The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1722 - Bartow Elmore

00:00:12.000 Seed money.

00:00:14.000 Tell me.

00:00:15.000 Tell me about all this dirtiness. 0.68

00:00:16.000 Tell me about these monsters and the money that they make.

00:00:22.000 Yeah.

00:00:22.000 How'd you get involved in this, first of all?

00:00:23.000 Yeah, sure.

00:00:24.000 Why'd this become your field of study?

00:00:27.000 Well, thanks, Jeff, for having me on.

00:00:29.000 This is awesome.

00:00:29.000 My pleasure.

00:00:29.000 Thanks for being here.

00:00:30.000 I'm excited to talk to you about this.

00:00:32.000 Very important subject, right?

00:00:33.000 Yeah.

00:00:33.000 For me, it was.

00:00:35.000 It really started with the first project I worked on, the first book I wrote, which was the history of Coca-Cola and its environmental impact around the world.

00:00:44.000 You were just telling us that Pepsi is actually older than Coke, which is surprising.

00:00:47.000 Dr. Pepper.

00:00:48.000 Yeah, Dr. Pepper.

00:00:49.000 Dr. Pepper's older?

00:00:50.000 Yeah, Dr. Pepper's older.

00:00:51.000 Weirdly.

00:00:52.000 And you think of it as like the, you know.

00:00:54.000 Yeah, I thought it was like the new kid on the block.

00:00:56.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:00:57.000 That's the oldest?

00:00:58.000 1885. Not the oldest, but it's older than Coke.

00:01:00.000 What's the oldest?

00:01:01.000 Coke was 1886. I don't really even know what the oldest one would be.

00:01:04.000 So Dr. Pepper came along first, then Coca-Cola, and then Pepsi?

00:01:08.000 And then Pepsi later. 0.99

00:01:08.000 So Pepsi is still bullshit. 0.99

00:01:10.000 Look, you're talking to a guy from Atlanta, so I agree with you there. 0.99

00:01:13.000 What does that mean?

00:01:15.000 Well, Atlanta is like, yeah, Coke's from Atlanta.

00:01:17.000 And, you know, when we were growing up, it was like in the water.

00:01:21.000 You had to drink Coca-Cola.

00:01:22.000 In fact, when you want any soft drink, you just say, I want a Coke.

00:01:25.000 Yeah, nobody says I'd like a Pepsi.

00:01:27.000 Well, maybe they do.

00:01:28.000 But the thing about Pepsi is like it never had cocaine in it, did it?

00:01:31.000 No.

00:01:32.000 Actually, this is relevant.

00:01:33.000 I mean, so this was the beginning of this book because I was doing that.

00:01:37.000 I was looking at all the ingredients that go into Coca-Cola and saying, okay, what's in the drink, first of all, because it's from my hometown.

00:01:43.000 That's where it started.

00:01:44.000 I said, okay, I want to find out all these natural resources in the product.

00:01:48.000 And, you know, is Coca in the drink?

00:01:52.000 And also caffeine.

00:01:53.000 We'll get to that.

00:01:54.000 That's how it connects to Monsanto.

00:01:55.000 But coca was the most interesting, actually, because I thought, you know, it's called Coca-Cola, so does it have cocaine in it?

00:02:03.000 And so I went back to look at that, and it turns out, yeah, you know, trace amounts.

00:02:08.000 Still?

00:02:09.000 In the beginning.

00:02:10.000 No, no, no.

00:02:10.000 In the beginning.

00:02:10.000 Yeah, but this is what's interesting about the history of the drink.

00:02:14.000 So...

00:02:15.000 This is 1886. Back then, the coca leaf was actually seen as something that was...

00:02:20.000 Medicinal, right?

00:02:21.000 Medicinal.

00:02:22.000 Inocuous.

00:02:22.000 Absolutely.

00:02:23.000 And everyone was using the coca leaf.

00:02:26.000 I mean, there was a drink called Vin Mariani.

00:02:28.000 It was actually a wine, a red wine that was mixed with coca leaves.

00:02:32.000 Wow.

00:02:32.000 So it kind of had a little kick to it.

00:02:34.000 And like Queen Victoria of England drank this stuff.

00:02:37.000 Ulysses S. Grant, our president, was like, woo!

00:02:40.000 You know, coca wine.

00:02:41.000 This is awesome.

00:02:43.000 And even the Pope, actually.

00:02:46.000 I wonder if communion would have had, you know, Vin Mariani, we would all be Catholic or something.

00:02:51.000 But so it was really popular.

00:02:54.000 And this guy, this guy who was down on his luck, John Pemberton, who started Coca-Cola in Atlanta, he wanted to make a Coca drink himself.

00:03:01.000 And so he made this, originally Coke was actually a wine.

00:03:04.000 It was like a wine of Coca.

00:03:05.000 It was a red wine mixed with Coca leaves.

00:03:07.000 Exact knockoff of that drink that was really popular.

00:03:12.000 And then Prohibition hits Atlanta because we're in the Protestant South in the 1880s.

00:03:17.000 And so he has to take out the alcohol.

00:03:19.000 And so he creates this non-alcoholic drink, Coca-Cola, that has the coca leaf in it.

00:03:25.000 They weren't concerned about the coca.

00:03:27.000 They were concerned about alcohol.

00:03:29.000 And it remained in the drink throughout the 20th century.

00:03:33.000 What kind of dose would it have in it?

00:03:35.000 Very small.

00:03:37.000 And this, I think, is important.

00:03:39.000 People equate the coca leaf with cocaine because, yes, you can make cocaine, like street cocaine, from processing all these coca leaves.

00:03:49.000 But if you go to Peru today or you go to certain parts of South America, people chew coca leaves.

00:03:55.000 It's a normal practice.

00:03:56.000 It's been going back thousands of years to the Inca even.

00:04:00.000 And so it's very small amounts.

00:04:02.000 We're not talking about, like, In fact, you'd probably get a bigger hit from experience from a cup of espresso from Starbucks.

00:04:11.000 But interestingly, the reason that cocaine became taboo and why it got pulled from the drink had nothing to do with national laws in the country, which was so interesting when I was studying it.

00:04:22.000 It had everything to do with racism, actually, in the South, because there was a concern that Cocaine was contributing to black crime in Atlanta, which was being, of course, blown up by segregationists and white supremacists.

00:04:36.000 And Asa Candler, who was a white guy in Atlanta, didn't want to have anything to do with that.

00:04:40.000 So he decides, kind of quietly, to take out the cocaine.

00:04:44.000 But here's the interesting thing, Joe.

00:04:46.000 They kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients.

00:04:50.000 Yeah.

00:04:51.000 So secret ingredient number five.

00:04:53.000 By the way, Coke doesn't like talking about this.

00:04:55.000 This is not part of their history that they like discussing.

00:04:59.000 But it's clear as day in the archives.

00:05:02.000 You can see it.

00:05:03.000 So it's called merchandise number five, the fifth secret ingredient in Coca-Cola.

00:05:08.000 I like the name.

00:05:09.000 Isn't it merchandise number five?

00:05:11.000 Well, the whole idea is that you name things so that no one asks questions, right?

00:05:16.000 What's merchandise number five?

00:05:17.000 Also, that ingredient includes a little bit of the cola nut, which is from West Africa, actually.

00:05:25.000 It was originally in there because it has caffeine, another kind of caffeine kick.

00:05:29.000 That's where Coca-Cola comes from.

00:05:31.000 But cola, by the way, is with a K, the actual cola nut.

00:05:35.000 Anyway, that's merchandise number five.

00:05:36.000 And it's basically the flavor of the coca leaf, the essence of the coca leaf.

00:05:42.000 And the way it works is these leaves are brought in from Peru is actually where Coca-Cola sourced it.

00:05:48.000 And that was crazy.

00:05:49.000 I had to track down, okay, where are they getting their coca leaves from?

00:05:52.000 And there's this company called Maywood Chemical Company.

00:05:55.000 Today the company's called Steppen Chemical Company.

00:05:58.000 Is that in New Jersey?

00:05:59.000 It is in New Jersey, exactly.

00:06:00.000 Maywood, New Jersey.

00:06:01.000 Yeah.

00:06:02.000 No, they're the ones who process it and they make medical-grade cocaine out of it and then use the flavor aspect of it for Coca-Cola.

00:06:09.000 Exactly.

00:06:10.000 And, you know, technically, at first, as you put it, most of the cocaine was going for pharmaceutical uses and for, you know...

00:06:19.000 Lidocaine.

00:06:20.000 All sorts of things like that they use for legitimate purchases.

00:06:22.000 But Coke needed actually so much flavoring.

00:06:25.000 Think about their brand.

00:06:26.000 It's so big.

00:06:27.000 Like wheatgrass juice.

00:06:28.000 You have to squeeze a lot to get a cup.

00:06:31.000 So they had to come up with this special...

00:06:34.000 I love it.

00:06:35.000 You can't make this stuff up.

00:06:36.000 This is why history is fun.

00:06:38.000 There's a special exemption in our laws for what are called special leaves from Peru.

00:06:44.000 And if anybody looking at it saying, well, what the hell are these special leaves, you know?

00:06:47.000 And they're special because they're allowed to come into the United States exclusively, basically, to create the flavoring extract for Coca-Cola.

00:06:55.000 A lot of people call it the Coca-Cola Joker.

00:06:58.000 How closely do you think they monitor that supply?

00:07:03.000 Very closely.

00:07:04.000 They would have to.

00:07:05.000 If a bundle or two fell off a truck here or there, that could be extremely profitable.

00:07:11.000 Right.

00:07:11.000 I talked to somebody once.

00:07:12.000 They said, so is there like a pile of cocaine somewhere up in New Jersey where this is happening?

00:07:18.000 I don't think that's the case.

00:07:20.000 But here's the crazy part, too.

00:07:21.000 This is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead you to places you never thought you'd go, like this book, which we'll talk about.

00:07:30.000 It got weird.

00:07:32.000 If that's not weird, it got weirder in the 60s because Coca-Cola wanted to figure out a way to make coca leaves in the United States, to grow their own coca leaves.

00:07:43.000 They weren't satisfied with this trade with Peru.

00:07:47.000 And these are declassified DEA documents at the National Archives.

00:07:51.000 This is not like, you know, something crazy.

00:07:55.000 You can see it and actually it's in the book.

00:07:57.000 But basically, They petition the federal government to start growing it.

00:08:03.000 At first, they're thinking like the Virgin Islands.

00:08:05.000 But then they're like, I don't know.

00:08:07.000 There's like all these tourists.

00:08:08.000 It's going to be crazy.

00:08:09.000 But they have to find a climate and a location, geography, where they can do this.

00:08:13.000 And they ultimately go, okay, what about Hawaii?

00:08:17.000 And they do, Joe.

00:08:19.000 They grew coca leaves secretly, a totally secret operation called the Alakea Project.

00:08:25.000 Also called alakeia.

00:08:27.000 What does that mean?

00:08:27.000 Exactly.

00:08:28.000 Nobody's going to ask questions, you know, obfuscate the story.

00:08:32.000 In Kauai.

00:08:34.000 Oh, wow.

00:08:35.000 And it was done through the University of Hawaii.

00:08:38.000 They had to sign all these non-disclosure agreements and they wouldn't publish their papers, you know, on the study of all this.

00:08:46.000 The reason the government agreed to it is that Koch said, we're going to create a cocaine-less coca shrub.

00:08:51.000 Like, basically breed a plant that doesn't have cocaine in it.

00:08:57.000 And, of course, that never really transpires, but they do end up growing, secretly, behind barbed wire fences, coca leaves for Coca-Cola in the 60s.

00:09:07.000 But I'm an environmental historian, so I study the relationship between, like, businesses and the environment.

00:09:13.000 And, in this case, the environment matters, because nature bit back.

00:09:17.000 So, in the 60s, this fungus That's native to Hawaii was like, whoa, this plant that's not native and attacks it.

00:09:27.000 And it wipes out the entire coca crop of Coca-Cola.

00:09:31.000 So the supply they had for a very brief time in the 60s is wiped out.

00:09:35.000 They go back to sourcing it from...

00:09:39.000 So I was looking at all those ingredients and it was when I was looking at caffeine that I ended up talking about Monsanto.

00:09:45.000 So does Coca-Cola have a legitimate relationship with coca leaf growers in Peru right now?

00:09:53.000 Right.

00:09:54.000 Legitimate, I think, is the right kind of question to ask.

00:09:57.000 I mean, I went down to Peru because I think it's important if you're going to write about people or you're going to write about a place that you go there.

00:10:03.000 Yeah.

00:10:04.000 So I went down there.

00:10:05.000 Actually, my father, who doesn't speak any Spanish, was like my bodyguard down there with me.

00:10:10.000 It was probably a bad idea to bring my dad with me.

00:10:13.000 But we kind of went on this journey to go see if we could figure it out.

00:10:16.000 He's from Georgia as well.

00:10:18.000 Sounds like a good way to find yourself missing.

00:10:20.000 Yeah.

00:10:21.000 Exactly.

00:10:22.000 We probably should have been more.

00:10:24.000 But this is how it goes when you're a historian and you're in graduate school and you don't really know what you're doing.

00:10:29.000 You're just taking risks and doing things that probably years later, you're like, maybe this is not the smartest idea.

00:10:34.000 You wouldn't do it if you had a family.

00:10:36.000 Yeah, exactly, as I do now.

00:10:38.000 Although it wasn't that safe for this book either.

00:10:41.000 But anyway, we go down and we look into this story.

00:10:44.000 And I think to kind of answer your question, I mean, There is a trade.

00:10:49.000 It's managed actually by a state agency in Peru called Anaco.

00:10:55.000 And exactly where the coca leaf comes from for Coca-Cola is a little bit unclear, you know, in the 21st century.

00:11:01.000 But if you talk to cocailleros or people who represent the cocailleros, the farmers who produce the coca leaf, a lot of what they're frustrated about is that Basically, Coke has this exclusive right to bringing coca leaves into the United States.

00:11:20.000 Now, if you and I were to try and do that, we'd be arrested at the border, right?

00:11:24.000 Right.

00:11:25.000 Because the laws in this country now say you can't bring in coca leaves.

00:11:29.000 Coca leaves are banned.

00:11:30.000 So one company only.

00:11:31.000 Basically.

00:11:32.000 And by the way, yeah, this is what Pepsi, we were talking about Pepsi earlier.

00:11:36.000 They were livid about this because they wanted access.

00:11:40.000 And other soft drinks wanted access to this supply.

00:11:43.000 But the federal government was saying, no, no, no, you know, and trying to kind of protect that single buyer access, what we call monopsony trade.

00:11:51.000 What a crazy deal.

00:11:53.000 It was so crazy.

00:11:54.000 And it's one of the reasons why Coke, you know, they have a unique flavor, right?

00:11:57.000 They have something that no one else can get.

00:11:59.000 But here's the other thing, Joe, right?

00:12:00.000 So, like, think about Coke.

00:12:01.000 They're everywhere.

00:12:02.000 Like, you could sell this stuff.

00:12:04.000 In any part of the world.

00:12:05.000 And I think that's the trick for Coke.

00:12:07.000 How do you get stuff that's cheap?

00:12:09.000 Well, if everyone had access to coca leaves, you know the price of coca leaves might be pretty high.

00:12:13.000 You can't grow coca leaves everywhere.

00:12:16.000 And so because they only have access to that leaf, They get a great deal on the price of coca leaves, and that's what cocaeros don't like, right?

00:12:24.000 They would love to be able to sell coca tea in the United States.

00:12:27.000 They would love to be able to sell, you know, you name it, coca cookies, coca flour.

00:12:32.000 But because of international laws that ban it, by the way, that were in part brokered by Coca-Cola, that's part of the rub.

00:12:39.000 And they have it on their name, you know?

00:12:42.000 Think about that rub, too.

00:12:43.000 Here's a product that comes from your...

00:12:48.000 That deep history that goes back to the Inca, it's on the brand and they're preventing that trade, in part, historically, have been preventing that trade.

00:12:58.000 That's what I think unnerves people.

00:13:00.000 They don't see it as legitimate.

00:13:01.000 They think a lot of people would see it as some kind of theft.

00:13:04.000 Using your company to lobby and to throw money around to make that happen, I look at it two ways.

00:13:14.000 In one way, it's a genius move.

00:13:16.000 I mean, if you're a company, and you have figured out how to make a monopoly on what's not a Schedule I drug, right?

00:13:22.000 Because it's got legitimate medical uses.

00:13:24.000 Yeah, and as I said, you can bring it in for certain medicinal purposes.

00:13:30.000 But beyond that, the coca leaf itself cannot be imported.

00:13:34.000 But to make one company have an exemption for that, that's only using it for flavor, but not allow other companies to do that...

00:13:42.000 How does that stick?

00:13:43.000 That seems crazy.

00:13:44.000 That seems like Pepsi should challenge it.

00:13:46.000 Well, they did.

00:13:47.000 I mean, there are letters back when this was being unfolded.

00:13:52.000 I think they should do it right now.

00:13:56.000 I think about the farmers.

00:13:58.000 A lot of these stories, I think about what would be the benefit to a group of people To have the coca leaf be revalorized.

00:14:04.000 I know on your show you talk a lot about marijuana and cannabis.

00:14:09.000 We're not talking about the coca leaf, which was villainized in similar ways.

00:14:13.000 We had this kind of view of, this stuff is terrible and you can't touch it.

00:14:20.000 And, sadly, you know, that could mean an incredible kind of bounty for people who grow this in Peru and other parts of South America.

00:14:29.000 The problem really is, sorry, the problem really is like people who step on it, right, and add things to it, like fentanyl, which is a giant issue now.

00:14:36.000 Or process out and create this kind of, you know, take out just the alkaloid that's the powerful cocaine in it instead of taking the leaf.

00:14:43.000 And as I said, imagine going to Starbucks and having coca tea, you know?

00:14:46.000 Like, no big deal.

00:14:48.000 It'd be great.

00:14:48.000 I've had it before.

00:14:49.000 It's interesting.

00:14:50.000 Yeah, and I did it in Peru.

00:14:51.000 And it's totally like, it's not what people are thinking.

00:14:54.000 It's like a caffeine sort of buzz.

00:14:57.000 Like, maybe like a little bit different, but pretty similar in terms of the strength.

00:15:02.000 It doesn't make you crazy or anything like that.

00:15:04.000 Exactly.

00:15:05.000 And, you know, it's used for high altitude exertion.

00:15:09.000 It helps people at high altitudes and things like that.

00:15:11.000 So I think one of the things in that book was trying to point that out, that, you know, we're having this discussion about cannabis, but we should have it.

00:15:18.000 And they are.

00:15:18.000 There are people that are trying to say, look, we should be revalorizing, is the word.

00:15:22.000 The coca leaf.

00:15:23.000 Like, there's no reason why this thing needs to be treated this way.

00:15:26.000 Yeah.

00:15:27.000 We're stuck, though.

00:15:28.000 We're stuck with these narratives.

00:15:30.000 We are.

00:15:31.000 That's the narrative that cocaine is evil and it ruins lives.

00:15:34.000 Yeah.

00:15:35.000 And I think, you know, again, there's a difference between that kind of purified powder that's going to have all this other stuff in it that can cause all these problems versus...

00:15:43.000 But the problem is that there is this sort of black market world and that's the only market to get it. 0.85

00:15:49.000 So it is cut with a bunch of other shit that's not supposed to be in there like amphetamines and fentanyl. 0.95

00:15:54.000 Are you aware of Dr. Carl Hart? 0.98

00:15:57.000 I don't know if I know.

00:15:58.000 He's a professor at Columbia?

00:16:01.000 Yeah.

00:16:02.000 And a brilliant guy who was originally, he was a scientist who was working with drugs and he was a very straight-laced guy.

00:16:13.000 But then upon working with them and really understanding their effects and understanding what the propaganda had done in terms of changing the way people viewed these drugs, He then started taking these drugs regularly and is open about it,

00:16:28.000 but is also brilliant.

00:16:30.000 And he's a genuine scholar.

00:16:32.000 So he's a guy who will sit on a podcast and tell you, I take cocaine.

00:16:36.000 I take heroin.

00:16:37.000 It's lovely.

00:16:38.000 He goes, regular heroin.

00:16:40.000 I'm like, how do you do it?

00:16:41.000 I sniff it.

00:16:42.000 And he goes, it's wonderful.

00:16:43.000 I love it.

00:16:44.000 It makes me feel good.

00:16:45.000 It helps, strengthens my relationships.

00:16:47.000 And he's like, you and I should do cocaine together. 0.98

00:16:49.000 I'm like, that is the craziest fucking thing anybody's ever said to me that's a professor from Columbia on a podcast. 0.99

00:16:54.000 We should do cocaine together. 0.99

00:16:55.000 Right.

00:16:56.000 That's a rarity.

00:16:57.000 But he's like, if you get pure cocaine.

00:16:58.000 He goes, pure cocaine is fantastic.

00:17:01.000 He goes, it's great stuff.

00:17:02.000 Yeah.

00:17:02.000 I mean, I think of Michael Pollan's book.

00:17:04.000 You had Michael Pollan on, you know, and how to change your mind.

00:17:06.000 I mean, we're seeing, in other words, what you're talking about, that there was a history here.

00:17:10.000 That's why I think history matters, that this stuff hasn't always been perceived this way, and we got into this mess, and I think history can help us think about how I get out of it.

00:17:20.000 In the case of Coca-Cola, again, I think it's just a matter of, you know, rethinking this coca leaf.

00:17:25.000 I mean, here you've got a company that, again, has it on their name, and yet...

00:17:29.000 And they won't acknowledge that, too.

00:17:31.000 Part of it is just like, we never had this.

00:17:32.000 That's even worse.

00:17:33.000 That's kind of a kick in the face.

00:17:35.000 And they still have the flavor that comes from the leaf.

00:17:38.000 As far as when I last researched it, yeah.

00:17:40.000 Well, yeah, we brought it up on the podcast before we went into it.

00:17:43.000 We're stunned that they still, not only that, but they use that and process it to make medical-grade cocaine.

00:17:51.000 And interestingly, at the very beginning, I went deep into this, so I got...

00:17:56.000 They did sell it.

00:17:58.000 They did sell cocaine.

00:17:59.000 I mean, I don't know how else to put it, but they had extra.

00:18:02.000 But then they realized that the laws were emerging.

00:18:04.000 Because again, it wasn't always that way.

00:18:06.000 Again, the president's consuming coca.

00:18:09.000 Everyone's consuming it.

00:18:10.000 So it took time.

00:18:14.000 So the coca was fun and interesting and wild.

00:18:17.000 But then I got to caffeine, and that's what led to this.

00:18:19.000 So I always ask people, Where does the caffeine come from that's in soft drinks?

00:18:28.000 Do you drink caffeinated beverages?

00:18:31.000 Maybe not Coke, I don't know.

00:18:33.000 Yes.

00:18:33.000 Okay.

00:18:33.000 Have you ever wondered where it comes from?

00:18:35.000 You know what?

00:18:36.000 I haven't.

00:18:37.000 Okay.

00:18:37.000 I didn't really either, and I drank it all the time, but I was like...

00:18:41.000 Right.

00:18:41.000 I tried to Google it, as one does, and I was like, where's the caffeine come from?

00:18:46.000 And I couldn't...

00:18:48.000 Figure it out.

00:18:49.000 And so I'm doing that ingredient by ingredient story for the cookbook and I get to caffeine and I'm kind of stuck.

00:18:55.000 I'm like, I don't know where they get it.

00:18:58.000 And so if you had a guess though, like what would be a guess?

00:19:01.000 Would you have a good guess?

00:19:02.000 Well, I would say, you know, I'm not really exactly sure how they synthesize things.

00:19:08.000 So I would say synthetic caffeine.

00:19:10.000 Yeah.

00:19:11.000 But I mean, what does that mean?

00:19:12.000 Exactly.

00:19:13.000 It's got to have precursors.

00:19:14.000 There's got to be, like, compounds that you mix together.

00:19:17.000 What is it?

00:19:18.000 I didn't even go that far.

00:19:19.000 I actually thought, like, maybe it's coffee, you know?

00:19:21.000 And that wasn't right either.

00:19:23.000 So here's how it worked.

00:19:25.000 Basically, and I found all this by going to Monsanto's Records in St. Louis, which was part of the beginning of this book.

00:19:32.000 I got access to Monsanto's Records.

00:19:35.000 Which was like, as a historian, this is incredible, right?

00:19:38.000 I have an ability to tell a story that maybe, you know...

00:19:42.000 Did they give you access?

00:19:43.000 They had to give permission to go into their archives, to their records.

00:19:47.000 Wow.

00:19:48.000 I still don't really understand why they do this, but...

00:19:51.000 Did you get a burner phone?

00:19:53.000 I didn't, but we'll talk about that.

00:19:55.000 I did use an encrypted phone to talk to some sources inside Monsanto and stuff like that.

00:19:59.000 And look, I was just a historian coming out of grad school who had never had training in journalism or never really had training in the art of protecting a source.

