The Joe Rogan Experience - #1722 - Bartow Elmore

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Bart Elmore is the associate professor of environmental history and core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at the Ohio State University. He's the author of "Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future."

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Seed money. Tell me. Tell me about all this dirtiness. Tell me about these monsters and the money that they make. Yeah. How'd you get involved in this, first of all?

Yeah, sure. Why'd this become your field of study? Well, thanks, Joe, for having me on. This is awesome. My pleasure. Thanks for being here. I'm excited to talk to you about this. Yeah. So- Very important subject, right? Yeah. For me, it was. It really started with the first project I worked on, the first book I wrote, which was the history of Coca-Cola and its environmental impact around the world. You were just telling us that Pepsi is actually older than Coke, which is surprising.

Dr. Pepper. Yeah, Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper's older? Yeah, Dr. Pepper's older, weirdly. And you think of it as like the, you know. Yeah, I thought it was like the new kid on the block. Yeah, exactly. That's the oldest?

1885. Not the oldest, but it's older than Coke. What's the oldest? Coke was 1886. I don't even know what the oldest one would be. So Dr. Pepper came along first, then Coca-Cola, and then Pepsi?

And then Pepsi later. So Pepsi is still bullshit. Pepsi is still... Look, you're talking to a guy from Atlanta, so I agree with you there. What does that mean? Well, Atlanta is like...

Yeah, Coke's from Atlanta. Oh, okay. And, you know, when we were growing up, it was like in the water. You had to drink Coca-Cola. In fact, when you want any soft drink,

you just say, I want a Coke. Yeah, nobody says I'd like a pep. Well, maybe they do. But the thing about Pepsi is like it never had cocaine in it, did it? No. Actually, this is relevant. I mean, so this was the beginning of this book because I was doing that. I was looking at all the ingredients that go into Coca-Cola and saying, okay, what's in the drink, first of all, because it's from my hometown. That's where it started. I said, okay, I want to find out all these natural resources in the product. And, you know, is coca in the drink? And also caffeine.

We'll get to that. That's how it connects to Monsanto. But coca was the most interesting, actually, because I thought, you know, it's called Coca-Cola. So does it have cocaine in it? And so I went back to look at that and it turns out, yeah, trace amounts. Still? In the beginning. No, no, no. In the beginning. Yeah, but this is what's interesting about the history of the drink. So this is 1886. Back then, the coca leaf was actually seen as something that was- Medicinal, right? Medicinal. Inobvious. Absolutely. And

everyone was using the coca leaf. I mean, there was a drink called Vin Mariani. It was medicinal. Medicinal. Inobvious. Absolutely. And everyone was using the coca leaf. I mean, there was a drink called Vin Mariani. It was actually a wine, a red wine that was mixed with coca leaves. Wow. So it kind of had a little kick to it. And like Queen Victoria of England drank this stuff. Ulysses S. Grant, our president, was like, woo, you know, coca wine. This is awesome.

And even the Pope, actually. I wonder if communion would have had, you know, Coca wine, this is awesome. And even the Pope, actually. I wonder if communion would have had, you know, Vin Mariani, we would all be Catholic or something. But so it was really popular. And this guy, this guy was down on his luck, John Pemberton, who started Coca-Cola in Atlanta, he wanted to make a Coca drink himself. And so he made this, originally Coke was actually a wine.

It was like a wine of Coca. It was a red wine mixed with coca leaves, exact knockoff of that drink that was really popular. And then prohibition hits Atlanta because we're in the Protestant South in the 1880s. And so he has to take out the alcohol. And so he creates this non-alcoholic drink, Coca-Cola, that has the coca leaf in it. They weren't concerned about the coca. They were concerned about alcohol. And it remained in the drink throughout the 20th century. What kind of dose would it have in it?

Very small. And this, I think, is important. People equate the coca leaf with cocaine because, yes, you can make cocaine, like street cocaine, from processing all these coca leaf with, you know, cocaine, because yes, you can make cocaine like street cocaine from, you know, processing all these coca leaves. But if you go to Peru today, or you go to certain parts of South America, people chew coca leaves. It's a normal practice. It's been going back thousands of years to the Inca even. And so it's very small amounts. We're not talking about like, in fact, you'd probably get a bigger hit from like, you know, experience from a cup of espresso from Starbucks. But interestingly, the reason that cocaine became taboo and why it got pulled from the drink had nothing to do with national laws in the country, which was so interesting when I was studying it.

the country, which was so interesting when I was studying it. It had everything to do with racism, actually, in the South, because there was a concern that cocaine was contributing to black crime in Atlanta, which was being, of course, blown up by segregationists and white supremacists. And Asa Candler, who was a white guy in Atlanta, didn't want to have anything to do with that. So he decides kind of quietly to take out the cocaine. But here's the interesting thing, Joe. They kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients. So secret ingredient number five, by the way, Coke doesn't like talking about this. This is not part of their history that they like discussing. But it's clear as day in the archives. You can see it. So it's called merchandise number five, the fifth secret ingredient in Coca-Cola.

I like the name. Isn't it Merchandise No. 5? Well, the whole idea is that you name things so that no one asks questions, right? What's Merchandise No. 5? Also, that ingredient includes a little bit of the kola nut, which is from West Africa, actually. And it was originally in there because it has caffeine, another kind of caffeine kick. That's where Coca-Cola comes from. But cola, by the way, is with a K, the actual kola nut.

Anyway, that's merchandise number five. And it's basically the flavor of the coca leaf, the essence of the coca leaf. And the way it works is these leaves are brought in from Peru, is actually where Coca-Cola sourced it. And that was crazy. I had to track down, okay, where are they getting their coca leaves from? And there's this company called Maywood Chemical Company. Today, the company is called Steppen Chemical Company. Is that in New Jersey? It is in New Jersey. Exactly. Maywood, New Jersey.

Yeah. No, they're the ones who process it and they make medical grade cocaine out of it and then use the flavor aspect of it for Coca-Cola. Exactly. And technically, at first, as you put it, most of the cocaine was going for pharmaceutical uses and for- Lidocaine. All sorts of things like that that are used for legitimate purposes. But Coke needed actually so much flavoring. Think about their brand. It's so big. Like wheatgrass juice.

You got to squeeze a lot to get a cup. So they had to come up with this special – I love it. You can't make this stuff up. This is why history is fun. There's a special exemption in our laws for what are called special leaves from Peru. And if anybody looking at it is saying, well, what the hell are these special leaves? And they're special because they're allowed to come into the United States exclusively, basically, to create the flavoring extract for Coca-Cola.

A lot of people call it the Coca-Cola Joker. How closely do you think they monitor that supply? You know, I mean— Very closely. They would have to. Yeah. Like if a bundle or two fell off a truck here or there, that could be extremely profitable. Right.

I talked to somebody once. They said, so is there like a pile of cocaine somewhere up in New Jersey, you know, where this is happening? And, you know, I don't think that's the case. But here's the crazy part, too. This is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead you to places you never thought you'd go, like this book, which we'll talk about. But it got weird. If that's not weird, it got weirder in the 60s because Coca-Cola wanted to figure out a way to make coca leaves in the United States, to grow their own coca leaves.

They weren't satisfied with this trade with Peru. And these are declassified DEA documents at the National Archives. This is not like something crazy. You can see it and actually it's in the book. But basically, they petitioned the federal government to start growing it. At first, they're thinking like the Virgin Islands. But then they're like, I At first, they're thinking like the Virgin Islands. But then they're like, I don't know. There's like all these tourists. It's going to be crazy.

