to 90% of all food we eat, including vegetables and flesh of meat.
02:22:05.000Well, that was the argument that I was reading in an argument for grass-fed cattle, that you're much better off eating animals that are just eating natural grasses because there's been no pesticides and they're just basically free-ranging.
02:22:22.000Same with the animals you hunt, right?
02:22:24.000Those are much healthier because they're eating without these chemicals.
02:23:22.000And so it's a very disturbing idea that you could eat something today.
02:23:27.000You go hunting in the woods and you find a deer, you shoot that deer, and you think, oh, I have this clean, organic meat.
02:23:35.000But someday, whether it's next week or 20 years from now, it might be that you could get a brain disease, the same disease that cannibals get.
02:23:45.000This neurological disease that's coming from this...
02:23:53.000By the way, they've done these sterilization processes on the tools that they use to determine whether or not they have this disease.
02:24:02.000These fuckers, you could take these medical instruments on a deer that has this CWD with its prions and they can be exposed to thousands of degrees and the prions stay alive.
02:24:29.000There's more evidence that it comes out of a lab in Wuhan that somehow or another when they were doing these, because you know there's a level four lab in Wuhan.
02:24:38.000Brett Weinstein, who's also a biologist, was on my podcast.
02:24:41.000He was explaining I would butcher it if I went into detail about it, but it's explaining all the indicators that point to the fact that this was a virus that was used for research, and that they were using it to learn more about or come up with strategies to defeat coronaviruses,
02:24:59.000and that the same lab that's in Wuhan in 2018, just two years ago, was cited for safety violations.
02:25:10.000Yeah, and there have been cases in the past, even with bubonic plague, where research labs actually inadvertently released the plague into the local population.
02:25:17.000My guess is, though, when this is all said and done, it's going to be from eating bushmeat in China, that people will have eaten bats or they've eaten pangolins that got infected by bats.
02:26:11.000Steve Bannon linked groups' push study claiming China manufactured COVID. Yeah, but see, the thing is, even if China did, and this guy pushed it, you would be suspicious.
02:27:02.000Well, we were both little kids, but I think that's probably the last time that this country has faced this kind of thing.
02:27:08.000The crazy thing is if you went back before Trump was president, you went back to the last years of the Obama administration when the economy had done the turnaround from 2008, and things were looking pretty good.
02:27:20.000And even during the beginning of the Trump administration, even though people didn't like him, The economy was kicking ass.
02:27:26.000But there was the beginning of the polarization because there's so many people who didn't like him and the people that did like him were like, fuck you!
02:27:32.000They had someone on their side now that they could thumb their finger up at the liberals and then...
02:27:41.000It just got worse and worse and worse.
02:27:43.000And then COVID threw gasoline on the fire.
02:27:48.000I mean, it's just like when you think it couldn't get any worse.
02:27:50.000You have record wildfires where you have the worst air quality on earth in Portland, Oregon.
02:27:57.000All that being said, though, when this started and we first started getting cases in the United States, I was really concerned that society would fall apart.
02:28:05.000And I was partially, I think I was concerned about that because I just spent eight or nine years reading these historical accounts of society falling apart during the bubonic plague, during yellow fever, and so on, where literally the society fell apart.
02:28:54.000And I'm also concerned about a new disease.
02:28:56.000I mean, when you see what happened with this pandemic and you realize this is a fairly mild disease in terms of, like, historic context...
02:29:04.000What if something horrific like the Spanish flu or something along those lines that we don't predict coming?
02:29:10.000Yeah, this is why we need a very vibrant federal agency that deals with this, that prepares for it.
02:29:18.000Yeah, that's what really pissed everybody off when they found out that the pandemic response team had been sort of redistributed and disbanded.
02:30:00.000We don't know what it does and see what happens.
02:30:03.000An example of this is my family has a log cabin in New Hampshire that my grandfather and my father and his brother built back in the 1940s.
02:31:02.000Maybe if we genetically engineer anopheles, we can get rid of malaria and not harm mosquito populations and not Harm nature, but we better figure it out before we release these things and before we try it.
02:31:13.000The unintended consequences are what really concerns me.
02:31:20.000Well, it just seems like we have an amazing amount of knowledge, comparatively, to people that lived thousands of years ago.
02:31:26.000But when you think about how little we know just about ants communicating or various bugs and how they operate, And that we're going to fuck with mosquitoes?
02:31:40.000And we really don't know what happens if you take that piece out.
02:31:45.000Like, let's take that piece and throw it over there.
02:32:06.000We have so much knowledge that we're just six months into this pandemic and there's already eight or nine vaccines close to development, right?
02:32:23.000But are we equipped to deal with these things?
02:32:28.000I mean, we made nuclear weapons during World War II. My great-grandfather was actually in charge of the chemistry division of the Manhattan Project.
02:32:36.000So he helped to make the- You got some fucking history, buddy.
02:32:40.000And so, you know, we make this thing and right away we use it, right?
02:33:19.000Those last three, those all happened in the 1970s, and they happened under Nixon and Ford.
02:33:24.000And so if that could be accomplished in a bipartisan way, why can't we deal with these problems we're talking about now in a bipartisan way?
02:33:34.000I suspect we are, but I suspect that the progress is incremental.
02:33:38.000And the progress, you know, I believe, I could say without a shadow of a doubt, we are wiser than homo sapiens that lived half a million years ago.
02:33:59.000I think just based on, I know we have more information, but I think we've absorbed a lot of it, more so than we probably understand it.
02:34:09.000And that if you look at the violence statistics, rape statistics, racism, all the different statistics, like if you look at Pinker's work, it shows that things are getting better even though they still suck in a lot of cases.
02:34:22.000And then it just takes, we're a big ass battleship and every turn takes a long time.
02:34:29.000I think we're wiser, but I think it's a long process to educate this dumb monkey.
02:34:35.000We're smart and dumb at the same time.
02:34:37.000Yeah, I would say maybe if you go back 150 years, they were wiser than we are now because they lived in a much less polluted world.
02:34:45.000And then we got less wise and now we're getting wiser again.
02:34:48.000You look at air pollution in the United States and the amount of lead in the atmosphere now is less than 1% of what it was when we were kids.