The Joe Rogan Experience - #1540 - Frank von Hippel

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Frank A. Von Hippel is an expert in ecotoxicology: the study of how pollutants impact human health and the environment at large. A professor at Northern Arizona University, Von Hippel is the author of The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth, and the host of The Science History Podcast.

the Joe Rogan experience hello Frank hi it was a false start that's why it's like weird right I have to go ready and go welcome to our polarizing studio a lot of people don't like it here a lot of complaints Jamie that's what I'm hearing from people that read the comments. Folks, relax. We had to bang this together in a month because we moved here. Like, literally, from the time I was saying, maybe I should move to Austin to we're in Austin in studio,

it was like two months? Less. Less. I think it was six weeks. Six weeks. So all this was created. Shout out to Matt Alvarez. All this I think it was six weeks. Six weeks. So all this was created. Shout out to Matt Alvarez. All this was created in like two weeks.

So if you think it sucks, that's okay. I like it. I think it's awesome. It's definitely weird. It's just a big shock from people that saw it. Like your brother was at the old studio. And the old studio was, you know, very conventional. It was like a curtain and a brick wall and the old studio was you know very conventional it's like a curtain and a brick wall and the american flag was like pretty pretty normal this is uh there's a big difference some

people are bad with change well you have this lovely uh asian uh that's ganesh ganesh that's right from india remover of obstacles yeah my daughter actually went to last year's high school in india i bought that in Thailand, actually. Oh, okay. Yeah, I bought it in Thailand and had it shipped over. So what did your daughter do in India? She did her last year's high school there. That's crazy.

Yeah. Why'd she do that? My oldest went to his last year's high school in Costa Rica. Loved it. Wow. And so she wanted to do something similar. And she went to this great school called Woodstock School, which is in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Had a great time. That's pretty cool. Yeah, pretty awesome. Did you visit her out there? We did, yeah, multiple times. That's got to be weird, too, to be the last two years of high school, 15 or 16 and 17, and just leave your family and be in another continent. But don't you remember being that age,

and you just wanted to have some independence and head out? Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I think. I'm so old. It's hard to look back when I'm 16. I mean, I have some vague memories. Well, if you're so old, I'm so old.

I think we're born the same year. 67? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're both old. Yeah, totally. Look at my hair it's all white well mine would be white too if i had it i have the side hairs are pretty white now

it's very disturbing now when it comes in i'm like whoa god damn just shaving all now and my face too i'll give them a lot of gray hairs on my face too it's like yeah they come in either black or white you know it's this mix father time doesn't give a fuck it's like sorry kid yeah for me it was actually lots of hair and it was brown and then i had my first kid and then overnight it went gray and then i had my second kid and it went white really yeah that's interesting so just just the lack of sleep stress yeah getting sick when you have a kid and yeah all of that yeah it gets you so what's in the tube there? It's a present for you.

Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, wow. What is this? Is this a bone? Is this a human bone? No. What animal is this?

So I'm a biologist, and I brought you a gift from my home state of Alaska. Can you figure out what it is? Well, first of all, it's fossilized. It is. You're right. I can tell because of the weight. Yes. Thousands of years old.

Yeah. And for people that don't, I had to try to explain this to one of my kids, that a fossil is not the actual bone. It's a representation of the bone that's been absorbed. It's been mineralized. Yes. Yeah. So I was trying to, she was like, wait, but it's a bone.

Yeah. Because they have a fossil at her school. And I was trying to say, see how that looks not like bone? Yeah. It's because it's not really bone. This is what the bone, the bone used to be there. And then this is the shape of the bone that's been mineralized. Yeah.

So I love fossils. I collect fossils. This is so heavy. Yeah. And I thought I'd bring you a fossil. Let me guess. I would say it's fairly thin, so I would say some sort of a horse or something or a cow or a deer?

No. I can give you a hint. Okay. So I got it on St. Lawrence Island. Jamie, any ideas? A bear? No. There are polar bears there, but there's no other bears.

But I got it on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea where I do a lot of work. And the people there are subsistence hunters. Oh, caribou. Not caribou, no. No? There are reindeer on the island that come from Siberia, but there's no caribou there. So they're subsistence hunters. They're marine hunters.

Oh, so it's like a seal. And it's not a seal, but you're close. Walrus? Walrus. Is it? Yeah. Oh, what part? The baculum.

Oh, baculum. If someone said, I hurt my baculum, I'd be like, shut up. You don't even know what you're talking about. It's not even a bone. So the baculum is a penis bone. Oh, Jesus, I'm holding a big old dick. I wanted to wait for him to say it. That's enormous.

I thought that's what it was. Wow. Imagine. All you fellows out there complaining. Look. Okay. Thank you, sir. Yeah.

Thanks for the big old walrus penis. Yeah. I was trying to think of what you might not already have. I definitely don't have that. Yeah. Look at that one. Whoa. That's crazy.

That'd be from an extinct walrus probably. I bet that's why it's extinct. All the ladies were like, get out of here with that. You're going to kill me. Well, thank you, Frank. I appreciate it, man. Of course. Thank you.

Thanks for having me on the show. My pleasure. Your book, The Chemical Age, touches on a lot of subjects that I find very fascinating, particularly pesticides. I'm consistently terrified of pesticides. I ran into a man once that I met on a ranch, and he had an artificial thigh bone. His femur had been replaced with a piece of metal, a metal bone. And he told me he got bone cancer from pesticides that he used on a golf course that got got into local water supply, and a bunch of people in that area got cancer.

And there was like some large-scale lawsuit against the – I don't know if it was against the chemical company or the golf course or both. But I remember thinking like, whoa, like, okay, I didn't even think of that. Like, of course, if you're going to have all that green grass, you have to do something about the weeds, you have to do something about the bugs. All that stuff is terrifying. When I was listening to your podcast, the Science History podcast, and your friend was interviewing you.

Who was it? Pete Myers. Pete Myers was interviewing you, and you were talking about the prevalence of these pesticides and chemicals that we use all over the world. And he said, I think his exact quote was, am I wrong in saying that there's a square centimeter of this planet that's not somehow or another polluted by humans and our chemicals?

And you said that's accurate. That's accurate. Yeah, it's amazing said that's accurate. That's accurate. Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it? That's insane. Yeah. And you think of, you've been to Alaska. Yeah. And you go to Alaska, it looks pristine, it's beautiful. And you think everything is perfectly clean. But in fact, even the most remote places in the world, like Alaska, are getting atmospherically deposited chemicals, including pesticides, that are used at lower latitude. And so there really isn't anywhere on the Earth that's not polluted, unfortunately. And you're explaining the way these chemicals get into the atmosphere and then get distributed all over the world akin to a still, like a whiskey or a moonshine still. Yeah, exactly.

If you go back and you look at an old still, the way it works, you would have a heat source, like a Bunsen burner, that's heating up a liquid. And that liquid volatizes. Some of it evaporates into a gas. And then that is connected via a glass tube to a glass ball that has cold water on it. And that whatever vaporizes from that heat is going to condense on that cold surface where the cold water is. So that's the basics of how you would make a distillery.

And the Earth works really in the same way. So the equator is the part of the Earth that's most directly facing the sun. It's getting the most intense solar radiation. So you have these contaminants like many pesticides, PCBs, a lot of other things that some portion of them will volatize. They'll become a gas. And they'll be in the atmosphere. They'll move in the atmosphere. And then they'll condense out of the atmosphere when it gets colder, so when it's wintertime. And it'll be a little higher in latitude. And the next summer, they'll volatize again, they'll evaporate again, and they'll move north again. It's called the grasshopper effect. And so over some number of years, they move their way north. When they get to the north

pole to the south pole, those are hemispheric sinks for these contaminants. It's cold year-round. And so the amount of deposition from the atmosphere is far greater than the amount of evaporation. And therefore, the poles have the highest concentrations of certain classes of these so-called persistent organic pollutants. They're the ones that are relatively light that can move through the atmosphere. As a result, and these are also fat-soluble, so they get into the food web. And as you go up each food trophic level, you end up with higher and higher concentrations. So the animals with the highest concentrations of these certain kinds of persistent organic pollutants on Earth are these high trophic level, long-lived animals in the Arctic, like the killer whale and the polar bear,

that'll have millions of times the background concentration of these contaminants. Things like DDT, mercury, a lot of other chemicals, a lot of pesticides, flame-retardant chemicals, and so on. Wow. So polar bears. So when they test these animals, so if the people in these areas eat these animals, are they at risk of being infected by these contaminants, or is it not at a level where it's going to harm them? No, it's a really sad case of environmental injustice because you have subsistence peoples, the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, that they're living off the marine environment. They're eating bowhead whale and walrus and ice seals and polar bear. And every single one of their meals, they're getting in the fat, in the rendered oil. They take the blubber and they

render oil, which goes onto all of their meals. Every single meal, they're getting hundreds of parts per billion of PCBs and pesticides and things like that. So it's just grossly unfair when you think about it, because they never used these chemicals. They didn't benefit economically from these chemicals. And yet they're subject to some of the highest concentrations in the world. And you were also saying that their breast milk is contaminated with it. Yeah, actually, the way this whole problem was discovered was in the 1980s, scientists in Canada wanted to understand breast milk contamination of women who lived in southern Canada, in the industrial and agricultural areas of Canada. And so they were thinking, where can we find a reference population of people who have no exposure to these chemicals?

So they decided to go to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada to look at the Inuit people that live there. And they were surprised to find that the women on Baffin Island, their breast milk contained 10 to 20 times higher concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs and mercury than the women who lived in the industrial areas where these chemicals were used. So that was the first kind of global alert that actually were poisoning the people, our people of the Arctic were poisoning them. And that's how the rights of indigenous people in the Arctic to live in a clean environment became part of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. There's representatives from these tribes who go

to the negotiations every time. It's because of this problem. It's called global distillation because of this fact that it's like a still, the way that it works. Now, we know this problem exists. Is there a solution that's on the table or a possible solution, a theoretical solution to try to extract that? Yeah, and actually the problem is kind of twofold. So we've talked about one aspect of it, which is this atmospheric transport of contaminants. But the other aspect of it is there are also thousands of locally contaminated sites in the Arctic. I do a lot of work on this, things like formerly used defense sites from the Cold War. So the military built thousands of these, U.S. military, Europe, Russian military. And these sites have terrible problems with contamination.

And typically when the military pulled out of them, they just left everything behind. We have sites we've worked in in Alaska where there's just fields of barrels, and you don't know what's in the barrels. And they're leaking, and you test it, and you find't know what's in the barrels, and they're leaking, and you test it, and you find there's all kinds of nasty things, flame retardants and pesticides and PCBs. So it's been there a long time. Been there for decades.

And unfortunately, these chemicals, many of them persist for decades. That's why they were so wonderful. PCBs were so wonderful because they were stable. They could last for decades. But that's also why they're so bad, because they're carcinogenic. They disrupt the hormone system. They cause a lot of different problems. So in terms of what can we do about it, the main thing is to not be using these chemicals and to be using, there's a field called green chemistry, which seeks to instead use safe chemicals in place of these toxic chemicals. But in terms of cleaning up, yeah, there's also things

to do to clean up. We're involved with that in some places, and it's an important thing to do, but we have to stop the problem even before it gets going. When did this problem start? When did human beings start using large-scale pesticides? So large-scale pesticide use started in the 1880s, and at that time, they were based on metals and metalloids, so naturally occurring toxic metals that would kill insects or kill fungal pests, things like that. And those were actually quite dangerous, things like lead and arsenic being used in these pesticides. They were dangerous because they ended up on the food. So you'd buy an apple, and if you didn't wash it well, you'd get a dose of lead poisoning.

That continued until about World War II. And in World War II, we made a dramatic shift from using these metal-based products to using synthetic organic compounds. So in World War II, we saw the origin of the organochlorine compounds and the organophosphate compounds. And those really became the basis for pesticide use then. And then they were broadcast all over the environment following World War II and until today. So in the 1880s, when they were using lead and they were using arsenic, what were they combating? Locusts? What were they trying to kill? So the very first commercial pesticide was actually a copper-based pesticide, and it was used in France to stop the mildew that was destroying the vineyards. And once it was found that it could destroy,

it was called a water mold, once it was found that it could destroy the water mold and save the vineyards, scientists realized you could also use it against the potato blight, which had caused the famine in Ireland in the 1840s and other famines around the world. So it became a very powerful tool to prevent famine. And, you know, one thing I like to look back on is you can think, why did people poison the world like this with these horrible things? But really, their motivations initially were quite positive. They were trying to stop famine.

Ireland had just been through this devastating famine. They were trying to stop infectious diseases that were vectored by insects, things like malaria and yellow fever. So the motivation was good, but unfortunately, the use for public health, instead of just using it for public health, we started using it in the house and for convenience for everything. It is really crazy when you think that the human species has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and it took till 1880 before we decided to fuck everything up with pesticides. Yeah. That's a long time.

Yeah, and we fuck things up pretty fast because now we have a world that is, like you said, anywhere you go in this world, you're going to find contaminated animals. You go to Antarctica and you measure pesticides in penguins and their eggs, and you'll find very high concentrations. And are they seeing health effects of the Inuit people and the people that eat these animals? Is it having a detrimental effect on them? It does. And in fact, the cancer rates are quite high among the people who are subsistence hunters in the Arctic. And that's really how I got involved with this kind of work is that people reported very high cancer rates, also high rates of developmental disorders

that could be due to these chemicals disrupting development in the womb. And so there are groups that bring together teams of scientists to work on this. I was brought in as an ecotoxicologist to work on some aspects of this. But yeah, there's quite a work on some aspects of this. But yeah, there's quite a few health problems associated with this.

And are these subsistence hunters, are they free of all the other problems that many Inuit folks have in terms of like cigarettes and alcohol and a lot of people that have been introduced to some of the vices of the Western world? No, and it's the same kind of problems also with these communities in Alaska. There's high tobacco use and a lot of problems with alcohol. How do they parse whether or not it's a contributing factor, you think? It's a contributing factor, and it's very hard to parse it out. And actually, this is the justification the government often uses to say, well, it's not the contaminants from this military site that's causing the problem. They'll say, look, the cancer rates are no higher in this village that's next to the military site than they are in this village that's away from the military site.

But, you know, you can't actually solve the problem with epidemiology. We're talking about tiny communities. It might be the villages I work in typically are no more than 800 people. Oh, wow. And so how can you do a proper study of a rare health effect when you have a small population? So I'm sure it's contributing to the health problems. And unfortunately, people use the fact that there are these other issues that cause health problems like smoking in order to justify not doing anything about the pollution.

And so when you go to these villages, is it uniform that most of them are using cigarettes and alcohol? So it's not uniform. So in Alaska, actually, most of the villages are legally dry. And so it's illegal to have alcohol. It's illegal to bring in alcohol. Really? But many people do or they homebrew. Is this because the village has realized the problem with this in the community?

Yeah, exactly. And so they have passed their own laws. They have their sovereign governments. They've passed their own laws to make their villages dry. But there are still problems, of course, with alcohol and drugs, even in dry communities. So they pass these laws, they make them dry, but people sneak the stuff in anyway. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, when we fly into these villages in small airplanes, there's typically a state trooper searching through looking to see if anyone's bringing alcohol in. Cigarettes as well? No, cigarettes are allowed.

