Kevin Fulta, a public scientist at the University of Florida, joins me to talk about the controversial topic of genetically modified foods and their impact on the world. We talk about what they are, why they are bad, and what they could be good, and why they should be grown in the wild instead of in a greenhouse. We also talk about how the Terminator seeds were created, and how they might have a role in the suicide crisis in India and Brazil. And, of course, we talk about why we should be worried about them, because they could have a big impact on our food supply and our ability to grow food on our lands. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneatersound, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. We are produced by Riley Bray. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, Podchaser, and tell us what you thought of the episode and what you think of it in the comments section below. Thank you so much for listening, and please tell a friend about it! if you like it, share it on iTunes, and spread it to your friends about it on social media! if it helps spread the word around the world! Timestamps: 5 stars! 6 stars 7 stars 8 stars 9 stars 10 stars 11 stars 12 stars 13 stars 15 stars 16 stars 17 stars 18 stars 19 stars 20 stars 21 stars 22 stars 14 stars 23 15 16 17 18 19 21 22 13 14 20 12 24 25 27 26 6 5 3 4 7 (Thank you! 16? , and & ) "Thank you, you can help us spread it out! 21) 's=1=1_1=2_1_2_ 2 #3 1_2 3_2=2=3_3_4_4
00:00:06.000Kevin, you're a scientist, a GMO foods expert, and if there is one subject that gets beaten to death online and in conversation and butchered, I've heard many conversations that I had to just walk away from at parties where people started talking about what GMO foods do and what's going to happen and all the horrible things.
00:00:29.000GMO foods are probably one of the most confusing and also one of the most hated things in in the world today, but also one of the most common and most misunderstood, right?
00:00:43.000I mean almost everything there's a Neil deGrasse Tyson did a video about this where he was kind of explaining like the term Like, virtually everything you see, including things that are quote-unquote organic at a supermarket, have been modified in some way in order to prolong their shelf life,
00:01:02.000in order for them to taste better, including corn and tomatoes and oranges and you name it.
00:01:09.000Yeah, I think that's the big problem, and you framed this very well.
00:01:13.000The problem is that we confuse this idea of GMO, which is kind of a pejorative term, that we've derived to kind of misrepresent this kind of technology, which is really just plant genetic improvement.
00:01:27.000Like you say, we've been improving plants for 10,000 years as a species.
00:01:32.000We find the ones that work best and we continue to select those particular lines that have benefits for us.
00:01:37.000And we've been doing this for a long time.
00:01:40.000So everything is different than it was in the wild.
00:01:42.000If you look at the natural forms, they're nothing like what you see today in the store.
00:01:47.000So this GMO thing is just the most recent way that we've been able to modify the way a plant behaves and what plant products are.
00:01:54.000And it just is a much more precise extension of conventional breeding.
00:01:57.000But there is a company that looms like the Death Star out there in the world of GMO foods.
00:02:04.000And that company, I don't even have to say the name, it's spoken in hushed terms around hippie campfires.
00:03:27.000I'm the chairman of a horticultural sciences department in a state where we grow almost no GM crops.
00:03:33.000The difference is that I see tremendous potential for how these technologies could be helpful for our farmers.
00:03:38.000And we try to get them excited about ways we can apply them in the future.
00:03:44.000But let me go back to your last question, because I don't even know much about this Brazil issue either.
00:03:50.000Jamie, I'm sure you could pull up the article if we could see it on the big screen.
00:03:54.000Yeah, so the last question out of that was the Terminator seeds.
00:03:59.000And the Terminator seeds, this is something that never existed in terms of a product that was available.
00:04:04.000A company called Delta Pine and Land back in the 1990s developed the technology to ensure that genetically engineered seeds would stay in the fields they were planted, that you wouldn't have pollen leaving and pollinating something else and creating plants in other places.
00:04:30.000You couldn't replant it and get it to grow.
00:04:32.000So when Delta Pine and Land later was bought out by the Big M, by Monsanto, everybody saw the Terminator.
00:04:40.000Well, it wasn't called the Terminator.
00:04:41.000Seed had some other name, but it quickly gained the name Terminator.
00:04:45.000And so these were never grown outside of a greenhouse and the company has said they never will grow them outside of a greenhouse just because of the overlaid implications of what they might mean.
00:04:55.000But there have been instances of GMO crops by pollination infecting the lands of people who are not supposed to have these Monsanto crops on and they were sued for having these crops growing on their land,
00:05:28.000You buy the seeds from any of those companies.
00:05:30.000You fill out a form saying, I agree to not grow more of this.
00:05:35.000And so there are cases where people have grown more of it.
00:05:38.000And it hasn't been from a little bit of pollen drifting into a field.
00:05:41.000The court cases are all public record.
00:05:43.000In the ones where they've been successfully tried and litigated, they've been for thousands of acres of plants that someone would knowingly grow, and maybe even treat with Roundup in many cases, so that they were selecting for the trait.
00:05:55.000The intent was to sell the seeds that they agreed not to sell.
00:06:00.000So these stories about farmers that were getting sued because of cross-pollination, because the GMO crops have infected their land, is not true.
00:06:10.000There's no evidence in the record to show that this is substantiated.
00:06:14.000And what's even more scary about that is that when the company has litigated any of these and won favorable court decisions, they haven't kept the money, that any damages went back into the community.
00:06:30.000Like damage just went back in the community?
00:06:32.000Meaning that if they sued a farmer and actually won the case, any of the funding that was won as a penalty from that case was given back to the community where that farmer lived.
00:07:07.000Well, if you were to go buy corn from, let's say, Monsanto or Dow or any of the companies that make it, and you were to grow, say, soybeans that were Roundup resistant, so they resist the herbicide, you can kill the weeds but let the plants grow through.
00:07:22.000If you were to buy those and you were to spray them and then keep the seeds and then bulk them up and then start selling them out of your garage, the company would come and say, no, you can't do that.
00:07:35.000So what you're doing is you're taking the corn and the corn itself is essentially a seed, right?
00:07:51.000Yeah, so they're essentially, and maybe not corn as much, and I can get to that in a second, but things like cotton and soy, you can't, it's a lot like software.
00:08:01.000And Dr. Anastasia Bodnar is an excellent example of this.
00:08:05.000You can't go buy a copy of Microsoft Office and go home and make a thousand copies and sell them on eBay without Microsoft knocking on your door.
00:08:14.000This is a technology that takes years and years to develop.
00:08:18.000It's a really expensive technology to deregulate.
00:08:21.000Something like 130 million dollars sometimes to deregulate one of these genetically modified lines.
00:08:28.000So the company needs to make money to maintain its R&D. And so they ask farmers, who are the beneficiaries ultimately of this, to sign an agreement saying that they'll buy it every year.
00:08:38.000So this is the lawsuit, the Brazilian lawsuit.
00:08:41.000If you scroll up, Jimmy, you can read this whole thing.
00:10:06.000So it's possible that these things were brought before these governments saying that these were unfair practices to farmers to make them sign a contract and then repurchase the seed later on.
00:10:17.000So these seeds that you were talking about before, how did these folks get them then?
00:10:21.000If they're getting enough seeds to plant thousands and thousands of acres illegally, how are they doing that?
00:10:27.000Well, you just save the seeds from the previous year instead of processing it.
00:10:31.000You can imagine a corn cob has several hundred kernels, and each one of those represents a new plant.
00:10:38.000So you can have X amount of your We're good to go.
00:10:56.000It would be able to plant, replant more seeds.
00:11:00.000Now, corn's a bad example, because corn are hybrids.
00:11:03.000And without going into a whole genetics whiteboard thing here, corn is made from two parents that are genetically very different.
00:11:13.000But when you combine them together, give you a hybrid that when you cross a hybrid with a hybrid, gives you a mixture of seeds that don't give you any uniformity in the next generation.
00:11:24.000So since the 1930s, the seed companies have been able to resell that hybrid seed to farmers every year because there's nothing to be gained in producing your own.
00:11:34.000And so corn isn't always the best example and the companies have used genetics for going on a century now to protect their breeders interests.
00:11:43.000So the original corn before it was modified at all was that corn that you get like for Thanksgiving that you hang on your door that nobody eats, that weird colored funky looking corn?
00:12:19.000This little stick with little rocks on it and stick it in fire and pop it and eat it like popcorn because it's too hard to use a lot of water and grinding to make any food out of it.
00:12:29.000But you can imagine how exciting it was when you were a person who was using this for sustenance when you found a teosinte plant that maybe made twice as many or maybe instead of 13 kernels gave you 26. And so you would select those and plant them the next year.
00:12:44.000And it's really interesting that now you can go back through the 10,000 years of corn improvement, and we've been able to identify the genes that were at all of the critical thresholds that shifted this thing from being a bush with lots of little sticks of kernels to being what it is today.
00:13:00.000And it really is just a small number of genes that were changed.
00:13:02.000So before they started modifying genes, how did they select, like say, how did they, because before any genetic modifications were done in laboratories, they had turned this geosynti, what did I say it?
00:13:18.000No, even according to that commercial.
00:13:21.000Is that BS? Well, maize is kind of a general term for everything from field corn, which is what we think about, which is fed to animals, which 80% of GM crops go to animal feed.
00:13:32.000And we differentiate that versus what is typically eaten by humans, which is usually sweet corn varieties.
00:13:39.000So, how did they turn it, before there was any genetic modifications done in laboratories, how did they turn that corn into what we eat now, which is delicious and sweet, and you put butter on it, it's fantastic.
00:13:56.000Yeah, DNA replication is a sloppy process, and funny things happen when you, from environment, so in the process of replication of DNA itself, you can make errors.
00:14:07.000Cosmic radiation, just chemicals in our environment, natural chemicals that are out there can induce changes in DNA. And these kind of mutations sometimes, very rarely, result in a change in the plant that's beneficial, or at least from a human perspective.
00:14:23.000So in all the plants that we've had, all the plants that we have, the significant amount of change has come from random mutations that change genes in ways we don't understand, pieces of DNA that get up out of the genome and sit down somewhere else randomly.
00:14:41.000Viruses in the plants that get into the genome and sit down in places that we have no idea where.
00:14:46.000So genetic modification is something that's ongoing and constant and a factor in every genome, including our own.
00:14:54.000And so what we're seeing today is just the long-term effect of humans who've been able to put all the good traits in one place.
00:15:03.000So when you see those tomatoes that are in the supermarket that are pale and you could play basketball with them, those hard tomatoes, and then you compare them to like heirloom tomatoes, the only difference between those two is that someone had found some tomatoes that had grown extra firm and selected those and used the seeds from those to create more similar tomatoes and only selected those.
00:15:53.000The problem is that plant breeding over the last 50 years, or say over the last 100 years, the objectives of the breeders has been bigger fruit, uniformity, big yield, disease resistance, nothing about flavor and aroma.
00:16:09.000So to meet production characteristics, which is what we've been selecting for, Breeders have been looking for these kind of characteristics that don't involve the consumer.
00:16:19.000And so our decline in the flavors and the quality of fruits and vegetables is directly related to the mass breeding, not anything to do with GMO. So when you say genetic modified in those terms, they are kind of genetically modified,
00:16:35.000but they're not modified in terms of being in a laboratory and human beings doing some funky stuff with genes.
00:16:41.000They're sort of modified almost naturally and just selected.
00:16:47.000And some of the things that we've selected for have been the ones that didn't kill us when we ate them, or the things that didn't make a poison or something that tasted horrible.
00:17:01.000So what we've seen in our stores right now is the residue of thousands of years of human selection.
00:17:07.000And we can call it genetic modification if we want to, but we can differentiate it from what we do in the laboratory.
00:17:13.000Which is now we can call adding a transgene or transgenesis, moving a gene from one background of genetics to another via laboratory.
00:17:23.000And these selections that people have moaned about, and I have as well, I mean, it's horrible when you get a sandwich and it has a pale tomato in it because they just taste awful.
00:17:34.000There's no science involved in any of that other than selection.
00:17:38.000There's no, like, injection of some alien sort of genetics into those things, alien to the plant.
00:17:46.000No, there's no syringes, nothing like that.
00:17:52.000Being a plant breeder is the most kick-ass career these days and has been for a long time.
00:17:58.000Plant breeding is essentially inventing the next generation of food and all we're talking about is mixing pollen from things that maybe normally wouldn't cross together, like something that nature would never cross.
00:18:10.000But you got this cool tomato from Europe that has great qualities and we can mix it with this great production quality tomato that grows in Florida where nothing else can grow.
00:18:19.000And now you mix these two together and you get this beautiful tomato that works well in everybody's garden.
00:20:15.000So when we're adding genes across, let's say, species or across kingdoms through a laboratory, and that's what people, I think, really get strange about or really don't understand.
