Jeff Perla is the author of a new book about the history of Coca-Cola and the impact it has had on the environment and the world. He s also the co-founder of Pepsi and co-author of the book, "Cocoa: The Secret to the World's Best Soft Drink." In this episode, Jeff talks to us about the origins of the drink, how it got its name, and how it changed the way we think about soft drinks. He also talks about how the drink came to be and why it s more important than you think it is. Jeff also explains why he thinks Pepsi is the best soft drink in the world, and why you should be worried about what it s made of coca leaves and coca leaf in your drink. This episode was produced and edited by Jeff Perla. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, Podchaser, and leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite soft drink? 2:30 - What do you think of Pepsi? 3:40 - Why does it taste better than Coke? 4:20 - What would you like to drink it? 5: Which soft drink is your favorite? 6: What are you worried about? 7:00 8: What is the worst soft drink you like? 9: Is it better? 11: What does it have the most important? 12:00- What is your favourite soft drink that you drink most? 13:00 -- what do you like about it's the best thing? 14:30 -- what would you eat? 15:40 -- what s your favorite piece of food? 16: What kind of soft drink do you would you drink more than that? 17: How do you drink it more? 18: What do they like about your morning coffee? 19: What s your favourite part of the day? 21:30 15, what do they think of the morning afternoone else? 22:00 | What s the worst thing you re drinking? 27:30 | What are your favorite part of your morning
00:00:35.000It really started with the first project I worked on, the first book I wrote, which was the history of Coca-Cola and its environmental impact around the world.
00:00:44.000You were just telling us that Pepsi is actually older than Coke, which is surprising.
00:01:33.000I mean, so this was the beginning of this book because I was doing that.
00:01:37.000I was looking at all the ingredients that go into Coca-Cola and saying, okay, what's in the drink, first of all, because it's from my hometown.
00:04:02.000We're not talking about, like, In fact, you'd probably get a bigger hit from experience from a cup of espresso from Starbucks.
00:04:11.000But interestingly, the reason that cocaine became taboo and why it got pulled from the drink had nothing to do with national laws in the country, which was so interesting when I was studying it.
00:04:22.000It had everything to do with racism, actually, in the South, because there was a concern that Cocaine was contributing to black crime in Atlanta, which was being, of course, blown up by segregationists and white supremacists.
00:04:36.000And Asa Candler, who was a white guy in Atlanta, didn't want to have anything to do with that.
00:04:40.000So he decides, kind of quietly, to take out the cocaine.
00:04:44.000But here's the interesting thing, Joe.
00:04:46.000They kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients.
00:06:38.000There's a special exemption in our laws for what are called special leaves from Peru.
00:06:44.000And if anybody looking at it saying, well, what the hell are these special leaves, you know?
00:06:47.000And they're special because they're allowed to come into the United States exclusively, basically, to create the flavoring extract for Coca-Cola.
00:06:55.000A lot of people call it the Coca-Cola Joker.
00:06:58.000How closely do you think they monitor that supply?
00:07:21.000This is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead you to places you never thought you'd go, like this book, which we'll talk about.
00:07:32.000If that's not weird, it got weirder in the 60s because Coca-Cola wanted to figure out a way to make coca leaves in the United States, to grow their own coca leaves.
00:07:43.000They weren't satisfied with this trade with Peru.
00:07:47.000And these are declassified DEA documents at the National Archives.
00:07:51.000This is not like, you know, something crazy.
00:07:55.000You can see it and actually it's in the book.
00:07:57.000But basically, They petition the federal government to start growing it.
00:08:03.000At first, they're thinking like the Virgin Islands.
00:08:35.000And it was done through the University of Hawaii.
00:08:38.000They had to sign all these non-disclosure agreements and they wouldn't publish their papers, you know, on the study of all this.
00:08:46.000The reason the government agreed to it is that Koch said, we're going to create a cocaine-less coca shrub.
00:08:51.000Like, basically breed a plant that doesn't have cocaine in it.
00:08:57.000And, of course, that never really transpires, but they do end up growing, secretly, behind barbed wire fences, coca leaves for Coca-Cola in the 60s.
00:09:07.000But I'm an environmental historian, so I study the relationship between, like, businesses and the environment.
00:09:13.000And, in this case, the environment matters, because nature bit back.
00:09:17.000So, in the 60s, this fungus That's native to Hawaii was like, whoa, this plant that's not native and attacks it.
00:09:27.000And it wipes out the entire coca crop of Coca-Cola.
00:09:31.000So the supply they had for a very brief time in the 60s is wiped out.
00:09:54.000Legitimate, I think, is the right kind of question to ask.
00:09:57.000I mean, I went down to Peru because I think it's important if you're going to write about people or you're going to write about a place that you go there.
00:10:38.000Although it wasn't that safe for this book either.
00:10:41.000But anyway, we go down and we look into this story.
00:10:44.000And I think to kind of answer your question, I mean, There is a trade.
00:10:49.000It's managed actually by a state agency in Peru called Anaco.
00:10:55.000And exactly where the coca leaf comes from for Coca-Cola is a little bit unclear, you know, in the 21st century.
00:11:01.000But if you talk to cocailleros or people who represent the cocailleros, the farmers who produce the coca leaf, a lot of what they're frustrated about is that Basically, Coke has this exclusive right to bringing coca leaves into the United States.
00:11:20.000Now, if you and I were to try and do that, we'd be arrested at the border, right?
00:11:32.000And by the way, yeah, this is what Pepsi, we were talking about Pepsi earlier.
00:11:36.000They were livid about this because they wanted access.
00:11:40.000And other soft drinks wanted access to this supply.
00:11:43.000But the federal government was saying, no, no, no, you know, and trying to kind of protect that single buyer access, what we call monopsony trade.
00:12:16.000And so because they only have access to that leaf, They get a great deal on the price of coca leaves, and that's what cocaeros don't like, right?
00:12:24.000They would love to be able to sell coca tea in the United States.
00:12:27.000They would love to be able to sell, you know, you name it, coca cookies, coca flour.
00:12:32.000But because of international laws that ban it, by the way, that were in part brokered by Coca-Cola, that's part of the rub.
00:12:39.000And they have it on their name, you know?
00:12:43.000Here's a product that comes from your...
00:12:48.000That deep history that goes back to the Inca, it's on the brand and they're preventing that trade, in part, historically, have been preventing that trade.
00:13:58.000A lot of these stories, I think about what would be the benefit to a group of people To have the coca leaf be revalorized.
00:14:04.000I know on your show you talk a lot about marijuana and cannabis.
00:14:09.000We're not talking about the coca leaf, which was villainized in similar ways.
00:14:13.000We had this kind of view of, this stuff is terrible and you can't touch it.
00:14:20.000And, sadly, you know, that could mean an incredible kind of bounty for people who grow this in Peru and other parts of South America.
00:14:29.000The problem really is, sorry, the problem really is like people who step on it, right, and add things to it, like fentanyl, which is a giant issue now.