So is there anywhere you can study that has this issue with the pollutants but doesn't have the issue with alcoholism? And is there a village that's figured it out and has avoided the alcohol? So that's a great question. I don't know. I've not come across any communities that don't have multiple problems. It's difficult. And it's the same in other parts of the world where I've done work, like in Australia with Aboriginal communities. There's a whole bunch of things going on that are harmful to health, but the part that I'm focused on is the contribution of contaminants. Right. I just was wondering if there was a place where you could examine only the contaminants, if somehow or another these people had figured out how to be free of the Western vices.

It's a great question, right? It would be a great way to study it, but I don't know. Now, you were telling me before that you also work with some Native American tribes as well. Is this the same issue? So different kinds of contaminants. I'm doing work down on the Arizona-Mexico border. That's mostly on pesticide use, and we're working with migrant farm workers there. And so if you think about the pesticides that were common when we were kids and a little bit earlier, these organochlorine pesticides like DDT, they were pretty safe to handle. And the problem was that they were destroying wildlife, causing species to go

extinct. It's why the bald eagle almost went extinct, why the peregrine falcon almost went extinct. It was from DDT. And so countries, including the United States, phased those chemicals out. They were replaced by the organophosphate chemicals, pesticides. And these were developed by Nazi scientists during World War II. They're very similar to the Nazi nerve gas poisons like tabin and sarin. And those chemicals are incredibly toxic, but they break down faster in the environment. So we ended up doing a trade-off where the organochlorines would end up as residues on food, and consumers would end up with two unacceptable levels. Like if you go back into the 1960s, the average American had 12 parts per million DDT in their

body fat. And that's the toxic level of DDT. And that was the average. So really terrible consequences for health. So in order to prevent that, we switched to organophosphates. But then that caused another problem. Because then we're asking the farm workers, instead of using this relatively safe chemical to use, to use something that's

quite dangerous. A lot of people get killed during application. And the farm workers are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They're typically migrants from Mexico or other parts of Latin America. They're coming up, they're working incredibly hard. They don't have the right protective equipment. And then they're spraying these chemicals that are incredibly poisonous. So I also work on that, on health effects of pesticides in the border region, both with migrant farm worker communities and with some of the tribes there. Now, are they absorbing this stuff through the respiratory system? Is it in their skin? Like, what is getting them sick? So it depends on the pesticides. Some pesticides like DDT, you actually get from

food. And if you go back and look at World War II photos where the army was spraying refugees and soldiers with DDT powder, that's actually pretty safe. You're not going to get DDT poison by having it on your skin. And they were doing this for what reason? To kill the body loss because uh lice transmit typhus and so to prevent epidemic typhus um during the war and after the war we used massive amounts of ddt to spray the people down spray the people down in fact the very first time a typhus epidemic was stopped in its tracks was in naples in december 1943 to february 1944 military conquered Naples. Neapolitans had been living in caverns by the tens of thousands under the city during the bombardment. And so, of course, if you're crowded and dirty and you're living in a cavern with thousands of other people,

there's going to be body lice, and that caused an outbreak of typhus. So the U.S. military set up these delousing stations where we literally sprayed the DDT powder on every single person in Naples and stopped typhus in its tracks, very first time. Before that, typhus had decided the outcome of more wars than any other factor. It is the companion of war. It's also, if you go back to the Irish potato famine, people don't really die of hunger when they're starving to death. They die of disease. So their immune system is compromised. And the Irish died, over a million Irish died during the famine from typhus and from relapsing

fever, both of which are vectored by the body loss. So that's why we're using DDT during the war. Typhus is actually something that they've discovered recently in Los Angeles in the homeless community. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was a big shock. It was a real stunner. People were terrified because, you know,

there's some of the areas in Skid Row that are literally thousands and thousands of people in these areas are homeless. I mean, it's the craziest scene you've ever seen. It's just tents and garbage, and it's horrific. And apparently some of the people have tested positive for typhus. It's a terrible one. And in some of the wars where typhus broke out, like in the Crimean war, the mortality rate could get to 70% of the people who were infected. So it makes COVID look like nothing. So the DDT that they're spraying these people with, they shielded their food somehow

or another, right? they're just spraying them physically with it yeah they actually weren't worried about shielding food back then but if you were sprayed down with ddt even if you had some food there that one exposure wouldn't be that big of a deal so the toxic levels of ddt coming from long-term exposure exactly yeah and so for wildlife too because it persists in the environment for for decades then that led to the poisoning of a lot of wildlife and when you're saying eagles so are the eagles getting it from the prey animals that are eating it yeah so top predators are the ones that get the highest concentrations because it's fat soluble and so it ends up getting passed from the prey to the

predator and you have an animal like an eagle that's a top predator, or a peregrine falcon, or polar bears. So a single polar bear will eat hundreds of seals. And each of those seals has eaten thousands of fish. And those fish have eaten thousands of small fish and zooplankton. So by the time you work your way up through that food web, you're at a million times the background concentration.

I had my blood tested once, and I tested high for arsenic. And I was like, oh, my God, somebody's trying to kill me. And the doctor was asking me questions about my diet, and I eat a lot of sardines. And I was eating, like, several cans of sardines a day. He's like, oh, well, that's it. I go, really?

He goes, yeah, cut those out and come back in a couple months. I cut it out, and there in a couple months. I cut it out and there was no arsenic. Wow. So I was getting arsenic. He goes like, it's not a level that's going to kill you. It's just, it's a little alarming to see that in your blood. And it was from the heavy metal poisoning in the ocean. So these sardines apparently live in a very polluted area of the ocean. Okay. Yeah. I'm surprised that you'd get arsenic from fish. Typically it's mercury that people get from fish. Yeah, and arsenic was actually one of the—it's a metalloid.

It's one of the metalloids that was used in fungicide, still is actually in many places. So you can also get it from agricultural use. And it's also in background levels, high in background levels in some places like Bangladesh, parts of Alaska, parts of Arizona, Navajo Nation, for example. So there's places in the world where the natural levels are unacceptably high, and then that's where you get in your drinking water. So people are usually exposed to arsenic through water. So these migrant workers, the DDT is safe for them to use and handle, but these other chemicals they're using now in place of DDT are not, and they're killing them. And we were getting to whether or not they're being

exposed to it through respiratory. That's right. Right. So some pesticides, like the organophosphates, you can take it directly through the skin. And so if they're out there and it's being aerial sprayed or they're spraying it themselves, they could get it through the skin, they can get it through breathing it in. And they're not protecting these people? They're not wearing gear or anything like that when they're spraying the crops? So they do now. But if you go back, say, 20 years, oftentimes they weren't. You may remember the protest movement led by Cesar Chavez in Southern California for the migrant farm workers and the great boycott in the 1980s. And what that was about was the spraying of these incredibly toxic chemicals without protective gear, without proper training,

and people are getting exposed to really high levels. But even today, if you're a farm worker with protective gear and you're in a place like I work in Yuma, Arizona, where there's agriculture all year round, and those people are getting exposed to aerial applications and handheld applications of pesticides all year round. So even if you have gear, you take off your gear, you go home to your family, you're right next to the spraying, you're still going to be breathing it in. It'll be on the clothing. It'll be in the food and the water. And so is there an alternative that's more expensive that's healthier?

Or is there just no way around this? Yeah, so there are a number of alternatives. So the one that most people talk about is integrated pest management. alternatives. So the one that most people talk about is integrated pest management. And with that kind of alternative, you use the least amount and the least toxic pesticide and only where it's necessary. So you're trying to completely minimize pesticide use and use things like spiders and birds and other insects that will... They bring in spiders? Yeah, that will eat the pest insects. insects that will... They bring in spiders? Yeah, that will eat the pest insects. So if you think about spraying down a field with a nasty pesticide where you kill all the arthropods, all the insects and the spiders and so on, you're not just killing the pest like the grasshopper that's eating the

food. You're also killing the insects that eat the grasshopper. You're killing the wasp that parasitizes the grasshopper. So you're losing that biological control. And so integrated pest management combines biological control of using animals to control the pest animals with minimal focused use of pesticides. What do you got there, Jamie? What is this? Conveniently on Twitter,

as of a couple hours ago, this is 10,000 ducks being released on a field in China for pest cleaning. Look at all those fuckers. Rice fields. Look at them go. That's a lot of ducks, man. Wow.

Just swarming. And they're almost like they know where they're going. They're all following each other. Look how crazy that is. That has, oh, I know this is not your field of study, or maybe you know something about it, but it's fascinating to me how birds move in unison. Even ducks on the ground,

they move the way these big, massive clouds of birds move in the sky. Look how they move. Yeah, and it's like fish, same thing. And so what's apparently happening with schooling or this kind of behavior is where do you not want to be if you're in a school of fish? Where's the worst place to be? On the outside.

On the outside, right? That's where the shark's going to get you. Everyone's trying to get to the middle at all times. And so that causes the whole thing to be this boiling mess where all the animals are trying to get to the center and it makes it look coordinated. But really it's just everyone's trying to get away from the edge. Is that the same thing with birds when they're flying around those beautiful clouds? Well, if it's a massive flock of birds,

like you see with starlings where you have thousands of them, but it's different with things like geese that are migrating or cranes that are migrating where they're going for that aerodynamic position in the group. So the V that you see. And they're responding to something magnetic, right? that aerodynamic position in the group. So the V that you see. Yeah. And they're responding to something magnetic, right? They're using a variety of things.

So they do sense the Earth's magnetic field. That's part of it. But they also use landmarks. Some animals use polarization of the sun. Like if you look at honeybees, how do honeybees communicate and navigate about where their food is. It's remarkable. It was discovered by a guy named Von Frisch. He won the Nobel Prize for this along with Nico Timbergen and Conrad Lorenz.

They were the only people to ever win the Nobel Prize in something to do with animal behavior. And what Von Frisch found is that honeybees, when they go out, the workers are foraging. They're trying to find a good nectar source. So they find some good flowers that come back to the hive, and they then communicate where that food is with something called the waggle dance. But it's remarkable because it's kind of an abstract language. They do the dance on the vertical honeycomb, and they transpose the angle from where you have to fly relative to the sun to the vertical honeycomb. So they position, they act like the sun is completely vertically above the honeycomb. And let's say they had to fly 10 degrees to the right of the sun to get to the flower.

Then they dance 10 degrees to the right of the vertical of the honeycomb. And they can dance for hours. But of course, the sun is moving, but they move their dance to coordinate with where the sun would be. They know where the sun would be internally in their brain, and they transpose their dance for that. But they don't just communicate the angle to fly. They also communicate how far to fly. And it's really about how much energy you need to fly. Because if there's a headwind, it takes more energy. And if there's a tailwind, it takes less energy. So the intensity of the waggle dance tells the other bees how much energy you need to fly there. And then when the workers leave the hive, they know the angle to go and they know how much energy to expend to get there. But bees can also navigate by polarized light.

So if the sun is completely covered up with clouds, they still know where the sun is by the polarization of light. They still do the waggle dance based on that. And they can also navigate by landmarks. And the landmarks actually will take precedence. So you can screw them up. You can have a landmark out there, and then they do the waggle dance, and then you move the landmark. When they come out, they'll follow the landmark and go to the wrong place.

Wow. So they fucked with the bees to find out whether or not they could do that. Yeah. Wow. That is so amazing. It's so fascinating to me how insects have this sort of collective intelligence. My friend Lex Friedman was on the other day, and we were talking about ants and about how amazing it is that ants collectively have some sort of intelligence, and it allows them to make these, I'm sure you've seen these gigantic leafcutter ant villages.

Yeah, I've studied them a little bit when I was in school. We did a course in tropical ecology in Costa Rica, and you can have a single leafcutter ant colony with 7 million individuals, and they're acting as one. And they can defoliate an entire rainforest tree in a couple of hours. But we don't know why. We don't know how. We have no idea how they're doing it, right? We don't know how they're thinking together collectively. We don't. And in fact, leafcutter ants are farmers. So you have one cast of ant that cuts the leaf pieces. There's another cast of ant that cuts it in tiny little pieces. And then there's other ants that then process those pieces and seed them with a fungus.

And then the fungus grows in this nest with 7 million ants, and it grows these little fruiting bodies. And that's all they eat. They eat the fruiting bodies from the fungus. That's their diet. So they're doing all that work of bringing leaves and flowers to tend this garden of fungus. And the fungus can only live with the ant, and the ant can only live with the fungus. They're farmers. They're farmers. I've seen the leafcutter ants hot when they take it and they fill it with concrete, and they show that there's areas that they have that are specifically designed to ferment the leaves. Like have a vent yeah they've built a vent like how are they figuring this out they even have refuse pits so you can find an exit where they've taken the processed food and fungus and they they refuse it they have a landfill they make so

yeah like how and and we just kind of are like we don't know, we shrug our shoulders science does not have the ability currently to reach into their little brains and figure out what's going on, it might not be brains it might be pheromones, it might be a variety of different things

we know some things, we know how they communicate with pheromones how they lay down scents also the ants, the bees and the wasps they all belong to a group called the hymenoptera. And they're a really interesting group because the females are diploid, like humans. They have two copies of every chromosome. The males are haploid. The males only have one copy of a chromosome. So the way that you make a male is a female produces an unfertilized egg. And the workers are all females. So you look in a honeybee colony, an ant colony, all the workers are female. They only make a male when it's time to reproduce. And so almost all the workers,

they're all sterile. They don't have their own babies, right? It's only the queen that has babies. When they want to make a queen, they provide special nutrition to make a queen. And so then the question is, why would these workers work their whole lives when they're not having their own babies, right? They're not making their own offspring. And part of the answer is they're actually more related to their siblings than they would be to their own offspring. And that's because if they have their own offspring, they're related by 50%, right? They're only going to send down half of their chromosomes. But the queen, who then has siblings of that worker, is sending down

half of her genes, which are in common with each of the workers. But the male who fertilizes those to make another worker, he only has one set of genes. So the workers are actually related to each other by three quarters, but they're only related to their own offspring by a half. And therefore, because all of the genes are in common through the father, half the genes are in common through the mother. We're lucky they're little. Imagine if they were the size of horses. Yeah, and they can't be because exoskeleton can't handle that kind of body size.

So that's why ants exist. But if we had a different gravity like Starship Troopers, remember? I mean, I think they're some of the most complex and amazing life forms on this planet. And it's just so weird that we know so little about particularly ants, like how they're communicating and how they're figuring out how to do this uniformly. Like leafcutter ants that are nowhere near, it's not like one colony figured it out and the dad told the son, the son told the daughter. No, they're far away from each other and they have the same methods. Yeah. Yeah. In a leafcutter ant colony, it'll stretch a huge distance through the rainforest. They make these paths. You can easily find a colony because they clear all the vegetation from their path. And the path will be several inches wide and it's working its way to whatever

tree they're working on and back. You see these columns of millions of these ants marching along with flowers or leaves and that poor tree is naked. Well, and there's another weird one that happens when some of them get infected with cordyceps mushrooms. It's different ants, but I think it's in the Amazon, where they realize that this ant is infected with these mushrooms. So they take it far out of town so that when it explodes and blows spores up in the air, they're not there. That's awesome. They figure it out. Yeah.