But they have to find a climate and a location geography where they can do this. And they ultimately go, okay, what about Hawaii? And they do, Joe. They grew coca leaves secretly, a totally secret operation called the Alakea Project, also called Alakea. What does that mean? Exactly. Nobody's going to ask questions, obfuscate the story, in Kauai. Oh, wow. And it was done through the University of Hawaii. They had to sign all these non-disclosure agreements and they wouldn't publish their papers on the study of all this. The reason the government agreed to it is that Koch said, we're going to create a cocaine-less

coca shrub, like basically breed a plant that doesn't have cocaine in it. And of course, that never really transpires, but they do end up growing secretly behind barbed wire fences, coca leaves for Coca-Cola in the 60s. But I'm an environmental historian, so I study the relationship between businesses and the environment. And in this case, the environment matters because nature bit back. So in the 60s, this fungus that's native to Hawaii was like, whoa, this plant that's not native and attacks it. And it wipes out the entire coca crop of Coca-Cola. So the supply they had for a very brief time in the 60s is wiped out. They go back to sourcing it from Peru. But so I was looking at all those ingredients, and it was when I was looking at caffeine that I ended up talking about Monsanto.

So does Coca-Cola have a legitimate relationship with coca leaf growers in Peru right now? Right. Legitimate, I think, is the right kind of question to ask. I mean, I went down to Peru because I think it's important if you're going to write about people or you're going to write about a place that you go there. Yeah. So I went down there. Actually, my father, he doesn't speak any Spanish, was like my bodyguard down there with me.

It was probably a bad idea to bring my dad with me, but we kind of went on this journey to go see if we could figure it out. He's from Georgia as well. Sounds like a good way to find yourself missing. Exactly. We probably should have been more. But this is how it goes when

you're a historian and you're in graduate school and you don't really know what you're doing. Right. You're just taking risk and doing things that probably years later, you're like, maybe this is not the smartest idea. Yeah. You wouldn't do it if you had a family. Yeah, exactly. As I do now. So, although it wasn't that safe for this book either, but anyway, we go down and we look into this story. And I think to kind of answer your question, I mean, there is a trade. It's managed actually by a state agency in Peru called Anaco. And exactly where the coca leaf comes from for Coca-Cola is a little bit unclear in the 21st century. But if you talk to cocaeros or people who represent the cocaeros, the farmers who produce the coca leaf, a lot of what they're frustrated about is that

basically Coke has this exclusive right to bring in coca leaves into the United States. Now, if you and I were to try and do that, we'd be arrested at the border, right? Right. Because the laws in this country now say you can't bring in coca leaves. Coca leaves are banned. So one company only. Basically. And by the way, yeah, this is what Pepsi, we were talking about Pepsi earlier, they were livid about this because they wanted access.

And other soft drinks wanted access to this supply. And other soft drinks wanted access to this supply. But the federal government was saying, no, no, no, you know, and trying to kind of protect that single buyer access, what we call monopsony trade. What a crazy deal. It was so crazy. And it's one of the reasons why Coke, you know, they have a unique flavor, right? They have something that no one else can get. But here's the other thing, Joe, right?

So, like, think about Coke. They're everywhere. Like, you could sell this stuff in any part of the world. And I think that's the trick for Coke. How do you get stuff at cheap? Well, if everyone had access to coca leaves, you know, the price of coca leaves might be pretty high because it's, you can't grow coca leaves everywhere. And so because they only have access to that leaf, they get a great deal on the price of coca leaves. And that's what coquilleros don't like, right? They would love to be able to sell coca tea in the United States. They would love to be able to sell, you know, you name it, coca cookies, coca flour. Yeah.

But because of international laws that ban it, by the way, that were in part brokered by Coca-Cola, that's part of the rub. And they have it on their name, you know? Wow. Think about that rub too. Here's a product that comes from your, you know, that deep history that goes back to the Inca. It's on the brand and they're preventing that trade in part, you know, historically have been preventing that trade. That's what I think unnerves people. They don't see it as legitimate. They think a lot of people would see it as some kind of theft.

Using your company to lobby and to throw money around to make that happen is – it's like I look at it two ways. In one way, it's a genius move. I mean if you're a company and you have figured out how to make a monopoly on – well, it's not a Schedule I drug, right? Because it's got legitimate medical uses. Yeah, and you can – as I said, you can bring it in for certain medicinal purposes. But beyond that, the coca leaf itself cannot be imported. But to make one company have an exemption for that, that's only using it for flavor, but not allow other companies to do that. How does that stick? That seems crazy. That seems like Pepsi should challenge it. Well, they did. I mean, there are letters back when this was being unfolded. I think they should do it right now.

But well, and I think about the farmers. A lot of these stories, I think about what would be the benefit to a group of people to have the coca leaf be revalorized. I mean, we talk a lot about, I know on your show, you talk a lot about marijuana and cannabis. You know, we're not talking about the coca leaf, which was villainized in similar ways, you know? We had this kind of view of this stuff is terrible and you can't touch it. And sadly, that could mean an incredible kind of bounty

for people who grow this in Peru and other parts of South America. The problem really is – sorry. The problem really is like people step on it, right, and add things to it like fentanyl, which is a giant issue now. Or process out and create this kind of – take out just the alkaloid that's the powerful cocaine in it instead of taking the leaf. And as I said, imagine going to Starbucks and having Coke a tea. Like no big deal. It would be great. I've had it before. It's interesting.

Yeah, and I did it in Peru. And it's totally like it's not what people are thinking. It's like a caffeine sort of buzz, like maybe a little bit different but pretty similar in terms of the strength. It doesn't make you crazy or anything like that. Exactly. And, you know, it's used for high altitude exertion. It helps people at high altitudes and things like that. So I think one of the things in that book was trying to point that out that, you know, we're having this discussion about cannabis, but we should have it. And they

are. There are people that are trying to say, look, we should be revalorizing is the word, the coca leaf. Like there's no reason why this thing needs to be treated this way. Yeah. We're stuck, though. We're stuck with these narratives. We are. That's the narrative that cocaine is evil and it ruins lives. Yeah.

And I think, you know, again, there's a difference between that kind of purified powder that's going to have all this other stuff in it that can cause all these problems versus this. But the problem is that there is this sort of black market world and that's the only market to get it So it is cut with a bunch of other shit. That's not supposed to be in there like amphetamines and fentanyl And have you aware of dr. Carl Hart? I don't know if I know he's a professor at Columbia and brilliant guy who was originally, he was a scientist who was working with drugs

and he was a very straight laced guy. But then upon working with them and really understanding their effects and understanding what the propaganda had done in terms of changing the way people viewed these drugs, he then started taking these drugs like regularly Wow and is open about it, but is also brilliant so and he's you know a genuine scholar So he's a guy who will sit on a podcast and tell you I take cocaine. I take heroin. It's lovely

He was regular heroin. I'm like. How do you do it? I sniff it and he goes. It's it's wonderful I love it. It makes me feel good. It helped strengthensens my relationships. And he's like, you and I should do cocaine together. I'm like, that is the craziest fucking thing anybody's ever said to me. That's a professor from Columbia on a podcast. We should do cocaine together. Right. That's a rarity. But he's like, if you get pure cocaine, he goes, pure cocaine is fantastic. He goes, it's great stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think of Michael Pollan's, but you had Michael Pollan on, you know, and how to change your mind. I mean, we're seeing, in other words,

what you're talking about, that there was a history here. That's why I think history matters, that this stuff hasn't always been perceived this way. And we got into this mess. And I think history can help us think about how I get out of it. In the case of Coca-Cola, again,

I think it's just a matter of, you know, rethinking this coca leaf. I mean, here you've got a company that, again, has it on their name. And yet there's almost – and they won't acknowledge that too. Part of it is just like we never had this. Like that's even worse. That's kind of a kick in the face. And they still have the flavor that comes from the leaf.