00:14:36.000Or process out and create this kind of, you know, take out just the alkaloid that's the powerful cocaine in it instead of taking the leaf.
00:14:43.000And as I said, imagine going to Starbucks and having coca tea, you know?
00:15:05.000And, you know, it's used for high altitude exertion.
00:15:09.000It helps people at high altitudes and things like that.
00:15:11.000So I think one of the things in that book was trying to point that out, that, you know, we're having this discussion about cannabis, but we should have it.
00:15:35.000And I think, you know, again, there's a difference between that kind of purified powder that's going to have all this other stuff in it that can cause all these problems versus...
00:15:43.000But the problem is that there is this sort of black market world and that's the only market to get it.
00:15:49.000So it is cut with a bunch of other shit that's not supposed to be in there like amphetamines and fentanyl.
00:16:02.000And a brilliant guy who was originally, he was a scientist who was working with drugs and he was a very straight-laced guy.
00:16:13.000But then upon working with them and really understanding their effects and understanding what the propaganda had done in terms of changing the way people viewed these drugs, He then started taking these drugs regularly and is open about it,
00:17:02.000I mean, I think of Michael Pollan's book.
00:17:04.000You had Michael Pollan on, you know, and how to change your mind.
00:17:06.000I mean, we're seeing, in other words, what you're talking about, that there was a history here.
00:17:10.000That's why I think history matters, that this stuff hasn't always been perceived this way, and we got into this mess, and I think history can help us think about how I get out of it.
00:17:20.000In the case of Coca-Cola, again, I think it's just a matter of, you know, rethinking this coca leaf.
00:17:25.000I mean, here you've got a company that, again, has it on their name, and yet...
00:19:55.000I did use an encrypted phone to talk to some sources inside Monsanto and stuff like that.
00:19:59.000And look, I was just a historian coming out of grad school who had never had training in journalism or never really had training in the art of protecting a source.
00:20:11.000And I give a plug to New America, this organization that gave me a fellowship and I got to hang out with writers from the Washington Post and from different places that helped me think about how do you do this the right way.
00:21:26.000So basically, they took tea leaves that were broken and damaged around the world on tea exchanges, like the garbage of the tea trade, and they realized no one was going to consume that.
00:24:24.000I think, you know, it could be key to it.
00:24:25.000I mean, I will say one other thing about it.
00:24:27.000I can't get off the Coca thing because it's so, like, weird.
00:24:29.000But there is a document, and this is actually from a reporting of another journalist, Mark Pendergrass, but it's really good about New Coke.
00:24:37.000I don't know if you remember when New Coke came out.
00:24:48.000You can go to the museum and they had, like, a voicemail machine that you could pick up that is, like, people being like, When they had new Coke, did they still have old Coke available?
00:25:40.000I mean, one of the biggest things that made Coke so big and where they basically just outpaced Pepsi was World War II. They got government contracts to provide Coke to the troops.
00:27:29.000They just drink it after 5 because they don't want to say it.
00:27:31.000They definitely hate it in the early part of the 20th century because they had no real good system for getting out the caffeine and it made it taste terrible.
00:27:53.000And decaffeinated, you would imagine, actually is decaffeinated, but it's not.
00:27:57.000It's like the difference in milligrams is like, I think like a cup of decaf has like 15 milligrams or something like that, as opposed to like, you know, 100. I don't know what it is, but I do know that there's still, yeah, there's caffeine in there for sure.
00:29:10.000So it's basically the byproduct of processing coal into coke, which is coal without its impurities, often used in the steel industry.
00:29:18.000And it's literally a black tar-y substance that's the byproduct of that process, kind of the waste of processing coal into coke.
00:29:26.000And in that tar is all these different chemicals that you can make because it's all these different carbon compounds that you can tease out and then do things to make all sorts of things.
00:29:38.000And actually, one of the points of this book is that all this stuff around us ultimately comes from fossil fuels, whether it be coal tar byproducts or petroleum.
00:29:48.000It's pretty nuts when you see how many different things come from fossil fuels.
00:29:51.000Yeah, like our headphones, this stuff.
00:29:53.000Headphones, plastic that covers these wires.
00:29:55.000And that's why I think when we transition, if we do, to a fossil fuel-free economy and try and reduce greenhouse gases and things like that, People are talking about cars and power plants.
00:30:06.000After writing this book, I'm like, no.
00:30:46.000And they're like, hey, could you make synthetic for us?
00:30:49.000But if you look internally at Coke, they're like, well, I don't even know if we're going to buy it.
00:30:54.000But we just want more caffeine in the market because more caffeine means other buyers who are getting caffeine may use that caffeine, which keeps the price of caffeine down.
00:31:03.000Because Coke's real model was not owning stuff, making other people do stuff.
00:31:08.000They were a business that basically just Monsanto was a middleman in the economy.
00:31:12.000They didn't actually grow the ingredients in their product, and they didn't distribute it.
00:31:17.000It was independent bottlers who did it.
00:31:18.000They were kind of like this middleman in the economy.
00:31:21.000And so for Monsanto, they were like, hey, go experiment with this, see how it goes.
00:31:58.000This is exactly what the chemists, there's this great oral history at one of these archives I went to, from one of the chemists who knew what was going on inside the company who said, internally, when we were talking to them, they said, that sounds too much like urine.
00:33:06.000P! Well, you know, and a lot of things are made from this, but ultimately then natural gas became the feedstock and things, and a lot of it's produced in China, but anyway, it's crazy.
00:33:17.000But that was when I was like, oh my gosh!
00:33:49.000Shout out to my friend, Jesse Pappas, who came up with that title and was like, it was brilliant because it did reflect what I wanted to tell, which is that there is going to be this seed company, but it's not a seed company when it starts.
00:34:56.000And it was owned by Delta and Pine and Land Company that they ended up acquiring in the early 2000s.
00:35:04.000And at that time, Delta had this technology, but they didn't deploy it.
00:35:09.000And one of the things that raised all this fear about this company getting bigger and bigger was, oh my gosh, they're going to get this technology and they're going to use it.
00:35:17.000There's no evidence that we have that they have actually deployed that.
00:35:21.000The way that they prevent farmers now from resaving their seeds and planting them is through an extremely intense contract called a Technology Use Agreement, or TUA, that farmers have to sign.
00:35:35.000Like a soybean farmer has to sign it and say, I will not replant seeds that come from this harvest.
00:35:58.000So you're going to license this technology to us, and we can't save the seeds and replant them?
00:36:06.000And that's what led to all this havoc and chaos in farm country where farmers were saying, This goes against, like, centuries-old practices where we're always saving seeds and experimenting with them and challenging them.
00:36:18.000So that was a huge change to the food system.
00:36:21.000But way later in Monsanto's story, I mean, they weren't even in the ag business.
00:36:27.000I definitely want to get back to the beginning of it, but is that still going on in India?
00:36:31.000Because you don't hear about that story anymore, where these farmers get massively in debt and there was a rash of suicides.
00:36:40.000And I think that, you know, it's hard to parse out that story of what's causing these suicides.