00:20:27.000This is the part where it's actually terribly simple, and we've been doing this since the 1980s, introducing the plants since the 1980s.
00:20:40.000That the human gene for insulin is cut out of the human genome, placed into a bacterium, and then gigantic fermenters of bacteria.
00:20:47.000So we're talking like an organism that is so different from humans.
00:20:51.000And then we pull out the insulin and we use this to inject in the patients rather than relying on isolating it from calf or cow pancreas.
00:21:01.000Where there can be all kinds of allergic reactions and all kinds of other issues.
00:21:04.000So here we have a source of insulin that's human insulin that's coming through a GMO intermediate that allows humans to live for a low-cost medicine that has no side effects.
00:21:15.000And there's a bunch of instances of that, aren't there?
00:21:18.000It's not just insulin that they've done with...
00:22:23.000You know, we've got this really cool system of public universities where we're using money from public funding, from, you know, your tax dollars, to solve problems, like how to make better cheese less expensively.
00:22:34.000That's our main thing as a land-grant university.
00:22:37.000And so these are the basic science questions that we strive to answer, and I think we are doing a good job with.
00:22:45.000And that's why this GMO thing is so frustrating, because we're so down in the Monsanto noise, and we're so in the noise that we have solutions that we can't use.
00:22:54.000So like the camel gene, you know, things that we don't think of that we've figured out.
00:22:59.000Is it because of the name, because that name is associated with this big evil corporation, that all GMO foods are sort of looked at in this regard?
00:23:08.000Because, I mean, people aren't freaking out about camel jeans and cheese because they didn't know about it.
00:23:13.000But everybody knows about GMOs, and they instantly connect that to Monsanto, and they instantly connect Monsanto to greed and callousness and Indian farmers committing suicide, as we talked about.
00:23:26.000Oh yeah, we gotta come back to that, too.
00:23:27.000Don't let me walk out of here without hitting that.
00:23:30.000But this is the problem, though, is that when you look at the real solutions that are there in science, the stuff I care about.
00:23:36.000You know, Monsanto, if they went away tomorrow, it wouldn't affect the fact that the science is really good.
00:23:42.000So they're a company that's profiting off of the science, essentially.
00:24:00.000And when you're talking about the disasters that come from heat waves and floods and everything else, they're operating just by breaking even.
00:24:06.000And so farmers who can get improved seeds that maybe don't require an insecticide because the plant makes its own protection, that saves a farmer big bucks in terms of fuel, labor, products that they don't have to spray.
00:24:21.000And so farmers have adopted the GM technologies faster than cell phones.
00:24:26.000I mean, these went from zero to 95% of acreage in just a couple of years for five crops.
00:24:32.000So, farmers buy the crops, Monsanto makes the seeds, the farmers want the seeds and demand more, and that's why Monsanto stays in business.
00:24:50.000So, the best place to get information on this comes from academic sources.
00:24:54.000And if you look at Ronald Herring, who is a professor at Cornell University, he's looked at this question very much.
00:25:01.000Suicide is a major issue in India, and it's very common now more than ever among young women, and certainly is an issue among farmers.
00:25:09.000They plant a very risky crop, and that's cotton.
00:25:13.000Cotton is a difficult to grow crop that in most areas requires lots of water, and if you don't get monsoonal rains, your crop fails.
00:25:21.000So where this idea that Monsanto crops were somehow causing farmer suicides comes from the idea that the seeds are more expensive, farmers go into debt to some degree to buy them, and then when the crop fails, they lose the money.
00:25:35.000It doesn't have anything to do with Monsanto per se or with those particular crops.
00:25:41.000The other big issue you have is because these crops...
00:25:43.000So these are cotton plants that make their own insecticide.
00:25:46.000They make a protein, completely benign to humans, that protects the plant against the weevils and other critters that burrow into cotton.
00:25:57.000And so farmers don't have to spray pesticides.
00:26:00.000And it's a huge deal because it allows them to farm without having the cost of it.
00:26:10.000Now the problem is there's a counterfeit seed market where people are selling something that isn't legit.
00:26:16.000And there are legitimate problems with farmers who commit suicide because of indebtedness.
00:26:22.000But I don't know how much we can directly blame that on the company or its agents.
00:26:27.000So, if someone buys Monsanto cotton, say, they buy cotton seeds, and you grow cotton, that farmer has to make an agreement to not use that cotton to plant more cotton, that they have to buy more seeds.
00:27:03.000You grow the corn once, and then you have to continue to buy seeds from us to grow corn.
00:27:08.000That was never the case before in human history.
00:27:11.000This one company comes along and demands that, And that was connected to the suicides of these people in India, that this is a totally new situation.
00:27:20.000Actually, very much not a new situation.
00:27:23.000Plant variety protection and protection of plant genetics has been around since the 1930s.
00:27:29.000And farmers, as I mentioned before, have been doing this strictly by using hybrids, which don't yield decent plants in the next generation.
00:27:35.000So you had to buy them from the company every year.
00:27:39.000More recently, and if you wanted to, let's say you bought an apple tree for your apple orchard from Cornell University, one that Cornell University devised.
00:27:53.000The apple trees are all propagated by vegetative cuttings.
00:27:57.000You cut off the little branch, you grow roots on it, grow a new tree.
00:28:00.000And you sign a licensing agreement, non-GMO, but there's things like that, strawberries from University of California.
00:28:09.000You sign a licensing agreement, and what does that entail?
00:28:11.000It says that you will not propagate those plant materials as a farmer, that you'll use them to grow your crop, and that when you need more, you'll buy more.
00:29:00.000Apples are propagated by the cuttings rather than seeds because every seed is a genetic mess.
00:29:07.000You can plant an apple, buy an apple, red delicious apple, you can plant the 20 seeds inside and you're going to get 20 plants that are nothing alike and none of them will have decent fruit.
00:29:18.000The ones that have the blockbuster traits, and this is why there has to be protection.
00:29:23.000For us at University of Florida, to grow a new orange variety might take 30 years.
00:29:29.000It might take acres and acres that cost the university hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to borrow or to lease.
00:29:37.000The pest treatments, the fertilizer, the water, the labor, it costs hundreds of thousands, maybe a million dollars to bring that new variety to market.
00:29:47.000And to have to just give it away is it ends a breeding program.
00:29:52.000So wouldn't the solution be to publicly fund the research so that the people benefit from it?
00:30:00.000So instead of a large corporation being able to lock down this perfect orange that you've developed at the University of Florida, instead the taxpayers' dollars, which goes towards the research, creates this beautiful plant that everyone is allowed to benefit from.
00:30:15.000Well, that's what happens, is that the public good, or public research, publicly funded, says you get a little dribble of dollars.
00:30:23.000But our breeding programs are very much self-sustaining in many cases, that you need to commercialize your best selections or your best fruit in order to be able to keep the breeding program going.
00:30:36.000So the university has to generate money through its breeding program and then it has to protect that money to ensure that they will continue to receive money from all the different things they develop in their lab which will justify the amount of money that you spend on your research.
00:30:58.000But most of it goes to the breeding programs that allow them to continue to be leading breeding programs and hire people and lease land and produce the next varieties for the public.
00:31:10.000And the only way to do that is to make sure that people don't take your orange and take the seeds and plant new oranges?
00:31:16.000And because if people do illegally propagate this and compete against the nurseries that are doing it legally and selling it to farmers, you have a couple problems.
00:31:25.000One is you lose control of the product quality.
00:31:28.000Is it really true to type what people say it is?
00:31:32.000And really the beneficiary is the farmer.
00:31:35.000We make something that the farmer wants and that the farmer is desperate for.
00:31:40.000Our farmers need, we have an orange problem right now in Florida that's coming here.
00:31:45.000We have 60 million citrus trees that are dying, and we're doing everything we can to identify resistant material, not GMO. What are they dying from?
00:31:53.000Something called citrus greening disease, Huanglongbing.
00:31:59.000Yeah, I've seen all those Bruce Lee movies.
00:32:04.000The citrus greening disease is a disease where bacterium blocks the vasculature of the orange tree.
00:32:10.000And it's spread from tree to tree with something called a psyllid.
00:32:13.000It's an insect and there's jillions of them.
00:32:15.000And this thing bites one infected tree, goes to another, and now spreads that bacterium that can live in that tree for five years before there's any symptoms.
00:32:25.000And then the tree just gets sick and starts to die.
00:32:28.000We've got an orange industry that is half as big as it used to be, and we need a solution.
00:32:35.000And so our breeders are making everything they can to generate new trees, accelerating the process, everything they can.
00:32:43.000And if they can get that new tree after they've spent millions of dollars, some of it from the USDA, to identify a solution, there has to be a way for some of that funding to come back to the program to invent the next generation.
00:32:56.000So that now we're ready when the next threat comes.
00:33:01.000Like say if you have some sort of bacteria that's infecting these plants and killing these oranges, what could be a potential solution to that?
00:33:09.000And what would be the ramifications if you didn't come up with a solution?
00:33:12.000Yeah, so the cool part about this is that being where I am at the university, and I'm the chairman of a department that does everything from organic and sustainable biology all the way through space biology, you see people attacking this from so many ways.
00:33:38.000We're building rootstocks that can generate resistance to the bacterium so that now when you graft on a scion, maybe it will be resistant.
00:33:46.000We're doing everything from insect control.
00:33:48.000We're doing everything from essential oil treatments.
00:33:52.000Novel drugs that are used in humans and approved for humans being applied to see if they can kill the psyllid.
00:33:59.000Like an antibiotic or something like that?
00:34:00.000Well, it's hard to do antibiotics because of the resistance factor, that people are resistant to using antibiotics on trees because they're afraid they'll get...
00:34:10.000So this is the defensive, weird science environment that we have to work in as public scientists.
00:34:16.000We're trying to identify compounds that are approved for use in humans or approved for use on food that might have a shot at it.
00:34:25.000Some of the things that have worked very well are GMO solutions.
00:34:30.000And so there's a company in Florida that is looking to commercialize a spinach gene in orange that solves the problem.
00:34:38.000We have a couple of them at the University of Florida at our Lake Alfred facility where there are genes that directly affect the bacterial growth.
00:34:47.000And they work well, and they're not harmful to humans.
00:34:50.000And the trees are now five years old with no symptoms.
00:34:54.000So here's an example of a GMO solution.
00:34:58.000We can't solve this problem with breeding, not easily anyway.
00:35:03.000And here's something that we can solve this in five years.
00:35:06.000Thousands of families, thousands of Florida families, thousands of California families are watching their groves, waiting for the yellow symptoms to appear.
00:35:56.000And so I really appreciate you being here for this.
00:35:58.000But there's a lot of fears that people have that are founded in fact and founded in actual consequences, like MRSA. What did MRSA come from?
00:36:08.000It's a medication-resistant strain of this horrible staph infection that people get.
00:36:30.000The medication has created a resistance to this medication.
00:36:34.000Bacteria that have survived the medication and have grown stronger because of that, and that is a fear that people are worried about that.
00:36:43.000There's a balance to nature, and that when you screw around with that balance, there's unintended consequences, and oftentimes they can be deadly, like MRSA. And this is something that I think people are...
00:36:56.000I mean, it gives them cause to worry about someone putting antibiotics in their food, whether it's in their chickens or whether it's in their...
00:37:04.000which they've started to do less and less of.
00:37:07.000And I think it was Tyson Foods that publicly stated that they were going to significantly decrease their use of antibiotics and try to cut it out entirely because of public concern.
00:37:31.000But the idea of MRSA, okay, and all of our resistant bacterial strains, that comes because of an overuse of a silver bullet technology.
00:37:40.000These things come about because the mom has a screaming kid who says he must have an ear infection, so I'm going to demand from my doctor that I can get antibiotics.
00:37:49.000It comes from, you know, those of us saying not taking them correctly, you know, taking them for a few days and then not taking the whole bottle as we're supposed to.
00:38:03.000They had believed that for a certain amount of time, but now they no longer believe that it's necessary to take a full, that it doesn't do anything bad to create a, or to take a shorter dose of it.
00:38:15.000Okay, I don't know the literature on that, so I'll have to get back to you.
00:38:19.000I try to shoot from, you know, the stuff I'm really solid on.
00:38:23.000But the long story short is that, and it came up a lot online, if we can segue into that, they talked on the Twitter feed before we talked, a lot of concerns about the superweeds issue.
00:38:35.000That because the Roundup resistant technology has been so successful for farmers that it's what they constantly use, now you see resistant weeds that invade those fields that are resistant to the compound, just like in MRSA. And it's from using a silver bullet technology.
00:38:54.000The reason that that's a problem is because the process to come up with the next generation of solution is so arduous and so expensive that we stick with the old technology and we can't come up with something new fast enough.