Like they know, oh up mike got the zombie and so this this have you seen those mushrooms when they grow inside the ant's body no oh it's fascinating they literally spring forth out of the ant's body like a leaf like a tree like look at that that is that's a dead ant that has this cordyceps mushroom it There's many types of cordyceps mushrooms, but some cordyceps mushrooms, they grow on caterpillars, and they're actually beneficial for humans for physical endurance. They optimize oxygen absorption. My company, Onnit, actually, we sell a product called Shroom Tech

that is a cordyceps mushroom-based product that has B12 and other adaptogens in it, but it's a great workout supplement, and it's based on the cordyceps mushroom, but it's not the same cordyceps mushroom. Go back to that again, Jamie? That looks worse than aliens. Yeah, it's crazy. And the way we get it,

they farm it off of caterpillars, which is crazy. And the way they found this is high-alt altitude herding populations were noticing that their cattle were eating these mushrooms and they were more active. And so then they're like, well, let's try it. And they started eating them.

But these weirdos, they grow inside these ants' bodies and then they explode and they spray the spores and they infect more ants. But it kills the ant and then look at that one in the upper middle jamie look at that so that's just all these little arms of this cordyceps mushroom growing out of this ant's body yeah and it's an awesome question how do they know that yeah yeah how do they know how do they know that this is going to happen like oh bob's got the zombie fungus we got to get him out of town and they know? How do they know that this is going to happen? Like, oh, Bob's got the zombie fungus.

We've got to get him out of town. And they'll take his body. They drag the other ant's body way away. And then they leave it there. And then, poof, it'll blow. Yeah, if I remember correctly, Sigourney Weaver didn't know that those things were going to pop out of people when she got to the spaceship, right? No, she didn't. And these ants know.

Yes. Is this a video of it? Yeah. I can't play this online this is from our planet on Netflix it has a little piece on it see they get infected and then these things grow they do a time lapse video of it

our planet fungus and it's a clip from Netflix so these spores grow in this time lapse and you get a chance to see how this parasitic fungus infects and it's a murderous fungus i mean it killed the ant and then it affects his little body and grows out and i guess it's just hoping there's other ants nearby so it can get them like look how crazy that is yeah and typically there would be other ants nearby because they're all social. Look how wild that is, how it's growing out of the ant's corpse.

And see how it's just, they're starting to spray out into the air. And these spores will then infect the other ants. It's really nuts. But it's so cool, too. The variety, the biological variety of life on this planet, the variety, the biological variety of life on this planet, there's not enough time in your life to really even consider it all because there's so many different varieties of it, and it's all so complex and so puzzling.

If you think that all this somehow or another through natural selection and random mutation became that, and this weird relationship with the fungus and the ants i'm like yeah the amazing thing is we know very little about small and microscopic life and so for example there's something like 10 000 species of microbial fungi and things that you that are described and scientifically named but you can find 5 000,000 unknown species in a CC of soil. Really? Unknown? Unknown.

Just, you know, people will sequence them to figure out, we don't know what this is yet. You look at insects, and here at insects, you would think we would know all the insects. But when scientists go down to the rainforest, they'll set up a net under a rainforest tree, fumigate it to kill the insects, you would think we would know all the insects. But when scientists go down to the rainforest, they'll set up a net under a rainforest tree, fumigate it to kill the insects, collect all the insects that fall out. And a lot of times, 30, 40% of the insects are new to science. So, you know, we know most of the mammals, we know most of the birds. We're down to maybe a

new mammal discovery every year or two, a new bird every year or two. But you get to, and there's not that many species of them. There's about 4,600, 4,700 species of mammals. There's 500,000 species of beetles. Whoa. So there's more beetles than all vertebrates combined by a long shot. That's crazy. It's such a weird animal too.

Beatles. Again, if it was huge, we would be in real trouble. Yeah. Yeah. We'd be running. The Amazon is such a,

well, any of the rainforests are so fascinating in that they do have this insanely dense, um, population of life. I have a friend who went to Guyana and he stayed in the rainforest for a couple of weeks

and filming this, my friend Steve Rinello, this television show, Meat Eater, on Netflix. And one of the things that he said, the craziest part that was,

you know, really surprising was how loud the jungle is at night. He's like, you'd think like at nighttime, you go to sleep, it's going to be quiet, like the forest. He goes, it's night. He's like, you'd think at nighttime, you go to sleep, it's going to be quiet, like the forest.

He goes, it's screaming. It's just bugs and birds and monkeys and all these nocturnal creatures. It's just deafening. It's all around. There's all this noise. Yeah, so it starts at night with the insects. It can be incredibly loud. If you're there when the cicadas are out, and oftentimes they're emerging on these

prime number years, so some years will be low, some years will be very high. It can be deafening. Like you can have to shout to hear each other when the cicadas are out. And then you get to hour, hour and a half before sunrise, and you start to get the howler monkeys going off, and they have their morning chorus. And then half an hour before sunrise, the birds are starting their dawn chorus. And then everything quiets down about an hour, hour and a half after sunrise, and it's pretty quiet until evening again. And it depends which rainforest you're in.

So if you're in Africa, same thing goes on, different species. So if you're in the Amazon, you're in Africa, same thing goes on, different species. So if you're in the Amazon, you're going to hear the howler monkeys in the morning. If you're in Africa, tropical Africa, you'll hear the colobus monkeys in the morning. God. What's a real bummer is that there's people that want to chop that shit down just to grow crops or make it for cattle graze. Yeah, it's particularly tragic because that's where most of the world's biodiversity is, is in these rainforests. They're the most valuable habitat

on earth in terms of supporting life. So it is awful. And also what's interesting is how many pharmaceutical drugs that can benefit people are derived from plants that they find in the rainforest. And they believe there's so many more to be discovered if we get there before they chop everything down. Yeah, and it's not just before we chop everything down, but before we lose the indigenous knowledge of what plants are good for what. You know, the shamans who know from thousands of years of practicing what's good for what, and a lot of that knowledge is already gone.

But if you look at it, most people don't realize how much of our medicine comes from plants. And if you look at Western medicine, which I think of all the medical traditions in the world, probably has the least drugs coming from plants, it's still about half of our drugs are derived from plant products. And you go to traditional Chinese medicine, it's almost all of it. You go to traditional Indian medicine, it's almost all of it. You go to traditional Indian medicine, it's almost all of it. So, yeah, there's an incredible knowledge base and an incredible diversity of species that we have to protect for our future.

We have no idea what drugs might be incredibly valuable in the future from the rainforest. It's so interesting, too, if you talk to people about where drugs come from. Like, where do pharmaceutical drugs come from? They think it's a laboratory. Most people do, right? If you say, well, they come from plants, like, get out of here, hippie.

Yeah, and it may be a lab now, but originally it was synthesized from, it was extracted from a plant and then synthesized. Some of them you can't synthesize. It can only come from plants. Some of them can be synthesized and then the lab, but still it had to come from a plant to begin with. Now, when they're extracting this stuff and they're turning these into pharmaceutical drugs,

what is the impact that that has on the area? Is there a danger when they find something that they can use and extract as a drug? How do they parse that out? How do they find this when they have a spot where this particular plant grows, do they just take it, extract it, and then use it to make pharmaceutical drugs in a compounding pharmacy or through some scientific method? What happens to all the other plants that are in those areas, and is there a risk that as they're extracting the plants they use to make these pharmaceuticals

that they're screwing up the whole ecosystem of this area and there might be other plants that can do different things that they're now dooming to death because they're pulling out, they're focusing on this one drug that's really good for arthritis or whatever? Yeah, there's a lot there. What I'm getting at is we're monkeying with these environments. And so the most efficient way to find drugs in the rainforest would be to find what the locals use, what plants do they use for different things.

And there's probably a good chance that that works. And then once that's done, unfortunately, the history has been that pharmaceutical companies then take those plants back to the lab, and then that's the end of the story for the locals. And really, that resource is coming from them. They should get some economic benefit from those plants being derived. There are some small companies that are trying to do this now. They're trying to feed money back to the communities where they come from.

But if you want people to protect the rainforest, they have to have an economic incentive to do so. And one of those incentives can be around pharmaceuticals. I used to work in a rainforest in western Kenya, and there were many problems associated with people girdling trees because a lot of the medicines come from the bark. Girdling? So they would cut the bark completely around the tree within reach. All the bark they could reach, they would cut out. And then you have this 500-year-old tree that dies

because it doesn't have the bark anymore, which it needs for moving nutrients around. So yeah, it can, of course, damage the forest. But I think one of the most important things is not just taking that resource in a responsible way for the environment, but also in a responsible way for the people who live there who made these discoveries over thousands of years. Yeah, so how do you incentivize pharmaceutical companies to bring in these folks that live in this area and incorporate them like and and actually include them in the profits like how do you because if they don't have to do it especially when you're you're going to a place like the amazon which is notorious for them taking advantage of the indigenous people and uh you know having these horrific abusive relationships i'm sure you're aware of the guy who got murdered in the Amazon just the other day. He got shot by this tribe, and he was actually one of the people that's trying to protect

these uncontacted tribes and just leave them alone. And unfortunately, it's hard for them to recognize whether or not this is a guy that's there for the oil companies or the cattle companies because they've had these horrific relationships with these companies that are trying to exploit them and their resources. And so they shot this guy and killed him with an arrow. Yeah. And usually it's the other way around. Usually it's the gold miners who are killing the environmentalists. And so I don't know the answer to your question because I don't know how to motivate businesses to do the right thing. I think we have a long history on this planet of businesses doing the wrong thing when they get the power and not thinking responsibly

about how to do what they're doing sustainably. And also, I would worry that, I mean, I don't know if this is a good worry or if I'm being ridiculous, but that if they did hit some sort of a windfall, if they found some area of the Amazon where they have this plant that you can make pharmaceutical drugs out of and it's incredibly valuable, and so there's an enormous amount of profit for this village,

you don't want a situation like you have in these Native American communities where a tribe allows a casino to come in and then it sort of bastardizes what the reservation used to be or the tribe used to be. Now you have all these people running around driving Mercedes and making all this money off of people gambling, but the original way of life is gone. Now, obviously with Native Americans, there's a lot more complicated problems that go way

back for the genocide, the fact that they were taken over by the settlers and all the treaties that were broken and all the various injustices that were done to them then on top of that you've got this whole weird casino culture it would be like i don't want to live in a subsistence jungle tribe in the middle of the Amazon, but that's how they live and they love it and they thrive that way and that's the only life they've ever known. If we all of a sudden gave them money and you go back and now they're wearing Under Armour t-shirts and they have iPads and they're partying and playing music and they have internet connections and their way of life is gone. The argument is, is that good or is that bad?

Is that progress? I don't know. I don't want to live in a hut. But I think it's awesome that there's people that live off the land the way they've lived for thousands and thousands of years. When you see those photos of those uncontacted tribes, there's one incredible photo of these folks that are pointing their bows and arrows at, it was either a drone or a helicopter is taking photos.

And I'm like, wow, what a weird convergence of the past and the present. And how does this play out? Like, would it be good if they were educated about modern electronics and medicine and the internet and all these different or would it be better if you leave them alone like it's it's a it's a conundrum is that the photo yeah look at that god damn that's cool i mean this dude has a big fistful of arrows there's a couple of them and he's uh and that's the one that's the one that i've seen before that one where these people are all they all have body paint on and i mean there's something really wild about that but would it be better if they got medicine would it be

better if they got i mean i don't know i don't yeah i i think that communities have to decide for themselves right what they want and they don know. They don't know the consequences of bringing in the Western world into their way of life. It's cool that you can see that still. Yeah, it is cool. I think part of the answer, though, is can the technology be integrated in a way that fits with the culture, and can they make it part of their culture? But isn't it a slippery slope?

Maybe, maybe not. Like, if you were living on a reservation, wouldn't you still love to have your Porsche? But that's a reservation. See, the reservation is in America, and they're well aware of what's going on and what happened to them. And it's so much more complicated.

Whereas this is, they're isolated. I mean, there's many of these tribes that really don't, they're not aware. Yeah, like that one in the island off India where the, that American missionary. North Sentinel Island. Yeah. Yeah. I have a whole bit in my act about that fella. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a really weird one because they actually welcomed people before that. There's, I think the guy's name is Commander Maurice Vidal Portman. He was this English explorer slash pervert who would go to these islands and dress these guys up and take pictures with them and do all kinds of weird shit. And weird sexual stuff, too, like measuring their penises and their balls. There he is. And so he traveled around. There he is right there.

Look at that guy. Looks like a little freak. He got a lot of people sick and kidnapped some folks. And there was a lot. And they wound up getting rid of him. And now I think they probably have some stories that they passed down about what happens when white people show up in boats so when that poor fuck got out trying to bring Bibles you know they probably had this story about white

people showing up in boats that ruin your life yeah and it's probably a part of their history and their lore and their you know their their legends that they passed down yeah so so you can certainly understand why they wouldn't want anyone coming in anymore well yeah and there's only they think there's only like 39 of these folks left they're the direct descendants of people who left africa 60 000 years ago wow yeah it's crazy so it's there's not many of them and they don't even know if they they use fire like there's no evidence that they're they're using fire they have some metal that they got from a boat that sank and uh they had they did attack another boat there was an instance of a boat being uh grounded and uh they got rescued

just in time when the north sentinel people were making their way to the boat they extracted them and got them out of there and they think that from that boat, they made some knives and some various things. There's a guy named, his Twitter name is Respectable Lawyer. And he has a great chunk, like a Twitter thread, on Maurice Vidal Portman in North Sentinel Island. And he studied it for years. So he's got a really in-depth depiction. There it is right there, Respectable Law. I'm sorry. Respectable Lawyer is the name, but Respectable Law is his handle. It's an awesome little thread, though, if you get a chance to. There it is, Maurice Vidal Portman. Big thread about this creep and some facts from this gentleman's

decade-long obsession with the island and you think about just during our lifetimes when we were kids see the picture though go to that go to that back look at the picture in the upper left hand corner that's the kind of shit he did with these guys he had them pose in these weird outfits and weird homoerotic stuff the guy was a Yeah. So think back to when we were kids, there were lots of people that were still not contacted or were still living a traditional life. Now there's barely any, right? It's a huge story if you find a small group in the Amazon that have not been contacted yet. So things have changed incredibly fast. And I don't think we know what

that means for people yet. It's just all happened so fast. It's a bummer. And it's also confusing because I could see it both ways. I could see it like, wouldn't it be better if they got education? And wouldn't it be better if they got medicine? And wouldn't it be better if you gave them iPads filled up with porn? Like, not really. But wouldn't it be better if they advanced? If you didn't have three quarters of the kids die

as infants and right yeah all the stuff that goes along with these sort of nomadic tribal people yeah it's uh but it's also cool to see like when you see those guys with the painted bodies pointing the bows and arrows like those folks are probably living exactly the same way people 10,000 years ago lived it seems like they don't have any metal it seems like they're using the natural materials to make their bows and arrows and they're they're covering themselves with pigments that they make from plants it was really fascinating yeah but i don't want to live like that yeah right so what's the answer yeah i don't know you're you're kind of reminding me of our discussion

earlier about the indigenous people in the Arctic. And when European explorers first got to Greenland and Baffin Island and places like that, the locals basically didn't have any heart disease because their marine diet was so protective of the heart. All of these omega-3 fatty acids, all of the wonderful things you get from fish. And so here they had one of the heart, all of these omega-3 fatty acids, all of the wonderful things you get from fish. And so here they had one of the healthiest diets in the world, and then now it still has those healthy elements, but it also has unhealthy elements because of the way that we've polluted the world. So it's kind of the same sort of change where things are dramatically different than they were not very long ago. It's crazy that we give them a double whammy too, right?