00:36:47.000And there's some, you know, people who say the suicide rates, you know, when they look at it, well, did it increase when these seeds came in?
00:36:54.000I think the debt issue is the bigger issue, right?
00:36:56.000That you have this kind of industrial-scale agriculture and the pressures on these rural farmers that leads to these problems.
00:37:04.000But there's a lot of other ways in which I think Monsanto kind of creates this, This system that prevents farmers from doing something they'd always done, which is saving seeds.
00:37:16.000And the debt story is also true in the United States.
00:37:18.000I mean, these seed costs go through the roof.
00:37:20.000The more genetically engineered traits that are added to them and stacked in, we see this dramatic increase in those prices.
00:37:27.000And the only way to really keep up is to keep trying to grow as big as you possibly can and using as much petrochemical Pesticides and fertilizers as you can to increase your productivity.
00:37:37.000And it's kind of a rat race where farmers don't necessarily feel like they're incredibly profitable, but they feel like they're just trying to keep up.
00:37:46.000Does that same technology contract apply today with, say, like corn or soybean farmers in America?
00:37:54.000Corn is a unique situation because you were talking about This terminator gene that could be added.
00:38:02.000And again, we don't really have evidence that they did that.
00:38:04.000But with corn, going back to the 20s and 30s, we developed what was known as hybrid corn.
00:38:11.000And the weird thing about hybrid corn is that when you plant When you take the seeds that are produced from that harvest, they will not be as prolific as the seeds you originally bought.
00:38:26.000Even going back to the 20s, there was a system in place that was just part of the genetic peculiarity of corn that meant that farmers had to buy corn over and over again.
00:38:36.000But what was different was soybeans, cotton, and a lot of other products.
00:38:42.000If that is the case, if the corn, like when you try to replant the corn, it's not as prolific, where are they getting the original corn that you can plant?
00:38:51.000From these crosses of these two different varieties, these kind of parent strains.
00:38:56.000And as long as you get that original strain, that original parent strain coming from those crosses, then that corn Grows well.
00:39:06.000But if you try and take the seeds from those siblings of those parents, they don't produce the same amount.
00:39:14.000So you have companies like Pioneer that made a lot of money off this because they figured out how to have these parent lines and to do these crosses.
00:39:22.000And then be able to sell those seeds from those original parent lines.
00:39:34.000When they're doing it now, so they have to have these two different strains and cross them now to make seeds to sell to farmers.
00:39:44.000Yeah, and you're seeing experimentation with With the top seed companies trying to figure out, okay, which parent crosses are going to produce the best yield.
00:39:53.000But then if you try and save that seed and replant it, you're not going to have the same vigor is what it's called.
00:40:00.000So weirdly with corn, There was kind of a corporatization of the seed business baked into the peculiarities of crossing corn.
00:40:09.000Whereas with soybeans, cotton, and other crops, you had to have an agreement that Monsanto created to make farmers come back and buy those seeds every year.
00:40:21.000And I think about it, I'm so puzzled right now because I'm trying to figure out how would you have enough of these two different strains to cross them to make enough seeds to grow all this corn?
00:40:33.000Well, you can have different parent crosses.
00:40:35.000You can have different kinds of parents that you cross to make this hybrid seed.
00:40:41.000And you have a lot of different seed companies that are playing with different parents.
00:40:45.000What I'm saying is once you do that...
00:42:09.000And, you know, often in these cafos, which is just such a broken system, these, you know, consolidated feeding lots where you're producing so much waste and manure and things like that that it becomes quite toxic.
00:42:22.000But it's kind of, you know, I think for me, the story about food with Monsanto that was interesting was I wanted to kind of know, did these genetically engineered crops actually produce much higher yields?
00:42:39.000Did we see this massive growth in the productivity of genetically engineered crops?
00:42:46.000And maybe I should back up just to say like when that happened.
00:42:50.000You know, the first large-scale introduction of genetically engineered crops, commodity crops like soybeans, like corn, like all these things, they were introduced in 1996. So one of the interesting things about sitting here today is that we're kind of at the 25-year mark of genetically engineered crops being introduced in the United States and ultimately around the world.
00:43:14.000Brazil, Argentina, some 28, some state countries around the world that now have genetically engineered crops.
00:43:20.000And so I looked at it as a historian and said, okay, well, what can we say about that?
00:43:24.000You know, what did these crops actually do?
00:43:29.000And when they were introduced, you know, the idea was, and just to be clear, this was a new technology.
00:43:35.000It's often said, well, we've always been changing, you know, crops and things like that.
00:43:40.000What was different in this era, 80s and 90s, was, you know, we were taking genes from a bacterium, for example, inserting it into a plant, taking things from one species, putting it in another, and changing the makeup of that crop.
00:43:58.000In 96, when we see this happening, they're trying to do two things.
00:44:03.000The main genetically engineered crops were Roundup-ready crops that were designed to tolerate heavy dosages of herbicide called Roundup, that interestingly, of course, Monsanto owned, right?
00:44:16.000And they had been making since the 1970s.
00:44:19.000But at this point, they're thinking, this could be amazing.
00:44:22.000If we can genetically engineer crops to be resistant to Roundup, Wow.
00:44:31.000You can spray Roundup on your fields, and this is the key, during the growing season, when your crops are growing, kill any weeds that are in those fields, and wow, you know, the plants will survive with the crops.
00:44:44.000And this use of glyphosate, did they know at the time how toxic it was?
00:45:20.000So let's go back just a little bit more to get to that.
00:45:22.000So, and I talk about the whole story of Agent Orange in here in this book.
00:45:28.000They first start making, and by they I mean Monsanto, 245T. It's a chlorinated hydrocarbon that's an active ingredient in Agent Orange.
00:45:39.000In 1949, in a little town called Nitro, West Virginia, which I traveled to, because nobody went to go talk to the workers.
00:45:47.000Nobody went to the actual place where the people who made the herbicides To me, my dad was in Vietnam, and those stories are important, and I want to talk about that as well.
00:45:58.000But it also mattered to me that we need to go to the root of the story, the people who actually made these chemicals.
00:46:04.000So Monsanto was making it in 1949. This chemical goes back to the 40s, wartime, World War II. In some ways, there were some experiments with it.
00:46:11.000Monsanto's doing it in 1949. 245T, the active ingredient in Agent Orange, it's actually two chemicals in Agent Orange.
00:46:20.0002,4-D, 2,4-5-T, and about 50% of each of these compounds.
00:46:28.000And the problem was with 2,4-5-T. That chemical had a contaminant known as dioxin.
00:46:37.000Which Dow Chemical writing to Monsanto in 1965 said, this is the most toxic compound we've ever seen.
00:48:56.000And so you tell me, if you're seeing workers coming down with this, might you say, wait a minute, we might have a problem with our chemical.
00:49:42.000And so chloracne is really nasty stuff.
00:49:46.000And again, this is what they're seeing internally, you know, inside the firm with their workers.