00:39:07.000So this silver bullet technology, this antibiotic that we've created to deal with very specific infections, it works.
00:39:14.000It's very effective, so people use too much of it, and because of that, then it creates this medication-resistant strain of this, and there's not enough research done to fight off that medication-resistant strain of it because it's so cost prohibitive to do the work to create a medical solution in the first place.
00:39:33.000I think because the main issue, remember, go back to this idea that DNA has natural mutation and natural problems in its replication that give new information in a cell.
00:39:43.000And when you get that MRSA infection, those cells are dividing every 20 minutes, and you have millions of them.
00:39:49.000And so the chance of one gaining the ability to metabolize your antibiotics is actually pretty good.
00:39:55.000And when you're talking about billions of cells over many generations, that's where these things come from.
00:40:01.000It's kind of funny because actually I have an appointment on Wednesday morning because something out of my lab, I have something that looks like it would be a potential ability to make the next generation of MRSA. We're actually going to test it on MRSA. And something that I came up with in plants,
00:40:16.000that process we're patenting, that makes new compounds that could be very helpful against other creatures outside of plants.
00:40:25.000Okay, one of the things that troubles people the most about genetically modified things, whether it's foods or whether it's animals or anything that we're messing around with, is the potential health risks for the people that consume them.
00:40:49.000You're not dealing with people that get sick from certain things.
00:40:52.000What evidence, if any, is there that medication or rather that genetically modified foods cause diseases in people, cause sickness in people?
00:41:05.000We've been growing these things and eating them now for 18 years and studying them a lot longer, 30, in terms of feeding them to animals and everything else.
00:41:14.000There has not been one case of one single health effect that's been attributed to this.
00:41:19.000So it looks like it's, I mean, in my perspective, these are some of the safest products in the history of humans.
00:41:36.000When you say you're going to take a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis, this BT gene, The thing that we use in, it's actually called CRY1A or whatever it's called.
00:43:16.000We can look at every single gene that's turned on or turned off.
00:43:20.000We can look at where the gene that's added is integrated.
00:43:23.000We can understand metabolite profiles or screen for specific carcinogens.
00:43:27.000It is so easy right now to be able to do a very careful assessment.
00:43:32.000I'm not in this ballgame to hurt people, and farmers aren't either.
00:43:36.000They want to produce wholesome food for people.
00:43:39.000My job as a public scientist is to use my ability to dream and think of ideas and solutions for public benefit.
00:43:48.000You've got tens of thousands of me out there.
00:43:51.000The person who found something wrong would win a Nobel Prize for it.
00:43:56.000It's that much of a big deal if there was something wrong.
00:43:59.000But to play devil's advocate, if there was some sort of a reaction in 1% of the people or less than, let's say, one-tenth of 1% of the people that was deadly, but the company, whether it's the Big M or some other company, is making a billion dollars a year off of this,
00:44:17.000there would be a tremendous amount of pressure to I'm not saying it's through scientists.
00:44:24.000I certainly wouldn't think it would be through people like you.
00:44:27.000But I would think that somewhere, locked away in some office, high in a gun turret, is some evil asshole who owns a giant stake of the corporation, and he's like, let him die!
00:45:16.000But the big deal is, and I agree with you, when you start talking about money, you can look at many examples throughout history, whether you're talking cigarettes, you're talking, you know, where you see examples where money has bought influence.
00:45:29.000But the beautiful part of this is that science always wins.
00:45:36.000And for these companies that are producing these products, in my opinion, and I'm not with these companies, I can't tell you how they think, they stand to make a lot more money by making a product that's thoroughly tested and being clean with anything they would find that would be problematic.
00:45:51.000The other thing that's really important here is that We know, so when you say you're going to move, let's say now we're going to talk about rice that you can add genes to to make it have high beta-carotene content, higher vitamin A content.
00:46:06.000You know what those genes do, because we studied them in carrots.
00:46:11.000We understand the products they produce.
00:46:13.000So there's a plausibility aspect to this, too, that when we take this from carrot and put it in rice, what's the difference?
00:46:19.000Maybe there are some differences, and we can test for those.
00:46:23.000But it starts out with the plausibility.
00:46:25.000This isn't magic and voodoo and weird backroom, you know, let's see what this lever does.
00:46:30.000So the idea is that if you eat carrots and rice together as food, that's not much different than splicing carrots and rice together.
00:46:39.000And likely, if you're not allergic to either one of those things, you're not going to be allergic to this rice that you create.
00:46:44.000And even if you are allergic to carrots, taking one gene out of it that doesn't have an immunological footprint, you know, an antigenic footprint in humans, like the genes associated with beta-carotene production don't have, you'd be able to move those into rice and have no problem.
00:46:59.000That's a good point, the point of allergic.
00:47:02.000Because biodiversity is a huge issue when you're talking about foods in general.
00:47:08.000That some people have extremely different reactions, whether it's to peanuts or to shellfish or to a variety of things that most of us enjoy.
00:47:16.000But there's a few people that have severe reactions to this very same thing.
00:47:21.000And this is natural, completely, totally natural.
00:47:25.000This is the question when it comes to certain types of medication.
00:47:29.000If you're dealing with these outliers, if you're dealing with this one-tenth of one percent of the population where this chemical reaction happens inside their body, completely natural, should we stop the production of peanuts?
00:47:46.000Should we stop the production of shellfish?
00:47:50.000But if you're dealing with a medication that does the exact same thing and reacts with the biodiversity of the exact same percentage of the population and could potentially be fatal, like shellfish can, like peanuts can be fatal.
00:48:47.000We have, there's wheat that still makes decent bread, where the gluten and gilad, or the glutens are the giladin and the other one, glutenin have been shut off.
00:48:57.000You have soy that you can decrease specific allergens.
00:49:00.000We know what the allergens are in food and can turn them off.
00:49:03.000And sometimes it makes the plant a little different or makes the product, like the wheat, when you take out the major glutens, it could change the bread structure.
00:49:11.000But it still seems that the other ones kind of ramp up to compensate.
00:49:16.000So we can make a better product using this technology, and they exist.
00:49:42.000So you feel like this could all be eradicated.
00:49:46.000But in nature, these things are eradicated in a much more disturbing way.
00:49:51.000In nature, the people that are allergic to peanuts eat them and die, and it's no longer expressed in the genetics.
00:49:57.000That's the natural method of doing it.
00:50:00.000The concern with any of these genetic modifications to the layperson, which I am most certainly lay, is that you are creating something that shouldn't be there.
00:50:13.000You're creating something, and you don't know the consequences of this, like the wings of the butterfly that create the hurricane, you know, that stupid fucking...
00:50:47.000And I can tell you that today, on June 4th, 2015, 20,000 people are going to die because of insufficient nutrition.
00:50:55.000That's a problem that I can tell you exists.
00:50:58.000I can tell you that kids will have allergic reactions to peanuts here.
00:51:01.000I can tell you that there are 60 million citrus trees dying.
00:51:05.000And these aren't problems Monsanto is going to fix.
00:51:08.000These are problems that I need to fix, that guys like me, people like me need to fix.
00:51:12.000And we're being handcuffed by an irrational fear of a good technology.
00:51:16.000And do you think that this irrational fear of a good technology comes about because of what they consider to be a greedy corporation?
00:51:23.000So this fear of greedy corporations because we like we talked about with GM I mean we could talk about we could talk about other corporations that have moved into Countries that are poverty stricken and taken over and abused their natural environment and that we associate money with Especially corporate entities with this idea of constantly needing to make more money every year to justify what they're doing to their shareholders.
00:51:52.000I mean this is the reality of these businesses, these infinite growth businesses.
00:51:56.000And we associate them with callousness.
00:51:58.000We associate them with not caring about the people who work for them or the people that they affect in the environments that they build their plants.
00:52:06.000And this is one of the main concerns that people have Is the diffusion of responsibility that comes with being a part, a single piece of a large entity that is ultimately doing at least some bad.
00:55:31.000But going back to answer your question, so the guy in me who hates his cable company, who hates the people who sell him gas, all that stuff, I look at companies like Monsanto and others as being the way that farmers who are my real clients are enabled.
00:55:49.000And so whether or not I like who they're buying it from, they're the folks who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the technology.
00:55:56.000And the other thing that's really, and so the other exciting thing for me is when the small companies can use something like GMO technology to gain a unique market niche, like Okanagan specialty fruits.
00:56:09.000They make this apple that doesn't turn brown when you cut it, and they have four full-time employees.
00:56:24.000But they have this apple that when you cut it doesn't brown, which is a great trait.
00:56:30.000It uses an apple gene to turn off an apple gene.
00:56:33.000And in other words, the GMO modification puts this gene in backwards so it shuts off the innate construct, the innate gene.
00:56:42.000It turns off that gene and then the apple doesn't brown when you cut it, which is a great trait if you want to have apples in processed products or apples as, you know, sliced apples in bags or whatever for full-time employees.
00:56:56.000So my whole thing is, go ahead and hate your Monsanto, march against them, whatever, I don't care.
00:57:01.000But do you realize that when you dress like a bee and lay on the ground and go into convulsions and say that this is biotechnology that's bad, that now you're affecting the people who would buy that apple, the people who I would come up with a solution for, for the people who need bananas in Uganda,
00:57:17.000or the people who eat rice in Southeast Asia that need a more nutritious rice.
00:57:22.000That by mixing together biotechnology and agriculture and conflating that with companies and things companies did or didn't do, you automatically take technology out of the hands of the people and the solutions that we care about.
00:57:37.000Things like the environment, things like farmers, things like the needy.
00:57:43.000And that's the thing that just why the Monsanto phobia is dangerous.
00:57:47.000Well, I think a good part of what the problem is, it can be attributed to the idea of people not being responsible for actions because they're part of a collective group, being completely unnatural.
00:57:59.000And I think that if the idea of a corporation was Was not that that corporation would be immune to...
00:58:10.000The actual people being involved in that corporation wouldn't be immune to responsibility for everything that a corporation does.
00:58:17.000That's one of the reasons why businesses get an LLC, right?
00:58:40.000But if you do something under the guise of your corporation, there's a completely different legal ramification than if you do something on your own, like bankruptcy, things along those lines.
00:58:53.000The problem might be, I know that you're a decent person and a nice person, and I know that what you're trying to do is noble and just and true and in the vein of science.
00:59:24.000We have to stop this idea that a bunch of people together collectively can do something that's really unethical, and they can do it and ruin natural environments and not be responsible, like the BP oil spill.
00:59:37.000I mean, everybody knows there was all kinds of fuckery and shenanigans that went on to protect the people that were involved from that BP oil scandal.
00:59:44.000Those people that had been profiting in insane, sacrilegious amounts of money for a long period of time.
00:59:51.000When it came time to pony up that money and clean that fucking mess up, boy did things get weird.
00:59:56.000You know, boy did things get legal and complicated and people were given non-disclosures to sign to make exorbitant monies for cleanup and people were paid off and there was a lot of fuckery involved.
01:00:06.000That is what people worry about when it comes to genetically modified foods.
01:00:10.000What we're worried about is the method of action that corporations have been proven to take.
01:00:17.000That is to protect the corporation as a unit and to do so and act collectively in a way that you would never act as an individual.
01:00:27.000But I guarantee you that 90% of the people that went to march against Monsanto drove a car that used oil that may have came out of a BP well.
01:01:07.000All I'm saying is, let's not put out the bullshit that says that GMOs cause cancer, GMOs are causing autism, that the herbicides associated with it cause autism.
01:01:19.000All of that is crazy talk that takes us out of our process.
01:02:01.000But these are examples where I see that technology that can actually enhance those things and that we can wrestle it away from the big corporations if we only stop fabricating information about them.
01:02:14.000Yeah, well, obviously this doesn't have anything to do with social justice or anything.
01:02:17.000But this study linking GMOs to cancer, liver, kidney damage, and severe hormonal disruption in rats, right?
01:02:27.000That was one that Collective Evolution had written a story about.
01:02:30.000Well, they covered it just like everyone else did.
01:02:32.000And what was the study, and what's wrong with this study?
01:02:35.000I think they're mixing together two different studies there, but the main one was one done by Sara Leaney in 2012. And they used a limited number of rats, which are called Sprague dolly rats.
01:02:46.000They're rats that are good cancer models because they're prone to cancers.
01:02:50.000And so as you're testing different compounds against them, you'll have a model which is at least susceptible to developing tumors.
01:02:57.000And so if you're testing the toxicity of different compounds, you would use this rat strain.
01:03:03.000The problem is that by two years into the study, 75% of the rats have or 77% have tumors.
01:03:11.000So Seralini chose this to do a two-year study.
