Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmnU-A9gJ2Q
The Joe Rogan Experience he doesn't look happy well and that living in 1901 [ __ ] yeah average life expected he's 40 years old average like 60 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 two for five T 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 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 fish algae blooms and fish death yeah 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 life 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 interesting how it's used so much in California yeah it's a priority application of it that look at 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 that's also you know the land of like like 90 of our almonds like night you know the salad everything comes right 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 in 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 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 a 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 seven then agent orange then yeah I mean yeah you're comparing it against some pretty bad uh 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 the first time we put it together but when that weed resistance takes off I think it's the next graph after that what what happens is check this out okay this is this is what's happening I put this together with a friend of mine is data scientist let's try to 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 and 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. boom all those herbicides that were really toxic including by the way the other half of Agent Orange 24d is now being used to try and beat back
Roundup resistant weeds wow and so last [ __ ] it's crazy watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify