The Dr. Hyman Show - The Harmful Effects Of Glyphosate, The Most Common Agrochemical with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

The Harmful Effects Of Glyphosate, The Most Common Agrochemical | This episode is brought to you by Tushy and ButcherBox We’re living in an age where it’s increasingly hard to avoid exposure to toxins. Some of the most ubiquitous are right on our food, on some of the most commonly eaten items in the American diet. It’s no wonder that illnesses related to toxicity, like cancer, infertility, and neurological diseases, are on the rise. The most widely used pesticide in our food supply is glyphosate. It’s used all over the world on more than 70 different food crops, including corn, soy, and wheat and is linked to some serious health risks, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It’s terrifying to consider that a bowl of Cheerios has more glyphosate per serving than vitamins D and B12, both of which are added to try to boost nutritional value.  We need to change our food system if we want to change our health, and it’s issues like these that need our help. I was so happy to sit down with my good friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to dig into the topic of glyphosate and corruption in the agricultural industry. Bobby Kennedy serves as President of Waterkeeper Alliance, Chairman of the Board and Chief Legal Counsel for Children’s Health Defense, and of counsel to Morgan & Morgan, a nationwide personal injury practice. He was previously Chief Prosecuting Attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at Pace University School of Law’s Environmental Litigation Clinic.  This episode is brought to you by Tushy and ButcherBox. The Tushy bidet is a sleek attachment that clips onto your existing toilet and connects to the water supply behind your toilet to spray you with clean, fresh water. And it’s really affordable, starting at only $79. Right now Tushy is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners 10% off, too, so it’s a better time than ever to make the switch to a bidet. Just go to hellotushy.com/HYMAN.  ButcherBox makes it super easy to get humanely raised meat that you can trust delivered right to your doorstep. ButcherBox has everything you could want - like 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef and wild Alaskan salmon - and shipping is always free. Visit ButcherBox.com/farmacy Here are more of the details from our interview:  How glyphosate is used, its prevalence, any why it’s so bad for us (6:03) Monsanto, Rachel Carson, and the chemical industry’s efforts to quash dissent of its products (9:01) Monsanto’s introduction of Roundup ready corn and patented seeds (18:25) The incidence of spraying Roundup on crops at time of harvest and how that coincides with the rise of gluten allergies, celiac disease, and other illnesses (21:59) How the Daubert standard kept a legal suit from being filed against Monsanto until 2015 (23:53) Dewayne Johnson v. Monsanto Company, the first case brought against Monsanto for toxic effects of Roundup (32:11) Glyphosate’s toxic effects on the human and soil microbiome (41:33) The Environmental Protection Agency’s relationship and support of Monsanto (44:12) Halting the freefall of our democracy into plutocracy (55:15) Follow Bobby Kennedy Jr. on Facebook @rfkjr, on Instagram @robertfkennedy, and on Twitter @robertkennedyjr

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a bidet can feel really soothing also. Tushy is a really affordable way to upgrade your bathroom, starting at only $79. And if you're on the fence right now, it's the perfect time to give it a shot since they're offering my audience an extra 10% off. Just go to hellotushy.com forward slash Hyman to get 10% off your order. That's hellotushy, T-U-S-H-Y.com forward slash Hyman. I think you'll be as pleasantly surprised as I was at what a nice upgrade using a bidet can be. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you're concerned about chemicals in our food, particularly glyphosate or weed killer called Roundup, which is

on 70% of our food and has been linked to cancer and microbiome issues and lots more health concerns, then this podcast is going to matter to you because it's with my friend and activist lawyer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's an extraordinary guy. We've known each other for many years. We've traveled the world together. We've kayaked and rafted in Peru, in Chile. We've gone through many adventures, near-death experiences,

and it's just been a pleasure knowing Bobby because not only is he an activist, leader, environmentalist, but he's also a heck of a lot of fun. So Bobby serves as the president of Waterkeeper Alliance. He's the chairman of the board and chief legal counsel for the Children's Health Defense and of counsel to Morgan & Morgan, which is a nationwide personal injury practice. He was the chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper. And when he was involved with the Hudson Riverkeepers, he helped hold General Electric accountable and had over a billion dollar settlement to make them clean up the Hudson River from all the PCBs they dumped in there. He's a defender of the

environment and children's health, and he's had many, many successful legal actions. He was named one of Time Magazine's Heroes for the Planet for his success in helping Riverkeeper lead the fight to restore Hudson River. This group's achievement has helped spawn 300 waterkeeper organizations around the globe. He also was a co-host of Ring of Fire on Air America Radio. I was on that show once. He served as a distant district attorney in New York City. He's worked on environmental issues across America and has helped many indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada

negotiate treaties protecting traditional homelands. He's credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's water supply and has done so much good in the world. He wrote a number of great best-selling books, including Crimes Against Nature. He went to Harvard Law School. He graduated from the London School of Economics and got his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. And he's just an extraordinary man. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy, Bobby.

Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me. Okay, so I want to just sort of give people a little bit of a background on glyphosate because uh you know i recently wrote my book food fix which talks a lot about the farm system what's wrong with it and glyphosate is really at the center of that conversation because it is a weed killer that's used on farms to prevent weeds growth particularly around gmo soy crops and many other crops. It's an incredible blockbuster chemical from agriculture. It's been used all over the world. In fact, according to the EPA, 220 million pounds of Roundup, which is glyphosate, were used just in 2015. In California alone, there's more than 10

million pounds used every year. It's the world's most commonly used herbicide. It accounts for 72% of all pesticides and agricultural chemicals around the world. And since 1974, we've put on 1.6 billion kilograms, more than 3.5 billion pounds on crops in the United States alone. It's on 70 different food crops, including corn, soy, canola, wheat. So if you eat a slice of bread, a bowl of Cheerios, a sushi roll, a plate of pasta, slice of pizza, chicken nugget, there's a good chance one or more of its ingredients was doused in Roundup or Weed Killer before it left the farm. In fact, Cheerios have more glyphosate per serving than vitamin D

and vitamin B12, which are added to enrich the cereal. It's even been in commercial honey. So it's a big problem. It's linked to cancer. It's linked to all these health issues. So Bobby, take us back to the origins of glyphosate and how it's become such a prevalent chemical and why it's so bad for us. Well, you mentioned the Hudson River and my work on the Hudson River. And my first case on the Hudson was getting used at General Electric's PCBs at the Hudson. The manufacturer of those PCBs was Monsanto.

And I've had so many cases against Monsanto over the years. I told Mike Papantonio, who did the radio show with me and who was my law partner for many years, some really, really big cases, including the case that Mark Ruffalo just made, the movie about dark water, which Pap and I represented about 4,000 people and a team of attorneys who had been poisoned by C8, which is the active ingredient for Teflon, which DuPont had discharged from his plan in West Virginia and poisoned the entire community, knew it, and kept it secret from everybody. Wow. But anyway, I told pap at one point because we were talking about all my different involvements with monsanto and i said if my life were a superman comic monsanto would be lex luther i feel like i've been struggling against my whole

life um and my first consciousness of monsanto was when I was a little boy because I met Rachel Carson when I was a kid. And she came to my house at Hickory Hill. For those who don't know, who was Rachel Carson? Rachel Carson was probably the, you know, most people would say she was the central figure in the environmental movement as the kind of founder of of modern environmentalism she wrote a wrote a book she was an extraordinary woman she was a brilliant marine biologist she

wrote a whole series of new york times bestsellers that broke every one of them broke records for um the length of time on the new york times bestseller list, was not only a very gifted marine biologist, and interestingly, she was from, I think, Redding, Pennsylvania, and she never saw the ocean until she was 22 years old. Wow. But she was, you know, she was 180 IQ, and she was a brilliant writer and a brilliant communicator, and had this, you you know this gift of empathy for all creatures and she wrote silent spring which was sort of the and she wrote silent spring and silent spring was

a really important book because up until she wrote that book nobody did not believe that the chemical industry was um was what it pretended to be which was this huge um boon to american prosperity better living it was uh it had you know it had helped us win the war against fascism and now it was going to help us it was going to allow us to win the war against the insects and create free food, abundant food for everybody. And she wrote a book that for the first time disclosed to Americans in very, very clear language, very well-sourced science, the price we were paying for that temporary cheap food solution was actually imposing enormous costs that if we had known about them we would have never taken the deal not only to human health

but that you know the term silent spring indicated that was going to eliminate you know the birds and the insects and and things that a lot of people didn't think that we really cared about that much. But she showed us why we should care about it. And, in fact, it was a very prescient book about 90% of birds. Long birds in America have disappeared. 90%. Since she wrote that book. We're living in a very different world today than I grew up in and you grew up in.

She was attacked viciously by Monsanto. And a lot of people looked at what Monsanto did during the roundup cases, which I was just on that legal team. And they said that Monsanto took the blueprint from the tobacco industry but monsanto really was the company that created that that um that blueprint or how do you deal how do you quash dissent yeah against your product and you know the tobacco industry did it very masterfully for 60 years by manipulating science and creating doubt. And they were able to escape any regulation of a product that was killing one out of every four of its customers who used that product as directed.

Cigarettes. But Monsanto really was the mastermind for those techniques. And they hired Hill and Knowlton and Edelman, was the mastermind for that, those techniques. Um, and a, a hired Hill and Nolten and Edelman. And they, you know, they created these PR firms that really from the ground up went out to lie to the public, to, to hire these phony scientists, we call them by ostitudes to generate tobacco science, junk junk science just to sow doubt yeah that's what the food industry does too and that was their um you know that was their strategy

but when rachel carson published this book and it was published in cereal farm and the new yorker magazine and then it went on to you, then the book was consolidated. And I think it stayed for many, many months on the bestseller list, I believe. I remember 62 weeks or something that it was number one on the bestseller list. And that could be wrong, but I think that that's right. They mounted a very, very concerted and deliberative attack against her. They sent these white-coated lab scientists, medical doctors, every community in the country to lecture about the benefits of pesticides and how Rachel Gardner was crazy. And they went out and they found third-party front groups with integrity,

the institutions in our society, who they would secretly co-opt with payoffs, et cetera, who would then go out and act on their behalf without their fingerprints on it and they got the american medical association to condemn rachel carson they got time magazine life magazine sports illustrated the american garden clubs all of them to attack carson and if you read the contemporary critiques of her at that time they they almost all use the same language, and they often attack her very personally. You'll read that she's a spinster,

which was the contemporary euphemism for lesbian. So they're really trying to discredit her, and she never defended herself. She was dying of cancer at the time. But I'm very proud that my uncle President Kennedy stepped in and he defied his own USDA his Department of Agriculture which was leader had already been captured it was a captured agency was all bought and owned by Monsanto even at that early date. Really?