01:03:26.000I mean, they showed fewer, but they talk about 5 versus 8 versus 9. Statistically, the numbers were too small to say that that was a significant difference.
01:03:36.000So when you say 5, 8, or 9, you mean percent?
01:04:04.000But the main thing in this, though, and the place that really colors it for me, and I don't know, do you have the picture of the lumpy rats on your screen?
01:05:01.000Well, I mean, that's something that I feel pretty strongly against.
01:05:04.000I really severely dislike the idea of testing things on animals in the first place, but it seems that that's where a lot of the big improvements in medicine have come from.
01:05:47.000If you had that exact same goddamn SeaWorld commercial and you had it about human beings, those people would be thought of as some of the most evil fucks on the planet.
01:05:56.000But they don't think of orcas as human beings, even though they have a cerebral cortex of 40% larger than a human beings.
01:06:02.000Even though they have dialects, they have a bunch of different words for all sorts of things, we don't even understand what they're saying.
01:06:07.000They have super complex methods of communication.
01:06:12.000They just don't alter their environment.
01:06:14.000So because they don't alter their environment and they can't smile at us, they don't have articulating lips, we choose to think of them as being inferior to us and it's acceptable to have them in a fucking swimming pool, you know?
01:06:26.000And I think that's dark and I think that's really evil and I think one day when we figure out a way to interpret what they're saying and have like a Google Translate for killer whales, it's gonna be a mess.
01:06:37.000The Sea World, they're gonna go to jail immediately.
01:07:27.000Jumped in the cage jumped into the car and pulled her out and killed her in front of everybody and It's it's it's horrible.
01:07:34.000It's horrible horrible thing, but that's what lions do.
01:07:37.000I mean that is their reward system That's why they're here in 2015 they have a predator prey reward system and that reward system isn't being recognized at all in zoos That's one thing one aspect of their life.
01:07:49.000It is probably as satisfying and as primal as intercourses to them.
01:07:54.000It's And they're not being allowed to express it.
01:08:32.000And you're like, tell me that's any different than some guy in a psych ward who's trapped in aliens with giant fucking watermelon-sized eyes or staring at them all day.
01:10:01.000And soldiers, this is how soldiers film this at the beginning of the war, and they just, they just have a goat.
01:10:08.000And the goat, it's fucking Jurassic Park.
01:10:10.000The goat is just let out of this gate, and the goat walks up, and the lions realize that the goat is there, and then, whooom, they're all on them, and they tear this fucker apart.
01:10:59.000These goats, they just open the door and they let them out, and then they release the lions.
01:11:03.000They open this gate, and the lions just come charging in because they know exactly what the fuck is going on.
01:11:10.000I remember people watching it saying that it's cruel.
01:11:14.000The reason why you think it's cruel is because we have been sheltered in some weird way to think that our way of living should be imposed on animals.
01:11:46.000By giving them pre-cooked meat, you're not allowing them to express.
01:11:50.000This charge they must get, the bond and community that they generate together because of killing and surviving off that kill together, Human beings have it, and I guarantee that lions have that as well.
01:12:02.000And you're not allowing them to bond in the same way.
01:12:05.000This is a part of establishing the pecking order in the communities as well.
01:12:31.000It's more cruel to not let them express their nature.
01:12:35.000This idea that you feeding them an animal that somebody killed nowhere near the cat is somehow or another more ethical than letting the cat kill the animal is preposterous.
01:13:06.000I mean, what ethical way would there even be?
01:13:09.000Yeah, I think we have to go back, and this isn't my area by any stretch, but animal testing is a really important part of biology, a really important part of pharmacology.
01:13:20.000When you look at how animals are used as drug models, like right now we have animals, like mice, that express Don't express a gene associated with brain function that we know is impaired, say, with ALS in humans.
01:13:35.000So essentially we have these mice that will develop ALS. So now you can use compounds to see what solves that problem.
01:13:43.000Cancer models are many in animals, where you have these animals that are predisposed to specific kinds of cancers or ailments that now allow us to do tests to find them.
01:13:52.000And I think that's a really important role for this, that animals can help us identify problems that help the human condition, which then can help us help animals.
01:14:02.000Is there a way to do it, though, that's going to make everybody happy?
01:14:06.000I think it's one of those things we have to say, we're better than you.
01:14:08.000Well, or that we have to say that these are, that this is, it's just like when we raise animals to eat them, I guess.
01:14:14.000I mean, we're, it's, there's a purpose for these animals that we bring them into our provision.
01:14:20.000We raise them humanely, and we are very, and these animals that are in these drug experiments, by definition, have to be very carefully, they have to be happy.
01:14:31.000They have to be as happy as you can be, you know, as a rat in a cage.
01:14:34.000How would you know that a rat is happy?
01:14:36.000Well, because there's physiology that's involved and if you start seeing, if you have rats that are living in conditions that are subpar or animals that are mistreated, they won't give you adequate results from your experiments.
01:14:48.000You need to have incredible control with animals that are well cared for and give you a solid physiological baseline where the only information being introduced is through your treatment.
01:15:00.000Do you know what being a speciesist is?
01:15:02.000Have you ever been accused of being a speciesist?
01:15:18.000I don't know if that's necessarily the case that we're more important, but we certainly have more faculties to be able to control the outcomes of certain situations.
01:15:26.000Right, but if rats were smarter than us and decided to do tests on humans, it would really suck, wouldn't it?
01:15:32.000I mean, we're very smart for other animals, but we're not very smart in terms of there's a lot of shit that human beings do that we probably shouldn't do collectively, like pollution, destruction of the environment, so on and so forth, proliferation of nuclear weapons.
01:15:47.000There's a lot of stupid shit that we do.
01:15:48.000So I think that we're incredibly smart for being an animal, but we're not necessarily smart in terms of the universal potential of intelligent life.
01:15:58.000That's why, I mean, there's a million fucking arguments you can make all day long.
01:16:02.000The gay marriage thing, the marijuana thing, the war thing.
01:16:06.000There's just so many stupid contradictions, the way human beings exist and live their lives.
01:16:11.000If there was something that was far more intelligent than us, like as intelligent As we are to pigs, or as we are to things that we think are smart, like dogs are fairly smart.
01:16:21.000What kind of test would they do to us?
01:16:24.000I never really think about that very much.
01:16:26.000I mean, you know, I guess I am a speciesist.
01:16:28.000Yeah, there's only one way to get that smart.
01:16:30.000You gotta fucking keep fucking pink pigs and stick them with needles and shit.
01:16:34.000The main idea is that we've evolved as a species for a long time away from our common ancestors, you know, other primate ancestors, because of our ability to control situations and because we make decisions that end in more favorable outcomes, for whatever reasons those are,
01:16:50.000And so even though we do a lot of dumb stuff, and I'm with you on that, I think we do an awful lot of smart stuff too, and I think the human capacity to create change that's favorable for humans is immense.
01:17:03.000Maybe you can do your own documentary.
01:17:21.000Nick DiPaolo, one of my buddies, hilarious stand-up comedian, had some joke.
01:17:25.000I don't want to fuck the joke up, but it was about...
01:17:28.000Doing tests on a monkey to find you know to cure AIDS and it was fucking hilarious, but I Don't remember how the joke went but it was something about battery cables and it was very funny But the idea being is like yeah.
01:17:41.000Yeah, I'm saying I'm more important than a monkey I'm saying my mom who's dying of cancer is more important than a rabbit I'm saying that I'm saying that a rat is not as important as my children.
01:18:03.000Again, as soon as you look at, instead of whether it's money or the results being more important than the actions of the individual, and the actions of the individual not being ethical, that's not important.
01:18:18.000Yeah, but that's, and so even to circle it back then, you know, this is why being a scientist is so cool, is because I'm bound by data, and I'm bound by a hypothesis that I test using the best available tools.
01:18:31.000And being a public scientist is really cool, that the people who choose to do this like me, and there's a lot of them in this country, we are really operating in the public's trust, in the public's best interest.
01:18:48.000Let's say, interpretations of data which suggest that maybe we're going the wrong way.
01:18:54.000These things are caught in the peer review process.
01:18:56.000These things are caught when our grants are evaluated, and they're debated in the scientific literature.
01:19:01.000And so when we're making steps in progress, these are very careful, guarded, reviewed, Re-reviewed steps that we're doing as a public science enterprise.
01:19:14.000And this is why I wish we had more support.
01:19:19.000I wish we, and that, you know, people say that, you know, oh, you're from Monsanto.
01:19:22.000You know, we get nothing compared to what they have.
01:19:26.000I mean, we're, as a university, we get something like 3% of our support from corporate entities.
01:19:32.000Everything else comes from grants that we go out and get.
01:19:35.000And so this is what's so important about having an active public science enterprise is to keep all that other stuff in check.
01:19:42.000I think it's also important to try to understand the whole process that's involved in science that the average person who doesn't have a background in it, the average person who didn't take science other than the classes where you dissected frogs in high school, they're ignorant of the process.
01:19:59.000They're ignorant of the process that creates this data.
01:20:02.000And they don't understand where we come from and what we go through.
01:20:06.000If you talk to anybody, they'll tell you, well, universities are just paid off by the companies.
01:20:21.000Well, in other fields, it's a much bigger issue.
01:20:24.000Financially, it's been a big issue in the setting of regulations for the stock market and things like that, the people who did it in university.
01:20:31.000Those economics professors who made recommendations and then wound up getting these huge jobs with the banks after it was over for millions of dollars.
01:20:40.000I think what's really important, though, is that a lot of the pharmaceutical companies will come to a medical school and say, we need you to do this clinical trial because you are the experts.
01:21:19.000No, because seriously, at the end of the day, I'm not a religious guy.
01:21:22.000I don't believe that there's some great reward for me.
01:21:26.000What I'm leaving here is a legacy, like a product of my work and my record, and I don't want that tarnished.
01:21:34.000I believe you 100%, and I'm certainly not questioning that.
01:21:37.000I want to tell everybody, the thing I was saying about mathematics professors, you should watch a documentary called Inside Job, or An Inside Job.
01:22:02.00028 days later, one of the greatest zombie movies in the history of the known universe, my personal favorite, starts out because of medication that was created.
01:22:12.000I forget why they created it for soldiers or something like that.
01:22:15.000It infects these chimps, and then these chips get it, they bite people, the people get it, and then the zombie outbreak takes over the world and kills everybody except for a few cool people.
01:22:42.000But 28 Days Later was about a medication that they had intended for human beings and it went terribly wrong.
01:22:50.000That's the kind of scientists that people are worried about.
01:22:52.000People are worried about the evil people that are creating...
01:22:55.000I mean, look, there have been scientists that have created weaponized drugs or weaponized biological weapons, rather, that they can use on people's, you know, certain gases.
01:23:05.000I mean, those are created by scientists, like poisons that have killed untold numbers of people were also created by scientists.
01:23:26.000You know, which is an herbicide called 2,4-D. And a number of herbicides were combined...
01:23:32.000And there was this whole rainbow of herbicides, they call it Agent Blue, Agent Green.
01:23:36.000Agent Orange was this 2-4-D stuff, 2-4-5-T. They're what they call synthetic auxins.
01:23:42.000They make plants grow to death, basically.
01:23:44.000And the government was able to weaponize a legitimate product for warfare.
01:23:50.000It had nothing to do with an evil scientist necessarily, but it was implementation potentially by people who had an agenda to be able to expose an enemy in a jungle atmosphere.
01:23:59.000Along with the purification of those products, 245T was the main one, was dioxin, which is what killed people and harmed our own soldiers.
01:24:09.000That is one of the scariest things about human beings, that we're willing to kill your whole forest to find you.
01:24:18.000Just stop and think of how fuck that is.
01:24:48.000Here you had something that a really great scientist came up with.
01:24:52.000Arthur Galston came up with 24D to control plant growth and control weeds.
01:24:59.000And it's a relatively useful compound that we've had for 70 years, but yet people will say you're using Agent Orange on corn.
01:25:06.000You know, we're not using Agent Orange.
01:25:08.000It's a growth regulator that was part of Agent Orange that humans decided to weaponize against other humans.
01:25:14.000So that was created first, and then human beings took this and said, well, there's some sort of a weaponized application of this very beneficial Right.
01:25:26.000And a compound that can be used safely in an agricultural context and has been since the 1940s.
01:25:32.000See, again, it's not people worrying about the scientists.
01:25:35.000They're worried about the evil people that control the scientists and take that stuff and turn it into this and then spray it in Vietnam.
01:25:41.000Yeah, but we can't go forward worrying about the small number of evil people that might be out there, because they're going to do it.
01:25:47.000You know, there's always going to be some guy who finds a way to sew a bomb into his underwear, but that doesn't mean we outlaw underpants.
