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[Music] tell me tell me about all this dirtiness tell me about those these monsters and the money that they make yeah uh how'd you get involved in this first of all yeah why'd this become uh your field of study well thanks jeff for having me on this my pleasure thanks for being here yeah i'm excited to talk to you about this yeah so very important subject right yeah for me it was i you know i 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 you were just telling us that pepsi is actually older than coke which is surprising dr pepper yeah dr dr pepper's yeah yeah dr pepper's older weirdly and it's you think of it as like the you know yeah i thought it was like the new kid on the block yeah exactly that's the oldest 1885. not the oldest but it's older than coke what's the oldest cook was 1886. i don't really even know what the oldest one would be so dr pepper came along first then coca-cola and then pepsi and then pepsi away so pepsi is still [ __ ] pepsi's look you're talking to a guy from atlanta so i agree with you there what does that mean well atlanta was like yeah coke's from atlanta and uh you know when we were growing up it was like in the water you had to drink coca-cola in fact when you want any soft drink you just say i want a coke yeah nobody says i'd like a pep well maybe they but the thing about pepsi is like it never had cocaine in it did it no actually this is this is relevant i mean so this this was the beginning of this book because i was doing that i was looking at all the ingredients that go into coca-cola and saying okay where what's in the drink first of all because it's from my hometown that's where it started i said okay i want to find out all these natural resources and the product and you know is cocoa in the drink and also caffeine we'll get to that that's how it gets to monsanto but um cocoa was the most interesting actually because i thought you know it's called coca-cola so does it have cocaine in it
um and so i went back to look at that and turns out yeah you know trace amounts back still in the beginning no no in the beginning yeah but this is what's interesting about the history of the drink so this is 1886 back then the coca leaf was actually seen as something that was medicinal medicinal innocuous absolutely and everyone was using the coca leaf i mean there was a drink called vin mariani it was actually a wine a red wine that was mixed with coca leaves wow so it kind of had a little kick to it and like queen victoria of england drank this stuff ulysses says grant our president was like woo you know cocoa wine this is awesome and uh even the pope actually and i i wonder if communion would have had you know vin mariani we would all be catholic or something but um but so it was really popular and this guy this guy was down on his luck john pemberton who started coca-cola in atlanta he wanted to make a coca drink himself and so he made this originally coke was actually a wine it was like a wine of cocoa it was a red wine mixed with cocoa leaves exact knockoff of that drink that was really popular and um and then prohibition hits atlanta because we're in the protestant south in the 1880s and so he has to take out the alcohol and so he creates this non-alcoholic drink coca-cola that has the coca-leaf in it they weren't concerned about the coca they were concerned about alcohol and it remained in the drink uh throughout the 20th century what kind of dose would it have in it very small you know and this i think is important you know people equate the coca leaf with you know cocaine because yes you can make cocaine like street cocaine from you know processing all these coca leaves but if you go to peru today or you go to certain parts of south america people chew coca leaves it's a normal practice it's been going back thousands of years to the inca even um and so it's
very small amounts we're not talking about like in fact you'd probably get a bigger hit from like a you know experience from a cup of espresso from starbucks um 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 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 and asa candler who was white guy in atlanta didn't want to have anything to do with that so he decides kind of quietly to take out the cocaine but here's the interesting interesting thing joe they kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients yeah it it's so secret ingredient number five by the way cook doesn't like talking about this this is not part of their history that they like discussing um but it's clear as day in the archives you can see it so it's called merchandise number five the fifth secret ingredient in coca-cola and i like the name isn't it merchandise number five well the whole idea is that you name things so that no one asks questions right um what's merchandise number five also that that ingredient includes a little bit of the cola nut um which is from uh west africa actually and it was originally in there because it has caffeine another kind of caffeine kick that's where coca-cola comes from but cola by the way is with a k the actual coconut anyway that's merchandise number five and it's basically the flavor of the coca leaf um the essence of the coca leaf and the way it works is these leaves are brought in from peru is actually where coca-cola sourced it that's crazy i had to track down okay where are they getting their cocoa leaves from and there's this company called maywood
chemical company today the company is called steppen chemical company is that new jersey it is in new jersey exactly maywood new jersey yeah they're 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 exactly and you know technically at first as you as you put it most of the cocaine was going for pharmaceutical uses and for you know lidocaine all sorts of things like that they use for legitimate purposes but coke needed actually so much flavoring think about their brand it's so big like wheat grass juice a lot to get exactly the cup so they had to like come up with this special i love it you can't make this stuff up this is why history is fun there's a special exemption in our laws for what are called special leaves from peru and if anybody looking at it saying well what the hell are these special leaves you know and they're special because they're allowed to come into the united states exclusively basically to create the flavoring extract for coca-cola a lot of people call it the coca-cola joker how closely do you think they monitor that supply you know i mean very closely they even have to yeah if a bundle or two fell off a truck here or there that could be extremely profitable right i talked to somebody once they said so is there like a pile of cocaine somewhere up in new jersey you know where this is happening and uh you know i don't think that's the case but here's here's the crazy part too this is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead you to places you never thought you go like this book which we'll talk about but um it got weird 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 they weren't satisfied with this trade with peru and these are declassified dea documents at the national archives this is not like you know yeah something crazy you can see it and actually it's in the
book but basically they petition the federal government to start growing it at first they're thinking like the virgin islands but then they're like i don't know there's like all these tourists it's gonna be crazy but they have to find a climate and a location geography where they can do this and they ultimately go okay what about hawaii and they do joe they grew coca leaves secretly a totally secret operation called the alakaya project also called alakaya what does that mean exactly nobody's gonna ask questions you know obfuscate the the story in kauai oh wow and it was done through the university of hawaii they had to sign all these non-disclosure agreements and they wouldn't publish their papers uh you know that on the study of all this the reason the government agreed to it is that coke said we're going to create a cocaine-less coca-shrub like basically breed a plant that doesn't have cocaine in it 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 but i'm an environmental historian so i study the the relationship between like businesses and the environment and in this case the environment matters because nature bit back so in the 60s this fungus that's native to hawaii was like whoa this plant uh that's not native and attacks it and it wipes out the entire uh cocoa crop of coca-cola so that the supply they had for a very brief time in the 60s is wiped out they go back to sourcing it from peru but so i was looking at all those ingredients and it was when i was looking at caffeine that i ended up talking about monsanto so does coca-cola have a legitimate relationship with coca leaf growers in peru right now right legitimate i think is the the right kind of question to ask i mean i went down to
peru because i think it's important if you're going to write about people who are going to write about a place that you go there yeah so i went down there actually my my father uh he doesn't speak any spanish was like my bodyguard down there with me it was probably a bad idea to bring my dad with me but we kind of went on this journey to go see if we could figure it out he's from you know uh georgia as well so sounds like a good way to find yourself missing exactly we probably should have been more 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 right you're just you're just taking risks and doing things that probably years later you're like maybe this is not the smartest yeah you wouldn't do if you had a family yeah exactly as i do now so although it wasn't that safe for this book either but anyway we go down and we we look into this story and i think to kind of answer your question i mean there is a trade it's managed actually by a state agency in peru called a naco and exactly where the coca leaf comes from for coca-cola is a little bit unclear you know in the 21st century but but um if you talk to coquelieros or people who represent the kokiros the farmers who produce the coca leaf a lot of what they're frustrated about is that basically coke has this exclusive right to bring in coca leaves into the united states now if you and i were to try and do that we'd be arrested at the border right right because the laws in this country now say you can't bring in coca leaves company only basically and by the way yeah this is what pepsi we were talking about pepsi earlier they were livid about this because they wanted access and other soft drinks wanted access to this to the supply but the federal government was saying no no no you know and trying to kind of uh protect that single buyer access what we call monopsony crazy deal it was so crazy and it's one of the reasons why coke you know they
have a unique flavor right they have something that no one else can get but here's the other thing joe right so like think about coke they're everywhere like you could sell this stuff in any part of the world and i think that's the trick for coke how do you get stuff that cheap well if everyone had access to coca-leaves you know the price of coca leaves might be pretty high because it's you can't grow coca leaves everywhere right 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 cochieros don't like right they would love to be able to sell coca tea in the united states they would love to be able to sell it's you know you name it coca cookies cocoa flower yeah but because of international laws that ban it by the way that we're in part brokered by coca-cola that's part of the rub and they have it on their name you know wow think about that rub too here's a here's a product that comes from your you know that deep history that goes back to the inca it's on the brand and they're preventing that trade in part you know historically have been preventing that trade that's what i think unnerves people they don't see it as legitimate they think a lot of people would see it as you know some kind of theft do you use like using your company to lobby and to throw money around to make that happen is it's like i look at it two ways in one way it's a genius move i mean if you're a company exactly and you have figured out how to make a monopoly on what's not a schedule one drug right because it's got legitimate medical uses yeah and you know it you can as i said you can bring it in for certain medicinal purposes and right but beyond that you know the coca leaf itself cannot be imported 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 how does that stick that seems crazy this seems like pepsi should challenge it yeah well they did i mean there's there are letters back in the back when this was being kind of uh unfolded i think they should do it right now
but well and i think that i think about the farmers you know 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 i mean we talk about a lot about i know on your show you talk a lot a lot about marijuana and cannabis you know we're not talking about the coca leaf which was villainized in similar ways you know we had this kind of view of this stuff is terrible and it you know you can't touch it 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 the problem is sorry the problem really is like people step on it right and add things to it like fentanyl it's exactly giant issue now 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 and like i said imagine going to starbucks and having coca tea you know like no big deal it'd be great and i've had it before it was exactly interesting yeah and i did in peru and it's it's totally like it's not what people are thinking it's just it's like a caffeine sort of buzz like maybe like a little bit different but pretty similar in terms of the strength it doesn't make you crazy or anything like that exactly and you know it's used for high altitude um exertion it helps people at high altitudes and things like that 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 and they are there are people that are trying to say look we should be revalorizing is the word the coca leaf like there's no reason why this thing needs to be treated this way yeah so we're stuck though we're stuck with these uh narratives we are that's that's narrative that cocaine is evil and it ruins lives yeah 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 but the problem is that there is this sort of black market world
and that's the only market to get it so it is cut with a bunch of other [ __ ] that's not supposed to be in there like amphetamines and fentanyl and have you aware of dr carl hart i don't know if i know he's a professor at um columbia and uh brilliant guy who uh was originally he was a scientist who was working with drugs and he was a very straight-laced guy 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 like regularly wow and is open about it but is also brilliant right so and he's you know a genuine scholar so he's a guy who will sit on a podcast and tell you i take cocaine i take heroin it's lovely he goes regular heroin i'm like how do you do it i sniff it and he goes it's it's wonderful i love it it makes me feel good it helps strengthens my relationships and he's like you and i should do cocaine together i'm like that's the craziest [ __ ] thing anybody's ever said to me that's a professor from columbia on a podcast we should do cocaine together right that's a rarity but he's like if you get pure cocaine he goes pure cocaine is fantastic because it's great stuff yeah i mean i think of michael pollan's but you had michael pollan on you know and and how to change your mind i mean we're seeing in other words what you're talking about that there was a history here 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 in the case of coca-cola again i think it's just a matter of you know rethinking this coca-leaf i mean here you got a company that again has it on their name and yet you know there's almost and they won't acknowledge that too it's part of it it's just like we've never had this like that's even worse that's kind of a kick in the face and they still have the flavor that comes from the leaf as far as when i last researched it yeah well yeah we brought it up on the podcast before we went into it we were we're stunned yeah that they still not only
that but they use that and process it to make medical grade cocaine and then interestingly like at the very beginning this was i went deep into this so i got they they did sell it they did sell cocaine you know like i mean i don't know how to put it but they had extra but then they realized that the laws were emerging because again it wasn't it wasn't always that way right people were again the president's you know consuming coca everyone's consuming it so it took time but you know when i got to so the cocoa was fun and interesting and wild um but then i got to caffeine and that's what led to this so like i i i always ask people like where does the caffeine come from that's in like soft drinks or do you drink caffeinated like beverages maybe not coke i don't know yes okay have you ever wondered where it comes from uh you know what i haven't okay i didn't really either and i drank it all the time but i was like right i tried to google it as one does and i was like where's the caffeine come from and i couldn't figure it out and so i'm doing that ingredient by ingredient story for the cookbook and i get to caffeine and i'm kind of stuck i'm like i i don't know where they get it um and so if you had a guess though like what would be a guest would you have a good guess um well i would say yeah i'm not really exactly sure how they synthesized since synthesized things so i would say synthetic caffeine yeah but i mean what does that mean exactly it's got to have precursors it's got there's got to be like compounds yeah you mix together like what is it i didn't even go that far i actually thought like maybe it's coffee you know and and and that wasn't right either um so here's how it worked basically and i found all this by going to monsanto's records in st louis which was part of the beginning of this book i got access to monsanto's records which was like as a historian this is incredible right i have a ability to tell a story that maybe you know um did they give you access
they had to give permission to go into their archives to their records yeah wow i just still don't really understand why they do this but did you get a burner phone i didn't but we'll talk about that i did use an encrypted phone to talk to some sources inside monsanto and stuff like that and i look i was just a historian you know coming out of grad school who had never had training in journalism or never really had training in the art of like protecting a source and so i really had to and i give a plug to new america this organization that um 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 um but they did i had permission and i started to see this caffeine story like monsant this is crazy so but for coca-cola there would be no monsanto really yes because when monsanto this chemical company from st louis that started in 1901 it was like barely getting by it was you know the american chemical industry almost didn't exist the germans were really in control they ran the organic chemistry we were getting all of our chemicals from overseas monsanto we think of it as like this monopoly it controls everything back then they were nothing and so they needed a big contract and so their initial buyer was coca-cola and they sold coca-cola two things they sold them saccharin the artificial sweetener which ultimately comes from coal tar you can talk about that and then caffeine that they this is the crazy part all right this is how they did it i would have never figured it out so basically they took tea leaves that were broken and damaged around the world like on tea exchanges like the garbage of the tea trade and they realized no one was going to