Food industry owned the USDA, and you know that's a huge problem today. It is, yeah. And they were attacking her, and he had to go against them. He created an independent, he got Jerome Wisner, who was his chief science advisor, to put together a panel of scientists with impeccable credentials

to go through every important or relevant material assertion in her book and to validate the science. And they came back and they absolutely vindicated Carson. But at the time that I met her, when she visited Hickory Hill, she was under attack. President Kennedy's vindication of her ended up being an important part in planting the seeds for Earth Day, which happened seven years later. First, in the passage of FIFRA, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act in 1973, and the ban that year of DDT. So DDT had wiped out a peregrine falcon,

which had gone extinct on the East Coast. And, of course, it was causing health impacts that people didn't know how to assess or evaluate yeah on humans right and Monsanto it was a flagship product from on Santos the loss of that product which the biggest pesticide in the world at that time was something that they had to quickly repair and they found at that time a um scalant, which is a chemical that was used to remove metals and accretions of calcium and other compounds from the inside of metal tanks. That was glyphosate. And that's why it had been developed.

But at some point in glyphosate's history, somebody had thrown a bucket of it out in the lawn and noticed that it killed everything. And Monsanto took a look at that and said, we can make an herbicide of that. During the first decade of its use, it was a conventional herbicide. Farm workers would strap a tank of glyphosate onto their backs and they would go through the corn fields yeah in the early days right after the planting when the weeds were at the same side were competing with the corn saplings and they would spray the weeds and kill the weeds to give the corn time to grow high enough so the weeds could no longer compete. The spraying took place very, very early in the season before there was any food on that plant.

And then in 2000 or in 1994, and Monsanto or glyphosate was not a particularly noteworthy herbicide at that time. It had many, many competitors in the marketplace. And something changed in 1994, which was that Monsanto introduced Roundup Ready corn. And what had happened is they were dumping the glyphosate or the Roundup out in the grass. At one point, they noticed there was a weed that was not being killed. And they said, that weed is immune to glyphosate.

Let's take a gene out of that weed and put it in corn and make the corn immune to glyphosate. And that was really the first big GMO crop. And now you could fire all those farm workers and you could fly an airplane spraying pesticides and saturate the entire landscape with just one guy. And everything would die except for the Roundup Ready corn. Yeah.

And it changed the face of agriculture across the planet. Within a few years, most of the corn was Roundup Ready corn. Virtually all corn grown today is, you know, 95, 98% of it is Roundup Ready corn. It's Roundup, it's monsanto's corn yeah they sell the seeds and they sell the herbicides it's a it's a closed circuit it's a closed circuit and they also implant in the seed they've done other genetic manipulations that allow that that creates a plant that reflects the sunlight, certain spectrums of light. You can actually fly a plane over the cornfields with a special camera,

which is what Monsanto does. They can photograph it, and they can know from the air which are Roundup Ready corn and which corn is natural corn. And they have a list of all the people who have paid for their corn. If you're a farmer and you happen to have their crop on your property and you haven't paid for it, then they sue you. And that's one of the things that makes them very notorious. Those lawsuits against individual farmers,

a lot of times they've got Roundup corn on their property because of drift. Because the corn drifted onto their property because of drift because you know the corn drifted onto their property but it's not what they bought wait wait just to recap that that's important so basically what happens because of wind there's a farmer who has regular natural corn and a farmer who has roundup ready corn and it drifts over to their farm and it starts growing and then monsanto sues them because they're growing their genetically. Their seeds have become pollinated by Roundup Ready. Right, by the patented seeds have fertilized the seeds, the natural seeds,

the heritage corn of a farmer. So the next year, he's got Roundup Ready corn or a large part of it on his property. And then they just sue him and make him pay for it. Wow. So, um, so not only are there poisoning farmers are trying to make a bankrupt. And then,

um, and then something happened in 2006. Oh, I, so between 1994 and 2006 roundup Ready corn, GMO corn, and they developed soy and sorghum and you know, John Greenewald everything was Roundup Ready. Steve Trang Yeah, everything except for

John Greenewald canola. Steve Trang Everything except for wheat. And then in 2006, they discovered that Roundup was a desiccant. And what that means, if you spray it on a crop, it will actually dry out the crop. And one of the big enemies of the farmer is that if there's rain around the time of harvest, their crops can get wet, and then they get moldy, and then it ruins the entire silo. Yeah. Their crops can get wet, and then they get moldy, and then it ruins the entire silo. Yeah. And so what Monsanto did is they began telling farmers, spray this on the crop, on your wheat, right before harvest or at the time of harvest.

And it was so popular that about 85% of the Roundup that has been used in history has been used since 2006. Wow. A large part of that is as a desiccant. And what that meant, Mark, is for the first time, they're spraying it on food right at harvest. Not early in the season when it may have a chance to wash off, but actually just before you're going to eat it right and they're spraying it for the first time on wheat because there was no such thing as roundup ready wheat they started spraying it on wheat as a

desiccant and so 2006 marks the date when suddenly these gluten allergies began exploding, the celiac disease, and all these kind of wheat problems that we started seeing in this country. If you measure it back and say, when did it start, you can look and draw a red line. It's 2006, and it's the year that they began spraying it on wheat. What happened is after that... And we'll get into why that is in a minute. We'll get into why that is in a minute we'll get into why that is in a minute we can explain the the mechanism so um so in order to bring and and we know that roundup is

associated with all kinds of illnesses right with um with gluten allergies with celiac disease, definitely with non-alcoholic fatty liver cancer, with colon cancers, with kidney cancers, and with many, many other problems. But you can't sue somebody. You can't sue the producer of a toxic chemical until science on that chemical and that particular association and the particular harm reaches a certain threshold. That's called Daubert. It's a federal rule, and most of the states have rules that follow Daubert says is, the purpose of Daubert is they don't want somebody coming in and going to a jury and saying, you know, that this perfume made me insane.

