Camp Gagnon - The Dark Truth About Microplastics and Pesticides | Frank von Hippel

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

🏞️ Sign up to Camp for exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/Frank A. von Hippel is a leading toxicologist and environmental health scientists in the world. he came to the tent to discuss how pesticides and chemicals are polluting our food and harming our bodies. BigAg is messy and if you don't want to have microplastics in ur balls, this is the episode for you!!! welcome to camp. 🏕️Edited and Produced by Chris PapastefanouS/O to our sponsors Morgan & Morgan, Bespoke, Ma...

We are exposed to a soup of chemicals. There's 350,000 synthetic chemicals that are now in the environment. Chemical companies are producing about 10,000 new compounds a year. And then we as scientists or as consumers have to prove something as toxic to get it off the marketplace. The burden of proof is on us. It's on us. Many of these chemicals are so-called endocrine-discrupting chemicals. Can you describe that term endocrine disruption?

Anything that disrupts hormones is an endocrine disruptor. And the time period when this is of most concern is during. Male infertility is on the rise. Chemicals, microplastics. What would be your prescription for why that's happening? The chemicals that were exposed to at the highest concentrations tend to be... So you think there is an optimistic end to this, potentially? We need to raise awareness to get there.

Frank. Thank you so much for joining me, brother. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Mark. I appreciate it. I'm really excited to talk to you. And kind of what we were talking about a bit before. I guess the question that I would like to start everything off with is this. Are the chemicals in our food and drinking water potentially causing infertility in men and women in humans,

as well as developmental abnormalities as people are aging and getting older? Yes. So we are exposed to a soup of chemicals. And the time period that's when this is of most concern is during pregnancy, when the baby's in the womb, and then also, of course, during early childhood development. So that's when things are changing fast, the body's changing fast, the brain is developing. And many of these chemicals are so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals. They either block or mimic hormones.

And those can have long-term effects on all kinds of developmental aspects, including sexual development. Can you describe that term? A lot of people say that, I've heard that a lot, like endocrine disruption. and just like briefly for like a high schooler to understand what is endocrine disruption? Right. So anything that disrupts hormones in the body is an endocrine disruptor.

And what hormones are is there are chemical signals that go between different organs in the body. So this chemical is produced somewhere. It goes into the bloodstream. It moves all over the body and then it has targets somewhere in the body where it has its effect. So for example, neurotransmitters are not hormones. They're just going to sell the cell in the brain. They're not going through the bloodstream. hormones go through the bloodstream and they're regulating all aspects of our function throughout the day.

We have cycles, for example, our melatonin cycles that regulate our sleep. We have thyroid hormone that's regulating our metabolism and our growth. And we have sex steroids that are regulating sexual development and aspects like that. So these are all subject to disruption or somehow getting altered in their function by chemicals. and so hopefully we're living in an environment where that's not happening, but many of us are exposed to chemicals that are hormone disruptors or endocrine disruptors. So let's just start with infertility. I've read a lot of different kind of headlines and research to suggest that

specifically male infertility, which is the thing that concerns me as a dude, like male infertility is on the rise from, you know, the 1950s to today. It's like half, or I guess our fertility rates are half. And I've heard people point to different things like chemicals, microplastics, yada, yada. I'm curious, what would be your kind of prescription for why that's happening and how we can kind of understand what that phenomenon is? Right. So that also has to do with exposure to endocrine-destrupting chemicals during development, typically in the womb.

And the sperm counts in adult men now in industrialized countries is about half what it was in the 1950s to 1970s. So we know this is a big problem. There's also infertility problems in women that are also occurring. And together, those are causing, you know, higher and higher rates of couples having difficulty having children. But certainly the reduced sperm count and reduced sperm quality is a big part of it. And so if you have a boy in the womb who's exposed to high levels of estrogen-like chemicals, chemicals that mimic estrogen bind to the estrogen receptor, you can have disruption

of the development of the testes that leads to this kind of an outcome. Hey, what's up, guys? Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe. That is the best way to support this show, because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations, and it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much.

Let's get back to it. So this is not, I guess in my mind, I was like, oh, you know, if I'm consuming things as an adult, that can affect my fertility. But you're suggesting that the science is showing that it's actually in utero. That's right. So there's something called the developmental origins of health and disease, and many aspects of our health, such as our sexual health as during adulthood, has to do with early life exposures during the fetus development and early baby development.

So that's the time period where we need to do. to be particularly careful. So it's not so much you and me now as adults. What we're exposed to now could have an effect. But in endocrinology, there are kind of two categories of effects scientists talk about, organizational effects and activational effects. Organizational effects are something happens

that's organizing the development of that individual. And activational effects would be something's happening right now through whatever hormone change there is. So the bear comes along, and you're startled by the bear and you had that flight or flight response and adrenaline is pumping, that's activational. It's happening right now.

The effect is immediate. Organizational would be you're exposed to high levels of, or your mother was exposed to high levels of, say, DDT or other estrogenic chemicals when you were in utero, and that caused your sexual development to be affected in later life. I mean, that is really concerning.

So if you're, you know, like someone that might be listening to this right now might be pregnant. This is kind of a red flag because this is the most important time to make sure that you're not taking in any of these chemicals that could potentially disrupt

the actual development of your fetus. So my question is, how do these chemicals get to the fetus? And what can specifically, you know, mothers do to try to stop these things from affecting the development of their child? It's a great question. So if you look at so-called persistent organic pollutants,

which are persistent, meaning they take a long time to break it down, organic, they have a carbon skeleton, and pollutants, they're toxic. So things like DDT, PCBs, many other kinds of chemicals. These are ones that a woman would want to avoid during pregnancy. And also, you know, a lot of other things too, like many personal care products make up anything with perfume. These are the kinds of chemicals that may have endocrine disrupting qualities or plastic, plasicizers. So thallates that are in plastic bisphenols. And so, what I would recommend and what we did with our kids is have drink out of glass and not microwave

anything in plastic, especially when the woman is pregnant to the extent that you can afford it during pregnancy, eating organic food, and also during the baby's early development. So being careful about what food the baby is getting, the quality of the milk, what container it's in. That's really, it's so sensitive periods of development that we want to be really careful about. And what other types of daily uses can these chemicals sneak into? So obviously the big things are talking about like food, skin care, but, you know, there's even little things like, you know, my, like I mentioned to you, my wife is a midwife and sometimes she'll tell, you know, some of her patients, you know, like be specific about what nail polish you're using. Because some nail polishes can have specific chemicals that can cause endocrine disruption. So are there other things that are kind of sneaky that people should be aware of, shampoo, conditioner, is it everything?

It's a really complicated problem because there's 350,000 synthetic chemicals in their breakdown products that are now in the environment. And chemical companies are producing about 10,000 new compounds a year. And then we as scientists or as consumers have to prove something as toxic to get it off the marketplace, which happens very slowly. So the whole regulatory system is backwards. The burden of proof is on us. It's on us. It's on us. And what we should have is like what we have,

for drugs, right? If you, Mark, want to make a new medicine, and you have a blockbuster idea for medicine, you have to first do animal testing, and then you have to go through clinical trials, and you have to demonstrate efficacy and safety. And once you've proven all that, then you could go around to marketing and producing your drug.

But it's not like that if you decide you're gonna make a perfume or a new product for cleaning the home or whatever it might be. So it's a very complicated problem. The chemicals that were exposed to, at the highest concentrations tend to be pesticides because we're using those more than any other chemical class in terms of trying to change the way things are,

and trying to fight pests and increase agricultural productivity. But you look in our drinking water, you're going to find all kinds of pharmaceutical products that don't get broken down in the wastewater treatment facilities. You find all kinds of plastics, you find linings from food containers, you name it. So we're exposed through a variety of different mechanisms. It's not something to freak out about, but it's more that one of the things that I like to tell people is this is something where you can actually make a difference

because you can decide whether you're going to microwave in that plastic or microwave in a safe container and thereby avoid exposing your kids or yourself or your spouse to something. One thing that I saw recently that kind of freaked me out was using a plastic cutting board. This seems like such an obvious thing once it got pointed out to me. But literally, you are chopping vegetables with a knife on a plastic cutting board. If you look at an old plastic cutting board, like the ones that my wife and I used for years before I realized this, there's all these lines and grooves and plastic bits. Like, it is the most, it's just like, it seems so asinine to be using this, you know, plastic surface to be chopping your food on

and then consuming the plastic. It just seems so obvious. And I pointed out, we were both like, oh, yeah, we should not be. using this. So that was one of those cases where I was like, what are we doing? Yeah, you're probably not exposed very much through doing that. Really? Because it's not, you're not. I thought it was like obvious. Well, if you have flakes of plastic, of course you don't want that going into your food, but you're not, you're not heating that cutting board up. And typically when these chemicals that are of concern are getting into the food, it's because it's getting heated up. So for example, we have

non-stick frying pants, and those are coated with PFAS per and polyfluoralkal substances, which are endocrine-disrupting compounds. And as you're heating up that frying pan with a non-stick surface, that can get into your food. So that would be an example of maybe you shouldn't use a non-stick frying pan when a woman is pregnant or for a young child when they're developing.

And again, that developmental period is really the more critical time. The developmental period? The period of rapid development of the baby is when you want to be careful. You're saying in utero? Both in utero and early, early childhood is when you want to be careful, most careful. I mean, obviously we want to be

careful about chemical exposures at any time. But because a lot of these chemicals have developmental effects, we want to be especially careful when the kids in the womb or a young child rapidly developing. Yeah, this is, yeah, just it's so, things become more clear once you kind of point them out. Like, something that we used to do all the time was ordering takeout. You know, we might order like soups or, you know, like, you know, Fah from a Vietnamese restaurant or different things like that. And they would come hot in a plastic container. And you would get it and it would almost be like a little dented in because like the heat. And you can tell like, oh, this is really hot that is actually like kind of creating a pressure,

like a pressure differential within the container. And it's all foggy because it's so much heat. And I'm looking at it. And now kind of being aware of this just a little bit, I'm like, oh, this is not good. That's a perfect example of what's not good, right? or it's that the pizza container, which is lined with this P-FAS compound or the fast food container lined with the P-FAS compound.

Or the, you know, if you're buying canned goods, it typically has that kind of lining. So rather than heat it up in the can, you should heat it up in something that is not lined with these compounds. Yeah, I've even heard that some paper cups, like you think the paper cup will be better for you than heating up in the plastic cup,

but even the paper cup can have a little bit of these compounds inside that's lining it. Is that true? That's right. And so even people who work in retail and they're holding receipts all the time as part of their job, they're getting exposed to these PFAS compounds through the receipts because they're lining the paper that we have in our receipts. So a lot of us are advocating for just completely changing the way that we use chemicals in society. We shouldn't have to be exposed.

People shouldn't have to learn toxicology to avoid. to get and exposed to these things, right? Yeah. So we should have an environment where things are safe, except for when you have a need to use some chemical for a particular purpose. But unfortunately, that's not the way we're living. And how do we know that these things are not safe? Like, how do I know that you're not just an alarmist coming here,

scaring everybody, telling everyone these chemicals are going to cause problems? Like, what kind of research have you done or have you seen that you would say, yeah, we need to be concerned about these? Well, first of all, I don't want to be alarmist at all. And in many ways, we are living in the safest kind of world humanity has ever known. You think about even going back four generations before the advent of penicillin and other antibiotics. You could expect to lose a third or half your children to disease before they reach adulthood. Or the likelihood that you could raise kids with the same.

without them getting called up to war and dying in war. And so in a sense, it's a luxury now that we're in a situation where we're not dying from childhood diseases, we're not getting killed most of us from war. And we have the ability to think about, okay, how can we make our life better, be healthier, live longer, more satisfying lives?

And a lot of that has to do with having a clean environment. So going back to your question, how do we know it? We know it from now decades of research on animals and on people showing that these kinds of exposures cause a variety of health problems. So unfortunately we're polluting the world very quickly and there are many tens of thousands of studies of impacts of that on wildlife and on people.

And can you speak to what the specific disruptions are? We kind of talked about a little bit of a couple of them before. But yeah, I guess what specifically in humans could exposure to these different chemicals due to us? So there are many things that are regulated by hormones, as we were discussing. But for example, you can have a baby that's born with ambiguous genitalia where you can't tell if it's a boy or a girl.

The males and females are starting from the same body plan, but develop differently based on hormonal exposures. So that's why even though you and I are never going to breastfeed, we have nipples as part of the same body plan, whereas a female is exposed to female hormones that develop those into breast for breastfeeding. And in the same way, the analog to the penis is the clitoris. And so if you have a boy during in utero

who's exposed to estrogenic contaminants, that can cause the penis to develop quite small and maybe even internal, and you can't tell when the baby's born, if it's a boy or girl, the testes can be, The baby can be born with undescended testes, in which case they do surgery to extract the testes

because testicles have to be temperature regulated. So they'll get cancer if they don't do that. So all kinds of problems like that, but not just sexual development. There are many other problems related to the hormones that we're exposed to in utero. Some of them have, to do with later onset reproductive problems like we were talking about. So even, for example,

polycystic ovarian syndrome, which women can get, that can be caused through changes during development. But also cancers can be delayed onset, hormonally mediated cancers. You can have, for example, in males prostate cancer, which is hormonally regulated or in females breast cancer, which is hormonally regulated. So there are many kinds of health problems that might be genetically caused, they might be environmentally caused or some combination of those. Wow. I mean, that is, that's pretty significant. And you're able to see through the research that these things, you know, through sexual development, like I guess being intersex is what we would call it, or hermaphroditic, I guess, is a term that could be used. Well, for humans, or for mammals in

general, our sexual development between male and female is, is more different than it is for, say, fish or frogs where it doesn't take as much of a change for an animal to develop ovatestis, meaning they have both ovarian and testicular tissue and they're grown out at the same time. So you don't see that in humans. So in some animals, like in fish and in frogs, we can see hermaphrodites. That is, we can see individuals that make both sperm and eggs at the same time. And there are some animals that are that way naturally. Like there are fish that are simultaneous hermaphrodites where they're both male and female,

at the same time, they don't mate with themselves, they still court other individuals and they made with those other individuals. And the eggs are more valuable than the sperm. And so when you have two hermaphroditic fish that meet each other to mate, the way that if you imagine that if one fish spawned all of her eggs and the other fish then fertilized it with sperm,

the fish that fertilized those eggs with sperm would take off because the eggs are valuable, why give them up and out of this individual? So what happens in simultaneous hermaphrodites is one individual will release a few eggs, The other one will fertilize them, and then that one will release a few eggs. The first one will fertilize those,

and they'll go back and forth until they're done with breeding. Because the sperm are so cheap to make and the eggs are so expensive to make. They're basically bargaining. There's like a negotiation that happens. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of a tit-for-tat strategy of you don't want to give up what you have that's valuable unless you know you're going to get something back.

Wow. I mean, it's interesting that even within fish, the idea that, like, eggs being more valuable is clear and simple in the way that it is with humans, I guess. Well, do you know what defines a male and a female in biology? What's the difference between? You find some species you've never seen before. How do you know if it's a male or a female? My assumption, knowing absolutely nothing, would be like X and Y chromosomes, whatever your chromosomal makeup is. Yeah, and that doesn't work because in mammals, we have X, Y chromosomes.

So the male is X, Y, the female is X, X, X, X, X, S. In birds, it's the other way around. So birds, the female has two different kinds of chromosomes. The male is both the same. Oh, interesting. In insects like the hymenoptera, the ants bees, and the wasps, the females have two chromosomes, the male only has one chromosome, one copy of each chromosome.