01:25:54.000You know, we have to, we could, but the idea is that we need to think about what the science allows us to do.
01:26:03.000I mean, certainly be aware of malevolent uses.
01:26:06.000People could genetically engineer viruses, and I believe I've heard about the Russians doing this back during the Cold War days, to, say, engineer an antibody that would attack human myelin, which is the stuff that covers your nerves, so that you could essentially infect people with a virus that would kill them because it would paralyze them.
01:26:25.000These kind of things were discussed, and biological agents and biological weaponry is there.
01:26:31.000But as it has power in that dimension, I think the main conversation here is really, how do we take the same technology and use it for good?
01:26:40.000Essentially, what we're talking about is really what I was saying before, is that I think a lot of your hate comes from people that are terrified that they don't understand what's going on.
01:26:58.000But realistically, when you're talking to me about the expressions of genes, my brain is just going, those are a bunch of noises that represent some things I don't totally understand.
01:27:07.000Well, let's talk about things that we can talk about.
01:27:14.000I guess I'm kind of giving you an opportunity to say, what are the things that you care about that I could fix?
01:27:21.000Or scientists could fix like what are some what are some concerns about food that you?
01:27:27.000Yeah, the interviewee becomes the interviewer What what are some things that you would worry about in terms of food or maybe food abundance or you know What would you do abundance is always a big concern for everybody?
01:27:37.000Especially when you look at parts of the world where you see these like I have a good friend named Justin Ren he comes on the podcast and And he used to fight in the UFC and now he works in the Congo building wells.
01:27:59.000That our listeners of the podcast generated through Bitcoin and then I matched the donation and he built these wells He's just this guy's dedicating his whole time to doing that to giving these people clean water like that I think I mean that's not even scientific other than the ability to create somebody obviously had to invent these water pumps and filters and figure out how to make these these wells portable and functional that That's really what needs to be done.
01:28:25.000We need to figure out a way to take the worst parts of the world and bring them to a higher standard of living and give people the opportunity to not live on dirt floors where they're drinking muddy puddle water.
01:28:37.000You know, I mean the fact that That it takes a guy like Justin to go down to the Congo and dedicate his life to that, and a bunch of other brave people that are doing the exact same thing.
01:28:47.000But that countries never talk about it.
01:28:50.000They'll talk about all sorts of issues that are going on in the environment.
01:28:53.000All sorts of things about, what happens if the ocean rises and we lose Malibu?
01:28:58.000You know, like everybody's freaking out, but no one's freaking out about these poor babies with distended bellies because they're filled with parasites.
01:29:06.000And if they were white people that looked like they were from Norway, and this was their problem, if they were all beautiful people that looked like they were from the Game of Thrones, and they all had distended bellies, everybody would be freaking out, and they'd want to go over there and save those folks.
01:29:17.000And it's one of the more disturbing and sadder aspects of humanity.
01:29:23.000I mean, science can help, certainly, with medication, with antibiotics and antiviral drugs to help these people that have all these parasitic infections, which is incredibly rare in these tropical-rich jungle environments.
01:29:35.000You know, that's I think what would be the thing that I would look forward to the most to fix the world and stop this whole killing other people shit Well, let me let me this is really a perfect example I'm glad you brought that up the the especially with you got I'm with Congo because Uganda is the one who I just met a scientist this weekend and He's a plant breeder by trade who he said Here in the United States.
01:30:00.000Everybody is screaming that they want choice.
01:30:02.000They want GMO versus non GMO. He says Over by us, we just want food.
01:30:07.000And a very sincere man who is desperate for solutions for his country, and I'm going to work with him.
01:30:14.000And there's three things that could really help Uganda right now and that are actively on the ground there.
01:30:20.000Three solutions for problems they have.
01:30:21.000They have something like 70% of their carbohydrate calories come from bananas.
01:30:27.000And not like bananas we have, but African bananas.
01:30:33.000One of them, well, two bacterial, two pathogen problems.
01:30:36.000They get what's called xanthomonas, they get phytophthora.
01:30:39.000There are genetic engineering solutions that are in place that can solve both of those problems.
01:30:45.000There's also an issue that people there have vitamin A deficiency.
01:30:48.000So they're going blind along this golden rice line.
01:30:51.000You're looking at 250 million to 500 million blindnesses a year.
01:30:56.000Most of it in kids and half of them die within a year.
01:30:59.000And it's all because of a vitamin deficiency?
01:31:01.000And now they have bananas that have the genes from a banana that produces vitamin A that's kind of agriculturally useless, but they move those into the production banana from Uganda.
01:31:14.000And this is a Gates Foundation-sponsored stuff, and other people have done this.
01:31:18.000So now they have a banana that produces vitamin A, or beta-carotene, which is converted to vitamin A, and then resistant to the two main diseases.
01:31:30.000And you've got Greenpeace and other activist organizations on the ground there fighting it.
01:31:35.000And they're telling people that this is just the Westerners coming in to take over and give you the food and the technology they reject, saying that it'll cause sterility.
01:31:45.000These are very wealthy Western-funded organizations that are opposed to genetic modification.
01:31:51.000They know that if Uganda develops these products and is allowed to give them to their people and they solve a problem, that now the house of cards in the Western world falls down.
01:32:41.000Yeah, but it's very transparent, is what I guess I'm going for.
01:32:45.000This isn't some secret clandestine operation.
01:32:47.000This is something that is very well understood that this is what they're doing.
01:32:51.000But to play devil's advocate, isn't it possible that they really truly are concerned that a company like Monsanto would get their monetary hooks into a country and start fucking around there and doing a bunch of unethical shit?
01:33:07.000Throw the baby out with the bathwater?
01:33:09.000Well, let's not accept phantom fears for real fears.
01:33:13.000We've got people that need problems, and let's not say, well, maybe Monsanto will be involved, so let's not allow it.
01:33:19.000Let's let them use the best technology.
01:33:22.000Are they trying to license this technology and profit from their use of it?
01:33:26.000No, what's so funny about this is that these are laboratories there that said we want biotechnology, and they're developing their own labs and their own stuff.
01:33:35.000This professor I met this weekend, I'm going to go there next year to help him set up a lab to grow coffee in culture, not GMO coffee, which is maybe an interesting idea.
01:33:48.000But their issue is that they can make a tremendous amount of money by growing coffee for farmers.
01:33:54.000Farmers can grow coffee and have a very profitable operation, but you can't grow enough plants of the types that are resistant to the diseases.
01:34:01.000And so we're going to help them do that in tissue culture, where we can propagate tens of thousands of plants very quickly in a jar rather than by seed.
01:34:10.000He's actually going to sponsor a student to come to my lab to do that, and I'm going to go there and help him.
01:34:15.000But this is the kind of place where you can solve a problem with this kind of technology and where we're being blocked.
01:34:22.000And to me as a scientist, I think of the 20,000 people who die.
01:34:26.000I talk about it when I give talks and I can't help but get tears in my eyes when you think about the malnourished people I've met in my travels.
01:34:36.000You meet them one time, and it, you know, especially when you shake their hand and feel how weak and small they are, and you dedicate yourself to how you're going to fix it.
01:34:47.000And to have people say, well, it's all Monsanto, it's going to give you cancer, all this stuff that's not true, you block the investment in technology and the application of technology that can help.
01:35:01.000And so when we have this kind of conversation, I think about the allergy-free peanuts.
01:35:06.000I think about the golden bananas, the golden rice, all the applications we have.
01:35:14.000And we can't use them because of a fear of the technology.
01:35:17.000And you feel just an ignorance of the technology.
01:35:20.000And an ignorance of biology and genetics.
01:35:24.000But you also think that they have to be aware of this, too, in order to make this grand conspiracy to try to keep this illegal, to keep this out of this country.
01:35:34.000They have to be aware that they are preventing good.
01:36:38.000Scientists like me have totally screwed this up too, because the first time I talked to a public audience about GMOs 15 years ago, I sat down and I bombed them with science.
01:36:49.000And I told them about how it's done and details that they didn't need.
01:36:53.000I turned off more people than I converted.
01:36:57.000And only in the last three years really have us scientists got together and said, this is a crisis, that our technology can't reach those who need it, and we need to rethink the way that we talk to them about science.
01:37:09.000And it's not about beating people to death with the science hammer.
01:37:13.000It's about sharing ideas and things that we all really want and our solutions that we can use.
01:37:18.000And really separating a technology that's very good from companies that, you know, good, bad, or whatever.
01:37:25.000We need to know the technology is good.
01:37:29.000What do you think initially caused the fear of GMOs?
01:37:34.000Was there any particular story that came out that misrepresented it, that became viral?
01:37:40.000What was it that started off this big fear of this aspect of science?
01:37:44.000Well, I think there's always been an environmental movement that has decried the use of any kind of chemicals in farming.
01:38:13.000I went out to Hawaii to talk to them, and they all talked about back in the day when they would grow the cane and they would use all these chemicals.
01:38:21.000And whether the stories are true or not, I think there's a certain level of understanding that we did things differently back then.
01:38:27.000And we weren't in places like South America.
01:38:32.000If a little bit works, more is better.
01:38:35.000Here the regulations are really tight, and how you can use a compound and how it's allowed to be used, and the residues that are present are all very well monitored.
01:38:44.000And I think that the times are changed.
01:38:46.000But going back to your question of, you know, where did this come from?
01:38:49.000I think people, there was an environmental movement that was certainly on guard, and I'm glad they're there.
01:39:28.000But here's just another way that this company is rolling out a product to gain world domination of a food supply and make money off chemicals.
01:39:35.000Well, it's because of what we discussed earlier.
01:39:37.000Or I should say it could be because of what we discussed earlier.
01:39:41.000People have an inherent distrust in folks that are willing to copyright life.
01:39:48.000The idea that you own the copyright to some corn.
01:39:52.000And I know that you genetically modified it.
01:39:57.000And if you do that to a pig, what happens then?
01:40:00.000If you do it to a pig, why can't you do it to artificial livers?
01:40:03.000Why can't you do it to all sorts of things?
01:40:05.000You could all of a sudden copyright an entire human body and own a trademark on human bodies.
01:40:11.000You could specifically design a type of human That the only way you can get your kid to be alpha-beta-16 is you've got to get the alpha-beta-16 Monsanto gene inside of your kid.
01:40:22.000I mean, this is not outside the realm of possibility.
01:40:25.000This is within 100 years from now that we'll be doing shit like that.
01:40:28.000That freaks people out, that a corporation could own human life.
01:41:21.000I think it's two mothers, because there's a mother that provided the nucleus and a mother that provided the rest of the cell goo, and then the dad just sperm.
01:41:58.000And it has, because pigs, you know, their effluent is a problem.
01:42:04.000And to keep it out of the environment is a good thing.
01:42:07.000And so they made the Enviropig, and the Enviropig is a crushed idea now.
01:42:12.000There are only a few embryos left in the tank of liquid nitrogen.
01:42:16.000They made, this week I heard of salmon.
01:42:19.000That they put a salmon gene into a salmon to make it grow twice as fast.
01:42:24.000It was originally developed in 1989, and that the company that's been trying to get it approved has been at it since the 90s.
01:42:32.000And they've got all the approval, but it's never been finalized.
01:42:35.000And the beauty of this fish is, it grows to...
01:42:39.000Harvestable size as a you know a farmed fish in half the time So you're using half the stuff half the food half the resources to eat make the equivalent amount of protein But what if these fuckers get out into the wild?
01:42:52.000Yeah, they thought of that their hulk spawn they Trout well, they're all females and they're triploid so they have an extra chromosome that makes them infertile But isn't this how every bad horror movie starts?
01:43:51.000And so, when you can come up with a fish that gets to eating size in half the time, which could, in theory, really relieve pressure on wild salmon fishing and put high protein and good food into the hands of people who don't normally afford fish,
01:46:24.000You know, the thing that makes your computer grow better, that you can have the equivalent of the Apollo lander's firepower in terms of computational ability on your wrist.
01:47:14.000Like, you could probably explain this shit to me for months, and I would just be slowly working its way into my understanding.
01:47:20.000But people worry about what they don't understand.
01:47:24.000And they really worry about human beings, quote-unquote, playing God and manipulating genetics and manipulating life, even though that's kind of what we always have done.
01:47:43.000And one of the things about it is their attempts to keep invasive species from entering the Galapagos Islands.
01:47:51.000And the plant species were going there from the bottom of people's feet, where they had stepped in seeds, and then they stepped on the grass, and these new species of grasses grow.
01:48:00.000Pirates had left goats on the land so that they could come back and they have a food source when they would land on the island again.
01:48:06.000So they had these invasive goat species that were living all through.
01:48:09.000And they realized, like, there's no fucking way.
01:49:26.000They have these fucking foxes running around just killing everything.