00:49:52.000And I think I just wanted to stress this, you know, 40, 51, 52, this is years before Agent R is going to be sprayed in Vietnam and before veterans are going to be exposed to this.
00:50:04.000Yeah, I mean, if you want to take a generous interpretation of this, they're saying, well, I don't know, it's acne, but maybe it's not going to have these systemic effects.
00:50:14.000But in my opinion, you're seeing it so visibly.
00:50:56.000Do some people somehow or another avoid it?
00:50:58.000Yeah, I mean, they had different buildings, and it seemed to depend on if you were working closely with those chemicals or not, because they're producing other chemicals there, rubber chemicals and other things.
00:51:08.000Is it dermal absorption, or is it inhaling?
00:51:11.000I think it does come through dermal penetration.
00:51:18.000Interestingly, I should say this about one of the doctors who was overseeing the company at the time, he often said that people that were complaining of health problems were what he called kind of the disgruntled tent.
00:51:29.000You know, this is the people who are just unhappy with working here and things like that.
00:51:33.000And that's kind of how he saw workers.
00:51:35.000If they're coming in to complain about their health problems, it's probably because they have a bigger problem with management or something like that.
00:56:30.000But it was all designed to be healthy.
00:56:32.000I know a guy who lived in a community that was connected to a golf course and he grew up drinking water from a well.
00:56:41.000And him and a large number of people in the community got cancer.
00:56:46.000And they firmly believed that it was because of whatever pesticides that they were using or herbicides that they were using on the golf course that it leaked into the wells.
00:56:58.000Can I show you what Roundup looks like nowadays?
00:57:01.000Jamie, there's a map in there that's like a map of the country, and it's kind of brown, and it shows you kind of Roundup.
00:58:11.000By 2017. And that's because you've made crops that are now resistant to glyphosate.
00:58:17.000So you can spray it as much as you need to kill your weeds.
00:58:23.000And Jamie, you had that weed resistance graph going up.
00:58:27.000But a fifth grader can tell you, well, when you spray that much Roundup, On something or glyphosate on something, you're going to start seeing resistance.
00:58:43.000Like what's happening with antibiotics, where you're seeing these, like, MRSA, like these medication-resistant staph infections that are insanely difficult to treat.
00:58:53.000You know, in fact, some of the weed scientists I talked to, I'll be honest, when I first was going to a talk at Ohio State that they said the weed scientists are talking, I thought, oh.
00:59:08.000Yeah, I want to find out how to make the shit stronger.
00:59:12.000But these weed scientists at Ohio State who are great and helped out with a book, fantastic folks, you know, some of those, you know, they're like glyphosate was like penicillin, man.
01:00:19.000So what we're looking at is pounds of herbicide per acre of soybeans.
01:00:23.000So this is just looking at soybeans as a case study.
01:00:26.000And we're looking at the amount of herbicides that's being used on farms per acre.
01:00:30.000In the US, in specific states, just because they had data for this, for us to compare.
01:00:36.000And what we're seeing is this, like, explosion in Roundup, glyphosate, that big dark line going up like that.
01:00:43.000And notice, look, We started seeing the decline in all these other herbicides that are really toxic stuff, like chlorinated compounds and things like that.
01:00:54.000They're going down and down and down, but check out weed resistance.
01:01:00.000All those herbicides that were really toxic, including, by the way, the other half of Agent Orange, 2,4-D, is now being used to try and beat back Roundup-resistant weeds.
01:01:16.000If the folks are looking at this graph, you're essentially seeing two mountains superimposed, but one's upside down.
01:01:26.000So it starts out that everything's working great, and then it turns terrible, and then you have these herbicide-resistant It's like the graph.
01:03:12.000And interestingly, Bayer, the company that now owns Monsanto, they bought Monsanto in 2018. They're going to pull Roundup from Home Depot and Lowe's voluntarily in the next two years.
01:03:31.000So they're not even going to sell this stuff for like regular consumers like you and I who might...
01:04:01.000But then within that agency, there are scientists that disagree on that and debate that.
01:04:07.000There have been three major cases out of California, all of which have gone in favor of the plaintiffs who have charged that Roundup exposure has been linked to their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
01:04:19.000I have to say, looking at it very closely, it's a mess.
01:04:22.000I'm trying to figure out, what does it do?
01:04:38.000If you want to produce the kind of crops that we produce in this country, if you think about how many animals that we have to feed and how many acres of soy and corn they're growing, what would be the options in terms of if they need some sort of an herbicide and they don't use Roundup,
01:04:54.000they're not going to go out there and Pick the weeds.
01:04:59.000I think we have to fundamentally rethink the way that we're doing agriculture and definitely think about how much of our agricultural land is going towards these CAFOs and fodder.
01:05:09.000Well, even just agriculture in general, people need to understand that monocrop agriculture, like having these massive fields filled with corn is completely unnatural.
01:06:55.000It's hard to say worse, you know, because when you look at these stories, you're like, what's worse?
01:06:59.000You know, the Asian orange story or this?
01:07:03.000This is what's going on right now with dicamba.
01:07:07.000Because, you know, there's Roundup resistant weeds, farmers are now buying these seeds that are resistant to Roundup and dicamba, this other chemical.
01:07:17.000The problem with dicamba is when you spray dicamba over some plants, it vaporizes in hot temperatures.
01:07:26.000So this herbicide jumps up and actually spreads onto other plants, which is totally crazy.
01:07:35.000So if you're spraying in a really hot temperature, dicamba will jump and hit other farmers nearby.
01:08:05.000And so I went to the court case and sat in the gallery and watched.
01:08:09.000And I was like, I wanted to hear the corporate documents because they got challenged by farmers who were hit by dicamba saying, what the hell?
01:08:15.000You know, we're just farming over here and we're getting hit by this vapor.
01:08:55.000Forcing people to use these monster crops.
01:08:58.000Now, there was also a story where farmers were sued because it showed that they had Monsanto crops growing on their field, even though they had never purchased or had a contract with Monsanto, because of just this natural thing that happens,
01:09:16.000whether it's the wind carrying these seeds or animals or what have you, right?
01:09:36.000I have seen lots of cases of what you're talking about where a farmer...
01:09:42.000For whatever reason, comes into possession of Roundup Ready Trades and plants it on his crop without signing an agreement with Monsanto and gets sued for doing that.
01:09:53.000Now, the question is, how do they get it?
01:10:18.000I don't know if we could do it, but you can call a hotline, like today, like right now, and rat out your neighbor if you think that they are planting seeds illegally And let's be honest, it's a construct that it's illegal.
01:10:33.000Farmers have been saving seeds or borrowing from their neighbor or whatever.
01:10:37.000Once you're in possession of seeds, as long as you didn't steal them from somewhere.
01:10:40.000Yeah, it's like this guy, you know, a cleaner may say, hey, here you can have some seed cleaners.
01:12:06.000I mean, it's one thing if it's an actual intellectual property, like if they've created something out of this, that they have some process where they create something, and that's a very unique process to make a thing, and then they sell that thing.