00:20:09.000 And so I really had to...

00:20:11.000 And I give a plug to New America, this organization that gave me a fellowship and I got to hang out with writers from the Washington Post and from different places that helped me think about how do you do this the right way.

00:20:23.000 But they did.

00:20:24.000 I had permission.

00:20:25.000 And I started to see this caffeine story like Monsanto.

00:20:30.000 This is crazy.

00:20:31.000 So but for Coca-Cola, there would be no Monsanto.

00:20:34.000 Really?

00:20:34.000 Yes.

00:20:36.000 Because when Monsanto, this chemical company from St. Louis that started in 1901, it was like barely getting by.

00:20:48.000 The American chemical industry almost didn't exist.

00:20:51.000 The Germans were really in control. 1.00

00:20:54.000 They ran the organic chemistry.

00:20:56.000 We were getting all of our chemicals from overseas.

00:20:58.000 Monsanto, we think of it as like this monopoly.

00:21:00.000 It controls everything.

00:21:01.000 Back then, they were nothing.

00:21:04.000 And so they needed a big contract.

00:21:07.000 And so their initial buyer was Coca-Cola.

00:21:10.000 And they sold Coca-Cola two things.

00:21:12.000 They sold them saccharin, the artificial sweetener, which ultimately comes from coal tar.

00:21:17.000 We can talk about that.

00:21:18.000 And then caffeine.

00:21:22.000 This is the crazy part.

00:21:23.000 This is how they did it.

00:21:25.000 I would have never figured it out.

00:21:26.000 So basically, they took tea leaves that were broken and damaged around the world on tea exchanges, like the garbage of the tea trade, and they realized no one was going to consume that.

00:21:38.000 So it was just waste.

00:21:40.000 And they basically swept that stuff up and processed out the caffeine from the garbage, from the waste tea leaves.

00:21:48.000 How many are there out there?

00:21:50.000 A lot.

00:21:51.000 This is so much Coca-Cola.

00:21:53.000 Exactly.

00:21:54.000 So that was what I knew was like, okay, well, wait a minute.

00:21:56.000 This is 1901, but Coke's going to grow.

00:21:59.000 And this is where your point comes in.

00:22:01.000 It's going to become synthetic, right?

00:22:02.000 But at first, they're like, okay, this waste tea trade works.

00:22:07.000 Then they need more caffeine.

00:22:11.000 And decaf coffee takes off.

00:22:16.000 If you've ever wondered where does all that caffeine go, right?

00:22:20.000 If you drink decaf, I don't know if you do, but all that caffeine from the decaf coffee market ended up going into soft drinks.

00:22:29.000 In the 50s.

00:22:30.000 But nobody was really drinking decaf coffee in the early part of the 20th century.

00:22:35.000 People wanted the caffeine kick.

00:22:37.000 That was the big deal.

00:22:38.000 But they still needed more, to your point.

00:22:41.000 They needed more caffeine.

00:22:43.000 We're talking about a company that sells 1.9 billion servings of its product every day now. 1.00

00:22:47.000 Holy shit. 1.00

00:22:48.000 1.9 billion servings every day. 1.00

00:22:50.000 That's crazy.

00:22:51.000 It is nuts.

00:22:52.000 So that's like, what, one-seventh of the total population?

00:22:55.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:22:55.000 Something around those?

00:22:56.000 Yeah.

00:22:56.000 How many people do we have now?

00:22:58.000 7.7.

00:22:59.000 More than 7. Yeah.

00:23:00.000 Isn't it closing in on 8?

00:23:01.000 Yeah.

00:23:02.000 So more than... 0.99

00:23:03.000 That's a lot of fucking servings. 0.99

00:23:06.000 1. what was it? 0.99

00:23:07.000 You said it earlier, 1.9 billion servings.

00:23:09.000 It goes up every year.

00:23:10.000 That's crazy.

00:23:11.000 But that's...

00:23:12.000 You know, I joke in my class.

00:23:13.000 I have this class history, 3705, Cocoa Globalization.

00:23:17.000 Great students.

00:23:18.000 Love those guys.

00:23:19.000 And they...

00:23:20.000 This class, basically, they say...

00:23:22.000 I say, you can either come to this class and learn how to make a lot of money, you know, or you can learn about...

00:23:28.000 The environmental impacts of some of this stuff.

00:23:30.000 Dude, that means like, that's basically one out of four people have a Coke every day.

00:23:34.000 Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

00:23:35.000 Yeah.

00:23:36.000 Well, and remember- Isn't it?

00:23:38.000 I said- Obviously some people have a lot.

00:23:39.000 And it's all the other products they have.

00:23:41.000 Right, but it's obviously some people go ham, and they have like, doesn't John Daly drink like 18 Diet Cokes a day?

00:23:47.000 Yeah, and like Warren Buffett drinks Cherry Coke every day.

00:23:49.000 Right.

00:23:50.000 Everybody, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:23:51.000 Those guys are driving.

00:23:53.000 Thanks, Warren Buffett.

00:23:54.000 The servings, the amount of, 1.9?

00:23:57.000 Remember, it's not just Coca-Cola.

00:23:59.000 It's like all their brands.

00:24:00.000 And they have a lot of different brands.

00:24:01.000 So servings of their products.

00:24:03.000 But still, Coca-Cola is like, you know, the number one soft drink in the world.

00:24:07.000 Still is.

00:24:08.000 And Diet Coke was always number two.

00:24:09.000 It always ticked off Pepsi because they were one and two.

00:24:12.000 Well, Pepsi seems like a fake cola when you've had Coke because it doesn't have that Coke, that whatever that flavonoid.

00:24:20.000 Is that what it is?

00:24:20.000 Is it a flavonoid?

00:24:21.000 Yeah, whatever the flavoring profile is.

00:24:23.000 Yeah.

00:24:24.000 I think, you know, it could be key to it.

00:24:25.000 I mean, I will say one other thing about it.

00:24:27.000 I can't get off the Coca thing because it's so, like, weird.

00:24:29.000 But there is a document, and this is actually from a reporting of another journalist, Mark Pendergrass, but it's really good about New Coke.

00:24:37.000 I don't know if you remember when New Coke came out.

00:24:38.000 Yeah, I do.

00:24:39.000 But it was, like, a huge catastrophe because they were trying to totally reshape the flavor in 1985. Nobody liked it?

00:24:47.000 Nobody liked it.

00:24:48.000 You can go to the museum and they had, like, a voicemail machine that you could pick up that is, like, people being like, When they had new Coke, did they still have old Coke available?

00:24:57.000 No, that's the thing.

00:24:58.000 They literally said, we're going to completely wipe out the old Coke.

00:25:03.000 So was it cocaine-free?

00:25:05.000 And that's what was interesting.

00:25:06.000 Mark Pendergrass found some evidence that when they made the switch to new Coke, they decided temporarily, well, why not?

00:25:14.000 We have this weird trade that we keep getting asked about.

00:25:16.000 Let's just go ahead and get rid of this.

00:25:18.000 So one of the things that they might have removed, according to Pendergrass, is...

00:25:23.000 This coca leaf flavor.

00:25:24.000 But interestingly, we have a report from 1988 in the New York Times that they put it back in because it was so bad, right?

00:25:30.000 And you can almost imagine the executives at Coke being like, whoa, wait a minute, maybe we don't mess with this flavor.

00:25:34.000 Maybe that's the one thing that separates them from Pepsi.

00:25:37.000 Maybe that's what it is.

00:25:39.000 I think it's a lot of things.

00:25:40.000 I mean, one of the biggest things that made Coke so big and where they basically just outpaced Pepsi was World War II. They got government contracts to provide Coke to the troops.

00:25:53.000 And this was coming from the top.

00:25:55.000 I have the letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower saying...

00:25:57.000 Don't send me this.

00:25:58.000 Don't send me that.

00:25:59.000 You're sending us Coca-Cola.

00:26:00.000 Wow.

00:26:01.000 And that meant that there were all these veterans and everyone.

00:26:04.000 I mean, you're going to have a Pepsi at your house after you come home from D-Day.

00:26:07.000 The parents would slap that out of their hands, like, drink Coke.

00:26:11.000 And actually, Pepsi wrote to the government saying, you can't do this. 0.99

00:26:14.000 Pepsi's getting fucked up. 1.00

00:26:15.000 Fuck left and right. 1.00

00:26:16.000 Totally. 1.00

00:26:16.000 No cocaine. 1.00

00:26:17.000 No cocaine.

00:26:18.000 They don't get served to the troops.

00:26:21.000 Yeah, you could argue this is really just a book about how Pepsi got screwed.

00:26:25.000 But anyway, yeah, I mean, so there is evidence of that and that new Coke fiasco.

00:26:31.000 But it ends up back, we know for sure about it.

00:26:33.000 Is there enough caffeine from decaffeinated coffee when they extract it to really put caffeine into all those sodas?

00:26:40.000 Because if I really...

00:26:42.000 That goes back to your point.

00:26:46.000 I mean, because you said synthetic.

00:26:47.000 Yeah.

00:26:48.000 Yeah, they needed more.

00:26:50.000 Yeah, I would imagine the percentage of people that drink caffeinated coffee versus uncaffeinated or decaffeinated.

00:26:56.000 It's probably like five to one or something.

00:26:59.000 I would guess.

00:27:00.000 What do you think?

00:27:01.000 What's your guess?

00:27:01.000 I have no idea.

00:27:02.000 Should we find out?

00:27:03.000 Let's find out.

00:27:04.000 Let's take a guess.

00:27:07.000 Jamie, let's see what your guess is first.

00:27:08.000 What percentage of the coffee?

00:27:10.000 How many people drink decaf to regular caff?

00:27:12.000 Yeah.

00:27:14.000 Like in the morning or at night?

00:27:15.000 Just like cups served, period.

00:27:19.000 It's like 10 to 1, probably.

00:27:21.000 You think 10 to 1?

00:27:21.000 I think like 5 to 1. Like 10% of the coffee drinks.

00:27:24.000 You're probably right, though.

00:27:25.000 10 to 1 probably sounds better. 1.00

00:27:26.000 Because people hate that decaf shit. 1.00

00:27:28.000 They rarely drink it. 1.00

00:27:29.000 They just drink it after 5 because they don't want to say it.

00:27:31.000 They definitely hate it in the early part of the 20th century because they had no real good system for getting out the caffeine and it made it taste terrible.

00:27:36.000 Well, not only that, it's not real.

00:27:38.000 Even if you buy decaffeinated coffee, it's got caffeine in it.

00:27:41.000 Yeah, it's still got caffeine in it, exactly.

00:27:43.000 People need to know that, because they'll give it to their kids before they go to bed. 1.00

00:27:46.000 Have some decaf coffee in the fucking kids' mouths. 1.00

00:27:49.000 To their kids, really? 1.00

00:27:49.000 Little kids. 1.00

00:27:50.000 Yeah, people are crazy. 0.99

00:27:51.000 People with terrible pants. 0.98

00:27:53.000 And decaffeinated, you would imagine, actually is decaffeinated, but it's not.

00:27:57.000 It's like the difference in milligrams is like, I think like a cup of decaf has like 15 milligrams or something like that, as opposed to like, you know, 100. I don't know what it is, but I do know that there's still, yeah, there's caffeine in there for sure.

00:28:09.000 Let's see.

00:28:10.000 Servings of regular coffee...

00:28:13.000 American coffee drinkers had roughly 0.23 cups of decaf coffee per day, but it's not in comparison to caffeinated.

00:28:21.000 There's no...

00:28:23.000 Some of us have done a comparison.

00:28:25.000 That's why I got asked right after I found that.

00:28:29.000 Why don't we compare them together?

00:28:32.000 Sorry, give me a second.

00:28:33.000 Okay.

00:28:34.000 Yeah, the sourcing at that time was Maxwell House.

00:28:36.000 So it was like not even really good coffee.

00:28:38.000 Oh, okay.

00:28:38.000 Instant.

00:28:39.000 Instant junk. 0.86

00:28:40.000 And that was really exploding. 0.68

00:28:43.000 But still, you're right.

00:28:44.000 It's pretty small.

00:28:44.000 So they needed more.

00:28:46.000 And in the 40s, in part because of the war, they couldn't get supplies of various things.

00:28:52.000 Once again, we see Coca-Cola turning to Monsanto and saying, hey, Monsanto, you've supplied us with caffeine, saccharin, all these things.

00:29:00.000 Can you make synthetic caffeine?

00:29:03.000 And Monsanto does.

00:29:05.000 They figure out a way to make synthetic caffeine from coal tar.

00:29:09.000 What is coal tar?

00:29:10.000 So it's basically the byproduct of processing coal into coke, which is coal without its impurities, often used in the steel industry.

00:29:18.000 And it's literally a black tar-y substance that's the byproduct of that process, kind of the waste of processing coal into coke.

00:29:26.000 And in that tar is all these different chemicals that you can make because it's all these different carbon compounds that you can tease out and then do things to make all sorts of things.

00:29:38.000 And actually, one of the points of this book is that all this stuff around us ultimately comes from fossil fuels, whether it be coal tar byproducts or petroleum.

00:29:48.000 It's pretty nuts when you see how many different things come from fossil fuels.

00:29:51.000 Yeah, like our headphones, this stuff.

00:29:53.000 Headphones, plastic that covers these wires.

00:29:54.000 We couldn't function.

00:29:55.000 And that's why I think when we transition, if we do, to a fossil fuel-free economy and try and reduce greenhouse gases and things like that, People are talking about cars and power plants.

00:30:06.000 After writing this book, I'm like, no.

00:30:08.000 I'm thinking about everything else.

00:30:11.000 I was literally just looking at all the equipment in here and things.

00:30:13.000 So much plastic.

00:30:14.000 So much stuff.

00:30:15.000 And all of that goes back to this period where they're experimenting with coal tar, experimenting with petroleum.

00:30:20.000 They're like, wow, we can make this.

00:30:21.000 We can make this.

00:30:22.000 And it was cheap because oil was booming at that time.

00:30:25.000 You could just do it.

00:30:27.000 So they can make caffeine out of oil.

00:30:30.000 Yeah, and ultimately it's natural gas largely now, but at that time it was coal tar originally for Coca-Cola.

00:30:37.000 And talk about kind of some shady stuff.

00:30:40.000 You know, Coke has had these long contracts with Monsanto at this point.

00:30:44.000 This is the 40s.

00:30:46.000 And they're like, hey, could you make synthetic for us?

00:30:49.000 But if you look internally at Coke, they're like, well, I don't even know if we're going to buy it.

00:30:54.000 But we just want more caffeine in the market because more caffeine means other buyers who are getting caffeine may use that caffeine, which keeps the price of caffeine down.

00:31:03.000 Because Coke's real model was not owning stuff, making other people do stuff.

00:31:08.000 They were a business that basically just Monsanto was a middleman in the economy.

00:31:12.000 They didn't actually grow the ingredients in their product, and they didn't distribute it.

00:31:17.000 It was independent bottlers who did it.

00:31:18.000 They were kind of like this middleman in the economy.

00:31:21.000 And so for Monsanto, they were like, hey, go experiment with this, see how it goes.

00:31:27.000 And Monsanto does it.

00:31:28.000 They figure out how to synthesize caffeine from coal tar.

00:31:30.000 And they have to use a base molecule found in that coal tar called urea.

00:31:35.000 And this is true, okay?

00:31:40.000 They make it, and they're like, hey, Coke, look, we've got this synthetic for you.

00:31:44.000 Comes from urea, found in coal tar, and Coke's like, Nah.

00:31:51.000 Consumers aren't going to drink this.

00:31:52.000 Urea sounds like urine.

00:31:54.000 You said it. 0.97

00:31:56.000 Okay, this is what's crazy.

00:31:57.000 This is in the archives.

00:31:58.000 This is exactly what the chemists, there's this great oral history at one of these archives I went to, from one of the chemists who knew what was going on inside the company who said, internally, when we were talking to them, they said, that sounds too much like urine.

00:32:15.000 They're going to think it's pee.

00:32:18.000 And they legitimately initially say, we're not going to do it.

00:32:22.000 And they stick with natural source caffeine, again, coming from the coffee bean and things.

00:32:27.000 Now, they ultimately decide to pivot because, to your point, they're growing at such a pace, they need to have synthetic.

00:32:34.000 And I can't prove this, but it seems logical that their thinking is...

00:32:41.000 Wait a minute.

00:32:41.000 Consumers are never going to ask where their caffeine comes from.

00:32:43.000 Look at everyone I've ever talked to.

00:32:45.000 No one knows where their caffeine comes from.

00:32:47.000 And so they do switch to synthetics.

00:32:51.000 And if you go to their website, it's great.

00:32:52.000 It says, we source our caffeine from...

00:32:55.000 Tea leaves, so that waste tea leaf story is still part of it.

00:32:59.000 The coffee beans, decaf coffee, and then appropriate sources.

00:33:05.000 Appropriate?

00:33:06.000 P! Well, you know, and a lot of things are made from this, but ultimately then natural gas became the feedstock and things, and a lot of it's produced in China, but anyway, it's crazy.

00:33:17.000 But that was when I was like, oh my gosh!

00:33:20.000 Monsanto.

00:33:20.000 So that got Monsanto off the ground because then they have a giant project.

00:33:23.000 They had a huge project with the saccharin and caffeine for Coca-Cola, these big contracts that kept them afloat.

00:33:30.000 This is readily available information on their website.

00:33:34.000 They'll say, but for Coca-Cola we wouldn't exist.

00:33:37.000 So sometimes when I think about the environmental footprint of Coca-Cola, I'm like...

00:33:40.000 It's bigger than just the firm.

00:33:43.000 It goes into these other stories.

00:33:45.000 It's the literal seed money.

00:33:47.000 It's the literal seed money, yeah.

00:33:49.000 Shout out to my friend, Jesse Pappas, who came up with that title and was like, it was brilliant because it did reflect what I wanted to tell, which is that there is going to be this seed company, but it's not a seed company when it starts.

00:34:01.000 It's only making chemicals.

00:34:02.000 And at the very beginning, it's only making chemicals for Coca-Cola.

00:34:05.000 There was a while where mainstream news sources were reporting on the crisis with Indian farmers.

00:34:11.000 Yeah.

00:34:12.000 Farmers in India that... 0.61

00:34:15.000 Correct me if I'm wrong.

00:34:16.000 I'll probably butcher this.

00:34:17.000 But essentially, the way Monsanto engineered its seeds is like you grow a plant, but you don't have the use of the seeds from that plant.

00:34:28.000 So, say...

00:34:30.000 I'm going to fuck this up, I'm sure. 0.92

00:34:31.000 But if you grow a tomato or a pumpkin, let's say you grow a pumpkin... 0.96

00:34:34.000 I think we're good to go.

00:34:56.000 And it was owned by Delta and Pine and Land Company that they ended up acquiring in the early 2000s.

00:35:04.000 And at that time, Delta had this technology, but they didn't deploy it.

00:35:09.000 And one of the things that raised all this fear about this company getting bigger and bigger was, oh my gosh, they're going to get this technology and they're going to use it.

00:35:17.000 There's no evidence that we have that they have actually deployed that.

00:35:21.000 The way that they prevent farmers now from resaving their seeds and planting them is through an extremely intense contract called a Technology Use Agreement, or TUA, that farmers have to sign.

00:35:35.000 Like a soybean farmer has to sign it and say, I will not replant seeds that come from this harvest.

00:35:40.000 Well, you don't own the seeds.

00:35:43.000 Right?

00:35:43.000 Is that the deal?

00:35:44.000 When you buy the seeds to use them, you're essentially leasing them for that season?

00:35:48.000 Exactly.

00:35:48.000 It's like a licensing fee, in a sense.

00:35:50.000 And actually, this was revolutionary.

00:35:53.000 Farmers had never seen something like this in the 90s.

00:35:56.000 They were like, wait a minute.

00:35:58.000 So you're going to license this technology to us, and we can't save the seeds and replant them?

00:36:06.000 And that's what led to all this havoc and chaos in farm country where farmers were saying, This goes against, like, centuries-old practices where we're always saving seeds and experimenting with them and challenging them.

00:36:18.000 So that was a huge change to the food system.

00:36:21.000 But way later in Monsanto's story, I mean, they weren't even in the ag business.

00:36:27.000 I definitely want to get back to the beginning of it, but is that still going on in India?

00:36:31.000 Because you don't hear about that story anymore, where these farmers get massively in debt and there was a rash of suicides.

00:36:38.000 Right, a rash of suicides.

00:36:40.000 And I think that, you know, it's hard to parse out that story of what's causing these suicides.

00:36:47.000 And there's some, you know, people who say the suicide rates, you know, when they look at it, well, did it increase when these seeds came in?

00:36:52.000 Or is it because of those seeds?

00:36:54.000 I think the debt issue is the bigger issue, right?

00:36:56.000 That you have this kind of industrial-scale agriculture and the pressures on these rural farmers that leads to these problems.

00:37:04.000 But there's a lot of other ways in which I think Monsanto kind of creates this, This system that prevents farmers from doing something they'd always done, which is saving seeds.

00:37:16.000 And the debt story is also true in the United States.

00:37:18.000 I mean, these seed costs go through the roof.

00:37:20.000 The more genetically engineered traits that are added to them and stacked in, we see this dramatic increase in those prices.

00:37:27.000 And the only way to really keep up is to keep trying to grow as big as you possibly can and using as much petrochemical Pesticides and fertilizers as you can to increase your productivity.

00:37:37.000 And it's kind of a rat race where farmers don't necessarily feel like they're incredibly profitable, but they feel like they're just trying to keep up.

00:37:46.000 Does that same technology contract apply today with, say, like corn or soybean farmers in America?

00:37:52.000 It does, especially soy.

00:37:54.000 Corn is a unique situation because you were talking about This terminator gene that could be added.

00:38:02.000 And again, we don't really have evidence that they did that.

00:38:04.000 But with corn, going back to the 20s and 30s, we developed what was known as hybrid corn.

00:38:11.000 And the weird thing about hybrid corn is that when you plant When you take the seeds that are produced from that harvest, they will not be as prolific as the seeds you originally bought.

00:38:24.000 So with corn, it's weird.

00:38:26.000 Even going back to the 20s, there was a system in place that was just part of the genetic peculiarity of corn that meant that farmers had to buy corn over and over again.

00:38:36.000 But what was different was soybeans, cotton, and a lot of other products.

00:38:39.000 This was not the case.

00:38:41.000 Can I ask you this?

00:38:41.000 Yeah.

00:38:42.000 If that is the case, if the corn, like when you try to replant the corn, it's not as prolific, where are they getting the original corn that you can plant?

00:38:51.000 From these crosses of these two different varieties, these kind of parent strains.

00:38:56.000 And as long as you get that original strain, that original parent strain coming from those crosses, then that corn Grows well.

00:39:06.000 But if you try and take the seeds from those siblings of those parents, they don't produce the same amount.

00:39:14.000 So you have companies like Pioneer that made a lot of money off this because they figured out how to have these parent lines and to do these crosses.

00:39:22.000 And then be able to sell those seeds from those original parent lines.

00:39:25.000 That would be really prolific.

00:39:27.000 But if the farmers saved those seeds and tried to grow another generation, they just wouldn't produce the same amount.

00:39:33.000 That is wild.

00:39:33.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:39:34.000 When they're doing it now, so they have to have these two different strains and cross them now to make seeds to sell to farmers.

00:39:44.000 Yeah, and you're seeing experimentation with With the top seed companies trying to figure out, okay, which parent crosses are going to produce the best yield.

00:39:53.000 But then if you try and save that seed and replant it, you're not going to have the same vigor is what it's called.

00:39:59.000 You don't have the same productivity.

00:40:00.000 So weirdly with corn, There was kind of a corporatization of the seed business baked into the peculiarities of crossing corn.

00:40:09.000 Whereas with soybeans, cotton, and other crops, you had to have an agreement that Monsanto created to make farmers come back and buy those seeds every year.

00:40:19.000 We grow so much corn though.

00:40:21.000 And I think about it, I'm so puzzled right now because I'm trying to figure out how would you have enough of these two different strains to cross them to make enough seeds to grow all this corn?

00:40:33.000 Well, you can have different parent crosses.

00:40:35.000 You can have different kinds of parents that you cross to make this hybrid seed.

00:40:41.000 And you have a lot of different seed companies that are playing with different parents.

00:40:45.000 What I'm saying is once you do that...

00:40:47.000 Oh, I get it.

00:40:48.000 It won't work again with the offspring of those.

00:40:51.000 But what I'm saying is how are they breeding so many...

00:40:54.000 How many crosses they're doing to get enough seeds? 0.99

00:40:58.000 Like if you drive through Kansas or I have a buddy who lives in Iowa and you drive through these cornfields, you're like, holy shit. 0.98

00:41:07.000 If you're a person from the city and you don't know what... 0.99

00:41:10.000 It's incredible.

00:41:11.000 Did you drive through some of those areas to research it?

00:41:14.000 Being in Ohio, shout out to Jamie, who's also from Ohio.