Right, right, right, right. Because they want to make sure that there's enough science that you can't just bring a weird theory or a marginal theory into court to the jury and have the jury decide on that. So the judge has to say that the science on this is actually mainstream enough. It has passed a threshold that I'm going to allow you to explain this to the jury. And so we couldn't sue Monsanto, even though we all knew it's causing all these problems. We couldn't sue them on it until 2015.

Because in 2015, the IARC, which is the International Agency for Research in Cancer, I'll just stop for a second and tell you who IARC is. IARC is an agency back in, I think it was the 70s. People realized that a lot of things were carcinogenic. They were increasing your risk of cancer. And the different countries were regulating them all differently. And they were regulating them different substances

and different compounds and different elements, and they were regulating them with varying degrees of good science. So the major Western countries said, you know, none of us really has the capacity to round up all the science in the world and the best scientists and figure out what's carcinogenic and what isn't. So let's create all of us together. And that's part of the WHO, is that right?

Yeah, and we'll create an agency, and they ended up headquartering it in France. And every year it looks at certain associations, at certain vectors. For example, it might look at coffee one year. It might look at cell phones one year. It might look at PCBs or whatever, or tetrachloroethylene, or polyaromatic hydrocarbons or any compound. And it will bring in the best scientists in the world in that area

from every country in the world. And it will assemble all of the literature on that association. It will have them read all of that literature. There may be a thousand studies, and then make a determination about whether it's a definite carcinogen or it's a probable carcinogen or a possible carcinogen in both, or not a carcinogen, in both animals and human beings. It looks at the animal studies separately,

and it looks at the human studies separately, recognizing that just because something causes cancer in animals, it doesn't necessarily cause it in humans. And in order to make the determination that it's a probable carcinogen in humans, you need both the animal studies, the mechanistic studies, like petri dishes, et cetera, and then you need the epidemiological studies, which are the human population studies. And it takes a lot of science to get to the point where I, Eric, will say that's a probable carcinogen, and that happened in 2015. For glyphosate.

For glyphosate, but with only one association with it, which was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Even though we have a pretty good idea, it's causing many, many, many, many, many other problems. Yes. And there's really strong science on those other problems. None of them had hit the threshold where we could take it to a jury. And just because IARC says it is not enough, the judge has to make an independent determination.

Now, even though, you know, the agencies all over the world take what IARC say is gospel, for example, in California, there's a law called Prop 65, which says that anything that's carcinogenic has to be labeled as such at the place where you purchase it. And the way they determine what is carcinogenic, what isn't, is what an IRC says. So if an IRC says something's a probable carcinogenic, it has to be labeled in California. And there are at least 10 nations and probably 50 jurisdictions around the world that do the same thing,

that say whatever anARC says, that becomes the law. But still, the judges in this country are not allowed to say whatever IARC says passes to Albert. They have to make an independent determination. Once we got that decision from IARC, a couple of firms,

mainly Bob Hedlund, here in Los Angeles, another firm called the Miller Firm in Virginia, and Morgan & Morgan and Weiss Luxembourg filed suits, and they began collecting cases and advertising for them. And so two years ago, we had about 14,000 cases in six firms. And Bob Headlin had about 1,400. And we filed on a lot of suits.

Now, were these all individuals who had glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma or other things? Only for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. They had to have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma or other things? Only for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. They had to have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and they had to have a strong evidence that they had a long-term exposure to glyphosate. And then we chose our first... I mean, this is actually a very cool story. You want to hear it the first case um but you know when you when you bring these cases they're called mass tort litigation it's not a class action suit

each case is treated different separately and you try each one individually so there'll literally be 14 000 different we would have 14 000 trials but what happens in practice is after you have tried about six or eight of those cases, everybody kind of knows what the case is worth. And the company will then come and settle because having all those outstanding cases, it creates so much uncertainty. And isn't that a huge impact because Bay bear stock, which bought Monsanto, not a very good idea. Let me tell you what happened. We, we brought this case and it's kind of an interesting story because at the beginning, the six firms were all working together and we had to decide

strategically, where should we bring the first case? And which case should we bring? What's the best case? A good judgment. And there's another complication, because the firm that wins that contest is the firm that gets the biggest payoff from that case, because he owns the case. Yeah.

We're all going to work on it. But Mike Miller's firm kind of won the contest he had sharp elbows and he had a really good argument that dwayne johnson's case was a really important case and dwayne johnson was the first case that was tried to say it was like a dwayne johnson was a um was an african-amerAmerican high school groundskeeper, and part of his job had been spraying glyphosate to control vegetation around the school. As it turned out, he had a backpack dispenser, a tank that was leaking all the time, and sometimes it would cover his whole body. It would kind of explode and and

he would be covered with glyphosate but he wasn't worried about it because it said on the label that it's safe as aspirin and it had a picture of a guy spraying it with no protective gear well aspirin kills about 40 000 people a year so uh so maybe he's right so he um right. So he got worried because non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is like autoimmune disease. It can attack any organ in your body. His sister had that. It attacked his skin. Yeah. And his skin, he discovered it was fatal.