So the males are diploid like us, the females are haploid. Sorry, the females are diploid. So there's all kinds of sex determination mechanisms out there. And the chromosome type is just one of many. So that's not the answer. So you can't use mammalian. on other animals. You can't, no.

So do you have any ideas of what might define a male versus a female? I guess, see, I don't want to say like reproductive organs. I mean, yeah. Yeah, that doesn't really work either, even within mammals. Like if you look at the spotted hyena, the female has an external clitoris. She looks like a male. The pseudopinus, right?

Yeah, she's dominant over the male. And so there you, unless you have close inspection, which you probably don't want to risk with a spot-in, you can't tell what's the male versus what's the female. So the answer is the sex that makes the larger gamete is the female. The sex that makes the smaller gamete is the male. And when you say gamete, what do you mean by that? Sperm or eggs.

So you come across this thing and you see this one's, they're the same species that are mating with each other. And this one has a larger something rather, egg or sperm, right? The sperm is mobile. it's gonna move and it's smaller. And the egg is bigger and it doesn't move. So no matter what species you look at, the individual that's making the larger gamete is the female

and the smaller gamete is the male. This is a principle called an iso-gammie and not iso-equal gamete, so not equal gamete size. And that's what defines a male versus a female. And that holds up in humans as well. Yeah, so this idea of an eggs, right? And they're born with all the eggs they're ever going to have.

Whereas the average human male ejaculate is something like 200 million sperm. Yeah. So it's just super cheap to make sperm and very expensive to make eggs. Female have a few thousand

in her lifetime. That is so fascinating. Now this is actually a great segue. It's something that we were talking about before. There's obviously a very famous meme about they turning the frogs gay. Can you explain to me

if they, those evil people out there, are turning the frogs gay or not? Well, first of all, you'd have to ask a fraud, how it feels about its own sex versus the other sex. But no, that's not accurate. So what this is referring to is actually work that was done by a classmate of mine in grad school,

Tyrone Hayes at Berkeley. And he was studying atrazine, which is a common herbicide used all over the United States and in many other parts of the world. And when he studied the effects of atrazine on development of frogs, he found that male frogs were found So meaning you'd have male frogs that are developing ovotesties are looking more like a female or some combination of male and female.

It's not that necessarily you can't tell what their feelings are towards another frog, but physically their sexual development was altered. And we see this in lots of animals. So you see this in fish commonly where fish, male fish that are exposed to contaminants that mimic estrogen like many pesticides do and PCBs and many other chemicals will develop either ovo testes or there's develop into a female instead of a male. Sometimes you get the other way around. We did a study where we exposed male and female fish to a common aquatic contaminant called perchlorate, and we had some females that were masculized into hermaphrodites where the female made ovotusties.

So she had both sperm producing and egg producing tissue in her gonads. But, no, the gay frogs, that's a misunderstanding and exaggeration of what happens. but what happens is more important, which is that the sexual development of the frogs is impacted by this particular pesticide, and that would therefore suggest that people exposed to that same pesticide would also experience similar problems. And you might ask why, why, how could you say that just because a frog or a fish is having problems of sexual development, people would? Well, the reason we know that it's an indicator for people is that we share the same hormone system with all all vertebrates.

And even our genetics are almost the same. Like you compare the genome of a fish with the genome of Mark, and there's about 70% overlap. Wow. And if you compare the genes that are associated with diseases in humans, with the genes associated with diseases in fish,

there's about 80% overlap. So that means they're a good model. They're a really good model to understand what's happening to people exposed to these chemicals. What's up guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because it's 2020. and it's time to talk about something important.

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what we could expect a developing fetus to have, that it's possible that their brain and their sort of developmental system being bathed in these hormones could potentially cause a dysphoria in how they perceive themselves. So, you know, is it possible? Have you ever seen that in the research that someone could, you know, potentially identify as transgender and express themselves in that way because of the hormones that they've received in utero? Right. So we don't know yet whether transgender feelings are associated with chemical exposures, but in terms of the premise of it, which is the the brain is either masculized or feminized during development, that is associated with hormonal exposures.

And given that you can see these kinds of changes in animals that are exposed to hormones, like when goals are exposed to chemicals that mimic estrogen, you can get lesbian-type behavior between the goals. And so there's a variety of cases like that where we know from animal studies that behavior can be impacted by chemical exposures that are endocrine-disrupting chemicals. So in the same way it's possible

that the soup of contaminants were exposed to could impact the way people feel about what they're attracted to and who they are. But we don't know yet. And I think part of the reason we don't really know yet is that the phenomenon of being open about transgender feelings is relatively new. Right.

And which is great. I mean, we want people to be able to express themselves in the way that they feel comfortable. But we just don't know yet what, you know, what's causal behind that. That's interesting. Yeah. And I also think it is worth noting that, you know, just because potentially a, you know, endocrine disruption is causing someone to feel a certain way, I don't think ascribes any type of moral significance to the way that they would identify themselves. So, you know, to say, like, for example, some people might have, you know, a developmental. issue with their hand because of a chemical exposure that doesn't ascribe a moralism to the way

that their hand is, so to speak. Yeah, exactly. Which I just think is a, but it is an interesting explanation. Obviously, we've seen people's identification with transgenderism has obviously increased in the past 20 years. And obviously it wasn't really well known or studied and the scientific ability to transition hasn't been there for a long time. So certainly, I think there's a lot of social factors that are causing people to be more open with their expression. But it is interesting to wonder if there's a chemical factor as well. Yeah, and I would say that there may be some complexity, even if there is a cause from contaminants for some of this,

or maybe some interesting complexity there. Like now, as far as I understand, it's more common for transgender feelings to be biologically born girls to transition to becoming boys. And it used to be more common, the reverse, where it was biologically born boys, transitioning to become girls or men to women. And in terms of endocrine disrupting compounds,

it's more common for endocrine disruptors to be estrogenic, to mimic estrogen and to cause feminization than it is for them to be androgenic or to mimic testosterone and to cause masculization. So it's far more common in animals, for example, that we find male animals that are feminized than it is that we find female animals that are masculized.

That's rare. So if these chemicals are playing a role, it's probably more common that they would be playing a role in feminization rather than in masculization. Oh, interesting. So it might indicate that there's more of a social contingency

that's happening rather than purely chemical. But there could be an intersection and it's hard to know. Yeah, and people are so complex that most likely it's a complex interplay between lots of factors. Yeah. And would it be possible to do research on that

or do you think there would be a social pressure to maybe not look into something like that. I don't know that people want to know the answer to that or even how they would go about studying that because part of the problem is that it's sort of like if you want to know, is this person's prostate cancer due to some dioxin that were exposed to in the womb?

Well, this person now is 60 years old. How are you going to know what his mother was exposed to you 60 years ago during pregnancy? There's just no way to know. And so at least at this point, it seems like an unanswerable question. Although you could approach it epidemiologically in terms of comparing people with different, say,

water sources or food sources and what's in those foods and how they're developing. So there are people looking at a variety of developmental effects associated with what someone was probably exposed to in the womb. But to look at what Mark was exposed to in the womb, that's a hard question. Yeah, and then isolating those variables.

Like it seems like an interesting study, in theory, but to actually carry it out with any type of, I guess, statistical significance would be basically impossible. Yeah. Yeah, that's a, it's a complex problem. And it really does scare me, like the idea that what we're drinking, what we're eating is potentially causing developmental disruptions in, you know, our children. It's a really, really big issue. It's scary, but at the same time, it's also a tractable problem. Like, you think about climate change and you're worried about climate change and we should all be worried about climate change. But what can I do about climate change?

What can you do about climate change? Whereas something like this, what could you do about your drinking water? Well, if you're in a place with bad drinking water, you can filter your drinking water. And you can- Would a Britta work or something like that? Not to get Britta plug here, but-

Yeah, it depends on what kind of contaminants you have in your water. So activated charcoal filter is good for a lot of kinds of contaminants. Some kinds of contaminants, you have to go to reverse osmosis filter. But potentially you could deal with your water quality problem independently,

on your own, in your own home. And so in that sense, it's the kind of problem that I think people can get their hands around. Same thing with food. Like you probably saw recently that there was something like 450 babies in the United States exposed to serious levels of lead from applesauce that was tainted with lead,

that cinnamon applesauce that was tainted with lead, probably from a supplier in Ecuador. And there are a lot of kids. it's poisoned also in Ecuador. And that's the kind of thing where our food inspectors, our FDA should be doing a better job and they should be doing a better inspection. The recent reporting around this showed that the FDA was not

doing as much testing as they're supposed to do and they don't have as much funding as they need and all of those kinds of things. But it's a solvable problem. Or another example, if you go back to before World War II, a lot of people were getting lead and arsenic poison from eating apples. Why was that? Because arsenic and lead were used as insecticides in many crops, and you had to wash the crop in order to get rid of the lead and arsenic residues.

Well, somebody just grabs an apple and eats it without washing it, would then get exposed to high levels of lead and arsenic. And at that time, we had regulations about how much lead and arsenic could be present on apples and other crops through interstate commerce, but not within a state. So you are protected if that apple was exported from Washington to Idaho, but not if you ate it within Washington. But the point is that there's something you can do about it. So I feel optimistic about the problems of pollution

because there are problems that we can figure out what the problem is and we can solve the problem and reduce exposures for both people and for wildlife. If something says organic on the package, do you think that that's fine to eat or is there some other type of classification that we should be looking for to ensure that the food we're consuming

is actually good for us? Right, so organic means that is grown without synthetic pesticides. And generally organic crops have much lower pesticide residues than conventional crops do. They may not have no pesticides because pesticides drift. So if you have an adjacent farm that sprain, you could have drift onto your organic farm,

but they should be lower than conventionally grown crops. Most of us can't afford to buy everything organic, but there are really good tools out there where you can look up how much pesticide is present on different types of foods, and then you could allocate your available budget towards high priority foods with high pesticide residues. So, for example, strawberries may be quite high, and maybe you want to spend a little bit more on your strawberries to get them organic and not worry so much about, you know, some other crop where the levels are low regardless.

Okay. So get an activated charcoal water filter, get reverse osmosis if you can. Try to buy specific organic foods and limit the amount of processed foods you're consuming. Those things specifically, maybe I guess look into like perfumes and, you know, skincare products

and ensure that things you're using are not filled with these chemicals. If you're doing that, is that cutting out maybe like 90% of the? the unwanted exposure? Yeah, I think you're cutting out most of it that way. So the Environmental Working Group has some really nice apps and websites where you can look up

which personal care products have these chemicals and which don't, for example, which foods have high pesticide residues and which don't. You wouldn't need both an activated charcoal filter and an RO filter. You need a water filter if you're in a place with bad water quality.

A lot of places like here in New York City, the water quality is excellent. And so, you know, New York gets water from a fairly undisturbed watershed and has quite good drinking water quality. And so many people don't need it. And we are very lucky in the United States that you can drink the tap water anywhere in the country

and you're not going to get bacterial and viral illnesses as opposed to most of the world. So we're quite lucky here. But you may live somewhere where there's high levels of certain kinds of contaminants. I live in Tucson now and the drinking water has relatively high levels of arsenic. And so you, you,

especially if you have little kids, you would probably want to filter that arsenic out of the drinking water. Wow. Now, I'd ask you before, but about fluoride. Apparently, there's fluoride in the drinking water, and as we know, fluoride could be neurotoxic. This seems like a problem. Why is it there and is it something we should be concerned about? Yeah, so the fluoride is actually a pretty big controversy now about whether or not water should be fluorinated for killing bacteria that could cause problems or, or, or, or strengthening the teeth development. And I don't know very much about fluoride, but part of the concern is that fluorine carbon bonds are the strongest chemical bonds in nature,

and they are very persistent. So a lot of these compounds we've discussed like per and polypheracal substances, PFS, those are the fluorinated part, the halogen part of that is what's causing the toxic endocrine-disrupting response, and it's very persistent in the environment. So the question becomes when you add fluorine to water or fluoride to water, what complexes does it form? What kinds of chemicals does it form in that water? And whether or not it becomes a problem, I think, would depend on what sorts of compounds it's forming in the water. I don't have the expertise to answer that question.

Are there people doing research that you're familiar with that would be able to say, yes, we should be putting fluoride in the water or no, or the levels that we're putting it in are safe? So I have seen at conferences, scientists give talks about neurotoxic effects of high levels of these compounds in the water. And then I've heard other people arguing that the levels in almost all places in the drinking water are sufficiently low that they're not problematic. And that debate I don't know the answer to. That's fair. I guess on a personal basis, you know, just as boys. Would you use fluorine toothpaste? So it's probably a good idea to have some kind of a tooth hardening compound in your toothpaste.

And when I was a kid in Alaska, we actually grew up on well water. So we didn't have fluorinated water. And my parents had us do a fluoride wash when we brushed our teeth. I'm not an expert on this, so I can't say, but I got my first cavity when I was 17 or 18. Maybe it was helpful, but I really don't know. Interesting. Okay. Other things that I've heard can cause endocrine disruption.

Sunscreen. I've heard people, my mother specifically, says, don't wear sunscreen. It's bad for you. Or if you wear sunscreen, wear an organic sunscreen. Do you know if sunscreen is good or not? Yeah, so I wear sunscreen, and I'm living in a place with a lot of sunshine in Arizona, and I'm a white guy, therefore I'm at risk of skin cancer. We've had skin cancer in my family.

So I wear sunscreen, but I buy anything like that. I buy it without the perfumes and the dyes and all of those kinds of things. So a lot of times the compounds that are problematic are these added on compounds. For example, if you buy soap, it get unscented soap or shampoo, get the unsented shampoo.

You're probably getting what you want without getting the more dangerous chemicals that are in them. That being said, there is an environmental, cost of these sunscreens for the environment because a lot of aquatic animals have a toxic response to these compounds.

So you go to coral reefs, for example, a lot of people are out there swimming, they're wearing a lot of sunscreen. We know now from quite a lot of research that those animals are getting impacted by the sunscreen. So it does have an environmental cost to it. Oh, wow.

But no, I don't think it's going to give you cancer. In fact, the sunscreen should protect you from skin cancer. Interesting. But if you're going to go swimming, and it could affect the local population. So maybe looking for an organic sunscreen or something like that would be a good option.

Exactly. Interesting. This might be outside of your purview, but I'm curious. I don't like antiperspirant. On a personal basis, I'm just like, I put on deodorant. I don't want to smell, obviously,

but I feel like you're supposed to sweat a little bit. Is anti-perspirant good for us? So I agree with you. I don't use that either. I use a deodorant, but not an antiperspirant. And so we were talking about endocrine glands before, right? The hormone glands.

So hormones are all these compounds that communicate between different tissues in your body. We also have exocrine glands. So crin is a secretion. So outside the body secretions. And sweat is an example of that. Bile, stomach acids. Actually, the whole GI tract biologically is outside of your body.

You're passing things through your body, extracting what you want from the food and from the water. but it's under your control, but everything that's going into the GI tract, that's all exocrine, not endocrine. It's not going through circulation. It's just being put into that passageway. So like you, I think it's good to sweat

and it's part of the way that we excrete things actually. You know, we excrete with our urine, we excrete with our sweat, we excrete with our bile, and we can get rid of contaminants that way, we can be healthier that way. It helps us to thermoregulate, which is why we sweat, and cools us down.

So I would, wouldn't recommend using antiperspirants. Interesting. And non-aluminum. People always say that. You see it advertised now of the deodorant, non-aluminum deodorant.