consume that so it's just waste and they basically swept that stuff up and processed out the caffeine from the garbage from the waste tea tea leaves how many are there out there a lot there's so much coca-cola exactly so that's that was what i knew was like okay well wait a minute this is 1901 but coke's going to grow this is where your point comes in it's going to become synthetic right but at first they're like okay this waste trade works then they need more they need more caffeine and um decaf coffee takes off if you've ever wondered like where does all that caffeine go right like if you drink decaf i don't know you know if you do but like all that caffeine from the decaf coffee market ended up going into soft drinks in the 50s but nobody was really drinking decaf coffee in the early part of the 20th century um you know people wanted the caffeine kick that was the big deal but they still needed more to your point like they needed more caffeine we're talking about a company that sells 1.9 billion servings of its product every day now holy [ __ ] 1.9 billion servings every day that's crazy it is nuts so that's like what one-seventh of the total population yeah exactly something around this yeah how many people do we have now seven points more than seven yeah isn't it closing in on eight yeah so more than that's a lot of [ __ ] servings one point what was it you said it earlier 1.9 billion servings it goes up every year crazy but that's you know i joke in my class uh i have this class history 3705 cocoa globalization great students love those guys and they uh this class basically they said i said you can even come to this class and learn how to make a lot of money you know or you can learn about this uh the environmental impacts of something that means like that's basically one out of four people have a coke every day yeah it's pretty crazy yeah hey well remember isn't that i said i'm serving people and it's all the other products they have right but there's obviously some people go ham and they have like doesn't john daly drink like
18 diet cokes a day yeah like warren buffett drinks cherry coke every day right everybody yeah yeah yeah that's how they're driving yeah thanks for them the servings the amount 1.9 remember it's not 2.8 and that's not just coca-cola it's like all their brands and they have a lot of different brands so servings of their products but still coca-cola right is like you know the number one soft drink in the world still is and diet coke was always number two always ticked off pepsi because they were one and two but well pepsi seems like a fake cola when you've had coke because it doesn't have that coke that whatever that flavonoid is that what it is whatever the flavoring profile is yeah i think you know it could be key to it i mean i will say one thing one other thing about it can't get off the cocoa thing because it's so like weird but there is there is a document and this is actually from a reporting of another journalist mark pendergrass but it's really good about new coke if you remember when you came out but it was like a huge catastrophe because they were trying to totally reshape the flavor in 1985 and nobody liked it nobody liked it you can go to the museum they had like a voicemail machine you know machine that you could pick up that is like people being like give me back my cooking when they had new coke did they still have old coke available no that's that's the thing they've literally said we're going cold slightly we're going to completely wipe out the old coke so was it cocaine-free is that and that's what was interesting mark pendergrass found some evidence that when they made the switch to new coke they decided temporarily well why not like we have this weird trade that we keep getting asked about like let's just go ahead and get rid of this so one of the things that they might have removed according to pendergrass is this coca-leaf flavor 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 and you can almost imagine the executives at coke being like whoa wait a minute maybe we
don't mess with this flavor maybe that's the one thing that separates them from pepsi maybe that's what it is i think it's a lot of things i mean one of the biggest things that made coke so big and and where they basically just outpaced coke uh pepsi was world war ii they got government contracts to provide coke to the troops and this was coming from the top i have the letter from dwight d eisenhower saying don't send me this don't send me that you're sending us coca-cola wow and that meant that there were all these veterans and everyone yeah i mean you're gonna have a pepsi at your house after you come home from deed you know the kid the parents would like slap that out of their hands like drink coke you know and actually pepsi wrote to the government saying you can't do this like perhaps he's getting [ __ ] left and right no cocaine they don't get set safe served to the troops yeah you could argue this is really just a book about how pepsi got screwed but um but anyway yeah i mean so there is evidence of that and that new coke fiasco but it ends up back we know for sure is there enough caffeine from decaffeinated coffee when they extract it to really put caffeine into all those sodas because if i really and i would imagine that that goes back to your point i mean because you said sympathetic yeah and then yeah they needed more yeah i could i would imagine like the percentage of people that drink caffeinated coffee versus uncaffeinated or decaffeinated it's probably super small yeah it's probably like five to one or something yeah i would guess what do you think what's your guess i have no idea yeah yeah let's find out google say yes like how many let's let's uh jamie let's see what you're getting what percentage of the coffee like uh how many people drink decaf to regular cats yeah like in the morning or at night just like cups served period it's like ten to one probably i think ten to one i think it's a lot yeah like ten percent of them maybe you're probably right ten to one probably sounds better because people hate that decaf [ __ ] they really rarely drive just during drinking
definitely hate it in the early part of the 20th century because it was they had no real good system for getting out the caffeine and it made it taste terrible well not only that it's not real expensive even if you buy decaffeinated coffee it's got caffeine in it yeah it still has got caffeine in it exactly yeah people need to know that because they'll give it to their kids before they go to bed have some decaf coffee in the [ __ ] kids really little kids yeah people are crazy people terrible parents and decaffeinated you would imagine actually is decaffeinated but it's not it's like the difference in milligrams it's like i think like a cup of decaf has like 15 milligrams or something like that as opposed to like you know i don't know what it is but i do know that there's still yeah there's caffeine in there for sure let's see servings of regular coffee american coffee drinkers had roughly 0.23 cups of decaf coffee per day but it's not in comparison to caffeinated uh-huh there's no uh someone else that's why i got i asked right that i found that and it's not why don't they compare them together sorry give me a second okay yeah the sourcing at that time was maxwell house so it was like not even really good coffee oh like 50s like instant yeah junk and so and that was really exploding but still you're right it's pretty small so they needed more and in the 40s in part because of the war they couldn't get supplies of various things once again we see coca-cola turning to monsanto and saying hey monsanto you know you've supplied us with caffeine saccharin all these things can you make synthetic caffeine and monsanto does they figure out a way to make synthetic caffeine from coal tar so what is coal tar so it's basically the byproduct of processing coal into coke which is coal without its impurities often used you know in the steel industry and
it's literally a black tarry substance that's the byproduct of that process kind of the waste of processing coal and coke and in that tar is all these different chemicals that you can make because it's all these different carbon compounds that you could tease out and then do things to to make all sorts of things and actually one of the points of this book is that almost all this stuff around us like ultimately comes from fossil fuels whether it be coal tar by products or you know petroleum but it's pretty nuts when you see how many different things come from fossil fuels yeah like our headphones this stuff plastic covers these wires couldn't function and that's what i think when we transition if we do to a fossil fuel free economy you know and try and and reduce greenhouse gases and things like that people are talking about cars and power plants after running this book i'm like no i'm thinking about everything else i was just literally just looking at all the equipment in here and things like so much plastic so much stuff and all that goes back to this period where they're like experimenting with coal tar experimenting with petroleum feeling wow we can make this we can make this and it was cheap because oil was booming at that time right you know you could just do it so they can make caffeine out of oil base yeah and ultimately it's natural gas largely now but at that time it was coltar originally for coca-cola and this is this talk about kind of some shady stuff you know coke has had these long contracts with monsanto at this point this is the 40s and they're like hey could you make synthetic for us but if you look in internally at coke they're like well i don't even know if we're gonna buy it but we just want more caffeine in the market because more caffeine means you know other buyers who are getting caffeine may use that caffeine which keeps the price of caffeine down because coke's real model was like not owning stuff like making other people do stuff like they were they were a business that basically just
did was a middleman in the economy they didn't they didn't actually grow the ingredients in their product and they didn't distribute it it was independent bottlers who did it they were kind of like this middleman in the economy and so for for monsanto they were like hey go experiment with this see how it goes and monsanto does it they figure out how to synthesize caffeine from coal tar and they have to use a base molecule found in that coal tar called urea and this is true okay they make it and they're like hey coke look we've got this synthetic for you comes from urea found in coal tar and coke's like nah consumers aren't going to drink this urea sounds like urine you said it okay this is what's crazy this is in the that's exactly what the chemist there's this great oral history at the um 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 they're gonna think it's p and they legitimately initially say we're not gonna do it you know and they stick with natural source caffeine again coming from the coffee bean of things now they ultimately decide to pivot because to your point they're growing at such a pace they need to have synthetic and i uh can't prove this but it seems logical that their thinking is wait a minute consumers are never going to ask where their caffeine comes from look at everyone i've ever talked to no one knows where the caffeine comes from right and so they do switch to synthetics and if you go to their website it's great it says we source our caffeine from tea leaves so that waste tea leaf story is still part of it the uh coffee beans uh decaf coffee and then appropriate sources appropriate [Laughter] well you know and a lot of things are made from this but you know ultimately
the natural gas became the feedstock and things and it's a lot of it's produced in china but wow anyway it's crazy and so but it's that was when i was like oh my gosh monsanto so that got monsanto off the ground because then they have a giant project they had a huge project you know with the saccharine and caffeine for coca-cola these big contracts that kept them afloat you can go to my this is like you know readily available information on their website they'll say but for coca-cola we wouldn't exist so sometimes when i think about the environmental footprint of coca-cola i'm like it's bigger than just the firm you know it's right it goes into these other stories literal seed money it's the literal seed money yeah uh shout out to my friend jesse pappas who came up with that title and was like it was it was brilliant because it it did reflect what i wanted to tell which is that there is going to be the seed company but it's not a seed company when it starts it's only making chemicals and at the very beginning it's only making chemicals for coca-cola there was a while where uh mainstream news sources were reporting on the crisis with indian farmers yeah farmers in india that um they correct me if i'm wrong i'll probably butcher this 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 like so say like i'm gonna [ __ ] this up i'm sure but if you grow a tomato or a pumpkin let's say you grow a pumpkin then you get all the seeds from the pumpkin those seeds aren't viable like they've engineered the the plant to make sure that the seeds aren't viable right right that's a popular actual myth about what they've done they've done a lot of things they haven't done that they haven't done that so they this came from a a technology called what they called terminator technology from 1990 you know the 1990s film and it was owned by delta and pine and lane company that they ended up acquiring in the early 2000s and at that time delta had this technology but they didn't deploy it 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 there's no evidence that we have that they have actually deployed that the way that they prevent farmers now from re-saving their seeds and planting them is through a extremely intense contract called a technology use agreement or tua that farmers have to sign like a soybean farmer has to sign it and say i will not replant seeds that come from this harvest well you don't own the seeds right is that the deal like you when you buy the seeds to use them you're essentially like leasing them exactly it's like a licensing fee and actually this was this was revolutionary like farmers had never seen something like this in the 90s like right they were like wait a minute so you're going to license this technology to us and um we can't save the seeds and replant them and you know that that's what led to all this havoc and chaos in farm country where farmers are saying this goes against like centuries-old practices where we're always saving seats and experimenting with them challenging them so that was a huge change to the food system but way later in monsanto's story i mean they weren't even they weren't making they weren't even in the actual i definitely want to get back to the beginning of it but is is that still going on in india because you don't hear about that story anymore yeah these farmers get massively in debt and there was a rash of suicides right a rash of suicides and i think that you know it's it's hard to parse out that story of what's causing these these suicides um 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 come in or is it it was it because of those seeds i think the debt issue is the bigger issue right that you have this kind of industrial scale agriculture and the pressures on these rural farmers that leads to these problems um but there's 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 and the debt story is also true in the united states i mean these seed costs go through the roof the more genetically engineered traits that are added to them and stacked in we see this dramatic increase in those prices 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 and it's kind of a rat race where farmers don't necessarily feel like they're you know incredibly profitable but they feel like they're just trying to keep up does that same technology contract apply today with say like corn or soybean farmers in america it does especially soy corn is a unique situation because you were talking about this terminator gene that could be added and again we don't really have evidence that they did that but with corn um going back to the 20s and 30s we developed what was known as hybrid corn and the 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 so with corn it's weird even going back to the 20s there was a system in place that was just part of the kind of genetic peculiarity of corn that meant that farmers had to buy corn over and over again but what was different was soybeans cotton and a lot of other products this was not the case can i ask you this yeah 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 from these crosses of the of these two different varieties these kind of parent strains and as long as you get that original strain that original appearance strain coming from those crosses then that that corn grows well but when
you if you if you try and take the seeds from from those siblings of those parents they don't produce the same amount 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 and then be able to sell those seeds from those original parent lines that would be really prolific but if the farmer saved those seeds and tried to grow another generation they just wouldn't produce this wild so it's crazy 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 yeah and you're exciting experiment experimentation with with the top seed companies trying to figure out okay which cross which parent crosses are going to produce the best the best yield but then if you try and save that seed and replant it you're not you're not going to have the same vigor as what it's called you don't have the same productivity so weirdly with corn there was kind of a corporatization of the seed business baked into the peculiarities of crossing corn whereas with soybeans and cotton and other crops this you had to have an agreement that monsanto created to make farmers come back and buy those seeds every year we grow so much corn though yeah and i i think about it i'm on my 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 well you can have different parent crosses you can have different kinds of parents that you cross to make these to make this this this hybrid seed um and you and you have a lot of different seed companies that are playing with different parents what i'm saying is once you do that and then it farms oh i get it yeah it won't work again with the offspring of those but what i'm saying is how are they breeding so many see how many crosses they're doing to get enough seeds like if you drive through kansas or i have a buddy who lives in iowa and you drive to through these corn fields like you're like holy [ __ ] like if you're a person from the city and you don't know what