And he hasn't died yet, but he was, even when we brought the case, his doctors were saying he had three months to live. His body was covered with, he was really, he was a very, very handsome man and he had a very happy marriage and wonderful wife and wonderful kids. And his body was covered with postulating lesions. He couldn't know.

He loved swimming, but he could no longer swim because it would gross other people out who were using a swimming pool. So it really destroyed his life in so many ways, or it was destined to take his life. And he was a very good plaintiff and had you know the exposure was very clear mike miller was supposed to bring the case he's a virginia law firm but about two weeks before we were going to bring the case to trial mike miller who's my age the 66 was injured in a kite surfing accident wow cape hatteras um he rigged the kite wrong, upside down,

and it lifted him up and slammed him against the pier, and it broke his back, broke a lot of ribs. And he called us from the hospital and said, you know, we're going to go forward with the case, but you guys, your firm, which is Bob Hedlund, needs to step up and take a bigger responsibility because, you know, he couldn't be there. And he assigned his partner, Tim Litsenberg, to lead the case.

And about a week later, we were on the phone with our firm was on the phone, and Bob Hedlund was on the phone with Tim Litsenberg, and he had a grand mal seizure while he was on the phone, strategizing about the case. And it turned out that Bob Hedlund really had to take the lead in the case. I think it was a lucky thing because it was a kid, Bob Hedlund, who had been working on this case for two years, named Brent Wisner. And he's a brilliant attorney. He looks kind of like Jonah Hill. Uh-huh. And he's a brilliant attorney. He looks kind of like Jonah Hill.

And he has just a genius mind and extraordinary capacity to communicate with a jury. He is unflappable. Total command over the science and a very, very unusual ability to be able to translate very complex scientific concepts to people who may not even have a high school education. Yeah, could get. And the first case we had was in San Francisco. We had that trial, and he asked the jury in the end for 300 million we were saying brent you can't ask him that much because you know that's a big strategic consideration at the end of a trial

yeah how much you go ask because if you ask too much the jury it's a max of overreaching and the jury may punish you right and he said i'm gonna ask for 300 million he asked for it they gave him 289 million it was a very highly educated jury we had a couple of working scientists on that jury and other people who are very you know all college educated many advanced degrees we did the next trial amy wags to have try the next trial in federal court in San Francisco, and we expected that we could lose that case. We had a judge who was very hostile to her, and we couldn't read the jury very well. We won $89 million in that. That was two and a half months later. The third trial we tried in Oakland and at the end of that trial Brent, we had that meeting the night before the closing argument and Brent said I'm going to ask for a

billion dollars and we said no you can't do it. He went ahead and did it. They came back with the two billion dollar judgment. Two billion dollars. And what you were saying about the impact on bear so when we were picking a jury in the first case and the duane johnson case um monsanto and one of the most brilliant uh corporate maneuvers in history sold itself to bear yeah for 63 billion dollars and we were already picking a jury right this was this this wasn't after the cases were tried right or this was when we were picking a jury on the first case really the transaction why would why would they want to do that? Crazy. I don't know. And then they, you know, I think, I don't know what Monsanto told them, but clearly Monsanto must have told them

that they were going to win the case. I mean, their stock price went down $34 billion. It went down. After the first case, it dropped 17%. On the second case, it dropped, Bayer's share price dropped 30%, and then it dropped ultimately 50% in the third case. It's hovered between 30 and 50,

but I saw a couple of weeks ago, I saw that the Wall Street analysts were evaluating Bayer's total value as a company at $63 billion, which is the price that they paid for Monsanto. That's crazy. And they just fired the CEO. The board just fired the CEO of Bayer, right? Yeah, the chair. But Bayer's value today is the same price that they paid for Monsanto.

So the entire value of Monsanto has been completely erased. Wow. Which is, to me, you know, justice. Yeah. That company was a bad company. They brought us Agent Orange, DDT, PCBs, dioxin, and glyphosate. Yeah, also, they bought Cereol. Which is a pharmaceutical company. Yeah, but they owned a sugar substitute.

Mm-hmm. NutraSweet. No, the other one. Aspartame? No. Aspartame. Yeah. They had a niche.

Finding all the bad chemicals and selling them really well. Finding all the bad chemicals that nobody else wanted to touch. And that was Monsanto. And then they had a corporate culture that was like a cowboy in a black hat. Well, their motto is essentially, we need this type of agriculture to feed the world. I know people who have been in Monsanto, and their mantra is, we need to feed the world. We need GMO seeds. We need these herb-sizing chemicals in order to feed the world.

And that just isn't true. When you look at the data, it's really clear that you can grow as much food or more food, better food, without all those chemicals, without those seeds. And this has been demonstrated all over the world. And like in Europe, there's been incredible studies where they don't allow gmo foods there and you can look at the amount of pesticides and herbicides they use is far less and the yields are no worse in fact maybe better soils are just are better and they're more absorbing carbon and you know the soils are the biggest

carbon sink yeah and we've destroyed that using glyphosate and then you know of course you look at you look at the insects and what's happened to the biodiversity and the amphibians and everything and we don't know which of the pesticides particularly, but clearly glyphosate is eliminating. There's 13 that we know are being exterminated, extirpated from the planet. So glyphosate also kills the insects. It either kills them directly, or it interferes with the chicken-made pathway.