01:16:28.000Like these fucking people just at one point in time when they didn't know any better said wouldn't it be great if we had this place and we just filled it up with a bunch of animals?
01:16:43.000So they have fucking herds of wild stags and herds of deer.
01:16:48.000And then Australia, of course, has their natural animals or their native animals like kangaroos and wallabies and all these different things are competing with these other new animals they brought in.
01:17:02.000You could argue that's America in the early 1900s too, where we're like wiping out wolves and then as a result we have like mice everywhere.
01:17:40.000They're trying to reintroduce wolves to Colorado.
01:17:43.000And its resistance is like a bunch of different sources of resistance, but some of it is from ranchers that are like, listen, there's a reason why they killed off the wolves in the first place.
01:17:56.000And then there's also the people that are the hunters that live in Colorado that are enjoying this sort of unnatural predator-prey balance.
01:18:05.000Like Colorado has more elk than I think all the other states combined.
01:18:10.000I think it for sure has the most elk of any state and doesn't really have things that eat elk.
01:20:03.000You know, my brothers lived there for like 20 years and every time I go up, I'm just like, you know, you have to like cinch down your like jacket and stuff when you get back in the backcountry with that stuff because it's nuts.
01:20:13.000And I grew up in like, I lived in Savannah, you know, I grew up in Georgia.
01:21:11.000Why is it illegal to show people, like, hey...
01:21:15.000If you found out that the only way to make tires is to kill babies, and there was a factory where they're beating babies to death to make a tire, you'd be like, I'm not buying tires.
01:21:25.000If you're finding out that the only way to get bacon is they have to stuff these pigs into these tiny cages and it creates these toxic lakes.
01:21:34.000You've seen those when they fly the drones over these factory pig farms.
01:22:22.000If you really follow the evidence, that's not true.
01:22:26.000That's argued by these really zealous vegan advocates and activists, and I see why they would think that way, and I see why they think that it's so smart.
01:22:36.000But they're also unwilling to look at monocrop agriculture, which is absolutely necessary for developing the amount of crops that you need to feed the entire country a vegetarian diet.
01:22:47.000You're going to have to use monocrop agriculture and it's going to have to be crazy.
01:22:52.000Also, farms work in a regenerative manner when they're done correctly, meaning that everything, just like we were talking about with nature and animals and predators and prey, the way farms are supposed to work, the way things are supposed to grow,
01:23:07.000you have ruminants and these animals and they shit and that shit is fertilizer and it's much more rich and it grows and it's actually a carbon neutral environment when done correctly.
01:23:18.000You know, like the way Joel Salatin does it with his polyface farms, and there's a few other really ethical people that have really thought this out and engineered their farms to rotate their crops and rotate the use of animal fertilizer,
01:23:38.000natural animal fertilizer, with grazing, and they make sure that they do it all together.
01:24:07.000You know, it's actually incredible to watch the amount of thought and, you know, having animals move on various grassland and trying to kind of create this This system that is clearly not trying to take a freaking sledgehammer to the ground and trying to be like,
01:25:42.000And he was talking about just the smell of death.
01:25:46.000That every day you would go in there and you would smell blood and corpses.
01:25:52.000And that was like this constant smell that was in you, which is not normal, right?
01:25:56.000It's not normal for a person to experience that every day.
01:26:00.000If you lived on a farm and you had to kill a cow, You kill the cow once a year, once every six months or whatever you did.
01:26:07.000And you didn't just kill a thousand cows a day and cut them up and cut their organs out and just stand around with waders because you're standing ankle-deep in blood and guts, literally, like these guys do.
01:26:21.000What kind of psychological effect Must that have on a human being that every day is just hooks and meats coming by and you're gutting it and spilling it out and cutting this and throwing it over there and you're making no money.
01:26:37.000Right, and then you don't get paid anything.
01:26:38.000Yeah, when this guy wrote this article about it, and also in the article he was talking about how this industry would completely fall apart if it wasn't for illegal aliens.
01:26:48.000He was like, you know, I don't know how this is working, but everyone's like these undocumented workers that are doing this horrific, really intense labor that's bad for you.
01:27:01.000Like in terms of like, gotta be bad for you psychologically.
01:27:16.000Once you start having that connection, which I think is part of The history of the 20th century of our food system is we just got disconnected from that.
01:27:28.000The good news about Texas is there's a lot of ranchers and you can have a relationship with ranchers or you can buy food from ranchers that That actually use ethical practices.
01:27:42.000And if you do a little bit of research and you find...
01:27:45.000There's people that you can actually trust that do...
01:28:39.000If you look at it, like I had a friend over this weekend and I shot an elk last week and I was going over it and I vacuum sealed all the cuts of meat and I was cutting up liver and vacuum sealing the liver and I was cutting up all these different pieces of The tenderloin and backstrap.
01:28:57.000And my friend was like, look how red this is.
01:29:00.000I'm like, this is what an animal's supposed to look like.
01:29:15.000If it was a human, there'd be a person who's really depressed and something's wrong with them, because they're not supposed to be that overweight.
01:29:24.000And that's why they have to introduce so many antibiotics to these cows, because they're eating a diet that's not sustainable for long-term health and vitality for the cow.
01:29:35.000When you get grass-fed, grass-finished beef, like one of my sponsors is ButcherBox, And you'd get these steaks, these ribeye steaks from ButcherBox.
01:29:44.000They'd be smaller than a ribeye that you'd get somewhere else because they don't have all this fat in them.
01:30:16.000I think, you know, that's one side of the—because when I was writing about the Monsanto thing, it wasn't just that, like, if this was a story about genetically engineered seeds.
01:30:25.000I mean, honestly, that comes later in the book.
01:30:27.000It's about all the other chemicals that end up, like— In our food system that aren't necessarily even chemicals designed for food.
01:31:49.000And there's this document, I actually had it, I don't know if Jamie wanted to see it or not, but that's handwritten notes from this meeting in 1969 inside Monsanto, a confidential document that they had, where they're discussing like, What should we do with PCBs?
01:32:05.000We now know it's a global contaminant.
01:34:18.000And firemen, fire, rescue people, even today, if there's a big transformer fire or something, they can be exposed to burning PCBs because they were allowed to remain in place.
01:34:29.000So this PCB contamination is still out there.
01:34:32.000And there are actually states, Washington State, I don't know all of them off the top of my head, Delaware, that are suing Bayer right now To pay for PCB contamination from that long ago because it's still out there.
01:36:41.000They've been in the game for a very long time.
01:36:43.000They were the kind of frontrunners in organic chemistry in the late 19th century.
01:36:46.000And part of it had to do with a lot of great research institutions that were close to coal deposits, which were the source of all that organic chemistry.
01:37:00.000Though I will say the oil boom in the United States in the early 20th century gave the Americans a chance because we had all this oil that we could use to make chemicals and companies like Monsanto started to catch up.
01:37:12.000But what's crazy is Wernherbaughman buys Monsanto in 2018. Literally, a couple months later, the first Roundup case goes against Bayer.