right it's incredible have you did you drive through those areas being in ohio uh shout out to jamie who's also shout out to columbus yeah shout out to toronto yeah we got a lot of ohio representation in here you know you just see tremendous amounts of corn and tremendous amounts of soybeans everywhere and yeah it's interesting i mean you know you have a prolific generation of seeds from a harvest um and so you know it it is a bit baffling i have to say about just the scale of it how does it how does it all work but you know when you think about it the majority of our cropland our arable crop land is is cultivating soybeans corn hay and all almost all of that is going into animal fodder which is its own story right um but yeah most of it right most of it i mean the vast majority of it is going into animal feed and animal feed and then that animal feed is it mostly for cows uh cows all sorts of livestock yeah pigs and you know often in these cafes 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 yeah um but it's kind of you know i think for me the the story about food with monsanto that was interesting was i wanted to kind of know did these genetically engineers engineer crops actually produce much higher yields you know did we see this like massive growth in the productivity of genetically engineered crops and maybe i should back up just to say like when that happened you know the first large-scale introduction of genetically engineered crops commodity crops like soybeans like corn like all these things um 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
brazil argentina some 28 some state countries around the world that now have genetically engineered crops and so i looked at it as a historian and said okay well what can we say about that you know did these what did these crops actually do and when they were introduced you know the idea was and just to be clear this was a new technology it's often said well we've been always been changing you know crops and things like that 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 another and changing the makeup of that crop and in 96 when we see this happening two they're trying to do two things they're trying to 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 and they had been making since the 1970s but at this point they're thinking this could be amazing if we can genetically engineer crops to be resistant to roundup wow think about the sales right 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 and this uh use of glyphosate did they know at the time how toxic it was it was the opposite joe you know when when they introduced this in the 1970s so it was actually discovered in 19 around 1970 by a chemist inside the firm called john franz and the this is what's so wild when you go back is they saw it has the environmentally friendly herbicide you know what they're trying to replace at that point ddt agent orange yeah
agent orange god so let's here's the story so let's go back just a little bit more to get to that so and i talk about the whole story of agent orange in here in this book they first start making and by they i mean monsanto 245 t it's a chlorinated hydrocarbon that's an active ingredient in agent orange in 1949 in a little town called nitro west virginia which i traveled to because nobody went to go talk to the workers nobody went to the actual place where the people who made the herbicides you know to me i you know my dad was in vietnam and and those stories are important and i want to talk about that as well but it also mattered to me like we need to go to the root of the story the people who actually made these chemicals what happened there at that plant you know so monsanto was making it into 49 this chemical goes back to the 40s wartime you know world war ii in some ways there were some experiments with it monsanto's doing at 49. um 245t the active ingredient in agent orange it's actually two chemicals in asian orange 24d 245t um and about 50 of each of these compounds and the problem was with 245t that chemical had a contaminant known as dioxin which dow chemical writing to monsanto in 1965 said this is the most toxic compound we've ever seen holy [ __ ] 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 and that could be drawing in and of itself 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 like they have chloracne
which um you can probably find on google but you know what it looks like but it's basically like where your skin is peeling off it's just these massive pustules it's acne like lesions that are showing that you have systemic exposure to dioxin the workers had this there's a guy in there james really met these guys well a lot of them were dead um and or a lot of them weren't around by the time i did it but i got their files as i say in the book you know they're telling stories they may not be here but their records found in those corporate records still tell a story and james ray boggas i just will never forget the story he talked about in a deposition because he took monsanto to trial um and they they took these workers years later in the 80s took monsanto to trial they lose that trial and actually monsanto puts i think liens out on their homes to make them pay the court costs back the workers themselves but anyway this is 49 in the 50s right so they've got chloracne on their faces this this is all being documented by the doctors and people in the in the company but and you know he has to peel off his face he literally said five times they used a solvent to try and peel off layers of the skin to because of the the chloracne exposure they were they were complaining of nervousness all these systemic health problems of course we now know dioxin is super toxic and they even said in 65 right i need to see what this looks like so that's something yeah chloracne and this is uh oh jesus like that guy who got poisoned in ukraine exactly um 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 well you guys need to wash your face you know well in this case you know that's kind of what they did they said stuff they said stuff like look oh my god um you know you don't worry this is just acne it'll go away what is he showing in the upper
corner the up what is that is he pulls that his stomach what is that is that a sack this is balls i think that is correct on google yeah okay so but yeah i think you know it this is that child down there that's an environmental poisoning oh god yeah this oh my god this is horrific and so chloracne is really is really nasty stuff and again this is what they're seeing internally you know inside the firm with their workers 40 and i think i just wanted to stress this you know 40 51 52 this is years before agent orange is going to be sprayed in vietnam and before veterans are going to be exposed to this they already know yeah i mean you know you if you want to take a generous interpretation of this you know they're saying well i don't know it's acne but maybe it's not going to have these systemic effects you know but in my opinion you're seeing it so visibly you should you stop production you prevent this from going out into the world what do they do well in those years they continued to um to produce it and it was used in the united states this is the thing that i think gets overlooked we use 245t here on gardens and you know all sorts of places you can look this up and still relatively google no back then in the 50s you know right as that post-war long culture and automobile age is taking off so how many people are getting this chloracne at the plant we're talking about dozens of workers is it most people do some people somehow another avoid it yeah i mean you know a lot they had different buildings and it seemed to depend on if you were working closely with those those chemicals or not because they're producing other chemicals they're rubber chemicals and others is it dermal absorption or is it inhaling it's i think it does come through dermal penetration and these guys you know uh interestingly i should say this about one of the doctors who was overseeing the the company at the time he often said that people that were complaining of health problems were what
he called kind of the disgruntled tenth you know this is the people who are just unhappy with working here and things like that and that's kind of how he saw workers 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 which is part of the problem right i think they might they probably overlook things because that's how they saw people complaining about health issues but this is hard to overlook you know you're seeing workers that are systemically coming down with problems you're hiring people to test them and look into this and instead of saying wait wait wait wait before we've got this all figured out you know maybe we shouldn't keep pushing this stuff out yeah but they do of course because they're making money they're making a lot of money at this point and then of course with agent orange it becomes a big deal they're the largest producer by volume of agent orange during during the vietnam war dow of course is producing it but and actually monsanto is because of their process it was more laden with dioxin than the other compounds what a crazy company if you really stop and think about it they start off as just a chemical company probably fairly innocuous if not beneficial to their customers and then they make cocaine caffeine not the cocaine they make caffeine and saccharine yeah well because they don't do the decoconized coca leaf stuff for okay that was yeah so they make caffeine for coca-cola they start making money and then they start making agent orange and then they start making roundup and then they start i mean and now they're sort of synonymous with evil corporations yeah if you think like if you ask someone what's an evil corporation like monsanto would be one like people would use that oh yeah that's a good one that's a good evil like if you're like name and evil corporation like if you're on what is it jeopardy sure what's the show would you do the the things oh uh family feud family feud yeah that's right survey says survey says yes i mean that's but that's how it's
about you know i actually got that i got that actual bumper sticker from my brother who lives in alaska he sent that to me and i started writing this he's like look at this says man satan you know and i have to be honest with you when i started this i was very aware of that i think uh you know having watched your show and your conversations like you appreciate this i really wanted to start from scratch i wanted to say okay well like what happened and was it as bad as you know as people say um and there were definitely moments like you're saying where i was like ah you know these guys are just trying to make money they're trying this scrappy guy john queenie who started the company he's in his 40s he's got two kids get this all right when he starts monsanto in 1901 he's got two kids he's his wife by the way is olga monsanto so if you're wondering olga's either hot or a monster right it's either you get an olga she's a super hot yeah there she is yeah there's olga monster especially for back then yeah like what year is this this is around 1901 or so and there's edgar hot volga next to him yeah and then there's he got a good one right yeah and then there's uh his mustache oh guida look at that look at that thing he doesn't look happy wow and that living in 1901 [ __ ] yeah average life expected he's 40 years old average like say like 44 45 really at that time i mean but if you make it past childbirth of course you have a better much better chance of of surviving but but anyway he does name his company after his wife what's interesting is you wonder whether that was like whether she'd be happy about that right it becomes this hated name in so many ways years later but he's scrapping by he actually had tried to start a chemical industry in the late 19th century it had burned down and he didn't have any money he's got these kids he's got his family so like to your point i'm kind of when i'm reading this i'm trying to understand how is this company starting what's the human story here how do we get into this
mess you know money and then you know we do when you get as you said to the 50s and 60s these agricultural chemicals become a huge part of their business but kind of back to roundup 70. okay 245t now now the lid's off you know the government's starting to find out about it people are raising alarms scientists are talking about how toxic this stuff is and you know they're looking for an alternative something that's not as toxic as this stuff and that's when john franz finds uh glyphosate interestingly you know all like the detergent all yes that was a monsanto product of course it was but it had it had a phosphate based ingredient in it that helped it clean clothes but in the 60s phosphate-based detergents were ending up in waterways and contributing to like algae blooms and fish staff and so they had to get rid of that phosphate detergent and they had all this phosphate and they're like what do we do with all this phosphate boom all detergent you know and all that phosphate ends up becoming the building blocks of roundup roundup is ultimately coming from elemental phosphorus wow it's crazy and but it was all designed to be healthy i knew a guy who lived in a community that was uh connected to a golf course and he grew up drinking water from a well and him and a large number of people in the community got cancer 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 can i show you what roundup looks like nowadays jamie there's a 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 um probably mostly
glyphosate it says glyphosate because that's the active ingredient but i just want to show you the change that's happened over the last several years with glyphosate so like that's glyphosate this comes from the usgs pesticide national synthesis program um this is what happened with roundup ready technology like we were this is 92. so remember i said roundup is created in the 70s but it's not really used that much you know throughout the growing season it's interesting how it's used so much in california yeah so it's a primary application of it that that's that the weird farmland on the way up to san francisco if you're driving from la and you see you know like [ __ ] joe biden signs that's where they are exactly yep that's also you know the land of like like 90 percent of our almonds like you know all the salad everything comes in there yeah and so much pesticide use in that valley wow but look at the midwest i mean it goes from like you know almost none almost very little to swarm to swarms and 2017 and that's because you've made crops that are now resistant to glyphosate so you can spray it all you know as much as you need to kill your weeds but um and jamie there's a you had that weed resistance graph going up but a fifth grader can tell you well wow when you spray that much roundup on something or glyphosate on something you're going to start seeing resistance adaptation exactly like it's nature fighting back like what's happening with um antibiotics where you're seeing these like mrsa like these medication resistant staph infections that are insanely difficult to treat just like it yeah just like it you know in fact some of the weed scientists i talked to i'll be honest the when i first was going to a talk at ohio state that they said the weed scientists are talking i thought oh i thought marijuana showed up i was like oh this is cool too you know yeah i want to find
out how to make the [ __ ] stronger so but these weed scientists at ohio state who are great and helped out with the book um fantastic folks you know some of those you know they're like glyphosate was like penicillin man it was it was so powerful it was so effective at killing weeds that like and we burned through it because these weeds became resistant to it and so and that's where we're at now kind of going back to your point about chemicals and exposures like roundup was introduced because it was seen as an environmentally more friendly herbicide at the time in the 70s than asian art yeah you're comparing it against some pretty bad it's like would you like to get punched or shoot you and you know it had to do with you know the way it worked and the mechanisms there 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 you get to see this this first time we put it together but when that weed resistance takes off i think it's the next graph after that what happens is check this out okay this is this is what's happening i put this together with a friend of mine who's data scientist try to uh remember that a lot of people are just listening they're just like a huge percentage it's fair enough so i'll try and describe it so what we're looking at is pounds of herbicide per acre of soybeans so it's just looking at soybeans as a case study and we're looking at the amount of herbicides that's being used on farms per acre in the u.s in specific states just because they had data for this to for us to compare and what we're seeing is this like explosion in roundup glyphosate that big dark line going up like that and notice look we we started seeing the decline in all these other herbicides that are really toxic stuff like chlorinated compounds and things like that they're going down and down and down but check out weed resistance 2004 2005 and 2006. boom 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 wow and so [ __ ] miss crazy yeah so like if the folks are looking at this graph you're essentially seeing like two mountains superimposed but one's upside down so it starts out that everything's working great and then it turns terrible and then you have these uh herbicide resistant uh it's like the graph is it available online it's people i don't know if we have an available i'll see if i can figure out a way to do that and and do that but but to see this in the book it's like the clearest example ever this is broken right 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 like we were told that genetically engineered crops would reduce our dependence on all these toxic herbicides but because of resistance we're seeing all these toxic herbicides coming back so if you're a consumer and honestly it's not just so much about us and like caring about our food but if you care at all about the people that produce your food you know and their exposure to compounds i mean we're talking about some of these chemicals that are coming back producing the 40 you know invented in the 40s 50s that's not good no and we're also because we're spraying these things people have more exposure to glyphosate so you're seeing whatever health problems that glyphosate causes i'm sure you're seeing that exasperate yeah that's that's expanding right yeah you know on on glyphosate so here's where we're at with glyphosate and what what's out there from all the the different studies so what happened in 2015 was the world health organization came out and said that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen what year was that this 2015 15. um but yeah we still use it well interesting it's only been six years exactly well yeah think about it and interestingly bayer the company that
now owns monsanto they bought monsanto in 2018. they um you know they they're going to pull roundup from home depot and lowe's voluntarily in the next two years so they're not even going to sell this stuff for like regular consumers like you and i who might well use it on your lawn or whatever whatever right um but somehow we're going to keep using it on farms right it's kind of like this logic doesn't hold up right right now the epa of course after that 2015 decision by the who they produced the study and said uh we disagree we don't think it's carcinogenic but then within the that agency there are scientists that disagree on that um and debate that 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 i have to say looking at it very closely it's a mess like i can't you know i'm trying to figure out what does it do does it cause it does it not all i'll say is given the uncertainty looking at that graph it's like come on you know like should we be doing this i don't know i i know but what are the alternatives 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 like if they need some sort of herbicide and they don't use roundup and they're not going to go out there and pick with the weeds exactly right so what do they do well that's part of it right 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 cathodes and fodder yeah well even just agriculture in general like people need to understand that monocrops monocrop agriculture like having these