As far as when I last researched it, yeah. Well, yeah, we brought it up on the podcast before we went into it. We were stunned that they still, not only that, but they use that and process it to make medical grade cocaine. And interestingly, like at the very beginning, this was, I went deep into this. So I got, they did sell it. They did sell cocaine, you know, like, I mean, I don't know how else to put it, but they had extra. But then they realized that the laws were emerging because, again, it wasn't always that way. People were, again, the president's consuming coca. Everyone's consuming it. So it took time. But when I got to, so the coca was fun and interesting and wild. But then I got to caffeine, and that's what led to this.

So I always ask people, where does the caffeine come from that's in, like, soft drinks? Or do you drink caffeinated, like, beverages? Maybe not Coke. I don't know. Yes. Okay. Have you ever wondered where it comes from? You know what?

I haven't. Okay. I didn't really either, and I drank it all the time. But I was like. Right. I tried to Google it, as one does, And I was like, where's the caffeine come from? And I couldn't figure it out. And so I'm doing that ingredient by ingredient story for the Coke book and I get to caffeine and I'm kind of stuck. I'm like, I don't know where they get it.

And so if you had a guess though, like what would be a guess? Would you have a good guess? Well, I would say, yeah, I'm not really exactly sure how they synthesize things. So I would say synthetic caffeine. Yeah. But I mean, what does that mean? Exactly. It's got to have precursors. It's got to be like compounds that you mix together.

What is it? I didn't even go that far. I actually thought like maybe it's coffee, you know, and that wasn't right either. So here's how it worked basically. And I found all this by going to Monsanto's records in St. Louis, which was part of the beginning of this book. I got access to Monsanto's records, which was like, as a historian, this is incredible, right? I have an ability to tell a story that maybe, you know, um, Did they give you access?

They had to give permission to go into their archive to their records. Yeah. I just still don't really understand why they do this, but did you get a burner phone? I didn't, but we'll talk about that. I did use an encrypted phone to talk to some sources inside Monsanto and stuff like that. And I look, I was just a historian, you know, coming out of grad school who had never had training in journalism or never really had training in the art of like protecting a source. And so I really had to and I give a plug to New America, this organization that gave me a fellowship. And I got to hang out with writers from The Washington Post and from different places that helped me think about how do you do this the right way? But they did. I had permission.

And I started to see this caffeine story. Like, this is crazy. So, but for Coca-Cola, there would be no Monsanto. Really? Yes. Because when Monsanto, this chemical company from St. Louis that started in 1901, it was like barely getting by. It was, you know, the American chemical industry almost didn't exist. The Germans were really in control. They ran the organic chemistry. We were getting all of our chemicals from overseas. Monsanto,

we think of it as like this monopoly. It controls everything. Back then, they were nothing. And so they needed a big contract. And so their initial buyer was Coca-Cola. And they sold Coca-Cola two things. They sold them saccharin, the artificial sweetener, which ultimately comes from coal tar. We can talk about that. And then caffeine that they, this is the crazy part. All right, this is how they did it.

I would have never figured it out. So basically they took tea leaves that were broken and damaged around the world, like on tea exchanges, like the garbage of the tea trade. And they realized no one was going to consume that. So it was just waste. And they basically swept that stuff up and processed out the caffeine from the garbage, from the waste tea leaves. How many are there out there? A lot. This is so much Coca-Cola.

Exactly. So that was what I knew was like, okay, well, wait a minute. This is 1901, but Coke's going to grow. This is where your point comes in. It's going to become synthetic, right? But at first they're like, okay, this waste tea trade works.

Then they need more caffeine, and decaf coffee takes off. If you've ever wondered, like, where does all that caffeine go, right? If you drink decaf, I don't know if you do, but, like, all that caffeine from the decaf coffee market ended up going into soft drinks in the 50s. But nobody was really drinking decaf coffee in the early part of the 20th century. People wanted the caffeine kick. That was the big deal. But they still needed more, to your point. They needed more caffeine.

We're talking about a company that sells 1.9 billion servings of its product every day now. Holy shit. 1.9 billion servings every day. That's crazy. It is nuts. So that's like, what, one-seventh of the total population? Yeah, exactly. Something around those?

Yeah. How many people do we have now? Seven point something. More than seven. Isn't it closing in on eight? Yeah. So more than, that's a lot of fucking servings. One point what was it? You said it earlier, 1.9 billion servings. It goes up every year.

That's crazy. But that's, you know, I joke in my class, I have this class history, 3705, Coca-Cola globalization, great students, love those guys. And they, this class basically, they say, I say, you can either come to this class and learn how to make a lot of money you know or you can learn about this the environmental impacts of some of this that's basically one out of four people have a coke every day yeah it's pretty crazy

and remember I said all the other products they have right but it's obviously some people go ham and they have like doesn't John Daly drink like 18 Diet Cokes a day? Yeah. And like Warren Buffett drinks Cherry Coke every day. Right.

Everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Those guys are driving. Thanks, Warren Buffett. The servings, the amount of 1.9? Remember, it's not just Coca-Cola. It's like all their brands and they have a lot of different brands.

So servings of their products. But still, Coca-Cola is like, you know, the number one soft drink in the world still is and diet coke was always number two always ticked off pepsi because they were one and two but well pepsi seems like a fake cola when you've had coke because it doesn't have that coke that whatever that flavonoid is that what it is yeah the whatever the flavoring profile is yeah i think you know it could be key to it. I mean, I will say one other thing about it. I can't get off the Coca thing because it's so weird.

But there is a document, and this is actually from a reporting of another journalist, Mark Pendergrass, but it's really good about New Coke. I don't know if you remember when New Coke came out. Yeah, I do. But it was like a huge catastrophe because they were trying to totally reshape the flavor in 1985. Nobody liked it. Nobody liked it? Nobody liked it. You can go to the museum and they had like a voicemail machine that you could pick up that is like people being like, give me back my Coke.

When they had new Coke, did they still have old Coke available? No, that's the thing. They literally said, we're going cold slate. We're going to completely wipe out the old Coke. So was it cocaine free? And that's what was interesting. Mark Pendergrass found some evidence that when they made the switch to new Coke, they decided temporarily, well, why not? We have this weird trade that we keep getting asked about. Let's just go ahead and get rid of this. So one of the things that they might've removed, according to Pendergrass, is this coca leaf flavor. But

interestingly, we have a report from 1988 in the New York Times that they put it back in because it was so bad, right? And you can almost imagine the executives at Coke being like, whoa, wait a minute, maybe we don't mess with this flavor. Maybe that's the one thing that separates them from Pepsi. Maybe that's what it is. I think it's a lot of things. I mean, one of the biggest things that made Coke so big

and where they basically just outpaced Pepsi was World War II. They got government contracts to provide Coke to the troops. This was coming from the top. I have the letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower saying, don't send me this, don't send me that. You're sending us Coca-Cola. That meant that there were all these veterans and everyone. You're going to have a Pepsi at your house after you come home from D-Cola. And that meant that there were all these veterans and everyone, I mean, you're going to have a Pepsi at your house after you come home from D-Day. The parents would slap that out of their hands, like, drink Coke. And actually, Pepsi wrote to the government saying, you can't do this.