01:38:15.000And so the CEO, Warner Bauman, goes into the shareholders meeting and I have some pictures of the book where he's like, sorry, you know, and he's standing in front of the stock price that looks like this and trying to explain it to his shareholders.
01:38:30.000And the shareholders aren't having it.
01:38:32.000They've issued a vote of no confidence in the CEO and the board of management, which had never happened in the history of the DAX. Yeah, this is a picture from that meeting.
01:38:45.000And that's him thinking about his future.
01:38:47.000Yeah, it's kind of an amazing picture.
01:38:50.000Before that, he was thinking about buying a yacht.
01:39:12.000They just hold those off while the people die?
01:39:14.000Well, basically, that's what they're trying to do in some ways, you know, is just kind of delay, delay, delay.
01:39:21.000But the problem is these people aren't going away.
01:39:23.000There were 120,000 Roundup litigation cases that were filed or either were going to trial when I last looked, you know, back when I was writing this book.
01:39:33.000This was, you know, people who are coming on hard.
01:39:51.000It's made up of people, and there's good people and bad people, and there's some people like that guy who ended up writing, let's sell the hell out of them as long as they can.
01:42:15.000And just so people that, you know, to fill in Agent Orange, why it was used in Vietnam, it was used as this defoliant, exactly, as you said, to kind of expose these jungle areas so that we could fight more effectively.
01:42:27.000And it was sprayed in an enormous quantity across the country.
01:42:33.000That dioxin persists, and it stayed in the environment Into the 21st century, into the 2010s, and it's still there.
01:43:13.000That's part of the thing, I think, going back to how do you get away with this?
01:43:18.000You don't end up having to pay for stuff.
01:43:20.000Monsanto has not paid a cent for that Was that a part of the agreement that they had with the military when they sold them stuff?
01:43:27.000Part of the argument that they used in court and things like that is, look, we sold this to the government for the government's purposes, and we can't be held in the contractor's defense.
01:43:37.000We're just a contractor here doing the bidding of the federal government.
01:43:40.000We have a certain degree of insulation.
01:43:42.000But what I'm trying to show in the book is they saw things internally and knew things about their product that I think Should blow that out of the water.
01:43:51.000Just because you sell something to the federal government, but if you know that it's making your workers look like the people we saw, are you not in some way liable for trying to clean that up?
01:44:02.000And so in this case, it's totally nuts, Joe.
01:44:08.000So if you fly into Da Nang in Vietnam, which is one of the former air bases of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, When you fly into the airport, on the south end of the airport, tarmac, is this huge concrete structure that we just have dumped soil into that has tremendous high concentrations of dioxin.
01:44:34.000This just finished 2012 to 2017. This is how it works.
01:44:40.000They put all this soil into this huge concrete structure Then they put electrodes, like a thousand of them, into that concrete structure and heat it up using electricity to like some insane thing, like 300 degrees Celsius, to basically cook the dioxin.
01:45:04.000They have to put this dirt into a big concrete structure, burn it, And that's how we're going to go around Vietnam and clean up a lot of this dioxin contamination.
01:45:14.000But that also must kill all the biological material in that dirt.
01:46:55.000We couldn't get access to the site, so my buddy who's a photographer and I, John Zadrow, we went and got up on this hotel, and there was this crazy...
01:47:06.000You know, pool up there and people were drinking.
01:50:17.000All those people that had horrific diseases directly connected to Agent Orange.
01:50:21.000And there's been some really brave writers that have been writing some op-eds recently from Vietnam who are trying to just continue to make sure that people don't forget about this and tell this story.
01:50:39.000Right now, they've moved to another American airbase that's just outside of Ho Chi Minh City, former American airbase, in Binhua.
01:50:47.000So if you're interested in this topic, right now, there's a massive dioxin remediation project that, again, USAID and the US government's doing.
01:50:57.000The companies that sold this stuff are nowhere to be seen.
01:51:01.000But we're paying for it and it's a much more expensive project because it's way more expansive.
01:51:18.000Yeah, I don't think it's a five-second rule, but I do think it's gone a long way to prevent this leaching of dioxin into those lakes and leaching other contaminants in there, and I think it's made it a much safer place.
01:56:47.000So this pile of slag, okay, is a pile because in the 70s, they finally prevented Monsanto from selling this stuff as aggregate to build things out of.
01:57:04.000So, the town of Soda Springs in Idaho and Pocatello nearby used the slag waste as an aggregate to build basement foundations and roadways and their sidewalks and stuff like that.
01:57:22.000Let me make sure I get all this because it's just so wild.
01:57:48.000Folks, there's elevated levels of gamma radiation coming out of basement foundations and school buildings and whatever else they've used for its streets and things like that.
01:58:55.000So what happened there was these overburdened piles leached selenium into the grassland.
01:59:00.000Grassland picked up that selenium and animals died as a result of eating that selenium.
01:59:06.000By the way, Monsanto called this at the time, this is our sustainable, environmentally friendly herbicide.
01:59:14.000And you're like, this is how it's manufactured.
01:59:16.000So when they made basements and these various structures out of that stuff, that waste, they recognized eventually that this is a problem and then would they demo everything and then put it onto that pile?
01:59:54.000You know, not physically, but when they came in to do the hearings, they were like, we don't want you to designate our town a Superfund site, which there was a suggestion that the EPA might do that for the whole city.
02:00:09.000And we're not talking about high levels of gamma radiation.
02:01:14.000I haven't seen any data that says, you know, we've seen precipitous increase in cancer rates or things like that.
02:01:19.000But I want to follow that because, you know, we're looking at how over the long term are we going to see, you know, long-term health issues.
02:03:07.000Yeah, it was one of those things where I thought it was clear that he was like, we don't want you to go in that river and go on whatever journey you're going to go on potentially to see this story.
02:03:17.000And I don't know whether it was he was worried about Us exposing something or seeing something or whether it was just, you shouldn't be here.
02:04:00.000So when you start asking around, people start talking, and because of the fact that they're so reliant on these plants, do you think that they were concerned that you guys could screw it up and they would lose their livelihood so they saw you and you're about to get in that water and like, this guy's going to cause trouble?
02:04:38.000And that chapter is about, like, the loyalty of some of these smaller towns, you know, that, like, and the kind of, this is our lifeblood.
02:04:47.000Well, you know, you see that in, like, I'm sure you've seen Roger and me, right?
02:04:51.000You see that in these towns where a big company does pull out of the town, and if they're dependent upon that town economically, it's devastating.
02:08:17.000Because, like, the archives only go so far.
02:08:19.000And we sat down and had dinner with them.
02:08:21.000They were, like, an amazing couple and super sweet.
02:08:23.000And they were talking to me and they were like, they bought our property.
02:08:29.000They bought us out, basically, and for a good price.
02:08:34.000One of the ways that Monsanto suppressed the resistance from people like the landowners was to buy their properties and offer them a lot of money.
02:08:45.000Some of these families agreed to that.