They get the pesticides and then they get all our vices as well. And the Native Americans, same thing in terms of the vices. You know, it's such a, it's a bummer. It's really, when you think about alcoholism amongst Native American populations and also also you know inuits uh eskimos there's so many different folks that have problems with all these things that we've brought to them you know it's uh and it ruins our understanding of their health because like as you're saying like the low instances of heart disease and like it's that was confusing to

people because like wait a minute these folks don't eat any vegetables. Yeah. This is kind of incredible. Very few diseases, no cancer, no heart disease. Yeah, so they do eat greens traditionally. How do they get it? Just in the summer. So there's a short summer season they collect plants,

and they collect also aquatic vegetation in the intertidal zone. And then they save that throughout the year. But essentially, you're right, they're eating very little in the way of vegetation compared to what we normally eat, right, a salad or whatever, almost their entire diet is coming from the ocean. Yeah, it is pretty amazing. You were also in your book and in the that podcast you guys brought up fritz hobber and uh the he's a guy that i've talked about on this podcast multiple times because uh i listened to a radio lab podcast where they it was i think the podcast was called uh good and evil uh but it was basically highlighting people that have done amazing things but also awful things and he's

like literally one of the best examples because he was being he was going to be awarded the nobel prize for this method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere at the same time he was wanted for crimes against humanity that's right which is prettykers. In fact, he had the only Nobel Prize in the sciences ever contested. There were French scientists who refused to accept a Nobel Prize that year because he was getting the Nobel Prize. So explain why for people that... So the backstory of this is that the two greatest physical chemists in the world before World War I were Fritz Haber and Walter Nernst, both in Germany.

And Germany had the best chemistry in the world, the best physics in the world, the best biology in the world. It was the highlight of science around the world. And Haber and Nernst were racing each other to see who could be the first one to extract usable amounts of nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer, to make ammonium. And they were playing around with incredibly high pressures, incredibly high temperatures, and Haber got there first. And so he figured out how to do this, and that really averted world hunger, because before nitrogen could be extracted from the air, the air is 80% nitrogen.

nitrogen could be extracted from the air. The air is 80% nitrogen. So before we could pull that out of the air, fertilizers came mostly from caliche deposits in northern Chile. They had to be the old bird droppings and things that had to be, that were accumulated over millions of years, had to be shipped to wherever you wanted to do your farming. And also even people, they would use remnants from battlefields,

human corpses for fertilizing. So we were in a situation where the world was constantly hungry. People were starving every year because of a lack of food, and Haber solved that problem. So that initiated the Green Revolution, the mining of nitrogen from the air, the making of artificial fertilizers. And so that was done a few years before World War I. And when World War I broke out, the Kaiser first assigned Nernst to develop chemical weapons for the German military, and he failed. He was unable to make effective chemical weapons. We don't know whether he was unable because he was one of the two greatest chemists in the world. It seems unlikely to me that he couldn't figure it out,

or whether he just didn't want to do it, and so he purposely failed. So when he failed, Haber had just succeeded in his assignment for the German military of making an effective antifreeze for the German military vehicles that were operating in the winter fighting against Russia. And so they had this problem that had to be solved, and Haber solved it of making antifreeze. So the Kaiser assigned Haber the task of developing chemical weapons for the German military. And he started working with chlorine gas. And chlorine gas, because it's heavy, so if you release it, it'll stay near the ground. It's completely lethal. And started testing it.

And, in fact, his assistant was my great-grandfather, James Franck. And Franck and other scientists would put on gas masks, and they would expose themselves to these chemical weapons and figure out how effective the gas masks were, how effective the chemical was. They self-tested. They self-tested, and it was incredibly dangerous, as you can imagine. So through these tests, Haber figured out that you need a slight, slight breeze to deliver this weapon. If you could see grass bending in the wind, it was too strong of a wind.

And so then they went to Belgium, to the battlefront in Belgium, and waited until the wind was just right. And then they released the chlorine gas from cylinders, thousands of cylinders. Then this gas just started marching its way slowly towards the British lines. and it was mostly British colonial troops, Algerians and British soldiers. And at first, the British soldiers started firing their weapons into the gas. So the soldiers on the German lines said they'd never heard so much gunfire in the war as happened when that gas was coming to them. They tried to stop it by shooting machine guns and everything they had. Of course, that wouldn't stop it. And then some of the troops fled, some of the troops charged into the gas, and those died. So there were probably 10,000 people who died, soldiers who died immediately, and that tens of thousands of casualties. And that was the beginning of, that was the first use of a weapon of mass destruction. And it was the beginning of the modern use of chemical weapons in war.

And it's a horrific way to die too, right? Horrible way to die. And Haber actually, after that victory at, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, YRPES in Belgium, where that battle took place. After the victory there, he and his colleagues celebrated at their home. And his wife went outside with his service revolver and shot herself in the head, killed herself, in front of their son, Herman. So she was completely opposed to the development and use of chemical weapons. That was part of it. But also, she was a prominent

chemist herself. She gave it up to Mary Haber. And he was part of it. But also, she was a prominent chemist herself. She gave it up to Mary Haber. And he was also having a dalliance with his future wife. So there were lots of things going on, but she killed herself. He left that very night to deploy gas weapons on the Eastern Front against the Russians. And he left his 13-year-old son alone with his dead mom. With his dead mom, yep. And so then he fought using the same techniques on the Eastern Front. And then they developed mustard gas in his lab, which was much more lethal

than the chlorine-based, you know, the original chlorine gas. And after that, a whole series of other chemical weapons. So by the end of the war, both sides, about a quarter of the artillery had chemical weapons in it,

which is incredible, right? You're thinking about this battlefield that's just complete chaos, and a quarter of the weapons flying over those trenches was chemical. chemicals. There was this area that we were talking about once in the podcast that's the size of Paris and France that is uninhabitable because of munitions. I think it's from World War II. And there's so much unexploded munitions and so many bombs were dropped there and so much chemicals got released into the environment and in the atmosphere and into the soil and everything that it's uninhabitable. It's an enormous area. Yeah. So the first time that I went out to work in the Aleutians, you know, the chain of islands that go off of Alaska, I flew out there with a couple of other biologists. Everyone else on the plane

were munitions people. They were going out there to look for unexploded ordnance because the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands during World War II as the only American soil taken over by a foreign power. And that's how the war in the Aleutians happened. The reason why there's a road from the lower 48 to Alaska is the U.S. Army built the ALCAN, the Alaska Canadian Highway, to get the military up there to fight the Japanese. And so when I flew out there the Alcan, the Alaska Canadian Highway, to get the military up there to fight the Japanese. And so when I flew out there the first time, the military was giving the island back to the

Aleut tribe from whom they had taken it. And they had to find the unexploded ordnance, all these bombs and things that were left there. So we were told, look, when you're doing your biology out there, please let us know if you find the ordinance. We had GPSs with us because we were doing the science. We found a lot of unexploded ordinance and just marked everything with GPS, gave it to the military so they could go out and clean it. What's a lot? You come across bombs. You come across even things like the Rommel stakes, those pikes. They were set in the ground in the grass where you can't see them, those spikes that were set in the ground in the grass where you can't see them,

so that when forces come in, they get impaled on these things. And so the grass is tall there, and obviously we were worried about this. So you're going through, parting the grass. So they have these angled spikes to try to catch people walking through. Or the soldiers charging up from the beach, they would get impaled on these spikes. How many of them? Oh, there were a lot of those spikes, but you'd also find bombs not just from World War II, but then afterwards in the Cold War. This particular island, Adak, became a very important Navy site. And during World War II, Adak Island actually was the largest community in all of Alaska. There were 65,000 GIs stationed there.

Can you imagine out in the middle of the Aleutian chain? That's insane. That was a staging ground for the American armada that then attacked the Japanese fleet and fought to get the Japanese out of the Aleutians. So given that there were 65,000 soldiers there during the war and after the war, it was a very important Cold War military base. There's just incredible stuff there. We found these bunkers that you could go in. The military wasn't there anymore. You go in these bunkers.

They're flooded with water, and there's still beer sitting on the counter. There's still plates of food from decades ago that are just sitting there. Whoa. Oh, Jamie pulled up some photos of these bunkers. plates of food from decades ago that are just sitting there. Whoa. Oh, Jamie pulled up some photos of these bunkers. Yeah. Wow. That's wild.

So when you say you found a lot of unexploded, what is that? Abandoned police barracks? Abandoned police barracks. So when the tribe went back to this island, you have 120 people maybe go back, and they get to choose from housing that used to house 65,000 people. It was the farthest west McDonald's in the world. I just saw you go by. There it is. It's not there anymore, but there was a McDonald's there

that was the farthest west in the world because this island is just a couple of degrees from the hemisphere. Creepy as McDonald's. They set up a McDonald's out there for the guys yeah really wow yeah the the images of the no-go zone in france are insane like look at the size of those ordinances yeah um how when you say you found a lot of unexploded ordnance, like how much? Well, maybe a bomb or bomblet every hour or so as you're moving around. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Because there was a lot. They had trained out there for decades. It wasn't just from the war. It was from all the Cold War military training. So how many of those are at risk of actually accidentally going off? Any of them, but it's been cleaned up. So the military cleaned everything up, and as far as we know, there's no more unexploded ordnance as far as we know yeah air quotes yeah as opposed to

you go to places where mines are you know that's a million times more dangerous i have no idea but these things are on the surface you can see them can they use lidar to find mines and you know because that's one of the things they're using in a lot of these jungle environments to find lost civilizations. Isn't that cool? Amazing. Yeah, really cool. I'm fascinated by that.

Like the Mayan ruins that they find that way, which are completely underground and under the rainforest now. It's all been thrown over. And you go down to those places like in Belize, and you see this pristine rainforest. It's actually not a natural rainforest. If you look at what species of trees are there, a lot of them are species that the Mayans cultivated.

They wanted those trees there. So it's not the natural forest anymore. It's a human forest. It was made for humans to have the food and the medicine that they wanted. Yeah, that blew me away when I read that, that a lot of the rainforest is actually because people grew those plants specifically, and it created a rainforest. Yeah.

And then that rainforest engulfed their civilization. Yeah. Well, when you find, also they have these irrigation channels that they find with the LIDAR, when they realize, oh, look at this, there's grids. Yeah. Like these people who lived there, and they're not even sure who those people were what was the um the movie that came out a few years ago about the guy who found the gold city um it came it was a few years ago about a traveler from england from britain from Great Britain, that had come down to the Amazon,

and he found this lost tribe, and there was all this gold there, and I think the original guy had lost city of... Sounds like a Harrison Ford movie from a long time ago. It does. It sounds like it, but it's not. It's a fairly recent movie. What is it? Did I fuck it up? Is it the Dora movie? Did long time it does it sounds like it but it's not it's a fairly recent movie what is it did i fuck it up or a movie did you see it because you're just checking i did see that i saw it too i did see that is that movie yeah you're saying the poop hole dig dig dig

yeah i did see the mcconaughey was a movie called gold that was sort of like that no no not quite it was a another gentleman who was a not well known the lost city of something fucker it was based on a book and the book was based on the real uh or you know loosely based on the real life explorer who went down there and eventually was killed they think by cannibals or was cannibalized. Every time I'm typing in Lost City of Gold, it's just Doris. I got like, I fell down the wrong way. Oh, God, I can't believe I don't remember. You know what? I have it on my, let me look on my iTunes,

on my Apple, my movies that I kept. How plots remain in the Lost City of Gold? Is that it? No. Based on an 1887 novel out there knows what it is or there's also the city of gold so i know the least about popular culture of anyone you'll ever meet so that's amazing i'm happy for you this one also nope that's not it either what is that well it's from recently that's the thing i i feel like i know you're talking about but it's i bet you do what is that uh god damn it it was it was pretty decent

fuck i hate when this happens we're not gonna find it either and yeah uh here we go you got it z that's it i was gonna say world war z yeah i'm like but i know that's not right it's the lost city of z that's it that's the dude so this is actually kind of an interesting movie about this guy who goes down there and the idea is there was a city that existed and then by the time he had returned um i think the theory is that european explorers had given these people diseases and smallpox and the like and it wiped out like enormous swaths of the population almost instantly within you know 10 years there was nothing left and then the jungle just overtook whatever civilization they had and then when you know we're going back and looking at it through LIDAR,

that's what we're seeing. We're seeing hundreds of years later that there's very little evidence. And that's actually exactly what happened. When Europeans came over with slaves, they brought over typhus, they brought over yellow fever, they brought over malaria. There was one year in the 1500s when 2 million indigenous Mexicans died from typhus. And these were all brought over by Europeans. One year.

Slay trade. One year, 2 million people in Mexico, indigenous people, died from typhus. And these were people who were, you would say, they're epidemiologically naive to the disease. So people colonized the Americas from Asia, whatever, 20, 30,000, 40,000 years ago, and they hadn't experienced these diseases in that entire history. So they had no resistance to them. So when yellow fever came over, when influenza came over, when all of that, it just wiped out these populations. And so that's why Europeans were able to conquer the Americas so quickly, because the people were dead mostly before the battles could even take place. Most of the population had been wiped out. And this happens, you know, even more recently,

like St. Lawrence Island, where I do a lot of work in the Bering Sea. In the 1918 influenza epidemic, the Spanish flu epidemic, that wiped out most of the island. I think there were something around 18 villages. Now there's two. So that was only 100 years ago. Wow. Yeah. People are stunned when they find out that 90% of the Native Americans that were killed in this country were killed by disease. Yeah.

That's an amazing, horrific number. 90%. Imagine a disease that came. I mean, we're all very upset about COVID, rightly so, but COVID is a very small disease in comparison to what happened to the Native Americans. It's nothing compared to these other diseases. You look at the mortality rate of influenza coming through and killing 80, 90% of the people. It makes COVID look like nothing. How is malaria connected to colonialism?

So that's a really great question. Malaria has actually killed more people than any other disease in human history. And the origin of that is when, around 10,000 years ago, when people started agriculture, then people were clustered around water sources because you need water to grow crops. So you have a relatively dense population of people around water sources because you need water to grow crops so you have a relatively dense population of people around water sources the mosquito that vectors malaria is called anopheles which in greek means good for nothing and it was actually named before it was discovered to be the vector of malaria and so malaria has been a an epidemic proportion disease for humanity for about 10 000 years since the origin of agriculture.