Pepsi's getting fucked left and right. No cocaine. They don't get served to the troops. Yeah. You could argue this is really just a book about how Pepsi got screwed. But anyway, yeah, I mean, so there is evidence of that and that New Coke fiasco. But it ends up back, we know for sure. Is there enough caffeine from decaffeinated coffee when they extract it to really put caffeine into all those sodas? Because if I really – I would imagine that goes back to your point I mean because you said synthetic yeah and then yeah they needed more yeah I would imagine what the percentage of people that drink caffeinated coffee versus uncaffeinated or decaffeinated it's probably small yeah it's probably

five to one or something yeah I would guess what do you think what's your guess I have no idea yeah yeah it's out? Let's find out. Let's take a guess. Jamie, let's see what your guess is first. What percentage of the coffee do you like? How many people drink decaf to regular coffee? Yeah. Like in the morning or at night? Just like cups served, period. It's like

10 to 1 probably. You think 10 to 1? I think it's a lot. 10 to 1 probably sounds better. Because people hate that I think it's a lot. Yeah. Like 10% of maybe you're probably right. 10 to one probably sounds better because people hate that decaf shit. They really rarely drink it.

Just drink it. They definitely hate it in the early part of the 20th century because it was they had no real good system for getting out the caffeine and it made it taste terrible.

Well not only that it's not real expensive. If you buy decaffeinated coffee it's got caffeine in it. Yeah. It still has got caffeine in it.

Exactly. Yeah. People need to know that because they'll give it to their kids before they go to bed have some decaf coffee in the fucking kids really little kids yeah people are crazy people have terrible pants and decaffeinated you would imagine actually is decaffeinated but it's not it's like the difference in milligrams it's like i think like a cup of decaf has like 15 milligrams or something like that as opposed to like you know i don't know what it is but I do know that there's

still yeah there's caffeine in there for sure what's the servings of regular coffee American coffee drinkers had roughly point two three cups of decaf coffee per day but it's not in comparison to caffeinated mm-hmm there's no someone else I done a comparison that's why I got asked right after I found that and why don't they compare them together sorry give me a second yeah the sourcing at that time

was Maxwell House so it was like not even really good coffee like instant instant junk and so and that was really exploding but still you're right it's pretty small. So they needed more. And in the 40s, in part because of the war, they couldn't get supplies of various things. Once again, we see Coca-Cola turning to Monsanto and saying, hey, Monsanto, you've supplied us with caffeine, saccharin, all these things. Can you make synthetic caffeine? And Monsanto does.

They figure out a way to make synthetic caffeine from coal tar. What is coal tar? So it's basically the byproduct of processing coal into coke, which is coal without its impurities, often used in the steel industry. And it's literally a black, tarry substance that's the byproduct of that process, kind of the waste of processing coal into coke. And in that tar is all these different chemicals that you can make because it's all these different carbon compounds that you could tease out and then do things to make all sorts of things.

And actually, one of the points of this book is that all this stuff around us ultimately comes from fossil fuels, whether it be coal-tar byproducts or petroleum. It's pretty nuts when you see how many different things come from fossil fuels. Yeah, like our headphones, this stuff. Headphones, plastic that covers these wires. We couldn't function. And that's why I think when we transition, if we do, to a fossil-fuel-free economy and try and reduce greenhouse gases

and things like that, people are talking about cars and power plants. After writing this book, I'm like, no, I'm thinking about everything else. I was literally just looking at all the equipment in here and things. So much plastic. So much stuff. And all of that goes back to this period where they're experimenting with coal tar, experimenting with petroleum, going, wow, we can make this. We can make this.

And it was cheap because oil was booming at that time. Right. You could just do it. So they can make caffeine out of oil. Yeah. And ultimately it's natural gas largely now, but at that time it was coal tar originally for Coca-Cola. And this talk about kind of some shady stuff. Coke has had these long contracts with Monsanto at this point. This is the 40s. And they're like, hey, could you make synthetic for us? But if you look internally at Coke, they're like, well, I don't even know if we're going to buy it, but we just want more caffeine in the market because more caffeine means other buyers who are getting caffeine may use that caffeine, which keeps the price of caffeine down. Because Coke's real model was

like not owning stuff, like making other people do stuff. Like they were a business that basically just did, was a middleman in the economy. They didn't actually grow the ingredients in their product and they didn't distribute it. It was independent bottlers who did it. They were kind of like this middleman in the economy. And so for Monsanto, they were like, hey, go experiment with this, see how it goes. And Monsanto does it. They figure out how to synthesize caffeine from coal tar. And they have to use a base molecule found in that coal tar called urea. And this is true, okay? They make it and they're like, hey, Coke, look, we've got this synthetic for you. It comes from urea found in coal tar. And Coke's like, nah, consumers aren't going to drink this.

Urea sounds like urine. Urea gases. You said it. Okay, this is what's crazy. This is in the archives. Oh, really? That's what they said? That's exactly what the chemist, there's this great oral history at one of these archives I went to from one of the chemists who knew what was going on inside the company who said, internally, when we were talking to them, they said, that sounds too much like urine.

They're going to think it's pee. And they legitimately initially say, we're not going to do it. And they stick with natural source caffeine, again, coming from the coffee being the things. Now, they ultimately decide to pivot because to your point, they're growing at such a pace, they need to have synthetic. And I can't prove this, but it seems logical that they're thinking is, wait a minute, consumers are never going to ask where their caffeine comes from. Look at everyone I've ever talked to. No one knows where their caffeine comes from, right?

And so they do switch to synthetics. And if you go to their website, it's great. It says, we source our caffeine from tea leaves. So that waste tea leaf story is still part of it. The coffee beans, decaf coffee, and then appropriate sources. Appropriate. P. Well, you know, and a lot of things are made from this.

But, you know, ultimately then natural gas became the feedstock and things. And a lot of it's produced in China. But anyway, it's crazy. But that was when I was like, oh, my gosh, Monsanto. So that got Monsanto off the ground because then they have a giant project. They had a huge project, you know, with the saccharin and caffeine for Coca-Cola, these big contracts that kept them afloat. You can go to them.

This is like, you know, readily available information on their website. They'll say, but for Coca-Cola, we wouldn't exist. So sometimes when I think about the environmental footprint of Coca-Cola, I'm like, it's bigger than just the firm. You know, it goes into these other stories. It's the literal seed money. It's the literal seed money, yeah. Shout out to my friend Jesse Pappas who came up with that title and was like, it was brilliant because it did reflect what I wanted to tell, which is that there is going to be this seed company, but it's not a seed company when it starts.