Yeah, so avoiding metals that are neurotoxic is a good idea. Interesting. Okay. Now you might get canceled here. Okay? So you can punt on this question if you want to, but I need to know.

We're talking about early childhood development and trying to avoid unnecessary chemicals getting put into our bodies. Obviously, there's a big debate raging right now, specifically about vaccines. You know, people have said that there are, you know, aluminum salts that are in the vaccines. And before, I guess it was like mercury salts that would try to stabilize the vaccine so it could be transported so people can get them.

Obviously, a lot of people's lives have been saved by vaccines. But my question is, is it possible that any of the chemicals found a vaccine, specifically the stabilizers or the disruptors or the agitators that are in the vaccines could potentially cause, you know, endocrine disruption in young kids? Have you seen any research on that? So that's really not going to be a concern because you think about the quantity of the chemical that you're getting from that vaccine.

It's a minuscule quantity. These things that we've discussed that are undercut disruptors, these are chronic exposures where you're getting exposed through your water or through your food, month after month, year after year. And so when you have just a very short exposure, I mean, for example, the fillings of my teeth are all mercury, because I'm old enough that they're,

They were all mercury filaments back then. And, you know, it's pretty stable. It's unlikely to cause a problem. You don't have any superpowers. I don't have any superpowers. I'm not radioactive. And so, no, it's not, it's really not a feasible hypothesis that what's in the vaccine is going to cause

any kind of endocrine disruption. That's not to say that vaccines won't have problems. Like when you read the safety sheet for a vaccine, it'll say something like one in a million people will develop an adverse reaction to this vaccine. Like all medicine, there could be an adverse reaction. Right, and so there's going to be people who have an adverse reaction.

There's going to be people who die potentially from that vaccine. But the upside is so huge. Like you look at measles, mumps, rebella, tetanus, all of these things that we don't have anymore because we get vaccinated to prevent them. And now you have people who don't wanna vaccinate their kids for those things

because they've read something that it could cause autism, which is not true or that it could cause some other problem. And they're really not only putting their kids at risk by not making this public health measure. We've had some of these vaccines have been around for a couple hundred years now. I do think your point, and actually what you just said, I think is actually helpful for the discourse,

that I do think, you know, I grew up with many people in Florida that are very much against the vaccine situation. And the concern that they always say is, oh, well, I'm injecting my child with an agitator, like all medicine, you know, this could affect them. They could die from it. And people kind of brush them off and say, no, I don't know, vaccines are totally safe. The nuance is that they're not totally safe. They are incredibly safe, but one in a million or whatever could have an adverse effect. And those people, you know,

could be injured and they should be entitled to compensation or whatever the, you know, the law sees as fit. But I do think it is important to sort of acknowledge and kind of concede that to not gaslight people into thinking that, you know, no, you're crazy for thinking that anyone's ever died. It's like, no, you could get injured, but the upside is greater. Is that fair to say? People have an extraordinarily hard time judging risk. Yeah. Right. And so, so, um, you look at something like the fear of a shark attack. And, and the chance that you're going to die driving to the beach to go surfing is so much higher than the chance that you're gonna get eaten by a shark.

It's not that people don't get eaten by sharks, that it happens, but it's so infrequent. And we overjudge, the way our psychology works, we tend to over-worry about things that are rare and under-worry about things that are common. So the risk, if you don't get the MMR vaccine, for example, the risk of getting measles and getting very sick or dying as a child

is so much greater than the very small risk of an adverse reaction to that. Now, that's not the same thing as when you have a new vaccine, right? Every time there's some new vaccine, it hasn't been tested yet. And then, you know, what is the risk benefit ratio? It can be quite different. So I don't blame people when COVID started for, you know, doubting this and wondering if they should get vaccinated for this coronavirus,

which was new and we knew very little about it. And now, you know, the evidence shows that it's pretty safe vaccine, but it's not exactly what people thought at first. Like we were told when we first got the vaccine that you wouldn't be able to transmit the virus if you're vaccinated. That turned out not to be true.

But the death rate is much lower if you have the vaccine, especially if you're immunocompromise or if you're an older person, the death rate from COVID is much lower. However, right when that vaccine came out, it was a new technology and MRNA vaccine, had previously been only tested with animals, not with people. So we really didn't know too much about it.

From the biology of understanding messenger RNA and how these things work, it should be very safe. Like, biologically, it makes sense that it's very safe. It's not changing the DNA, anything like that. It's just upregulating the machinery that's producing antibodies to the coronavirus. So it should be very safe, and it is very safe, but I understand people fear when there's something new, and fair enough,

if something hasn't been around for a while and tested and you don't know what it does, then it's a reasonable thing to worry about it. Yeah, I think that's actually a very empathetic point of view. I think so many people specifically coming from academia will be a little bit flippant and kind of pompous, I guess, when it comes to this type of conversation, and they would kind of blow off anyone that's, I guess, skeptical or concerned as, you know, a kook or a conspiracy theorist, when I think there's a very reasonable and legitimate concern. And I think the facts should be kind of laid out in a reasonable kind of nuanced way, like you had said.

And yeah, I think that would, at least I hope, maybe I'm overly optimistic in this regard. But I think that that would clear up a lot of the discourse regarding this topic. Well, in fact, we should be understanding people's skepticism because scientists were trained to be skeptical about everything. Right. And everything we see, like, really? I doubt that.

Let me do an experiment on that. That's what we're trained to do. And so we should be accepting that people are skeptical. And I want people to be skeptical. And actually, I think part of what went wrong with the whole COVID societal changes and rollout and everything else

was because it became politicized very early and people formed their sides. They were not open to thinking through, listening to the arguments you were the other side and what it meant. So for example, it was a mistake to close schools down. Kids don't transmit COVID very easily. And we've now had this huge cost to kids' development and their social development, their academic development from being out of school for so long. Right. For what? And for what? And so whereas, at least in a lot of places, bars, we're still open. Right. And so what we should have done and a lot of

public health experts who knew these things were recommending that we do these things is we should be very careful with the older folks, the people who are in the old age homes and immunocompromise people, but otherwise let people move on with their lives and not be closing down schools, have reasonable kinds of changes to be a little bit more protective, but not to just shut everything down. Interesting. Yeah, I agree. I think that's a nuanced position that I think a lot of people can get behind. Okay, I feel like at this point we've established that there are too many chemicals in our food and water. They are causing effects and there's some ways that we can avoid them. So I guess what I'm curious about is why are these things in our food and water? Is it because the government is trying

to make us stupid, as maybe my uncle would say? Is it because there's a capitalist incentive that's creating some type of perverse structure for companies to try to get rich at the expense of the American people. What are some of the reasons why these chemicals are in the food? And is there sort of a bureaucratic or legislative way we can prevent it from affecting people? It's a great question. So part of the answer is that we need these chemicals to produce enough food and to do so in a way that people are having a good, healthy, nutritious diet. And if, so there's a place for for having, chemicals in our agricultural system. But we don't have, the way that we regulate chemicals is in a way completely backwards. So if you're developing a new drug, you have to do all kinds of experiments

first with animals and then with clinical trials to show that it's safe and effective. That's not true if you're developing a new chemical. You can put that chemical on the marketplace and then consumers have to prove or scientists have to prove that there's some bad effects. from this chemical that is causing some health problem or environmental problem in order to get it off the market. And then eventually you get it off the market and then companies typically replace it with something similar. This is what scientists call regrettable replacement.

So a good example, you may remember about 15, 20 years ago, the whole scare about bisphenol A and water bottles, BPA. Yes. And we could get BPA-free baby bottles and BPA-free water bottles. Everything's solved. Everything's solved. And so what did they do? They replaced BPA.

with other bisphenols like BPS, which are just as toxic. Come on, Frank. They're just as much endocrine disruptors. I'm getting pissed off. I'm about to go vandalize a courthouse or something. This is enraging me. So we have to change the way that we regulate chemicals

to be more like the way that we regulate drugs where the burden of proof is on the companies before they can bring it to market. Now, would that create a structure where it's harder to bring products to market than people could die in the meantime? Good question, right? you might have something where there's an urgent need to solve some problems so people aren't dying,

like the COVID emergency, where something has to be implemented in an emergency fashion. That could happen, and you might need to have some way of, we need to get something on right now to deal with this thing. If we go back and look at the chemicals that have been very important in our history, we take DDT as an example. DDT was, its insecticidal properties were discovered in 1939 by Swiss chemist. named Mueller. And it then was used very heavily by the United States during World War II

to prevent the spread of malaria and yellow fever throughout our war theaters in the South Pacific and North Africa and also to prevent typhus because it's very effective in killing the body life at vectors typhus. When the United States military got to Naples in December 1943, Naples

was experiencing a typhus outbreak. Typhus at his peak has about 70% mortality. So it goes through this rise. It goes from about 30% up to 70% and then falls back down. So it's a really, really bad disease. People think we went through a lot with COVID.

COVID was a fraction of a percent mortality, right? 70% mortality. And so what did the U.S. military do? We set up these sanitary stations where we sprayed every single person in Naples with DDT to kill the body lice and stopped a typhous outbreak in its tracks. It was the first time in human history that had been done.

was a public health emergency, there was a new chemical available to solve it, whatever small impact on health that DDT may have had to people from getting sprayed with it pales in comparison to the huge risk of dying from typhus. So yeah, there are emergencies sometimes where we need to implement it. In fact, DDT would still be an awesome public health tool today if we had only saved it for public health, if we had only used it for disease outbreaks. But we didn't. We came back and by actually the first non-military use of DDT happened very near where we are now in Jones Beach, New York. In August 1945, the beach was sprayed with DDT to kill flies and mosquitoes on the beach so people would have a pleasant beach experience. And it was filmed in Life magazine. There was a model named Kay Heffernan, who was there sipping her Coke and eating a hot dog in the middle of the cloud of DDT to show that it's perfectly safe.

and then we then put DDT in wallpaper for the baby's nursery in our paint for our homes. We sprayed cows with it to increase milk yield. We sprayed our crops with it. We sprayed it from airplanes to kill the fire ant and the Dutch elm disease and you name it. So it was broadcast so broadly over the earth that the pests that we wanted to kill with it

evolved resistance very quickly. And from a public health perspective, this was a tragedy because now you have things like the body louse with a few years later, DDT didn't kill the body loss anymore. By the time we got to the Korean War, it was ineffective at killing the body loss. And so then you have a risk of typhus.

So this is an example of the hubris of the way that we act with chemicals. You have something that's awesome, right? DDT was an awesome public health tool. And if we had just saved it for that, it would still be an awesome tool. Wow. But we couldn't stop ourselves from using it everywhere.

That's an interesting lesson. Were there downriver health effects of the DDT and were they similar to, I guess, the developmental kind of things we had talked about before? So it turns out it was pretty safe to spray people with DDT. There's not much germal absorption. It's mostly through food that we get exposed to DDT.

It's fat soluble. So the real problem became that it's very persistent in the environment and it's fat soluble, so it builds up in animals, including humans, over time. And by the time we got to the 1960s, the average American women had levels of DDT in her breast milk that were something like four to eight times more

than what was allowed in store-bought cows' milk. And that's when people started freaking out because this stuff is so persistent and it builds up over time, builds up, builds up, that we were putting our babies at risk. And it's an estrogen mimicking chemical. We didn't know it at the time. That wouldn't be discovered until the 1990s,

but we knew it caused problems back in the 60s. Didn't understand how. But it turns out a big part of the how is that it disrupts hormone function. Wow. that it mimics estrogen and causes these estrogen-mediated effects. But that's primarily through oral consumption. Through food.

Wow. So if it's sprayed on you, you can kind of, it's okay. You can wash it off and you're not going to get a ton of absorption. So the issue with the spray specifically is that you basically just made DDT-resistant, you know, lights. It gets the environment and it's going to be incorporating the environment and then, you know, eventually into the animals that we eat or that other animals eat. So different kinds of pesticides have different routes of absorption. The DDT was part of a class of insecticides

called organochlorine insecticides. They're very persistent in the environment and they persist for many decades and they are endocrine disruptors and they cause a variety of health effects on wildlife and on humans. Rachel Carson's book was called Silent Spring because these chemicals were wiping out birds

and so then you don't hear a bird song in the spring. They were mostly replaced by a class of insecticides called organophosphate insecticides. And it's kind of an irides erroneic replacement because the organophosphates, the reasons we switched to those when the organochlorians were banned is they don't persist in the environment.

They break down in days to weeks, not in decades. So that's good, right? They're not building up in our food chain. The downside of them is they're much more toxic. And so we started trading the risk to consumers to the risk for farm workers, where farm workers are spraying these things and many were getting killed

or very serious illnesses from spraying these, really dangerous chemicals. They were actually first synthesized by Nazi chemists named Gerhard Schrader during World War II. And the first chemical that he made in this class was called Tabin, which was the first organophosphate nerve gas. Then he made sarin, which you've probably heard about, which is 10 times more toxic than Tabin. And then towards the end of the war, another Nazi chemist made something called Soman, which is more toxic than sarin. And that became the most toxic chemical weapon ever developed until the U.S. and Britain developed VX, which was another organophosphate nerve agent. And then that was the most toxic chemical weapon ever developed

until the Soviets developed Novichuk in the early 1970s, which is another chemical in this class. So these are readily absorbed through the skin, and that's the primary route of exposure. So depending on what type of chemical it is, it might be water, it might be food, it might be skin absorption, it just depends. Wow. Now, Saren, is that what's found in agent? Agent Orange? No, Agent Orange was a defoliant that was used in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in an operation called Operation Ranch Hand that was,

the Americans were spraying Agent Orange to defoliate the mangrove and tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia in order to see the Viet Cong and also to deprive them of their food supply. And Agent Orange, what happened there, it was comprised of two, two chemicals that are used as plant hormone regulators that make them effective at defoliation at causing the plants to drop their leaves. And those chemicals themselves are undercurrent

disruptors, so that's problematic, but even more problematic. We were rushing to make Agent Orange so quickly in order to be spraying many tens of thousands of gallons of this stuff around the forest that the process was rushed and the chemical companies ended up accidentally making a lot of dioxin as part of the product. So it was dioxin tainted in addition to two active ingredients

that were endocrine disruptors. And so the main problem there is the women who were pregnant in Vietnam Laosan Cambodia who got sprayed with this stuff ended up having a lot of birth defects in their kids because the development was disrupted by these compounds, just like we've discussed.

in addition to that, people would develop later life onset cancers that are estrogen mediated cancer. So a lot of our GIs came back and maybe 20, 30 years later, got prostate cancer, for example. Wow. And there was a big fight about this because for a long time, the U.S. government wouldn't cover the medical costs. They were saying, well, you can't prove it was from Agent Orange,

but eventually there was a settlement, and that got, they got some medical care. Yikes. So, I mean, does that not violate the use of chemical weapons? Like what is the legality with that? Right. So actually, it's a great question. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we had a series of conventions that the United States signed on to,

including the Chemical Weapons Convention and the use of herbicides and warfare. So after that, at the end of that period, actually it was President Ford, I think, who was the one who signed the convention banning the use of these chemicals and warfare. But before that, there was no convention. Oh, really? them, not defolience. There was a chemical weapons convention, but these were not classified as chemical weapons. They weren't directly killing people.

They were killing the plants, but they were poisoning people. Yeah, I mean, and deforming a generation of children in a specific region. Right, and they're highly persistent. So if you go to these forests today, you can easily measure these compounds in the soil and in the plants in these places. Still? Mm-hmm. Wow. And these don't break down easily.