01:49:30.000They're so bad that they have a problem with their sheep, where the foxes are grabbing the baby sheep as they're coming out, which is apparently like standard predator behavior.
01:49:40.000And this is freaking people out, because this is all because humans meddled.
01:49:43.000You introduced an animal to a place where it didn't belong, then you tried to introduce a predator to compensate for it, and you see this chain of events that's Really a problem and a managerial nightmare for people that have to manage the wildlife down there.
01:49:57.000Yeah, but all these examples happen, and certainly things do sneak out here and there.
01:50:03.000But when we want to talk about releasing a new plant variety, and we're not talking GMO. We're saying, let's say, a new elite strawberry that we know, or sorghum or whatever, that comes to our university.
01:50:43.000So you would establish that these seeds will grow this big, fat, juicy, apple-sized strawberry.
01:50:49.000They're super juicy and delicious, and you have to do it consistently and continually and isolate it and have it down to one seed that you could give them and they could test themselves.
01:50:57.000Well essentially, or one plant essentially.
01:51:01.000Strawberries are another good example where you can't take strawberry seeds from a strawberry and plant them and get any two plants to look alike.
01:51:38.000But that's the idea, is that we're able to vegetatively, as they say, propagate these things.
01:51:42.000But all of this stuff is so carefully evaluated.
01:51:45.000And with GMO, it goes through FDA to make sure you can eat it.
01:51:49.000Then it goes through EPA to make sure that it's safe for the environment.
01:51:53.000And they look at how does it affect insect populations or pollinators or whatever.
01:51:57.000And then that goes to USDA, who then tests for farm application and invasiveness on the farm.
01:52:04.000So these things are crazy tested, and all the what-ifs are really well established.
01:52:10.000Because if there was, and I always have kind of, the way I think about this is, if we do want to assume companies are money-grubbing and horrible, if something were to go wrong, it would be the end of the company in gigantic lawsuits.
01:52:22.000And so in self-preservation, let alone profit to make a decent product, these things are extensively tested.
01:52:29.000So, what do you think is, what are the top unwarranted concerns that people have over genetically modified foods?
01:52:37.000Well, I'm glad you asked that, because I don't mean to be just, I hate when I come off as being just a Too excited and ambitious about the technology because there's downsides to everything.
01:52:48.000But you have to weigh the risks versus benefits.
01:52:53.000And some of the things that we've seen is this resistance to herbicides.
01:52:57.000So one of the most useful GMO crops is this Roundup Ready, or really what it is, is glyphosate resistant.
01:53:06.000It's off patent now, so many companies make glyphosate.
01:53:09.000So I tend to go with glyphosate when we discuss the trait.
01:53:13.000What it allows a farmer to do is plant, say, soybeans.
01:53:17.000You plant the soybeans, and then as the soybeans start to grow and the weeds start to grow, the farmer goes over the top with an application of this stuff called glyphosate that kills the weeds, but the crop keeps growing through it.
01:53:30.000And as the crop grows, it shades out the weeds, so then the crop is the only dominant thing there.
01:53:36.000The amount of glyphosate that's applied is about a mug worth per acre in terms of active ingredient.
01:53:43.000It's a very potent chemical that disrupts a very specific part of the plant's biochemistry.
01:53:48.000It can't make amino acids, so it can't make proteins, specific proteins.
01:53:58.000So it's a very safe chemical for humans.
01:54:01.000Lately, it's come under a lot of fire.
01:54:03.000Actually, now that people aren't attacking the gene insertion process or the traits themselves, they're going after the chemicals used.
01:54:11.000In the process of using just that chemical over and over again on land, we talked about this idea with MRSA and with mutations and with the one that happens to figure it out surviving.
01:54:23.000There are weeds that can grow through glyphosate.
01:54:26.000And when that one weed can grow through because of a mutation, now it drops its seeds and pretty soon you've got a major problem because all the rest of the competitors are gone.
01:55:32.000Well, not we, not me, but our nurseries.
01:55:36.000So if University of Florida comes up with a new strawberry, that's fantastic.
01:55:40.000They'll take that foundational plant, do many years of testing to make sure it's good and consistent in many different places, and then that plant will go to a nursery where it's propagated by experts who make billions of plants in a couple of years, and then they sell those plants back to our farmers.
01:55:54.000But when a person would go to the store and they would buy seeds, like say heirloom tomato seeds, How would they make those seeds?
01:56:04.000Yeah, those are seeds that come from heirloom tomatoes.
01:56:06.000So that comes from what you think of as single seed descent.
01:56:08.000In other words, you have a tomato that has some good qualities, then its seeds also have the similar qualities.
01:56:14.000They've been inbred so that essentially there's no genetic diversity within that fruit.
01:56:19.000That every gene, rather than having a copy from mom and a copy from dad that are different, They're all the same or at least very narrow and so this way you can have seeds from that same parental plant that look very so that what you plant will come out to be very similar to the parent that it came from.
01:56:35.000But this is where it gets confusing to me because you were telling me that if someone took like one of those tomatoes and grew took the seeds from it and tried to grow tomato plants they would not be similar to the initial tomato.
01:56:50.000Well the heirlooms probably would be because they're so well inbred Okay, but a regular tomato, a Monsanto-grown regular tomato?
01:56:59.000A hybrid tomato that came from two very distinct parents.
01:57:02.000That thing's going to be a genetic mix of many different traits, and that thing will give rise to many different progeny.
01:57:09.000So if you got a tomato from the grocery store, one of those pale, funky tomatoes that they cut up in, like, Carl's Jr., and you get in your burger that just looks sad, if you took the seeds from that, you could possibly grow different kinds of tomatoes?
01:57:43.000So a guy at my university named Harry Klee, they did sensory tests on hundreds of people, and they asked them, well, what do you like about a tomato?
01:57:52.000And they tested all the heirlooms on them, and they tested what heirlooms they liked and which ones they didn't.
01:57:57.000Then they took apart, chemically, what's in each one of those kinds of tomatoes, and they analyzed them by Maybe what the consumers were tasting and the volatile components and the acid balance and the sugars and they were able to come up with a recipe for the perfect tomato and then they made hybrids that would fit that expectation and they came out with two new tomatoes called Garden Gem and Garden Treasure which are just going to be used in the home market but they're tomatoes that have exceptionally high flavor And
01:58:27.000it's one of these heirlooms bred against the University of Florida production tomatoes.
01:58:44.000But these tomatoes are fantastic and do really well out here.
01:58:47.000And how do they establish those seeds then?
01:58:49.000They just do enough generations of very specific tomatoes where they're confident that the seeds will yield the same type of tomato?
01:58:56.000Well, the two parents are very standard genetically.
01:59:01.000And then those two parents get sent to a place like, I don't know where they did these, but it was someplace like Costa Rica or something, where you can generate huge amounts of hybrids, where you have people who will hand pollinate flowers with the one pollen from the other, and then generate the seeds.
01:59:17.000And so that's how hybrid seeds are made.
01:59:19.000So they're making these seeds by hand germinating?
01:59:26.000And the result is fantastic because it's a combination of the best of the heirlooms versus the best of the production traits.
01:59:33.000And this is what's exciting for me as a scientist, is that we understand more about what the consumer wants now, and we also are understanding more about the chemistry of fruits and vegetables.
01:59:43.000So, even without GMO, we can understand the genes that cause people to like tomatoes, like what are the components of a tomato or a strawberry that people just love.
01:59:53.000And then identify those compounds and breed them back in, just with traditional breeding.
01:59:59.000Because I watched this thing about in China, they had areas where they had decimated the bee population so badly that they had to hand pollinate a lot of their plants.
02:00:11.000And by sheer luck, they found out that hand pollination is far more effective.
02:00:17.000And if they paid people whatever their hourly wage is, it's actually more cost-effective to fucking get rid of the bees, which is horrible to find out.
02:00:27.000But these people, it was way better, because apparently bees are just kind of random.
02:00:31.000You know, they don't do the best job, but they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
02:00:34.000They don't know that they're carrying pollen on them.
02:00:36.000You know, they're just kind of doing it.
02:00:37.000It's not like a very specific goal for them.
02:00:40.000But when it's a specific goal and they're using, like, these artistic paintbrushes and brushing pollen on it, the effectiveness was, like, way, way better than just allowing nature to run its course.
02:00:49.000Yeah, it may have been the case in China.
02:00:51.000And it depends on the crop, too, because a lot of things are wind-pollinated.
02:00:54.000So if you emasculate all of the plants that you plan to be the female parent, if you cut out all the little stamens and anthers, the male parts, you know, you take out...
02:01:19.000You pull out all the stamens, and then now this plant can only be fertilized by what comes from, you know, you plant adjacent rows of the pollen donor.
02:01:26.000And now bees and wind and everything else will take care of that.
02:01:29.000So these people hand pollinate these plants, then grow tomatoes specifically from those plants, and then sell those seeds or use those seeds to grow more?
02:01:37.000I mean, how many generations do they do it before they're confident that they can get a seed that if you get it, it will grow that same specific seed?
02:02:03.000After that, it's a crapshoot because genes in cells, when you're making your gametes, your male and female reproductive components, You're going through homogenizations that now you lose control of what genes are in the next generation.
02:02:23.000Because I never really thought that the tomato that you got, like if you got an heirloom tomato, wouldn't necessarily grow heirloom tomatoes from its seeds because...
02:02:36.000I mean, I would have always assumed that you would be able to get it that way, but you telling me what you guys had specifically done, that you had to hand pollinate in order to ensure that that would create those certain types of tomatoes.
02:02:47.000It's the way it goes now, and you make hybrids.
02:02:50.000But there's so much more cool stuff in plant genetics that we can do because of this kind of thing.
02:02:55.000It's very cool, but it's disturbing, again, to dummies like me, because then all it comes up like, whoa, people are in charge of the process of creating this very specific form of life.
02:03:05.000I mean, that's really what that tomato is.
02:03:29.000There's a case where you're using chemicals to change the number of chromosomes in a cell.
02:03:34.000So now this plant has twice as many chromosomes.
02:03:37.000So now when you cross it against one that has the normal amount of chromosomes, the result...
02:03:42.000So we'd have, let's say, two times the chromosomes, and the next generation you would cross it with something that has the normal set.
02:03:49.000The resulting ones have this weird intermediate set that can't be fertile.
02:03:54.000Okay, I'm gonna play the part of the dumb hippie.
02:03:55.000Man, it just doesn't feel right with you just, like, fucking with nature and not knowing the results.
02:04:01.000I mean, the world has, like, a biological system, and you're just tampering with it without totally understanding ratifications of what you're gonna do.
02:04:10.000There's all sorts of cancer and autism that exist today, and a lot of it is because of scientists' ignorance who think that they're so smart.
02:04:45.000It's just that he worries about this one aspect of food production that...
02:04:50.000Humans have always changed food, and we've just now learned how to do it with precision.
02:04:55.000And so this is where he's got to kind of, you know, have a little, you know, come to Jesus moment here and say, this is science working for him.
02:05:03.000I think, again, it goes to that this is a very, very complex issue that doesn't have a lot of black and white in it.
02:05:14.000And like all things, there's pros and cons to the application of it, especially really complicated things, like anything involving biology.
02:06:03.000The only reason why there's numbers like that is because a hundred thousand of them are smart as shit, and those really, or maybe a million, might be a million out of seven billion, right, that have been responsible for putting together this amazing society.
02:06:14.000It's not me, but those people that have, yeah, there's been some mistakes along the way, but I think Without that innovation in that thirst for improvement that people seem to just we just have Like inherently like a guy like you when you're talking about these the application of these Technologies the application of this science in this work you get all jazzed up I mean senior you almost started crying when you were talking about these people that you had met that were emaciated You have a deep connection to this and
02:06:45.000then so you you're fucking important as shit, dude Well, you're more important than jay-z.
02:06:58.000Is he the guy who created Golden Rice?
02:06:59.000No, Norman Borlaug, he did more than that.
02:07:01.000Norman Borlaug was a wonderful, simple, came from a farm background.
02:07:07.000He became a scientist and studied ways that he could try to solve problems on the face of the earth for the hungry, and especially in India and Mexico.
02:07:14.000And his idea was to take the kind of plants that may never be able to mix naturally and make some crosses.
02:07:23.000Dwarfing varieties, so plants that were lower to the ground that would have fewer problems.
02:07:27.000And he made these crosses that really would go to feed a billion people.
02:07:33.000And scientists like me, I look at him, and he is the ultimate hero to me.
02:07:38.000He's a guy who should be a household name here.
02:07:41.000I stand on the shoulders of a giant, and he passed away in 2009. And those of us who've heard about him, who've read about him, who had a chance to see him speak, it changes us.