00:41:17.000 Shout out to Columbus.

00:41:18.000 Strong Columbus in this room.

00:41:19.000 Yeah, we got a lot of Ohio representation in here.

00:41:22.000 You just see tremendous amounts of corn and tremendous amounts of soybeans everywhere.

00:41:28.000 And yeah, it's interesting.

00:41:29.000 I mean, you know, you have a prolific generation of seeds from a harvest.

00:41:34.000 And so, you know, it is a bit baffling, I have to say, about just the scale of it.

00:41:38.000 How does it all work?

00:41:40.000 But, you know, and you think about it, the majority of our cropland, our arable cropland, is cultivating soybeans, corn, hay.

00:41:48.000 And almost all of that is going into animal fodder, which is its own story.

00:41:53.000 Right.

00:41:55.000 Most of it, right?

00:41:56.000 Most of it.

00:41:57.000 I mean, the vast majority of it is going into over 90% in animal feed.

00:42:01.000 And then that animal feed, is it mostly for cows?

00:42:06.000 Cows, all sorts of livestock, yeah. 0.99

00:42:08.000 Pigs.

00:42:09.000 And, you know, often in these cafos, which is just such a broken system, these, you know, consolidated feeding lots where you're producing so much waste and manure and things like that that it becomes quite toxic.

00:42:22.000 But it's kind of, you know, I think for me, the story about food with Monsanto that was interesting was I wanted to kind of know, did these genetically engineered crops actually produce much higher yields?

00:42:39.000 Did we see this massive growth in the productivity of genetically engineered crops?

00:42:46.000 And maybe I should back up just to say like when that happened.

00:42:50.000 You know, the first large-scale introduction of genetically engineered crops, commodity crops like soybeans, like corn, like all these things, they were introduced in 1996. So one of the interesting things about sitting here today is that we're kind of at the 25-year mark of genetically engineered crops being introduced in the United States and ultimately around the world.

00:43:14.000 Brazil, Argentina, some 28, some state countries around the world that now have genetically engineered crops.

00:43:20.000 And so I looked at it as a historian and said, okay, well, what can we say about that?

00:43:24.000 You know, what did these crops actually do?

00:43:29.000 And when they were introduced, you know, the idea was, and just to be clear, this was a new technology.

00:43:35.000 It's often said, well, we've always been changing, you know, crops and things like that.

00:43:40.000 What was different in this era, 80s and 90s, was, you know, we were taking genes from a bacterium, for example, inserting it into a plant, taking things from one species, putting it in another, and changing the makeup of that crop.

00:43:58.000 In 96, when we see this happening, they're trying to do two things.

00:44:03.000 The main genetically engineered crops were Roundup-ready crops that were designed to tolerate heavy dosages of herbicide called Roundup, that interestingly, of course, Monsanto owned, right?

00:44:16.000 And they had been making since the 1970s.

00:44:19.000 But at this point, they're thinking, this could be amazing.

00:44:22.000 If we can genetically engineer crops to be resistant to Roundup, Wow.

00:44:28.000 Think about the sales, right?

00:44:31.000 You can spray Roundup on your fields, and this is the key, during the growing season, when your crops are growing, kill any weeds that are in those fields, and wow, you know, the plants will survive with the crops.

00:44:44.000 And this use of glyphosate, did they know at the time how toxic it was?

00:44:49.000 It was the opposite, Joe.

00:44:51.000 When they introduced this in the 1970s, so it was actually discovered around 1970 by a chemist inside the firm called John Franz.

00:45:02.000 And this is what's so wild when you go back is They saw it as the environmentally friendly herbicide.

00:45:11.000 You know what they're trying to replace at that point?

00:45:13.000 DDT? Agent Orange.

00:45:15.000 Agent Orange.

00:45:15.000 Yeah.

00:45:16.000 Agent Orange.

00:45:17.000 Oh my god.

00:45:18.000 So here's the story.

00:45:20.000 So let's go back just a little bit more to get to that.

00:45:22.000 So, and I talk about the whole story of Agent Orange in here in this book.

00:45:28.000 They first start making, and by they I mean Monsanto, 245T. It's a chlorinated hydrocarbon that's an active ingredient in Agent Orange.

00:45:39.000 In 1949, in a little town called Nitro, West Virginia, which I traveled to, because nobody went to go talk to the workers.

00:45:47.000 Nobody went to the actual place where the people who made the herbicides To me, my dad was in Vietnam, and those stories are important, and I want to talk about that as well.

00:45:58.000 But it also mattered to me that we need to go to the root of the story, the people who actually made these chemicals.

00:46:01.000 What happened there at that plant?

00:46:04.000 So Monsanto was making it in 1949. This chemical goes back to the 40s, wartime, World War II. In some ways, there were some experiments with it.

00:46:11.000 Monsanto's doing it in 1949. 245T, the active ingredient in Agent Orange, it's actually two chemicals in Agent Orange.

00:46:20.000 2,4-D, 2,4-5-T, and about 50% of each of these compounds.

00:46:28.000 And the problem was with 2,4-5-T. That chemical had a contaminant known as dioxin.

00:46:37.000 Which Dow Chemical writing to Monsanto in 1965 said, this is the most toxic compound we've ever seen. 0.98

00:46:47.000 Holy shit. 0.85

00:46:48.000 65. And you've got those Vietnam War 66, 67, 68 ramping up, you know, and where the spring is going to be going on overseas. 0.98

00:46:56.000 And that could be jarring in and of itself.

00:46:58.000 But in the book, you'll see, I go back to 49 at the plant where they're producing 245T. And these workers are all sorts of tore up.

00:47:10.000 Like, they have chloracne, which you can probably find on Google what it looks like.

00:47:18.000 But it's basically like where your skin is peeling off.

00:47:22.000 It's just these massive pustules.

00:47:24.000 It's acne-like lesions that are showing that you have systemic exposure to dioxin.

00:47:31.000 Ugh.

00:47:33.000 The workers had this.

00:47:35.000 There's a guy in there, James Ray.

00:47:36.000 Who met these guys?

00:47:37.000 Well, a lot of them were dead.

00:47:39.000 Or a lot of them weren't around by the time I did it.

00:47:41.000 But I got their files.

00:47:42.000 As I say in the book, you know, they're telling stories.

00:47:44.000 They may not be here, but their records found in those corporate records still tell a story.

00:47:51.000 And James Ray Boggess, I just will never forget this story.

00:47:55.000 He talked about it in a deposition.

00:47:56.000 Because he took Monsanto to trial.

00:47:59.000 And they took these workers years later in the 80s, took Monsanto to trial.

00:48:06.000 They lose that trial.

00:48:07.000 And actually Monsanto puts, I think, leans out on their homes to make them pay the court costs back, the workers themselves.

00:48:17.000 But anyway, this is 49 in the 50s, right?

00:48:21.000 So they've got chloracne on their faces.

00:48:23.000 This is all being documented by the doctors and people in the company.

00:48:28.000 And, you know, he has to peel off his face.

00:48:30.000 He literally said five times they used a solvent to try and peel off layers of his skin because of the chloracne exposure.

00:48:39.000 They were complaining of nervousness and all these systemic health problems.

00:48:43.000 Of course, we now know dioxin is super toxic.

00:48:45.000 And they even said it in 65, right?

00:48:46.000 I need to see what this looks like.

00:48:48.000 You got something?

00:48:49.000 Yeah.

00:48:49.000 Yeah, chloracone.

00:48:50.000 And this is...

00:48:51.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:48:52.000 It's like that guy who got poisoned from the Ukraine. 0.93

00:48:55.000 Exactly.

00:48:56.000 And so you tell me, if you're seeing workers coming down with this, might you say, wait a minute, we might have a problem with our chemical.

00:49:03.000 Oh, you guys need to wash your face.

00:49:06.000 Well, in this case, that's kind of what they did.

00:49:09.000 They said stuff like, look, don't worry, this is just acne, it'll go away.

00:49:18.000 What is he showing in the upper corner?

00:49:21.000 What is that?

00:49:22.000 Is that his stomach?

00:49:23.000 What is that?

00:49:24.000 Is that his sack? 0.99

00:49:26.000 This is balls? 0.99

00:49:27.000 I think that is correct. 0.99

00:49:28.000 On Google?

00:49:30.000 Yeah.

00:49:30.000 Okay.

00:49:31.000 So, but yeah, I think, you know, this- So that child down there, that's an environmental poisoning?

00:49:38.000 Oh, God.

00:49:39.000 Yeah.

00:49:40.000 Oh, my God.

00:49:41.000 This is horrific.

00:49:42.000 And so chloracne is really nasty stuff.

00:49:46.000 And again, this is what they're seeing internally, you know, inside the firm with their workers.

00:49:52.000 And I think I just wanted to stress this, you know, 40, 51, 52, this is years before Agent R is going to be sprayed in Vietnam and before veterans are going to be exposed to this.

00:50:04.000 They already know.

00:50:04.000 Yeah, I mean, if you want to take a generous interpretation of this, they're saying, well, I don't know, it's acne, but maybe it's not going to have these systemic effects.

00:50:14.000 But in my opinion, you're seeing it so visibly.

00:50:19.000 You stop production.

00:50:21.000 You prevent this from going out into the world.

00:50:23.000 What do they do?

00:50:24.000 Well, in those years, they continued to produce it, and it was used in the United States.

00:50:31.000 This is the thing that I think gets overlooked.

00:50:33.000 We use 245T here on gardens and all sorts of places.

00:50:39.000 You can look this up and- Still?

00:50:41.000 Relatively Google-able.

00:50:42.000 No, back then, in the 50s.

00:50:44.000 Right as that post-war lawn culture and automobile age is taking off.

00:50:50.000 So how many people are getting this chloracne?

00:50:52.000 At the plant, we're talking about dozens of workers.

00:50:55.000 Is it most people?

00:50:56.000 Do some people somehow or another avoid it?

00:50:58.000 Yeah, I mean, they had different buildings, and it seemed to depend on if you were working closely with those chemicals or not, because they're producing other chemicals there, rubber chemicals and other things.

00:51:08.000 Is it dermal absorption, or is it inhaling?

00:51:11.000 I think it does come through dermal penetration.

00:51:14.000 And these guys, you know...

00:51:18.000 Interestingly, I should say this about one of the doctors who was overseeing the company at the time, he often said that people that were complaining of health problems were what he called kind of the disgruntled tent.

00:51:29.000 You know, this is the people who are just unhappy with working here and things like that.

00:51:33.000 And that's kind of how he saw workers.

00:51:35.000 If they're coming in to complain about their health problems, it's probably because they have a bigger problem with management or something like that.

00:51:40.000 Which is part of the problem.

00:51:41.000 I think they probably overlooked things because that's how they saw people complaining about health issues.

00:51:46.000 But this is hard to overlook.

00:51:48.000 You're seeing workers that are systemically coming down with problems.

00:51:51.000 You're hiring people to test them and look into this.

00:51:55.000 And instead of saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, before we've got this all figured out, Maybe we should keep pushing this stuff out.

00:52:02.000 But they do.

00:52:03.000 Of course, because they're making money.

00:52:05.000 They're making a lot of money at this point.

00:52:06.000 And then, of course, with Agent Orange, it becomes a big deal.

00:52:08.000 They're the largest producer by volume of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.

00:52:13.000 Dow, of course, is producing it.

00:52:15.000 And actually, Monsanto's, because of their process...

00:52:19.000 It was more laden with dioxin than the other compounds.

00:52:22.000 What a crazy company, if you really stop and think about it.

00:52:25.000 They start off as just a chemical company, probably fairly innocuous, if not beneficial to their customers. 0.73

00:52:31.000 And then they make cocaine?

00:52:35.000 Not the cocaine.

00:52:36.000 They make caffeine and saccharin, yeah.

00:52:38.000 Because they don't do the decoconized coca leaf stuff for Coca-Cola.

00:52:41.000 That was Maywood.

00:52:42.000 So they make caffeine for Coca-Cola, they start making money, and then they start making Agent Orange.

00:52:49.000 And then they start making Roundup.

00:52:51.000 And now they're sort of synonymous with evil corporations.

00:52:55.000 Yeah.

00:52:56.000 If you ask someone, what's an evil corporation, like Monsanto would be one.

00:53:02.000 People would use that.

00:53:03.000 Oh yeah, that's a good one.

00:53:04.000 That's a good evil.

00:53:05.000 If you're like, name an evil corporation.

00:53:07.000 Like if you're on, what is it, Jeopardy?

00:53:08.000 Sure.

00:53:09.000 What's the show?

00:53:10.000 Would you do the things?

00:53:11.000 Oh, Family Feud.

00:53:12.000 Family Feud?

00:53:13.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:53:14.000 Survey says!

00:53:15.000 Survey says, Monsatan.

00:53:17.000 I got that actual bumper sticker from my brother who lives in Alaska.

00:53:24.000 He sent that to me when I started writing this.

00:53:25.000 He's like, look at this, it says Monsatan.

00:53:27.000 And I have to be honest with you, when I started this, I was very aware of that.

00:53:31.000 I think, having watched your show and your conversations, you appreciate this.

00:53:35.000 I really wanted to start from scratch.

00:53:37.000 I wanted to say, okay, what happened?

00:53:40.000 And was it as bad as people say?

00:53:46.000 And there were definitely moments, like you're saying, where I was like, ah, you know, these guys are just trying to make money.

00:53:52.000 This scrappy guy, John Queenie, who started the company, he's in his 40s.

00:53:57.000 He's got two kids.

00:53:58.000 Get this, all right, when he starts Monsanto in 1901, he's got two kids.

00:54:02.000 His wife, by the way, is Olga Monsanto.

00:54:05.000 So if you're wondering... 0.88

00:54:06.000 Olga's either hot or a monster, right? 0.99

00:54:10.000 It's either you get an Olga, she's super hot, oh, she's pretty hot. 1.00

00:54:13.000 Yeah, there she is. 1.00

00:54:13.000 Yeah, there's Olga Monsanto. 1.00

00:54:14.000 Especially for back then.

00:54:16.000 Yeah.

00:54:16.000 Like, what year is this?

00:54:17.000 This is around 1901 or so.

00:54:19.000 And there's Edgar, his son.

00:54:20.000 That's a hot Olga. 1.00

00:54:21.000 Next to him, yeah.

00:54:23.000 You got a good one, right?

00:54:24.000 Yeah, and then there's...

00:54:25.000 Look at his mustache.

00:54:26.000 Oguita.

00:54:27.000 Look at that.

00:54:28.000 Look at that thing. 0.92

00:54:29.000 He doesn't look happy.

00:54:31.000 Well, he's living in 1901. Fuck. 1.00

00:54:33.000 Yeah, average life expectancy. 1.00

00:54:35.000 He's 40 years old.

00:54:35.000 Average life expectancy is like 44, 45. Really?

00:54:38.000 At that time.

00:54:39.000 I mean, but if you make it past childbirth, of course, you have a much better chance of surviving.

00:54:44.000 But anyway, he does name his company after his wife.

00:54:47.000 What's interesting is...

00:54:48.000 You wonder whether she'd be happy about that, right?

00:54:52.000 It becomes this hated name in so many ways years later.

00:54:55.000 But he's scrapping by.

00:54:56.000 He actually had tried to start a chemical industry in the late 19th century.

00:54:59.000 It had burned down.

00:55:01.000 And he didn't have any money.

00:55:02.000 He's got these kids.

00:55:03.000 He's got this family.

00:55:04.000 So to your point, when I'm reading this, I'm trying to understand how is this company starting?

00:55:10.000 What's the human story here?

00:55:11.000 How do we get into this mess?

00:55:14.000 Money.

00:55:15.000 And then, you know, when you get, as you said, to the 50s and 60s, these agricultural chemicals become a huge part of their business.

00:55:22.000 But kind of back to Roundup, 70, okay?

00:55:28.000 245T, now the lid's off.

00:55:30.000 You know, the government's starting to find out about it.

00:55:33.000 People are raising alarms.

00:55:34.000 Scientists are talking about how toxic this stuff is.

00:55:37.000 And, you know, they're looking for An alternative, something that's not as toxic as this stuff.

00:55:45.000 And that's when John Franz finds glyphosate.

00:55:49.000 Interestingly, you know all, like the detergent all?

00:55:52.000 Yes.

00:55:53.000 That was a Monsanto product.

00:55:54.000 Of course it was.

00:55:56.000 But it had a phosphate-based ingredient in it that helped it clean clothes.

00:56:02.000 But in the 60s, phosphate-based detergents were ending up in waterways and contributing to algae blooms and fish death.

00:56:11.000 And so they had to get rid of that phosphate detergent, and they had all this phosphate.

00:56:17.000 And they're like, what do we do with all this phosphate?

00:56:19.000 Boom! 0.99

00:56:20.000 All detergent and all that phosphate ends up becoming the building blocks of Roundup.

00:56:25.000 Roundup is ultimately coming from elemental phosphorus.

00:56:28.000 Wow!

00:56:29.000 It's crazy.

00:56:30.000 But it was all designed to be healthy.

00:56:32.000 I know a guy who lived in a community that was connected to a golf course and he grew up drinking water from a well.

00:56:41.000 And him and a large number of people in the community got cancer.

00:56:46.000 And they firmly believed that it was because of whatever pesticides that they were using or herbicides that they were using on the golf course that it leaked into the wells.

00:56:58.000 Can I show you what Roundup looks like nowadays?

00:57:01.000 Jamie, there's a map in there that's like a map of the country, and it's kind of brown, and it shows you kind of Roundup.

00:57:10.000 It's probably mostly country, right?

00:57:12.000 It says glyphosate because that's the active ingredient.

00:57:14.000 But I just want to show you the change that's happened over the last several years with glyphosate.

00:57:18.000 So that's glyphosate.

00:57:20.000 This comes from the USGS Pesticide National Synthesis Program.

00:57:24.000 This is what happened with Roundup Ready technology.

00:57:29.000 This is 92, so remember I said Roundup is created in the 70s, but it's not really used that much throughout the growing season.

00:57:36.000 It's interesting how it's used so much in California.

00:57:39.000 It's like the primary application of it.

00:57:41.000 Look at that.

00:57:42.000 That's the weird farmland on the way up to San Francisco. 0.98

00:57:44.000 If you're driving from L.A. and you see, like, fuck Joe Biden signs, that's where they are. 0.98

00:57:48.000 Exactly. 0.98

00:57:50.000 Yep.

00:57:50.000 Also, you know, the land of like 90% of our almonds.

00:57:55.000 Like, you know, salad, everything comes from there.

00:57:58.000 Yeah, and so much pesticide use in that valley.

00:58:02.000 Wow.

00:58:03.000 But look at the Midwest.

00:58:03.000 I mean, it goes from like Almost none.

00:58:08.000 Almost very little to swarms.

00:58:10.000 To swarms.

00:58:11.000 By 2017. And that's because you've made crops that are now resistant to glyphosate.

00:58:17.000 So you can spray it as much as you need to kill your weeds.

00:58:23.000 And Jamie, you had that weed resistance graph going up.

00:58:27.000 But a fifth grader can tell you, well, when you spray that much Roundup, On something or glyphosate on something, you're going to start seeing resistance.

00:58:40.000 Adaptation.

00:58:40.000 Exactly.

00:58:41.000 Like, it's nature fighting back.

00:58:43.000 Like what's happening with antibiotics, where you're seeing these, like, MRSA, like these medication-resistant staph infections that are insanely difficult to treat.

00:58:52.000 Just like it.

00:58:52.000 Yeah.

00:58:53.000 Just like it.

00:58:53.000 You know, in fact, some of the weed scientists I talked to, I'll be honest, when I first was going to a talk at Ohio State that they said the weed scientists are talking, I thought, oh.

00:59:04.000 I thought it was weed and marijuana.

00:59:06.000 I was like, oh, this is cool, too. 1.00

00:59:08.000 Yeah, I want to find out how to make the shit stronger. 0.98

00:59:12.000 But these weed scientists at Ohio State who are great and helped out with a book, fantastic folks, you know, some of those, you know, they're like glyphosate was like penicillin, man. 0.99

00:59:21.000 It was so powerful.

00:59:22.000 It was so effective at killing weeds.

00:59:23.000 And we burned through it because these weeds became resistant to it.

00:59:28.000 And so And that's where we're at now, kind of going back to your point about chemicals and exposures.

00:59:35.000 Roundup was introduced because it was seen as an environmentally more friendly herbicide at the time in the 70s.

00:59:41.000 Than Agent R. Yeah, you're comparing it against some pretty bad... 0.98

00:59:45.000 It's like, would you like to get punched or I'll shoot you?

00:59:49.000 And, you know, it had to do with, you know, the way it worked and the mechanisms there.

00:59:53.000 But what's happening now because of that resistance, and Jamie, I hate to bring it up again because it's actually kind of cool.

00:59:58.000 You get to see this.

00:59:59.000 This is the first time we put it together.

01:00:01.000 But when that weed resistance takes off, I think it's the next graph after that.

01:00:06.000 What happens is, check this out.

01:00:08.000 Okay, this is what's happening.

01:00:10.000 I put this together with a friend of mine who's a data scientist.

01:00:12.000 Try to remember that a lot of people are just listening.

01:00:16.000 They're just listening.

01:00:16.000 Probably a huge percentage.

01:00:17.000 Fair enough.

01:00:18.000 So I'll try and describe it.

01:00:19.000 So what we're looking at is pounds of herbicide per acre of soybeans.

01:00:23.000 So this is just looking at soybeans as a case study.

01:00:26.000 And we're looking at the amount of herbicides that's being used on farms per acre.

01:00:30.000 In the US, in specific states, just because they had data for this, for us to compare.

01:00:36.000 And what we're seeing is this, like, explosion in Roundup, glyphosate, that big dark line going up like that.

01:00:43.000 And notice, look, We started seeing the decline in all these other herbicides that are really toxic stuff, like chlorinated compounds and things like that.

01:00:54.000 They're going down and down and down, but check out weed resistance.

01:00:57.000 2004, 2005, 2006. Boom!

01:01:00.000 All those herbicides that were really toxic, including, by the way, the other half of Agent Orange, 2,4-D, is now being used to try and beat back Roundup-resistant weeds.

01:01:13.000 Wow. 0.99

01:01:14.000 What a fucking mess. 1.00

01:01:16.000 It's crazy. 1.00

01:01:16.000 If the folks are looking at this graph, you're essentially seeing two mountains superimposed, but one's upside down. 1.00

01:01:26.000 So it starts out that everything's working great, and then it turns terrible, and then you have these herbicide-resistant It's like the graph.

01:01:41.000 Is it available online?

01:01:42.000 I don't know if we have it available online.

01:01:44.000 I'll see if I can figure out a way to do that and do that.

01:01:47.000 But to see it, it's like the clearest example ever that this is a terrible policy.

01:01:51.000 That is broken, right?

01:01:51.000 And that's kind of what I was saying about looking back as a historian at 25 years of data and saying, wait a minute.

01:01:55.000 We were told that genetically engineered crops would reduce our dependence on all these toxic herbicides.

01:02:01.000 But because of resistance, we're seeing all these toxic herbicides coming back.

01:02:06.000 So if you're a consumer...

01:02:08.000 And honestly, it's not just so much about us and, like, caring about our food.

01:02:12.000 But if you care at all about the people that produce your food, you know, and their exposure to compounds.

01:02:19.000 I mean, we're talking about some of these chemicals that are coming back, produced in the 40s, you know, invented in the 40s, 50s.

01:02:27.000 That's not good.

01:02:28.000 No.

01:02:29.000 And we're also, because we're spraying these things, people have more exposure to glyphosate.

01:02:34.000 So you're seeing whatever health problems that glyphosate causes, I'm sure you're seeing that exacerbate.

01:02:42.000 Yeah.

01:02:43.000 That's expanding, right?

01:02:44.000 Yeah, you know, on glyphosate.

01:02:46.000 So here's where we're at with glyphosate and what's out there from all the different studies.

01:02:51.000 So what happened in 2015 was the World Health Organization came out and said that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen.

01:03:00.000 What year was that?

01:03:01.000 This 2015?

01:03:05.000 But yeah, we still use it?

01:03:08.000 Well, it's only been six years.

01:03:10.000 Exactly.

01:03:11.000 Well, yeah, think about it.

01:03:12.000 And interestingly, Bayer, the company that now owns Monsanto, they bought Monsanto in 2018. They're going to pull Roundup from Home Depot and Lowe's voluntarily in the next two years.

01:03:31.000 So they're not even going to sell this stuff for like regular consumers like you and I who might...

01:03:37.000 Use it on your lawn or whatever.

01:03:39.000 Whatever, right.

01:03:41.000 But somehow we're going to keep using it on farms, right?

01:03:45.000 It's kind of like this logic doesn't hold up, right?

01:03:48.000 Right.

01:03:51.000 Now, the EPA, of course, after that 2015 decision by the WHO, they produced a study and said, we disagree.

01:03:59.000 We don't think it's carcinogenic.

01:04:01.000 But then within that agency, there are scientists that disagree on that and debate that.