massive fields filled with corn is completely unnatural totally unnatural doesn't exist in nature and that's why you have these pests that you constantly have to beat back because they love stuff like this yeah and then they realize like well all we have to do is adapt to corn you know these corn corn consumption and corn wherever it's growing and there's uh all these minerals they're putting in the grounds to make the corn grow and this is our spot let's go there exactly and it's it's you've made a feast you've made this bounty and it's like come eat as much as you want and then you poison everybody but the corn and you just basically have this mutant corn that can take a beating you can well now these i mean most of these most of these plants are now genetic they're called stacked yeah so how do they do that explain what that means and how they did that yeah basically they they now have crops that are resistant not to one trait but it's stacked they're one herbicide they're resistant to in one case the one one that's seeking approval right now is like five herbicides so you're saying like you know plants that can beat back or like super tough pretty damn tough you know plants with five different herbicides they can tolerant it's like that's a mutant plant right 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 one of the things and this is the craziest the plants that are now coming out are called dicamba tolerant most people are talking about roundup dicamba is freaking crazy okay no it's worse it's hard to say worse you know because when you look at these stories you're like what's worse you know the asian orange story or this this is what's going on right now with that camo because you know there's roundup resistant weeds farmers are now buying these seeds that
are resistant to roundup and dicamba this other chemical the problem with dicamba is when you spray dicamba over some plants it like vaporizes in hot temperatures so this herbicide jumps up and actually spreads onto other plants which is totally crazy so like if you're spraying in a really hot temperature dicamba will jump and hit other farmers nearby what so it actually evaporates it evaporates it vaporizes which is crazy so you're spraying it it vaporizes under what temperature uh you know summer temperatures in arkansas 90s upper 80s and then it just flies through the air guess what you're a farmer over here who didn't buy monsanto seeds that have dicamba tolerance so you get pounded and so i went to the court case and sat in the gallery and watched 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 you know we're just farming over here we're getting hit by this vapor yeah and the documents were like crazy it showed that monsanto knew that drift was going to happen that that was going to happen during production like during the development of this not so much during development but once it was sprayed on farms like once farmers started spraying it was going to jump and oh my gosh it's going to start hitting this farm over here uh oh tough [ __ ] yeah basically but they weren't thinking tough [ __ ] they were like guess what they're gonna need us now because then they'll need our strains that can resist this stuff confidential internal document released in that court case said they'll buy this for quote protection from their neighbor oh my god forcing people to use these monster crops 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
with whether it's with the wind carrying these seeds or animals or what have you right yeah so again one of these ones that i really went in close on because i wanted to get it right and it's the the drift the idea that there's been a lot of cases where the drift of pollen has led to that i haven't seen cases of that i have seen lots of cases of what you're talking about where a farmer for whatever reason comes into possession of roundup ready traits and plants it on his crop without signing a agreement with monsanto and gets sued for doing that now the question is how do they get it and that's that's a little bit unclear does it do they get it from a neighbor did they did some maybe drop the actual seeds onto their farm and then they they end up seeing that it's roundup ready and then they use it i don't know but you're absolutely right and in the book we talk about it the the detectives that monsanto sends out to enforce this like are you are you using our seeds illegally you can actually do it 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 oh my god if you think that they are planting seeds illegally and let's be honest it's a construct that it's illegal farmers have been saving seeds or barring from their neighbor or whatever right once you're in possession of seeds as long as you didn't steal them from somewhere yeah it's like this guy you know cleaner may say hey here you can have some how did that slip through like is there can you trace it back is there a time where they made some sort of an agreement with lawmakers to allow them to enforce this because this sounds like a crazy thing you shouldn't be able to enforce yeah because it's nature you're essentially owning life right yeah totally and there was a lot of debates about it the big changes were in the 80s where the supreme court said that it was okay to patent the [ __ ] reagan days that's what it was a trickle down economics from the old gipper yeah i mean those 80 years were that was when you see this explosion a lot of wild [ __ ] happened yeah that's including new coke that's right maybe not as new
but they were worried about reagan by the way when they did that new coke were they because it was the war on drugs so it's like oh we gotta get it we don't want to have anything to do with cocaine right at this point just say no those just say no days exactly yeah i remember that was i was born so they that's when they allowed them to hold these patents on plants which is really it changed the game crazy it changed the game how much would be helped if they ruled that as something that's not just unnatural but illegal i mean it would totally have changed the game i mean it's hard to go put that genie back in the box is it you know i mean but you're you're 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 that where they create something and that's a very unique process to make a thing and then they sell that thing this is not a thing this is a life right it's plant life right right so there were people who made that legal argument or like this is crazy it's crazy yeah because it's like i mean it's a life form how are we allowed to patent and own life forms that seems in this case and what's weird here's the weird thing about that first case the supreme court case it's called the chakrabarti case the person developing it was trying to develop a microorganism that could clean up oil spills so again like the human story it was like that's not bad like right right i mean you know they make monsters right and then you know you think about this the technologies that go haywire i was reading something about they were trying to develop something to uh clean up the uh garbage patch you know there's a boy on slot who's been on the podcast a couple of times is a young wonder kind who's developed this machine to scoop all the plastic out of the yes incredible yeah it's incredible and it's actually been implemented and on top of
that he's actually now making products from that recycled plastic and they're selling like i believe it's like sunglasses and a few different products that they're making from it but um then there was more talk of some sort of genetically engineered bacteria that was going to eat the plastic and i was like and then when it runs out of plastic then what happens it starts eating whales like what the [ __ ] are you doing don't do that like this is a movie yeah you're throwing this into the ocean it's gonna be a movie it totally and yeah it always turns bad well it's just like it's this arrogance of not respecting nature and you know i think people think of that as like a hippie line or something i don't think it is i think it's just like it's like you know biomimicry like pay attention to it you could see it everywhere like australia is a fantastic example of that yeah do you know the history of australian wildlife not not as intimately as they like while wildlife in australia and new zealand as well it's very what they've done there is very strange new zealand's a different example but wildlife in australia they basically brought a bunch of [ __ ] over there like a bunch of different deer and different things from europe and then they started having these problems with certain animals so they go well you're gonna have to get some animals to kill those animals so they brought over cats and then the cats the feral cats over there just [ __ ] devastate everything so now people go out and hunt cats so like you know if you have like a hunting magazine in america you would show someone who hunted a deer like look he's going to eat their cherry cats dude they hold cats up right not exaggerating they hold cats up the way we would hold some sort of a horrible pest and you're like oh my god it's a [ __ ] cat cat right like it's like i could pet that cat like it's a [ __ ] house cat so they have this plague of house cats that are devastating ground nesting birds and all sorts of different types of wildlife and they've brought in these cats to kill something else and then they're like and then they have to bring in they're trying to figure out how to kill the cats here it is australia's cats
kill two billion animals annually which is actually not bad if you find out how much american cats american feral cats kill more than that wow yeah here's how the government is responding to the crisis a new report from the federal parliament recommends cat registration nighttime curfews i think that's amazing and spaying and neutering well spaying and neutering would work all that stuff's [ __ ] nonsense but they've done this with um animals in new zealand as well they have uh all these prey animals like stags and deer and all these different but they don't have any predators interesting so what they have to do is gun them down from helicopters and just leave them there sometimes because they they have overrun populations and then they also have a bunch of people that hunt in new zealand and it's a destination for it was actually developed that way like in the i think it was the 1800s i believe it was hunters from europe see if we find like the history of new zealand wildlife but it's kind of the same thing like these [ __ ] 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 right exactly but we don't want any bad animals like wolves we're going to do this because we're smarter than the whole system exactly so they have [ __ ] herds of wild stags and herds of deer and you know 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 it's a disaster it is and you know it speaks to the same image you could argue that 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 and then we got to kill the mice so right you know it's it's just a broken way of looking at you know the world and i think that's why it's fun to do environmental history because we're always trying to say come back to nature it's actually not too bad you know it's
it's not to go back to like no technology or anything like that it's just to respect it and there's a balance there's a balance that's achieved through natural like natural prey and predator balance is very important and they're trying to do that and there's resistance right now they're trying to reintroduce wolves to colorado 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 they're devastating predators they're really hard to manage 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 like colorado has more elk than i think all the other states combined i think that's th it for sure has the most elk of any state and doesn't really have things that eat elk right like coyotes have they can't really eat elk right you know so they have coyotes but coyotes mostly deer rabbits and smaller things it's very rare that they even get a calf right because the elk is such a large animal but you bring in wolves and you're going to have a significant impact and so people are kind of fretting about that totally it's but you know they shouldn't have done it in the first place exactly you shouldn't kill them and then it's all then we're dealing with those legacy yesterday but when you bring them back then you've there's a problem as well because you have animals that really haven't adapted to being preyed upon they don't know what the [ __ ] is going on they get wiped out and that's what happened when they reintroduced wolves into yellowstone right it just devastated the population but then they originally they eventually rather figured it out yeah it's a uh we were up in yellowstone mosquitoes that's the craziest thing in yellow has done that we don't like oh my gosh we went back on our honeymoon my wife and i we were back in the middle of nowhere in yellowstone and we were like people like bears and
all this stuff we were like these freaking mosquitoes man they are like ravenous in yellowstone so watch out for bears i've been to yellowstone i didn't experience the mosquitoes but i did experience those kind of mosquitoes and i was in uh excuse me alaska yes and they're crazy in alaska like you get a while to get back there i was fishing with my friend ari and we uh we pulled into this uh spot near like the trailhead and we went to get out of the truck and as soon as we opened up the car the car filled with mosquitoes we were like what the [ __ ] our idea was that we were gonna get out of the car and spare ourselves down with repellent right we just opening the door like instantly they found us and there was a hundred mosquitoes in the car and they were huge it's it's super scary um 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 that in the backcountry with that stuff because it's nuts and i grew up in like i lived in savannah you know i grew up in georgia like it's different they they can live a long time in georgia they're not so rushed exactly just picking people off in alaska they have like a week yeah they're only alive for like you know such a short amount of time where it's warm enough for them to live yeah they just [ __ ] go crazy dude i was gonna ask you though like food stuff i mean how do you think about food i mean when you know i i think hunting is a part of what you do fishing and things like that i mean yeah how do you navigate this crazy food system that you've we've just said is not so broken well i mean i started hunting because of pita videos really i mean i watched some of those videos of factory farming the ones that there are that are now illegal which is really crazy the gag laws and that is [ __ ] crazy if it's illegal to film something that would be abhorrent to most people right like there's a problem right why is it illegal to show people like hey 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 wait i'm not buying tires yeah why am i buying tires 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 and you've seen those when they fly the drones over these these factory pig farms you're like what the [ __ ] is that totally whether it's cows or pigs or chickens when they're stuffing them into these places and it's horrific and i was like you know 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 like there's gonna i'm gonna did you play with the vegetarian stuff and it was like i did when i was fighting i was i was trying to make a lower weight class when i was uh in my martial arts competing days and it just didn't work for me me and it's very arguable that i did it wrong it's very arguable that it's possible to do it right today not that arguable that the elite of the elite choose to eat vegetarian or vegan that's not really true you know if you really follow the the evidence that's not true that's like argued by these really zealous um uh vegan advocates and and activists and i see why they would think that way and i see why they think that it's smart but they're also unwilling to look at monocrop agriculture which is absolutely necessary for the developing the amount of crops that you need to feed the entire country a vegetarian diet you're going to have to use monocrop agriculture and it's going to have to be crazy and also like 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 you have ruminants and these animals and they [ __ ] and that [ __ ] is fertilizer and it's it's much more rich and it grows and it's actually a carbon neutral environment when done correctly you know like the way joel salatin does it with his polyface farms and there's a few other um really ethical
um people that have really thought this out and engineered their farms to rotate their crops and rotate the use of animal fertilizer natural animal fertilizer with grazing and they make sure that they do it all together and it really can work the question is can it work at scale yeah for the entire country and i don't know if it can it's an interesting question and you know i lived in charlottesville for uh a while and my good another joel friend of mine had a has a free union grass farm they actually learned a lot of their tactics from joel saladin who's right over the hill uh the mountain in virginia and you know i spend time with him and you're right i mean i actually get meat from him you know it's actually it's 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 yeah to the ground and trying to be like look the soil is amazing it's like this incredibly uh biologically diverse thing and the fact that we would just you know yeah as you're saying like not pay attention to it and just spray stuff on top of it i think yeah it all supposed to work together right like the chickens and the pigs and all these different animals when you move these things around the way joel salatin does and you know use these sort of regenerative farming practices if done correctly you really can have a harmonious environment for both animals and plants and you can grow all these things together and you could do it in an ethical way like and i think the ethics is part of it like for me that's the thing that once you start seeing that you can't unsee it yeah and i think it's it's agreed and it's the same way i feel about some of these people too like in these factories like i can't right when you see either the humans being treated that way or animals it changes what you can eat yeah i read something about this guy who is a journalist i want to say it was in esquire and he worked um