It's only making chemicals. And at the very beginning, it's only making chemicals for Coca-Cola. There was a while where mainstream news sources were reporting on the crisis with Indian farmers. Farmers in India that, correct me if I'm wrong, I'll probably butcher this, but essentially the way Monsanto engineered its seeds is like you grow a plant, but you don't have the use of the seeds from that plant. So say, I'm going to fuck this up, I'm sure, but if you grow a tomato or a pumpkin, let's say you grow a pumpkin, then you get all the seeds from the pumpkin. Those seeds aren't viable. They've engineered the plant to make sure that the seeds aren't viable, right? Right.

That's a popular actual myth about what they've done. They've done a lot of things. They haven't done that. They haven't done that. So this came from a technology called what they called Terminator technology from 1990, you know, the 1990s film. And it was owned by Delta and Pine and Land Company that they ended up acquiring in the early 2000s.

And at that time, Delta had this technology, but they didn't deploy it. And one of the things that raised all this fear about this company getting bigger and bigger was, oh my gosh, they're going to get this technology and they're going to use it. There's no evidence that we have that they have actually deployed that. The way that they prevent farmers now from resaving their seeds and planting them is through an extremely intense contract called a Technology Use Agreement, or TUA, that farmers have to sign, like a soybean farmer has to sign it and say, I will not replant seeds that come from this harvest.

Where you don't own the seeds, right? Is that the deal? When you buy the seeds to use them, you're essentially leasing them for that season? Exactly. It's like a licensing fee, in a sense. And actually, this was revolutionary. Farmers had never seen something like this in the 90s. They were like, wait a minute. So you're going to license this technology to us, and we can't save the seeds and replant them. And that's what led to all this havoc and chaos in farm country where farmers are saying, this goes against centuries old practices where we're always saving seeds and experimenting with them and challenging them.

So that was a huge change to the food system. But way later in Monsanto's story, I mean, they weren't even in the ag business. I definitely want to get back to the beginning of it, but is that still going on in India? Because you don't hear about that story anymore, where these farmers get massively in debt and there was a rash of suicides. Right, a rash of suicides. And I think that it's hard to parse out that story of what's causing these suicides. And there's some, you know, people who say the suicide rates, you know, when they look at it, well, did it increase when these seeds came in or is it because of those seeds? I think the debt issue is the bigger issue, right, that you have this kind of industrial scale agriculture and the pressures on these rural farmers that leads to these problems. pressures on these rural farmers that leads to these problems. But there's a lot of other ways in which I think Monsanto kind of creates this system that prevents farmers from doing something

they'd always done, which is saving seeds. And the debt story is also true in the United States. I mean, these seed costs go through the roof. The more genetically engineered traits that are added to them and stacked in, we see this dramatic increase in those prices. And the only way to really keep up is to keep trying to grow as big as you possibly can and using as much petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers as you can to increase your productivity. And it's kind of a rat race where farmers don't necessarily feel like they're incredibly profitable, but they feel like they're just trying to keep up. Does that same technology contract apply today with, say, like corn or soybean farmers in America? It does, especially soy. Corn is a unique

situation because you were talking about this terminator gene that could be added. And again, we don't really have evidence that they did that. But with corn, going back to the 20s and 30s, we developed what was known as hybrid corn. And the weird thing about hybrid corn is that when you plant, when you take the seeds that are produced from that harvest, they will not be as prolific as the seeds you originally bought. So with corn, it's weird. Even going back to the 20s, there was a system in place that was just part of the kind of genetic peculiarity of corn that meant that farmers had to buy corn over and over again. But what was different was soybeans, cotton, and a lot of other products. This was not the case.

Can I ask you this? Yeah. If that is the case, if the corn, like when you try to replant the corn, it's not as prolific, where are they getting the original corn that you can plant? From these crosses of these two different varieties, these kind of parent strains. And as long as you get that original strain, that original parent strain coming from those crosses, then that corn grows well. But if you try and take the seeds from those siblings of those parents, they don't produce the same amount. So you have companies like Pioneer that made a lot of money off this because they figured out how to have

these parent lines and to do these crosses and then be able to sell those seeds from those original parent lines. That would be really prolific. But if the farmers save those seeds and tried to grow another generation, they just wouldn't produce the same amount. That is wild. Yeah, it's crazy. So when they're doing it now, so they have to have these two different strains and cross them now to make seeds to sell to farmers.

Yeah, and you're seeing experimentation with the top seed companies trying to figure out, okay, which parent crosses are going to produce the best yield. But then if you try and save that seed and replant it, you're not going to have the same vigor is what it's called. You don't have the same productivity. So weirdly with corn, there was kind of a corporatization of the seed business baked into the peculiarities of crossing corn. Whereas with soybeans and cotton and other crops, you had to have an agreement that Monsanto created to make farmers come back and buy

those seeds every year. We grow so much corn though. And I think about my, I'm so puzzled right now because I'm trying to figure out how would you have enough of these two different strains to cross them to make enough seeds to grow all this corn? Well, you can have different parent crosses. You can have different kinds of parents that you cross to make these, to make this hybrid seed. And you have a lot of different seed companies that are playing with different parents. What I'm saying is once you do that, and then if farmers were to try and set it. It won't work again with the offspring of those. But what I'm saying is how are they breeding so many – how many crosses they're doing to get enough seeds?

Like if you drive through Kansas or I have a buddy who lives in Iowa and you drive to through these cornfields, like, you're like, holy shit. Like if you're a person from the city and you don't know what, right. It's incredible. Have you, did you drive through some of those areas? Well, I mean, being in Ohio, shout out to Jamie, who's also from Columbus. Yeah. Shout out to Columbus. Yeah. We got a lot of Ohio representation in here. You know, you just see tremendous amounts of corn and tremendous amounts of soybeans everywhere. And, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you know, you have a prolific generation of seeds from a harvest. And so, you know, it is a bit baffling, I have to say, about just the scale of it.

How does it all work? But, you know, and you think about it, the majority of our cropland, our arable cropland, is cultivating soybeans, corn, hay, and almost all of that is going into animal fodder, which is its own story. Right. But, yeah, it's— Most of it, right? Most of it. I mean, the vast majority of it is going into over 90%— Animal feed.

And then that animal feed, is it mostly for cows? Cows, all sorts of livestock. Yeah. Pigs. And, you know, often in these cathos, which is just such a broken system, these, you know, consolidated feeding lots where you're producing so much waste and manure and things like that, that it becomes quite toxic. But it's kind of, you know, like that, that it becomes quite toxic. But it's kind of, I think for me, the story about food with Monsanto that was interesting was I wanted to kind of know, did these genetically engineered crops actually produce much higher yields? Did we see this massive growth in the productivity of genetically engineered crops. And maybe I

should back up just to say like when that happened. You know, the first large scale introduction of genetically engineered crops, commodity crops like soybeans, like corn, like all these things, they were introduced in 1996. So one of the interesting things about sitting here today is that we're kind of at the 25-year mark of genetically engineered crops being introduced in the United States and ultimately around the world. Brazil, Argentina, some 28 some state countries around the world that now have genetically engineered crops. And so I looked at it as a historian and said,

okay, well, what can we say about that? You know, what did these crops actually do? And when they were introduced, you know, the idea was, and just to be clear, this was a new technology. It's often said, well, we've always been changing, you know, crops and things like that. What was different in this era, 80s and 90s, was we were taking genes from a bacterium, for example, inserting it into a plant, taking things from one species, putting it in another, and changing trying to do two things. The main genetically engineered crops were Roundup-ready crops that were designed to tolerate heavy dosages of herbicide called Roundup, that interestingly, of course, Monsanto owned, right? And they had been making since the 1970s. But at this point, they're thinking, this could be amazing. If we can genetically engineer crops to be resistant to Roundup, wow.