01:04:07.000 There have been three major cases out of California, all of which have gone in favor of the plaintiffs who have charged that Roundup exposure has been linked to their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

01:04:19.000 I have to say, looking at it very closely, it's a mess.

01:04:22.000 I'm trying to figure out, what does it do?

01:04:24.000 Does it cause it?

01:04:25.000 Does it not?

01:04:27.000 All I'll say is, given the uncertainty, looking at that graph, it's like, come on.

01:04:32.000 Should we be doing this?

01:04:33.000 I don't know.

01:04:34.000 I know.

01:04:36.000 But what are the alternatives?

01:04:38.000 If you want to produce the kind of crops that we produce in this country, if you think about how many animals that we have to feed and how many acres of soy and corn they're growing, what would be the options in terms of if they need some sort of an herbicide and they don't use Roundup,

01:04:54.000 they're not going to go out there and Pick the weeds.

01:04:56.000 Exactly.

01:04:57.000 Right?

01:04:57.000 So what do they do?

01:04:58.000 Well, that's part of it, right?

01:04:59.000 I think we have to fundamentally rethink the way that we're doing agriculture and definitely think about how much of our agricultural land is going towards these CAFOs and fodder.

01:05:08.000 Yeah.

01:05:09.000 Well, even just agriculture in general, people need to understand that monocrop agriculture, like having these massive fields filled with corn is completely unnatural.

01:05:20.000 Totally unnatural.

01:05:21.000 It doesn't exist in nature.

01:05:22.000 And that's why you have these pests that you constantly have to beat back because they love stuff like this.

01:05:27.000 Yeah.

01:05:27.000 And then they realize, like, well, all we have to do is adapt to corn consumption and corn wherever it's growing.

01:05:35.000 And there's all these minerals they're putting in the grounds to make the corn grow.

01:05:40.000 And this is our spot.

01:05:41.000 Let's go there.

01:05:42.000 Exactly.

01:05:43.000 And you've made a feast.

01:05:45.000 You've made this bounty, and it's like, come, eat as much as you want.

01:05:49.000 And then you poison everybody but the corn, and you just basically have this mutant corn that can take a beating.

01:05:55.000 You can.

01:05:56.000 Well, now these—I mean, most of these— Most of these plants are now genetic, they're called stacked.

01:06:03.000 Yeah.

01:06:03.000 They're stacked.

01:06:04.000 So how do they do that?

01:06:05.000 Explain what that means and how they did that.

01:06:07.000 Yeah, basically they now have crops that are resistant not to one trait, but it's stacked.

01:06:14.000 One herbicide they are resistant to, in one case, the one that's seeking approval right now is like five herbicides.

01:06:22.000 So you're saying like...

01:06:23.000 You know, plants that can beat back are like super tough.

01:06:27.000 Pretty damn tough, you know, plants with five different herbicides they can tolerate.

01:06:31.000 What's a mutant though?

01:06:32.000 It's like that's a mutant plant, right?

01:06:34.000 You know, I mean, I think in this case, you could argue that that's a pretty strange thing and not natural in so many ways, right?

01:06:42.000 One of the things, and this is the craziest, the plants that are now coming out are called dicamba tolerant.

01:06:47.000 Most people are talking about Roundup.

01:06:49.000 Dicamba is freaking crazy.

01:06:52.000 Oh no, it's worse? 0.93

01:06:55.000 It's hard to say worse, you know, because when you look at these stories, you're like, what's worse?

01:06:59.000 You know, the Asian orange story or this?

01:07:03.000 This is what's going on right now with dicamba.

01:07:07.000 Because, you know, there's Roundup resistant weeds, farmers are now buying these seeds that are resistant to Roundup and dicamba, this other chemical.

01:07:17.000 The problem with dicamba is when you spray dicamba over some plants, it vaporizes in hot temperatures.

01:07:26.000 So this herbicide jumps up and actually spreads onto other plants, which is totally crazy.

01:07:35.000 So if you're spraying in a really hot temperature, dicamba will jump and hit other farmers nearby.

01:07:42.000 What?

01:07:42.000 So it actually evaporates?

01:07:44.000 It evaporates.

01:07:45.000 It vaporizes, which is crazy.

01:07:48.000 So you're spraying it.

01:07:49.000 It vaporizes under what temperature?

01:07:52.000 You know, summer temperatures in Arkansas, 90s, upper 80s.

01:07:56.000 And then it just flies through the air.

01:07:57.000 And guess what?

01:07:58.000 You're a farmer over here who didn't buy Monsanto seeds that have dicamba tolerance.

01:08:02.000 So you get pounded.

01:08:05.000 And so I went to the court case and sat in the gallery and watched.

01:08:09.000 And I was like, I wanted to hear the corporate documents because they got challenged by farmers who were hit by dicamba saying, what the hell?

01:08:15.000 You know, we're just farming over here and we're getting hit by this vapor.

01:08:19.000 And the documents were like crazy.

01:08:22.000 It showed that Monsanto knew that drift was going to happen, that that was going to happen.

01:08:26.000 During production, like during the development of this...

01:08:29.000 Not so much during development, but once it was sprayed on farms, like once farmers started spraying it, it was going to jump.

01:08:34.000 And oh my gosh, it's going to start hitting this farm over here.

01:08:38.000 Uh-oh. 1.00

01:08:39.000 Tough shit? 1.00

01:08:39.000 Yeah, basically. 1.00

01:08:40.000 But they weren't thinking tough shit. 0.99

01:08:41.000 They were like, guess what? 0.99

01:08:42.000 They're going to need us now.

01:08:44.000 Because then they'll need our strains that can resist this stuff.

01:08:48.000 Confidential internal document released in that court case said they'll buy this for, quote, protection from their neighbor.

01:08:53.000 Oh my god.

01:08:55.000 Forcing people to use these monster crops.

01:08:58.000 Now, there was also a story where farmers were sued because it showed that they had Monsanto crops growing on their field, even though they had never purchased or had a contract with Monsanto, because of just this natural thing that happens,

01:09:16.000 whether it's the wind carrying these seeds or animals or what have you, right?

01:09:22.000 Yeah.

01:09:22.000 So again, one of these ones that I really went in close on because I wanted to get it right.

01:09:27.000 And it's the drift, the idea that there's been a lot of cases where the drift of pollen has led to that.

01:09:33.000 I haven't seen cases of that.

01:09:36.000 I have seen lots of cases of what you're talking about where a farmer...

01:09:42.000 For whatever reason, comes into possession of Roundup Ready Trades and plants it on his crop without signing an agreement with Monsanto and gets sued for doing that.

01:09:53.000 Now, the question is, how do they get it?

01:09:56.000 And that's a little bit unclear.

01:09:57.000 Did they get it from a neighbor?

01:10:00.000 Did some maybe drop the actual seeds onto their farm, and then they end up seeing that it's Roundup ready, and then they use it?

01:10:07.000 I don't know, but you're absolutely right, and in the book we talk about it, the detectives that Monsanto sends out to enforce this.

01:10:14.000 Like, are you using our seeds illegally?

01:10:16.000 You can actually do it.

01:10:18.000 I don't know if we could do it, but you can call a hotline, like today, like right now, and rat out your neighbor if you think that they are planting seeds illegally And let's be honest, it's a construct that it's illegal.

01:10:33.000 Farmers have been saving seeds or borrowing from their neighbor or whatever.

01:10:37.000 Once you're in possession of seeds, as long as you didn't steal them from somewhere.

01:10:40.000 Yeah, it's like this guy, you know, a cleaner may say, hey, here you can have some seed cleaners.

01:10:43.000 How did that slip through?

01:10:45.000 Like, is there...

01:10:46.000 Can you trace it back?

01:10:48.000 Is there a time where they...

01:10:50.000 Made some sort of an agreement with lawmakers to allow them to enforce this?

01:10:55.000 Because this sounds like a crazy thing you shouldn't be able to enforce.

01:10:58.000 Yeah.

01:10:59.000 Because it's nature.

01:10:59.000 You're essentially owning life, right?

01:11:02.000 Yeah, totally.

01:11:03.000 And there was a lot of debates about it.

01:11:04.000 The big changes were in the 80s, where the Supreme Court said that it was okay to patent. 0.99

01:11:10.000 The fucking Reagan days. 0.98

01:11:12.000 That's what it was. 0.99

01:11:14.000 A trickle-down economics from the old Gipper.

01:11:17.000 Yeah, I mean, those 80 years were, that was when you see this explosion. 0.99

01:11:21.000 A lot of wild shit happened. 0.98

01:11:22.000 Yeah, including new Coke. 0.99

01:11:25.000 That's right.

01:11:26.000 Maybe not as new.

01:11:27.000 But they were worried about Reagan, by the way, when they did that new Coke.

01:11:31.000 Were they?

01:11:31.000 Because it was the war on drugs.

01:11:32.000 So it's like, we don't want to have anything to do with cocaine at this point.

01:11:37.000 Just say no.

01:11:37.000 Those just say no days.

01:11:38.000 Exactly.

01:11:39.000 I remember that.

01:11:40.000 I was born in 81. So that's when they allowed them to hold these patents on plants, which is...

01:11:47.000 Really?

01:11:48.000 It changed the game.

01:11:49.000 Crazy.

01:11:49.000 It changed the game.

01:11:50.000 How much would be helped if they ruled that as something that's not just unnatural but illegal?

01:11:59.000 I mean, it would totally have changed the game.

01:12:01.000 I mean, it's hard to go put that genie back in the box.

01:12:03.000 Is it?

01:12:06.000 I mean, it's one thing if it's an actual intellectual property, like if they've created something out of this, that they have some process where they create something, and that's a very unique process to make a thing, and then they sell that thing.

01:12:18.000 This is not a thing.

01:12:20.000 This is a life.

01:12:21.000 Right.

01:12:22.000 It's plant life.

01:12:23.000 Right.

01:12:23.000 And there were people who made that legal argument.

01:12:26.000 They were like, this is crazy.

01:12:28.000 It's crazy.

01:12:29.000 Yeah, because it's like, I mean, it's a life form.

01:12:33.000 Are we allowed to patent and own life forms?

01:12:37.000 That seems...

01:12:38.000 In this case, and what's weird, here's the weird thing about that first case, the Supreme Court case, it's called the Shakabarthi case.

01:12:45.000 The person developing it was trying to develop a microorganism that could clean up oil spills.

01:12:52.000 So again, the human story, it was like, that's not bad.

01:12:55.000 Right, right, right.

01:12:56.000 But then they make monsters.

01:12:57.000 Right.

01:12:58.000 And then you think about the technologies that go haywire.

01:13:02.000 I was reading something about they were trying to develop something to clean up the garbage patch.

01:13:08.000 You know, there's Boy Onslaught, who's been on the podcast a couple of times.

01:13:11.000 He's a young wonderkind who's developed this machine to scoop all the plastic out of the...

01:13:18.000 Yes!

01:13:18.000 Incredible!

01:13:19.000 Yeah, it's incredible.

01:13:20.000 And it's actually been implemented.

01:13:21.000 And on top of that, he's actually now making products from that recycled plastic.

01:13:26.000 And they're selling like...

01:13:27.000 I believe it's like sunglasses and a few different products that they're making from it.

01:13:32.000 But then there was more talk of some sort of genetically engineered bacteria that was going to eat the plastic.

01:13:40.000 And I was like, and then when it runs out of plastic, then what happens?

01:13:43.000 It starts eating whales. 0.99

01:13:45.000 Like, what the fuck are you doing? 1.00

01:13:46.000 Don't do that. 0.99

01:13:47.000 Like, this is a movie.

01:13:48.000 You're throwing this into the ocean.

01:13:50.000 It's going to be a movie.

01:13:51.000 Totally.

01:13:52.000 Yeah.

01:13:52.000 It always turns bad.

01:13:54.000 Well, it's just like, it's this arrogance of not respecting nature.

01:13:58.000 And, you know, I think people think of that as like a hippie line or something.

01:14:00.000 I don't think it is.

01:14:01.000 It's not hippie at all.

01:14:02.000 It's like, you know, biomimicry.

01:14:04.000 Like, pay attention to it.

01:14:05.000 You could see it everywhere.

01:14:06.000 Like, Australia is a fantastic example of that.

01:14:08.000 Do you know the history of Australian wildlife?

01:14:11.000 Not as intimately as they like.

01:14:13.000 Wildlife in Australia and New Zealand as well.

01:14:16.000 What they've done there is very strange.

01:14:18.000 New Zealand's a different example, but wildlife in Australia. 0.95

01:14:21.000 They basically brought a bunch of shit over there, like a bunch of different deer and different things from Europe. 0.95

01:14:27.000 And then they started having these problems with certain animals. 1.00

01:14:32.000 So they go, well, we're going to have to get some animals to kill those animals. 0.94

01:14:34.000 So they brought over cats. 0.99

01:14:36.000 And then the feral cats over there just fucking devastate everything. 0.83

01:14:40.000 So now people go out and hunt cats. 0.89

01:14:43.000 So if you have a hunting magazine in America, you would show someone who hunted a deer.

01:14:50.000 Like, look, he's going to eat this deer he hunted.

01:14:51.000 Dude, they hold cats up.

01:14:53.000 I'm not exaggerating.

01:14:55.000 They hold cats up the way we would hold some sort of a horrible pest. 1.00

01:15:00.000 And you're like, oh my god, it's a fucking cat cat. 1.00

01:15:03.000 Right. 0.99

01:15:03.000 Like, it's like... 0.99

01:15:04.000 Like, you'd pet that cat. 1.00

01:15:06.000 Like, it's a fucking house cat. 1.00

01:15:08.000 So they have this plague of house cats that are devastating ground-nesting birds and all sorts of different types of wildlife. 1.00

01:15:16.000 And they've brought in these cats to kill something else.

01:15:19.000 And then they have to bring in...

01:15:21.000 They're trying to figure out how to kill the cats.

01:15:24.000 Here it is.

01:15:24.000 Australia's cats kill two billion animals annually, which is actually not bad if you find out how much American cats.

01:15:32.000 American feral cats kill more than that.

01:15:35.000 Here's how the government is responding to the crisis.

01:15:38.000 A new report from the federal parliament recommends cat registration, nighttime curfews, and spaying and neutering.

01:15:47.000 Well, spaying and neutering would work. 0.99

01:15:48.000 All that other stuff is fucking nonsense. 1.00

01:15:54.000 Interesting. 0.99

01:16:05.000 So what they have to do is gun them down from helicopters and just leave them there sometimes because they have overrun populations.

01:16:12.000 And then they also have a bunch of people that hunt in New Zealand and it's a destination for... 0.99

01:16:17.000 It was actually developed that way.

01:16:19.000 Like in the...

01:16:20.000 I think it was the 1800s.

01:16:21.000 I believe it was hunters from Europe.

01:16:24.000 See if we find like the history of New Zealand wildlife.

01:16:27.000 But it's kind of the same thing. 0.98

01:16:28.000 Like these fucking people just at one point in time when they didn't know any better said wouldn't it be great if we had this place and we just filled it up with a bunch of animals? 0.99

01:16:38.000 Right. 1.00

01:16:38.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:16:38.000 But we don't want any bad animals like wolves. 1.00

01:16:41.000 So we're going to do this because we're smarter than the whole system.

01:16:43.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:16:43.000 So they have fucking herds of wild stags and herds of deer. 1.00

01:16:48.000 And then Australia, of course, has their natural animals or their native animals like kangaroos and wallabies and all these different things are competing with these other new animals they brought in. 0.99

01:16:58.000 It's a disaster.

01:16:59.000 It is.

01:17:00.000 And it speaks to the same anger.

01:17:02.000 You could argue that's America in the early 1900s too, where we're like wiping out wolves and then as a result we have like mice everywhere. 0.99

01:17:10.000 Well, we've got to kill the mice!

01:17:12.000 So, you know, it's just a broken way of looking at, you know, the world.

01:17:17.000 And I think that's why it's fun to do environmental history because we're always trying to say, Come back to nature.

01:17:22.000 It's actually not too bad.

01:17:24.000 It's not to go back to no technology or anything like that.

01:17:28.000 It's just to respect it.

01:17:29.000 There's a balance that's achieved through natural prey and predator balance is very important.

01:17:38.000 And they're trying to do that.

01:17:39.000 And there's resistance right now.

01:17:40.000 They're trying to reintroduce wolves to Colorado.

01:17:43.000 And its resistance is like a bunch of different sources of resistance, but some of it is from ranchers that are like, listen, there's a reason why they killed off the wolves in the first place.

01:17:53.000 They're devastating predators. 0.97

01:17:54.000 They're really hard to manage.

01:17:56.000 And then there's also the people that are the hunters that live in Colorado that are enjoying this sort of unnatural predator-prey balance.

01:18:05.000 Like Colorado has more elk than I think all the other states combined.

01:18:10.000 I think it for sure has the most elk of any state and doesn't really have things that eat elk.

01:18:18.000 Coyotes, they can't really eat elk.

01:18:20.000 So they have coyotes, but coyotes mostly eat deer and rabbits and smaller things.

01:18:24.000 It's very rare that they even get a calf because the elk is such a large animal.

01:18:29.000 But they bring in wolves and you're going to have a significant impact.

01:18:33.000 And so people are kind of fretting about that.

01:18:36.000 Totally.

01:18:38.000 You know, they shouldn't have done it in the first place.

01:18:41.000 Exactly.

01:18:41.000 They shouldn't have killed them off in the first place.

01:18:43.000 Then we're dealing with those legacies today.

01:18:45.000 But when you bring them back, then there's a problem as well because you have animals that really haven't adapted to being preyed upon. 0.98

01:18:53.000 They don't know what the fuck's going on. 0.98

01:18:54.000 They get wiped out. 0.99

01:18:56.000 And that's what happened when they reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone.

01:18:59.000 It just devastated the population.

01:19:00.000 But then they eventually, rather, figured it out.

01:19:04.000 Yeah.

01:19:06.000 We were up in Yellowstone.

01:19:08.000 Mosquitoes.

01:19:09.000 That's the craziest thing in Yellowstone.

01:19:10.000 Really?

01:19:11.000 Oh my gosh.

01:19:12.000 We went back on our honeymoon.

01:19:14.000 My wife and I, we were back in the middle of nowhere in Yellowstone.

01:19:18.000 And we were like, people were like, bears and all this stuff. 0.52

01:19:20.000 We were like, these freaking mosquitoes, man. 0.77

01:19:22.000 They are like ravenous in Yellowstone. 0.98

01:19:25.000 So watch out for bears.

01:19:27.000 I've been to Yellowstone.

01:19:28.000 I didn't experience the mosquitoes, but I did experience those kind of mosquitoes in Alaska.

01:19:33.000 Yes, and they're crazy in Alaska. 0.99

01:19:35.000 It's fucking wild. 0.99

01:19:36.000 I was fishing with my friend Ari, and we pulled into this spot near the trailhead, and we went to get out of the truck. 0.98

01:19:44.000 And as soon as we opened up the car, the car filled with mosquitoes. 0.99

01:19:48.000 We were like, what the fuck? 0.98

01:19:50.000 Our idea was that we were going to get out of the car and spare ourselves down with repellent. 0.99

01:19:55.000 Right.

01:19:55.000 Just opening the door.

01:19:57.000 Oh, yeah.

01:19:58.000 Instantly they found us, and there was 100 mosquitoes in the car.

01:20:01.000 And they were huge.

01:20:02.000 It's super scary.

01:20:03.000 You know, my brothers lived there for like 20 years and every time I go up, I'm just like, you know, you have to like cinch down your like jacket and stuff when you get back in the backcountry with that stuff because it's nuts.

01:20:13.000 And I grew up in like, I lived in Savannah, you know, I grew up in Georgia.

01:20:16.000 It's different.

01:20:17.000 They can live a long time in Georgia.

01:20:19.000 They're not so rushed.

01:20:20.000 Exactly.

01:20:21.000 They've got time just picking people off.

01:20:23.000 In Alaska, they have like a week.

01:20:25.000 They're only alive for such a short amount of time where it's warm enough for them to live. 0.99

01:20:30.000 Yeah, they just fucking go crazy. 0.92

01:20:32.000 I was going to ask you, though, food stuff. 0.98

01:20:36.000 How do you think about food?

01:20:39.000 I think hunting is a part of what you do, fishing and things like that.

01:20:42.000 How do you navigate this crazy food system that we've just said is not so broken?

01:20:50.000 Well, I mean, I started hunting because of PETA videos, really.

01:20:54.000 I mean, I watched some of those videos of factory farming, the ones that are now illegal, which is really crazy. 0.99

01:21:01.000 The ag-gag laws, that is fucking crazy. 0.94

01:21:03.000 If it's illegal to film something that would be abhorrent to most people... 0.99

01:21:10.000 Right.

01:21:10.000 There's a problem.

01:21:11.000 Right!

01:21:11.000 Why is it illegal to show people, like, hey...

01:21:15.000 If you found out that the only way to make tires is to kill babies, and there was a factory where they're beating babies to death to make a tire, you'd be like, I'm not buying tires.

01:21:24.000 Yeah, why am I buying tires?

01:21:25.000 If you're finding out that the only way to get bacon is they have to stuff these pigs into these tiny cages and it creates these toxic lakes.

01:21:34.000 You've seen those when they fly the drones over these factory pig farms. 0.99

01:21:38.000 You're like, what the fuck is that? 0.99

01:21:40.000 Totally. 1.00

01:21:41.000 Whether it's cows or pigs or chickens when they're stuffing them into these places.

01:21:46.000 It's horrific.

01:21:49.000 I watched a few of those videos and I said, all right, I'm going to either become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter.

01:21:55.000 Because you play with the vegetarian stuff?

01:21:57.000 I did when I was fighting.

01:21:59.000 I was trying to make a lower weight class when I was in my martial arts competing days and it just didn't work for me.

01:22:06.000 And it's very arguable that I did it wrong.

01:22:08.000 It's very arguable that it's possible to do it right today.

01:22:14.000 Not that arguable that the elite of the elite choose to eat vegetarian or vegan.

01:22:21.000 That's not really true.

01:22:22.000 If you really follow the evidence, that's not true.

01:22:26.000 That's argued by these really zealous vegan advocates and activists, and I see why they would think that way, and I see why they think that it's so smart.

01:22:36.000 But they're also unwilling to look at monocrop agriculture, which is absolutely necessary for developing the amount of crops that you need to feed the entire country a vegetarian diet.

01:22:47.000 You're going to have to use monocrop agriculture and it's going to have to be crazy.

01:22:52.000 Also, farms work in a regenerative manner when they're done correctly, meaning that everything, just like we were talking about with nature and animals and predators and prey, the way farms are supposed to work, the way things are supposed to grow,

01:23:07.000 you have ruminants and these animals and they shit and that shit is fertilizer and it's much more rich and it grows and it's actually a carbon neutral environment when done correctly.

01:23:18.000 You know, like the way Joel Salatin does it with his polyface farms, and there's a few other really ethical people that have really thought this out and engineered their farms to rotate their crops and rotate the use of animal fertilizer, 0.97

01:23:38.000 natural animal fertilizer, with grazing, and they make sure that they do it all together.

01:23:42.000 And it really can work.

01:23:44.000 The question is, can it work at scale for the entire country?

01:23:47.000 And I don't know if it can.

01:23:48.000 It's interesting.

01:23:48.000 Interesting question.

01:23:49.000 And, you know, I lived in Charlottesville for a while, and another Joel friend of mine has a free union grass farm.

01:23:56.000 They actually learned a lot of their tactics from Joel Saladin, who's right over the hill, the mountain in Virginia.

01:24:02.000 And, you know, I spend time with him, and you're right.

01:24:05.000 I mean, I actually get meat from him.

01:24:07.000 You know, it's actually incredible to watch the amount of thought and, you know, having animals move on various grassland and trying to kind of create this This system that is clearly not trying to take a freaking sledgehammer to the ground and trying to be like,

01:24:23.000 look, the soil is amazing.

01:24:25.000 It's like this incredibly biologically diverse thing.

01:24:30.000 And the fact that we would just, you know, yeah, as you're saying, not pay attention to it and just...

01:24:36.000 Yeah, it's all supposed to work together, right?

01:24:39.000 Like the chickens and the pigs and all these different animals.

01:24:42.000 When you move these things around the way Joel Salatin does and use these sort of regenerative farming practices, if done correctly...

01:24:51.000 You really can have a harmonious environment for both animals and plants.

01:24:55.000 Totally.

01:24:56.000 And you can grow all these things together.

01:24:57.000 And you can do it in an ethical way.

01:24:59.000 And I think the ethics is part of it.

01:25:00.000 Like for me, that's the thing that once you start seeing that, you can't unsee it.

01:25:04.000 And I think it's...

01:25:05.000 Agreed.

01:25:06.000 And it's the same way I feel about some of these people too, like in these factors.

01:25:09.000 Like I can't...

01:25:10.000 When you see either the humans being treated that way or animals, it changes what you can eat.