02:07:54.000It was his compassion to take care of the needy that drove him.
02:08:02.000It was about being the guy that when he came to the village, everybody said, let's take him out to our best restaurant because here's a guy we like.
02:08:10.000He was a guy who insisted, if you visited his campus, to carry your bags to your car, despite the fact that he was a Nobel laureate.
02:08:18.000That's the kind of role models that we have in science, and this is the kind of role model that other people have to be aware of, that for every Norman Borlaug, it's going to take a few million evil scientists.
02:08:29.000We have to understand that, and he made crosses that were amazingly diverse, and that brought plants together that couldn't survive, that would never happen in the wild, and fed people because of it.
02:09:26.000I love talking to the anti-GMO crowds.
02:09:29.000I mean, I go into, and I'm the one they call because they know I'm reasonable.
02:09:33.000But I go into places and people will get in my face and yell at me.
02:09:37.000I'll have people come up and scream in my face about how my company has given their kid cancer.
02:09:45.000I mean, I get some heavy shit, and it happens often.
02:09:49.000But the idea is to get into those rooms and get into those spaces, just like we're doing here, and have a conversation, and introduce people to technology and get them to de-Monsantoize this.
02:10:00.000Talk about ways that we can make it work to make plant products that would require fewer pesticides, like the BT has.
02:10:07.000How many people have come up to you and yelled at you that you gave one of their loved ones cancer?
02:10:15.000A beautiful woman from Brazil, I think originally, who had a child who had cancer.
02:10:21.000And she said, here's what your company did to my child.
02:10:26.000What company did she think you were representing?
02:10:28.000I assume the Big M or one of the big companies.
02:10:32.000And the reason I was there was because I was invited by the companies to come to the island to talk to people as a neutral party because they were having a lot of conflicts.
02:10:52.000And when I came there, I made it my business to not hang around with the Syngentas, Monsantos, Dows.
02:10:58.000I didn't want to talk to the other scientists.
02:11:02.000I wanted to talk to the farmers and I wanted to talk to the people who were afraid and the people who had concerns because I could help them understand.
02:11:09.000And that was what my goal was, to help them to talk to them.
02:11:12.000And anyone who was there, even people who are adamantly anti-GMO, I think many of them would agree that I was very peaceful and very quick to engage them.
02:11:23.000That when I saw people in the audience at farmer forums where I was speaking, I'd see them shaking their heads and going, no way, no way.
02:11:30.000The minute I was done and the applause was over and the questions were answered, I chased them out into the parking lot and said, I need to talk to you.
02:11:37.000Because this is where this conversation needs to be.
02:11:39.000It needs to be one-on-one over a pizza and a cup of coffee.
02:14:00.000I think one of the things that you discussed and we talked about earlier that I thought was really fascinating was this idea that planting crops isn't really natural.
02:14:09.000Because I passed through Alberta this past weekend and I was driving through these enormous agricultural areas and I was thinking to myself like, wow, this is really crazy.
02:14:38.000And if you look at where the crops came from that we grow, I mean, corn doesn't belong in North America.
02:14:44.000I mean, it was, well, it came from southern Mexico.
02:14:47.000It wasn't in the United States and Canada anyway.
02:14:49.000If you look at a map, and I'll show you one maybe later, or if you look up crop domestication or centers of origin of major food crops, you see that there are maps and Google images that show that U.S. you have sunflowers, Maybe some progenitors to strawberry and blueberry and maybe some kind of brassicas that might be like canola.
02:15:08.000But for the most part, there's nothing that comes from here.
02:15:12.000Tomatoes are from South America, potatoes, peanuts, citrus is from Southeast Asia, apples are from Kazakhstan.
02:15:19.000All of our cabbage, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, all that's from the Middle East and Mediterranean areas.
02:16:46.000If you look at strawberry, it's a great story because strawberry grows naturally on the forest floors of North America and also from Chile.
02:16:54.000But the two are two different species.
02:16:56.000So there's two different kinds of yams, then.
02:18:09.000It's Yam 1 and Yam 2. Right, but nobody thinks about it that way.
02:18:12.000You go to a supermarket, it doesn't say that.
02:18:14.000Well, because the ones you get in the supermarket are probably just one kind.
02:18:17.000This other thing is probably something that doesn't work in production.
02:18:22.000But it is ultimately very fascinating to look at this map and think about what it must have been like, of course, To be people that were traveling all over the world looking for plants and looking for spices.
02:18:34.000I mean that was like a big part of the whole trade where they would get on boats and travel to foreign lands.
02:18:41.000They were trying to find plants and spices and shit.
02:18:43.000Let me tell you, the strawberry story is so cool.
02:18:46.000They grow in the forest floors of North America, like, you know, Eastern Seaboard, and people were dragging them back to Europe on colony ships.
02:18:55.000In 1500s, there's lots of them going back, and you can find accounts in the literature.
02:19:00.000And then in 1714, there was a spy who was going to South America, a French spy, who was going to Chile to look at Spanish fortifications.
02:19:10.000And he found a kind of strawberry that was being grown by indigenous peoples.
02:19:14.000And he brought this thing back to Europe.
02:19:17.000And unfortunately, these flowers were only male.
02:19:21.000You had a problem where these plants couldn't self-fertilize.
02:19:24.000So these plants from South America and these plants from North America made their way to the Botanical Garden in Versailles, where a teenager essentially started to identify crosses between these two species that came in different places because of spies and colonists,
02:19:40.000and there the pollen got together to make our modern-day strawberry.
02:20:02.000Every one of these plants has a really cool reticulate story about the way it came to be on our plate.
02:20:09.000I just think plants are absolutely fascinating.
02:20:12.000Like I said, I know guys who grow marijuana, and they use clones, and I had no idea what that even meant until I went to this guy's green room, and I was like, wait a minute, you take a...
02:20:23.000Okay, so you take a piece of this plant, you grow more plants.
02:20:27.000He was one of the first guys to get arrested for the medical weed, Todd McCormick, and his setup, the way they had charged him for individual plants.
02:20:36.000They had said his clones were individual plants.
02:20:39.000But if they were, like, in bulk, if they were all on one plant, it would be legal.
02:20:47.000Like, to take that plant and clone it, then it becomes a unique object in and unto itself, because that could be used to grow more illicit drugs.
02:20:59.000No, it's funny because the, so my main research, we didn't even talk about that stuff, but I work with identifying genes associated with flavors and strawberries and things like this using genomics tools, but I also do a lot with light.
02:21:11.000And so I do a lot with LED and a lot with how you are able to change plant traits using light, so make them taste better or change the way they grow.
02:21:24.000I was in the space early back in the late 90s.
02:21:27.000I've been getting emails from Stoner18 at AOL.com for years, and people asking about how do you grow a plant that you would want to grow, under what color lights, because there's so much of that production which has been brought into controlled environments.
02:21:44.000I never was able to answer the questions very well because we're forbidden to work on such products, at our university anyway.
02:21:54.000But using light to control those aspects of plant growth and development is something they're really interested in.
02:22:25.000So plant whispering is basically where we use light.
02:22:27.000So if you think about a plant, plants have 12 different light sensors at least that listen to different parts of the spectrum.
02:22:33.000So plants can see red, blue, green, even the red light that's off the end of the spectrum that we can't see, and they can see UV. And so when we give different pulses or different treatments at different times of the day, we can change the way a plant grows,
02:22:49.000what metabolites it accumulates, maybe the flavors.
02:22:52.000We can make cilantro taste absolutely horrible.
02:22:55.000If you like it, we can make it taste so cilantro-ly it's difficult to eat.
02:23:01.000But we can change plant flavors, we can change their colors, we can change many of their attributes.
02:23:07.000And now we're trying to understand how we can give light treatments to plant materials, like harvest strawberries, treat them with light before they go into the supply chain, before they go to the store and through all the refrigeration, and have them change their gene expression patterns so they come out the other end better and last longer in your refrigerator or last longer in your countertop.
02:23:28.000So our idea is to essentially change the gene expression in fruits and vegetables using the language of light to dictate how they decay.
02:23:36.000And my feeling is that we've got, you know, you say 7 billion now, we've got 10 billion, 3 more billion coming.
02:23:46.000Right now, if you buy a tomato at the store, or let's say you pick a tomato off the plant in Florida, the odds of that tomato being eaten by a person are 1 in 2. 50% of our food is wasted.
02:24:02.000And in the developing world, it either spoils or gets infestation.
02:24:07.000And one place where we can really solve the problem or address the problem of the 10 billion is in post-harvest technology, what they call post-harvest.
02:24:47.000I think that you'll see a lot of this online these days, that there's a lot of companies that are starting in abandoned warehouses and places where they use LED lights to do what's called vertical gardening.
02:24:58.000Where they grow plants in city centers where you don't have the transportation costs and the carbon footprint.
02:25:03.000So you can bring plants to market cheaper and maybe even higher quality products.
02:25:09.000So what I think about it, and this is where we think about this versus GMO. GMO, we change one gene.
02:25:18.000EMO, or environmental modification of plants, which is what I like to think of plant whispering, we're changing lots of genes in ways we don't necessarily understand, but we enjoy the outcomes.
02:25:42.000Is that similar to the light that we use for plants?
02:25:44.000And if so, is there a concern that there's a similar negative reaction somehow or another in those plants where they wouldn't be as healthy as they would be in natural sunlight?
02:25:53.000Sure, that you can have cases where plants, since your whole metabolism is driven by light, the whole photosynthesis, that if you have problems with your light sensing, that's why you have 13 different light sensors that control your growth and development, because you're paying attention to every aspect of that ambient environment.
02:26:11.000And making very good, let's say, predictions or conclusions based upon the information you get from the spectrum.
02:26:18.000And that's where we've been actually thinking and where we've applied the idea of manipulating the spectrum to change the way the plant grows.
02:26:25.000Ultimately, anything that isn't beneficial, we're not interested in.
02:26:28.000We want to grow better food that's more nutritious and lasts longer so that we're able to grow things more sustainably.
02:26:33.000Are these lights normal lights, or are these lights like some very specific growing type lights that give off a very specific spectrum that's not like normal LED or fluorescent lights?
02:26:48.000There's specific combinations of LEDs that are computationally controlled.
02:26:51.000So it's controlled at a certain, what would you say, amperage?
02:27:02.000In the light business, we call it fluence rate, the number of photons that are produced per square meter.
02:27:08.000The idea is that some of the photons we produce that give plants information you can't see.
02:27:13.000So you can't really call it intensity.
02:27:16.000The stuff that's in UV and off the end of the red part of the spectrum, it has information for plants that's really potent, but it's not information that you can see.
02:27:26.000But if you put a plant under far red light, the stuff off the end of the red part of the rainbow, the plant goes berserk.
02:27:32.000It starts growing really lanky and long.
02:27:45.000Consequence on the actual product that the plant produces that's consumed by humans, whether it's a tomato or an avocado or whatever, is there anything about this light that changes the actual food that you eat?
02:27:56.000Oh sure, yeah, and what we use it for, and we've done most of our experiments on sprouts, like kale sprouts, we can make kale sprouts change the level of glucosinolates, which are the anti-cancer compounds.
02:28:07.000We can increase that stuff just by using light.
02:28:13.000You also can change the attractive colors, make things that are purple or green.
02:28:19.000There's a kind of lettuce I can grow under eight different light treatments that gives you essentially eight different kinds of lettuce leaves.
02:28:39.000Like if you had four different rooms, you were growing four different kinds of lettuce, would I be able to walk in those rooms and discern that there's any difference in the light of each individual room?
02:28:49.000There's a lot of the stuff you can even find online with like, if you look at like LED and plant growth, you'd see all kinds of different ways that people do this.
02:28:58.000The problem is that most places stick plants under a purple light or under a pink light and they get some effect.
02:29:19.000I know what you're doing, dude, with your light theory.
02:29:21.000It just seems like the thing that people would be worried the most is that there would be some sort of nutritional deficiency in something that's grown with artificial light.
02:29:30.000That growing something in the sunlight is somehow or another better for you.
02:29:34.000Does that make any sense at all, or is that just total nonsense?
02:29:54.000So it seems to me that there's just a giant positive aspect to this about keeping food for longer, feeding more people, giving people nutrition in areas where it's unavailable.
02:30:06.000Seems to me there's a massive, massive positive benefit of it.
02:30:09.000What can we do to mitigate or prevent any negative aspects of it?
02:30:14.000The negative aspects of it being that somehow or another it could harm people.
02:30:20.000Somehow or another the corporations behind it would act in a greedy way that would be detrimental to the area where the crops are grown or whatever.
02:30:29.000I guess I'm kind of tooting our own horn here by saying we need to support public science.