They break down, but it takes decades. gates to break down. Wow. I mean, this is awful. The chemical warfare thing always seemed so bizarre to me that there was like, okay, you're allowed to kill each other

with weapons, bullets and stuff, but don't make people sick. Like, it just, but I guess it was because they weren't able to control very, with a lot of specificity where the, you know, I guess the runoff of these chemicals would be.

You know, it's such an interesting question because why is it okay to blow someone up with an improvised explosive device or to shoot someone with a machine gun and they're dying for hours in the battlefield or all of these things, but it's not okay to use chemical weapons. That's what people who advocate for chemical weapons

will say. And if you look at the data from World War I, which is the first time chemical weapons were used at scale in war. It wasn't the first time they were used in war. It was the first time they were used at scale in war. The number, the percentage of people of casualties who died from chemical weapons was far lower than the percentage who died from getting shot, for example. So, but it caused, in many cases, lifelong health problems, vision problems, you know, deformities, all kinds of things. So, and incredibly painful agents, the skin blistering agents like mustard gas and really pretty nasty stuff, scarring of the lungs. And so the first, so, you know, there were some cases before, like during the Civil War, there were attempts at chemical warfare in America between the Confederates and the Union forces. they weren't very successful.

And even in ancient times, going back to Greek fire, for example, in the Peloponnesian wars, they were firing flammable compounds at their enemies as a primitive kind of chemical agent. But the first time it was used and caused mass casualties was in Epres in Belgium, in World War I, when the German army deployed chlorine gas

against the French forces in Epreys. and they had to rely on the wind, so they had these canisters of compressed chlorine gas, and they waited, Fritz Haber was the scientist in charge of this effort. He was a noble laureate who's the one who figured out first how to fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia to make fertilizer and probably saved hundreds of millions of lives from starvation during the 20th century.

Wow. But he also developed the first chemical weapon that was effective and caused mass slaughter, and it was chlorine gas at Epreys in Belgium. So we had to wait until the wind was just very slight and heading towards the enemy, and then they opened the valves in these tanks, and the chlorine gas went across. And, you know, the soldiers on the western side saw this colored gas coming at them. They didn't know what it was.

It hit them. They started choking and dying, and then there's all this gunfires. They're shooting at the gas like that would do anything. And then when it was over and the German forces went across, there were thousands of casualties. but the German military refused to believe this military scientist that this would work, so they weren't prepared to breach the lines. And so it had very little effect on the war. And of course, the Allies then, the Western powers developed their own chemical weapons,

and by the end of World War I, a quarter of artillery shelves had chemical weapons in them. So it was a chemical war. It was just massive use of chemicals and warfare. Wow. And since then, there's been... chemical weapons used in warfare, but nothing at that scale. Wow. And do you feel like the drop-off and the use has been because of these conventions? Have they been somewhat successful in mitigating it, or has it just changed form? No, the chemical weapons conventions have been very effective. It's stopped

the United States and the Soviet Union from using them against each other, but they have been used by smaller countries, dictators like Saddam Hussein, used chemical weapons against the Kurds in northern Iraq. and Assad in Syria used chemical weapons against the Kurds. And then the Assad Jr., the one who's now the dictator of Syria, has used chemical weapons in the current Syria war against his enemies. And there are terrorist groups that have used chemical weapons like that cult in Japan that use sarin gas in the subway system. Oh, yeah.

So there are cases. And during colonial times, some of the colonial powers used, chemical weapons. Like the Italians use chemical weapons against the Ethiopians when Haile Selassi was the rebel leader in Ethiopia. They used mustard gas against the Ethiopian tribesmen from

airplanes. And so imagine being these guys fighting the Italian colonial forces and then getting this stuff poured in them that just wiped him out. Wow. I mean that is, that is, I mean, it's wild. I guess the conventions are good that they've

mitigated some of the use. But I'm also like, well, how would we just kind of chill out on killing each other in general? Yeah, that would be. Yeah. How would we just do it? We need to have like a bullets convention. Hey, no more bullets, all right? That'll be the next step.

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Everyone talks about Monsanto and how evil they are, yada, yada. I'm curious what your perspective on this is, you know, and using like Roundup Ready, you know, crops and corn and things like that. Is this a necessary thing that we need to avoid famine and blight and things like that? Or is this just a way to, you know, produce things at a higher rate and better margins and make more money? What is your take? Right. So this goes back to something you asked me earlier about why are we in?

this mess and part of the reason we're in this mess is these corporations that have a lot of money have a lot of power and they use that power to prevent the enactment of laws that would be protective of the consumer and protective of public health protective of the environment this has been the case forever i mean even going back to world war one there were so many millionaires that that made their fortune on making weapons to supply the militaries that that they would want to then promote war to make more money. And in the same way, these chemical companies like Monsanto, they're making billions of dollars through the use of these chemicals, and they have a lot of power to prevent protective kinds of measures taking place. At the same time, it's not that the scientists who

developed these chemicals were evil people. They were trying to solve practical problems. And what they were trying to solve was, first of all, famine. So we can go back to my favorite example of this, which is the Irish potato famine, in 1845, 1846, Ireland at that time was a pleasant class of people who were subsisting largely on a monoculture of potatoes. And they were forced on the most marginal lands of Ireland by their mostly absent British landlords. So they were growing crops for export for their landlords. and they had small pieces of marginal land where they could grow food for their families. But the only crop that could supply enough food with enough nutrition for their families was the potato. So it became more and more reliant on the potato, which is super nutritious and it has almost everything you need.

And the Irish peasant population was growing very rapidly. And then they got hit by the water mold that causes the blight that killed the potatoes. It's a kind of water mold called Phytoptera Infistone. which means infectious plant destroyer. And potatoes are from the New World. They're from the Incan Empire. And at some point, 1844, some potato seed crop got brought over,

probably on a steamship to Europe that had some of this water mold in it. And it got into Europe and it spread like wildfire. It only caused widespread famine in Ireland because the rest of the European continent, they had other crops, not just the potato. Right. They didn't have this British bureaucracy, I guess.

that was preventing them from growing whatever they wanted to. Exactly. And then the British government failed to prevent the famine because they had a super pro-free market government at that time, which felt like the free market will solve all problems and it will only make the problem worse if we do something to intervene. So as a result, over a million Irish people died and over a million Irish people emigrated from Ireland,

which gave us the makeup we have in this country, and Canada and Australia and New Zealand. These are all countries that were heavily impacted by the Irish potato famine. I don't know if you have an Irish background in your blood, but if you do, it probably arose from this potato famine. This Irish diaspora that came from this specific moment.

Yeah, and at that time, scientists believed in spontaneous generation. They thought that things like disease producing water mold in the potato, there's nothing to do about it because they just arise on their own. Life comes from no life. They didn't understand that all life is connected by evolution.

Darwin hadn't yet published on the origin of species. Evolution wasn't really known or understood. And then in 1859, the same year that Darwin published on the origin of species, but this is already 13 years after the Irish potato famine, Louis Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation. He showed that it's impossible for organisms to arise spontaneously.

And therefore these agents that cause the potato blight or cause malaria or cause typhus, these have to be caused by organisms. We just can't see them, see them. They're too small, the same. And so scientists started trying to develop chemicals to solve this problem either by killing the pathogen itself, like the water mold that kills the potato plant,

or by killing whatever's carrying that pathogen, like a rat or whatever. So in the case of the potato blight, it's a very interesting story because it was a French scientist named Millarday who was hired to solve the wine blight. And at that time, this is now in the 1870s, the French vineyards and much of the vineyards in Europe

were getting destroyed by water mold. This is such a French way to describe it. It's a wine plate. It's a wine blight. It's not a great blight. Yeah. This is a wine blight. And it was caused first, they had an insect infestation

from insects from North America, but then they also had this mold infestation of their vineyards. So Miller Day was walking around the vineyards trying to figure out what's going on in Bordeaux. And he noticed that the grapes that were growing next to the trails were in perfect condition. And the grapes that were away from the paths were wiped out. And he noticed that the grapes that were near the paths had this white powdery substance on them. So he asked the viticulture list, what do you put it on these plants?

I said, well, we put copper sulfate on them because it tastes bitter, and it keeps people from eating our crop who are walking by. And Miller Day realized this must be preventing the blight. So he did experiments, and he showed that the copper sulfate prevents the water mold from growing its tubule through the stomata, the hole in the leaf and infecting the leaf. And if it can prevent this mold from getting into the leaf, it prevents the mold from taking a hold. And he figured out the ideal mixture of copper sulfate to do this. And ever since then, we've been able to prevent famines from potatoes and from other similar crops. using copper sulfate.

Wow, still using the same compounds. Still using it. And so... And it's safe. Well, copper is toxic to fish. So it's not... There is a trade-off in that if this stuff gets into rivers and streams, it kills fish. But it's safe for us.

And so it's an example though where the motivation of the scientist was to prevent famine. And it's the same thing with these insecticides like DDT. They were first developed and used heavily to prevent famine. prevent pandemics. Because like malaria, it's vectored by the Anophilis mosquito, which in Greek means good for nothing. Or like yellow fever,

which is vectored by the mosquito 80s egypti. And DDT kills those mosquitoes. And so it was preventing, or the body loss, we talked about the vectors. Typhus. And so these were chemical tools really for public health,

for preventing famine and for preventing pandemics. And then after that, also to increase agricultural yields. But then once again, we've become over-reliant on them. And rather than using pesticides where there's little outbreaks to prevent it from becoming a big outbreak, we just spray it all over the place

and rely on this massive amount of chemicals. So that's the problem. Like if you look at Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, and she died two years later of cancer, so she never got to see the full effect of her book. But it led to the kind of emergence of the environmental movement and this massive push to reduce our pesticide use. I think she would have been disappointed to see that by the late 1990s,

in the United States, we were using twice the volume of pesticides that we were using when she published her book. But it's not surprising because pests evolved resistance. And so to kill them, you have to use more of it and more different kinds and constantly be making new ones and spraying more of it. So it's sort of built into the agricultural system that it gets worse and worse because of the evolution of resistance. Wow.

So what would happen hypothetically if I became president, which I don't think I could. I wasn't born in this country. But if I somehow became president and I passed a law and said, hey, no more pesticides. They're illegal. You can't do them. Would we experience famine in America? Are we able to produce enough food to sustain, you know, 300 something million people with natural growing techniques? Or do we need these things in some capacity? So we wouldn't experience famine in the United States, but there are other countries that would experience famine. And in the United States, we would certainly have more expensive food if we grew it that way. The solution that most people point to, which is a compromise that minimizes the use of chemicals but doesn't eliminate it entirely, is integrated pest management, where you're using biological controls,

rotating crops, making healthy soils, making sure that there's good microbiome communities in the soils and in the plants, and only using chemicals in kind of spot treatments where it's necessary to prevent an outbreak. So that's really the solution that we should be moving towards, along with organic agriculture, but not the heavy chemical use industry that we have today. And that's part of the problem too, is that because we grow monocultures,

monocultures means that it's all one crop for a big amount of land, that's going to cause pests to proliferate because there's so much food available for a specialized pest. And so part of it, we need to have diversity of crops, and it's more expensive to harvest. It's more expensive to grow, but we can do so with far less chemicals. Interesting.

I see. So that would be the reason why companies and corporations wouldn't want to do this because it would raise their operating costs. That's right. Now, is there a way... So I guess your solution would be to not create monocultures? Right.

Monocultures create bigger pest problems, and you have to use more chemicals on them. So if you look at really effective agricultural systems where they're using little chemicals or no chemicals, they're doing a much more diverse agricultural product where it's not just one crop over a big distance. They're having a diversity of crops, because each crop will have its different kinds of pests.

And so if you have a lot of different kinds of crops, you won't tend to have an explosion, of one kind of pest. Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. I guess that makes sense, right? If you're you have a forest or some type of extremely diverse biohabitat, you know, if there's a specific type of mosquito that eats a specific type of fruit, it's going to have to move around and migrate. They're going to have to inherently, they'll have to be nomadic. But if the whole space is that whole, is that one thing, they'll be able to reproduce at a rapid rate. You're going to be dealing with an insane population of these mosquitoes if that's the one fruit that you're growing

here. And the way that I guess, a lot of farming is done in the United States. Like I remember seeing these pictures of these giant agave fields where they're trying to make tequila. And it's just agave plants as far as you can see. And there's specific rodents and bugs that specifically eat agave. And they have to somehow create some type of resistance.

And like we had just said, how you had mentioned, there's going to become more and more resistance from the actual pest themselves. And so you're going to have to keep on raising the level. So I guess is it feasible to think that you could create some type of farm or some type of like crop rotation that has enough diversity?

Is that feasible or just all hypothetical? No, for sure. And many places are already growing crops like this. And also if you think about when you spray a lot of pest sites to kill the pests, you're not just killing the pests, you're killing the predators of those pests. You're killing the spiders that eat the pests.

You're killing the parasitoid wastes that infect the pests. You're killing the birds that eat the pests and so on. So we're disrupting the natural ecological controls to make purely chemical controls. And those chemical controls are inherently limited in their ability to work because the pest will evolve resistance.

So one of the quotes I like from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is she said, the chemical war is never won and all life has caught in its violent crossfire. And what she meant by that, the chemical war is never won because you always have to use more of it, new kinds and so on, because the pests evolved resistance very quickly.

And all life is caught in its violent crossfire. because if it's toxic for that grasshopper, it's probably going to be toxic to us or toxic to other critters out there, not just to the grasshopper. Yeah, it is a silent chemical war. Yeah, it definitely feels that way because I just don't think that many people are aware of it.

So if you pass legislation and said, hey, no more monocultures, no more monocropping, do you think that could potentially work? Like, would that be a nuanced enough legislation that could disrupt the way that people are using pesticides? So I don't really have expertise in legal sides and policies and how to implement it. And my gut says that if you punish people for doing things, it's the wrong motivation scheme to change the system. And so we probably need incentives for people to grow crops in a more ecologically sustainable way that's better for public health rather than necessarily saying you can't grow this way.

So again, I don't have expertise in this, but I would probably turn it around and say, what are some ways that we can provide incentives for this healthier way of growing crops? So if you made a subsidy for people that were growing in this type of way, that would reduce the amount of pesticides that we're using? It could be a subsidy or it could be because when you grow crops this way, there's much less damage to the soil, for example, that they get credits for preserving the soil or carbon credits or could be that there's there's typically more wildlife associated with agricultural lands that are that are grown with fewer chemicals and so maybe there's some payments society can make for

people for maintaining better wildlife habitat or better fishing conditions i mean there's all kinds of ways you might approach it but i think it would probably be more effective people don't like to be told you can't do this anymore right and so if there's a way to motivate that behavior rather than than than punish that might be more effective. Interesting. And something you had mentioned is that apex predators are the ones that they're most likely to be consuming these harmful chemicals. And why is that?