01:25:17.000 Yeah, I read something about this guy who was a journalist.

01:25:20.000 I want to say it was in Esquire, and he worked...

01:25:24.000 I don't remember what magazine it was.

01:25:26.000 I might be making that up.

01:25:27.000 Might have been another magazine.

01:25:28.000 But he worked on the line at a butcher place, at a slaughterhouse, essentially.

01:25:37.000 And he was, you know, essentially, like, dealing with cows coming in, coming out.

01:25:42.000 That's crazy.

01:25:42.000 And he was talking about just the smell of death.

01:25:46.000 That every day you would go in there and you would smell blood and corpses.

01:25:52.000 And that was like this constant smell that was in you, which is not normal, right?

01:25:56.000 It's not normal for a person to experience that every day.

01:26:00.000 If you lived on a farm and you had to kill a cow, You kill the cow once a year, once every six months or whatever you did.

01:26:07.000 And you didn't just kill a thousand cows a day and cut them up and cut their organs out and just stand around with waders because you're standing ankle-deep in blood and guts, literally, like these guys do.

01:26:21.000 What kind of psychological effect Must that have on a human being that every day is just hooks and meats coming by and you're gutting it and spilling it out and cutting this and throwing it over there and you're making no money.

01:26:37.000 Right, and then you don't get paid anything.

01:26:38.000 Yeah, when this guy wrote this article about it, and also in the article he was talking about how this industry would completely fall apart if it wasn't for illegal aliens. 0.99

01:26:48.000 He was like, you know, I don't know how this is working, but everyone's like these undocumented workers that are doing this horrific, really intense labor that's bad for you. 1.00

01:27:01.000 Like in terms of like, gotta be bad for you psychologically.

01:27:04.000 Totally, absolutely.

01:27:05.000 I think that was the turning point for me.

01:27:07.000 I think that's the problem. 0.76

01:27:09.000 Part of it is just being comfortable with being ignorant about it.

01:27:15.000 And then people say, well, whatever.

01:27:16.000 Once you start having that connection, which I think is part of The history of the 20th century of our food system is we just got disconnected from that.

01:27:25.000 We don't have that connection.

01:27:28.000 The good news about Texas is there's a lot of ranchers and you can have a relationship with ranchers or you can buy food from ranchers that That actually use ethical practices.

01:27:42.000 And if you do a little bit of research and you find...

01:27:45.000 There's people that you can actually trust that do...

01:27:47.000 Like there's the Rome Ranch.

01:27:49.000 I know they have...

01:27:50.000 That's the one that Paul Saladino uses and they...

01:27:54.000 They grow bison and cattle, and it's all grass-fed, grass-finished.

01:28:00.000 They roam through these fields, and they live like animals do, and then they have essentially one bad day.

01:28:06.000 Right.

01:28:07.000 But they don't live, and they don't really have a bad day.

01:28:09.000 They have a moment in a day.

01:28:11.000 They don't even know what the hell's happening, and all of a sudden, they get that pipe through the brain.

01:28:14.000 Yeah.

01:28:15.000 That's a wrap.

01:28:15.000 Yeah.

01:28:17.000 We've got to change it.

01:28:18.000 It's not good.

01:28:20.000 So that's how I got into hunting.

01:28:21.000 And I've been doing that.

01:28:23.000 I've been hunting since 2012. So the bulk of my diet is wild game.

01:28:30.000 That's the bulk of my diet.

01:28:32.000 And you feel good.

01:28:33.000 And it's great.

01:28:34.000 I think it has a lot to do with my vitality.

01:28:37.000 I really do.

01:28:37.000 I mean, it must.

01:28:39.000 If you look at it, like I had a friend over this weekend and I shot an elk last week and I was going over it and I vacuum sealed all the cuts of meat and I was cutting up liver and vacuum sealing the liver and I was cutting up all these different pieces of The tenderloin and backstrap.

01:28:57.000 And my friend was like, look how red this is.

01:29:00.000 I'm like, this is what an animal's supposed to look like.

01:29:02.000 This is a healthy animal.

01:29:03.000 This is like a super athlete animal. 1.00

01:29:05.000 When you're getting a piece of like Wagyu beef, that is a sick fucking animal. 1.00

01:29:11.000 You're not supposed to have that much fat. 1.00

01:29:13.000 You're basically eating like a slob. 1.00

01:29:15.000 If it was a human, there'd be a person who's really depressed and something's wrong with them, because they're not supposed to be that overweight. 0.89

01:29:23.000 This is terrible for your body.

01:29:24.000 And that's why they have to introduce so many antibiotics to these cows, because they're eating a diet that's not sustainable for long-term health and vitality for the cow. 0.99

01:29:35.000 When you get grass-fed, grass-finished beef, like one of my sponsors is ButcherBox, And you'd get these steaks, these ribeye steaks from ButcherBox.

01:29:44.000 They'd be smaller than a ribeye that you'd get somewhere else because they don't have all this fat in them.

01:29:49.000 And it's like, it's red.

01:29:52.000 You get the meat, it's like a red meat.

01:29:54.000 And people, they look at it, they go, oh, look how dark it is.

01:29:57.000 Like, that's what it's supposed to be.

01:29:59.000 When you're seeing that sort of pale...

01:30:01.000 In fact, there's been coloring added to meat at grocery stores.

01:30:04.000 Really?

01:30:05.000 Oh, yeah, totally.

01:30:05.000 There's a whole history of...

01:30:07.000 I know they did that with salmon.

01:30:09.000 I didn't know they did that.

01:30:10.000 They did, in part, to try and make things look fresher and things like that.

01:30:13.000 I mean, yeah, which is just kind of not so.

01:30:15.000 Yeah, that's got to be bad for you.

01:30:16.000 I think, you know, that's one side of the—because when I was writing about the Monsanto thing, it wasn't just that, like, if this was a story about genetically engineered seeds.

01:30:25.000 I mean, honestly, that comes later in the book.

01:30:27.000 It's about all the other chemicals that end up, like— In our food system that aren't necessarily even chemicals designed for food.

01:30:34.000 Like phthalates and things like that?

01:30:36.000 One of the ones that was crazy in this story was polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs.

01:30:43.000 Tastes good.

01:30:44.000 Yummy stuff.

01:30:45.000 And this stuff is like... 1.00

01:30:46.000 Dangerous shit. 1.00

01:30:47.000 Super dangerous. 1.00

01:30:47.000 Monsanto was the only producer of this stuff, of PCBs in the United States. 1.00

01:30:53.000 They had two factories.

01:30:55.000 One in East St. Louis and then one in Anniston, Alabama.

01:30:59.000 And they made this stuff.

01:31:00.000 And it was like a wonder chemical.

01:31:03.000 It came out in the 30s. 1.00

01:31:03.000 And that's the shit that's in plastic bottles and stuff, right? 1.00

01:31:06.000 Well, it actually was banned in the 60s. 0.99

01:31:10.000 So not BPA, which is in the plastic bottles, which comes later.

01:31:16.000 But PCBs were like crazy.

01:31:19.000 I mean, they were in like...

01:31:20.000 Artificial Christmas trees.

01:31:22.000 They were in carbonless paper.

01:31:23.000 They were in the paint that we lined our pools around.

01:31:26.000 They were actually in the paint in the silos that held grain.

01:31:31.000 And this stuff was like so insane and everywhere.

01:31:38.000 But then, classic situation, 60s again.

01:31:42.000 They're like, whoops.

01:31:43.000 This stuff is like super toxic.

01:31:47.000 Like exceptionally toxic.

01:31:49.000 And there's this document, I actually had it, I don't know if Jamie wanted to see it or not, but that's handwritten notes from this meeting in 1969 inside Monsanto, a confidential document that they had, where they're discussing like, What should we do with PCBs?

01:32:05.000 We now know it's a global contaminant.

01:32:07.000 It's super toxic.

01:32:08.000 It's in everything.

01:32:09.000 It's everywhere.

01:32:10.000 It's in breast milk at that time because it's just everywhere.

01:32:14.000 And they're discussing, like, okay, what should we do?

01:32:18.000 And it says, situation is snowballing.

01:32:21.000 1969. Handwritten notes in this big meeting.

01:32:24.000 Underneath it, it says, alternatives.

01:32:27.000 Well, we could go out of the business as option number one.

01:32:31.000 Which is weird.

01:32:32.000 You know, it's funny.

01:32:33.000 I was telling somebody about this document last night in Austin.

01:32:36.000 And yeah, here's the document.

01:32:38.000 Wow, look at that.

01:32:39.000 And this is from 69. This is this confidential document.

01:32:43.000 And for people just listening, it's just handwritten notes.

01:32:47.000 And it says, subject is snowballing.

01:32:48.000 Where do we go from here?

01:32:50.000 Well, we have a couple alternatives.

01:32:51.000 Look at that.

01:32:52.000 We can either go out of the business.

01:32:55.000 That didn't sound great.

01:32:56.000 Or we can quote, and this is what we're reading here, sell the hell out of them as long as we can and do nothing else.

01:33:03.000 Well, it says sell as long.

01:33:05.000 Oh, the hell out of them.

01:33:06.000 Right, above it.

01:33:07.000 What is amazing is that the guy took the time to like...

01:33:10.000 No, wait a minute.

01:33:11.000 Let's put a little thing up.

01:33:13.000 It's weird.

01:33:14.000 There's a chuckle to it because it just seems so freaking absurd.

01:33:18.000 The problem is that it's not that funny. 0.84

01:33:22.000 It's horrible.

01:33:23.000 This is crazy that the company does go on, by the way, to continue selling it.

01:33:27.000 He wrote it.

01:33:28.000 Sell?

01:33:28.000 You've got to look at this, folks, if you can find it online.

01:33:31.000 Yeah, it's available online.

01:33:32.000 It says, sell as long as we can and do nothing else.

01:33:37.000 And then...

01:33:39.000 After the fact, he wrote the hell out of them and then inserted it.

01:33:44.000 In between sell and as.

01:33:47.000 And then it's a big question.

01:33:49.000 I like this.

01:33:50.000 What do we tell our customers?

01:33:52.000 And that's the crazy thing.

01:33:53.000 They're selling this to everybody.

01:33:55.000 And part of it was also, when do we tell our customers?

01:34:00.000 And this is the kind of stuff you're seeing during this period in the 60s.

01:34:05.000 You're like, what is going on?

01:34:09.000 And they have a bunch of other things about dog studies and things like that.

01:34:14.000 But this stuff was crazy.

01:34:16.000 It was in everything.

01:34:17.000 It's in transformers, actually.

01:34:18.000 And firemen, fire, rescue people, even today, if there's a big transformer fire or something, they can be exposed to burning PCBs because they were allowed to remain in place.

01:34:29.000 So this PCB contamination is still out there.

01:34:32.000 And there are actually states, Washington State, I don't know all of them off the top of my head, Delaware, that are suing Bayer right now To pay for PCB contamination from that long ago because it's still out there.

01:34:48.000 And they're winning.

01:34:50.000 And by the way, Bayer made the worst decision ever.

01:34:54.000 Can we just acknowledge that?

01:34:56.000 Like, Bayer buys Monsanto in 2018. They were making aspirin.

01:35:00.000 Everybody was happy.

01:35:01.000 Woohoo! 1.00

01:35:01.000 You know? 1.00

01:35:02.000 And they were making aspirin since the late 19th century.

01:35:05.000 That's the crazy thing.

01:35:05.000 They were like, we're not making enough money off this aspirin.

01:35:08.000 Fucking ibuprofen's taking the legs out of us, boys. 0.98

01:35:11.000 It's time to step up. 0.99

01:35:12.000 Let's go by the most toxic liabilities we possibly can think of.

01:35:16.000 Oh, where's that?

01:35:17.000 Monsanto.

01:35:18.000 Oh, God.

01:35:18.000 They bought them.

01:35:19.000 For how much?

01:35:20.000 About $63, $64 billion.

01:35:22.000 Woo! 0.99

01:35:23.000 It was the largest merger, I think, in German history, a merger in a German firm.

01:35:30.000 Of course it's German. 0.52

01:35:31.000 Well, here's the thing.

01:35:33.000 The great irony of this is John Queenie, the guy with Olga Monsanto, his whole point for Bing was he wanted to beat the Germans.

01:35:42.000 Wow.

01:35:42.000 He wanted to like, you know, be his independent American chemical company, patriotic, you know?

01:35:47.000 And then they get bought out.

01:35:50.000 Poor guy, if he was alive, right?

01:35:51.000 He'd be like, oh man, the Germans got me. 0.94

01:35:53.000 You would think the Germans would be like super sensitive to anything that would be kind of like at least semi-genocidal.

01:35:59.000 Well, and Bayer, you know, of course, the chemical company was associated with this, right?

01:36:03.000 Nazi Germany and the chemicals that were created in that time.

01:36:06.000 So that chemical industry has a really sordid history of their own.

01:36:10.000 But in terms of Bayer now, it was nuts.

01:36:14.000 They buy the company.

01:36:15.000 And by the way, the CEOs at the time, it was...

01:36:18.000 One guy coming in, one guy going out.

01:36:20.000 The guy going out was like, don't do this, bro.

01:36:24.000 I'm sure they said bro.

01:36:25.000 You know, like, don't do it, bro.

01:36:26.000 And the new guy, Warner Bauman, was like, They've got some pretty cool technology.

01:36:32.000 You know, look at all this stuff.

01:36:33.000 How did the Germans get so advanced when it comes to chemicals? 0.98

01:36:37.000 Because, like, if you go to Fritz Haber and...

01:36:39.000 BASF. Yeah.

01:36:40.000 Part of it had to do...

01:36:41.000 They've been in the game for a very long time.

01:36:43.000 They were the kind of frontrunners in organic chemistry in the late 19th century.

01:36:46.000 And part of it had to do with a lot of great research institutions that were close to coal deposits, which were the source of all that organic chemistry.

01:36:54.000 And they just took off.

01:36:57.000 And so, you know, they had a leg up.

01:37:00.000 Though I will say the oil boom in the United States in the early 20th century gave the Americans a chance because we had all this oil that we could use to make chemicals and companies like Monsanto started to catch up.

01:37:12.000 But what's crazy is Wernherbaughman buys Monsanto in 2018. Literally, a couple months later, the first Roundup case goes against Bayer.

01:37:23.000 Now Bayer.

01:37:24.000 It's $285 million for one guy in that case, Dwayne Johnson.

01:37:30.000 $285 million.

01:37:31.000 The Rock?

01:37:32.000 Exactly.

01:37:33.000 Is that how The Rock got started?

01:37:34.000 Well, he actually prefers Lee Johnson because of that reason.

01:37:37.000 Dwayne Lee Johnson.

01:37:38.000 But, you know, he had terminal cancer at that point when he goes to trial.

01:37:44.000 And it was the first kind of case that went against Bayer.

01:37:47.000 And it was right after Warner Bauman bought the company.

01:37:51.000 And everyone's like, oh.

01:37:55.000 And you can look at their stock price.

01:37:57.000 It's nuts.

01:37:58.000 They lose a third of their value within, like, A couple months after that, and then two other cases happened and they're dropping.

01:38:06.000 They actually, by the end of 2019, Bayer was worth the amount of money they paid to buy Monsanto. 0.99

01:38:13.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:38:14.000 It was that bad. 0.99

01:38:15.000 And so the CEO, Warner Bauman, goes into the shareholders meeting and I have some pictures of the book where he's like, sorry, you know, and he's standing in front of the stock price that looks like this and trying to explain it to his shareholders.

01:38:30.000 And the shareholders aren't having it.

01:38:32.000 They've issued a vote of no confidence in the CEO and the board of management, which had never happened in the history of the DAX. Yeah, this is a picture from that meeting.

01:38:45.000 And that's him thinking about his future.

01:38:47.000 Yeah, it's kind of an amazing picture.

01:38:50.000 Before that, he was thinking about buying a yacht.

01:38:52.000 Exactly.

01:38:53.000 He's like, no yacht.

01:38:54.000 There will be no yachts.

01:38:56.000 Things aren't looking so good.

01:38:58.000 And so, you know, I think this is a situation where they don't know what's going to happen.

01:39:07.000 Because they're not only facing lawsuits.

01:39:08.000 Agent Orange is also still, you know, that's still an issue.

01:39:11.000 What do they do with those?

01:39:12.000 They just hold those off while the people die?

01:39:14.000 Well, basically, that's what they're trying to do in some ways, you know, is just kind of delay, delay, delay.

01:39:21.000 But the problem is these people aren't going away.

01:39:23.000 There were 120,000 Roundup litigation cases that were filed or either were going to trial when I last looked, you know, back when I was writing this book.

01:39:33.000 This was, you know, people who are coming on hard.

01:39:38.000 And it's just...

01:39:38.000 That's not just roundup.

01:39:40.000 PCBs.

01:39:40.000 So is that like the only thing that can stop a company that is...

01:39:43.000 It's hard to say that a company is evil.

01:39:47.000 Yes, I think that's right.

01:39:49.000 I don't think it's fair to say.

01:39:50.000 It's evil, right?

01:39:51.000 It's made up of people, and there's good people and bad people, and there's some people like that guy who ended up writing, let's sell the hell out of them as long as they can.

01:39:57.000 That's evil.

01:39:58.000 Yeah.

01:39:58.000 And clearly that does happen when you have...

01:40:02.000 These corporations that are acting to just have this constant, never-ending profit stream.

01:40:10.000 And they look at that and there's the diffusion of responsibility that comes with having a large corporation.

01:40:15.000 You're not thinking of it as an individual.

01:40:17.000 But when you're thinking about a company that also is responsible for a lot of the food...

01:40:25.000 That feeds all these animals and a lot of the food that feeds people.

01:40:28.000 It's like, okay, how much evil?

01:40:31.000 Is it 30% evil?

01:40:32.000 Right.

01:40:33.000 And 70% good?

01:40:34.000 Like, what's the net result of Monsanto existing?

01:40:37.000 I think my feeling about it was simply, you know, I wanted to answer that question.

01:40:41.000 Like, that was the driving question of the book.

01:40:43.000 Wait a minute.

01:40:44.000 How did a company that had all these, like, the most toxic compounds the world's ever seen basically help design our food system?

01:40:50.000 Do you think you, to your own personal satisfaction, did you come to a conclusion?

01:40:57.000 I mean, to that question, I think the answer is pretty clear.

01:41:01.000 And the answer is that they never really held accountable.

01:41:05.000 Not by the EPA, not by the USDA. Do you think they're going to be now with all these different cases?

01:41:10.000 It did feel weird.

01:41:11.000 Because the precedent has been set with that enormous payout.

01:41:14.000 Yeah.

01:41:14.000 And then all these cases in the wings.

01:41:16.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, Bayer is trying as hard as it can to try and settle all this.

01:41:22.000 I mean, they're talking about $15 billion.

01:41:25.000 I mean, it's an insane amount of money to try and settle something like this, but it reflects the scale of what's going on.

01:41:31.000 How did they not see that coming when they bought it?

01:41:33.000 I'm telling you, there were people, like the guy going out that I was telling you about, who was like, don't do this, you know?

01:41:39.000 Like, do you understand?

01:41:41.000 You know what I would say, Joe, is partially I think people don't.

01:41:46.000 Look to history.

01:41:47.000 They don't sit with it to say, look at how long this goes back and look at how persistent this stuff is.

01:41:55.000 We're still dealing with it.

01:41:56.000 Agent Orange is a good example.

01:41:57.000 I mean, I went to Vietnam.

01:42:00.000 We are now, most people don't know this, we are currently cleaning up Agent Orange in Vietnam for the first time.

01:42:06.000 The dioxin contamination in Vietnam that was sprayed by the U.S. military.

01:42:11.000 On the jungle?

01:42:12.000 Yes, in those areas.

01:42:14.000 How are they cleaning that up?

01:42:15.000 And just so people that, you know, to fill in Agent Orange, why it was used in Vietnam, it was used as this defoliant, exactly, as you said, to kind of expose these jungle areas so that we could fight more effectively.

01:42:27.000 And it was sprayed in an enormous quantity across the country.

01:42:33.000 That dioxin persists, and it stayed in the environment Into the 21st century, into the 2010s, and it's still there.

01:42:45.000 Is there a half-life of it?

01:42:46.000 I don't know what the half-life is, and I don't know how... 0.98

01:42:49.000 In a lot of cases, it will denature, but a lot of this stuff is still there, and there's hot spots.

01:42:54.000 There's research that was done that I talk about that shows all these hot spots.

01:42:59.000 And so I flew there because I couldn't believe it.

01:43:01.000 I was like...

01:43:02.000 Alright, what's happening?

01:43:04.000 And no one's talking about it.

01:43:07.000 Actually, you and I, Jamie, everyone in this room is paying taxpayers.

01:43:12.000 U.S. taxpayers are paying for it.

01:43:13.000 That's part of the thing, I think, going back to how do you get away with this?

01:43:18.000 You don't end up having to pay for stuff.

01:43:20.000 Monsanto has not paid a cent for that Was that a part of the agreement that they had with the military when they sold them stuff?

01:43:27.000 Part of the argument that they used in court and things like that is, look, we sold this to the government for the government's purposes, and we can't be held in the contractor's defense.

01:43:37.000 We're just a contractor here doing the bidding of the federal government.

01:43:40.000 We have a certain degree of insulation.

01:43:42.000 But what I'm trying to show in the book is they saw things internally and knew things about their product that I think Should blow that out of the water.

01:43:51.000 Just because you sell something to the federal government, but if you know that it's making your workers look like the people we saw, are you not in some way liable for trying to clean that up?

01:44:02.000 And so in this case, it's totally nuts, Joe.

01:44:08.000 So if you fly into Da Nang in Vietnam, which is one of the former air bases of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, When you fly into the airport, on the south end of the airport, tarmac, is this huge concrete structure that we just have dumped soil into that has tremendous high concentrations of dioxin.

01:44:34.000 This just finished 2012 to 2017. This is how it works.

01:44:40.000 They put all this soil into this huge concrete structure Then they put electrodes, like a thousand of them, into that concrete structure and heat it up using electricity to like some insane thing, like 300 degrees Celsius, to basically cook the dioxin.

01:44:57.000 Oh my God.

01:44:58.000 And it costs like a hundred and, I forget, $130 million or something for that one site.

01:45:03.000 And that's how they do it.

01:45:04.000 They have to put this dirt into a big concrete structure, burn it, And that's how we're going to go around Vietnam and clean up a lot of this dioxin contamination. 0.74

01:45:14.000 But that also must kill all the biological material in that dirt. 0.92

01:45:18.000 All that stuff.

01:45:19.000 Like all the stuff that grows life.

01:45:21.000 Sure.

01:45:22.000 It's a total mess.

01:45:23.000 So it's going to be a desert.

01:45:24.000 Well, but again, you're looking, you know, they're looking at concentrated areas.

01:45:28.000 How do they know?

01:45:30.000 How do they know if it's completely denatured?

01:45:32.000 No, I mean, how do they know where the concentrated areas are?

01:45:34.000 Well, part of it was where they stored a lot of the Agent Orange.

01:45:38.000 So, air bases were really bad hot spots because they were just having those...

01:45:43.000 You can think of, especially when you leave an area, it's just like all these big old tanks of Agent Orange were just there.

01:45:49.000 And they just left them there.

01:45:50.000 Leaked and did all this kind of disastrous stuff.

01:45:53.000 Oh, my God.

01:45:54.000 So, yeah, this is...

01:45:55.000 Oh, my God. 1.00

01:45:55.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:45:56.000 Fuck! 1.00

01:45:57.000 22 photographs of Agent Orange inventory in 1974. Oh my god. 1.00

01:46:03.000 This was a crazy trip for me because...

01:46:04.000 Look at all those barrels.

01:46:06.000 That's insane.

01:46:07.000 When I went to Da Nang, we didn't have access to go on site.

01:46:13.000 Look at that.

01:46:14.000 That's crazy.

01:46:16.000 It is crazy.

01:46:17.000 You're looking at, folks, you're looking at...

01:46:18.000 There it is, there it is.

01:46:19.000 Sorry, the medium.com one, Jamie.

01:46:24.000 Right below that to the left.

01:46:25.000 Overcoming the legacies.

01:46:26.000 That's that concrete structure I was telling you about.

01:46:28.000 See all those electrodes going in?

01:46:30.000 Yeah.

01:46:30.000 Basically, they put...

01:46:31.000 This is crazy.

01:46:32.000 They have to do it in batches.

01:46:33.000 So they have to cap it, put all the soil in, and then decap it, and then put in a new batch of soil, heat it, then take it off.

01:46:41.000 And what do they do with the old soil?

01:46:44.000 I don't know where they dump it, but it doesn't have to happen.

01:46:46.000 Click on that again, Jamie, that same picture up right?

01:46:49.000 See, they're capping it right there.

01:46:50.000 Yeah, look at that.

01:46:52.000 That's all dirt.

01:46:52.000 It's nuts.

01:46:53.000 We got the same picture, by the way.