Then as people moved around, the malaria moved with them. In around 1828, I think it was, two French chemists extracted quinine and cinchonine from the cinchona plant, which came from Peru. And the indigenous people of Peru had already been using this plant to treat what they called relapsing fever, which is malaria, a fever that comes and goes and comes and goes. And the first European to use it was the Spanish viceroy's wife was treated with this to cure her of malaria. That was in the 1500s. So Jesuits brought cinchona bark from Peru to Europe, but it took a couple of hundred years before these French scientists were able to extract two of the four active ingredients in the bark, which is quinine and cinchonine. And they then were able to use that to diagnose malaria and also to treat malaria. And once there

was a treatment available for malaria, then not much happened in terms of how it led to separation of people until it was discovered that Anopheles vectors malaria. So Ronald Ross made that discovery in India in the 1890s. Once that discovery was made, it was quickly realized that there's a disease reservoir. So all of these diseases have a reservoir. made, it was quickly realized that there's a disease reservoir. So all of these diseases have a reservoir. Typically, it's animals that carry them that can infect people, but also people who can infect other people. And some people don't get sick. Even with COVID, some people, maybe half, people don't get sick, and they serve as a reservoir for the disease. So once scientists realized that there's a reservoir for the disease, they actually

discovered in Africa that children act as a reservoir for malaria. So they get a more benign form of malaria, typically. And in sub-Saharan Africa, the people also have genetic resistance to malaria because many people are heterozygous for sickle cell genes. So they have one normal copy of the sickle cell gene and one mutation for the gene, which gives them resistance to malaria. So when the colonists realized that children were the reservoir for, native children were the reservoir for malaria, and there was a treatment for it, they segregated the European population, the colonists, from the

Africans. And they even destroyed indigenous huts that were too close to the European population, the colonists, from the Africans. And they even destroyed indigenous huts that were too close to the European colonist homes. And that was the origin of modern segregation, modern in the late 1800s, early 1900s, of segregation in Africa, in colonial Africa. It started with trying to separate the source of malaria, the African children, from the European colonists. Wow. But it also plays out in many other places. So even before it was known that mosquitoes vectored malaria, you can find cultural differences. You go to malarious regions where

there's mountains, and you'll find that the people who live in the mountains have a different language than the people who live in the valleys. And they have a different culture and they separate from each other. And the only time the people in the mountains would interact with the people in the valleys was in the non-malaria season. They wouldn't come down when there was malaria. So there you have a disease that's basically culturally separating these people from the mountains and from the valley. Also in America, it also entrenched slavery. So when the Europeans first colonized America, they first enslaved the indigenous population, and they had indentured servants who were Europeans. But both the Europeans and

the indigenous population were getting wiped out by these diseases. They didn't have resistance to them, to the yellow fever, the malaria, all of these other ones. And so when they started bringing over African slaves, black African slaves, these were people who had natural resistance to malaria because they had the sickle cell gene, and they also had acquired immunity to yellow fever because they typically would get it as a kid when it's less—the effect is less pronounced, and then they'd have resistance to it for the rest of less pronounced. And then they'd have resistance to it for the rest of their life. So the resistance of the African slaves to these diseases entrenched slavery,

because they were the valuable workers. So that really made this continent spiral down into slavery. It also led to the cultural separation between the North and the South, because in the South, there was much more malaria than in the north, in the United States. And so that meant that the working population there, the slaves, they were more valuable because they had the resistance to malaria and the yellow fever. And so it drove a lot of the cultural divide in this country. That's insane. I had no idea. I had no idea malaria was so prevalent in this country. I have a couple I had no idea. I had no idea malaria was so prevalent in this country. I have a couple of questions. First, going way back to extracting quinine and what was the other? Synchonine. How did they use that to diagnose? Right. So before that, nobody could

tell the difference between malaria and all the other febrile illnesses. Lots of illnesses cause fever. How do you know what illness it is if they're all causing a fever? You just can't tell. You could tell with yellow fever because people get yellow fever, they have a black vomit they make. And so that's why it's off. The disease is often called black vomit because of the vomit. But with malaria, you can't tell. And so you could tell once they had quinine and synchonine because they could treat someone with a fever. And if they recovered, it was malaria. If they didn't recover, it was a different febrile illness.

How did they figure that out? How did they figure out that these two extractions from plants, did they have an origin of how people figured out that that would treat malaria? So the origin actually is going back to what we discussed before. It was the indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes who were using this plant to treat febrile illnesses. How did they figure it out? You know, just like all the other shaman kind of medicinal treatments, it's over centuries. I don't know. Crazy.

Yeah. It's amazing when you think about it. I've spent time with shaman and rainforest, both in Africa and in Latin America, the real deal, you know, where they have thousands of different plants they use for things. And they know every single plant, they know every single treatment. I actually hired one when I was working in Kenya in 1992 to teach me the plants of the rainforest, because I had a translation book. I was working in a part of Western Kenya, the tribe is called the Luya tribe. And I had a translation book from their language to English. And so I had them teach me all the plants in their language, and then I could figure out what it was.

And that's how I was able to work on the plants that I was working on there. It's amazing that there's a lot of people that in the Western world, they're highly educated, would look at those people in terms of you know like what what their knowledge base is and kind of like dismiss it like they're shaman okay like what does that mean like what are they doing they're talking to trees arrogant isn't it yeah it is what it is when you think about the fact that they figured out somehow or another thousands of years ago to use these things to treat malaria. Now, the other question I had was, I did not know that malaria was that prevalent in the United States. And what did they do

to eliminate it? Right. So we couldn't eliminate malaria until it was discovered that the Anopheles mosquito is the vector for malaria. Once that happened, the very first eliminations actually took place in Egypt and in Cuba. So that was 1902, basically. And so the United States conquered Cuba in the Spanish-American War. And as we took over Cuba, many of our soldiers were getting yellow fever. So the United States military set up the Yellow Fever Commission of four scientists who went to Cuba. It was led by Walter Reed. And they very quickly figured out that Aedes aegypti, another species of mosquito, was the vector for yellow fever. Once they figured that out, there was a guy named Gorgas who was hired to solve this problem.

And what he did is they went through Havana and they broke open every pot that held water. water, because both Aedes aegypti and, which vectors yellow fever and chikungunya and what's the other one? There's another nasty tropical disease that's vectored by Aedes aegypti. Anyway, that mosquito and the Anopheles mosquito, they breed in stagnant water. So they started breaking open all of the containers of stagnant water. Anything that was too big, they screened. They treated with kerosene. In the space of a couple of months, they completely got rid of yellow fever from Havana, which had had yellow fever every single year and killed thousands of people every year. And they got rid of almost all the malaria, about 80% of the malaria, by getting rid of the breeding habitat. Once they accomplished that, Gorgas then moved over to the Panama Canal zone. So the French had tried to build the Panama Canal, but they had so much mortality from malaria and yellow fever that they gave up. And so the United

States bought the rights from the French. The French wanted to get out of there and get what they could out of it. We bought the rights from them. Gorgas went through, got rid of all the standing water to get rid of malaria, yellow fever, and that made it so that we could finish the construction of the canal. And then, of course, we backed these Panamanian rebels to steal Panama from Colombia because it was part of Colombia, create the new country of Panama so that we could have exclusive control of the canal zone. Once that was accomplished, this is all between 1902 and 1910, then we started eradicating these standing water sources in the United States. And by doing that and treating them with what are called calicocides, which are pesticides that kill larval mosquitoes. So through drainage and through using pesticides,

we got rid of malaria from this country. Well, if that was possible in America, then why do we hear all this talk about genetically modified mosquitoes and using that to treat malaria in Africa? Is it just the span of that, the scale of Africa is just too massive? No, the problem is that the mosquitoes very quickly evolve resistance to the chemicals that we use. that the mosquitoes very quickly evolve resistance to the chemicals that we use. So things like DDT was very effective for a few years, but then the mosquitoes evolved resistance and it's no longer effective against malaria.

Damn nature. And so in the United States, we were able through our infrastructure, through our ability to drain the water and to cover water and treat water, we were able to get rid of it. But not only the resistance, but also, like you're saying, the infrastructure is hard, and you have much more of it there. You go to Africa, it's the origin of malaria. There's far more malaria there. There's four different varieties. Some are more deadly than others. So it's a more difficult problem. It's still the number one killer of people as far as an infectious disease goes. And sickle cell anemia, which is prevalent in America with African Americans, comes from the resistance to malaria, right?

Yeah. So what happened is there's a— Tiffany Haddish taught me that, by the way. Okay, so there's a gene that relates to the shape of the hemoglobin and its ability to carry oxygen. And a mutation in that gene, in the sickle cell gene, it causes the... If you have two copies of that mutation,

one from mom, one from dad, it causes that you get this sickle shape. And those people are anemic and typically don't live. But if you are the heterozygote, if you have one sickle cell mutation and one normal, you have a normal ability to carry oxygen, but the parasite, it's a, it's a, it's a, now I'm having one of these brain freezes, the parasite that causes malaria is an amoeba-like parasite. It's not able to penetrate the hemoglobin if you have that gene. So these people are protected from malaria. They have the advantage of that. And so it was a mutation,

it was a random mutation that had this huge selective advantage for the people who lived in these malarious regions. Then those are the people that were brought over as slaves to the New World. And so, of course, they have their genetics they bring with them. And once there's no longer malaria here, it's not an advantage to have that gene because there's no malaria to get sick with. And if you're a heterozygote and you marry someone else who's a heterozygote, one quarter of your children will have sickle cell anemia. They'll have both of the mutations that leads to this pretty terrible anemia condition. How much of an issue is that today? Is that still a giant issue? So it's more common among African Americans, like you're saying, because it's a mutation

that arose in Africa. But it's relatively rare to have the disease because you have to have two people who each are carriers to have children together before you'll get someone with the disease. Relatively rare now in comparison to the past, is that what you're saying? It's relatively rare in this country because there's a lot of intermarriage, and a relatively rare mutation is just more common among African Americans than among other groups. And you could take whatever disease you would like. You'll find different ethnic groups have that disease.

Like I'm Jewish and we have a lot of Tay-Sachs disease among Jews, among French Canadians. What is that disease? Tay-Sachs. Yeah. It's a terrible disease that causes the kid to die when they're three or four years old. And it's caused by a single recessive mutation. And so if you have two carriers who have kids,

then a quarter of their kids will have that disease. And it's completely lethal. So it's relatively common among Amish, among Jews of European descent, and among French Canadians. And those are the main groups. But, you know, you could take whatever genetic disease you want. You'll find different ethnic groups have different frequencies of having that. And we have that allele in my family. We have that gene. We don't have anyone with the disease. But if you have that gene, your spouse has to get tested to see if they have it as well

so you know if you might have kids with it. That's a really tough call if you both have it, but you both love each other. Right. So then do you have kids or do you adopt kids? Right. So is there a cure for sickle cell anemia? Do they know how to stop that? So I don't know how they treat people with it. I know there's treatments for anemia, but I know the people who have the disease, they get quite sick. So I'm not, I don't know more about it. I grew up with a guy who had it and he died from it. It was a guy that I used to do martial arts with. It was a real bummer because he was just like really dynamic, just like super powerful, athletic guy. And then he

would get really sick and then he would come back and he'd be okay again. Then he'd get really sick. And then he would come back and he'd be okay again. Then he'd get really sick again. It was a reoccurring thing with him. When you're talking about eradicating malaria in the United States, how they did that, is it 100% eradicated or are there occasionally cases of malaria in America? No, you can still get cases because there's still a lot of malaria in Latin America. And so you can get these mosquitoes coming over that are carriers of it. Border crossers. Yeah, border crossers. And they can start, set up new breeding habitat, and then you have to treat it again. How often does this happen? You know, I don't know, but I've had to go on, I do a lot of work in the tropics. I've had to take the medicine that you take to prevent getting malaria a bunch of times. And even that medicine, the parasite evolves resistance to it so quickly. So, you know, we take one thing and you go back

six, seven years later, you have to take a different medicine because they're already... And some of the medicines make you go insane too. So there's... I mean, they can make you see people go insane. My friend Justin has gotten malaria several times. He's had it three times, actually. And one time he got it because he wasn't even in Africa. Malaria must have been dormant in his system somehow. He got really sick, and then from being really sick, got malaria again. Yeah, so it can recur.

It doesn't have to be a new infection. Yeah, he runs Fight for the Forgotten. It's a charity building wells for the pygmies. And so he takes regular trips to the Congo, and oftentimes he's there for months at a time and he's uh he's caught malaria multiple times there and he was taking this one medication in very high doses um and this is one of the medications that the military was having real problems with soldiers getting very sick from this medication and he was taking like many times higher doses than the soldiers were

getting sick. And he wound up getting really fucked up from that too. It was probably mefloquine. That was the one. Yeah. So I took that when I went to Africa in the early 90s. And a lot of people get vertigo from it. Some people get psychotic from it. For me, I just had strange dreams. That was what I noticed. It caused really bizarre dreams dreams my friend dave foley who was on news radio with me who's the nicest guy in the world like he couldn't be a sweeter guy was on that because he uh his family was going to africa and he had to meet them there and so he was taking this anti-malarial drug and uh i guess you're not supposed to drink when you're on that stuff either no one told me that yeah did you get fucked up from it too well we used to make these black

and tans there in the rainforest. You could get Guinness Stout in Kenya, and you can also get Tusker, this Kenyan light beer, so you could make black and tans out of that. And so did you do that while you were on Methlic? Yeah. And I'll tell you a funny story. We would do about one supply run a month out of the forest to get stuff. And it's a full day to get to the village and get what you want and get back. So we wanted to get beer. So we went into this village. And I went into the local shop and said, I'd like to buy a case of Guinness and a case of Tusker.

And the guy said, where are your bottles? I said, what are you talking about? He said, where are your bottles? You have to have bottles to turn in to get. So you have to turn in your old bottles to get the new beer. I was like, I don't have any bottles. He said, well, I can't sell you beer. I thought, well, this guy's an idiot.

So I went to the next shop and I said, I want to buy a case of Tusker and a case of Guinness. And he said, where are your bottles? Went through the whole thing again. I went to the third shop, same thing again. I was like, well, how does this start? Where do you get your first bottles? And so finally I realized there's got to be a solution to this. And they're all saying, no, there's nothing we can do.

So then I said, could I buy a case of bottles off of you, empty bottles of Tusker and a case of empty bottles of Guinness? And he was like, sure. So I bought these bottles and got them. I said, okay, I'd like to buy a case of Tusker and a case of Guinness. And, yeah, so that's how I was able to get the beer. It's amazing okay, I'd like to buy a case of Tusker and a case of Guinness. Yeah, so that's how I was able to get the beer. It's amazing that they didn't sort that out for you.

Yeah. They didn't say, you're just going to have to buy bottles first. No, it was impossible. You could not get beer. You have to inherit the bottles from your grandfather. So what was it like when you were taking the mefloquine and also drinking? Well, maybe that's why there were dreams. I don't know because I didn't know you weren't supposed to drink. You just told me this for the first time.

Well, I might be wrong. Maybe Dave was on another medication, but we were at this party. It's one of these weird press parties that they would have, these press junkets where the actress from the show would mingle with the press and people would be drinking alcohol and they would come by and just ask you questions. They would have tape recorders in your face. It's a really terrible idea, especially. But back then, this is pre-internet.

You can kind of get away with doing it. Not pre-internet, but pre-social media. The internet really hadn't been exploited to its full extent yet. And so some guy came over and asked Dave a question. He took his tape recorder and shoved it in his drink and told him to fuck off. Just unheard of Dave Foley behavior and was like yelling at the guy and i had to stand between him and the guy i had a real i'm like okay what is i don't i don't understand who are you so that's what neflican was doing to him he was like aggressive and like psychotic and i i had to literally stop him i don't know going to do it. I don't think he would do anything, but I didn't know.

It was at the point where I was like, okay, hey, sorry. Like, I'm breaking up these two. And then the next day he had no recollection of it. He's like, I don't remember what happened. He goes, I guess you're not supposed to drink when you're on this malaria medication. Yeah, or he just doesn't react well to it. Some people have weird behavior on it, and then they have to stop taking it. The dreams are supposed to be really insane, right?