Right. So for the chemicals that are bioaccumulative, meaning that they build up over time in an individual, like these persistent organic pollutants that are fat soluble, they build up over time in an individual. And then if we look at something like in the Arctic where these chemicals arrive through the atmosphere into the Arctic, they settle out as precipitate. in the Arctic. And then the Arctic, the animal food web is very fatty

because of the perpetual cold. So the zooplankton are eating the phytoplankton that have some of these chemicals and then they're incorporating all of these pollutants from the phytoplankton into their tissues. And then you have the small fish eating the zooplankton they're incorporating all of those chemicals into their tissues, the bigger fish are eating those,

the seals are reading the bigger fish, the polar bear or the killer whale are eating the seals and the people are eating the seals and the polar bears and the whales. So the animals that have the highest levels of persistent organic pollutants on earth are these high trophic level long-lived Arctic animals like the killer whale or the polar bear. And their levels of PCBs or DDT can be millions of times higher than the background concentration. And so they're not excreted well because they're fat soluble. So they're retained in the tissues, and that means they're retained in the food web. We call it biomagnification. With each step

in that food web, the levels are going up and up. Wow. That's very interesting. So even in the Arctic where it's say none of these pesticides are being used, they, even there, are getting like massive amounts of damage from these chemicals. They are. And actually the problem was accidentally discovered in a very interesting way. So in the 1980s, scientists in Canada, were studying women's breast milk in agricultural and industrial areas of Canada, which is along the U.S. border. And they wanted to have a reference population that would be completely pristine, that wouldn't have any exposure to any of these chemicals. So they decided to study the women on Baffin Island. And they went up there and collected breast milk, and they found, to their surprise,

that the levels of DDT and PCBs and mercury and so on in the breast milk was 10 to 20 times higher in these Inuit women on Baffin Island than it was in the women who lived in. the industrial regions where these chemicals were used. That's when it was discovered. These things are moving through the atmosphere. They're getting incorporated into the Arctic Food Web. And the Arctic indigenous peoples are subsistence peoples. They're eating the seals and the whales and the polar bears.

So they're getting exposed to toxic levels of these chemicals with every meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Wow. And so because of that discovery, this got incorporated into the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Plutens, the rights of Arctic indigenous people. to having food this clean because their diet otherwise is super healthy. When the explorers first arrived in Greenland, they reported no heart disease among the Greenlandic people,

probably because their diet was so rich in these fatty acids from the marine diet that's protective of the heart. So they still get those benefits from that diet, but they have this cost that they shouldn't have to face because they're not benefiting from these chemicals. They didn't produce them, they didn't use them, but they're exposed to them. Are there any politicians or is there a political push

to stop monocropping or to stop using DDT or chemicals like this? So some of these chemicals have been banned. Like DDT is banned with the exception it can still be used for malaria outbreaks in certain parts of the world, but otherwise has been banned by the Stockholm Convention. But we are using many other kinds of chemicals that have other hazards associated with them. And so there are certainly groups that are working to try to change the way that we, There are societies that focus on integrated pest management. There are societies that focus on organic cropping and these kinds of things.

In my opinion, we're not doing enough of that. But sure, there are a lot of good ideas, a lot of research going on. If you go to the big agricultural universities like mine, which is a land grant university in Arizona, they do a lot of research on integrated pest management and how do you best do it. How do you do it in a desert environment? How do you do it in low water use kinds of ways? and so there are groups are all over the world

coming up with creative solutions to these problems because we have to solve it. We can't keep living like this. We can't keep broadcasting chemicals in the environment and expect we're going to be okay or the environment will be okay.

Interesting. And this might be out of your purview, so feel free to pass on this. But as far as like GMOs are concerned, people always talk about genetically modified organisms. Is the problem the GMOs or is it the pesticide on the GMOs or is it both?

So being genetically modified in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't mean that it's unsafe. In fact, you could have a crop, like there's a GMO rice crop where the rice produces more protein than otherwise would exist in the crop. The reason why scientists have developed these crops

is to fight famine and to be able to grow more nutritious food on a smaller amount of land. So in my opinion, GMO has a place in the solution because there are aspects of GMO where, if you think about how did humans modify crops to the way that we want them for all of human history, we selected the traits that we wanted, and we grew those plants,

and then we selected their seeds of the ones we wanted, and we grew those plants. This is kind of a much faster way to get at that outcome, where you can, we now know this gene is gonna produce this protein that's really important for human nutrition, we can insert this gene into this rice plant or whatever it might be,

and then people could grow more nutritious food on a smaller plot of land. So there's environmental advantages and there's nutrition advantages to that. But you can also have genetically modified crops that make it, for example, that the plant is resistant to glyphosate. It's not killed by glyphosate, but other plants are killed by the glyphosate. So then you can grow a monoculture of that crop. You can spray lots of glyphosate. You can have a good yield and not have.

because you made a version of your crop that is not being killed by the glyphosate. And that would be an example where it's being used for something that leads to more chemical use. And so I would not be in favor of that. And this is effectively what Monsanto's doing with Roundup Ready Corn, which is the famous example, I guess, that I'm familiar with.

Right, now they might argue, well, by doing this, we can use less glyphosate because our plant is resistant to it and we can kill the plants around it with less. However, it's not, in my opinion, it's not doing the kind of genetically modified organism that's beneficial. It's making it so that there's a motivation to use this dangerous pesticide rather than, right?

So if you buy the glyphosate-ready crop to grow, you're going to use glyphosate, right? Because that's why you're buying this crop. Right. And so it creates this motivation to use more chemicals, not less chemicals. So I think it's a mistake. I don't think GMO in and of itself is a mistake.

There's a place for it, like I was saying, with we need to be able to grow highly nutritious food on less land for a growing human population that's less destructive to the environment. And GMO has a place in that. Interesting. Yeah, that's all very interesting. So you think there is an optimistic end to this potentially?

I'm an optimistic person, and I think that we already know a lot of the solutions to these problems, and people are experimenting with these solutions in many places all over the world. So yes, I think that we are going to solve these problems, but we need to raise awareness to get there. We need people to understand that every consumer choice they make

has a consequence potentially for their own health, the health of their families, and the health of the environment. And so if we can educate people about what are the things you need to know and making those personal decisions, then we can make a much cleaner world. safer world. Yeah, I'm skeptical that there's any political solution. I'll be honest.

I don't know, maybe I'm cynical in this regard. But I guess I recognize that there's a lot of corporate money and a lot of corporate lobbies that are getting legislation passed by politicians that are essentially funded by these corporations themselves. So it seems pretty bleak that, you know, any of these corporations that are making billions of dollars in this agricultural industry are going to work against themselves and against their self-interest to make as much money as possible at the expense of the American people. But I think to your point, if there is a way to educate people about what are these

things doing, you know, proving that they are doing them and here are simple and effective ways that you can, I guess, reduce the amount of inputs that you're putting these chemicals in your body, it's something that is a little bit more manageable on a personal basis. I completely agree with you. So the dark money in politics is a huge problem. And you have these companies that are, whether it's tobacco or the chemical companies or the big patrols, petroleum companies, they're able to influence the trajectory of our society through their money in a way that is really not okay. Because how can we steer things to a sustainable future if they have such outside influence? So like for my podcast, I interviewed David Michaels about dark money. He was the head of

OSHA under Obama, and he wrote a lot about how these companies use these, this incredible resources to change policy in a way that's bad for public health and bad for the consumer. This is a huge problem. And it's a problem all over the world that's worse in some places than it is in others. So we have to have another way to solve this problem. And one thing that's good is that there's increased awareness of the environmental concerns that people have. And it's hard to find a young person nowadays who's not concerned about the environment. I've been an environmentalist since I was a kid,

and when I was a kid, it wasn't very common for people to even know what these things were, and now there's a lot more concern, and you find people wanting to do the right thing, which is the first step, but then what is the right thing? And you need to know something to know what is the right thing. Yeah. Is there anything as far as, you know,

understanding the concern and understanding the chemical vector points and any of the individual things that people can do to better their health that we may, maybe skipped or that you think you really want to reiterate that way people know? Well, I think a great personal choice thing that people can do is reducing plastics in their lives. And there's several reasons for this. One is that plastic is a hydrocarbon, it's a petroleum product. So every time we're using plastic, that's more oil drilling and all of the environmental costs that are associated with that,

all the way to the production of that plastic thing that we're using. and it's a throwaway item. But also, plastics have thousands of chemicals in them that are of themselves toxic, and they're also the basis of many of our chemicals that we use. And so when we use plastic, we're also potentially exposing ourselves and our families to toxic compounds.

So it's not only a huge environmental cost of these throwaway things, but it's also a personal health cost. And we now know that there are microplastics, these small plastic particles everywhere on earth. If you go and collect a fish from the deepest trenches in the ocean, miles deep in the ocean, it will have microplastics in its tissues.

They're everywhere. So it is a type of chemical pollution that you might wanna consider in its own category because it's such a massive problem. And it's a problem that every individual could actually do a lot to help with by just avoiding plastics at all costs. Yeah, and what are the practical places

where people are using plastic is I think so many people, myself included, especially myself, just kind of be on autopilot. I'm not thinking, and I'm drinking out of a straw and I'm like, oh yeah, this is plastic. Like it's become so ingrained in my habit. So I guess my, what are the specific places where there's plastic? Obviously, we talked about food. We talked about, you know, some paper cups will even have a lining. What are other places that people might not expect there to be plastic? Well, first, I think there is a use for plastic. It's not that we shouldn't have plastic. It's super useful thing. And so, for example, I have my water bottle.

here and it's plastic and it's not a metal bottle because I like to run and it's hard to run with metal. There's your plug? That's safe. And so I am using something over and over and over again rather than buying a new container. So rather than buying a plastic water bottle, drinking that water and throwing it away,

I'm reusing this plastic water bottle. So I'm not saying no plastics, but we can at least get rid of single-use plastics. there's really no reason for us to be using anything that we're throwing away like that. Mm, okay. So I guess being aware of any single use plastic that you're using and specifically things

that are around heat, plastics with heat. That's right, you don't wanna heat up anything with plastic and then also thinking about the child's exposure. So when you're buying toys for your child, it's better to get a classic toy, you know, something made out of wood or something that's... Lead, something like that. Yeah, like we used to play with Mercury.

It's something that is an old style toy rather than all of these, you know, they tend to be these cheap, disposable plastic things. So avoiding those in all aspects of our life, avoiding the disposables, using reusable items, and then just kind of being a little bit more thoughtful about our purchases. Interesting. Yeah, I think that's all very, very doable and very helpful. I'm even thinking of things in my own life. I'm like, I do, you know, I, here.

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to the show. And you talk about this a lot on your podcast, science history podcast. That's the name correct, which is awesome, by the way. Thank you. You come from, on a personal basis, a very long history of scientists, which is very cool. But the podcast specifically is very interesting. I don't know if there's that many people that are doing specific, you know, this history of science.

So I just have really enjoyed kind of going through different episodes and looking at the different topics. I'm curious, is there a scientist or a field of scientific research that you personally think is really underrated or sort of underappreciated? You know, it's a great question because I think in most fields of human endeavor, we tend to focus on a few people and give them a lot of fame. And then kind of there's everybody else. Yeah.

So I think of music. Like, I'm a Springsteen fanatic. I absolutely love Bruce Springsteen. And so, you know, in my mind, he's just way up there compared to everybody else. But there's so many amazing musicians who never get any attention at all. It's the same in science, right? Everyone's heard of Einstein. Enough with Einstein, right?

This guy, the relativity, who cares? Right. But how many people have heard of Lisa Meitner, who is a co-discoverer of vision? In fact, so few people have heard of her that if you saw the Oppenheimer movie, they didn't even mention her even though she and Otto Hahn discovered fission. They only measured Han.

And he got the Nobel Prize not her because they didn't give women the Nobel Prize back then or was very, very seldom that they did. So there are many, many scientists who've done just absolutely incredible things and they never got that kind of recognition. It's more common than not

because how many are going to get that kind of fame. Yeah, of course. It's going to be disordinately, you know, a smaller population of scientists. But I guess who else, just on a personal base theory, like, this person is awesome and they did something really cool that no one knows about.

So, you know, the part of science history that I think is the most remarkable is the part where scientists discovered the germ theory of disease, that germs cause disease. So I already mentioned Louis Pasteur Disproved Spontaneous Generation in 1859. And then from that moment,

he and others were working on discovering what is the germ and what is the vector of disease after disease. And so starting in the, say, 1870s up until about World War I, we had this period where using really primitive technology, one disease after another was discovered, both the responsible bacterium or later on virus or amoeba or whatever it was, and what animal it's carried by. The two scientists who did the most to get this field going were Louis Pasteur in France and Coke and Germany. And they both discovered many germs, you know, bacteria and similar organisms and what they

were vectored by. And they also were starting to work on vaccinations back then. And there already were some vaccinations because there was the Jenner vaccine against smallpox, for example, which was based on cowpox. But with this discovery, the germ theory disease, all of a sudden, that it made sense that there are these things we can't see. They could see bacteria with microscopes. They couldn't see viruses, but they could see bacteria.

And so once they realized that there are these single-celled microorganisms that are causing the problems, there's just incredible work to discover them. I think of Ronald Ross, for example, who discovered the amoeba that causes malaria working in India. And he had this really simple micro-

He had no resources from the British government. He was fighting and fighting for research. They wouldn't give him anything. And he kept getting undermined in his work. And he persisted and persisted and persisted. And he was then able to discover the responsible pathogen that causes malaria. And he discovered the mosquito ennophiles that vectors that malaria. So that malaria is the biggest killer of people in human history. It's killed more people than any other, any other age in any other disease. Is that true? More than any plague? More than anything. Bubonic plague, wow. So bubonic plague killed about half of the people of Europe and about half of the people in the Middle East in that outbreak. And then there was a bubonic plague outbreak

about every hundred years that killed many people. But malaria has been with us since the advent of agriculture. And so if you look at the total number of people killed by any one disease, malaria has killed far more people than any other disease. Wow. But bubonic plague had a good percentage. It had the biggest percentage.

I don't think we can undermine that. You know what I mean? This is like LeBron Michael Jordan. Exactly. You know what I mean? Yeah. In fact, bubonic plague had a reorganizing effect on society. Oh, really?

There were two massive bubonic plague outbreaks. The first one was called the Justinian plague, and it's probably what caused the collapse of the Roman Empire because it wiped out such a large percentage of the society. The whole government degraded and collapsed. Society collapsed. And the fiefdom states of the Middle Ages arose out of the Justinian plague. Wow.

Is that widely accepted or is this? Among scientists and historians, yes. And then the black death plague in the middle ages that wiped out something like 40 to 60% of the population in Europe, again, a completely reorganized society. So for example, before that plague, workers were really badly treated and very poorly paid because there were so many serfs. There were so many poor people available to work. but the mortality rate was so high that it became a market for labor afterwards where they could demand higher wages and better conditions and all of that when people were dying in droves there were movements like the flagellant movement these people who would march through whipping themselves

on their backs and and there were all kinds of there was the dance of the dead where they would they would do these crazy jerky dances and weird things that were going on. Because imagine if half of the people around you were dropping like flies, what effect that would have on society. Wow. So these pandemics have had just an outsized effect on human history. And the reason I was saying that the discovery of the germ theory of disease is, in my mind, the most important underappreciated scientific story,

is that now we can have kids and expect them to live to adulthood. We can expect to, we could love our spouse and expect to have a lifetime with them. Imagine how you would feel about your kids like, okay, I'm going to have a dozen kids and I expect half of them will die by the age of 10. How do you have the same kind of closeness or the same relationship?