What is that, Bobby? Or it's part of the microbiome. It's the way that the microbiome essentially communicates with itself. And, you know, one of the things that Monsanto said from the beginning is that glyphosate is safe because it doesn't interfere with any human system or organ but that was before we understood the importance of the microbiome which is actually our largest and probably our most important organ i mean you know the brain is important the heart is important

but the microbiome is the largest organ and it and without the chicken meat pathway it it simply doesn't function so so this is something i don't think people realize i mean yes they've heard of the cancer glyphosate connection but people don't understand that glyphosate is toxic to the microbiome yeah and uh you know it's small amounts can have a big impact yeah and just for example the impossible burger which is a gmo soy burger has 110 times the amount of glyphosate that's needed to destroy your microbiome in animal studies. And we're seeing, like you said, increases in celiac expression. Because 35% of people have the celiac gene, but not everybody gets it.

1% usually get it. But the rate of celiac has gone up 400% in the last 50 years. And the rate of gluten sensitivity has gone dramatically up. And it's because in part, perhaps because it's destroying our microbiome. And we get changes in the gut flora, which lead to leaky gut. And then the gluten starts to create problems. So how does the glyphosate interact with the soil? Because you just mentioned soil and being a carbon sink.

And we've talked a lot about this in podcasts, the importance of soil for helping sequester carbon and reverse climate change. How does it affect the soil microbiome? It destroys the soil biome. And because of that, it makes the soil kind of impervious. The soil is no longer, it cuts off the relationship between the soil and the atmosphere. And it seals the soil off so it no longer acts as a carbon sink. Yeah, I mean, you've got the microbiome in your gut, but you've also got the microbiome in the soil. Right.

And that is what makes soil work. It's what allows the plants to extract the nutrients. It allows it to hold carbon. It actually sucks the carbon and holds water. Yeah, and glyphosate basically turns soil into dirt. Yeah. It's lifeless. So what's next in this whole glyphosate story?

Because you're in the center of it. You've tried these cases. There's more cases coming. And recently the EPA announced that glyphosate was safe, which seems preposterous given all this science. What's going to happen next? from the White House that showed that President Trump had sent, during the trial, a message to the leadership of Monsanto saying, we have got your back. And that basically is the way that EPA has been behaving. But, you know, the thing is that EPA, even before Trump was utterly captured and utterly corrupt, the pesticide division

was working hand in hand with Monsanto for many years. There was a guy who ran the... It was also a revolving door of people who were in the FDA. It was a revolving door, but even more than that, they had a guy in there called Jez Rowland, who was running the pesticide division who was communicating inside information to Monsanto and in fact when the another federal agency the agency for healthcare research oh no it was the 18th SDR, the Agency for Toxic Substance Review, had decided to do its own test for the National Toxicity Program, its test of the toxicity of Monsant, of glyphosate, and Roundup.

Roundup is actually much more toxic than glyphosate. Roundup is a formulated product which has these adjuvants in it which makes glyphosate which amplify the time you can buy that for your lawn right right you can buy it for your lawn and they um they had a guy called jess rollin who was the head of the pesticide division who sent a note to monsanto saying i'm gonna kill this study by the atsdr i'm gonna pressure them to kill the study and when i do that you guys need to give me a medal so we had that email wow and the judge wouldn't let us show the email to the jury why you know You know, the judges are funny. You know, we thought it was relevant, but the judge, it was too prejudicial.

Well, it was. Yeah, it was. It was incriminating. They should have seen it. But anyway, they still gave us $2 billion because of all the other stuff. The reason they gave them $2 billion is because we had reams of that kind of material these secret communications that showed monsanto was running epa and they were telling epa they all knew that that roundup was causing cancer and they were working together to hide it from the

public to derail tests the discredit tests to take the mice out of tests that were getting kidney tumors and to do all of these really deceptive, falsified science, fraudulent science. So these big food and ad companies are terrified of lawsuits because of discovery, where you can get all this information from emails and communications. And, uh, you know, there was a bill introduced into Congress a number of years ago called the cheeseburger bill euphemistically, which prohibited lawsuits against food companies for obesity. And it was passed in the Congress. It was defeated in the Senate, but then they found out a way to get it in states all over the country, which prohibits people from suing fast food companies,

which they're terrified of because of exactly what you're talking about. And I think it's such an important thing. Yeah, they don't want to win the losses. They want to make sure you can't bring the loss. Exactly. And now you did, and you're discovering all this dirty laundry that is the intersection of where big ag and the government have been colluding

to suppress information that's hurting the public and it's kind of shocking i mean even for me to hear it the level of the the the relationships the revolving door between monsanto executives the epa the usda the fda is kind of terrifying right yeah and what are the kinds of things that you found in that discovery that were sort of surprising that that kind of illustrate that that way in which our governments are co-opted by the oh it's just a manipulation of the of the science I mean at one point they knew it was cancer very early on yes from the beginning they knew it was cancerous and the way that they would let in fact epa originally said it's an it's initial licensing for roundup said it is a carcinogen and it and they based that on a on a study on a mouse study where where I think, I don't know, 70 or 80 percent of the mice got kidney tumors.

You add another, they brought it, Monsanto, and we got all of these internal documents from the Monsanto that showed they were going to pay the scientists a huge amount of money to come in and dispute those findings. And the EPA let them reopen the test, and he came in and claimed that he found tumors in the control groups, but he never showed those tumors to anybody. They threw out the study, and they said, but Monsanto had to promise to redo the study, and in 40 years, they've never redone it. The whole thing was based on fraud from the outset.