i don't remember what magazine was i might be making it up my another magazine but he worked as uh on the line at uh at a a butcher place at a slaughterhouse essentially and he was you know essentially like dealing with cows coming and coming out crazy and he was talking about the just the smell of death that every day you would go in there and you would smell blood and corpses and that was like this constant smell that was in you like which is not normal right it's not normal for a person to experience that every day yeah if you lived on a farm and you had to kill a cow you killed a cow once a year or whatever you know once every six months or whatever you did and you didn't just like kill a thousand cows a day and like cut them up and cut their organs out and just stand around with waiters because you're standing ankle deep in blood and guts literally like like these guys do like 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 like and you're making no money right and then you don't get paid anything yeah when this guy wrote this article about it and and also in the article he was talking about how this industry would completely fall apart if it wasn't for illegal aliens he was like you know there's like i don't know how this is working i don't know how this is but everyone's like these undocumented workers that are doing this horrific really intense labor that's bad for you like in terms of like gotta be bad for you psychologically totally absolutely i think that was the turning point for me is just thinking about i think that's the problem is that nobody part of it is just it's just being being comfortable with being ignorant about it right then people say well whatever i'll just you know once 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 this yeah like we don't have that connection connection well 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 and if you do a little bit of research and you find you there's people that you can actually trust that do like this is the rome ranch i know they have uh that's the one that um paul saladino uses and they they grow bison and cattle and button it's all grass-fed grass finished they roam through these fields and they just they live like animals too and then they have like essentially one bad day right but they don't live and they don't really have a bad day they have a moment in a day they don't even know what the hell is happening and also they get that pipe through the brain yeah that's a wrap yeah it's uh we've got to change it and i think it's not good so that's how i got into hunting yeah and uh i've been doing that i've been hunting since 2012 so the the bulk of my diet is wild game wow that's the bulk of my diet and you feel good and it's great i think it has a lot to do with my vitality i really do i mean it must it's if you look at it like i had a friend over this weekend and i i shot an elk last week and i was going over it and i i vacuumed seal 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 and my friend was like look how red this is i'm like this is what an animal is supposed to look like this is a healthy animal this is like a super athlete animal when you're getting a piece of like wagyu beef right that is a sick [ __ ] animal like you're not supposed to have that much fat you're you're basically eating like a slob yeah like if it was a human that would be a person who's really like depressed and something's wrong with them because they're like they're not supposed to be that overweight this is terrible for your body 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 and vitality for the cow like when you get grass-fed grass-finished beef like one
of my sponsors is butcher box and you'd get these steaks these ribeye steaks and butcher box they'd be smaller than a ribeye that you get somewhere else because they don't have us fat in them and it's like it's red like you get the meat it's like a red meat and people they look at it they go oh look how dark it is like that's what it's supposed to be when you're seeing that sort of pale coloring added to meat at grocery stores yeah totally there's a whole history of color i know they did that with salmon i didn't know they did they did in part to try and make things look fresher and things like that yeah which is just good that's so yeah that's got to be bad for you yeah i think that you know that's one side of the because because when i was writing about the monsanto thing it wasn't just that like if this was a story about genetically engineered seeds i mean honestly that comes later in the book it's about all the other chemicals that end up like in our food system you know that aren't necessarily even chemicals designed for food you know like phthalates and things like that one of the ones that was crazy in this story is polychlorinated biphenyls or pcbs that's good yeah yummy stuff and this stuff is like dangerous [ __ ] super dangerous monsanto was the only producer of this stuff of pcbs in the united states they had two factories one in east st louis and then one in anniston alabama and they made this stuff and it was like a wonder chemical came out in 30. that's the [ __ ] that's in plastic bottles and stuff right well this is it actually was banned in the 60s so um not not bpa oh right which is in the plastic bottles which comes later but pcbs were like crazy i mean they were in like artificial christmas trees they were in carbon-less paper they were in the paint that we lined our pools oh jeez around they were in the actually in the paint in the silos and this stuff was like so insane and um everywhere but then a classic situation 60s again they're like whoops this stuff is like super toxic like exceptionally toxic
and there's this document actually had it i don't know jamie wanted to see it or not but that's handwritten notes from this meeting in 1969 inside monsanto confidential document that they had where they're discussing like what should we do with pcbs like we now know it's a global contaminant it's super toxic it's in everything it's everywhere it's in breast milk you know at that time because it's just everywhere and they're discussing like okay what should we do and it says situation is snowballing 1969 handwritten notes in this big meeting underneath it says alternatives well we could go out of the business option which is weird you know it's funny i told i was telling somebody about this document last night in austin and uh yeah here's the document look at that and this is from 69 this is this like confidential document and what for people just listening is it's just handwritten notes and it's a subject is snowballing where do we go from here well we have a couple alternatives look at that we can either go out of the business that didn't sound great 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 well it says sell as long oh the hell out of them right what is amazing is that the guy took the time to like no wait a minute let's put a little yeah thing up and i it's weird like i'm you know there's a chuckle to it because it just seems so freaking absurd because the problem is that it's honestly not that funny right like it's horrible this is crazy that the company does go on by the way to continue selling it he wrote it sell and then it's you got to look at this folks if you can find it online yeah it's because you see the it says sell as long as we can and do nothing else and then after the fact he wrote the hell out of them and then inserted it in between cell and as you know and then it's a big question i like this what do we tell our customers and that's the big question they're selling this to everybody and they're like and and part of it was also when do
we tell our customers like which is like and this is the kind of stuff you're seeing at this during this period in the 60s you're like what is going on um and yeah they have a bunch of other things about dog studies and things like that but pc i mean this stuff was crazy it was in everything it was in the it's in transformers actually and firemen fire rescue people even today can you know if there's a big like transformer fire or something they can be exposed to burning pcbs because they were allowed to remain in place so this pcb contamination is still out there and they're actually states washington state i don't know all of them off the top when i had delaware that are suing bayer right now to pay for pcb contamination from that long ago because it's still out there um and they're winning and by the way bayer like made the worst decision ever can we just like acknowledge that like bayer buys monsanto in they were making aspirin everybody was happy woohoo you know and they were making astrum since the late 19th century that's a crazy thing they've been banking we're not making enough money off this aspirin [ __ ] ibuprofen is taking the legs out of us boys let's go step up let's go buy the most toxic liabilities we possibly can think of oh where's that monsanto oh god they bought them for how much about 63 64 billion dollars it was the largest merger i think in like german history german firm a merger in a german firm of course it's german they buy it well here's the thing the the a great irony of this is john queenie the guy with olga monsanto his whole point for being was he wanted to beat the germans wow he wanted to like you know be his independent american chemical company patriotic you
know and then they get bought out poor guy if he was alive right he'd be like oh man the germans got me but then i did germans to be like super sensitive to anything that we kind of like at least semi-genocidal well and bayer you know of course the chemical company was associated with this right nazi germany and the chemicals that were created in that time so that chemical industry has a really sorted history of their own but in terms of bear now it was nuts they buy the company and by the way the ceos at the time it was one guy coming in one guy going out the guy going out was like don't do this bro i'm sure they said bro you know like don't do it bro and and the the new guy warner brauman was like they've got some pretty cool technology you know look at all this stuff how did the germans get so advanced when it comes to chemicals because like if you grits go to fritz harbor and basf yeah part of it had to do they've been in the game for a very long time they were the kind of front runners in organic chemistry in the late 19th century now 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 and they just took off um and so you know they had a they had a leg up 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 monstanza started to catch up but when what's crazy is warner bombing buys monsanto in 2018 like literally a couple months later the first roundup case goes against bear now bayer it's 285 million dollars for one guy in that case dwayne johnson 285 million dollars rock exactly is that how the rock got started well he actually prefers lee johnson because of that reason dwayne lee johnson but you know he had uh terminal cancer at that point when he goes to trial and it was the first kind of case that
went against bayer and it was right after warner bomb and bought the company um and everyone's like oh and you can look at their stock price it's nuts it just they lose a third of their value within like a couple months after that and then two other cases happen and they're dropping they actually by the end of 2019 they bayer was worth the amount of money they paid to buy monsanto holy [ __ ] i was that bad and so the ceo warren obaman goes into the shareholders meeting and have some pictures of the book that where he's like ah 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 and um the shareholders aren't having it they they issue 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 from that meeting and that's him thinking about his future yeah it's kind of an amazing picture because he was before that he was thinking about buying a yacht except he's like no yacht yeah will be no yachts things aren't looking so good and so you know i think this is a situation where uh they are they don't know what's gonna happen because they're not only facing lawsuits the agent orange is also still you know that's still an issue what do they do with those they just hold those off while the people die well like basically what that's what they're trying to do in some ways you know is this kind of delayed delayed delay but the problem is these people aren't going away 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 this was you know people who are coming on heart and it's just that's not just roundup pcbs so is that like the only thing that can stop a company that is
it's uh it's hard to say that a company is evil yes i think that's right i don't think it's fair to say it's evil right 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 that's evil that's evil yeah yeah and it's clearly that does happen when you have these corporations that are acting to just have this constant never-ending profit stream and they look at that and there's the diffus diffusion of responsibility that comes with having a large corporation you're not think of it as an individual but when you're thinking about a company that also is like responsible for a lot of the food that feeds all these animals and a lot of the food that feeds people it's like okay how much evil is it 30 evil right and 70 good like what's the net result of monsanto existing i think my my feeling about it was simply you know i wanted to answer that question like that was the driving question in the book wait a minute how did a company that had all these like the most toxic compounds the world's ever seen basically does help design our food system do you think you like to your own personal satisfaction did you come to a conclusion i mean to that question i think the answer is is pretty clear and the answer is that they never really held accountable you know not by the epa not by the usda not just you know they're going to be now with all these different cases it did feel weird i mean it's a precedent right it's been set with that enormous payout and then and then all these cases in the wings yeah i mean you know bayer is like trying as hard as it can to try and settle all this and this is talking about 15 billion 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 how did they not see that compliment coming when they bought it 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 like do you understand i you know what i would say joe is partially i think people don't uh look to history they don't sit with it to say this look at how long this goes back and look at how persistent this stuff is we're still dealing with it yeah agent orange a good example i mean i went to vietnam we are now most people don't know this we are currently cleaning up agent orange in vietnam for the first time the dioxin contamination in vietnam that was sprayed by the us military on the jungle yes in those how are they cleaning that up and just some people that uh 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 and it was sprayed in an enormous quantity um across the country that dioxin persists and it stayed in the environment through the 20 into the 21st century into the 2010s and it's still there is there a half-life of it i don't know what the half-life is and i don't know how in some you know in a lot of cases it will denature but a lot of this stuff is still there and there's hot spots or this there's research that was done um that i talked about that shows all these hot spots and so i flew there because i couldn't believe it i was like all right what's happening and no one's talking about it like we actually you and i jamie everyone in this room is paying you know taxpayers u.s taxpayers are paying for it that's part of the thing i think going back to how do you get away with this right you don't end up having to pay for stuff like monsanto didn't pay us 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 part of the the argument they used in court and things like that is look we sold this to the government for the government's purposes and you know we can't be held you know the contractor's defense we're just a contractor here doing the bidding of the federal government we have a certain
degree of insulation but what i'm trying to show in the book is they saw things internally and new things about their product that i think should blow that out of the water just because you sell something to the federal government and but you but you if you know that it's making your workers look like the people we saw you know are you not are you not in some way liable for trying to clean that up right you know and so in this case it's it's totally nuts joe so if you fly into da nang in vietnam which is one of the former air bases of the us military and during the vietnam war when you fly to the airport on the south end of the air of the airport tarmac is this huge concrete structure that we just have dumped soil into that has tremendous high concentrations of dioxin this this just just finished 2015 2012 to 2017. this is how it works 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 oh my god and it costs like a hundred and i forget 130 million dollars or something for that one site and that's how they do it 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 but that also must kill all the biological material in that dirt oh that's right like all the stuff that grows life sure it's a total mess so it's going to be a desert well but again you're looking you know they're looking at concentrated areas a lot of them know how do they know if it's completely denatured no i mean how do they know where the concentrated areas are well part of it was where they stored a lot of the uh agent orange so air bases were really bad hot spots because they were just having those you can think of especially when you leave an area it's just like all these big old tanks of agent orange
just they just leaked and did all this kind of disastrous stuff so yeah this is uh god what the [ __ ] 22 photographs of agent orange inventory in 1974. oh my god this was a crazy trip for me because look at all those barrels that's insane when i went to da nang we we didn't have access to go on site look at that that's crazy this is crazy you're looking at folks you're looking there it is there it is uh sorry uh medium the medium.com one jamie um right below that to the left overcoming the legacies that's that concrete structure is tiny but you see all those electrodes going in yeah basically they put this is crazy they have to do it in batches 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 what do they do with the old soil i you know i don't know where they dump it so that's all there is to click on that again jamie that same picture up right yeah right there see they're capping it right there yeah look at that like that's all dirt it's nuts we got the same picture by the way we we couldn't get access to the site so my my buddy was a photographer and i uh john zader we went and got up on this hotel and there was like this crazy like you know pool up there and people were drinking it was the weirdest thing i'm like filming this like insane story about the accident and this is this is happening as we speak yeah this ju this particular site just completed almost no one talks about it here in the country and it was a partnership between usaid and the vietnamese government to finally start cleaning up some of the dioxin that was there and by the way you know by this point we've of course given benefits to veterans we've done all sorts of things to try and as the us government to try and write this but in terms of vietnamese citizens you know and that was part of the deal whenever we were trying to do negotiations with vietnamese they're like hey we'll negotiate once you clean up this