It just, it would be devastating, right? The whole way people had to live. And that's almost all of human history. So it's only really since starting around 1870 and after that, the things started to change. And we started to have safer and safer lives with regard to disease and really a big effect beginning with World War II and the modern antibiotics being present and antiseptic techniques, which also arose in the late 1800s. So it used to be before that in the Civil War, if you went to get treated from getting shot or stabbed and you went to a medical facility, you're more likely to die from the infection you would get from the surgeon not having cleaned his instruments

than if you just avoided treatment altogether. Wow. And more people died in warfare from diseases like malaria and yellow fever and typhus in every single major war in human history until World War II. That shifted in World War II because suddenly we had DDT, we had antibiotics,

we had atrobin to prevent malaria with all of these solutions. most of which were chemical solutions that shifted the burden such that for the first time in history more people died in combat than from disease. Wow. Yeah, you hear these stories which I'm not sure if they're true

but you would hear on a Civil War battlefield you'd have a surgeon and one guy got shot and the other guy broke his leg and he'd do surgery on both of them with the same knife and wouldn't even cross his mind to wash it. Because there was no germ theory of disease yet. Yeah.

And which just from where we sit now with all of the benefits of modern technology, it just seems so remarkable that there would be no idea of sanitary work conditions or sanitizing your tools. It just seems so clear to us. But even just 150 years ago, it was completely out of mind

that there could be these tiny little organisms causing infection. You could do surgery with the same scalpel and it's like, yeah, what's the worst I could happen? I can't figure out why these patients are dying. Right. Wow. And if you think about the inertia in society's, So even if you make an incredibly major discovery,

like antiseptic techniques to prevent the next person from dying from this scalpel, it took decades for these to take effect. Or like Ronald Ross's discovery that anophilies, vectors malaria, it took decades to get people to take that seriously. Was there resistance at the time of discovering germ theory from Pasteur, any of these other people that, oh, this is witchcraft? Or was there any type of, like, religiosity that was pushing back against it? There was a lot of religiosity pushing back against it in the sense that the idea of spontaneous generation being God's will was baked into the cake of European society.

So people believe that when you have something like the potato blight happening, it's God punishing the population. And that belief was so profound and so deeply felt that there was a lot of resistance to accepting that it could be something else. There was actually a reverend who was the first person who discovered the water mold that caused the potato blight. but he couldn't get anyone to take it seriously. And it took another 20 years after the pandemic was over, before Miller Day discovered the water mold is the causative agent and that you could kill it with this copper sulfate solution. Wow. I mean, that must be so frustrating.

Exactly. And it's not like that phenomenon has gone away. You have today people making major discoveries that won't be taken seriously for a long time because all this inertia and how do you get something to be, widely accepted. And maybe we're living through a moment like that now because like take the messenger RNA COVID vaccine, it's an incredibly effective vaccine

at preventing mortality. It's similar in effectiveness to say polio vaccine, which is among the most effective vaccines ever developed. But what are all the other, maybe there's a whole bunch of other diseases that we could vaccinate now. We're using this technology that we're not because all the controversy stirred up around this.

So I think it's just a part of human psychology that society has a lot of inertia, we're resistant to change, and how do you sort the meaningful change from the snake oil salesman? That's hard. It's hard. Yeah, it's really interesting.

Yeah, I guess even the way society can form with this understanding of germ theory, I guess society would probably collapse at a certain size prior because you would just have too many people living in proximity and disease would break out and then everyone would die. I wonder if this would be,

be an explanation for a lot of like central or South American cities that we know about or even some like colonial cities in America that just kind of wipe off. Like there's a famous case Roanoke, I think. I might be mistaken that where basically the whole city just vanished overnight and people weren't sure what happened and some people point to disease. I guess I'm curious, do you know if there's any credence to those ideas of cities that kind of disappeared being because of disease? I think it's probably pretty common. And so we had the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the collapse of the Incan civilization,

and of course some of that was when European explorers arrived, they introduced smallpox and they introduced Typhus, and they introduced, there was one year in the 1500s where something like two million indigenous people died in Mexico from Typhus, which was brought over from the old world. But it's not that they didn't have diseases here before that. And any time, like you're saying,

you have a dense population, diseases are density dependent. So as density goes up, the frequency of transmission goes up. It's like you go to live in a dormitory in college, you're going to get sick. You're going to get a cold because you have all these people living together in close quarters. And so it's the same thing with all of these diseases. And I think there's very good evidence of societal collapses

that were caused by disease. Nowadays, sometimes scientists are pulling out. the remains of people and sequencing the DNA of the pathogens to see what it was. Oh, wow. So recently, for example, it was shown that the Justinian plague, which I mentioned was associated of the collapse of the Roman Empire, that it was the same bacterium ursinia pestis that caused it and they're able to sequence the bacterium and show that it's the same one using ancient DNA. Wow.

So there are ways to get at that question, but yeah, I think it's part of, part of what happens. And it could be society gets unstable and you get war or society gets too dense and you get diseases, especially before there was any way to combat those diseases. We look at malaria as an example. So because malaria is vectored by mosquitoes, mosquitoes have an aquatic larval stage. They have to have water and people aggregated around water sources for their agriculture. So then you have the mosquito has a ready blood meal. They've got the people there. The mosquito has a ready water supply, which they can grow their offspring in and it's a dense population. And so that's where you get those disease outbreaks.

So I think human history was probably a lot of communities building, after agriculture, building very quickly up in size and then collapsing. It might have been smaller collapses were more common, where maybe you get to a few thousand or 10,000 people and then you get a mini collapse. But there are also, of course, these dramatic cases like the Mayan and the Incas where you had huge collapses. Or in the American Southwest, we had the, the disappearance of the Anasazi Indians and the cliff dwelling you know the cliff

dwellers and what caused that and there are a lot of hypotheses around disease either from from the chisodotas introducing diseases to the Americas or other diseases that spread wow yeah I mean it's really impossible to to overstate the the importance of germ theory I mean I wonder if they'd invented germ theory in the 1500s how different the world could be like these civilizations that collapsed might have been, you know, bustling cities now that were able to sustain their population, or if we invented germ theory 50 years later, and we have World War I that breaks out with no understanding of germ theory or World War II, how different the whole world looks. I mean, there probably is no America. There's no New York City without this understanding.

Right. It's such a good question and a good thought experiment, because, for example, how is it that the Europeans conquered the Americas so readily? I mean, there were all of these tribes here who had good fighting techniques, they weren't without their abilities. They know the land. They had weapons, they know the land. Well, by the time the Europeans were fighting, the Indians, for example, in the United States,

what became the United States, diseases had already either wiped out or made ineffective fighters of about 90% of the population. So they were heavily weakened before they were even fighting because these diseases passed through so quickly. Yeah. Or going to your thought experiment about, what if germ theory of disease,

was discovered in 1918 instead of in 1870. Well, World War I was a trench warfare. And what kind of organism proliferates in the trenches? It's the body lous, right? When conditions are dirty and typhus, and not just typhus relapsing fever, other body louse vector diseases. Well, it turns out that the body louse,

as a vector for typhus, was discovered right before World War I by a French scientist working in Algeria. and that discovery was made just in time. The sanitary measures to kill the body loss were implemented by the Western forces, and we had very few outbreaks of any body louse vector disease among our forces during World War I. There were eastern flank forces that didn't do those measures, maybe didn't incorporate the latest science,

who ended up having much higher levels of typhus. Wow. I mean, it's just remarkable. One of the, actually, there's a guy on YouTube that I really like this guy, C.GP. Gray, and he makes these video essays that are really interesting. And one of the ones that he talked about was why the European travelers going to the Americas and going to the, you know, interacting with the native people in America, why the diseases were so potent and why kill them at such a high rate and why the American diseases didn't kill the Europeans at such a high rate. And one of the things that he pointed out, and I'm curious, if, you find this to be true, is that at the time in Europe, right around the early 1400s and 1300s, there was already very agrarian societies in Europe, and they were pastoralists and they're raising cattle in close proximity to the civilizations that were growing there. And they kind of started to have these like proto-urban societies. And as a result of living so close to this livestock,

and they were actually able to breed them and cultivate them, they were getting these diseases from the livestock. So, you know, they would raise pigs and the pigs would shit and it'd get into the water and they would drink the water and then there would be cholera outbreaks. And then a bunch of people would die

but the ones that survived would now have a resistance to cholera. But unfortunately, they were also able to spread it. And in the United States, there was not, or the Americas at the time, that they did not have the same pastoralist society, is that they were not raising cattle to the same degree.

That I guess there's very few cattle that you can actually raise in the Americas. I think alpacas are one of the first. few animals that you can actually raise. So as a result, they weren't living in such close proximity. I think they were much more like agrarian, kind of growing small crops and kind of hunting and gathering. And as a result, they didn't have as much, you know, outbreak of disease and didn't have as much resistance to disease. So when the Europeans came over, they brought all this cholera and other diseases and then immediately, you know, transferred it and unfortunately

killed a lot of Native Americans. Is that true? That's exactly right. So 70% of human infectious diseases are zoonotic diseases, meaning they're passed between humans and animals. And so because in Africa and Eurasia, people lived with animals. They had these domestic animals. You have all kinds of diseases, just like you explained, that were passed between people and animals. Whereas in the Americas, the people in the Americas have been isolated since they came into the Americas.

So they came in when the Bering Sea was an ice-free corridor, maybe 20,000, 30,000 years ago, or whatever it was. Through your hometown. Through my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska. And they populated the Americas and they, epidemiologists would say they were epidemiologically naive to these pathogens because they hadn't experienced them. The last time it would even be possible that any of their ancestors would have been tens of thousands of years ago. So they didn't have this built-up resistance. So that's definitely a big part of the story. But another part of the story that's really important is when the Europeans colonized the Americas. They first, they had indentured servants that

they brought with them to be the labor and to grow the sugar cane or whatever. And those people tended to die to get the yellow fever and the whatever disease and either die or not be very effective. They also enslaved the indigenous people, but they had even worse outcomes. They had such low natural resistance to these things. They were not effective slaves. they were dying too readily. That's how slavery became entrenched in America from Africa because the Africans from sub-Saharan Africa had, or from Equatorial Africa,

had some natural immunity to malaria because they had evolved the sickle cell anemia gene, which gives you immunity. Also, they had virtually all of them been exposed to yellow fever as children, and children tend to have a mild case of yellow fever and then to develop lifelong resistance to it. It's like chickenpox.

Like chicken pox, right? So I had chicken pox as a kid. It was well before there was a vaccine for it. And so the Europeans discovered that if they enslaved the black Africans, they would have a population that was resistant to many of these diseases and much less likely to die. That was a cognitive choice that they were like, oh, these people are resistant. They knew they weren't dying from these diseases.

They knew the native slaves were dying. So they started bringing in more and more African slaves. The most of Brazil of anywhere in the Americas, right? Brazil had something like 2 million slaves, so way more than anywhere else. But it was the same all over the Americas, because at that time, everywhere in the United States was experiencing, everywhere coastal was experiencing yellow fever, and most of the United States was experiencing malaria.

This is before these were eradicated from the U.S. and a lot of other diseases like this as well. So it also heavily impacted our history in that the disease ecology made the kind of economic conditions suitable for slavery with African slaves. Wow. And then it also led to the kind of geographic divide we have between slave states and non-slave states because of not only the difference in what you're going to do economically in the north versus the south, but also the differences in the diseases.

Because in the south, there was heavy yellow fever outbreaks. In the northern states away from the coast, there were not. And so labor that's resistant to yellow fever wouldn't be that especially valuable in the north, but it would be in the south. Or to malaria, where there's much more malaria farther south than there is farther north. And if there were the more yellow fever outbreaks in the south,

does it just happenstance? So yellow fever is vectored by this mosquito, 80s, Egypti, and they moved with ships. So you would get an outbreak in a place like Haiti. And then Haiti's actually a great example because Haiti was a French colony and the slaves revolted in Haiti. It was the very first black republic in the world

was when the slaves overthrew the French. The French threw huge numbers, hundreds of thousands of French soldiers at the problem. They slaughtered countless Haitian slaves during the revolt. But most of the French forces died from yellow fever. And so they were not so much defeated by the slaves fighting them as they were by the disease that they had no resistance to. And so the Europeans who remained,

they fled Haiti and many of them went to places like Philadelphia so we got the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia and 1750 whatever year that was with that outbreak no 1780 it was after the formation of the United States 1780 1789 something like that we got this massive yellow fever outbreak in in Philadelphia because the 80s Egypti if infected with the virus the Hauses Yellow Fever made it with these Europeans to Philadelphia. Wow. And it spread through Philadelphia. Philadelphia at that time was the capital of Pennsylvania and the capital of the United

States. The government collapsed. The federal government collapsed. There was actually a constitutional crisis because it was illegal to convene Congress outside of Philadelphia. And we had that in our initial U.S. kind of ethic because what the King of England used to do when he wanted to change policy, it was a call a meeting of parliament somewhere else, but only tell those parliamentarians on his side,

they would convene somewhere else past the law he wanted and then come back to London with that new law. So to prevent that from happening here, we had the policy that you could only have Congress convened in Philadelphia. Congress couldn't convene because all the founding fathers fled Philadelphia and the city government collapsed. And that's why we ended up with a capital in Washington, D.C., because this was a place that kept getting infected with yellow fever.

Whoa, that is wild. And this yellow fever is getting into Philadelphia because of Haiti specifically or just the surrounding areas that had yellow fever going to the capital at the time? So from that case it was from Haiti, but there were other tropical places with yellow fever where the mosquito,

the 80s-Agypti mosquito, all they need is a little bit of water like a can, any kind of ash tray or anything that has a little bit of water in it is enough for them to breed. Wow. And so there's lots of containers where they can breed on the ship

and the ship transported them across. Plus you have people infected with the virus. And then so the mosquito, you have to have the mosquito and you have to have the virus. And so both came over with those ships to Philadelphia. Wow. But it was the same thing. There were Memphis,

I mean, there were city after city in the American coastline that got devastated by yellow fever again and again. And it was just economically preventing this country from taking off. Wow. And why didn't Washington, D.C. get affected by yellow fever? Well, Washington was a wetland, right? It was a marshland, so they had a lot of malaria there.

I don't think the conditions are as good for yellow fever. I'm not sure, but I think the 80s Egypt, I probably just didn't do as well there. That is so interesting. And why were the Haitians immune to it when they were overthrowing the French? So people who are exposed as children and survive, they develop immunity to yellow fever. Interesting.

And the Haitians, the slaves from Africa, they had mostly had yellow fever as kids. So by the time they were enslaved as adults, they already had resistance to yellow fever. Wow. So diseases don't just help white people. The Haitians also benefited from this. Wow.

Yeah, but Haiti is an interesting case study because Haiti was the first black republic in the world, but because they overthrew the white colonial power, all of the European powers punish them afterwards because they didn't want any other colony to replicate what the Haitians had done. So Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. That's a legacy of this, you know, a couple of hundred years of basically banishing them from trade and, and punishing this early slave revolt. Oh, really? I didn't know that. So there

was like concerted effort by the European forces to embargo the Haitians. Yeah, yeah. And try to like starve them out, basically. They basically were not treated the same as other, former colonial powers were when they when they ended up getting independence like all of Latin America they ended up having trade relations with their former colonial powers Spain and Portugal but that wasn't the case with Haiti but the French said yeah you guys are done forever yeah wow and why I think you kind of touched on it but I'm curious if there's more to it why did disease affect colonialism in America more than colonialism through all of northern and even into sub-Saharan Africa?

That's a great question. So in the Americas in general, because the people, the native people, did not have immunity to these diseases, something like 90% of them were wiped out by these diseases. That made it easy for the Europeans

to conquer all of these American lands. But was it just insulation? It was their not having experienced these diseases in their history meant that they got wiped out by them, by the smallpox, the typhus, the influenza, you name it.