02:08:49.000Interestingly, by the way, after that talk, just so you know, the university I gave the talk at, their caller ID the next day, they told me this.
02:08:59.000They got a call and it just said Monsanto.
02:09:40.000But more just, yeah, like what could be the ramifications of that?
02:09:44.000And the same thing kind of happened with Coke, you know, when I was talking about coca leaves and all that stuff, you know, which is all there and backed up in the archives.
02:09:52.000This is not stuff that's not provable.
02:09:56.000You know, you just feel a certain degree of like, ugh, what could happen?
02:09:59.000And when they called, I was like, ugh.
02:10:01.000And they wanted to do like a rebuttal to the story to be like, you know what, we've actually fixed a lot of the mining problems and things are getting better in Soda Springs.
02:10:09.000I would love to hear their conversation about that pile, the mountain.
02:10:13.000Yeah, like explain to me how that's sustainable, you know, is really what I would love.
02:10:17.000You're just going to keep building that until it reaches the moon?
02:11:29.000Maybe Amazon could buy Monsanto cheap now and go, this is what we're going to do.
02:11:34.000Well, weirdly, I'm writing a lot more.
02:11:36.000I'm writing this project right now that's about all these, like, the logistics companies and thinking about the environmental footprint of firms that we don't traditionally think of as firms that have big environmental footprints.
02:11:58.000They have to ship money around, but it's also just the incredible capital they have to be able to decide whether there's going to be an oil rig here or a Deepwater Horizon well here.
02:12:09.000Did you talk to anybody from Monsanto about all these various issues?
02:12:27.000Some of the people in Monsanto actually reached out to me.
02:12:31.000And I had to kind of learn a little bit on the fly about how to talk to sources that were really sensitive like that.
02:12:37.000And I had a bunch of lawyers for the first time that I would talk to you about how do I protect these people who want to talk to me inside the company because I don't want anybody to get hurt.
02:12:46.000And there's a section in here about a person who wanted to tell his story in this book.
02:12:57.000And I included it in the book, but he ultimately couldn't go on the record.
02:13:06.000I couldn't actually include what he wanted to say.
02:13:09.000I could just talk about our debates back and forth about whether he was going to go on the record in the book.
02:13:15.000And it was about a chemical that is currently being used and it was about how it got approved and how he felt things should have gone and the evidence that was used to get that approval from the government.
02:13:32.000He knew things about that that he thought were deeply problematic.
02:13:36.000But by going any deeper than that, On that specific piece of evidence, I would identify him because he had such close access to that.
02:13:48.000And he was the person who would know that.
02:13:52.000And so here's a person who's got a pension, who's got kids, college age and things like that, and he's trying to figure out, okay, do I go on the record or do I not?
02:14:18.000If things go bad, I've signed an NDA. What happens to little old me?
02:14:25.000Well, if you go all the way back to the history of those people that got dioxin poisoned and they lost the case and then they took liens out against their homes.
02:14:43.000I get a little bit fired up on some of these things because part of it is It matters.
02:14:47.000I feel like there's a certain degree of onus I have to tell some of these people's stories who don't get to tell it now because they're not here.
02:14:56.000And in this case, let me tell you about the end of that case.
02:15:01.000Because when you look at it on Google, it'll say, Monsanto wins.
02:15:37.000We're finding that Monsanto technically, based on West Virginia law, cannot be held liable here because of the technicalities of West Virginia law.
02:15:46.000Which the technicality was they had to prove that Monsanto willfully, recklessly, and wantonly hurt these people.
02:17:27.000A couple years later, that foreman I was telling you about from Union Carbide, he finds out that there was evidence in that case That because of technicalities, they weren't allowed to see as the jury.
02:17:40.000And I don't know the legalness of it, but there was a document from the EPA that showed just how expansive the pollution was and all this stuff.
02:17:54.000And he says, I hope that all my other jurors, he was the foreman, would have said the same thing.
02:18:01.000And at the end of that interview, which almost no one had seen, because, you know, it was buried, he said, I just can't get out of my head.
02:18:11.000You know, I feel like I just can't get it out of my head.
02:18:16.000I think what he's saying there is to let people down.
02:18:19.000So when you see that case, the Monsanto case in West Virginia related to these nitro workers, it looks like, well, I guess Monsanto did anything wrong.
02:18:29.000Even the jurors who let Monsanto off in a way Later say, we shouldn't have done it.
02:18:36.000So what was the reason why they were allowed to withhold that evidence?
02:18:41.000I don't know the actual kind of legal reason why.
02:20:05.000I mean, I think one thing that you can do if you don't think this type of agriculture, as we saw that graph, the petrochemicals, we're growing in our petrochemical dependency and you don't want to be a part of that.
02:20:18.000I do think you can choose, if you have the means, to buy organic foodstuffs to support, as we've talked about, farmers who are doing regenerative agriculture, trying to grow things and produce meat and food in a different way.
02:20:35.000Some people would poo-poo that and say, okay, you know, what does that really do?
02:21:14.000I was just going to say, we're seeing right now thousands of cases being brought by people.
02:21:18.000And not just people that are saying, look, my cancer was caused by this.
02:21:22.000But we're also seeing cases that are trying organizations, Center for Food Safety, for example, among many others, that are trying to say, look, These chemicals are questionable.
02:21:35.000We're petitioning the EPA to stop registering these chemicals and to try and change these things.
02:21:41.000I think getting in that kind of structural level of trying to change, you know, getting in some of those battles is important for us, especially for those who have the means and ability to fight those larger fights.
02:21:51.000And also, talk about the Farm Bill, you know?
02:21:54.000Put pressure on Congressmen to say, wait a minute, why are we subsidizing?
02:22:02.000I mean, the only reason that a lot of these farmers are able to make profits is because they're getting massive subsidies to do so.
02:22:09.000And aren't these subsidies that were left over from World War II? You could even go back even further, in a way, to the New Deal, you know, in the 30s.
02:22:41.000The whole idea was to subsidize the farmers to make sure that we had an abundance of food because they were preparing for war and they wanted to make sure that they could feed everybody.
02:22:49.000There's a little bit of that, for sure.
02:22:52.000There's also the story of these government programs coming in to try and give farmers a kind of support in times where there was so much surplus.
02:23:36.000Put gasoline on our farm policy saying, okay, what we need to do now is grow, as he put it, crops, fence row to fence row.
02:23:44.000We're going to start subsidizing the production of all these different commodity crops and not putting any restrictions on the acreage Getting rid of some of these acreage restrictions that were often tied to those subsidies.
02:23:57.000That was the big shift in the 70s, saying you don't have to reduce your acreage.
02:25:05.000Like, we've got a lot of productivity.
02:25:08.000I think that's part of the myth of our food problems is that productivity is the problem.
02:25:14.000Productivity really isn't the problem.
02:25:15.000Our bigger problem is distribution, the types of crops we're growing on the land that we have.
02:25:21.000And, you know, the ways in which we're equitably distributing it and also food waste, just tremendous amounts of waste of the average consumer.
02:25:30.000You think about even our own practices at home today.