mess right now so it became like this huge problem but if you ask where's monsanto and here's the crazy thing monsanto is now there they just got permission to begin selling guess what glyphosate and genetically engineered seeds oh my god so the story comes back right it's like what do they what they say good news we have agent orange resistant right exactly well and in a way i mean in a way joe again like it's so crazy but in a way that's probably true down the road because and i want to be clear it's not necessarily agent orange but 2 4 d that's that second half that's not the dioxin one this is the the other one that didn't have dioxin oh but it's still part of that agent orange and it's not it's not like it's it's it's more toxic than glyphosate in a lot of ways right it's a toxicity profile but it's not the 245-t with dioxin but anyway so it's still being used 24d that other half of agent orange so it's 2 4d and two four five t i know it's like my mind was swimming in numbers because of these chemicals and that's part of it i think a lot of these chemicals are named stuff like this like yeah whatever like who's paying attention right uh polychlorinated biphenyls who wants to talk about that yeah well it's all around us you know and we have to pay attention to it because we're exposed to it and in this case you kind of saw that there jamie no reason to bring it back back up but there was that like lake at the end of the you were talking about fishing and you know a lot of people in vietnam they're fishing in those ponds and things like that and that was the problem they were being exposed to super high levels of dioxin so by the way we're cleaning up the dirt but we're not necessarily taking care as effectively as we could be of the people themselves who could be exposed to dioxide in vietnam which is a big debate right now how do we take care of the legacies of that war and that and one could argue well given what we know about the history shouldn't there be companies that take and you could say this okay screw liability
forget the legal argument that whether okay they have the contractor's defense or whatever but if you're a company like bear and you want to come in and sell seeds i mean i'm just talking about a good will you know you know this is part of the history you know that we didn't clean this up right like you're a multi-billion dollar firm shouldn't you have some responsibility for going back and taking responsibility for that you know [ __ ] so then all those people all those people all those lives lost all those people that had horrific diseases directly connected to agent orange and there's been some really brave writers you know that have been writing some op-eds recently from from vietnam who are trying to to just continue to make sure that people don't forget about this you know and tell this story and just just to put a fine point on it that right now you said is it happening right now i just want to be clear on it that it right now they've moved to another american air base that's just outside of ho chi minh city former american air base in benue 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 the companies that sold this stuff are not nowhere to be seen but we're paying for it and it's a much more expensive project because it's way more expansive so this da nang project is completed it's completed so does that mean you can go there and eat off the ground well you know it's there's other contaminants i i might be concerned about the five-second goal count yeah i don't think it's a five-second rule but 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 in a much safer place so i think that human health costs yeah need to be taken care of so to be clear the cleanup is essentially
just the storage areas it's not the areas they sprayed right and you know a lot of areas these are hot spots in part because the heavy co you can think that the vietnam war has been you know over for a long time so the the the hottest spots were places where there was storage not so much necessarily where the spraying went right we're looking at this again for the folks that are just listening we looked at like multiple football fields filled with stacked drums of agent orange that's what the images were that's scary [ __ ] and you said that is small in comparison to the new project that they're right the denying site was a much more man i mean like most projects governments take on um yeah this is um down in uh it looks like bin y yeah this that's the whole site that's contaminated oh that's blocked off yeah a lot of these diff yeah you can see pacer ivy was also the name of the kind of removal of agent orange from that's bigger than austin the us well that's just about the about the green line is the boundaries is the boundary there's the hot spots the hot spots oh i see so the red areas of the hot spots so they have to and of course that's leaching into the ground so any well water all these things yeah it's it's you know and they've been those studies i mean it's not like it's we don't know we one of the reasons we've gone in is because we know that people have exposure to it you know it spreads and uh and there's little lakes there too see the lakes that are right next to it yeah exactly there's all these waterways and things like that it's kind of nuts mr hawk lake mr hawk's got his own lake mr hawk exactly we actually it was crazy i remember this day because how about that mr koi has his own lake too but his lake's not [ __ ] up mr hawk's lake's all in the hot zone that's a [ __ ] lake yeah imagine being mr hawk he's like he's [ __ ] americans i had a nice lake we went on motorcycles to get there and all i remember was we were just covered and just like dirt because we we couldn't figure out how to get out there were you worried
um this these were a couple of hectic days for me because i you know i was just a historian i i i i was not an experienced journalist at that time and i hadn't really learned some of the trade and i was kind of showing up and knocking on doors i went to the headquarters of monsanto and vietnam to ask questions but what i meant is you're worried about exposure from driving around with this oh that yeah no i left more about like getting monsanto or you know yeah being in in trouble in some way not necessarily the dioxin exposure there i will say this this is crazy so i did get really worried i went to the site where roundup is manufactured and soda springs idaho so this is where the elemental phosphorus that goes into glyphosate to make the herbicide yes and it's crazy because it comes from phosphate rock that's mine from the mountains there and as a byproduct of producing elements of phosphorus it's radioactive waste that's generated this is definitely viewable uh jamie on google you can look like soda springs slag pile phosphorus i think it'll pop up so and it'll be helpful just to talk about when we can see it but basically um there it is that's that's my piece the descent magazine piece there the second one my buddy john zader took that picture so what you're seeing here is this mountain of charcoal waste that's the the leftover slag that's that's this is done every 15 minutes every 15 minutes there's a dumping of this slag waste this is how you produce make roundup this is the elemental phosphorus that goes into glyphosate that makes roundup and what we're seeing is these cauldrons that are dumping like lava-like yeah you can see a good shot there sludge down the down this mountain you can see that barbed wire fence so we stood there for a long time and took pictures of all this but basically this this waste as you can see it's now just this mountain because they can't put it anywhere it's it's essentially
you know it it has radionuclides that make it dangerous if you're going to use it so is that an artificially created mound it looks like a mountain but there's nowhere to put it so we're just dumping more and more of this waste higher this is insane so this initially was flat ground no yeah oh my god the south end of the plant um of the plant and you can you can see the plant up there that's kind of the plant where is this again this isn't soda springs idaho we camped out there at a super fun site that's [ __ ] my friends always say my students always say super fun and i'm like not super fun the opposite of super fun super fund like the most toxic sites them dumping that lava [ __ ] and creating these mountains so that's one of the most toxic sites so what happens when that stuff gets rained on well you know there's all sorts of questions about the long-term effects of this and so let me just make this a little weirder okay so so this 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 okay so what the town of soda springs in idaho and pocatello nearby used the slag waste the slag waste as an aggregate to build basically to build basement foundations and roadways and their sidewalks and stuff like that and the let me make sure i get all this because it's just so wild so basically the epa comes in and the 80s remember a lot of this stuff is happening even before there's even an epa you know in the 70s so things are just going kind of wild but they come in in the 80s and they do these radiological surveys they actually fly over and look for gamma radiation and like oh folks like there's elevated levels of gamma radiation coming out of like basement foundations and school buildings and whatever else they've used for streets and things like that and
you know they're like you can't do this you know and so one of the reasons there's that pile is because it was like well we can't sell it anymore so it's just kind of getting higher and higher um and it was really a weird story we went there and kind of stayed there for a couple days just to kind of get a sense of it and the mine sites themselves where they mine the the phosphate ore are all super fun we're super fun sites and super fun goes comes from the super fun act of 1980 that designates the most you need a hard d there sir super fun exactly is this super fun i'm like it seems like not for the people living there you know it's it's a problem that word but those sites are so what happens there is the the overburden piles the waste piles from mining the rock have heavy concentrations of selenium and you were talking about hunting so what what happened there was these overburdened piles leach selenium into the grassland grassland picked up that selenium and animals died as a result of eating that selenium by the way monsanto called this at the time the this is our sustainable environmentally friendly herbicide oh right and you're like this is how it's manufactured 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 what do they demo everything and then put it onto that pile no so this is what's this is what like was the weirdest thing 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 and i was expecting like love canal right you know second like you know the town rises up and you've got uh lois gibbs and others they're gonna say hell no we're not gonna have this but what happens is the epa comes in and they're like get the heck out of here you know they kicked the epa out you know not physically but when they came in to do the hearings they're like we don't want you to designate our town a superfund site
which what there was a suggestion that the epa might do that for the whole city and we're not talking about high levels of gamer radiation i want to be clear it was it was fairly low levels but it was still above background and the epa thought it was a problem they said look you know you we've got to do something about this but the town kind of rebels against the epa it's not like they're welcoming the regulators coming in and that's partially because town of 3 000 people this is a huge plant there are other phosphate plants from for making fertilizer and other things from other companies that are there too and i think part of it is a story of these companies have you know they're a lifeblood yeah and we're okay with this low level of radiation you know we think about radon in basements and things like that we'll just deal with it and so the epa is kind of like oh what do we do and they kind of listen they try this decentralized strategy of like all right we'll work with this town and so demos don't happen like most people just have those houses and just deal with it and just and so for example deal with it are there health consequences because of this that you could track i i don't i haven't seen any data that says you know we've seen precipitous increase in cancer rates or things like that but i'm i want to follow that because you know you're looking at how over the long term are we going to see you know long-term health issues but what i will say is you know the the public health agency in the town in the recommendations and you can you can see this online too it says well folks if we're going to live with this it literally says spend less time in your basement oh jesus christ like imagine joey like you've just remodeled your house or whatever my god it's like just don't go down there oh my god that is so crazy spend less time in your basement
juice right god don't we don't want you to die so just leave some stuff don't leave food down there don't put nintendo down there oh the kids will not be happy with whatever happens well and we even i was going to say that we even tried to get into a river and kayak and to see one of the mine sites because they were closed off and we thought the only way we could get there is if we paddled and so we had these boats and we like put them in and this this person came up beside us and was like you're not getting in that river and my photographer buddy who i think just space for a second was like why is it polluted you know what's going on and i was like john he's saying we're not getting that river because he didn't want us to get in that river you know um and i'm not so i can't confirm that like that's why he was telling me not to get in there was it was it his did he think i was going to be going through his property because we were on a public land access point but did he not want us to go buy his property or was it that he was like who were these out of towners to do this well we weren't going to go on the you know the way the river was going to go so it was going to have a threat i'm confused here was he threatening you 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 to to see this potentially to see the story 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 you're you're you know you're not from here i don't know why you're getting this river and you shouldn't you shouldn't do it but it wasn't that he was worried about your health no exactly it wasn't that that's what john thought i guess that maybe it was logical i was just so paranoid at the point that i i i knew immediately that it was not about but he didn't have any authority to keep you out of that river in my opinion no because it was a you know you can you can paddle in the middle of a river you have a right of way to do that right but he you just listened to him i
did do you wish he didn't like maybe he would have saw something um i think i saw what i needed to see do you think i think that's part of the story well it's a small town yeah so when you start asking around people start talking and because 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 i don't know you know joe i don't know it's guesswork but it was one of those moments i all i'd say joe is that given what i had seen of the town's response it seemed plausible to me right that that was what was so surprising about that chapter you said earlier like how did monsanto survive you know to become the seed company or how did they get away with it i guess right it's one of the things and that chapter is about like the loyalty of some of these smaller towns you know that like and and the kind of this is our lifeblood well you know you see that and like i'm sure you've seen roger and me right mm-hmm you see that in these towns where a a big company does pull out of the town and if they're dependent upon that town economically it's devastating it's a horrific thing totally and you think you're talking about remodeling i mean i mentioned this in the book like what are you gonna do right so like okay you've got kids so you're gonna have them come in and rip out your foundation um you know and that wasn't there were options proposed by the company look if you really need us to do this we'll go we'll take out your foundation and do that but most people aren't going to do that and also they're the homes the home value like part of it was we don't want to be a super phone site because right now [ __ ] up everything everything invested my time and effort into my mortgage this to be worth nothing that's what i mean by like a human story like yeah you know i
don't blame a lot sometimes it was hard to blame people for what's going on it's like you know it's systemic in some ways yeah it's not great but it is all they have that's their town small towns that are relying on a big company that take care to take care of them like that that's uh it's a very precarious situation if that company goes under you know good luck moving your family you have your kids go to school in that town your entire income is based on that that company like that said and this is important to point out there were people that were like hell no you know this is not right the the biggest group of people that i found i followed a freedom of information actor quest to get these documents but uh were the the landowners around the plant who were farmers ranchers or whatever who were like uh-uh we don't work for this plant and what are you talking about this is going to get cleaned up in fact it was like this family feud there was an amazing family with like the grandmother who's like 80 years old was writing the epa and her letters were amazing fortunately you can get them because they're public records and i was like she was like i feel like i'm trespassing on my property to get to you know past all this pollution that's on my land and you're telling me i have to deal with it because for those owners they were saying well look you just have to have like you can't do certain things on it and they're like what are you talking about i can't do stuff on this part of my property you know just because you guys have more money than us yeah exactly this is not a deal that works for us and yeah and and ultimately what happened to this family they fought and fought actually it was so crazy uh joey because i i gave a talk i have i've gave very few talks when i was writing this by the way because i wanted to be able to talk to people both inside the company outside it without you know being a public figure talking about monsanto i wanted to be able to go to
places and be relatively anonymous you know but i gave one talk in utah about what i was finding at this site and after i gave the talk i'd shown that foia letter about that family that i'd found of you know that was fighting and this i swear to you this guy comes up to me at the end of the talk and he goes dude they're my neighbors and they're like now in their 80s or i don't even know maybe even 90s they were super old and they were still alive the people had written those letters the kids of that older grandmother were still alive and i was like oh my gosh let me go interview them because i want to figure out like so what happened you know because like the archives only go so far and we sat down and had dinner with them they were like an amazing couple and super sweet and they were talking to me and they're like they bought our property you know they they bought us out basically and for a good price like they they gave us and so one of the ways that they that monsanto you know suppressed the resistance from people like the landowners was to buy their properties and offer them a lot of money and some of these families agreed to that interestingly by the way after that talk just so you know um the university i gave the talk at their caller id the next day they told me this they said it just they got a call and it just said monsanto and i was you know look i got two kids you know i am writing this as a relatively unprotected person who goes out and tells these stories and i was i was nervous you know just the sheer amount of money that's involved yeah like i don't have billions of dollars to go up against a company like that was is a concern that they would sue you or kill you less kill i think my mother uh who's