Yeah, so that's what happened to me. I would just have these vivid, bizarre dreams. Like what kind? You know, I can never remember my dreams, but I remember them for seconds when I wake up, and then they're gone. But, you know, when you have a dream, and it feels so real, and then you wake up, and you're not sure where you are. Right. And it was that kind of thing, where every night it was just completely bizarre dreams. And that stuff is supposed to be toxic.

Like it lingers in your system, right? Yeah. So I was there for three months the first time and the second time two and a half months. And I was getting a little uncomfortable taking it that long. People take it for much longer who are. But on the other hand, you get, you're going to get malaria if you're there and you don't take something, that's the problem. And so I do the other things where mosquito repellent, where long sleeves, all of that,

but there's, it's just impossible to not get bitten by a mosquito. And so, so that's why you take the prophylactic. Do you guys use those? Um, James, we were just talking about that thermosel. Do you use those therm? James, we were just talking about that. Thermosel. Do you use those thermosels? I don't know what that is. Oh, it's really cool. It's great if you're in an area that has, like for camping,

if you're in an area that has a lot of mosquitoes. I don't know how bad it is for you, though. It's one of the things I wanted to ask you. We were actually talking about it just before because we were talking about doing podcasts outdoors, and Jamie was like, we're probably going to have a net to try to keep the mosquitoes out. And I'm like, what about a thermosel? But then I said, well, maybe ask Frank how bad this shit is for you.

And I've never even heard of it. Thermosels, it's a small device. And it is a lifesaver. Especially, I've used them in Alberta. Which Alberta, the mosquitoes know somehow or another they only have three months to live. And they fucking go ham. It's like Alaska. Yeah, exactly like Alaska.

And it's a device, and you have these little, like, sheets, like square sheets, and you slide these sheets. Here it goes. It's repellent altherin. Do you know what that is? No. Altherin? Altherin. It's a synthetic copy of

a natural pellet found in oh it's probably christine it's probably a pyrethroid yeah yeah it's comes from so so this one of the very first insecticide was derived from the chrysanthemum plant it's pyrethroids and um and so actually it it relates back to the World War II era we were talking about before, because there were two important things going on with preventing malaria before the advent of DDT. There were the chrysanthemum-derived pyrethroid insecticides. So these are naturally occurring from the flower. They're extracted from the flower. You can imagine it's labor-intensive and it's expensive.

And then there was a cinchona plantation. So you could grow cinchona trees, use the bark to make the quinine to treat yourself. 90% of the world's cinchona supply was on a single island and the Japanese took it over right after they invaded Pearl Harbor. So they then held basically the world's cinchona supply. There was a little bit in Vietnam that had started growing there. They took that over. And then the supply of quinine that was in storage, most of it was held in Amsterdam, and the Nazis seized that. So the Americans didn't have the plant anymore. They didn't have access to the plant or to the extracted drug product for treating malaria. And at the same time, there was labor unrest in Kenya.

And so the chrysanthemum crop from Kenya was basically non-existent at that time. So the U.S. Army prioritized, we need to make a synthetic version of quinine to treat for malaria. And we also need synthetic insecticides because the pyrethroids are not available anymore. So they ended up going through thousands of chemicals looking for the right thing. And they settled on a chemical the Germans had actually developed called atabrine. And the soldiers didn't like it because it caused what they called the atabrine tan. It would make you kind of yellow. And some people also went psychotic on it,

just like we're talking about with mefloquine. And then there was a rumor going around that it would make you impotent. A rumor? That's all it takes. Yeah. And so the soldiers, they wouldn't take it. Oh, boy. So the US Army, we were losing nine troops out of 10 to malaria in the first couple of years of the war in the South Pacific. Nine out of 10? Nine out of 10 to malaria in the first couple years of the war in the South Pacific. Nine out of 10? Nine out of 10 would be in the hospital with malaria. And so, you know, how can you fight a war? That's why we, the Bataan Death March, we lost that battle because our soldiers were sick with malaria. They were so sick that they were not allowed to leave their patrol duty unless their temperature was above 102 degrees because everybody was sick. And so

we tested these chemicals. We came up with atrobene. The soldiers wouldn't take it. So then the U.S. military decided, okay, we need a really good advertising campaign to convince soldiers to take it. The most effective one was actually developed by an Australian commander who took a couple of skulls and put them on top of a sign and said, these men didn't take their Atabrine. And that's what happens. But they also started saying, malaria will make you impotent. And that was what convinced people. So the U.S. Army recruited Dr. Seuss, Theodor Giesel, to make these. And you can find all... The real Dr. Seuss? Yeah, the real Dr. Seuss. The guy who wrote the books?

The guy who wrote the books. He made advertisements for an insecticide called the Flit Gun, which was based on these chrysanthemum products. And then when DDT came out, they incorporated DDT into that. You can find his ads online, these beautiful cartoons with the insecticide. But he also made the U.S. Army propaganda posters to get people to take their Atrobrine. Well, fine, that. No, you were.

Wow, that's crazy. I had no idea Dr. Seuss was involved in anything other than writing kids' books. Oh, yeah, he was. Wow, look at that. What this country needs is a good mental insecticide. Yeah, so if you Google Dr. Seuss and Flitgun there, you can start to see some of them there. Wow, the Flitgun.

And that one is before DDT was incorporated. He has such a unique style of drawing. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, what an imagination. Obviously, it must be his. I didn't know it was his illustrations as well. Oh, yeah. It must be.

I mean, that is so unique. Like that style of creature that he would draw. Yeah. When beasts like this can't stand one blast, how do you think a bug can last? When someone says, quick, Henry, the flit. Say it. Spray it.

Slay it. And then the posters would be, Anna, I think for Anopheles, was a mosquito that would suck your blood and give you the... Yeah, if you do... Wow, look at that. What a weird style of illustration that guy developed. Like, it's so recognizable.

Like, look at that. I mean yeah he was he was that's not him but somebody drew it in his style right oh look at that wow that's crazy that's really interesting um so these uh this chrysanthemum a derivative that they use for the thermosel. Do you think that stuff's bad for you? So it is toxic in the sense that it kills mosquitoes. And if you have too high of a dose, it can be bad for your health. So it depends on what kind of dosage they're using. It's less toxic than many other things. And it depends on whether you're using the natural version or the synthetic version. There's a synthetic version called permethrin, which is more toxic than the natural version so I'm not sure what they're using in that product but and it depends on the concentration that they're using

it's just a fine mist but boy mosquitoes fucking hate it yeah like what I was thinking is if we were outside here it goes al ala thrins are toxic to cats. Good. Fuck cats. That's the only thing I could find specifically about it. But it's probably in a low volume is what my guess would be based off of just... By the way, I actually love cats. I don't mean that. Just playing games, kids. But if we were outside and we were doing this podcast outside on this table and we had a

thermosel cooking right here, we'd be good. It wouldn't get us. You would literally be... It's like a halo. Mosquitoes, you would see them come in and go, oh, and good. It wouldn't get us. You would literally be, it's like a halo. Mosquitoes, you would see them come in and go, oh, and then they just take off. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah.

So that's going back to the origins of pesticides, right? Because the very first pesticides were from the chrysanthemum flower, tobacco. Tobacco? Tobacco. Tobacco is a good pesticide? Yeah. Really? Yeah.

In fact, there's a whole category of pesticides now that are artificial version of tobacco. They're called neonicotinoids. And they're the most used insecticide in the world now. Wow. So first, it was the things like DDT, the organochloric insecticides were the most used in the world up until they were banned in most of the world in the 1970s. And then the organophosphates became the most used insecticides in the world. Those weres. And then the organophosphates became the most used insecticides in the world. Those were the ones derived from the Nazi nerve gas weapons. And those reached their peak around 1999. They were the most used. And now it's the neonicotinoids, which are the synthetic version of nicotine. So nicotine is lethal if you have too much. It's highly toxic.

It's just the right amount in a cigarette, right? But if you have too much, it's lethal. It's highly toxic. It's just the right amount in a cigarette, right? But if you have too much, it's lethal. It's highly lethal to insects. And so how do they use it as an insecticide? Do they spray a mist of it? They spray it. So have you heard of colony collapse disorder? Yes. Yeah. So part of the reason why honeybee and bumblebee colonies are collapsing around the world is because of the neonicotinoids. They're highly toxic to bees. So they have their own environmental problems, but they're the most used insecticide in the world now. There's an issue with cell phones and bees as well, right?

I don't know anything about that. Does cell phone signals scramble them? I don't know. I don't know if it's speculative or what, but they believe that there's something about the particular frequency I don't know. Like we were talking about before, they're using the magnetic field. They're using polarized light. They're using so many different signals. Like you can take a homing pigeon and you can put it on a turntable and cover its head so it can't see anything and fly it from the United States to Europe. Let it go and it will fly right back to where it came from. So can you imagine being more confused than that?

You're spinning around. You can't see anything. We can just go right on back. Are cell phones killing bees? How the false memes spread false i i don't think it harms them but it right but that's what i said i i don't i never read that it was killing them but i read that it was disturbing their sense of uh their ability to communicate and perceive the world they've done so how does it harm them what What does it say? Well, they've done things. They put a phone on a hive and then testing. Okay. Yes, cell phone radiation harms bees.

A Swiss researcher placed cell phones next to hives and recorded what happens. When the phones were active, the bees emitted piping sounds, the high-pitched tones that spread the message through the colony that something disturbing is going on. Piping can be a signal for the colony to swarm, but that didn't happen here, and the researcher let the phones go as long as 20 hours.

He did report that the colony didn't return to baseline normal state for many hours after the phones were switched off and removed. But that's a phone being right there. Right. I wonder if that's the actual electrical energy coming off of the phone, or if that's the signal itself that it's receiving, what it is.

Yeah, and I wonder too, guys, we all put our phone in our front pocket, so what is that doing if anything? Yeah, so I already have kids, I'm not having more kids, but what about young people, young men who are doing this? I don't know anything about it, but you have to wonder. Well, I've read people talking about, like Sheryl Crow was speculating that she got a brain tumor from doing press on a cell phone all the time.

And I'm like, hmm, maybe. I mean, how do you find that out? Yeah, it's sort of like this whole chemical history we're talking about, where you make this wonderful new chemical that solves malaria. It kills the mosquitoes that transmit malaria and yellow fever. So once we do that, why don't we just spread it all over the world without having any idea of what else it might do? Well, that's how I felt too about the idea of genetically manipulated mosquitoes. What kind of chain is that going to put into effect? How do we know?

If you kill all the mosquitoes, the question was, do we need mosquitoes? And what function do mosquitoes play in the food chain? Do you want to find out? Yeah, and if you think about it, the mosquito species that vector these deadly diseases, there's only a few of them. Most of the mosquitoes don't carry diseases. And then you have all the birds that are eating the mosquitoes. Right.

Yeah. Who knows what could happen? Yeah. It's just, we never learn. Like, it's not just America. It's, you know, Australia brought in cats to deal with all sorts of animals that they had over there. And then now they have a crazy feral cat population that's killing all the ground.

They brought in the cane toad. And then it's got this bufotoxin, you know, on their head. And then the native marsupials eat it and they die. And now they're extinct or on the endangered species list. We never learn. And, in fact, the cane toad, it doesn't even eat the cane grub. It was brought over to eat because they're up on the stalk and the cane toad's on the ground. So, you know, we don't learn.

Even with natural animals, what are you talking about? Like when they were using, instead of pesticides, using spiders and bringing them into areas. Yeah, but you're bringing them in. Yeah, and in fact, if you're talking about invasive species, so species brought from one place to another. If you're on islands, like the Hawaiian Islands, invasive species are the number one cause of extinction. If you're not on islands, they're usually number two or number three after habitat loss, other things. But on islands, you're number one. The highest extinction rate, known extinction rate of anywhere in the world is in Hawaii, in the Hawaiian Islands.

And it's because the Hawaiian Islands, they rose out of the sea from nothing. So the species that are there are typically there and nowhere else. So they go extinct there. They're globally extinct. And it's all these animals that were brought in, the pigs, the cats, the mongoose, the rats, they're wiping out the native species. Have you ever been to Lanai?

I have, yeah. Have you seen the axis deer there? Yeah. It's bananas. It's the craziest invasive population I've ever seen anywhere. They have 30,000 deer on an island of 3,000 people. Yeah. And they hire snipers to shoot them at night.

I mean, it's amazing. Yeah. So we went to Lanai on one trip. I've been to Hawaii many times because it's just a straight shot from Alaska. It's very easy to get there from Alaska. Same time zone when I was a kid. It no longer is because Alaska got moved an hour east for business reasons. But we used to go there a lot.

And when our kids were little, we were on Lanai. And we wanted to go for a bike ride. And so we just asked around, does anyone have a bike we can use? And we rented this bike for our oldest. And it was too big for him. And so we so like, well, it's okay. We'll, we'll still have a nice bike ride. So we're biking along in this flat thing. And then there's this hill that's the steepest hill you've ever seen in your life.

And he's like, cool. And he goes down this hill and then his, his, his handlebars are wobbling like this and he just splattered and there's like no skin left. And I ran and grabbed him and I was just running for the, for there's one clinic there. I was running for the clinic. And it's one of the situations where your adrenaline's going and you feel like, you know, you could do anything. I literally got to the clinic, got him on the table and collapsed because I couldn't have carried him another inch. And it ended up being this wonderful thing because it was just road rash, right? They treated it, pulled the rocks out of him and everything, but then everyone in Lanai knew us, and it was the big news on Lanai.

And everywhere we went, people would say, oh, you're the kid who wiped out on his bike, and they invite us into their house, and we ended up having this fantastic trip because of that bike accident. Wow. Well, that's a lemons to lemonade situation. Look, it's a beautiful island and the people are really nice. I love it there. But it's a strange place when you see the amount. And I think they were given as a gift to King Kamehameha by the King of India in the 1800s.

And they just, they're everywhere. It's nuts. Like you see them at night. That's when it's really nuts when you're driving and you just see like thousands of eyeballs like staring at you on the side of the road yeah and there's no native mammals there so no there's no predators yeah yeah and they're delicious yeah they're like the the best tasting deer in the world they're incredible but invasive species uh like we really never have learned our lesson in terms of bringing them to places where they don't fit into the ecosystem whether it's what's going on right now in Florida with I mean

I think they just extracted and killed something like 5,000 pythons yeah from the Everglades and they didn't put a dent in it where in the Everglades there was a study where they went and they were tracking the populations of deer and raccoons and all these different animals over the past couple decades. And they're almost all gone. Like there's none left. Like they couldn't find any raccoons. They couldn't find any deer. There's almost nothing left.