01:46:55.000 We couldn't get access to the site, so my buddy who's a photographer and I, John Zadrow, we went and got up on this hotel, and there was this crazy...

01:47:06.000 You know, pool up there and people were drinking.

01:47:07.000 It was the weirdest thing.

01:47:08.000 I'm like filming this like insane story about the accident.

01:47:12.000 This is happening as we speak.

01:47:15.000 Yeah, this particular site just completed.

01:47:18.000 Almost no one talks about it here in the country.

01:47:22.000 And it was a partnership between USAID and the Vietnamese government to finally start cleaning up some of the dioxin that was there.

01:47:30.000 And by the way, by this point, we've, of course, given benefits to veterans.

01:47:33.000 We've done all sorts of things to try and, as the U.S. government, to try and write this.

01:47:37.000 But in terms of Vietnamese citizens...

01:47:39.000 And that was part of the deal.

01:47:41.000 Whenever we were trying to do negotiations with the Vietnamese, they're like, hey, we'll negotiate once you clean up this mess. 1.00

01:47:48.000 So it became like this huge problem.

01:47:50.000 But if you ask, where's Monsanto?

01:47:52.000 And here's the crazy thing.

01:47:54.000 Monsanto is now there.

01:47:56.000 They just got permission to begin selling, guess what?

01:47:59.000 Glyphosite?

01:47:59.000 And genetically engineered seeds.

01:48:01.000 Oh my God.

01:48:02.000 So the story comes back, right?

01:48:04.000 And it's like, what?

01:48:05.000 Well, they say, good news, we have Agent Orange resistant seeds.

01:48:09.000 Right, exactly.

01:48:10.000 Well, and in a way, I mean, in a way, Joe, again, like, it's so crazy.

01:48:14.000 But in a way, that's probably true down the road.

01:48:17.000 Because, and I'm going to be clear.

01:48:20.000 It's not necessarily Agent Orange.

01:48:22.000 But 2,4-D. That's that second half.

01:48:28.000 That's not the dioxin one.

01:48:29.000 This is the other one that didn't have dioxin.

01:48:32.000 But it's still part of that Agent Orange.

01:48:34.000 And it's not like it's...

01:48:37.000 It's more toxic than glyphosate in a lot of ways, right?

01:48:40.000 It's a toxicity profile.

01:48:42.000 But it's not the 2,4,5T with dioxin.

01:48:45.000 But anyway, so it's still being used, 2,4-D, that other half of Agent Orange.

01:48:49.000 So it's 2,4-D and 2,4,5T? I know.

01:48:52.000 It's like my mind was swimming in numbers because of these chemicals.

01:48:57.000 And that's part of it.

01:48:58.000 I think a lot of these chemicals are named, stuff like this.

01:49:00.000 Like, eh, whatever.

01:49:01.000 Like, who's paying attention, right?

01:49:02.000 Polychlorinated biphenyls.

01:49:03.000 Who wants to talk about that?

01:49:05.000 Yeah, well, it's all around us.

01:49:07.000 And we have to pay attention to it because we're exposed to it.

01:49:10.000 And in this case, you kind of saw that there, Jamie.

01:49:13.000 No reason to bring it back up, but there was a lake at the end of the...

01:49:16.000 You were talking about fishing.

01:49:18.000 And a lot of people in Vietnam, they're fishing in those ponds and things like that.

01:49:21.000 And that was the problem.

01:49:21.000 They were being exposed to super high levels of dioxin.

01:49:24.000 So, by the way, we're cleaning up the dirt, but we're not necessarily taking care...

01:49:28.000 As effectively as we could be of the people themselves who could be exposed to dioxin in Vietnam, which is a big debate right now.

01:49:34.000 How do we take care of the legacies of that war?

01:49:37.000 And one could argue, well, given what we know about the history, shouldn't there be companies that take...

01:49:44.000 And you could say this, okay, screw liability.

01:49:47.000 Forget the legal argument that whether, okay, they have the contractor's defense or whatever.

01:49:52.000 But if you're a company like Bayer and you want to come in and sell seeds...

01:49:55.000 I mean, I'm just talking out of goodwill, you know?

01:49:58.000 You know this is part of the history.

01:50:00.000 You know that we didn't clean this up.

01:50:02.000 Right.

01:50:03.000 Like, you're a multi-billion dollar firm.

01:50:07.000 Shouldn't you have some responsibility for going back and taking responsibility for that, you know? 1.00

01:50:12.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:50:13.000 And then all those people. 1.00

01:50:15.000 All those people.

01:50:16.000 All those lives lost.

01:50:17.000 All those people that had horrific diseases directly connected to Agent Orange.

01:50:21.000 And there's been some really brave writers that have been writing some op-eds recently from Vietnam who are trying to just continue to make sure that people don't forget about this and tell this story.

01:50:32.000 And just to put a fine point on it.

01:50:34.000 Right now, you said, is it happening right now?

01:50:37.000 I just want to be clear on it.

01:50:39.000 Right now, they've moved to another American airbase that's just outside of Ho Chi Minh City, former American airbase, in Binhua.

01:50:47.000 So if you're interested in this topic, right now, there's a massive dioxin remediation project that, again, USAID and the US government's doing.

01:50:57.000 The companies that sold this stuff are nowhere to be seen.

01:51:01.000 But we're paying for it and it's a much more expensive project because it's way more expansive.

01:51:06.000 So this Da Nang project is completed?

01:51:08.000 It's completed.

01:51:09.000 So does that mean you can go there and eat off the ground?

01:51:11.000 Well, you know, there's other contaminants I might be concerned about, too.

01:51:16.000 Does the five-second rule count?

01:51:18.000 Yeah, I don't think it's a five-second rule, but I do think it's gone a long way to prevent this leaching of dioxin into those lakes and leaching other contaminants in there, and I think it's made it a much safer place.

01:51:29.000 So I think that human health costs...

01:51:33.000 Need to be taken care of.

01:51:35.000 So to be clear, the cleanup is essentially just the storage areas.

01:51:39.000 It's not the areas they sprayed.

01:51:40.000 Right.

01:51:41.000 You know, a lot of areas, these are hot spots in part because the heavy...

01:51:45.000 You can think that the Vietnam War has been over for a long time.

01:51:49.000 So...

01:51:50.000 The hottest spots were places where there was storage, not so much necessarily where the spraying went.

01:51:56.000 Right.

01:51:56.000 We were looking at this again for the folks that are just listening.

01:51:59.000 We looked at like multiple football fields filled with stacked drums of Agent Orange.

01:52:05.000 That's what the images were. 1.00

01:52:06.000 That's scary shit. 0.99

01:52:08.000 And you said that is small in comparison to the new Right. 1.00

01:52:13.000 The Denang site was a much more...

01:52:15.000 I mean, like most projects governments take on.

01:52:19.000 Yeah, this is down in...

01:52:20.000 it looks like Benoit.

01:52:22.000 That's the whole site that's contaminated?

01:52:24.000 All that's blocked off?

01:52:25.000 Yeah, a lot of these...

01:52:26.000 you can see...

01:52:27.000 Pacer ivy was also the name of the kind of removal of Agent Orange from That's bigger than Austin.

01:52:33.000 The U.S. Well, the green line is the boundary of the airport.

01:52:37.000 Is the boundary of the airport.

01:52:38.000 Those are the hotspots.

01:52:38.000 The hotspots.

01:52:39.000 Oh, I see.

01:52:40.000 So the red areas are the hotspots.

01:52:42.000 So they have to...

01:52:43.000 And, of course, that's leaching into the ground.

01:52:44.000 So any well water...

01:52:46.000 Ground water, all these things, yeah.

01:52:48.000 And there's studies.

01:52:49.000 I mean, it's not like it's...

01:52:51.000 We don't know.

01:52:52.000 One of the reasons we've gone in is because we know that people have exposure to it.

01:52:56.000 It spreads.

01:52:58.000 And there's little lakes there too.

01:53:00.000 See the lakes that are right next to it?

01:53:03.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:53:04.000 There's all these waterways and things like that.

01:53:06.000 It's kind of nuts.

01:53:07.000 Mr. Hawk Lake.

01:53:09.000 Mr. Hawk's got his own lake.

01:53:10.000 Mr. Hawk, exactly.

01:53:11.000 We actually, it was crazy.

01:53:12.000 I remember this day because How about that?

01:53:16.000 Mr. Koi has his own lake too. 0.97

01:53:18.000 But his lake's not fucked up. 0.81

01:53:19.000 Mr. Hawk's lake's all in the hot zone. 1.00

01:53:21.000 That's a bullshit lake. 1.00

01:53:23.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:53:23.000 Imagine being Mr. Hawk. 1.00

01:53:24.000 He's like, he's fucking Americans. 1.00

01:53:26.000 I had a nice lake. 1.00

01:53:28.000 We went on motorcycles to get there.

01:53:30.000 And all I remember was we were just covered in just like dirt.

01:53:33.000 Because we couldn't figure out how to get out there.

01:53:35.000 Were you worried?

01:53:39.000 These were a couple of hectic days for me because, you know, I was just a historian.

01:53:44.000 I was not an experienced journalist at that time and hadn't really learned some of the trade.

01:53:50.000 And I was kind of showing up and knocking on doors.

01:53:51.000 I went to the headquarters of Monsanto in Vietnam to ask questions.

01:53:55.000 But what I meant is you're worried about exposure from driving around with the dirt.

01:53:58.000 Oh, that.

01:53:58.000 Yeah, no.

01:54:00.000 More about, like...

01:54:01.000 Getting killed.

01:54:02.000 Monsanto or being in trouble in some way.

01:54:05.000 Not necessarily the dioxin exposure there.

01:54:08.000 I will say this.

01:54:09.000 This is crazy.

01:54:10.000 So I did get really worried.

01:54:12.000 I went to the site where Roundup is manufactured in Soda Springs, Idaho.

01:54:17.000 So this is where the elemental phosphorus that goes into glyphosate to make the herbicide is.

01:54:22.000 And it's crazy because it comes from phosphate rock that's mined from the mountains there.

01:54:29.000 And as a byproduct of producing elemental phosphorus, it's radioactive waste that's generated.

01:54:36.000 This is definitely viewable, Jamie, on Google.

01:54:41.000 You can look like soda springs, slag pile, I think it'll pop up. 1.00

01:54:50.000 And it'll be helpful just to talk about it when we can see it.

01:54:53.000 But basically, there it is.

01:54:56.000 That's my piece, the Descent Magazine piece there, the second one.

01:55:00.000 My buddy John Zader took that picture.

01:55:02.000 So what you're seeing here is this mountain of charcoal waste.

01:55:06.000 That's the leftover slag that's This is done every 15 minutes.

01:55:12.000 Every 15 minutes, there's a dumping of this slag, waste.

01:55:16.000 This is how you make Roundup.

01:55:18.000 This is the elemental phosphorus that goes into glyphosate that makes Roundup.

01:55:23.000 And what we're seeing is these cauldrons that are dumping like lava-like, yeah, you can see a good shot there, sludge down this mountain.

01:55:30.000 You can see that barbed wire fence.

01:55:31.000 So we stood there for a long time and took pictures of all of this.

01:55:36.000 But basically, This waste, as you can see, it's now just this mountain because they can't put it anywhere.

01:55:46.000 It's essentially, you know, it has radionuclides that make it dangerous if you're going to use it.

01:55:52.000 So is that an artificially created mound?

01:55:55.000 Yeah.

01:55:56.000 It looks like a mountain, but there's nowhere to put it.

01:55:59.000 So we're just dumping more and more of this waste higher and higher.

01:56:02.000 This is insane.

01:56:03.000 So this initially was flat ground?

01:56:06.000 Oh, yeah.

01:56:06.000 Oh my god.

01:56:07.000 It's the south end of the plant.

01:56:10.000 You can see the plant up there.

01:56:12.000 That's kind of the plant.

01:56:13.000 Where is this again?

01:56:14.000 Idaho?

01:56:14.000 This is in Soda Springs, Idaho.

01:56:16.000 We camped out there.

01:56:17.000 That's a super fun site. 1.00

01:56:19.000 That's fucking crazy. 0.99

01:56:21.000 My friends always say, my students always say, super fun? 0.99

01:56:23.000 And I'm like, not super fun.

01:56:25.000 The opposite of super fun.

01:56:27.000 Super fund.

01:56:29.000 Like the most toxic sites.

01:56:31.000 Look at that. 0.99

01:56:31.000 Them dumping that lava shit everywhere. 0.99

01:56:33.000 And creating these mountains. 0.99

01:56:35.000 So that's one of the most toxic sites.

01:56:36.000 So what happens when that stuff gets rained on?

01:56:40.000 Well, you know, there's all sorts of questions about the long-term effects of this.

01:56:43.000 So let me just make this weirder, okay?

01:56:46.000 Oh, boy.

01:56:47.000 So this pile of slag, okay, is a pile because in the 70s, they finally prevented Monsanto from selling this stuff as aggregate to build things out of.

01:57:04.000 So, the town of Soda Springs in Idaho and Pocatello nearby used the slag waste as an aggregate to build basement foundations and roadways and their sidewalks and stuff like that.

01:57:22.000 Let me make sure I get all this because it's just so wild.

01:57:30.000 The EPA comes in in the 80s.

01:57:33.000 Remember, a lot of this stuff is happening even before there's even an EPA, you know, in the 70s.

01:57:37.000 So things are just going kind of wild.

01:57:40.000 But they come in in the 80s, and they do these radiological surveys.

01:57:43.000 They actually fly over and look for gamma radiation.

01:57:46.000 I'm like, oh!

01:57:48.000 Folks, there's elevated levels of gamma radiation coming out of basement foundations and school buildings and whatever else they've used for its streets and things like that.

01:58:00.000 And they're like, you can't do this.

01:58:04.000 And so one of the reasons there's that pile is because it was like, well, we can't sell it anymore.

01:58:10.000 So it's just kind of getting higher and higher.

01:58:13.000 Yeah.

01:58:15.000 And it was really a weird story.

01:58:18.000 We went there and kind of stayed there for a couple days just to kind of get a sense of it.

01:58:22.000 And the mine sites themselves, where they mine the phosphate ore, were Superfund sites.

01:58:28.000 And Superfund comes from the Superfund Act of 1980 that designates the most...

01:58:33.000 You need a hard D there, sir.

01:58:35.000 Superfund, exactly.

01:58:36.000 Is this superfund?

01:58:37.000 It seems like...

01:58:39.000 Not for the people living there, you know?

01:58:41.000 It's a problem, that word.

01:58:42.000 But those sites are...

01:58:44.000 So what happens there is the overburdened piles, the waste piles from mining the rock have heavy concentrations of selenium.

01:58:53.000 And you were talking about hunting.

01:58:55.000 So what happened there was these overburdened piles leached selenium into the grassland.

01:59:00.000 Grassland picked up that selenium and animals died as a result of eating that selenium.

01:59:06.000 By the way, Monsanto called this at the time, this is our sustainable, environmentally friendly herbicide.

01:59:14.000 And you're like, this is how it's manufactured.

01:59:16.000 So when they made basements and these various structures out of that stuff, that waste, they recognized eventually that this is a problem and then would they demo everything and then put it onto that pile?

01:59:30.000 No.

01:59:30.000 So this is what was the weirdest thing.

01:59:33.000 And that's why I think you have to go as a writer to these places because you have to kind of listen to what happened.

01:59:38.000 And I was expecting Love Canal.

01:59:40.000 Right.

01:59:40.000 I was expecting the town rises up and you've got...

01:59:44.000 Lewis Gibbs and others, they're going to say, hell no, we're not going to have this.

01:59:48.000 But what happens is the EPA comes in and they're like, get the heck out of here, you know?

01:59:52.000 They kick the EPA out?

01:59:54.000 You know, not physically, but when they came in to do the hearings, they were like, we don't want you to designate our town a Superfund site, which there was a suggestion that the EPA might do that for the whole city.

02:00:09.000 And we're not talking about high levels of gamma radiation.

02:00:11.000 I want to be clear.

02:00:12.000 It was fairly low levels, but it was still above background.

02:00:14.000 And the EPA thought it was a problem.

02:00:16.000 They said, look, you know, we've got to do something about this.

02:00:19.000 But the town kind of rebels against the EPA. It's not like they're welcoming the regulators coming in.

02:00:24.000 And that's partially because town of 3,000 people.

02:00:28.000 This is a huge plant.

02:00:29.000 There are other phosphate plants for making fertilizer and other things from other companies that are there, too.

02:00:36.000 And I think part of it is a story of these companies, they're all lifeblood.

02:00:42.000 And we're okay with this low level of radiation.

02:00:46.000 Think about radon in basements and things like that.

02:00:49.000 We'll just deal with it.

02:00:51.000 And so the EPA is kind of like, ugh, what do we do?

02:00:55.000 And they kind of listen.

02:00:57.000 They try this decentralized strategy of like, all right, we'll work with this town.

02:01:01.000 And so demos don't happen.

02:01:03.000 Like, most people just have those houses and...

02:01:07.000 Just deal with it.

02:01:08.000 And so, for example, deal with it.

02:01:10.000 Are there health consequences because of this that you could track?

02:01:13.000 I don't...

02:01:14.000 I haven't seen any data that says, you know, we've seen precipitous increase in cancer rates or things like that.

02:01:19.000 But I want to follow that because, you know, we're looking at how over the long term are we going to see, you know, long-term health issues.

02:01:28.000 But what I will say is, you know...

02:01:33.000 The public health agency in the town, in the recommendations, and you can see this online, too.

02:01:40.000 It says, well, folks, if we're going to live with this, it literally says, spend less time in your basements.

02:01:48.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

02:01:49.000 Like, imagine, Joey, like, you've just remodeled your house or whatever.

02:01:52.000 Oh, my God.

02:01:54.000 Just don't go down there.

02:01:56.000 Oh my god, that is so crazy.

02:01:57.000 Spend less time in your basement.

02:02:00.000 True story.

02:02:00.000 Oh my god.

02:02:01.000 We don't want you to die, so just leave some stuff.

02:02:03.000 Don't leave food down there, by the way.

02:02:05.000 Don't put Nintendo down there.

02:02:06.000 The kids will not be happy with whatever happens.

02:02:11.000 I was going to say that we even tried to get into a river and kayak in to see one of the mine sites because they were closed off.

02:02:20.000 And we thought the only way we could get there is if we paddled.

02:02:23.000 And so we had these boats and we put them in and this person came up beside us and was like, you're not getting in that river.

02:02:31.000 And my photographer buddy, who I think just spaced for a second, was like, why?

02:02:36.000 Is it polluted?

02:02:37.000 What's going on?

02:02:38.000 And I was like, John, he's saying we're not getting in that river because he doesn't want us to get in that river.

02:02:45.000 And I can't confirm that that's why he was telling me not to get in there.

02:02:50.000 Did he think I was going to be going through his property because we were on a public land access point?

02:02:55.000 But did he not want us to go buy his property?

02:02:57.000 Or was it that he was like, who are these out-of-towners to do this?

02:03:01.000 Well, we weren't going to go on the way the river was going to go.

02:03:05.000 So was he threatening?

02:03:05.000 I'm confused here.

02:03:06.000 Was he threatening you?

02:03:07.000 Yeah, it was one of those things where I thought it was clear that he was like, we don't want you to go in that river and go on whatever journey you're going to go on potentially to see this story.

02:03:17.000 And I don't know whether it was he was worried about Us exposing something or seeing something or whether it was just, you shouldn't be here.

02:03:24.000 You're not from here.

02:03:25.000 I don't know why you're getting in this river and you shouldn't do it.

02:03:28.000 But it wasn't that he was worried about your health.

02:03:30.000 No, exactly.

02:03:31.000 It wasn't that.

02:03:32.000 That's what John thought.

02:03:33.000 I guess maybe it was logical.

02:03:35.000 I was just so paranoid at the point that I knew immediately that it was not...

02:03:40.000 But he didn't have any authority to keep you out of that river?

02:03:43.000 In my opinion, no, because you can paddle in the middle of a river.

02:03:47.000 You have a right-of-way to do that.

02:03:48.000 Right, but you just listened to him?

02:03:50.000 I did.

02:03:51.000 Do you wish you didn't?

02:03:52.000 Like maybe you would have saw something?

02:03:55.000 I think I saw what I needed to see.

02:03:57.000 I think that's part of the story.

02:03:59.000 Well, it's a small town.

02:04:00.000 Yeah.

02:04:00.000 So when you start asking around, people start talking, and because of the fact that they're so reliant on these plants, do you think that they were concerned that you guys could screw it up and they would lose their livelihood so they saw you and you're about to get in that water and like, this guy's going to cause trouble?

02:04:16.000 I don't know.

02:04:16.000 You know, Joe, I don't know.

02:04:18.000 It's just guesswork.

02:04:18.000 It's guesswork, but it was one of those moments.

02:04:20.000 All I'd say, Joe, is that given what I had seen of the town's response, It seemed plausible to me, right?

02:04:28.000 That was what was so surprising about that chapter.

02:04:31.000 You said earlier, like, how did Monsanto survive, you know, to become the seed company?

02:04:35.000 Or how did they get away with it, I guess, right?

02:04:37.000 It's one of the things.

02:04:38.000 And that chapter is about, like, the loyalty of some of these smaller towns, you know, that, like, and the kind of, this is our lifeblood.

02:04:47.000 Well, you know, you see that in, like, I'm sure you've seen Roger and me, right?

02:04:51.000 You see that in these towns where a big company does pull out of the town, and if they're dependent upon that town economically, it's devastating.

02:05:01.000 It's a horrific thing.

02:05:02.000 Totally, and you were talking about remodeling.

02:05:04.000 I mean, I mentioned this in the book, like, what are you going to do?

02:05:06.000 Right.

02:05:06.000 So, like, okay, you've got kids, so you're going to have them come in and rip out your foundation.

02:05:12.000 You know, and that wasn't...

02:05:14.000 There were options proposed by the company.

02:05:16.000 Look, if you really need us to do this, we'll take out your foundation and do that.

02:05:20.000 But most people aren't going to do that.

02:05:21.000 And also, they're the homes, the home value.

02:05:25.000 Like, part of it was, we don't want to be a super phone site because...

02:05:27.000 Right.

02:05:28.000 It'll fuck up everything I've invested my time and effort into, my mortgage, my house will be worth nothing.

02:05:34.000 That's what I mean by, like, a human story.

02:05:36.000 Like, you know, I don't blame a lot.

02:05:38.000 Sometimes it was hard to blame people for what's going on.

02:05:41.000 It's like...

02:05:41.000 It's systemic in some ways.

02:05:43.000 Yeah, it's not great, but it is all they have if that's their town.

02:05:47.000 Small towns that are relying on a big company to take care of them like that, it's a very precarious situation.

02:05:54.000 If that company goes under, good luck moving your family.

02:05:59.000 You have your kids go to school in that town.

02:06:02.000 Your entire income is based on that company.

02:06:07.000 That said, and this is important to point out, there were people that were like, hell no.

02:06:14.000 You know, this is not right.

02:06:17.000 The biggest group of people that I found, I followed a Freedom of Information Act request to get these documents.

02:06:24.000 But were the landowners around the plant who were farmers, ranchers, or whatever, who were like, uh-uh, we don't work for this plant.

02:06:33.000 And what are you talking about?

02:06:35.000 This is going to get cleaned up.

02:06:36.000 In fact, it was like this family feud.

02:06:38.000 It was an amazing family with the grandmother who was like 80 years old, was writing to the EPA, and her letters were amazing.

02:06:45.000 Fortunately, you can get them because they're public records.

02:06:47.000 And she was like, I feel like I'm trespassing on my property to get past all this pollution that's on my land.

02:06:54.000 And you're telling me I have to deal with it?

02:06:57.000 Because for those owners, they were saying, well, look, you just have to have, like, you can't do certain things on it.

02:07:02.000 And they're like, what are you talking about?

02:07:04.000 I can't do stuff on this part of my property.

02:07:06.000 Just because you guys have more money than us?

02:07:08.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:07:09.000 This is not a deal that works for us.

02:07:11.000 And ultimately, what happened to this family, they fought and fought.

02:07:15.000 Actually, it was so crazy.

02:07:18.000 Because I gave a talk.

02:07:20.000 I gave very few talks when I was writing this, by the way.

02:07:23.000 Because I wanted to be able to talk to people both inside the company and outside it without being a public figure talking about Monsanto.

02:07:33.000 I wanted to be able to go to places and be relatively anonymous.

02:07:38.000 But I gave one talk in Utah about what I was finding at this site.

02:07:47.000 After I gave the talk, I'd shown that FOIA letter about that family that I'd found that was fighting.

02:07:54.000 And I swear to you, this guy comes up to me at the end of the talk and he goes, dude, they're my neighbors.

02:08:01.000 And they're like now in their 80s or I don't even know, maybe even 90s.

02:08:04.000 They were super old and they were still alive.

02:08:06.000 The people had written those letters.

02:08:08.000 The kids of that older grandmother were still alive.

02:08:11.000 And I was like, oh my gosh, let me go interview them.