passed but used to say i'm where you're going to get snuffed out and i always just say mom it's okay i'm not going to get snuffed out that's such an old-school way yeah it's like no mom but um but more just yeah like what what could be the ramifications of that 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 this is not stuff that's not provable um you know you just feel a certain degree of like ugh what could happen and when they called i was like ugh and they wanted to do like a rebuttal to this 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 i love to hear their conversation about that pile the mountain yeah like explain to me how that's sustainable you know it's really what i would love building that until it reaches the moon yeah i mean what's the story and it's getting you know one of the arguments is that you know at some point you're expanding closer to to the actual facility so we're looking uh yeah the video here of it um it's really wild it's really wild at night actually because because you see the molten lava look how that lights up the sky now what the [ __ ] is going in the air when they're doing that good question so look at that stuff the stacks i know that they're the some of the stacks looking at the data they were releasing you know low levels of polonium and various things in the air and it's just a crazy site and and it goes back to like come on a fifth grader can look at that and say this is the future of agriculture like this is sustainable yeah how long can you do that for how long can you do that well and it also goes back to a finite resource phosphate right this herbicide is going to sustain us forever is coming from this also like how do you do that not have a sustainable plan for getting rid of that pile
like yeah maybe jeff bezos can shoot it into space exactly space dust just sell it to amazon maybe amazon could buy monsanto cheap now and go this is what we're gonna do well weirdly i'm writing a lot more i'm writing this project right now that's about all these like the the logistics companies um and thinking about the environmental footprint of firms that we don't traditionally think of as firms that have big environmental footprints including banks by the way i'm writing environmental histories of banks like we don't think about banks as having an environmental footprint but they do they have a huge environmental footprint they have to ship money around they have to ship money around but it's also like just the incredible capital they have to to be able to decide whether there's going to be an oil rig here or you know deep water horizon well here did you talk to anybody from monsanto about all these various issues yeah did you talk to them about this mountain of [ __ ] um internally about this particular thing i didn't talk to them about that but i did talk to people um about a lot of different things and it was it was interesting some of the people in monsanto actually reached out to me um 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 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 and there's a section in here about a a person who wanted to tell his story in this book and i included it in the book but i ultimately uh he ultimately couldn't go on the record like i couldn't actually include what he wanted to say i could just talk about our debates back and forth about whether he was going to go on the record in the book 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 uh and and the evidence that was used to get that approval from the government he knew things about that that he thought were deeply problematic but 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 and he was the person who would know that 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 and we went back for months on this like did we talk about what do we do he got his own liars we talked about it and ultimately he said i just can't do it and i think that's also part of the story it's just like regular people in these companies who actually do have a pretty good conscience but who are like the risk reward here is so extreme right you know if things go bad i've signed an nda you know and we you know what happens well if you go along to the history of the the those people that got dioxin poison and they lost the case and then they took liens out against their homes that is some messed up stuff [ __ ] here's the crazy thing about that case i want to get this right i'm sorry i get a little bit fired up on some of these things because part of it is it matters i feel like there's a certain degree of onus i have to tell some of these people stories who don't get to tell it now because they're not here and in this case let me tell you about the end of that case because when you look at it on google it'll say monsanto wins and they did they won technically that case but here's what happened i went into every single note in that particular case i went to it was all the documents were housed at the philadelphia national archives so i went through them
the jury when they issued their decision they did something not unprecedented but super rare they're like we want this document read into the public record didn't end up in a lot of the newspapers or anything like that but this is the document that was in the archives they said we're finding that monsanto technically based on west virginia law cannot be held liable here because of the technicalities of west virginia law which the technicality was they had to prove that monsanto willfully recklessly and wantonly hurt these people those were the words willfully recklessly and wantonly and that stand that bar these jurors felt was just a little bit too high now you could argue wait a minute look at what they knew how could they how could they not say this is reckless but the jury felt that that bar was too hard to hit but they said in this document there is no doubt that these people were harmed by these chemicals you know that were in this plant so we want this red into the record that we feel this way about it the foreman of that jury worked at union carbide he was a chemical person you could tell he was torn you know he wasn't an anti-chemical person but he even was struck by like how nasty this stuff was get this though so after that happened as i said monsanto says you either pay us our court fees or we take your house and i interviewed the lawyer who knew all these people stuart caldwell and he he told me he said to a man i sat him down and said look they're going to take your house what do you want to do and uh 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 i mean they were they were ready to go to it but the judge caldwell went back and said judge you can't
let monsanto do this and ultimately the judge was like yeah this is unconscionable no you know and ultimately reverse it i think stewart had to make an argument to to get that released but ultimately it was but get this a couple years later that foreign about from union carbide he finds out that there was evidence in that case that because of technicalities he they weren't allowed to see as the jury and i don't know the you 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 and he says this clear his day if i had seen this document my verdict would have been different and he says i hope that all my other jurors he was the foreman would have said the same thing 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 you know i feel like you know i just can't get it out of my head like i've let's you know i think of what he's saying there's let people down so when you see that case the the monsanto case in west virginia related to these nitro workers it may it looks like well i guess monsanto did anything wrong even the jurors who let monsanto off in a way later say we shouldn't have done it right so what was the what was the reason why they were allowed to withhold that evidence i don't know the actual kind of legal reason why it freaks me out it's but this happens a lot right there's just a reason that no that evidence could be confounding i think it had to do with the fact that it was relatively present day at that time was like 80s report on the pollution the persistence of the pollution problem and i believe the judge was saying look you know this evidence has no bearing on what was going on 50s and 60s it's not admissible um there might have been another legal reason i don't i'm not aware of um but ultimately they weren't allowed to see that but if you know the point is that that evidence would have
been pretty powerful to say look at how contaminated the site was um and how again reckless that is if you're gonna have that kind of contamination um we're already three hours in almost two hours and 20 minutes in so i i want to get to this yeah is there a way that anyone can distance themselves from this company like is there a way you can not contribute economically is there a way you can protest what this company's been involved in what they're doing is there a way you can do something yes i do think there are things you can do there are small things and they're big things i've thought about this 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 the just we're growing in our petrochemical dependency and you don't want to be a part of that i do think you can choose if you have the means to buy organic food stuffs 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 and i and some people would poo poo that say okay you know what can what does that really do i think it matters 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 but if you live in detroit or something like that exactly cities it's so hard it is and i think that's why i think because it's a matter it's also a class issue it's also an access issue and a financial issue right totally a financial issue and all these things so not everyone can support that 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 have to stand up and we're seeing that right now i'm sorry keep going i'm just gonna say we're seeing right now thousands of cases being brought by people and not just people that are saying look my
cancer was caused by this but we're also seeing cases that are trying organizations and center for food safety for example among many others that are trying to say look these chemicals are questionable we're petitioning the epa to stop registering these chemicals and to try and change these things 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 and also talk about the farm bill you know put pressure on congressman and say wait a minute why are we subsidizing the you know corn and soybean 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 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 i mean this was all a response and this is what's so crazy like we were already producing too much the whole problem was we had a surplus the idea that we needed like we got to grow more we got to grow more these we were growing too much that's why the price of of wheat and everything was plummeting because we had this just huge bounty wasn't the origin of it though that they were preparing for war yeah and well that was the subsidies right 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 there's a little bit of that for sure that's that's part of the story there's also the story of these government programs coming in to try and give farmers uh a kind of support in times where there was so much surplus there was so much being produced in the 30s and 20s a lot like the aaa the agricultural adjustment act was passed as a means of being able to allow farmers to keep producing a lot of
corn and commodity crops but give them loans and support that could sustain them when the price of those products plummeted and then to your point the real big change was in the 70s actually when earl butts great name usda agricultural secretary really like ex put gasoline on our farm policy saying okay what we need to do now is grow as he put it crops fence road of fence road we're going to start subsidizing the production of all these different commodity crops and not putting any restrictions on the acreage or getting rid of some of these acreage restrictions that were often tied to those subsidies that was the big shift in the 70s saying you don't have to reduce your acreage you know what we're going to give you these subsidies and you can grow as he put at fence row defense grow as fast as you can we're going to subsidize that part of that was because of the 70s this we were at that time there was a concern about our surpluses dropping and so we kind of started the system that has continued where we're just we're subsidizing the production of really animal fodder that's what we're doing on most of our land and is there an abundance to the point where it's wasteful is there abundance to the point where we have more than we can use totally i mean what do they do with it when i joke to people all the time i say when i talk to the weed scientists um you know when we're out there and people are saying well this is about feeding the world we need this genetically engineered trait to feed the world he's like oh this is going to feed all this stuff what are we doing with it is a great question we end up putting it into different programs ethanol is a great example of this like we have so much corn we got to figure out a way to put it somewhere ah we'll put it into a fuel program so we'll start putting it into gasoline it's not an issue of productivity like we've got a lot of productivity um i think that's part of the myth of our food problems is that productivity is the problem productivity really isn't the problem our bigger problem is
distribution the types of crops we're growing on the land that we have and uh you know the the ways in which we're accurately equitably distributing it and also food waste just tremendous amounts of waste of the average consumer you think about even our own practices at home today we have a lot of food it's now about figuring out how to grow the right types of crops growing these more biodiverse fields as opposed to these mono crops and changing the game that to me i think is the future of food it's not about you know can we produce more corn and soybeans next year than we did last year but is there a way to incentivize people to do that to grow these biodiverse sort of farms absolutely i mean look at it you know as i said and 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 or listeners can do that themselves or corn it's it's it's a lot of money 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 and and nourish our country you know the farm bill can be radically changed and it should i think to reflect that interest and and getting away from some of that monocrop cultivation so this is all relatively new in human history right this this way of growing things it really started in the 20th century and now we're continuing it now is it possible within a reasonable amount of time to shift the way we do things and is do do people know about this like i didn't know about these gigantic mountains of toxic [ __ ] it's molten [ __ ] like how much of how much is this just because they've been able to kind of do it without people being aware of the consequences i think it's huge i think that's ninety percent of the reason i'm here i think is because i think people don't have a
connection to their food you know two percent what less than two percent of people in the in the us are farmers you know wow most people just have no sense of the world that's out there when i drive around in ohio farm country i see advertisements you've probably never seen right extend a max you know seed thing this cool herbicide they're marketing the companies are marketing to a very small clientele and those decisions that are being made to that small clientele affect all of us and i think that's why you know we live removed from that and just simply don't have that connection to it and i i think you're absolutely right i think part of you said what can people do ask questions like when you're eating somewhere where is this coming from you know what if you're talking to a farmer what's your farm like you know if you go if you have the ability to go to a farmers market and talk about those things and again um i think that that connection is key to the story but you said something like can we pivot here's the pr here's the big problem joe okay all of what we've talked about is based on petrochemicals and on fossil fuels eighty percent of what monsanto was making came from oil natural gas or coal eighty by the eighties eighty percent of their product lines were coming from from from fossil fuels the reason they became a seed company was because they saw that they knew that so much of what they were making was coming from petrochemical feedstocks so they started trying to make more money off selling seeds and getting into the sea business which they weren't they didn't even own a single seed company before the 1980s so they pivoted in part because of the energy crisis of the 1970s when oil prices rose they're like oh my gosh 80 percent of what we make comes from this raw material that's now really expensive in the 70s and that's why monsanto said oh we got to get out of this business of making
all these pcbs and all that stuff they hung on to some of their brands roundup for example because it was so profitable for them but they tried to get rid of a lot of the other chemicals and so they got it they knew that there's this dependence on petrochemicals and fossil fuels that we still have the problem is 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 and part of that's because of fracking that's happened over the last several decades right we see this huge spike so the economy's saying keep on producing petrochemicals it's safe it's great but the ecology is saying you cannot the environment saying you cannot keep doing that right 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 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 we have to get away from this economy that was built at a time when there was so much oil right 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 it you know ostensibly we won't have to be so dependent on those fossil fuel feedstocks how much of um how much of fossil fuel products can be replaced with organic things like things like uh i know i know that there are certain plastics that are made with plant fibers yeah that's a great question and and it's actually on the one hand it sounds like we're making progress you said the plant let's just say a plant bottle is a great example coca-cola has the plant bottle do they yeah a biodegradable plant yeah and if jamie there there is a label for the plant bottle if that's really interesting are they making this out of hemp are they using other plants that's what i asked right so i started looking at it and i was like okay what is this made out of yeah