And it was, as you say, it was EPA acting as a sock puppet for the industry that it was supposed to regulate. EPA had completely been co-opted and for all those years was colluding directly. And it was extraordinary, really, the control that Monsanto had over the pesticide division, where they had their own guy running that division for within the government, within the government, running EPA's pesticide division and making sure not only that the pesticide division did not regulate Monsanto, but that no other agency in the government was allowed to look at them. He would go out and kill studies by other agencies.

And there were no whistleblowers in the agency, whether it was Republican or Democratic presidents? Well, you know, there are periodically whistleblowers, but... But you think, you know, maybe the Clinton administration, Obama administration might have sort of dealt with this. But why wouldn't they? Are they scarier than Monsanto? You know, agency capture is pervasive.

That's an important sentence. Agency capture is pervasive. And that is exactly true in every aspect of the government, including and especially the food industry. And it's not just revolving doors there's there's there are a million different little ways that agency capture occurs and you know and it's not even like you know oftentimes you'll see high level officials high level officers from you know polluting corporations are brought in to run the agency or lobbyists.

Even more than that, people who work for those agencies, first of all, the budgets of the agencies are controlled by governmental committees. And the committees, like the pesticide committees and the health committees, the companies, the industry, knows that those committees have to be controlled. In Congress. In Congress. In Congress, because they write the budget for the agencies,

so they have tremendous control over what the agency does and does not do. And so they will work very hard to make sure that they control the chairman of those congressional committees who have oversight over the agencies. And then, you know, that's a way to engineer agency capture. chairman of those congressional committees who have oversight over the agencies and then you know that's a way to to engineer agency capture the other thing is yeah i mean at most 100 percent of the ag committees in the house of senate are highly funded and the members are highly funded by right and if you look at the ag for example the committees, the chair of those committees will always be the biggest receiver of, you know, of chemical and big ag. You know, it's going to be Cargill and Smithfield and Monsanto who are paying that guy's campaign, you know, given millions and millions of dollars over the career of that politician.

And he's bought and sold and owned. He is a sock puppet for those companies. The other thing is, I mean, another instrument of agency capture is that most people have, when they work for the government for 20 years, their pension matures and they're gonna get a 50% pension in some place 100% pension or the rest of their life yeah so at that point they will often leave the agency and go work for industry and continue and then they're collecting two salaries yeah the industry has an open door for those people and everybody knows it

and they're going to pay them huge um bonuses very very big and so when those those are the people who run the divisions within at regulatory agency so that's the guy because he knows he's he's been there for 20 years so He's now in charge of the division. Everybody else in the division is working for him. They take his lead because their salaries all depend on him. He knows that he's preparing the groundwork so that he can have a soft landing at Monsanto or wherever else. He needs to do them a bunch of favors while he's still in office there. And then on the 20th year, he can go over and work for the company. But everybody in that agency is being schooled in that.

So, you know, the whistleblowers get weeded out and they get sent to, you know, offices in Dubuque where they can't cause any problems and there's an example of what you've talked about which is corporate kleptocracy right which is this concept that our government's been co-opted in ways that is scary when you know when you talk about it in general as a oh yeah the the government is influenced by corporations you know you could dismiss it but when you hear the depth of the discovery that you did with the glyphosate case in Monsanto, all these relationships come out, all these communications come out,

and it's frightening as a citizen to think about who's running the government. Right. Yeah, well, it's not us anymore. No, how do we deal with that? I mean, I think the lawsuits, litigation, is this the thing that we have to be doing more of in the food industry? I mean, you know, that's a bigger question.

It's about how do you halt the free fall, the devolution, which has now become a free fall of democracy into corporate kleptocracy and ultimately plutocracy. It's the big, you know, the end game that Eisenhower warned us about on January 17, 1960. The military industrial complex. He was leaving office and said, you know, the biggest threat to America is not a foreign enemy.

It's the military industrial complex, which will destroy democracy, which will turn America into a a foreign enemy. It's the military industrial complex which will destroy democracy, which will turn America into a national security state and an imperial country abroad and a national security state at home. And it essentially transformed this model democracy into a plutocracy. And, you know, for 40 years we've seen as a systematic attack on the institutions of government regulatory agencies and the and the American middle class the thing does that really made America's stable democracy and you know at this point the Citizens United case was probably the biggest assault on the integrity of democratic institutions.

Can you talk about what that is? People might not know. What is Citizens United? Citizens United, we had a law that was written in 1907 that made it illegal for corporations to give political campaign contributions to federal officials. And there was a period in American history in the 1880s and 1890s, a period that we know as the Gilded Age, when we really did lose American democracy. America, by the end of the Gilded Age, had very little claim to being a democracy anymore. It was being run by large trusts, by the Standard Oil, by the Oil Trust,

the Sugar Trust, the Steel Trust. The Rock & Pallor, J.P. Morgan, the Mellon family. And they all were on interlocking boards on all of these big industries which were monopoly controlled and railroads, the steel industry, the sugar industry, the cotton industry. That's when Teddy Roosevelt came and was a trust buster, right?