And pythons are now eating alligators. There's so many pythons in the Everglades. And all from just some assholes just released them like, well, I don't want this anymore. I'll just throw it in the swamp. That should be fine. It'll be there. Well, that's why it's an impossible problem. Yeah. Because all it takes is one person who says, oh yeah, I think we need Northern pike in this lake. I'm going to toss them in there. And the next thing you know, that's the only fish that's in there. Yeah. And then they cannibalize. Yeah. We're so weird that we don't learn from that,

that it takes so much for us to get it into our head that that's a bad idea. Yeah. One more thing I wanted to talk to you about is glyphosate. And I've read some things about the dangers of glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is a very common pesticide. But one of the things that I read that I don't know if it's true, that there's an issue, some people believe, in animals eating plants that have been sprayed with glyphosate. Like, say, if you eat a cow that's been grazing on grass or grains that has been sprayed with Roundup,

that you could potentially develop gut issues because your body is reacting to the toxins that's in the animal flesh from them eating this glyphosate-sprayed plant? Yeah, so I don't know the answer to that question, but it is the most common herbicide used in the United States. It's been banned in Europe. It would have been banned in this country, but for political reasons, it wasn't because

of pressure from the company that makes it. And when do you think it would have been banned? It was slated to be banned at the end of the Obama administration, beginning of the Trump administration. And then that was pulled off the regulatory. What was the evidence that was indicating that it should be banned? So evidence of harming children and especially animal models in the laboratory of showing toxic effects on animals in the lab that relate to things in children's health. So that's why the Europeans banned it. So the Europeans banned it because the children were getting it in what way? Well, you can get it from food. So if there's residues left on food, you can get it if you're-

From plants. You can get it from water if you're in a place where it's getting into the water supply. You can get it from, if you're living in a place where it's being sprayed, you'll get it that way. And again, it kind of goes back to this issue we were just talking about. We use so much of it. Like if we go back to the story of DDT, DDT would have been a wonderful public health tool if we had just used it for that. We probably could still use it today against malaria and yellow fever if we had only just restricted its use for these public health emergencies. And you have a spot treatment here because you have an outbreak of malaria and a

spot treatment here because of yellow fever. But we couldn't stop ourselves. So we put it in wallpaper for nurseries so that babies wouldn't have flies on the wall. We put it in paint and we covered everything with this paint. We put it everywhere. If you went on an airline in the 1950s and 60s, the flight attendant would walk down the aisle spraying DDT. What? So you wouldn't have to be bothered by any mosquitoes or flies on the flight. That's the problem. It's going from, here's this precision tool that we should keep. It's awesome, right? You want to use this to stop an epidemic. Well, we can't. We have to use it everywhere, and then it's no longer effective because the pests have evolved resistance.

It's the same thing with these herbicides. There's some uses for it you could say are probably good. You have invasive plant species in Hawaii. We were just talking about Hawaii. A lot of the extinction there is from invasive plants. So you have invasive plants, and they can kill it with Roundup, and then they can plant the native plant and restore that forest. So you have this very small-scale kind of precision use, but

that's different than just broadcasting it everywhere, and then we all get exposed to it. So glyphosate or Roundup in America is used for crops, right? It's used to—it's a herbicide, not a pesticide, right? Is it both? The way that I would define a pesticide is any chemical that's designed to kill a pest. In this case, the pest is a weed, right? So a herbicide is a kind of pesticide. An insecticide is a kind of pesticide. A fungicide is a kind of pesticide. A rodenticide is a kind of pesticide. It's just, pesticide is a general term for any chemical you're using to kill a particular pest. In this case, the pests are the weeds, and all weeds are the competitor plants to our crops, right? We don't want them to grow. We want our crops to grow. So we use... Pesticide is a weird word too, right?

Yeah. Pest. Pest, and side means kill, so killing the pest. But it's like a scientific term for a slang term. Exactly. So what is a pest a pest is something we don't like yeah that's all it is it's a living thing though a living thing we don't like we've delegitimized it by calling it a pest um so they spray glyphosate to keep these these unwanted plants from growing and the plants that grow why don't they react in a negative way?

Yeah, so there's a few reasons for it. So some of the crops are actually genetically engineered so that they can handle the herbicide. So they are not damaged by the herbicide. The pest is, and then they out-compete the pest to grow that way. Some species are less damaged by others, by these herbicides. And there's actually a really interesting history that deals with warfare with this stuff too, because the herbicides were first

developed at the beginning of World War II. And the idea was back then, we have plant hormones, plants also have hormones, they cause the plant to grow in the way that they're going to grow, is if you could make an artificial version of that plant hormone, you can make it grow too fast so that it dies. And this was proposed to be used during World War II as a weapon to kill the rice of the Japanese. So you could wipe out their food supply so that they starve, and then they're obviously less effective at fighting if they're starving. After World War II, it was actually used by the British in the Malay Peninsula. And then we used it at a massive scale in the Vietnam War, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, in Operation Ranch Hand, where we sprayed 20 million gallons of defoliants over

the rainforest. And what we were trying to do is we were trying to wipe out the food supply of the Viet Cong, so starving these people. And we were also defoliating the forest so we could see the Viet Cong forces from the air. And that led to—have you been to Vietnam? No. So if you go to Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, there's actually kind of a city within the city where these people live who are kids. When we were spraying there, they have all these deformities. They have missing limbs. They have deformed limbs, they have tremendous health problems. And these were kids

who were in the womb when, you know, their mothers were sprayed with this by the U.S. military. They developed these horrible deformities. So, you know, this kind of warfare, environmental injustice thing, it extends even to herbicides, which were used in war. And because of that, at the end of the Vietnam War, we actually signed a declaration forbidding the use of herbicides in warfare. We forbid them in warfare, but we don't forbid them for our own consumption, for the crops that we eat. Right. And so we're not using the same chemical. Well, there are actually two chemicals that were used in Agent Orange that are still in use today in herbicides, but the process for creating them creates a less toxic compound now. The problem is that we're using so much of it. And so it's sort of like the DDT problem. You could get sprayed

with DDT. It kills the body louse on you. You don't get typhus. You're not harmed by it, even though you're covered with this stuff. But you're eating it day after day for years. You're going to be harmed by it. And it's the same with wildlife. Like we have a global decline of amphibians going on. Amphibian species are getting wiped out around the world. And a lot of it has to do with pesticides. So, you know, amphibians are aquatic herbivores when they're larvae, and then they're predatory terrestrial animals when they're adults. So they're affected by everything in the water, they're affected by everything on the land, and their

development is screwed up. So you end up with males becoming females, you end up with all kinds of thyroid diseases from these various pesticides. So what exactly is Roundup doing to us and these genetically modified plants that accept the Roundup, that don't have an issue with glyphosate, that are able to thrive when they're being sprayed by glyphosate? Like what kind of problems are we having digesting those things? Well, a lot of the concern is around the development of the brain for the child. And so the child in the womb and then the young child growing up. So a lot of these chemicals are neurotoxicants. They affect brain development. And actually the same with a lot of the metals we were talking about earlier. The primary

toxic problem with things like arsenic and mercury and the organophosphates. They're nerve poisons. They're neurotoxicants. So the main concern is with children's development. And of course, if you mess with a children's brain, it's permanent, right? It's like the lead problem, where I talked about this actually in the very beginning of the book in the preface that where I talked about this actually in the very beginning of the book in the preface that Thomas Midsley Jr. was working on this engineering problem of how do you make it so automobile engines don't knock, and they were knocking it, lower the power, lower the efficiency. And he figured out if you added tetralethyl lead to gasoline,

you could make this internal combustion engine that wouldn't knock. He got lead poisoning in the development of this. Some of the workers died from lead poisoning when they were developing this gasoline. They called it ethyl gasoline. They tinted it red as a marketing ploy. And then for the next 80 years, millions of people were using leaded gasoline. The entire Earth's atmosphere was polluted with leaded gasoline. We have untold millions of children in the womb and in early development whose brains were permanently altered, IQ permanently degraded from this, impulsivity permanently increased. You look at

the, you remember the crime wave in the 1980s, and you talk to, say, the police chief of New York City, they'll say, well, it was cracked. And we solved it with this zero tolerance policy. I think, and a lot of scientists think, what actually led to that crime wave was lead poisoning and poisoning by other neurotoxic metals. Because if you look at the lead pollution in the United States, and then you put on an 18 to 20 year delay, because those boys have to grow up into young men, and the men are the ones who are doing the crime, you see that there's this perfectly matched curve between lead pollution in the atmosphere and increasing crime rates. And then when we took lead out of gasoline, when we were kids,

lead was removed from gasoline during the Carter administration. Lead started coming down in the atmosphere, and then you see a 20-year lag, crime rates come down. It's not just crime. It's also unwed pregnancy. It's also all the juvenile delinquency. It's murder. It's rape. All of these things track lead poisoning in the atmosphere. Holy shit.

So the impulsivity and aggressive behavior? Aggressive behavior, impulsivity, you know, not being able to think through what you're doing. These are all things that can happen with lead poisoning. I mean, the Roman Empire probably fell because of lead poisoning. Really? Serious stuff, because they were using lead pipes and they were getting lead in their water supply. And so they probably started making bad decisions because of lead poisoning. And so they probably started making bad decisions because of lead poisoning. Wow. Now, Roundup and children and the neurotoxic effects of this stuff. Now, they use it for corn.

What else do they spray Roundup on? I don't know all the crops they use it for. It's the number one herbicide still in the United States, not in Europe anymore. How does someone avoid it? Do you have to eat organic food? Like, what is the way to avoid it? Yeah, so that's a great question. So for pesticides that are on the surface of the plant, you can wash them, right?

And so you can clean your food, or if it's something like a banana that you peel, you can do that. The only problem there is that a lot of pesticides are so-called systemic pesticides. They're actually taken up from the plant's roots and the plant's circulatory systems, delivering it throughout the plant. This was actually a technology that was developed by Gerhard Schrader during World War II.

He was a Nazi scientist who invented sarin and tabin and all these nerve agents. He also invented systemic pesticides. And so if a systemic pesticide is incorporated into the plant, then the only way to not get it is to wait long enough that it breaks down. And so they're supposed to not harvest that crop until the systemic pesticide is broken down. If it's one that's sprayed on the outside of the plant that is surfaced, you can wash it. What I like to do is there's some good online calculators you can look at. Most of us can't afford to only buy organic, and that would be the best thing to do. But you can't, most people

can't afford it. So what you can do is you can look at what, how much pesticide residues are in different kinds of plants. Like strawberries have a lot. So strawberries are a good one if you're going to invest, you know, if you have a limited budget and you want to get one thing organic, strawberries would be a good one to get organic. And then other things wash well before you eat. So strawberries have a lot systemic or a lot on the surface? So they have a lot on the surface and they have high pesticide residues compared to other crops. Is it effective to wash them? Yeah. I mean, you won't get rid of all of it, but you can get rid of most of it by washing them.

God damn it. How is this stuff still legal? I mean, is it that much of a factor in yield, in crop yield? Is that what it is? It is a huge factor in crop yield. And so, you know, the pesticide industry would argue, look, we're not starving anymore. You go back to before we had these modern pesticides, and there was mass starvation, and there was also much more disease. Like, you go back into the 1800s, you could expect you're going to lose, if you have 10 kids, you're probably going to lose three or four of them when they're kids to disease, maybe half of them. And now we live in this world where, you know, your kids can make it.

They're not all going to die from disease. They're not going to starve to death. So there's great things that have come from this. But at the same time, we are overusing these pesticides and we're relying too much on them. And then we end up with these problems. Agreed. There's great things that have come out of vaccines and great things that have come out of all these pesticides and herbicides and all that stuff. But knowing that this is doing damage to children today, and the fact that this is illegal in Europe now, and should have been

illegal at the end of the Obama administration, if not for political influence, how is that tolerated? Well, it's horrible, right, that we have corporations who have that kind of clout. Why is it that- And that they would do that. Right, for the profit. And why is it that a corporation should have more say and more influence with politicians than you do or I do. Than a scientist. Yeah, or anyone, just a regular person on the street. Why can't everybody have a say in what goes on? And we have a situation where these corporations have way too much influence,

way too much power, and their money is warping our politics. But is there a way to grow food for all the people that we need to grow food for without these herbicides? So with integrated pest management, you can grow food for everyone on the planet. How much would it cost? And that does use some pesticides. It just uses way less than what we're using now.

So it's integrating the pesticides with the biological control, with crop rotation. Part of the problem we have is we rely on these monocultures. They'll have 10,000 acres of the same thing. Well, of course, when a pest comes in there, it's going to take off, right? There's food everywhere. And so if you go back to the Incan Empire, a single farmer, Incan farmer pre-contact,

would have a few acres of land that are growing potatoes. They would have 200 varieties of potatoes on their land. And then you go to Ireland at the time of the famine, one variety of potato, you know, the whole country, it's 95, 90, 90, 95% of the nutrition of this entire population of 8 million people. Well, of course, you're going to have a disaster. And so part of it is we have to go back to a kind of agriculture that's much more diverse, rotating crops, all of these other things. And then we could use these chemicals but use them in a very smart, targeted way. It's just so disturbing that this is used all over the United States on crops and we know it's damaging. does it, I don't know if there's evidence of this, but does it make sense that if you ate a cow that had been eating grain that had been sprayed with glyphosate, that you could potentially

develop issues from eating that meat? Yeah. And so it has to do with how long is it from when the spraying occurred until when the cow eats the plant until you eat the cow, because you can look at how long does that molecule last before it breaks down. So this was the big problem with the organochlorine compounds is they would persist for decades. And so that's why you go to a woman in 1964 and she'll have 12 parts per million of DDT in her breast milk. Yet if cow's milk, if you go to the grocery store and the cow's milk had over four parts per million DDT, they couldn't sell it. So the average woman was producing milk for the baby with three times the amount of allowable DDT in food. And that was from eating, from eating animals that

had, and eating the crops that had this thing on it. So we have shifted to pesticides that break down in the environment much faster, which is a good thing because there's much less residues in our food. But we actually use more pesticides now. So when Rachel Carson published her book in 1962, that led to the emergence of the environmental movement. It led to the major environmental policies in the United States, which were passed between 1968 and 1976. And, you know, that's remarkable. You think back to President Nixon, you think of Watergate, right? But really, what else was going on? We had the National

Environmental Policy Act in 1968, Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, all of this, all the major environmental legislation, they were all passed by a democratically controlled Congress, and they were signed by a Republican president. So the environment was politicized after that. Why don't we still live in a world where everybody cares about the environment and children's health? Why should this be a partisan issue? I just find that ridiculous, right? We should all care about this, and we should all be working together to try to solve it. But now it's like everything else has become partisan. It is ridiculous. Everything is partisan. It is ridiculous. We're in such a strange

position now in this country. And everything's, all these conversations are toxic, and there's no middle ground, there's no room for nuance. But the idea that we're doing this with our food supply is very disturbing. But is there, other than these bringing in bugs, how would you do that with a monocrop? If you're dealing with, like, if you have thousands of acres of corn, say, how would you deal with the issue of plants that you don't want there or weeds or whatever they're trying to kill? Yeah, so that's part of the problem is growing the monoculture. You have to shift to the more diverse agriculture so what if they need that much corn right because a lot of it is for agriculture a lot of the the reason why they're growing is for feed right for animals yeah yeah so but you there's plenty of other crops that we need too so instead of having 10,000 acres of corn here

and then 10,000 acres of soybeans here and then 10,000 acres of wheat over here. You make this a more diverse chest-like board of crops so that you're not creating this situation where the pests can just explode in their population. Right, but if you have a farmer and, you know, his company or his family's business has been growing corn, growing corn for animal feed or for, you know, corn syrup or whatever they use it for. If that's your family business, now you have to diversify your family business. You have to start growing soy and alfalfa and all these different things just because of this roundup issue? Well, but you go back to that farmer's grandfather,

and he was growing a diverse set of crops. Right. But you know as well as I do that most farmers are on the verge of bankruptcy already. It's a really tough business. You work really hard, and you barely make any money, and you get subsidized by the government if you grow certain crops like corn. But if they're already in a tough spot, and then they have distributors that accept a certain amount

of their corn every year, and this is what's valuable to them. How do you get that guy? I mean, how do you say, hey, buddy, you know, you got to stop using Roundup, and instead, you're going to grow wheat, and you're going to grow asparagus or whatever. It seems like it's a tough sell. It is a tough sell. But every time that there's a challenge like this, it also creates opportunities for how do you improve your market. We actually had a farm when I was a kid. We had an 80-acre farm in Alaska, and we lost money on it every year. It's a very tough thing to do, especially in a place like that where there's a three-month growing season. We were the only Jewish pig farmers in Alaska, and we had hay and we had potatoes and chickens and geese and ducks and pigs. And it was great. But I understand it's a tough life and it's a tough way to make a living. that help people, that help people to do their farming without polluting the food supply,

without polluting the world, and in the process make a more productive, diverse economy for them. Was there a suggestion when they were talking about possibly outlawing glyphosate, was there a suggestion for other ways to go about removing weeds and unwanted plants, and that maybe there could be a workaround? Or was it just a political decision to shut it down? Yeah, so the decision to ban it was based on the toxicity and the effects on children. But you're also bringing up another really important issue, which is this concept of regrettable replacements. So for example, we were talking about DDT, and when DDT was phased out because it was showing up in food supply and women having breast milk with unacceptable levels of DDT in it, then that was replaced by the organophosphate chemicals. But then we talked about how they're toxic, that led to a lot of poisoning of farm

workers, transferring the risk to farm workers. Those have mostly been replaced by the new nicotinoids, these artificial versions of nicotine. So we also have this history in our human history of replacing something with something else without thinking through the consequences. And in the process, that's why we call it a regrettable replacement. We keep substituting one thing, we don't know what it does, for something else, we don't know what it does. So I don't know the answer really to your question, but I think that we need to be supporting our agricultural industry, diversifying it, using integrated pest management, minimizing the use of these pesticides. And it's not just for our own health, it's also for the health of the environment.