02:08:14.000 Because I wanted to figure out, like, so what happened?

02:08:16.000 You know?

02:08:17.000 Because, like, the archives only go so far.

02:08:19.000 And we sat down and had dinner with them.

02:08:21.000 They were, like, an amazing couple and super sweet.

02:08:23.000 And they were talking to me and they were like, they bought our property.

02:08:29.000 They bought us out, basically, and for a good price.

02:08:34.000 One of the ways that Monsanto suppressed the resistance from people like the landowners was to buy their properties and offer them a lot of money.

02:08:45.000 Some of these families agreed to that.

02:08:49.000 Interestingly, by the way, after that talk, just so you know, the university I gave the talk at, their caller ID the next day, they told me this.

02:08:59.000 They got a call and it just said Monsanto.

02:09:04.000 Look, I got two kids.

02:09:06.000 I'm writing this as a relatively unprotected person who goes out and tells these stories, and I was...

02:09:14.000 I was nervous, you know?

02:09:16.000 Just a sheer amount of money that's involved.

02:09:18.000 Yeah, like I don't have billions of dollars to go up against a company like Bayer.

02:09:23.000 And is it concerned that they would sue you or kill you? 1.00

02:09:26.000 Let's kill. 1.00

02:09:27.000 I think my mother, who's passed, but used to say, I'm worried you're going to get snuffed out. 0.99

02:09:32.000 And I always used to say, Mom, it's okay.

02:09:34.000 I'm not going to get snuffed out.

02:09:35.000 That's such an old school way of saying it.

02:09:37.000 Snuffed out, yeah.

02:09:38.000 It's like...

02:09:39.000 No, mom.

02:09:40.000 But more just, yeah, like what could be the ramifications of that?

02:09:44.000 And the same thing kind of happened with Coke, you know, when I was talking about coca leaves and all that stuff, you know, which is all there and backed up in the archives.

02:09:52.000 This is not stuff that's not provable.

02:09:56.000 You know, you just feel a certain degree of like, ugh, what could happen?

02:09:59.000 And when they called, I was like, ugh.

02:10:01.000 And they wanted to do like a rebuttal to the story to be like, you know what, we've actually fixed a lot of the mining problems and things are getting better in Soda Springs.

02:10:09.000 I would love to hear their conversation about that pile, the mountain.

02:10:13.000 Yeah, like explain to me how that's sustainable, you know, is really what I would love.

02:10:17.000 You're just going to keep building that until it reaches the moon?

02:10:19.000 Yeah, I mean, what's the story?

02:10:20.000 And it's getting, you know, one of the arguments is that, you know, at some point you're expanding closer to the actual facility.

02:10:26.000 So we're looking at a video here of it.

02:10:32.000 It's really wild.

02:10:33.000 It's really wild at night, actually.

02:10:35.000 Oh, because you see the molten lava?

02:10:37.000 Look how they're pouring it.

02:10:38.000 It lights up the sky. 0.98

02:10:39.000 Now, what the fuck is going in the air when they're doing that? 0.98

02:10:42.000 Good question. 0.98

02:10:43.000 Look at that stuff.

02:10:44.000 The stacks.

02:10:45.000 I know that some of the stacks, looking at the data, they were releasing low levels of polonium and various things in the air.

02:10:54.000 And it's just a...

02:10:59.000 Crazy.

02:11:00.000 And it goes back to, like, come on, a fifth grader can look at that and say, this is the future of agriculture?

02:11:06.000 Like, this is sustainable?

02:11:08.000 How long can you do that for?

02:11:10.000 How long can you do that?

02:11:11.000 Well, and it also goes back to a finite resource, phosphate.

02:11:15.000 This herbicide that's going to sustain us forever is coming from this...

02:11:18.000 Also, how do you do that and not have a sustainable plan for getting rid of that pile?

02:11:23.000 Yeah.

02:11:24.000 Maybe Jeff Bezos can shoot it into space.

02:11:26.000 Exactly.

02:11:27.000 Space dust.

02:11:28.000 Just sell it to Amazon.

02:11:29.000 Maybe Amazon could buy Monsanto cheap now and go, this is what we're going to do.

02:11:34.000 Well, weirdly, I'm writing a lot more.

02:11:36.000 I'm writing this project right now that's about all these, like, the logistics companies and thinking about the environmental footprint of firms that we don't traditionally think of as firms that have big environmental footprints.

02:11:48.000 Including banks, by the way.

02:11:49.000 I'm writing environmental histories of banks.

02:11:51.000 Like, we don't think about banks as having an environmental footprint, but...

02:11:54.000 They do.

02:11:55.000 They have a huge environmental footprint.

02:11:57.000 They have to ship money around.

02:11:58.000 They have to ship money around, but it's also just the incredible capital they have to be able to decide whether there's going to be an oil rig here or a Deepwater Horizon well here.

02:12:09.000 Did you talk to anybody from Monsanto about all these various issues?

02:12:13.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:12:14.000 Did you talk to them about this mountain of shit? 0.99

02:12:19.000 Internally about this particular thing, I didn't talk to them about that, but I did talk to people about a lot of different things. 0.99

02:12:26.000 And it was interesting.

02:12:27.000 Some of the people in Monsanto actually reached out to me.

02:12:31.000 And I had to kind of learn a little bit on the fly about how to talk to sources that were really sensitive like that.

02:12:37.000 And I had a bunch of lawyers for the first time that I would talk to you about how do I protect these people who want to talk to me inside the company because I don't want anybody to get hurt.

02:12:46.000 And there's a section in here about a person who wanted to tell his story in this book.

02:12:57.000 And I included it in the book, but he ultimately couldn't go on the record.

02:13:06.000 I couldn't actually include what he wanted to say.

02:13:09.000 I could just talk about our debates back and forth about whether he was going to go on the record in the book.

02:13:15.000 And it was about a chemical that is currently being used and it was about how it got approved and how he felt things should have gone and the evidence that was used to get that approval from the government.

02:13:32.000 He knew things about that that he thought were deeply problematic.

02:13:36.000 But by going any deeper than that, On that specific piece of evidence, I would identify him because he had such close access to that.

02:13:48.000 And he was the person who would know that.

02:13:52.000 And so here's a person who's got a pension, who's got kids, college age and things like that, and he's trying to figure out, okay, do I go on the record or do I not?

02:14:00.000 And we went back for months on this.

02:14:02.000 Like, do we talk about it?

02:14:04.000 What do we do?

02:14:04.000 He got his own lawyers.

02:14:05.000 We talked about it.

02:14:06.000 And ultimately, he said, I just can't do it.

02:14:08.000 And I think that's also part of the story.

02:14:10.000 It's just like regular people in these companies who actually do have a pretty good conscience, but who are like...

02:14:16.000 The risk-reward here is so extreme.

02:14:18.000 If things go bad, I've signed an NDA. What happens to little old me?

02:14:25.000 Well, if you go all the way back to the history of those people that got dioxin poisoned and they lost the case and then they took liens out against their homes.

02:14:36.000 That is some messed up stuff.

02:14:39.000 Here's the crazy thing about that case.

02:14:41.000 I want to get this right.

02:14:42.000 I'm sorry.

02:14:43.000 I get a little bit fired up on some of these things because part of it is It matters.

02:14:47.000 I feel like there's a certain degree of onus I have to tell some of these people's stories who don't get to tell it now because they're not here.

02:14:56.000 And in this case, let me tell you about the end of that case.

02:15:01.000 Because when you look at it on Google, it'll say, Monsanto wins.

02:15:05.000 And they did.

02:15:06.000 They won, technically, that case.

02:15:09.000 But here's what happened.

02:15:10.000 I went into every single note in that particular case.

02:15:14.000 All the documents were housed at the Philadelphia National Archives.

02:15:18.000 So I went through them.

02:15:20.000 The jury, when they issued their decision, They did something not unprecedented but super rare.

02:15:28.000 They're like, we want this document read into the public record.

02:15:32.000 Didn't end up in a lot of the newspapers or anything like that.

02:15:35.000 But this is the document that was in the archives.

02:15:36.000 And they said...

02:15:37.000 We're finding that Monsanto technically, based on West Virginia law, cannot be held liable here because of the technicalities of West Virginia law.

02:15:46.000 Which the technicality was they had to prove that Monsanto willfully, recklessly, and wantonly hurt these people.

02:15:56.000 Those are the words.

02:15:58.000 Willfully, recklessly, and wantonly.

02:16:00.000 And that bar these jurors felt was just a little bit too high.

02:16:05.000 Now you could argue, wait a minute!

02:16:07.000 Look at what they knew.

02:16:08.000 How could they not say this is reckless?

02:16:11.000 The jury felt that that bar was too hard to hit.

02:16:13.000 But they said in this document, there is no doubt that these people were harmed by these chemicals that were in this plant.

02:16:21.000 So we want this read into the record, that we feel this way about it.

02:16:24.000 The foreman of that jury worked at Union Carbide.

02:16:28.000 He was a chemical person.

02:16:30.000 You could tell he was torn.

02:16:32.000 He wasn't an anti-chemical person, but he even was struck by how nasty this stuff was.

02:16:37.000 Get this, though.

02:16:39.000 So after that happened, as I said, Monsanto says, you either pay us our court fees or we take your house.

02:16:45.000 And I interviewed the lawyer who knew all these people, Stuart Caldwell.

02:16:50.000 And he told me, he said to a man, I sat him down, I said, look, they're going to take your house.

02:16:57.000 What do you want to do?

02:16:58.000 And he said that one of them said to him, said, they could take my house, but can they give me 30 days to get out?

02:17:06.000 I mean, they were ready to go to it.

02:17:10.000 But the judge, Caldwell went back and said, Judge, you can't let Monsanto do this.

02:17:17.000 And ultimately, the judge was like, yeah, this is unconscionable.

02:17:19.000 No.

02:17:20.000 And ultimately reversed it.

02:17:22.000 I think Stewart had to make an argument to get that released.

02:17:25.000 But ultimately, it was.

02:17:26.000 But get this.

02:17:27.000 A couple years later, that foreman I was telling you about from Union Carbide, he finds out that there was evidence in that case That because of technicalities, they weren't allowed to see as the jury.

02:17:40.000 And I don't know the legalness of it, but there was a document from the EPA that showed just how expansive the pollution was and all this stuff.

02:17:46.000 And he says this clear as day.

02:17:49.000 If I had seen this document...

02:17:51.000 My verdict would have been different.

02:17:54.000 And he says, I hope that all my other jurors, he was the foreman, would have said the same thing.

02:18:01.000 And at the end of that interview, which almost no one had seen, because, you know, it was buried, he said, I just can't get out of my head.

02:18:11.000 You know, I feel like I just can't get it out of my head.

02:18:16.000 I think what he's saying there is to let people down.

02:18:19.000 So when you see that case, the Monsanto case in West Virginia related to these nitro workers, it looks like, well, I guess Monsanto did anything wrong.

02:18:29.000 Even the jurors who let Monsanto off in a way Later say, we shouldn't have done it.

02:18:36.000 So what was the reason why they were allowed to withhold that evidence?

02:18:41.000 I don't know the actual kind of legal reason why.

02:18:45.000 That actually freaks me out.

02:18:46.000 But this happens a lot, right?

02:18:48.000 There's just a reason that, no, that evidence could be confounding.

02:18:51.000 I think it had to do with the fact that it was relatively present day.

02:18:55.000 At that time, it was like 80s.

02:18:57.000 Report on the persistence of the pollution problem.

02:19:00.000 And I believe the judge was saying, look, this evidence has no bearing on what was going on 50s and 60s.

02:19:08.000 It's not admissible.

02:19:09.000 There might have been another legal reason I'm not aware of.

02:19:14.000 But ultimately, they weren't allowed to see that.

02:19:16.000 But the point is that that evidence would have been pretty powerful to say, look at how contaminated the site was.

02:19:25.000 And how, again, reckless that is, if you're going to have that kind of contamination.

02:19:31.000 We're already three hours in almost, two hours and 20 minutes in, so I want to get to this.

02:19:38.000 Is there a way that anyone can distance themselves from this company?

02:19:46.000 Is there a way you can not contribute economically?

02:19:51.000 Is there a way you can protest what this company has been involved in, what they're doing?

02:19:56.000 Is there a way you can do something?

02:19:59.000 Yes.

02:20:00.000 I do think there are things you can do.

02:20:02.000 There are small things and there are big things.

02:20:04.000 I've thought about this.

02:20:05.000 I mean, I think one thing that you can do if you don't think this type of agriculture, as we saw that graph, the petrochemicals, we're growing in our petrochemical dependency and you don't want to be a part of that.

02:20:18.000 I do think you can choose, if you have the means, to buy organic foodstuffs to support, as we've talked about, farmers who are doing regenerative agriculture, trying to grow things and produce meat and food in a different way.

02:20:35.000 Some people would poo-poo that and say, okay, you know, what does that really do?

02:20:39.000 I think it matters.

02:20:40.000 I think, you know, as a consumer, you can make a choice to try and support farmers and to get connected to farmers in some ways.

02:20:48.000 But if you live in, like, Detroit or something like that or a big city, it's so hard.

02:20:51.000 It is.

02:20:52.000 And I think that's why, I think, because it's a matter, it's also a class issue.

02:20:56.000 It's also an access issue.

02:20:58.000 And a financial issue, right?

02:20:59.000 Totally a financial issue and all these things.

02:21:01.000 So not everyone can support that.

02:21:03.000 So I'd also say the onus is on people who do have the time to try and fight for change, that we have to stand up.

02:21:11.000 And we're seeing that right now.

02:21:12.000 I'm sorry, keep going.

02:21:14.000 I was just going to say, we're seeing right now thousands of cases being brought by people.

02:21:18.000 And not just people that are saying, look, my cancer was caused by this.

02:21:22.000 But we're also seeing cases that are trying organizations, Center for Food Safety, for example, among many others, that are trying to say, look, These chemicals are questionable.

02:21:35.000 We're petitioning the EPA to stop registering these chemicals and to try and change these things.

02:21:41.000 I think getting in that kind of structural level of trying to change, you know, getting in some of those battles is important for us, especially for those who have the means and ability to fight those larger fights.

02:21:51.000 And also, talk about the Farm Bill, you know?

02:21:54.000 Put pressure on Congressmen to say, wait a minute, why are we subsidizing?

02:21:59.000 The, you know, corn and soybean.

02:22:02.000 I mean, the only reason that a lot of these farmers are able to make profits is because they're getting massive subsidies to do so.

02:22:09.000 And aren't these subsidies that were left over from World War II? You could even go back even further, in a way, to the New Deal, you know, in the 30s.

02:22:16.000 I mean, this was all a response.

02:22:18.000 And this is what's so crazy.

02:22:19.000 Like, we were already producing too much.

02:22:22.000 The whole problem was we had a surplus.

02:22:23.000 The idea that we need to, like, we got to grow more.

02:22:26.000 We got to grow more.

02:22:27.000 We were growing too much.

02:22:29.000 That's why the price of wheat and everything was plummeting because we had this just huge bounty.

02:22:35.000 Wasn't the origin of it though that they were preparing for war?

02:22:38.000 Yeah.

02:22:39.000 Well, that was the subsidies, right?

02:22:41.000 The whole idea was to subsidize the farmers to make sure that we had an abundance of food because they were preparing for war and they wanted to make sure that they could feed everybody.

02:22:49.000 There's a little bit of that, for sure.

02:22:51.000 That's part of the story.

02:22:52.000 There's also the story of these government programs coming in to try and give farmers a kind of support in times where there was so much surplus.

02:23:07.000 We're good to go.

02:23:36.000 Put gasoline on our farm policy saying, okay, what we need to do now is grow, as he put it, crops, fence row to fence row.

02:23:44.000 We're going to start subsidizing the production of all these different commodity crops and not putting any restrictions on the acreage Getting rid of some of these acreage restrictions that were often tied to those subsidies.

02:23:57.000 That was the big shift in the 70s, saying you don't have to reduce your acreage.

02:24:01.000 You know what?

02:24:01.000 We're going to give you these subsidies and you can grow, as he put it, fence row to fence row.

02:24:06.000 Grow as fast as you can.

02:24:07.000 We're going to subsidize that.

02:24:09.000 Part of that was because of the 70s.

02:24:11.000 We were, at that time, There was a concern about our surpluses dropping.

02:24:15.000 And so we kind of started the system that has continued, where we're just subsidizing the production of really animal fodder.

02:24:23.000 That's what we're doing on most of our land.

02:24:25.000 And is there an abundance to the point where it's wasteful?

02:24:28.000 Is there an abundance to the point where we have more that we can use?

02:24:31.000 Totally.

02:24:32.000 I mean, we're...

02:24:32.000 What do they do with it?

02:24:34.000 When I joke to people all the time, I say...

02:24:36.000 When I talk to the weed scientist, you know...

02:24:41.000 When we're out there and people are saying, well, this is about feeding the world.

02:24:44.000 We need this genetically engineered trait to feed the world.

02:24:46.000 He's like, oh, this is going to feed all of this stuff.

02:24:49.000 What are we doing with it is a great question.

02:24:51.000 We end up putting it into different programs.

02:24:53.000 Ethanol is a great example of this.

02:24:55.000 Like, we have so much corn, well, we've got to figure out a way to put it somewhere.

02:24:58.000 Ah, we'll put it into a fuel program, so we'll start putting it into gasoline.

02:25:03.000 It's not an issue of productivity.

02:25:05.000 Like, we've got a lot of productivity.

02:25:08.000 I think that's part of the myth of our food problems is that productivity is the problem.

02:25:14.000 Productivity really isn't the problem.

02:25:15.000 Our bigger problem is distribution, the types of crops we're growing on the land that we have.

02:25:21.000 And, you know, the ways in which we're equitably distributing it and also food waste, just tremendous amounts of waste of the average consumer.

02:25:30.000 You think about even our own practices at home today.

02:25:34.000 We have a lot of food.

02:25:37.000 It's now about figuring out how to grow the right types of crops, growing these more biodiverse fields as opposed to these monocrops and changing the game.

02:25:46.000 That, to me, I think is the future of food.

02:25:48.000 It's not about Can we produce more corn and soybeans next year than we did last year?

02:25:54.000 Is there a way to incentivize people to do that?

02:25:57.000 To grow these biodiverse sort of farms?

02:26:01.000 Absolutely.

02:26:02.000 I mean, look at it.

02:26:03.000 As I said, I wish I could pull up the numbers for how much a soybean farmer gets in terms of a per acreage subsidy from the federal government.

02:26:11.000 Or listeners can do that themselves.

02:26:15.000 Or corn.

02:26:16.000 It's a lot of money.

02:26:18.000 And what if we took that money and instead of subsidizing a system that we know is out of control, or we're growing way too much of this stuff, and turn it towards subsidies that supports the types of foods that's going to nourish our bodies, instead of necessarily going to animal fodder, and nourish our country?

02:26:35.000 You know, the Farm Bill can be radically changed, and it should, I think, to reflect that interest in getting away from some of that monocrop cultivation.

02:26:44.000 So this is all relatively new in human history, right?

02:26:48.000 This way of growing things.

02:26:50.000 It really started in the 20th century and now we're continuing it now.

02:26:54.000 Is it possible within a reasonable amount of time to shift the way we do things?

02:27:00.000 Do people know about this? 1.00

02:27:03.000 Like, I didn't know about these gigantic mountains of toxic shit, this molten shit. 1.00

02:27:08.000 Like, how much is this just because they've been able to kind of do it without people being aware of the consequences? 1.00

02:27:16.000 I think it's huge.

02:27:17.000 I think that's 90% of the reason I'm here, I think, is because I think people don't have a connection to their food, you know?

02:27:23.000 2%, well, less than 2% of people in the U.S. are farmers.

02:27:28.000 You know?

02:27:29.000 Wow.

02:27:29.000 Most people just have no sense of the world that's out there.

02:27:32.000 When I drive around in Ohio farm country, I see advertisements you've probably never seen, right?

02:27:40.000 Extendamax, you know, seed thing, this cool herbicide.

02:27:44.000 They're marketing.

02:27:46.000 The companies are marketing to a very small clientele.

02:27:50.000 And those decisions that are being made to that small clientele affect all of us.

02:27:54.000 And I think that's why, you know, we live removed from that and just simply don't have that connection to it.

02:28:02.000 And I think you're absolutely right.

02:28:04.000 I think part of you said, what can people do?

02:28:07.000 Ask questions.

02:28:09.000 When you're eating somewhere, where is this coming from?

02:28:13.000 If you're talking to a farmer, what's your farm like?

02:28:15.000 If you have the ability to go to a farmer's market and talk about those things.

02:28:20.000 And again, I think that connection is key to the story.

02:28:25.000 But you said something like, can we pivot?

02:28:29.000 Here's the big problem, Joe.

02:28:35.000 All of what we've talked about is based on petrochemicals and on fossil fuels.

02:28:43.000 80% of what Monsanto was making came from oil, natural gas, or coal.

02:28:48.000 By the 80s, 80% of their product lines were coming from fossil fuels.

02:28:55.000 The reason they became a seed company was because they saw that.

02:29:00.000 They knew that so much of what they were making was coming from petrochemical feedstocks.

02:29:05.000 So they started trying to make more money off selling seeds and getting into the seed business, which they didn't even own a single seed company before the 1980s.

02:29:13.000 So they pivoted in part because of the energy crisis of the 1970s when oil prices rose.

02:29:19.000 They're like, oh my gosh, 80% of what we make comes from this raw material that's now really expensive in the 70s.

02:29:27.000 And that's why Monsanto said, ooh, we've got to get out of this business of making all these PCBs and all that stuff.

02:29:32.000 They hung on to some of their brands, Roundup, for example, because it was so profitable for them.

02:29:37.000 But they tried to get rid of a lot of the other chemicals.

02:29:41.000 And so they got it.

02:29:44.000 They knew that there's this dependence on petrochemicals and fossil fuels that we still have.

02:29:49.000 The problem is...

02:29:51.000 The market is not going to force industry to change right now because we've seen this boom in oil and gas production in the United States.

02:30:01.000 And part of that's because of fracking that's happened over the last several decades, right?

02:30:05.000 We see this huge spike.

02:30:07.000 So the economy is saying, keep on producing petrochemicals.

02:30:10.000 It's safe.

02:30:11.000 It's great.

02:30:13.000 But the environment is saying you cannot keep doing that, right?

02:30:18.000 If you keep doing that, we're going to keep seeing the cycle of weed resistance developing and farmers are going to be kind of locked into that system.

02:30:27.000 So the biggest thing I'd say is that If we're going to fix our food system, we have to get away from that fossil fuel dependency, right?

02:30:34.000 We have to get away from this economy that was built at a time when there was so much oil, right?

02:30:38.000 In the 20s and 30s, we're producing all this stuff that made everything around us, including our food, and recognize that we have to start shifting to regenerative agriculture because, you know, ostensibly, we won't have to be so dependent on those fossil fuel feedstocks.

02:30:53.000 How much of fossil fuel products can be replaced with organic things, like things like...

02:30:59.000 I know that there are certain plastics that are made with plant fibers.

02:31:03.000 Yeah, that's a great question.

02:31:05.000 And it's actually...

02:31:08.000 On the one hand, it sounds like we're making progress.

02:31:10.000 You said the plant...

02:31:11.000 Let's just say a plant bottle is a great example.

02:31:14.000 Coca-Cola has the plant bottle.

02:31:16.000 Do they?

02:31:17.000 Yeah.

02:31:17.000 A biodegradable plant bottle.

02:31:19.000 There is a label for the plant bottle.

02:31:22.000 That's really interesting.

02:31:24.000 Are they making this out of hemp or are they using other plants?

02:31:26.000 That's what I asked, right?

02:31:27.000 So I started looking at it and I was like, okay, what is this made out of?

02:31:31.000 Yeah.

02:31:32.000 Sugar cane byproducts.

02:31:34.000 Sugar cane.

02:31:35.000 So pause, right?

02:31:37.000 I mean...

02:31:38.000 Think about environmental sustainability of sugarcane production.

02:31:42.000 Probably, in the scale of history, one of the worst monocrop.

02:31:46.000 Oh, really?

02:31:47.000 I mean, when you think about not only the ecological...

02:31:51.000 We're talking about tropical regions that have to be completely changed into these monocrop farms.

02:31:57.000 It's a huge impact, not to mention the health cost of all the sugar that's out there.

02:32:03.000 So sugarcane byproducts.

02:32:04.000 And the only reason you can make a plant bottle out of that sugarcane is because of...

02:32:09.000 That fossil-fueled agricultural system that makes sugarcane so big and so, you know, that it's everywhere, right?

02:32:18.000 Because it's inefficient.

02:32:19.000 Yeah, because now you have...

02:32:20.000 The only reason you can make a throwaway plastic bottle made of sugarcane is because you're producing so much sugarcane from all that synthetic petrochemical agricultural system.

02:32:31.000 Jesus.

02:32:32.000 Yeah.

02:32:32.000 What a bummer.

02:32:33.000 So it's pretty crazy.