Well, a whole bunch of things happened once. You had a populist movement, which was in the agricultural areas, and you had a progressive movement, which was in the city, and they kind of blended, which were people who were fighting this takeover of our country by large corporations. And then you had muckraking journalists like Sinclair Lewis, Ida Tarbell. Upton Sinclair. Upton Sinclair and many others who came along and who were directly attacking,

informing the American public about corporate takeover. And then you had a very charismatic leader, Teddy Roosevelt, who came in and was willing to stand up to them. And in the first 10 years of the 1900s, we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which allowed us, gave us a tool to reduce the power of corporations. We passed a graduated income tax that made wealthy people in corporations for the first time pay their share of the cost of our democracy.

We had minimum wage laws for the first time. We had child labor laws. We gave women the vote. We abolished the, you know, there was no direct election of senators. At that point, senators were chosen by the state legislatures who were utterly corrupt. So it gave the capacity. It was said about that in Pennsylvania, none of the members of the state legislature were for sale because they were all owned by Standard Oil and Standard Oil wouldn't sell any of them. And Standard Oil could choose whoever was senator of Delaware, was senator of Pennsylvania, et cetera, because they control the legislatures.

And that was true in virtually all the states. And then corporations were putting huge amounts of money into the political process. We passed all these laws, but the most important law we passed in terms of reclaiming democracy was a law that was passed in 1907 that forbade and prohibited contributions by corporations to federal elected officials. And 100 years later, in 2008, you know, the Scalia-Thomas court, the court was once again taken over by corporatists who then threw out that law and said, we're going to, you know.

And that was Citizens United. What they said was that money was speech. And if you had money. It was free speech. The First Amendment prohibited anybody from telling you who you could give it to and who you couldn't. Wow. And so it basically gave constitutional sanction to legalize bribery. Wow. It legalized bribery.

So that was the beginning of the corruption. Well, that was the beginning of the end for America. I remember I heard Senator McCain talking once, and he's a Republican. He says, you know, until we turn back the ties on Citizens United, we're not going to have a real democracy anymore. And I remember the other thing you told me once, Bobby, was the other big catastrophe in our democracy was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Yeah. And so tell people what that is and why it's such a big deal that it was repealed. And let me just say another thing.

You know, from the beginning of our national history people you hear people today saying you know the big enemy is big government and that's true you know particularly if government is reading our mail and our emails and you know and reading every communication that we have and torturing people and doing all the things that american government now does that it didn't used to do yeah that's scary and putting in 5G everywhere without anybody being able to object about it. That's a new podcast we'll do on 5G. But from the beginning of our national history,

our most visionary political leaders and beloved political leaders were warning Americans that the biggest threat to democracy and to human rights and civil rights is going to come from corporate power. And that's why Thomas Jefferson wanted to illegalize corporate charters because he said, we can't create these entities that are immortal, that have no soul, that have no sense of right or wrong, that are going to become predatory on democracy. And then Andrew Jackson fought against the banks.

There was a long history of this. Teddy Roosevelt, who is a Republican, said that America will never be destroyed by a foreign enemy. Our democracy will be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would erode it from within. Eisenhower, who was a Republican in his greatest speech ever, warned Americans against the military industrial complex. Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party, probably the greatest president in American history, said during the height of the Civil War in 1863, I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me.

And for my country, I fear the bankers more. And Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is, quote, the essence of fascism. And Benito Mussolini, who had an insider's view of that process, said the same thing. He complained that fascism should not be called fascism. It was corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power. And what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism.

Our job is to kind of walk that narrow trail in between and keep big government at bay with our left hand, big business at bay with our right. And the only way that we can do that, have real representative democracy, functioning democracy, is if we have an informed public that can recognize all the milestones of tyranny and that we have an informed independent press

that is speaking truth to power. And we don't have those things. I remember seeing that movie Vice about Dick Cheney, and there was a scene in the movie where Roger Ailes was talking to the vice president at the time, George H.W. Bush, and Bush said to him, you know, we're talking about the fairness doctrine to get that repealed and fix that,

and that was the birth of Fox News, right? Yeah. And the end of fox news right yeah and the end of of independent fair media the end of while the walter cronkite era where you could actually listen and wasn't just a bunch of nonsense now you know even the network news and cnn and and fox are all you know run by corporations i mean it was terrifying i mean you look at that look at the advertisements for 5g and Fox are all run by corporations. I mean, it was terrifying. I mean, you look at the advertisements for 5G

by the pharmaceutical industry, by the oil industry. The food industry. I mean, I was mortified. And they're not going to, you know, Anderson Cooper is not going to bite the hand that feeds him. I mean, I was mortified. I was in the green room. I was about to go on TV in Washingtonhington yesterday and i saw good morning america and they were serving wendy's breakfast sandwiches to the

entire audience they were munching down them on television they had a big ad afterwards for wendy's and i'm like this is what our democracy has come to and our news has come to it's really terrible bobby you are such a wealth of knowledge, of history. You really enlightened us about this whole Glyphosate story and how important it is that we actually litigate to actually bring awareness and to create discovery for these companies to show what they're really doing. And I think you're just a real hero in my mind, Bobby, that you're telling the truth, speaking truth to power, and getting these companies to be accountable for their bad behavior. And we need more people like you out there doing this because I think our democracy is at stake. And I really thank you for all you're doing, Bobby. Thank you. I just work for everything you do.

You're my hero. Thanks, Bobby. Is that a Red Bull that you have in that cup? No, it's not Red Bull. It's water. It's tea. So thank you for listening to Doctors Pharmacy. I hope you enjoyed this

conversation. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe to every podcast and we'll see you next week on the Doctors Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from.

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