Think about the sales, right? You can spray Roundup on your fields, and this is the key, during the growing season. When your crops are growing, kill any weeds that are in those fields, and wow, the plants will survive, but the crops won't. And this use of glyphosate, did they know at the time how toxic it was? It was the opposite, Joe. When they introduced this in the 1970s, so it was actually discovered around 1970 by a chemist inside the firm called John Franz. And this is what's so wild when you go back is they saw it has the

environmentally friendly herbicide. You know what they're trying to replace at that point? DDT? Agent Orange. Agent Orange. Yeah. Agent Orange. Oh my God. So here's the story. So let's go back just a little bit more to get to that. So, and I talk about the whole story of Agent Orange in here in this book.

They first start making, and by they I mean Monsanto, 245T. It's a chlorinated hydrocarbon that's an active ingredient in Agent Orange. In 1949, in a little town called Nitro, West Virginia, which I traveled to, because nobody went to go talk to the workers. Nobody went to the actual place where the people who made the herbicides. To me, my dad was in Vietnam, and those stories are important,

and I want to talk about that as well. But it also mattered to me, we need to go to the root of the story, the people who actually made these chemicals. What happened there at that plant? So Monsanto was making it in 49. This chemical goes back to the 40s, wartime, World War II. In some ways, there were some experiments with it. Monsanto's doing it in 49. 245T, the active ingredient in Agent Orange, it's actually two chemicals in Agent Orange, 24D, 245T,

2,4-D, 2,4-5-T, and about 50% of each of these compounds. And the problem was with 2,4-5-T. That chemical had a contaminant known as dioxin, which Dow Chemical writing to Monsanto in 1965 said, this is the most toxic compound we've ever seen. Holy shit. 65, and you've got those Vietnam Wars, 66, 67, 68, ramping up, you know,

and where the spring's going to be going on overseas. And that could be jarring in and of itself, but in the book you'll see, I go back to 49, at the plant where they're producing 245T. And these workers are all sorts of tore up. Like they have chloracne, which you can probably find on Google, but you know what it looks like, but it's basically like where your skin is peeling off. It's just these massive pustules. It's acne-like lesions that are showing that you have systemic exposure to dioxin. The workers had this.

There's a guy in there, James Ray. Who met these guys? Well, a lot of them were dead, or a lot of them weren't around by the time I did it, but I got their files. As I say in the book, they're telling stories. They may not be here, but their records found in those corporate records still tell a story. And James Ray Boggess, I just will never forget this story. He talked about it in a deposition because he took Monsanto to trial. And they took these workers years later in the 80s,

And they took these workers years later in the 80s, took Monsanto to trial. They lose that trial. And actually Monsanto puts, I think, leans out on their homes to make them pay the court costs back, the workers themselves. But anyway, this is 49 in the 50s, right? So they've got chloracne on their faces. This is all being documented by the doctors and people in the company. And he has to peel off his face. He literally said five times they used a solvent to try and peel off layers of his skin because of the chloracne exposure. They were complaining of nervousness and all these systemic health problems. Of course, we now know dioxin is

super toxic. And they even said it in 65, right? I need to see what this looks like. So- You got something? Yeah, chloracne. And this is- Oh, Jesus. Like that guy who got poisoned from the Ukraine. Exactly. And so you tell me, if you're seeing workers coming down with this, might you say, wait a minute, we might have a problem with our chemical, right? You guys need to wash your face. You know, well in this case, you know, that's kind of what they did.

They said stuff. They said stuff like, look. Oh my God. You know, you, don't worry, this is just acne, it'll go away. What is he showing in the upper corner? The up, what is that? Is he, is that his stomach?

What is that? Is that his sack? Uh, yeah. That's his balls? I is that is he pulled out his stomach what is that is that a sack that's his balls i think that is correct on google yeah okay so but yeah i think you know it this is that child down there that's an environmental poisoning oh god yeah this oh my god this is horrific and so chloracne is really nasty stuff. And again, this is what they're seeing internally inside the firm with their workers. And I think I just wanted to stress this. 40, 51, 52, this is years before age and orange is going to be sprayed in Vietnam and before veterans are going to be exposed to this.

They already know. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you want to take a generous interpretation of this, you know, they're saying, well, I don't know, it's acne, but maybe it's not going to have these systemic effects, you know. But in my opinion, you're seeing it so visibly, you stop production. You prevent this from going out into the world. What do they do? You stop production. You prevent this from going out into the world.

What do they do? Well, in those years, they continued to produce it, and it was used in the United States. This is the thing that I think gets overlooked. We use 245T here on gardens and all sorts of places. You can look this up and- Still? Relatively Googleable. No. Back then, in the 50s.

still relatively googleable no back then in the 50s you know right as that post-war long culture and automobile age is taking off so how many people are getting this chloracne at the plant we're talking about dozens of workers is it most people do some people somehow another avoid it yeah i mean you know a lot there they had different buildings and it seemed to depend on if you were working closely with those those chemicals or not because they're producing other chemicals they're rubber chemicals and other things is it dermal absorption or is it inhaling it's i think it does come through dermal penetration and these guys you know uh interestingly i should say this about one of the doctors who was overseeing the the company at the time. He often said that people that were complaining of health problems were what he called kind of the disgruntled tenth.

You know, this is the people who are just unhappy with working here and things like that. And that's kind of how he saw workers. If they're coming in to complain about their health problems, it's probably because they have a bigger problem with management or something like that, which is part of the problem, right? I think they probably overlook things because that's how they saw people complaining about health issues. But this is hard to overlook. You're seeing workers that are systemically coming down with problems. You're hiring people to test them and look into this. And instead of saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, before we've got this all figured out, maybe we shouldn't keep pushing this stuff out. But they do. Of course, because

they're making money. They're making a lot of money at this point. And then, of course, with Agent Orange, it becomes a big deal. They're the largest producer by volume of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Dow, of course, is producing it. And actually, Monsanto's, because of their process, it was more laden with dioxin than the other compounds. What a crazy company, if you really stop and think about it. They start off as just a chemical company, probably fairly innocuous, if not beneficial to their customers.

And then they make cocaine, caffeine. Not the cocaine. They make caffeine and saccharin, yeah. Because they don't do the decoconized coca leaf stuff for Coca-Cola. That was Maywood. So they make caffeine for Coca-Cola. They start making money. And then they start making Agent Orange.

And then they start making Roundup. And now they're sort of synonymous with evil corporations. Yeah. If you ask someone what's an evil corporation, like Monsanto would be one. People would use that. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. That's a good evil. If you're like, name an evil corporation.

Like if you're on, what is it, Jeopardy? Sure. What's the show? Would you do the things? Oh, Family Feud. Family Feud, yeah, that's right. Survey says. Survey says Monsantan.

Yes, I mean that's how it's about. I actually got that actual bumper sticker from my brother who lives in Alaska. He sent that to me when I started writing this. He's like, look at this. It says Monseitan. And I have to be honest with you. When I started this, I was very aware of that.