Like you like to hunt, right? Have you been to Kodiak Island in Alaska? No, I haven't. So if you go to Kodiak Island, if you go to the southern tip of the island, there's all these deer where their antlers are completely messed up. And the males have cryptorchidism. This is where their testes have not descended. So they're getting some kind of a contaminant that makes their development messed up. I don't think you want to eat those probably.

You see this deer. It doesn't have testicles hanging down. Its antlers are all deformed. You might think that's not the animal that I want to hunt. I want a clean animal. It's the same thing. You get a cow for your dinner. You want it to be clean.

You don't want it to be full of chemicals. Jamie, see if there's any known connection between glyphosate and animal protein like see if uh if how would you google this um is there a connect i tried sort of yeah it's found in a lot of stuff so when they've tested things um so they tested actually most of it would be yeah but most of the stuff they're testing is uh grains and things that are growing like that. So if you buy grains, you are ingesting some glyphosate. When DDT came out, we started using it on dairy cattle and on meat cattle. And the idea was to kill the flies that are harassing the cows all the time.

And DDT actually greatly increased the yield of meat in cows. But then it was discovered it's getting into the milk, and then kids are drinking it and all of that. The glyphosate thing is very disturbing, because we're not talking about the 1960s. We're talking about 2014 or 2016, right? That's what you're saying? It should have been eliminated? Is there any discussion right now to have it removed? I know there's people in Brazil, farmers in Brazil, that are suing the company that makes it. Yeah, so different countries have different regulations. I go to some countries where they're still using DDT. So just because it's banned here doesn't mean it's banned everywhere.

The fact that it's banned other places but not banned in America is a disgrace. Yeah. Yeah, and so part of it has to do—obviously, the politicization of our regulatory process is a huge part of it, because that shouldn't be political either, right? If something is not safe, it should be regulated. And so I think the drivers of this, we need to get out of this thing where the politics are driving decisions that are public health decisions or environmental decisions. The thing I keep finding, which is repeated, but it might be because there's been multiple lawsuits about this, which causes lots of websites to pop up,

but it's saying it's found in up to 90% of all food we eat, including vegetables and flesh of meat. So I don't know. Jesus Christ. Exactly what it is. Well, that was the argument that I was reading in an argument for grass-fed cattle, that you're much better off eating animals that are just eating natural grasses because there's been no pesticides and they're just basically free-ranging.

Same with the animals you hunt, right? Those are much healthier because they're eating without these chemicals. Yeah. Well, there's an issue now with deer. That's a pretty big one. It's kind of spooky. Right now it's contained only deer. It's CWD.

Are you aware of that? No. Chronic wasting disease. Oh, with the brain? Yes. Yeah. It's very similar to mad cow disease. What is that?

Jakob Kretzfeld? Yeah. So they're getting it from wildlife. Isn't some of it coming from western states, and then it's moving into the deer population that are moving around, and hunters can get brain poisoning from that. Isn't that right? Well, they haven't. No, right now it doesn't jump species.

Right now it's not, it doesn't jump species. Right now it's isolated in cervids. So cattle might be able to get it, but deer get it. They've found instances of mule deer that get it, elk get it, different animals get it, but it hasn't jumped to humans, but it has jumped species to mice. And so they're really, it's a very disturbing idea that you could eat something today. Like you go hunting in the woods and you find a deer. You shoot that deer and you think, oh, I have this clean, organic meat. But someday, whether it's next week or 20 years from now, it might be that you could get a brain disease.

The same disease that cannibals get yeah you know this uh neurological disease it's coming from this the the prions that are they're in this um this this disease they by the way they they've done these sterilization uh processes on the tools that they use to determine whether or not they have this disease you could these fuckers you could take these medical instruments in on a deer that has the cwd with his prions and they can be exposed to thousands degrees thousands of degrees and the prions stay alive and for like hours thousands of degrees for hours and these prions are like virtually immortal yeah So this is just like what we're going through now with COVID because that began from people eating bats. Allegedly not.

There's more evidence that it comes out of a lab in Wuhan that somehow or another when they were doing these. Because, you know, there's a level four lab in Wuhan. Brett Weinstein, who's also a biologist, was on my podcast. It was explaining, I'm not, I would butcher it if I went into detail about it, but it was explaining all the indicators that point to the fact that this was a virus that was used for research and that they were using it to, you know, to learn more about or come up with strategies to defeat coronaviruses. And that the same lab that's in Wuhan in 1998, or not, excuse me, 2018, just two years ago, was cited for safety violations. Yeah, and there have been cases in the past, even with bubonic plague, where research labs actually inadvertently released the plague into the local population. My guess is, though, when this is all said and done, it's going to be from eating bushmeat in China, that people will have eaten bats or they've eaten pangolins that got infected by bats. HIV is the same kind of thing, right? People eating chimpanzees, they're getting this infection, and then it causes a pandemic around the world. So we're

seeing more and more of these diseases because we're punching into this habitat we've never been in before. People are eating the animals and getting sick from it. Well, obviously, I don't know whether or not it came from a lab or whether it came from people eating bats. And I think ultimately it's not really the big concern. The big concern is dealing with the virus itself. But Brett seemed to be fairly convinced without, I mean, he couldn't say without any uncertainty,

but he's fairly convinced that it came from a lab. As you were saying this, I stumbled across this online. It seems to be related. But... Okay. But this is Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon linked groups, push study claiming China manufactured COVID. Yeah, but see, the thing is, even if China did and this guy pushed it, you would be suspicious.

You'd be like, oh, great. Now it's politicized. Again, they've politicized a fucking pandemic disease. And now it becomes this thing about the trade war with China or coming up with reasons why people should be suspicious of China. It's very unfortunate. Yeah. No, it's really sad.

And it stymies progress on so many fronts when when things get polarized like yeah it's terrible and i think it's in in our lifetime i think it's the worst now that it's been i mean maybe if you went back to vietnam war era there was similar levels but it's you know yeah i don't know i wasn't i mean i was alive then but i wasn't paying attention i was a little kid well we were both little kids but but i think that's probably the last time that this country has faced this kind of thing. The crazy thing is if you went back before Trump was president, you went back to like the last years of the Obama administration when the economy had done the turnaround from 2008 and things were looking pretty good. Everything was nice. And even during the beginning of the Trump administration,

even though people didn't like him, the economy was kicking ass. But there was the beginning of the Trump administration, even though people didn't like him, the economy was kicking ass. But there was the beginning of the polarization because there's so many people didn't like him and the people that did like him were like, fuck you. It was like they had someone on their side now that they could thumb their finger up at the liberals and then it just got worse and worse and worse.

And then COVID threw gasoline on the fire. And now half the country's on fire. I mean, it's just like when you think it couldn't get any worse. You have record wildfires where you have the worst air quality on earth in Portland, Oregon. Yeah. All that being said, though, when this started and we first started getting cases in the United States, I was really concerned that society would fall apart. first started getting cases in the United States, I was really concerned that society would fall apart. And I was partially, I think I was concerned about that because I just spent eight or nine

years reading these historical accounts of society falling apart during the bubonic plague, during yellow fever, and so on, where literally the society fell apart. And that hasn't happened. Not totally. I mean, compared to past pandemics, things are pretty good. We have two months to the election. Right. That's my worry. I'm worried about that too. I'm very worried about that. The post-election world could get fucking wild. It could get really wild. I'm legitimately concerned about that. Yeah. I'm concerned about two things. I'm concerned about the erosion of democracy in this country, and I'm concerned about a violent backlash.

Yeah. And so it is a worrisome time. And I'm also concerned about a new disease. I mean, when you see what happened with this pandemic, and you realize this is a fairly mild disease in terms of like historic context. What if something horrific like the Spanish flu or something along those lines that we don't predict coming? Yeah, this is why we need a very vibrant federal

agency that deals with this, that prepares for it. Yeah, that's what really pissed everybody off when they found out that the pandemic response team had been sort of redistributed. Disbanded. What else concerns you? Is there anything else that should freak people the fuck out? Because we've kind of covered it all.

We've covered it all from toxins to disease to... Yeah, well, you know, I think that we all want a brighter future for ourselves, for this planet, for wildlife, for nature. And it's useful to learn about the history because you can see what happens. And an example of this is my family has a log cabin in New Hampshire that my grandfather and my father, his brother built back in the 1940s. Yeah, it's really cool. It's on 30 acres. And it's now an inholding because after my grandfather bought the land and built the cabin, it became National Forest. So it's this really beautiful spot. And in the 1950s, the Forest Service decided to do an experiment. So they came in and they dumped massive amounts of DDT in this river to see what would happen.

And so, of course, it killed all the fish. But then they never even came back to see what happened. So to me, that's kind of a metaphor for just stupidity. They just wanted to see? Yeah, let's do an experiment. What did they think? Let, let's do an experiment. Let's throw poison into an ecosystem. Yeah, and let's make it so you can never fish here again. And so, you know, I would like to see us being careful and thoughtful. And you were talking about genetically

engineered mosquitoes and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it's a great thing, right? Maybe if we genetically engineer anopheles, we can get rid of malaria and not harm mosquito populations and not harm nature. But we better figure it out before we release these things and before we try. The unintended consequences are what really concerns me. Exactly. And they happen all the time. It just seems like we have an amazing amount of knowledge comparatively to people that lived thousands of years ago. But when you think about how little we know just about ants communicating or various bugs and how they operate, and that we're going to fuck with mosquitoes?

And we don't really – we really don't know what – we don't know what happens if you take that piece out like let's take that piece and throw it over there what happens well what there's a void now and what fills that void and what what are the what are the domino pieces that fall into place we do we know i don't know i can't imagine if we don't know how ants are so smart that we really know what the fuck happens if we kill all the mosquitoes. Sure. And you're saying we know all this, we have this incredible knowledge. We have so much knowledge that we're just six months into this pandemic and there's already eight or nine vaccines close to development, right? That's incredible, much faster than ever before. But are we any wiser than people were thousands of years ago? There's no evidence that we're

any wiser. We know a lot more, but are we equipped to deal with these things? I mean, we made nuclear weapons during World War II. My great-grandfather was actually in charge of the chemistry division of the Manhattan Project. So he helped to make the- You got some fucking history, buddy. And so we make this thing and right away we use it, right? We drop it on Japan. And now we make this thing, and right away we use it. We drop it on Japan. And now we live in this world. And when we were kids, I don't know if your school had it, but my school would have drills. We had a major Air Force base in Anchorage and Army base, and we would have these air raid drills once a week.

And we had bomb shelters and all of that. And that's a pretty scary thing to grow up with. Why do we have this? Why are we, just because we have something, we have to use it? It's the same with chemical weapons. So, you know, the good thing is we have the nuclear nonproliferation treatment. We have a chemical weapons ban. We have a biological weapons ban. We have the herbicide ban. Those last three, those all happened in the 1970s, and they happened under Nixon and Ford. And so if that could be accomplished in a bipartisan way, why can't we deal with these problems we're talking about now in a bipartisan way? I don't know if we're wiser.

I suspect we are, but I suspect that the progress is incremental. And the progress, you know, I believe I could say without a shadow of a doubt we are wiser than Homo sapiens that lived half a million years ago. Sure. I think we are. Our brain's a lot bigger, too. Yeah, we are wiser. So I would assume, I think we're probably wiser than people that lived in the 1920s. I think we are.

I think just based on, I know we have more information, but I think we've absorbed a lot of it, more so than we probably understand, and that if you look at the violence statistics, rape statistics, racism statistics, all the different statistics, like if you look at Pinker's work, it shows that things are getting better even though they still suck in a lot of cases. We're a big ass battleship and every turn takes a long time yeah i think we're wiser but i think it's a long process to educate this dumb monkey yeah we're dumb well we are we're smart and dumb at the same time yeah

i would say maybe uh if you go back 150 years they were wiser than we are now because they lived in a much less polluted world and then we got less wise and now we're getting wiser than we are now because they lived in a much less polluted world. And then we got less wise and now we're getting wiser again. You look at air pollution in the United States and the amount of lead in the atmosphere now is less than 1% of what it was when we were kids. So the air is so much cleaner. You go back to when we were kids, two-thirds of the waterways in the United States were unsafe for swimming or fishing. Now it's about less than a third. So the water's way cleaner. And so we've cleaned up our act in this country. The pollution is getting much less. I mean, we've been talking about some of the darker side, right, of these chemicals getting in our food. But the bigger picture is actually pretty bright in this country.

Pollution levels have been going down. There's more forests now in this country than there was when we were younger. The air is cleaner, the water is cleaner. And that's because we have this important environmental legislation, like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. And that goes back to this political point, because that was done in a bipartisan way. And I think we have to get back to that to solve the problems we're dealing with now. Well, listen, your book is fantastic. This conversation was amazing. I really appreciate your time coming here and I really enjoyed it very much. I really appreciate

you having me. It's awesome. My pleasure. And people, is there an audio book of this? I hope there will be not out yet. Not yet. Please tell me you'll read it. Will you read it? Will I read the book? Yeah. The audio book. Oh no, no, no. I don't have a good voice. You know what I want? But it's your work yeah no i want a british man oh well so like an infomercial do you listen to audiobooks yes i love audiobooks and my favorite narrators are all men from the united kingdom so i'll get someone uh uh like there's this guy john lee he's amazing i would love to have him read my book well put it out there in the universe maybe john lee will hear this Yeah. But it's available right now

if you're a reader. The Chemical Age, right there. Go pick it up. Thank you, Frank. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Joe. I really appreciate it.

Goodbye, everybody.