Whereas in Africa, that's where humanity arose. And so that's where people have had the most experience with diseases. There's a viral history. And in fact, viral and bacterial and amoeboid and so on. In fact, Africa, the reason why the colonialization of Africa was so difficult for Europe

is Europeans didn't have resistance to the African diseases, and they kept getting wiped out by it. The reason why segregation happened between blacks and whites was an outcome of the discovery of the germ theory of disease. In America? In Africa. Because, for example, Koch, who was the German person like Pasteur, discovered this, he also discovered that it's the African children

who are the reservoir for diseases like malaria that caused new outbreaks. They're harboring the pathogen that gets into the mosquitoes that then gets into the European colonists. So what they did to protect the European colonists is they said, first of all, we're going to have screens and all the windows to keep the mosquitoes out. We're going to have whatever chemical sprays

they had back then, which were pretty primitive, things like kerosene to kill the larvae. But also they said that European colonists had to segregate from the black Africans to protect themselves from disease. Wow. So the initiation, before that, they didn't have physical separation

between the blacks and whites. They did that as a result of the discovery of the germ theory of disease. And then of course that physical separation is going to create an economic separation, it's going to create a political separation, it's going to create two separate countries operating within the same country.

Exactly, and it's not as if the Europeans thought they were better than the indigenous people anyway, but then the more separation you have, the less interaction you have, the less you're gonna see these people as people. Wow. And so that thought process of that the native people are going to be the ones

who harbor the disease, that influenced people elsewhere as well. So even though that was basically a problem in Africa where these tropical diseases were, the reservoirs were the kids in some cases, the indigenous kids, the black kids in this case, people started thinking this separation is good for us health-wise. So that also got implemented in other places,

but mostly in Africa. Wow. That is so interesting. Yeah, I guess I'm curious, how did they not understand germ theory, but they understood disease? like what was the thinking and how did they rationalize what disease was without understanding what germs were? So in Europe they had the concept of spontaneous generation.

So it's God's will. He creates disease and wipes out for sinners or whatever. But it's not that people everywhere didn't have a decent idea. There were cases going even back thousands of years where local people made policy changes, understanding an association between disease and the environment. They didn't know exactly what caused it, but they had enough of an association to do something about it. So for example, malaria, mal aria, bad air,

people had an association between the disease and malaria and wetlands. They didn't understand that it was the mosquito in the wetland that was vectoring, but they had this understanding that there's some association. So even back in Babylonian times, there were cases where wetlands were drained as a public health measure, and sure enough,

it reduced malaria. And so they thought it was bad air coming off of the water, but they had this policy that helped. And there were also some cases in some parts of the world where the local folklore had mosquitoes as dangerous. And so some understanding of their danger, but that didn't get into Western science until the germ therapy disease.

So there were kind of inklings of ideas in different places. There were, if you went to, Southeast Asia, a lot of the separation in the people between the mountain dwellers and the people living in the lowlands was a separation by disease. Because the people who lived in the mountains, they understood that during part of the year, the people in the lowlands got sick, and therefore they were dangerous. So they developed different cultures in the mountains than the people in the lowlands. They physically separated themselves so they wouldn't get sick. They didn't notice a mosquito

causing the malaria or whatever it was, a yellow fever, but they knew it was something. And there other places where people built their homes on stilts and when they did that they had less sickness well they were getting less exposed to the insects that stayed near the water so there were interesting cases of some association but also lots of cases where cultures develop separately because of disease interesting yeah i guess the you see these famous pictures of like plague doctors yeah and it's kind of become like a popular kind of almost like pop culture steampunk kind of aesthetic, but these plague doctors that have these super long sort of conical mask that they would wear. And I guess this was to going to the idea that, oh, the air is bad. So if we can create some type of

buffer in the air, that this would actually prevent the disease from spreading. Is that? That's right. And the plague doctors made the bubonic plague a pandemic worse because it was spread by the fleas from rats. And they were so filthy and they were going from home to home with their bogus treatment, that they were transmitting the fleas from infected homes where those fleas were infected with the bacteria and that causes the plague to homes that had fleas, everyone had fleas, but not infected fleas. They were spreading the infected fleas. So it was part of the reason why the pandemic was so bad was that all of the things that people did to solve the pandemic made it worse. Wow. They're just spreading it around. That is very interesting. Yeah, they're going a house

house from infected person to non-infected person and saying it's okay the air is different you don't have to worry about it and they go but what about the fleas on you don't worry about the fleas on you don't worry about the fleas they're just fleas and that's actually the thing that's spreading it isn't it true they also killed cats that they thought cats were somehow involved but actually the cats were actually culling the rat population so again it was counterintuitive that's right there were a lot of measures like that where there was a superstition about cats as a good example that made it much worse because that predator control was then gone on the rats that were the vectors of the fleas that were the vectors of the plague.

Something else I wanted to know, and I feel like you might be the person to answer this, was lead involved in the downfall of the Roman Empire? It's a great question, and it probably was involved, because they were using lead glazes and they had plumbing that probably had lead in their pipes, and there's some forensic work people have done where they've gone back and measured lead levels in the old Roman cookware, for example. And it is high. And lead causes irreversible brain damage, which reduces intelligence, reduces cognition. So it is a very interesting and plausible theory of the downfall of the Roman empire. If I had to guess as a scientist, I would say it was a combination of people getting

dumber with lead exposure, with the collapse of society, with the Justinian plague, along with external forces, because there were armies coming in from the outside that took advantage of the weaknesses that happened maybe because of those other factors to conquer parts of the Roman Empire that led to this collapse, and then it became these smaller fiefdoms around Europe, and at 1.2 Roman empires, and, you know, just really, really fragmented. So probably that's society just got too big and too complex to handle, certainly to handle the collapse due to bubonic plague, but probably also some of these other factors. What's up, guys?

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But if you're masking your smell, it's harder for your newborn baby to actually create an attachment with you. Have you ever heard that? You know, there's so many things like this. Like an example that I really found fascinating is women have much more sense. kind of tastes in their mate than men do. And so one of those is that women prefer the smell of men who have a different genotype genes for what's called the major histocompatibility complex,

which is part of our immune system. And it's advantageous to mate with a man who has a different genotype than their own because then the offspring will have both genotypes and more protective against various diseases. Wow. And women can smell, the MHC genotypes. You can have men wear t-shirts and the women smell the shirts, never seen the man,

and they say which sense they prefer, and more often than not, they prefer the scent of the man with a different MHC genotype from their own. But when women are on the pill, they don't have that preference. So that's an example where being on the pill might mess up, mate selection, made choice, you know, who you're attracted to because of the importance of what you're smelling and the whole sensory system, which can change. So it's sort of like what you're talking about with perfume. There's all kinds of things like that where... That's so interesting. And I guess it would make sense that women don't have the ability to select for those pheromones when they're on the pill because the pill is basically an increase in progesterone, which is basically simulating their body's reaction when they get pregnant. And so they're

not going to be releasing an egg, so therefore they can't get pregnant. But it's basically tricking your body into thinking that it's pregnant, and if your body is already, quote, unquote, pregnant, why would it need to have pheromone selection? Yeah, and on top of that, women's preferences change as they cycle. So when women are ovulating, they tend to be more attractive to more masculine high testosterone men, and high testosterone is associated with, you know, greater strength and fitness and all of that in the offspring, particularly the male offspring. But when they're not ovulating when they're not going to get pregnant, they're more attractive to men who are lower testosterone and perhaps better caregivers. So it cycles as well. So if those signals are getting

disrupted by the pill, it could change preferences based on these really primitive biological signals that we have. So hypothetically, if women are on the pill, they might be attracted to maybe more docile, empathetic men than when they're not and they're ovulating regularly. Well, so the only study that I'm aware of that relates to this has to do specifically with that immune system function of smell. And so that's the only one I know of that can be disrupted by the pill. But it's certainly theoretically possible that others could be disrupted that are scent-based or cycle-based. Wow. That is so fascinating.

Yeah, there's so many things I feel like that we do that we're not aware of the downriver consequence of how it affects us. Because as human beings, we possess a consciousness that is unique within the, animal kingdom. We are very much human, which is some type of transcendent, higher level consciousness, but we are also very much animal and a part of nature, and we do so many things that are in accordance with nature that we separate ourselves from. Another one that people have told me, again, I don't know if this is true. I kind of am speculating here, but that by eating things that are grown locally, and you hear this all the time around like holistic hippie communities, my whole family is very much like granola hippie white people,

but they're always like buy local, buy local, eat local honey. And the reason is that when you're eating local honey, you're getting the pollen from the local area that you actually exist in and as a result, you have a higher immunity to pollen and allergies of that area in that specific season.

Because the bees of that area are going around, pollinating plants, introducing your immune system to that pollen, and then you have a high resistance. That makes a lot of sense. I'm going to start buying local made honey. I never thought of that, but that's interesting. Yeah, and because most of our honey is grown somewhere else and some feed or whatever, and you're not actually getting the

immunity from the bees. It's just so interesting how all of these things are working together in ways that we are so unaware of. And you also want the honey that's a pure unadulterated stuff, not that's been added corn syrup to it to kind of fill it and have the cheap. Yeah, exactly. They're cutting it's like cocaine. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's just, it's all so fascinating to me how yeah, we've kind of become, I don't know, maybe I'm too much of a hippie. But I'm very much on the- There's a lot of good things about being a hippie, right? There's a lot, there's different kinds of cultural movements

give us many beneficial things, right? And it doesn't really make sense for, I don't like this idea of cultural appropriation is bad. I think that we should be taking the best from all cultures and saying, how do we benefit from what people have learned, you know, wherever they may be. Speaking of cultural influence, you are someone that has seen a lot of different cultures. You're even just telling me before,

and I've read a little bit about your time in Kenya and that you lived basically in a rainforest for six months? Yeah, so when I was in college in the 80s, I spent a semester in Costa Rica learning tropical ecology in rainforest. Oh, wow. That was a really terrific experience.

And we spent as a class about two weeks per rainforest moving from different kinds of rainforests to learn about the ecology. Really fascinating. And when I started graduate school in 1990, I, late 89, early 90, I decided I wanted to keep working in the rainforest. And I got a project to work on rainforest conservation and primate conservation in this forest in western Kenya on the Ugandan border. So I went there in 1992, and it was so different from my experience in Latin America. So it was like, night and day. So it was super interesting. You know, a lot of times in life, the most challenging, difficult things are the best things that happened to you because you learn so much from them.

But I just happened to arrive in Kenya when they were being forced to have elections by the European Union. And Daniel Rappmoy was the dictator of Kenya at the time. And he said, if we have multi-party elections here to lead to tribal warfare, and then he started doing things to make sure that would happen. So basically manipulating the system to show that you have to have a dictatorship, you can't have a democracy. So the part of Kenya that I was living in was Louisville Country and it was there were I was I was living in a adjacent to a Lulia village where at one point people came in dressed up as the neighboring tribe and they burned the village down and it started fighting between the tribes.

Wow. And the people I knew who were aware of what was happening at a more sophisticated level, said these are police. They're dressed up as this other tribe in order to start travel warfare. They were agent provocateurs. Yeah, exactly. And this was happening all over Kenya. And so it was kind of rough.

It was also there was a drought while I was there. And even though I compared to them, I had plenty of money, I could afford to buy eggs or I could afford to buy meat. There wasn't any really to buy. It was really hard to get decent food. And I ended up losing 20 pounds in three months while I was there. And I'm not a big guy. You know, that's a lot of weight on me.

And then I remember when I went to Nairobi, so this was well before sat phones, cell phones, anything like that. We were still, wasn't even email yet. We were, I was still communicating with my wife over telegrams back then. Really? And so I went to Nairobi and all of my data were on handwritten notes. And so this was after my first three months in the forest. And like my whole life of those three months were on these notes and these notebooks.

So I didn't want that to be the only source. I went to a copy place to photocopy the notes because I decided I'm going to mail one copy to myself. and I'm going to hold on to the other copy. And as I was walking to this photocopy place in Nairobi, and people were just walking down the street, minding their own business, the police came out and started shooting people. And so I ran into a bank just as they slammed the doors shut.

And this happened twice while I was in the space of a couple of days while I was in Nairobi where people were getting shot in the streets. And so it was stressful. You know, it was a stressful place to work. I went back again in 1998 for another three months. and at that point we had our first kid who was two years old. And so the only way my wife and I could communicate with each other was if she sent me a telegram, if there's a problem, then I could go a day's journey away to the nearest phone

and call her. And at one point I got a telegram from her saying, Max, our baby, was in the hospital. And so I didn't know, is the kid alive? Is he dead? What's happening? And so I immediately did the journey to the closest town where there was a phone, a post office with a phone. I called home. And thankfully, he was out of the hospital at that point. But the telegram had taken a week to get to me. And so after that, I decided from now on, I'm not going away for months at a time.

I'll go away for two or three weeks of fieldwork at a time, but not this kind of isolation. And of course, now it's easy because now we can bring a sat phone with us and communicate. but it was a much more stressful experience back then. So I got a lot out of my experiences in Kenya, super fascinating, super beautiful place, but also a lot of both times I was there. There was a lot of political violence. The 1998 there was also an election while I was there,

also a lot of violence, and that was a pattern that just kept happening there. Wow. I mean, when you went out into the town and the police started shooting people, was that your closest experience with death in that moment? That's the closest I've ever been to getting shot. I've had other pretty dangerous experiences.

One time my wife and I were just backpacking through Latin America, and we were in Ecuador on one of these chicken buses going over the Andes to go to the Amazon. And we were just driving along, and then the bus driver slammed on the brakes, and I looked out the front window. And what I thought I saw was a herd of Wildebeest in front of the bus, which makes no sense because this is in the Andes. and it just took my mind in a few seconds to realize what I was seeing.

It was a flash flood and the entire road was washing away in front of the bus. And the bus put it in reverse and backing up, backing up as a road was falling apart in front of us and just this torrent of water flowing through. And then eventually got away from where the road had collapsed. If we had been just 20 feet in front, we would have been wiped out.

And then he did one of these 30-point turns on this little road and turned the bus around. We started driving back towards Keto. and the whole road landslid in front of us down the mountain, just completely disappeared. And he slammed on the brakes and backed up. And then we're between, you know, this flash flood and the road washed out here. And so I went up to the driver and I said, you know, what's the plan?

He said, we're just going to wait for them to dig us out. And I said, well, how long will that take? And he said, last time it only took a week. And so, and everyone has their pigs and their chickens and stuff. And they're just sitting there. So we decided no. not going to stay. This seems really dangerous. So we said we're leaving. They tried to convince us to stay, but we got off the bus and we walked. We were just traveling with day packs. We had almost

nothing. We walked back to where the flash flood had been and the locals had already cut this huge rainforest tree over the ravine and they're just like ants walking back and forth across this tree and the water's raging below. There's houses that got wiped out. And so we, you know, walked across this log to get to the other side, hitchhiked to ride down to the Amazon and the back of a pickup truck and we're fine. But there have been things like that that were close-caused. Like the piece of land that you were on in between these two rivers cutting through it,

how long was that piece of land? It was probably half a mile long. It was a pretty big piece of land, but I just thought this road is so unstable. It's falling apart. Any second, what's gonna stop on the third river from cutting through us? And then how big was the chasm you had to walk across?

So this tree was, we had to walk across probably 40 feet of the, across this tree trunk to get across the country is huge, 40 feet, wide. And it was very deep because at that point, you know, it was the road that it was eroding everything away. So it was a raging river below us at that point. And so this is a massive tree you guys were on. Yeah. Yeah. It was a big wide rainforest tree that they chainsawed down to make a bridge across the road. And so when you're walking across it with your backpacks and you're looking down, I mean, one slip, one loose piece of bark, you fall into the river, you're gone. Yeah, you know,

it was funny because my wife was worried about that. And there was this little local boy who held other hand and walked her across and it just relaxed her and she went across just fine. How wide was the tree? The tree was big, you know, it was. Eight feet wide? No, it was like we had a good three feet of width to walk on. So it was, but it was scary because you don't want to slip and fall. I mean, you hear the river underneath you.