02:32:35.000 And, you know...

02:32:35.000 What about hemp?

02:32:37.000 By the way...

02:32:38.000 They do make plastic.

02:32:39.000 I'm sorry, go ahead.

02:32:40.000 I was just going to see if this one over here...

02:32:42.000 Jamie, sorry, the third over.

02:32:46.000 Yeah, one more.

02:32:47.000 I just want to see if this one has...

02:32:49.000 The Coca-Cola biodegradable packaging.

02:32:51.000 Not a viable option, it says.

02:32:54.000 New Coke bottle made entirely from plants.

02:32:56.000 Okay, I just want you to notice a couple of things on this bottle, so when we're looking at it, it says 100%, it's kind of blurry, but it's okay, 100% recyclable plastic.

02:33:08.000 And I always joke with my students, what does recyclable mean, you know?

02:33:11.000 Well, it could be recycled.

02:33:14.000 Part of this is greenwashing labels, like, it's 100% recyclable.

02:33:19.000 Well, technically, almost anything's 100% recyclable.

02:33:22.000 Like, you could.

02:33:23.000 It's a bowl.

02:33:24.000 You could recycle it, but is it actually recyclable?

02:33:27.000 Right.

02:33:27.000 The other thing it'll say on there, and for yours, it said up to 30% plant-based materials.

02:33:32.000 Up to.

02:33:35.000 Well, up to could mean zero plant-based material.

02:33:38.000 Oh, there you go.

02:33:39.000 There it is.

02:33:40.000 Up to 30% made from plants.

02:33:43.000 Oh, man.

02:33:44.000 Do you see the cleverness of it?

02:33:45.000 How dirty.

02:33:46.000 It's like, well, it could be 1%.

02:33:49.000 Yeah, or it could be one half of one percent.

02:33:51.000 Or zero.

02:33:52.000 Or got up to, right?

02:33:53.000 It could be zero.

02:33:54.000 It could be just plastic.

02:33:56.000 We have to, going back to asking hard questions, we've got to get beyond this BS, right?

02:34:01.000 All the labeling should be illegal.

02:34:03.000 It's misleading.

02:34:05.000 That's like up to 0% poison.

02:34:08.000 Right.

02:34:08.000 Up to 30%.

02:34:09.000 And then recycle a bull.

02:34:11.000 You see what I'm saying?

02:34:11.000 Like you've got a trademark on it.

02:34:13.000 You could recycle.

02:34:14.000 Look how they did it.

02:34:15.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:34:17.000 Leaf turns into bottle turns into leaf.

02:34:19.000 And look, I'm sounding pretty pessimistic here.

02:34:21.000 And you mentioned hemp, right?

02:34:22.000 But like, I mean, you're right.

02:34:24.000 There are certain products.

02:34:25.000 I think that's what we want to say.

02:34:26.000 Okay, cool.

02:34:27.000 So what...

02:34:28.000 Plant-based material is sustainable to grow, where you could potentially make these products.

02:34:34.000 That's the kind of questions I think all of us should be asking, and I think it sounds interesting for me.

02:34:40.000 Have you looked into that at all?

02:34:41.000 A little bit.

02:34:42.000 I had a friend who actually, after I wrote the book, wanted to go into this industry, and he was like, what do you think?

02:34:48.000 And I was like, sounds interesting to me.

02:34:51.000 I'll say it's a lot better than sugar cane when I think about environmental footprint.

02:34:55.000 Well, in the years back, my company Onnit, when we were first starting to sell hemp protein, we had to buy it from Canada.

02:35:04.000 We couldn't grow it in America.

02:35:06.000 So we were getting our hemp from Canada, and then we were re-importing it into the United States because it was illegal at the time to grow hemp here.

02:35:18.000 But it was legal to have it and sell it.

02:35:22.000 Yeah. 0.55

02:35:22.000 It's just goofy. 0.55

02:35:24.000 Hemp is a really good source of protein.

02:35:26.000 It's filled with amino acids.

02:35:28.000 It's got a full amino acid profile.

02:35:30.000 And if you get good hemp hearts, like a good, high-quality hemp seed, when they break it down, it's very biodigestible.

02:35:40.000 It's very easy for your body to break down.

02:35:41.000 Yeah.

02:35:42.000 I think, to your point, if we're going to use plants, it's got to be the right plant.

02:35:47.000 Corn is the other thing you often hold out.

02:35:48.000 I just talked to you.

02:35:49.000 We just talked about corn.

02:35:50.000 It's just a disaster because it's all tied into the same system.

02:35:54.000 And the only reason it's so cheap that you can have a throwaway container like that, and throwaway, I mean, you can drink it once, as we do at a party or whatever, and you're like, oh, well, it's done.

02:36:03.000 So go ahead.

02:36:04.000 Part of it I would just say is like, I actually saw this when I first started listening to your podcast and watching.

02:36:09.000 I noticed that you have this.

02:36:11.000 Metal cup.

02:36:12.000 Yeah.

02:36:13.000 And I was like, awesome.

02:36:14.000 Reusable and like, you know.

02:36:15.000 We have a filter machine that filters our water.

02:36:19.000 And we used to have plastic bottles.

02:36:21.000 And then I was like, what are we doing? 0.96

02:36:22.000 We're fucking just throwing bottles away every day. 0.90

02:36:25.000 And those bottles, by the way, even though you throw them in the recycle bin, they don't really get recycled. 0.97

02:36:31.000 It's too expensive.

02:36:33.000 I found that out, that they mostly get thrown into landfills.

02:36:37.000 Yeah, so I read a lot about recycling of plastic bottles, and here's the data.

02:36:41.000 I mean, 30% of plastic bottles used in the United States, PET plastic bottles, get recycled.

02:36:45.000 30%.

02:36:46.000 So 70% ends up in landfills and everything else.

02:36:49.000 But to that point, I'll just say this.

02:36:54.000 Part of it is about what you're doing here.

02:36:57.000 So do we need that throwaway container?

02:37:00.000 And asking those questions.

02:37:02.000 Most of the time it's a shift in thinking as opposed to we need a new technology or the new plant-based material. 0.91

02:37:11.000 But is it possible to use plants for all the shit we use fossil fuels for and not be tied into this monocrop agricultural system that relies on herbicides? 0.92

02:37:24.000 Because it seems like... 0.97

02:37:25.000 I mean, I don't know much about growing hemp, but I gotta imagine that if you're growing 100,000 acres of hemp, you're gonna have a lot of fucking pesticides and herbicides, and you're gonna have... 0.87

02:37:37.000 Well, part of it is trying to work with nature.

02:37:40.000 One thing to do is trying to versify a little bit your agricultural system so you don't create that buffet for pests, you know?

02:37:47.000 But would you be able to get the same sustainable yield, like a yield that you could use to make all these bottles of Coca-Cola and all that, you know?

02:37:56.000 You know, predicting whether you could do all the bottles of Coca-Cola, I don't know. 0.99

02:37:59.000 Are we fucked? 1.00

02:38:00.000 That's my question. 1.00

02:38:02.000 No, we're not.

02:38:03.000 You don't think so?

02:38:04.000 I don't.

02:38:05.000 You know, it's funny.

02:38:06.000 I'm actually a big optimist, but after writing this book, I was like, man, I come off as a pretty bad pessimist.

02:38:13.000 But I don't think so.

02:38:16.000 I think what we're seeing right now is some pretty smart things happening in agriculture.

02:38:19.000 Regenerative agriculture, as you know, as you've been talking about, is actually not becoming a niche thing.

02:38:24.000 It's becoming like a much broader accepted way of doing things.

02:38:29.000 It's an option for a percentage of the people.

02:38:31.000 It is.

02:38:32.000 But I think your point's well taken.

02:38:34.000 Can we create billions of throwaway plastic bottles that are made of plants?

02:38:40.000 I actually think the question is, we shouldn't do that.

02:38:43.000 We should rethink the way we consume.

02:38:46.000 What's wrong with having a reusable container as opposed to needing a throwaway?

02:38:52.000 That throwaway culture was a product.

02:38:55.000 Of that period of, we could just produce whatever we want because we've got tons of oil.

02:38:59.000 We're moving away from that because we have to.

02:39:02.000 It's funny because when I was a kid, no one had a water bottle.

02:39:06.000 Yeah.

02:39:06.000 You just drank water out of a glass.

02:39:08.000 Like, it didn't exist.

02:39:09.000 And then all of a sudden, it's like they were everywhere, like cell phones, right?

02:39:13.000 There was no cell phones, now cell phones are everywhere.

02:39:16.000 When we were kids, we just had a glass of water. 0.99

02:39:19.000 Like, no one took a fucking water bottle away like a weirdo. 1.00

02:39:22.000 Like a weirdo. 1.00

02:39:23.000 If your friend showed up at your house with a water bottle, you're like, Bob, what are you doing?

02:39:26.000 Why do you have a water bottle on you?

02:39:28.000 Yeah. 0.54

02:39:28.000 I mean, but also think about how silly we're going to look. 0.54

02:39:31.000 I think as a historian, I look back at our time.

02:39:33.000 What are people 100 years from now going to look back at us?

02:39:36.000 Think about how insane this is.

02:39:39.000 Wait a minute.

02:39:39.000 They took a finite natural resource and they turned it into a container that they used once.

02:39:47.000 Right.

02:39:47.000 And then they threw it away?

02:39:49.000 Right.

02:39:50.000 Like, who were these people from the 2000 and whatever?

02:39:54.000 Yeah.

02:39:55.000 It's weird.

02:39:56.000 And also, like, a lot of the drinking water that people buy is not from a spring.

02:40:00.000 It's just tap water.

02:40:02.000 They take tap water and they filter it and then they sell it to you.

02:40:04.000 Oh, let me tell you that.

02:40:05.000 This is nuts, okay?

02:40:06.000 I'm going to give you a number of this.

02:40:07.000 If you're drinking bottled water out there, listen up.

02:40:10.000 This is important, okay?

02:40:12.000 Dasani bottled water, which is Coca-Cola's brand.

02:40:15.000 Yeah.

02:40:16.000 It was called Dasani, but I had to look this up.

02:40:18.000 Why are they calling it Dasani?

02:40:19.000 It turns out it was just like totally a marketing thing.

02:40:21.000 They sat in a room for hours.

02:40:23.000 They're like, Dasani, it sounds refreshing.

02:40:25.000 It comes from nothing.

02:40:27.000 I went and looked at this.

02:40:28.000 Okay, so I went and looked because I live in Atlanta.

02:40:31.000 So I went and looked at our water bill and we're in Fulton County.

02:40:34.000 So I looked at what that water bill was for a gallon of water or whatever.

02:40:40.000 No, I must have looked at something smaller.

02:40:42.000 And then I went to the Kroger and got a Dasani bottle of water.

02:40:46.000 And at same volume and quantity, I compared the price, okay, of how much you're paying for bottled water versus if you just drank that water out of your tap.

02:40:57.000 And here in Austin, the water's great.

02:40:58.000 So, you know, people do that.

02:41:02.000 So what would happen if you did that?

02:41:03.000 What was the comparison?

02:41:04.000 I crunched the numbers.

02:41:05.000 It was like, okay, Whoa.

02:41:08.000 It wasn't 10 times more expensive, which would have been like a huge markup for the company.

02:41:14.000 It wasn't 100 times more expensive.

02:41:18.000 It wasn't even 1,000 times more expensive.

02:41:21.000 It was 1,900 times more expensive to drink that bottled water than to drink that water out of the tap.

02:41:29.000 And it's like, why on earth would I ever pay for that, considering just how expensive it is?

02:41:36.000 And if you look at the bottle, it says, repurposed public tap water.

02:41:40.000 It is tap water.

02:41:41.000 You know, they put it through a filtration system.

02:41:44.000 But not much different than a Brita, right? 0.76

02:41:46.000 Exactly.

02:41:47.000 Actually, I use an APEC filter.

02:41:49.000 It's like a five-layer reverse osmosis filter underneath my sink and parsley because I've been researching about water supplies and lead and water and stuff, and it's kind of nuts what's out there.

02:42:01.000 I'm not sure which system we use, but it is some sort of a...

02:42:04.000 It's a big machine that filters our stuff out that we have here.

02:42:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:42:08.000 You press a button and the cold water comes out or the hot water, but it's all filtered out.

02:42:14.000 Yes, and you don't have to constantly go get that bottle that cost 1,900 times more.

02:42:21.000 And that's at a time, by the way, where our...

02:42:24.000 The taps are, you know, our pipes are kind of crumbling. 0.98

02:42:26.000 It's like, why are we spending so much money on the stupid bottled water when we could be fixing our taps and cleaning it up as well? 0.97

02:42:35.000 So, yeah, the bottled water thing, it's just kind of... 0.99

02:42:38.000 And then you've got the plastic.

02:42:40.000 So it's like this, again, 100 years from now, we think of it as just so...

02:42:45.000 Normal and it's like they're gonna think this is insane.

02:42:48.000 Yeah, for sure the plastic is gonna be a thing where they're gonna be Baffled like how we allowed the Pacific garbage patch to get so big before we did anything and how literally a 19 year old kid figured out how to make this machine and He's a boy in slot. 0.96

02:43:04.000 It's the only guy that I know that's figured out how to do something to mitigate it But even then like how much can he mitigate like how?

02:43:11.000 We're still making plastic.

02:43:13.000 And then they find birds with all these bottle caps.

02:43:16.000 And what does California do?

02:43:17.000 Well, no more straws, man.

02:43:19.000 I saw a straw in a turtle's nose.

02:43:22.000 And there's the discussion about how many canvas bags do you have.

02:43:26.000 It's like, wait a minute.

02:43:27.000 There's now more canvas bag plastic pollution than...

02:43:30.000 Canvas bags?

02:43:31.000 You know, like when you have those bags that you take to the grocery store that are reusable.

02:43:35.000 Oh! 0.60

02:43:35.000 They're canvas. 0.60

02:43:36.000 But the problem is...

02:43:37.000 Every conference, every show, everyone's giving out these reusable canvas bags.

02:43:43.000 It's got to be better than plastic, though.

02:43:45.000 At least that's recyclable.

02:43:45.000 Yeah, but the problem is it's the same problem of that kind of we've got to produce more of this stuff one year than the next.

02:43:56.000 Well, the crazy thing is the paper straw.

02:43:57.000 The paper straw is going to solve it all while you have plastic water bottles.

02:44:01.000 This is nuts.

02:44:03.000 You have all these plastic water bottles, but you've just done...

02:44:06.000 What's the ratio of straw to water bottle?

02:44:09.000 I don't know.

02:44:10.000 It can't even be close.

02:44:11.000 It's got to be like 30 to 1. Yeah, exactly.

02:44:13.000 But you've got the straw.

02:44:14.000 As long as you get the straw, have at it. 1.00

02:44:15.000 Those straws suck, too. 1.00

02:44:17.000 They're not as good. 0.98

02:44:17.000 If you had a water bottle that was made out of paper and just started deteriorating at the rate that straw did... 0.98

02:44:23.000 You'd never even be able to keep water on the shelf.

02:44:25.000 The water bottles that are made out of paper, they're like waxy, you know, they have like that stiff and it seems like there's metal in the paper and there's like an aluminum surface to it or something.

02:44:36.000 I'm not into it.

02:44:36.000 Yeah, back to your point, like I'm fine.

02:44:38.000 I'm just drinking.

02:44:39.000 But I will say that, you know, it is funny with the other thing that's happening with the plastic bottles is like we're getting more efficient.

02:44:48.000 We're making bottles with less plastic.

02:44:51.000 That doesn't mean anything.

02:44:52.000 And the same thing with water.

02:44:53.000 We're using less water to produce the bottled water.

02:44:56.000 There's a concept called Jevons Paradox in economics.

02:45:00.000 This guy from the 1860s, he said, efficiency is going to kill us, folks, because his argument is that when you start making something more efficient, you actually have incentivized the use of that natural resource.

02:45:14.000 Oh.

02:45:14.000 And he's like, this paradox is, yes, you're more efficient, but over time you're actually going to use more of it.

02:45:19.000 So I think, you know, we're at a point where we just have to fundamentally rethink things, I guess is what we're getting to here.

02:45:25.000 Like, instead of saying, how do we design that throwaway container? 0.99

02:45:28.000 Say, do we need that stupid throwaway container? 1.00

02:45:31.000 This is just fine. 1.00

02:45:32.000 But I think the message needs to get out at scale.

02:45:36.000 It needs to get out to a large number of people.

02:45:39.000 I don't really see that happening right now.

02:45:41.000 It seems like the message is really with a few conscious people that are kind of aware of it, that make choices that are different.

02:45:49.000 But overall, there's more people than ever before and more people that aren't making those choices than are.

02:45:57.000 And it seems like the consumption continues to increase exponentially.

02:46:02.000 It does.

02:46:03.000 I mean, I will say a shout-out to students again at Ohio State.

02:46:09.000 Again, CBUS, a Columbus shout-out that, you know, I get to walk into that room, and you have younger guests on the show, too.

02:46:19.000 Where do you get to talk to them?

02:46:22.000 I think they get it.

02:46:24.000 Yeah, they probably get it more than the older folks do.

02:46:26.000 Yeah, it's really, like, jarring, actually, to walk in there, and I'll be like, okay, here's this thing, and it's a problem, and they're like, We know.

02:46:34.000 We're on it.

02:46:36.000 On the other hand, I don't think it's fair for us.

02:46:42.000 I'm stealing this from somebody who made me see this, actually, because I was like, it's your generation. 0.76

02:46:47.000 You're going to help us.

02:46:48.000 You're going to solve it.

02:46:49.000 And this person told me, she said, don't put this on them.

02:46:54.000 Let them go have a party.

02:46:56.000 Let them go have some fun.

02:46:59.000 There is a certain degree of people who are like, the new generation is going to solve everything, instead of being like, well, we're still here.

02:47:04.000 And we were part of that problem. 0.99

02:47:06.000 It's like making the military go now and clean up the Vietnam War Agent Orange shit. 1.00

02:47:13.000 You motherfuckers should have taken care of that a long time ago. 1.00

02:47:16.000 Exactly. 1.00

02:47:17.000 And maybe there's another hopeful thing.

02:47:19.000 We're seeing this company finally, maybe not with Agent Orange, but with some of these other chemicals.

02:47:26.000 Look, a vote of no confidence from your shareholders is not a good thing.

02:47:31.000 In other words, the pressure, as you said, what can you do?

02:47:35.000 Well, what people are doing is they're filing lawsuits.

02:47:38.000 They're putting pressure, and we're seeing an effect with Bayer.

02:47:43.000 They were literally worth the price they paid for Monsanto.

02:47:46.000 I mean, they lost like half of their value.

02:47:49.000 I mean, it was incredible.

02:47:50.000 And they have all these pending lawsuits.

02:47:52.000 And they're still there.

02:47:53.000 It's still there.

02:47:54.000 But the crazy thing is the thing that's killing them is the thing they're still selling.

02:47:57.000 So it's essentially that handwritten note, sell the hell out of it for as long as we can.

02:48:02.000 That's what they're doing still.

02:48:04.000 I mean, it's essentially a version of what we saw.

02:48:08.000 They were like, oh my god, read that 1969 note. 0.98

02:48:11.000 Well, read the fucking 2021 note. 0.98

02:48:13.000 They're on the same game plan, right? 0.99

02:48:15.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

02:48:17.000 I was sitting in that...

02:48:18.000 I bought a share of bigger stock so I could go to the shareholders meeting.

02:48:22.000 Oh, really?

02:48:22.000 Yeah.

02:48:23.000 How much does the share cost?

02:48:25.000 It was like $60 then.

02:48:26.000 I think it's like...

02:48:27.000 I don't know, it's running out like 40s.

02:48:29.000 So I mean, it keeps going down.

02:48:31.000 And I remember being like, I gotta do this.

02:48:34.000 So I did.

02:48:36.000 And the pandemic hit.

02:48:37.000 So actually, they did everything on Zoom.

02:48:39.000 So I ended up being able to watch it from home, which kind of sucked because I was looking forward to going to Germany.

02:48:43.000 But I watched it.

02:48:46.000 And oh my gosh.

02:48:49.000 And this three hours went by like that.

02:48:53.000 But they got questions from shareholders for three hours, 250 questions, where everyone was like, what's going on?

02:49:00.000 Why do we buy this company?

02:49:02.000 What's up with dicamba?

02:49:03.000 What's up with glyphosate?

02:49:05.000 What's happening?

02:49:06.000 In other words, we're seeing people asking those questions to the people on top.

02:49:12.000 I never expected this.

02:49:14.000 You've got to understand, when I started writing this, none of those cases had happened.

02:49:17.000 The 2015 decision by who?

02:49:18.000 That wasn't even there.

02:49:20.000 I was really pessimistic then.

02:49:22.000 I was like, dude, these guys got away with so much stuff.

02:49:26.000 To be slightly optimistic, I'm impressed with how much pressure they're feeling right now.

02:49:33.000 It feels almost like Like something's changing.

02:49:37.000 And I don't know whether it's the chaos of the times or what, but as a historian, this is somewhat unprecedented.

02:49:45.000 I mean, it had never happened on the history of the German exchange where the shareholders had given a vote of no confidence.

02:49:50.000 It never happened.

02:49:51.000 So we'll see what ends up transpiring.

02:49:54.000 But in that meeting, sorry, you said they're still doing the same thing.

02:49:58.000 It was crazy.

02:49:59.000 They're like, Glyphosate, whatever.

02:50:01.000 We've got all these new technologies.

02:50:03.000 But then they have to say, we're going to sell this herbicide because you're talking to your shareholders and you've just lost everything.

02:50:09.000 To your point, what are you going to say?

02:50:11.000 We're going to pull it and one of our most profitable products?

02:50:14.000 They're in that pinch.

02:50:16.000 It's like, we've lost everything because of these legacies.

02:50:18.000 We've got this thing that makes us money.

02:50:22.000 What do we do?

02:50:22.000 And you're getting sued from that thing that makes you money.

02:50:25.000 I know.

02:50:25.000 And there's thousands of pending cases.

02:50:27.000 And you're willing to settle $15 billion because it's that profitable.

02:50:32.000 That, Joe, I think shows you how stuck we are in a way, right?

02:50:35.000 That shows you just how dependent we are on these petrochemicals.

02:50:39.000 That a company would go to that extreme.

02:50:41.000 I mean, if we weren't dependent...

02:50:44.000 Screw it.

02:50:45.000 Just get rid of it.

02:50:47.000 But even the firm itself is just so connected to that petrochemical past.

02:50:52.000 It can't let go.

02:50:57.000 And on that note, ladies and gentlemen...

02:50:59.000 Well, it seems like because they are being held accountable and there are thousands of cases pending, let's end on that.

02:51:07.000 It seems like progress is being made.

02:51:09.000 So could you hold up your book and let people know?

02:51:11.000 Put it up in the camera so we can see.

02:51:14.000 Seed Money.

02:51:14.000 Did you do the audio version of it?

02:51:16.000 Yeah, there's an audio version.

02:51:18.000 Did you read it?

02:51:18.000 I didn't.

02:51:19.000 Fuck! 1.00

02:51:20.000 Fuck! 1.00

02:51:20.000 I get so mad! 1.00

02:51:22.000 They always want actors to read it.

02:51:24.000 But I will say, the person who read it, Sean, is an amazing actor. 1.00

02:51:30.000 Fuck Sean! 1.00

02:51:31.000 I'm just kidding. 1.00

02:51:32.000 I'm just kidding, Sean.

02:51:32.000 Great, great, great reader, and did a better job than I would have done.

02:51:37.000 No, you would have done a perfect job.

02:51:38.000 If you just read it the way you talk today, it would have been perfect.

02:51:41.000 Thank you very much, man.

02:51:43.000 I really appreciate it.

02:51:44.000 And that's out now, and the audiobook is out now.

02:51:46.000 It's available.

02:51:47.000 Do you have social media?

02:51:49.000 I'm on Twitter, yeah.

02:51:50.000 At Bart Elmore.

02:51:51.000 Spell it out for people.

02:51:52.000 At Bart, B-A-R-T-E-L-M-O-R-E. Okay.

02:51:56.000 And Instagram?

02:51:57.000 Do you have an Instagram?

02:51:58.000 I don't.

02:51:58.000 Good for you.

02:51:59.000 Yeah.

02:51:59.000 Good for you.

02:52:00.000 Stay the fuck away from Facebook. 0.99

02:52:01.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:52:01.000 All right. 1.00

02:52:02.000 Thank you very much.

02:52:03.000 Really appreciate what you've done.

02:52:05.000 Thank you, Joe.

02:52:05.000 And I appreciate all your hard work.

02:52:07.000 And thanks for coming in here, man.

02:52:08.000 Thank you.

02:52:08.000 It's a pleasure.

02:52:09.000 My pleasure.

02:52:10.000 Yeah.

02:52:10.000 All right.

02:52:10.000 Bye, everybody.

02:52:11.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 20, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1722 - Bartow Elmore

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Summary

Transcript