I think having watched your show and your conversations, you appreciate this. I really wanted to start from scratch. I wanted to say, okay, what happened? And was it as bad as you know as people say um and there were definitely moments like you're saying where i was like you know these guys are just trying to make money they're trying this scrappy guy john queenie who started the company he's in his 40s he's got two kids get this all right when he starts monsanto 1901 he's got two kids. His wife, by the way, is Olga Monsanto. So if you're wondering.

Olga's either hot or a monster, right? It's either you get an Olga, she's super hot. Yeah, there she is. Yeah, there's Olga Monsanto. Especially for back then. Yeah. Like what year is this? This is around 1901 or so.

And there's Edgar, his son. That's a hot Olga. Next to him, yeah. You got a good one, right? Yeah. And then there's. Look at his mustache. Oh, Guida. Look at that.

Look at that thing. He doesn't look happy. Wow, he's living in 1901. Fuck. Yeah, average life expectancy. He's 40 years old. Average life expectancy is like 44, 45. Really?

At that time. I mean, but if you make it past childbirth, of course, you have a much better chance of surviving. But anyway, he does name his company after his wife. What's interesting is you wonder whether she'd be happy about that, right? It becomes this hated name in so many ways years later. But he's scrapping by. He actually had tried to start a chemical industry in the late 19th century.

It had burned down. And he didn't have any money. He's got these kids. He's got this family. So, like, to your point, I'm kind of, when I'm reading this, I'm trying to understand how is this company starting? What's the human story here? How do we get into this mess? Money. And then when you get, as you said, to the 50s and 60s, these agricultural chemicals become a huge part of their business. But kind of back to Roundup, 70, okay? 245T, now the lid's off.

You know, the government's starting to find out about it. People are raising alarms. Scientists are talking about how toxic this stuff is. And, you know, they're looking for an alternative, something that's not as toxic as this stuff. And that's when John Franz finds glyphosate. Interestingly, you know all, like the detergent all? Yes. That was a Monsanto product. Of course it was.

But it had a phosphate-based ingredient in it that helped it clean clothes. helped it clean clothes. But in the 60s, phosphate-based detergents were ending up in waterways and contributing to like algae blooms and fish death. And so they had to get rid of that phosphate detergent

and they had all this phosphate. And they're like, what do we do with all this phosphate? Boom, all detergent, you know, and all that phosphate ends up becoming the building blocks of Roundup. Roundup is ultimately coming from elemental phosphorus.

Wow. It's crazy. But it was all designed to be healthy. I know a guy who lived in a community that was connected to a golf course. And he grew up drinking water from a well. And him and a large number of people in the community got cancer. And they firmly believed that it was because of whatever pesticides that they were using or herbicides that they were using on the golf course that it leaked into the wells. Can I show you what Roundup looks like nowadays?

Jamie, there's a map in there that's like a map of the country, and it's kind of brown, and it shows you kind of Roundup. It's probably most of the country, right? It says glyphosate because that's the active ingredient. But I just want to show you the change that's happened over the last several years with glyphosate. So, like, that's glyphosate. This comes from the USGS Pesticide National Synthesis Program.

This is what happened with Roundup Ready technology. This is 92. So remember I said Roundup was created in the 70s. But it's not really used that much throughout the growing season. It's interesting how it's used so much in California. Yeah. It's the primary application of it. Look at that.

The weird farmland on the way up to San Francisco. If you're driving from L.A. and you see, you you know, like fuck Joe Biden signs, that's where they are. Exactly. Yep. That's also, you know, the land of like, like 90% of our almonds, like nine, you know, all the salad, everything comes from there. Yeah. And so much pesticide use in that valley. Wow. But look at the Midwest. I mean, it goes from like, you know. Almost none. Almost none. Or very little to swarms.

To swarms. By 2017. And that's because you've made crops that are now resistant to glyphosate. So you can spray it all, you know, as much as you need to kill your weeds. But, and Jamie, you had that weed resistance graph going up. But a fifth grader can tell you, well, when you spray that much Roundup on something or glyphosate on something, you're going to start seeing resistance. Adaptation.

Exactly. Like it's nature fighting back. Like what's happening with antibiotics, where you're seeing these like MRSA, like these medication-resistant staph infections that are insanely difficult to treat. Just like it. Just like it. In fact, some of the weed scientists I talked to, I'll be honest, when I first was going to a talk at Ohio State, they said the weed scientists are talking.

I thought, oh. So it's weed, marijuana? I showed up. I was like, oh, this is cool too. Yeah. I want to find out how to make the shit stronger. But these weed scientists at Ohio State who are great and helped out with the book, fantastic folks. Some of those, they're like glyphosate was like penicillin, man. It was so powerful. It was so effective at killing weeds. And we burned through it because these weeds became resistant to it. And so, and that's where we're at now, kind of going back to your point about chemicals and exposures. Like Roundup was introduced because it was seen as an environmentally more friendly herbicide at the time in the 70s. Then Agent R.

Yeah, you're comparing it against some pretty bad... It's like, would you like to get punched or I'll shoot you? And it had to do with the way it worked and the mechanisms there. But what's happening now because of that resistance, and Jamie, I hate to bring it up again because it's actually kind of cool. You get to see this the first time we put it together. But when that weed resistance takes off, I think it's the next graph after that, what happens is, check this out. Okay, this is what's happening. I put this together with a friend of mine who's a data scientist. Try to remember that a lot of people are just listening. They're just listening. Probably a huge percentage. Fair enough. So I'll try and describe it. So what

we're looking at is pounds of herbicide per acre of soybeans. So this is just looking at soybeans as a case study. And we're looking at the amount of herbicides that's being used onicide per acre of soybeans. So this is just looking at soybeans as a case study. And we're looking at the amount of herbicides that's being used on farms per acre in the U.S. in specific states just because they had data for this for us to compare. And what we're seeing is this like explosion in Roundup, glyphosate, that big dark line going up like that. And notice, look, glyphosate, that big dark line going up like that. And notice, look, we started seeing the decline in all these other herbicides that are really toxic stuff, like chlorinated compounds and things like that. They're going down and down and down, but check out weed resistance, 2004, 2005, 2006. Boom, all those herbicides that were really toxic, including, by the way, the other half of Agent Orange, 2,4-D, is now being used to try and beat back Roundup-resistant weeds.

Wow. And so- What a fucking mess. It's crazy. Yeah. If the folks are looking at this graph, you're essentially seeing two mountains superimposedosed but one's upside down so it starts out that everything's working great and then it turns terrible and then you have these uh herbicide resistant it's like the graph is it available online there's people i don't know if we have

it available i'll try i'll see if I can figure out a way to do that and do that. But to see it, it's like the clearest example ever that this is broken, right? And that's kind of what I was saying about looking back as a historian at 25 years of data and saying, wait a minute, like we were told that genetically engineered crops would reduce our dependence on all these toxic herbicides. But because of resistance, we're seeing all these toxic herbicides coming back. So if, we're seeing all these toxic herbicides coming back. So if you're a consumer, and honestly, it's not just so much about us and like caring about our food. But if you care at all about the people that produce your food, you know, and their

exposure to compounds, I mean, we're talking about some of these chemicals that are coming back produced in the 40s, you know, invented in the 40s, 50s. That's not good. No. And we're also, because we're spraying these things, people have more exposure to glyphosate. So you're seeing whatever health problems that glyphosate causes, I'm sure you're seeing that exasperate.