02:25:37.000It's now about figuring out how to grow the right types of crops, growing these more biodiverse fields as opposed to these monocrops and changing the game.
02:25:46.000That, to me, I think is the future of food.
02:25:48.000It's not about Can we produce more corn and soybeans next year than we did last year?
02:25:54.000Is there a way to incentivize people to do that?
02:25:57.000To grow these biodiverse sort of farms?
02:26:03.000As I said, I wish I could pull up the numbers for how much a soybean farmer gets in terms of a per acreage subsidy from the federal government.
02:26:18.000And what if we took that money and instead of subsidizing a system that we know is out of control, or we're growing way too much of this stuff, and turn it towards subsidies that supports the types of foods that's going to nourish our bodies, instead of necessarily going to animal fodder, and nourish our country?
02:26:35.000You know, the Farm Bill can be radically changed, and it should, I think, to reflect that interest in getting away from some of that monocrop cultivation.
02:26:44.000So this is all relatively new in human history, right?
02:28:35.000All of what we've talked about is based on petrochemicals and on fossil fuels.
02:28:43.00080% of what Monsanto was making came from oil, natural gas, or coal.
02:28:48.000By the 80s, 80% of their product lines were coming from fossil fuels.
02:28:55.000The reason they became a seed company was because they saw that.
02:29:00.000They knew that so much of what they were making was coming from petrochemical feedstocks.
02:29:05.000So they started trying to make more money off selling seeds and getting into the seed business, which they didn't even own a single seed company before the 1980s.
02:29:13.000So they pivoted in part because of the energy crisis of the 1970s when oil prices rose.
02:29:19.000They're like, oh my gosh, 80% of what we make comes from this raw material that's now really expensive in the 70s.
02:29:27.000And that's why Monsanto said, ooh, we've got to get out of this business of making all these PCBs and all that stuff.
02:29:32.000They hung on to some of their brands, Roundup, for example, because it was so profitable for them.
02:29:37.000But they tried to get rid of a lot of the other chemicals.
02:30:13.000But the environment is saying you cannot keep doing that, right?
02:30:18.000If you keep doing that, we're going to keep seeing the cycle of weed resistance developing and farmers are going to be kind of locked into that system.
02:30:27.000So the biggest thing I'd say is that If we're going to fix our food system, we have to get away from that fossil fuel dependency, right?
02:30:34.000We have to get away from this economy that was built at a time when there was so much oil, right?
02:30:38.000In the 20s and 30s, we're producing all this stuff that made everything around us, including our food, and recognize that we have to start shifting to regenerative agriculture because, you know, ostensibly, we won't have to be so dependent on those fossil fuel feedstocks.
02:30:53.000How much of fossil fuel products can be replaced with organic things, like things like...
02:30:59.000I know that there are certain plastics that are made with plant fibers.
02:32:20.000The only reason you can make a throwaway plastic bottle made of sugarcane is because you're producing so much sugarcane from all that synthetic petrochemical agricultural system.
02:32:54.000New Coke bottle made entirely from plants.
02:32:56.000Okay, I just want you to notice a couple of things on this bottle, so when we're looking at it, it says 100%, it's kind of blurry, but it's okay, 100% recyclable plastic.
02:33:08.000And I always joke with my students, what does recyclable mean, you know?
02:35:06.000So we were getting our hemp from Canada, and then we were re-importing it into the United States because it was illegal at the time to grow hemp here.
02:35:18.000But it was legal to have it and sell it.
02:35:50.000It's just a disaster because it's all tied into the same system.
02:35:54.000And the only reason it's so cheap that you can have a throwaway container like that, and throwaway, I mean, you can drink it once, as we do at a party or whatever, and you're like, oh, well, it's done.
02:37:02.000Most of the time it's a shift in thinking as opposed to we need a new technology or the new plant-based material.
02:37:11.000But is it possible to use plants for all the shit we use fossil fuels for and not be tied into this monocrop agricultural system that relies on herbicides?
02:37:25.000I mean, I don't know much about growing hemp, but I gotta imagine that if you're growing 100,000 acres of hemp, you're gonna have a lot of fucking pesticides and herbicides, and you're gonna have...
02:37:37.000Well, part of it is trying to work with nature.
02:37:40.000One thing to do is trying to versify a little bit your agricultural system so you don't create that buffet for pests, you know?
02:37:47.000But would you be able to get the same sustainable yield, like a yield that you could use to make all these bottles of Coca-Cola and all that, you know?
02:37:56.000You know, predicting whether you could do all the bottles of Coca-Cola, I don't know.
02:40:28.000Okay, so I went and looked because I live in Atlanta.
02:40:31.000So I went and looked at our water bill and we're in Fulton County.
02:40:34.000So I looked at what that water bill was for a gallon of water or whatever.
02:40:40.000No, I must have looked at something smaller.
02:40:42.000And then I went to the Kroger and got a Dasani bottle of water.
02:40:46.000And at same volume and quantity, I compared the price, okay, of how much you're paying for bottled water versus if you just drank that water out of your tap.
02:40:57.000And here in Austin, the water's great.
02:41:49.000It's like a five-layer reverse osmosis filter underneath my sink and parsley because I've been researching about water supplies and lead and water and stuff, and it's kind of nuts what's out there.
02:42:01.000I'm not sure which system we use, but it is some sort of a...
02:42:04.000It's a big machine that filters our stuff out that we have here.
02:42:40.000So it's like this, again, 100 years from now, we think of it as just so...
02:42:45.000Normal and it's like they're gonna think this is insane.
02:42:48.000Yeah, for sure the plastic is gonna be a thing where they're gonna be Baffled like how we allowed the Pacific garbage patch to get so big before we did anything and how literally a 19 year old kid figured out how to make this machine and He's a boy in slot.
02:43:04.000It's the only guy that I know that's figured out how to do something to mitigate it But even then like how much can he mitigate like how?
02:44:17.000If you had a water bottle that was made out of paper and just started deteriorating at the rate that straw did...
02:44:23.000You'd never even be able to keep water on the shelf.
02:44:25.000The water bottles that are made out of paper, they're like waxy, you know, they have like that stiff and it seems like there's metal in the paper and there's like an aluminum surface to it or something.
02:44:39.000But I will say that, you know, it is funny with the other thing that's happening with the plastic bottles is like we're getting more efficient.
02:44:48.000We're making bottles with less plastic.
02:44:53.000We're using less water to produce the bottled water.
02:44:56.000There's a concept called Jevons Paradox in economics.
02:45:00.000This guy from the 1860s, he said, efficiency is going to kill us, folks, because his argument is that when you start making something more efficient, you actually have incentivized the use of that natural resource.
02:46:24.000Yeah, they probably get it more than the older folks do.
02:46:26.000Yeah, it's really, like, jarring, actually, to walk in there, and I'll be like, okay, here's this thing, and it's a problem, and they're like, We know.
02:46:59.000There is a certain degree of people who are like, the new generation is going to solve everything, instead of being like, well, we're still here.