sugarcane byproducts sugarcane so pause right i mean think about environmental sustainability of sugarcane production probably in the scale of history one of the worst monocrop oh really i mean when you think about not only the the the the ecological we're talking about tropical regions that have to be you know completely changed into these monocrop farms it's a huge impact not to mention the health cost of all the sugar that's out there um so sugar cane bipartite and the only reason you can make a plant bottle out of that sugar cane is because of that fossil-fueled agricultural system that makes sugarcane so big and so you know that it's everywhere right it's inefficient yeah because now you have the only reason you can make a throwaway plastic bottle made of sugar cane is because you're producing so much sugar came from all that synthetic petrochemical agricultural system jesus yeah what a bummer so it's pretty crazy and you know what about hemp um by the way i i don't think fantastic i'm sorry go ahead i'm just going to see if this one over here um jamie sorry the third over yet one more i just want to see if this one had the coca-cola biodegradable packaging not a viable option it says new coke bottle made entirely from plants okay i just want you to notice a couple of things on this bottle so when we're looking at it it says a hundred percent it's kind of blurry but it's okay a hundred percent recyclable plastic and i always joke with my students what does recyclable mean you know well it could be recycled part of this is greenwashing labels like it's 100 recyclable well technically almost anything's a 100 recyclable like you could it's a bowl you could recycle it but is it actually recyclable right the other thing it'll say on there and for years it said up to 30 plant-based materials up to well up two could mean zero plant-based material oh there you go there up to 30 percent made from plants
oh do you see the cleverness of it it's dirty it's like well it could be one percent yeah or it could be one half of one percent or zero you know up to right could could be zero it could be zero just plastic so that's where i'm that we have to going back to asking hard questions we gotta get beyond this bs right all the labeling should be illegal it's misleading that's like up to zero percent poison right up to 30 yeah and then recyclable you see what i'm saying like i got a trademark on it you could recycle look how they did it yeah exactly turns into bottle turns into leaves and look i'm sounding pretty pessimistic here and you mentioned hemp right but like i mean you're right there are certain products i think that's what we want to say okay cool so what plant-based material is sustainable to grow right where you could potentially make these these products that's the kind of questions i think all of us should be asking and i think kemp it sounds interesting for me um i don't know all the time a little bit i had a friend who actually after i wrote the book wanted us to go into this industry and he was like what do you think and i was like sounds interesting to me i'll say it's a lot better than sugarcane when i think about environmental footprint you know well in the years back my company on it when we were first starting to sell hemp protein we had to buy it from canada we couldn't grow it in america so we were getting our hemp from canada and then we were reimporting it into the united states because it was illegal at the time um to grow hemp here wow but it was legal to have it and sell it right yeah it's just goofy hemp is a really good source of protein so it's filled with amino acids it's got a full amino acid profile and if you get good hemp hearts like a good high quality hemp seed when they um they break it down it's very biodigestible it's very easy for your body to break down yeah i think to your point we've got to make if
we're going to use plants it's got to be the right plant yeah corn is the other thing you often hold out and i just talked to you you know we just talked about like it's just a disaster because it's all tied into the same system and the only reason it's so cheap that you can have a throwaway container like that and throw away i mean like you know you can drink it once as we do like at a party or whatever and like oh well it's done well would seem to so go ahead part of it i would just say is like i actually saw this when i first started you know listening to your podcast and watching i noticed that you have this metal cups yeah and i was like yeah awesome reusable and like you know we have a filter machine that filters our water and we used to have plastic bottles and then i was like what are we doing we [ __ ] just throwing bottles away every day and those bottles by the way even though you throw them in the recycle bin they don't really get recycled it's too expensive i found that out that they mostly get thrown into uh landfills yeah 30 i said i read a lot about recycling and plastic bottles and here's the data i mean thirty percent of plastic bottles used in the united states pet plastic bottles get recycled thirty percent yeah so seventy percent ends up in landfills and everything else but but to that point i'll just say this you know um part of it is about what you're doing here like so do we need that throwaway container right and asking those questions most most of the time it's you know it's a shift in in thinking as opposed to we need a new technology or the new plant-based material but is it possible to use plants for all the [ __ ] we use fossil fuel fossil fuels for and not be tied into this mono crop agricultural system that relies on herbicides because it seems like i mean i don't know much about growing hemp but i gotta imagine that if you're growing you know 100 000 acres of hemp you're you're going to have a lot of [ __ ] pesticides yeah herbicides and you're going to have
well part of that you know part of it is trying to work with nature one thing to do it's trying to diversify a little bit your agricultural system so you don't create that buffet for pests you know but would you be able to get the same sustainable yield like like a yield that you could use to make all these bottles of coca-cola and all that you know you know predicting whether they could do all the bottles of coca-cola i don't know but are we [ __ ] that's my question no we're not i don't think so i don't you know it's funny uh i i'm actually a big optimist but after reading this writing this book i was like man i come off as a pretty bad pessimist um but i i don't think so i think what we're seeing right now is some pretty smart things happening in agriculture regenerative agriculture as you know as you've been talking about is actually not becoming a niche thing it's becoming like a much broader accepted way of doing it it's an option for a percentage of the people it is i but i i think your point's well taken can we create billions of throwaway plastic bottles that are made of plants i actually think the question is we shouldn't do that like we should rethink the way we consume like what's wrong with having a reusable container right as opposed to needing a throwaway that throwaway culture was a product of that period of we could just produce whatever we want because we've got tons of oil yeah we're moving away from that because it's funny because when i was a kid no one had a water bottle yeah you just drank water out of a glass like it didn't exist and then all of a sudden it's like they were everywhere like cell phones right there's no cell phones now cell phones are everywhere when we were kids we just had a glass of water like no one took a [ __ ] water bottle like a weirdo when your friend showed up at your house with a water bottle you're like bob what are you doing what why do you have a water bottle on you yeah i mean but also think about how silly we're going to look like i think as a historian i look back
at our time like what are people like 100 years from now going to look back at us oh yeah like think about how insane this is wait a minute they took a finite natural resource and they turned it into a container that they used once right and then they threw it away right like who were these people from the 2000 whatever yeah it's weird and also like a lot of the drinking water that people buy is not from a spring it's just tap water they take tap water and they filter it and then they sell it to you oh let me tell you that this is nuts okay i'll give you a number this if you're drinking bottled water out there listen up this is important okay dasani bottled water which is coca-cola's brand yeah it was called desani but i had to look this up why are they calling it a son it turns out it's just like totally a marketing thing they're like they sat in a room for hours they're like dasani it sounds refreshing it comes from nothing i went and looked at this okay so i went and looked because i live in atlanta so i went and looked at our water bill and we're in fulton county so i looked at what that water bill was for a gallon of water whatever now i must have looked at something smaller and then i can i went to the kroger and got a dasani bottle of water and that 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 and here in austin the water is great so you know people do that so what would happen if you did that what was the comparison i crunched the numbers it was like okay whoa it's not it wasn't 10 times more expensive which would have been like a huge market for the company it wasn't a hundred times more expensive it wasn't even a thousand times more expensive it was one thousand like 900 times more expensive to drink that bottled water than to drink that water out of the tap and it's like
why on earth would i ever pay for that considering just how expensive it is and if you look at the bottle it says repurposed public tap water it is tap water you know they they put it through a filtration system but not much different than a brita right exactly actually i use a apec filter um that's like a five layer reverse osmosis filter underneath my my um sinking parsley because i've been researching about water supplies and like lead and water and stuff and it's kind of nuts what's out there i'm not sure which system we use but it is some sort of a it's a big machine that filters our stuff out that we have here yeah that you just you know you press a button and the cold water comes out over the hot water but it's all filtered out but yes and you know and you don't have to constantly go get that bottle that costs 19 whatever it was 1 900 times more and that's at a time by the way where our taps are you know our pipes are kind of crumbling it's like why are we spending so much money on the stupid bottled water when we could be fixing our our taps and cleaning it up as well um so yeah the bottled water thing it's just kind of and then you've got the plastic so it's like this again 100 years from now we think of it as just so normal and it's like they're going to think this is insane yeah for sure the plastic is going to be a thing where they're going to 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 and slot is 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 we're still making plastic and then they find birds with like all these bottle caps and what does california do well numerous straws man i saw a straw in a turtle's nose and there's the discussion about the how many uh like those canvas bags do you have it's like wait a minute there's now more like canvas bag plastic pollution than
canvas bags you know like when you have those bags that you take to the grocery store that are reusable oh canvas but the problem is like every conference every show everything everyone's giving out these these reusable canvas bags and it's like it's gotta be better than plastic though at least yeah i mean but the problem is like it's the same problem of like you know that kind of we've got to produce more of this stuff your neck one year than the next well the crazy thing is the paper straw the paper straw is going to solve it all while you have plastic water bottles like this is nuts like you have all these plastic water bottles but you've just done with what's the ratio of straw to water bottle oh no it can't even be close it's got to be like 30 to one yeah exactly but you get water as long as you get the straw yeah these straws suck too they're not as good if you had a water bottle that was made out of paper and just started deteriorating at the rate that straw did yeah you'd never even be able to keep water on the shelf yeah well 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 yeah there's like an aluminum surface to it or something yeah back to your point like i'm fine like you know yeah drinking but but i will say that you know it is funny with the the other thing that's happening with the plastic bottles is like we're getting more efficient like we're making we're making bottles with less plastic and this doesn't mean anything and the same thing with water we're using less water to produce the bottled water there's a concept called jevin's paradox uh in economics it's this guy from the 1860s he said don't 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 and he's like this paradox is yes you're more efficient but over time you're actually going to use more of it 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 like like instead of saying how do we design that throwaway container say do we need that stupid throwaway container this is just fine but i think the message needs to get out on at scale and it needs to get out to a large number of people i don't i don't really see that happening right now 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 but overall there's more people than ever before and more people that aren't making those choices than are yeah it seems like the consumption continues to increase you know exponentially it does i mean i will say i will say a shout out to students again at ohio state um again sea bus a columbus uh shout out that you know i get to walk into that room and you have younger guests on the on the show too where do you get to talk to them um i think they get it yeah they probably get it more than the older folks do 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 you know like we're on it and on the other hand i also think it's a little bit i don't think it's fair for us um and i'm stealing this from somebody who who maybe see this actually because i was like it's your generation you're going to help us you're going to solve it and this this person told me she said she said don't put this on them yeah you know like let them go have a party let them go have some fun you know there is a certain degree people are like the new generation is going to solve everything instead of being like well we're still here yeah and we were part of that problem it's like you know making the military go now and clean up the vietnam war asian orange [ __ ] you know you [ __ ] should have taken care of that a long time ago exactly and and maybe there's another hopeful thing we're seeing this company finally maybe not with agent orange but with with some
of these other chemicals like they're look a vote of no confidence from your shareholders is not a good thing in other words you know the pressure as you said what can you do well what people are doing is they're filing lawsuits you know they're they're putting pressure and we're seeing an effect with bear like they were literally worth the price they paid for monsanto yeah i mean they lost like half of their value i mean it was incredible and they have all these pending lawsuits and they're still there it's the crazy thing is the thing that's killing them is the thing they're still selling so it's essentially that handwritten note sell the hell out of it for as long as we can that's what they're doing still yeah that's i mean it's essentially a version of what we saw they were like oh my god read that 1969 note well read the [ __ ] 2021 note they're on the same game plan right yeah this is interesting i was i was sitting in that i i bought a share of bigger stock so i could share all the training oh really yeah i was like how much does the share cost it was like 60 then i think it's like i don't know i was running out like 40s so i mean it keeps going down um and i remember being like you know this is i got to do this so i did um and the pandemic kits are actually they did everything on zoom so i ended up being able to watch it from home which kind of sucked because i was looking forward to going to germany but um but i watched it and oh my gosh and this three hours went by like that but they got questions from shareholders for three hours 250 questions where everyone was like what's going on why why do we buy this company what's up with dicamba what's up with glyphosate what's happening in other words we're seeing people asking those questions to the people on top and you know i i never expected this you can understand when i started writing this none of those cases had happened the 2015 decision by who that wasn't even there
i was really pessimistic then i was like dude these guys got away with so much stuff so to be a slightly optimistic like i'm impressed with how much pressure they're feeling right now like you know it it feels almost like like something's changing and i don't know whether it's the chaos of the times or what but it this as a historian this is somewhat unprecedented i mean that it never happened on the history of the german exchange where the shareholders had given a vote of male confidence that never happened wow so we'll see what what ends up transpiring but but in that meeting sorry you said uh they're still doing the same thing it was crazy they're like glyphosate whatever we've got all these new technologies but then they have to say we're going to sell this service side because you're talking to your shareholders and you've just lost everything to your point like what are you going to say we're going to pull it and like our most one of our most profitable products they're in that pinch it's like wow we've lost everything because of these legacies we've got this thing that makes us money what do we do and you're getting sued from that thing that makes you money i know thousands you're pending cases and you're willing to settle 15 billion dollars because it's that profitable that joe i think shows you how stuck we are in a way right that shows you just how dependent we are on these petrochemicals that a company would go to that extreme i mean if we weren't dependent you know screw it yeah just get rid of it but even the firm itself is just so connected to that petrochemical past it can't let go and on that note ladies and gentlemen well it seems like some because they are being held accountable in their arms yeah thousands of cases let's end on that it seems like progress is being made so can you hold up your book yeah let people know um put it up in the camera so we can see uh seed money did you do the audio version of it you read an audio version did you read it i didn't [ __ ] i get so mad
they always want actors to read it but i will say uh uh the the the person who read it uh sean is an amazing i'm just kidding just kidding great great uh great reader and and uh did a better job than i would no you would have done a perfect job if you just read it the way you talked today it would have been perfect hey um thank you very much man i really appreciate it and that's how now and the audiobook is out now it's available um do you have social media um on twitter yeah at bardell moore uh spell it out for people at bart b-a-r-t e-l-m-o-r-e okay um and instagram do you have an instagram i don't good for you yeah good for you stay the [ __ ] away from facebook yeah all right uh thank you very much really appreciate what you've done and uh appreciate all your hard work and and thanks for coming in here man thank you it's a pleasure my pleasure yeah all right bye everybody [Music] you