02:30:36.000You know, we've got this group of people, like in the land-grant university system, this was a brilliant idea that came out of the Morrill Act back in the 1860s, where they established a university in every state that's job was to take care of the public need, where you train the students,
02:30:51.000you help the farmers, you do the research that puts you at the cutting edge to help the farmers and train the students.
02:30:56.000And that's a model that's still here today.
02:30:59.000University of California Davis is the best in the world at this, and they're amazing at the things that happen there.
02:31:05.000The problem is that as a nation, we've been less excited to fund science.
02:31:11.000Right now, if I write a proposal to the USDA or National Science Foundation, the odds of it getting funded are between 5 and 10 percent.
02:31:20.000And if you think that they have these competitions once a year, you know, you may go 10 years without getting a research award.
02:31:55.000Like, if one is going to college and you're graduating, you're getting your master's in whatever you're getting it in, and you get recruited by a company like Monsanto, does that happen?
02:32:05.000Or do you go to them and look to get a job?
02:32:07.000Like, how does a scientist become a good scientist like yourself, or an Evil scientists like even the most evil we would think the guy who created the atomic bomb but Oppenheimer wasn't evil at all and he was actually really disturbed by the whole event the thing that he had created he was a part of this Scientific process that ultimately seemed necessary the time being the first person to come up with this bomb and So,
02:32:49.000Everybody else just takes out the graduation.
02:32:51.000But to be honest, I do know lots of people who work there and lots of our former students from our program have gone there because they're hiring.
02:33:29.000But the companies are happy to take these people, especially people with good backgrounds in plant breeding.
02:33:35.000Because Monsanto, at the end of the day, they're not a GMO company.
02:33:38.000They're not a chemical company anymore.
02:33:40.000They're a plant genetic improvement company.
02:33:43.000And they're working on breeding plants so that then you can add that gene to the elite background.
02:33:48.000There's only so much you can do with a GMO transgene.
02:33:51.000The rest of that has to be done by breeding.
02:33:54.000And lots of plant breeders, like people come to my lab, the two plant breeders to my lab, one of them got snapped up by one company, another one got snapped up by another, right out of the PhD, each one of them into a six-figure plus salary, plus all kinds of benefits.
02:34:09.000Do you ever think about going over to the dark side?
02:34:17.000I like how you're staying with my Star Wars terminology.
02:34:24.000My Yoda said, stay in university, you must.
02:34:29.000My whole thing is I think I like being in the public sector because I don't like to have secrets.
02:34:33.000I don't like to have proprietary information that I can't share.
02:34:37.000My whole thing is, and I've been this way my entire career, when I got the first little bit of strawberry sequence information, With an $1,800 grant that I got from the Florida Strawberry Association, we got the first little bit of strawberry information, we gave it away.
02:34:52.000Because the idea was to spark more research and more discovery.
02:34:55.000We could have sat on it and used it just for our lab.
02:34:58.000So you guys are like the Elon Musks of strawberries.
02:36:26.000You know, I'm grateful that companies do anything for us, if anything.
02:36:30.000You know, like if anybody wanted to build a new building on our campus, I wouldn't say no.
02:36:34.000But that doesn't mean they're going to get any favors.
02:36:37.000So when you, okay, if you are involved in any sort of a project or any sort of a scientific analysis of something, are you required to release the results to your superiors before you go public with them?
02:37:42.000You could have easily just said to me, I mean, as far as I knew, you could have easily just said, well, everything that I do has to go through a board and they have to devote on whether...
02:37:55.000Like, I've been accused of, like, with different jobs that I've had, different shows, and even working for the UFC, of someone telling me what I can and can't say.
02:38:18.000What you're talking about is these discoveries that could potentially impact untold thousands of people in a very beneficial or in a very negative way.
02:38:36.000And especially when we're in a country where we're all pretty comfortable and we all have plenty of food and we have a few bucks in our wallet to do stuff, that we do tend to focus on the worries and on the what-ifs.
02:38:48.000We're afraid of something upsetting the apple cart.
02:38:51.000But I can tell you as a scientist that if I were to find something, like just through some process, through some experiment, find something wrong with a Monsanto product or a Dow product or whatever.
02:39:01.000I don't like to just pick on the big M. I find something wrong with a product in agriculture that would shift the paradigm, that would change it from something safe and used everywhere to something that we better have some alarming care with.
02:39:13.000That would be something that, when I publish that, it would be on the best journal.
02:39:35.000And probably get a Nobel Prize out of it.
02:39:37.000So, you don't think that there would be any negative repercussions before it was clearly established that you were correct?
02:39:43.000I mean, like we were talking about before, if it's involving a corporation that's profiting in the billion-dollar range and making insane amounts of money, and you have some information that would put a monkey wrench into the gears of this incredible money-making venture, you don't think there'd be negative repercussions?
02:40:00.000No, I'll tell you exactly what would happen, and I'm sure this is what would happen.
02:40:04.000The first people I would let know would be the company that makes it.
02:40:39.000They knew and they kept their fucking mouth shut.
02:40:41.000No, it's a good point, you know, and it ties in with my kind of naive idealism sometimes that I think everybody's going to do the right time.
02:40:49.000But at the same time, the other side of the coin is that if I was the guy who discovered the ignition issue, I And I was an investigative reporter, and I was able to put together seven or eight cases of this and tie it to the ignition and did a study that analyzed the mechanism of failure.
02:41:08.000And I went to GE or GM and said, this is a problem.
02:41:29.000But this is how it should work, is that we've got to have, but those are scientific processes that go through a series of steps to develop evidence that's analyzed to come to a conclusion.
02:41:39.000And then we can shape policy based on that.
02:41:41.000And that's where I get excited about what we can do with science.
02:41:45.000Well, I mean, there's reasons that people are worried, though, about information leaking out that could harm companies.
02:41:51.000I mean, there's reasons why people shield their identity when they're leaking certain information.
02:41:55.000Because they get caught, and then those companies get really pissed off, and even if it's just lawsuits.
02:42:00.000I mean, any company like Monsanto could cripple any normal person just with lawsuits.
02:42:06.000They would just smash you with lawsuits.
02:42:08.000When you are in charge of this kind of information, obviously we're not talking about the conspiratorial stuff, we're talking about like the nutritional things like the bananas that you're passionate about, the vitamin A and M. What is that feeling like when you You're being ignored,
02:42:27.000or you're being, either it's a conspiracy by these companies that they don't want, or these people that they don't want to open up the door for genetically modified foods, or it's ignorance to the science involved with these people and their massive What does it feel like to be the guy who knows?
02:42:47.000Because that's got to be a crazy place to be, to be the scientist who actually understands the mechanisms involved in the creation of these very organic products that were manipulated by human beings and how they could benefit human beings.
02:43:08.000This is why I appreciate you so much in letting me do this today, and why people like Kara Santamaria, who has been so helpful in talking about the GMO issue.
02:43:17.000Anytime we can talk about this and get people to understand where I'm coming from, that there's trust here.
02:43:24.000Joe, every night I answer 30 minutes to an hour of emails from the concerned public who ask questions to me about this.
02:43:32.000I was watching your Twitter today, your feed between yesterday when I announced that you were going to be on and today.
02:43:58.000Because this is how we're going to change it.
02:44:01.000It comes from talking to people who have concerns and people who are worried and help them understand the science.
02:44:07.000Because if they get this, then they're less likely to worry about the artificial problems and start focusing on the real problems.
02:44:16.000And how important is it to fund more public science and to try in some way to make more people attracted to what you're doing as opposed to going over to these universities?
02:44:29.000Because if people really are concerned, like probably that's the best way to deal with it.
02:44:34.000The best way to deal with science is to fund science.
02:44:43.000The idea of being corrupted seems so tempting.
02:44:46.000Well, but we do have to be careful because companies can fund individual laboratories or programs or universities, and it doesn't necessarily mean corruption.
02:45:37.000Kids have this kind of modular understanding of the world anyway, that they're comfortable with bits and pieces coming together in different ways to make different products.
02:45:46.000And when we talk, I spend about maybe two or three mornings a month with third to fifth graders, seventh graders, mostly third and fifth.
02:46:54.000The cool part about that, though, is that he's right.
02:46:57.000If you could isolate the things from the insect.
02:46:59.000And so my challenge as a teacher in that scenario, when I'm interrogating their interest in science, is to somehow never tell one of them that they're crazy.
02:47:07.000That I have to take whatever answer they give me and somehow loop it back to, well, here's how you're right and how it just might work.
02:48:04.000He's like Stephen King, like the dome book that he wrote...
02:48:10.000The kid made a whole fucking ocean garden that way.
02:48:13.000There's ways to tie them back in, but I think the whole idea is that they're so used to their teacher saying, wrong, that here's a case where I set up a situation around a real problem that's in their state, maybe in their yard, that allows them to actually exercise their science muscles as little kids.
02:48:28.000And I think that's a big way we change this.
02:48:30.000Yeah, that is a really important point when it comes to human beings, little children, is figuring out a way to not make their curiosity a negative.
02:48:40.000You know, don't scold them for having a ridiculous imagination.
02:48:43.000You know, express the issue with it or how it could be right and why it's probably wrong.
02:48:50.000You know, but, and you gotta figure out a way to reward them for taking that chance to come up with this dome under the ocean.
02:48:55.000Because that, who knows, that kid might have three of those that suck, but one of those that everybody goes, hey, wait a minute.
02:49:04.000And there's a great video, a great TED talk by someone named Allison Gopnik.
02:49:08.000And Allison, I forget where she's at, maybe Berkeley.
02:49:11.000She is a scientist who studies the way kids think.
02:49:14.000And she shows that children, when they're born and through the next few months, are actually the smartest they've ever going to be in terms of their ability to test hypotheses and synthesize information.
02:49:28.000Maybe I don't want to be like an indictment of the way we train people, but there is a certain amount of curiosity and exploration that we tend to break out of kids.
02:49:39.000And I think as an educator, as someone who is really committed to education, that getting to kids is the most important way to get science to improve.
02:49:48.000Get them so excited about the cool things we can do.
02:49:51.000And it breaks my heart when I have a kid show up at the March against Monsanto who's holding a sign saying, your science causes autism.
02:50:01.000And here's a kid who's going to now go through life thinking science is evil and done by evil people with evil intentions when really we're trying to get that kid may hold the solution to the next big citrus crisis.
02:50:13.000Yeah, it's unbelievably ironic that so many anti-science websites are online.
02:50:28.000This is not an all-natural computer you're typing this recipe through.
02:50:32.000I think it's really important that people recognize that science has brought us virtually every single thing that you enjoy today.
02:50:40.000Outside of the natural world, outside of coconuts falling and you eat them.
02:50:44.000There's so much that we have relied on science about.
02:50:49.000The way we stay warm, the way we keep things cool, the way we communicate with each other.
02:50:54.000And this fear that people have about foods being modified, I think, it's a big one.
02:51:01.000And it's one of the biggest ones in this country.
02:51:03.000And so to have a guy like you come on and express why we should be concerned and why we shouldn't be concerned, and what the positive aspects of it are, I think it's really, really important, man.
02:51:14.000I think a lot of people need to hear what you have to say and they need to be able to listen to it from an objective standpoint and understand that this is a very complex issue.
02:51:22.000It's very complex and it's very important.
02:51:24.000I appreciate that we have time to talk about it because it's something that I really encourage people.
02:51:30.000There's places where you can get great resources.
02:51:32.000There's a blog called biofortified.org which is written by scientists who are independent scientists and it really is just an information hub about this particular topic.
02:53:03.000So you play the antagonist, and so they come along, and then they have to use you as a tool to get to the root of the problem, the ignorance that people have with science.
02:54:03.000Why don't you have a podcast where people, instead of like, I've seen rather you spend so much time typing.
02:54:11.000I'm sure you can type, or you can talk rather, quicker than you can type all that shit out.
02:54:15.000So why don't you just take those questions and have people send them to you every week, and if they're not redundant, just that way you can choose.
02:54:21.000You know what you've already addressed, and you can say, hey, we covered that in podcast two or three.
02:54:27.000You would have a kick-ass podcast, man.
02:56:49.000Yeah, my stepdad went there for architecture or something.
02:56:52.000Well, I totally admired the faculty there, and when I had the opportunity to apply there, I applied and thinking, there's no way I'll ever get the call.
02:57:01.000And I got the interview, and then I interviewed, and I thought, there's no way I'll ever get the job.
02:57:05.000And then when they called me for the job, I showed up, and I've always felt like the guy on the All-Star team who just gets put on the team because his team didn't have anybody else.
02:58:10.000I mean, you know, I have a great relationship with the growers in our state and the people who are doing the farming and the people in those industries.
02:58:17.000There's a lot of great people in Florida.