That's just imminent death. Yeah, it also shows the advantage of light packing because had we brought anything more than just a day pack, we wouldn't have been able to bring it anyway. Yeah, you'll either lose it or you can't go anywhere. Yeah. Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me traveling was the first time I went to Israel in 1984. I hadn't traveled much by myself,

and I had a whole suitcase full of stuff. And I had a little backpack on the plane, and I got there, my bag didn't show up. And at first I was kind of irritated, but then I thought, you know, actually there's not really anything I needed in that bag. And I just bought one change of clothes, and I was there for the summer,

and it was awesome. I was just traveling light. And it made me realize that the key to traveling well is traveling light. And anything you really need, you can probably get it, you can buy it. And if you can't buy it, you probably don't really need it.

Yeah, my bag never showed out. So when I got back to Alaska, it was back in Alaska. And that was great. So ever since then, we've just learned to travel very light. Any other close brushes with death? I mean, those two examples are crazy. So those would be the most dramatic. but there were disease outbreaks

in some of the places I was working. You got malaria at one point. I didn't get malaria, but I was taking mephloquin, which is a malaria preventative drug. So the first time I went down to the tropics in the 80s, I was taking chloroquine. And chloroquine is actually the oldest treatment for malaria.

It rose from, it was used by the indigenous people in Peru to treat fever. They didn't have malaria in the new world, but they used it to treat fever. And the monks in the 1500s learned about this from the local people in Peru, and they brought some back to Europe, and they found that they could differentiate between malaria and other fevers. Malaria was a fever that came and went,

and the bark from the Sanchona tree, which has chloroquine in it and some other quinines in it, treated this kind of fever, but it didn't treat any other of the fevers. So the first diagnostic tool that existed to differentiate malaria from kind of in a medical sense from other febrile diseases was actually this extract from the bark from the Sanchona tree.

Interesting. And we continued to use the extract from that as a malaria treatment until pretty recently. And so I was on basically the same thing when I first went to the tropics, but the mosquitoes, the Anophilis mosquitoes evolved resistance to it. So by the time I went to Kenya in the early 1990s, we switched over

something called larium or mephloquin. And some people had mental illness on it. So it was, you know, that's a side effect that some people experience. Yeah, I heard your dreams are very strange. Dreams are strange. I had strange dreams. It makes you dizzy. But, you know, malaria is, there's different kinds of malaria.

Some of them are deadly and some of them not too bad. And you can't be on it too long either. So for three months, yeah, it was worth it to go on it. If I've been there for, you know, if I moved there, you, I wouldn't have. done long-term growing in that medicine. Now why does this bark have chloroquine in it? Is there a benefit to the tree to have chloroquine? It's such a good question.

So plants can't run away from their predators. And so plants have, they have primary compounds, which are compounds involved in growth, and they also produce what are called secondary compounds, which are compounds to protect them from their predators because they can't run away. The predators are plants are mostly insects. So most of the poisons that plants have,

they evolve to prevent them from getting eaten by insects, but sometimes other animals as well. So you can think of things like cyanide, which is a plant-produced compound that makes the plant toxic. There's also compounds like tannins, which are in our tea, that make the plant hard to digest. And so we can divide up these compounds into qualitative secondary compounds,

which are the poisonous ones and quantitative ones like tannins that just make them difficult to digest. So what's really interesting about that is that medicine is based on plant secondary compounds. Even Western medicine in its modern form, about half of the medicines that we have,

they were originally a plant secondary compound. Then they figure out what the compound is, synthesize it in the lab and make the medicine. Do you have an example of that? Well, so actually a good one would be the chloroquine that we were just discussing, that that's actually the very first kind of medical plantations that existed

were for malaria using the cinchona tree. And so these trees were exported from Peru and they made plantations in Java, they made plantations in India in different parts of the world and they grew the tree to get the bark. And the bark has four secondary compounds in it that are effective against malaria. And eventually scientists figured out how to extract

and make that synthetically. And so then we have a synthetic version of that compound. But that's been the story of medicine. If you go to other parts of the world outside of the West, almost all the medicines are based on plants. And I wonder how many medicines are being used around the world that we haven't integrated into our Western understanding of medicine.

It's gotta be huge. And it's one of my worries and a lot of people worry about is that we're losing the knowledge, the local knowledge of when people were living in these rainforests and they still do in places like the Amazon, they know which plants are useful for which medical ailments,

but we lose a lot of that information. And so that's a human ecological knowledge is so important to medicine. But we were talking before about cultural appropriation. This is another example where hostility gets engendered when you have a country that has a particular plant, like in the rainforest that's effective in treating cancer or whatever it might be.

Pharmaceutical companies, they come in, they figure out what it is, they figure out how to synthesize it in the lab, and then those people don't benefit from that discovery. Wow. So there are some companies that are small companies that are trying to rectify that, and they're learning from the local shaman,

what do you use to treat what conditions, and they're trying to figure out what it is, and then they have some kind of economic arrangement for profits to go to those communities. But there's not enough of that. We have too much of kind of the exploitative model of let's learn from them, take what we can to learn about the uses,

and then profit from that. Right, yeah, it creates a really bad incentive structure where if you're an indigenous group or people that have, have information about these medicines. It's like, I'm not giving away any of our secrets because you guys are going to exploit us. You're going to take it. You're going to monetize it.

You are somehow we're going to get screwed over in this. So we're not sharing anything with you. And so then you create this hostility where so many people could benefit if there was just less of a desire to screw over the people that had the information. So much so. And it's not just stuff from the rainforest. Like all over the Americas, indigenous people have. And in many cases, still have knowledge about what plants are used for what conditions.

Yeah, even like psilocybin mushrooms, the whole understanding, which again, I'm a proponent that I think psilocybin in medical settings can be extremely beneficial and that people can use them with therapeutic environments that, I mean, has helped with PTSD. Sean Ryan is a popular podcaster that used to be a Navy SEAL, I believe, that talks a lot about how he dealt with his PTSD with psilocybin. And the entire access to this understanding of psilocybin in the West was very. vectored through one woman in Mexico. Are you familiar with this? No. This is a, I hope I'm getting all the details, right? But I'm pretty sure there was one woman in Mexico that was sort of like an herbalist that,

I think in like the 40s, 30s, that had understanding and awareness of these types of mushrooms that were used in ceremonies, traditionally in, you know, Mexican and the South American culture. And a lot of the people that were familiar with it either died off or it wasn't passed down. And there was one researcher, I forget which calls. he was with, but was looking into this as a, yeah, basically just a point of interest and found this one woman that had access to this knowledge. And through this one person, it exploded and became, you know, a treatment for millions of people today. And had this one person, you know, either not been found, who knows where we would be at with this type of research? Would we have ever found it? Who

knows? And how many other types of plant medicines have died off with the people that had the remaining knowledge. Imagine that for every one woman like this is probably 10,000 cases like that that never make it out. We think we know everything. We think we know all the medicines like, oh, if you have cancer, the best treatment is this. And it's like, that might be the best treatment we have. But who knows if there's something happening? And who knows if there's a plant in North Korea that is the cure to some type of ailment that we have, that dementia. And there's some plant that's happening in North Korea that we just have no idea about. It's buried under the ice in Antarctica. Who knows? There's just so much that we're not

aware of, and I feel like maybe as Americans or just as humans in general, I think there is arrogance where we're like, nah, we know the most we've ever known, but there's still so much. Yeah, I agree. I think so much of the problems that we have is arrogance. And it's so important to be humble about what we don't know, which is most things we don't know. Yeah. And to kind of not oversell what we think we know either to say it's more important than it really is. but just one brief thing going back to the Kenyan experience and this medicinal knowledge. When I went there in order to do the work that I was doing, I needed to learn all of the trees in this forest and what they were. And I had a list of the scientific names for all the trees.

And I had that list also the names in the local Luya language, but I didn't know any of the trees, basically. And so I hired a local, I don't know if you're... would say he's a shaman, but a local person with vast knowledge of the medicinal uses of the plants who knew all of the plants. And he's the one who taught me. He would say the Louia word, and I would look on this list, and I would find the scientific name, and then I knew what it was. And that's how I learned the trees and was able to do the work that I was doing there. Yeah. So it just also speaks to the importance of local knowledge. And all the projects that I do around the world, we always have locals involved in the project. And they're the ones who really know what's going on. Yeah, I think, I don't know,

My perception is a little skewed because my family has been very much into like, you know, plant medicine. And when I say that, I don't mean psychedelics. I mean, like, actual, like, herbs for a type of, you know, medicinal remedies for a long time. But I do think that there's kind of a Western arrogance where I think we look at people in developing countries. And I think we think, oh, they're so backwards. If only they had our pills and our pharmaceuticals, you know, they could be, you know, so much better off. And sure, that's true in some cases. but I do think it really discounts the generational knowledge.

These people have lived in this area for 50,000 years, 100,000 years. Who knows? Homo sapiens have been around for a decent chunk of time with the same cleverness and mental aptitude as we have now and their ability to understand, oh, when we use these herbs or these plants, it helps us with these things. They have the same capacity to do that as we do in the West

and with all the technology information that we have. So I think to discount that, I think, does us a disservice. Totally. And there's examples that I just find incredible of how the knowledge came to exist. Like there are examples from Indonesia where the bark of this tree has to be peeled and then boiled for this amount of time and then buried and then you have to do this. I mean, it's just this month-long sequence of things. And finally at the end of that, there's this medicine that works.

Yeah. And how did they figure that out? I mean, ayahuasca. Like, this is a, like, are you familiar with how they create ayahuasca? It's you basically, it's two pieces of bark, I believe, that you have these two separate pieces of bark that never are going to necessarily interact. And one of them is effectively contains the DMT, which is going to actually make you hallucinate. But then the other one, if you just drink that, your body is able to catalyze it. So it's able to process the DMT and you don't actually hallucinate.

but you basically then drink another like brood bark stew that then inhibits your body's ability to then process it. So you have to have both and you have to drink them in a specific order. And no one knows, I mean, even through like tribal shamans that I've talked to, none of them know how the people of that time and of that place figured out that you put these two things together and you see God. It's like remarkable that they even came to this conclusion. But somehow they did and it got passed down orally.

And there's all these kind of stories and folklore around it, but no one really knows how. But even that example of the indigenous people knowing something does something but not knowing how, that's also true in modern Western science all the time. Like we were talking quite a bit about endocrine disruptors before. And if you go back and look at Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, she talked about maybe, you know,

maybe there's a couple sentences in there about how maybe DDT and these other chemicals have some kind of hormone. but what she really focused on was cancer. Because at that time, they knew that radiation causes cancer and they thought these chemicals probably also cause cancer. We now know that there are some chemicals that cause cancer, but the numbers of cancers that are caused by chemicals are far lower than these developmental problems

caused by these chemicals. And endocrine disruption, that mechanism wasn't discovered until the 1990s. So knowing that like DDT causes problems, causes developmental problems is related to cancer. All of those things, that was known back in the 50s and 60s. But the mechanism of it wasn't discovered until the 1990s. Interesting.

So they can see the correlation, but not necessarily the causation. Right, and there's so many things like that, or like the example of yellow fever we were talking about before. When the Yellow Fever Commission, which was a US Army commission that was working in Cuba, when the United States conquered Spain and the Spanish American War and we took over Cuba, the first order of business was we have to stamp out

yellow fever because so many people are dying from yellow fever. And so the United States government sent a commission to Cuba. The person who organized the commission was Walter Reed as in the Walter Reed Medical Center. And he sent this commission for scientists to Cuba to try to figure out what's causing malaria. And they did these very clever, I'm sorry, yellow fever. They did these very clever experiments and they were able to prove that it was caused by this mosquito, a Pacific mosquito 80s Egypti, which was super important knowledge because then they were able to wipe out yellow fever from Cuba just by getting rid of all the standing water and where these mosquitoes bred. So in that example, they knew the mosquito was the vector, once they figured that out,

that was a vector of yellow fever, but they didn't know what the pathogen was. Fires hadn't been discovered yet. And they knew that if they took blood from someone who had, had yellow fever, and they filtered that blood through a filter that removes all bacteria, because they knew about bacteria, and they could remove bacteria. And then they took the blood after it had been filtered, injected into someone else, they got yellow fever. And so it was something smaller than bacteria. They called it a virus, but they didn't know what a virus was. They couldn't visualize it, they couldn't figure it out. It was decades later, in 1930s, when viruses were discovered, and it was actually with yellow fever

and they were able to show what this thing is. It wasn't until the 1930s? Yeah. And so this was quite a delayed, you know, delayed thing where they knew the mosquito, they knew the illness, but they didn't know what it was because it was just too small.

When did we start flying? When was Kitty Hawk with the Wright brothers? So, you know, fly. I guess that's beginning of the 20th century was flying. So we could fly before we knew about viruses? Yeah. That is wild. If you put it that way,

What is going on? I also like to put these things in context of an individual person's lifetime. I mean, think how much the world has changed in your lifetime. And I'm a bit older than you and has changed more in my lifetime. But I really like to think about my grandfather's lifetime. He was born in 1898, and he fought in the German army in World War I. And then my family's Jewish, so they escaped from the Nazis, came to America. He worked for the U.S. military in World War II,

and he lived all the way until 2003. He was 105 years old when he passed away. But when he was born, people were getting around on horseback and using steam engines, and the world had less than 2 billion people in it. And just think about all those changes, all the way to modern computers. Your grandfather used a computer?

He didn't use computers. Well, he used some of the early scientific computers, but not what, not personal computers. But you showed and you're like, hey, look at this computer. Look at what it does. Yeah. We can go on the internet.

We can look up anything. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, it's just so wild. Just the changes. And, you know, of course, the pace of change is not slowing down. It's ongoing. But the world is changing so fast. And that provides incredible opportunities and incredible risks that we need to manage.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think even the example of germ theory and how little we knew about it and how much we know now, maybe in the future we'll do kind of the same turn with pesticides and all the chemicals that we're consuming. You know, I don't know if we're completely aware of it, but through your work and obviously your book, The Chemical Age,

which I'm really excited to read. Thank you again for the copy. I really appreciate it. Maybe more people will be aware of that. And even, I don't know, just your examples, you're an encyclopedia of scientific history. It's really, really cool. And your podcast goes through all of this.

I think it's important to note your podcast is not only about how, you know, the food is giving all of us cancer, we're all going to die. It's just, it's a really cool sort of chronology of scientific history, which I think is really interesting. And I think people should definitely go check it out. It's a, yeah, it's just awesome. And I really appreciate you being here and sharing all this with us. I'm really just fascinated by human ingenuity, and I share kind of your optimism that I hope that we can solve these problems that individuals themselves can kind of, you know, help the, the, the, the chemistry. chemicals that they're consuming and make for a better world for everyone.

You know, it's awesome to talk to you, and I appreciate that a comedian like you is interested to having a scientist on the show. It's not a normal kind of thing to expect on a comedian's show. So I really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I mean, that's the Joe Rogan effect, right? Someone like me, I'm so inspired by him, and I saw you on his show, and I was like, yeah, this is the guy. So thank you again. I really appreciate it. Let's do this again soon. Awesome.