Yeah. That's expanding, right? Yeah. You know, on glyphosate, so here's where we're at with glyphosate and what's out there from all the different studies. So what happened in 2015 was the World Health Organization came out and said that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. What year was that? This 2015. But yet we still use it? Well, interestingly.

Well, it's only been six years. Exactly. Well, yeah, think about it. And interestingly, Bayer, the company that now owns Monsanto, they bought Monsanto in 2018. you know, they're going to pull Roundup from Home Depot and Lowe's voluntarily in the next two years. So they're not even going to sell this stuff for like regular consumers like you and I who might, well. Use it on your lawn or whatever. Whatever, right. But somehow we're going to keep using it on farms, right?

It's kind of like this logic doesn't hold up, right? Right. Now, the EPA, of course, after that 2015 decision by the WHO, they produced a study and said, we disagree. We don't think it's carcinogenic. But then within that agency, there are scientists that disagree on that and debate that. There have been three major cases out of California, all of which have gone in favor of the plaintiffs who have charged that Roundup exposure has been linked to their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I have to say, looking at it very closely, it's a mess.

I'm trying to figure out, well, what does it do? Does it cause it? Does it not? All I'll say is, given the uncertainty, looking at that graph, it's like, come on. Should we be doing this? I don't know. I know. But what are the alternatives? If you want to produce the kind of crops that we produce in this country, if you think about how many animals that we have to feed and how many acres of soy and corn they're growing what would be the options in terms like if they need some sort of an herbicide and they don't use roundup they're not going to go out there and pick with the weeds exactly right so what do they do well that's part of it right i think we have to fundamentally rethink the way that we're doing agriculture and definitely think about how much of our agricultural land is going towards these cathos and fodder. Yeah. Well, even just agriculture in

general, like people need to understand that monocrops, monocrop agriculture, like having these massive fields filled with corn is completely unnatural. Totally unnatural. It doesn't exist in nature. And that's why you have these pests that you constantly have to beat back because they love stuff like this. Yeah. And then they realize, like, well, all we have to do is adapt to corn consumption and corn wherever it's growing. And there's all these minerals they're putting in the grounds to make the corn grow. And this is our spot. Let's go there.

Exactly. And you've made a feast. You've made this bounty. And it's like, come, eat as much as you want. And then you poison everybody but the corn and you just basically have this mutant corn that can take a beating. Can.

Well, now these, I mean, most of these plants are now genetic, they're called stacked. Yeah. Stacked. So how do they do that? Explain what that means and how they did that. Yeah. Basically, they now have crops that are resistant not to one trait, but it's stacked.

One herbicide they are resistant to. In one case, the one that's seeking approval right now is like five herbicides. So you're saying like plants you know, plants that can beat back are like super tough, pretty damn tough, you know, plants with five different herbicides they can tolerate. What's a mutant though? It's like, that's a mutant plant, right? You know, I mean, I think in this case, you could argue that that's a pretty strange thing and not natural in so many ways, right? One of the things, and this is the craziest, the plants that are now coming out are called dicamba tolerant. Most people are talking about Roundup.

Dicamba is freaking crazy. Oh, no. It's worse? It's hard to say worse, you know, because when you look at these stories, you're like, what's worse? You know, the Asian orange story or this. This is what's going on right now with dicamba. the Asian orange story or this. This is what's going on right now with dicamba.

Because, you know, there's Roundup-resistant weeds, farmers are now buying these seeds that are resistant to Roundup and dicamba, this other chemical. The problem with dicamba is when you spray dicamba over some plants, it, like, vaporizes in hot temperatures. So this herbicide jumps up and actually spreads onto other plants, which is totally crazy. So like if you're spraying in a really hot temperature, dicamba will jump and hit other farmers nearby. What?

So it actually evaporates? It evaporates. It vaporizes, which is crazy. So you're spraying it, it vaporizes under what temperature? You know, summer temperatures in Arkansas, 90s, upper 80s. And then it just flies through the air. And guess what, you're a farmer over here who didn't buy Monsanto seeds that have dicamba tolerance.

So you get pounded. And so I went to the court case and sat in the gallery and watched. And I was like, I wanted to hear the corporate documents because they got challenged by farmers who were hit by dicamba saying, what the hell? You know, we're just farming over here and we're getting hit by this vapor. And the documents were like crazy. It showed that Monsanto knew that drift was going to happen, that that was going to happen. During production, like during the development of this?

Not so much during development, but once it was sprayed on farms, like once farmers started spraying it, it was going to jump. And, oh, my gosh, it's going to start hitting this farm over here. Uh-oh. Tough shit? Yeah, basically. But they weren't thinking tough shit. They were like, guess what? They're going to need us now because then they'll need our strains that can resist this stuff.

Confidential internal document released in that court case said they'll buy this for, quote, protection from their neighbor. Oh, my God. Forcing people to use these monster crops. where farmers were sued because it showed that they had Monsanto crops growing on their field even though they had never purchased or had a contract with Monsanto because of just this natural thing that happens with whether it's with the wind carrying these seeds or animals or what have you right yeah so again one of these ones that I really went in close on because I wanted to get it right. And it's the drift,

the idea that there's been a lot of cases where the drift of pollen has led to that. I haven't seen cases of that. I have seen lots of cases of what you're talking about where a farmer, for whatever reason, comes into possession of Roundup Ready traits and plants it on his crop without signing an agreement with Monsanto and gets sued for doing that.

Now, the question is, how do they get it? And that's a little bit unclear. Did they get it from a neighbor? Did some maybe drop the actual seeds onto their farm and then they end up seeing that it's Roundup ready and then they use it. I don't know, but you're absolutely right. And in the book,

we talk about it, the detectives that Monsanto sends out to enforce this. Like, are you, are you using our seeds illegally? You can actually do it. I don't know if we could do it, but you can call a hotline like today,

like right now and rat out your neighbor. If you think, oh my God, You can call a hotline like today, like right now, and rat out your neighbor if you think that they are planting seeds illegally. And let's be honest. It's a construct that it's illegal. Farmers have been saving seeds or borrowing from their neighbor or whatever. Right. Once you're in possession of seeds, as long as you didn't steal them from somewhere.

Yeah. It's like this guy, a cleaner may say, hey, here, you can have some seed plants. How did that slip through? Like, is there, can you trace it back? Is there a time where they made some sort of an agreement with lawmakers to allow them to enforce this? Because this sounds like a crazy thing you shouldn't be able to enforce. Yeah. Because it's nature. You're essentially owning life, right? Yeah, totally. And there was a lot of debates about it. You're essentially owning life, right? Yeah, totally.

And there was a lot of debates about it. The big changes were in the 80s where the Supreme Court said that it was okay to patent. The fucking Reagan days. That's what it was. A trickle-down economics from the old Gipper. Yeah. I mean, those 80 years were, that was when you see this explosion. A lot of wild shit happened. Yeah, including New Coke.

That's right. Maybe not as new. But they were worried about Reagan, by the way, when they did that New Coke. Were they? Because it was the war on drugs. So it's like, we don't want to have anything to do with cocaine at this point. Just say no. There was just say no days.

Exactly. I remember that. I was born in 81. So that's when they allowed them to hold these patents on plants which is really it changed the game crazy it changed the game how much would be helped if they ruled that as something that's not just unnatural but illegal i mean it would totally have changed the game i mean it's hard to go put that genie back in the box. Is it? You know, I mean. But you're, I mean, it's one thing if it's an actual intellectual property, like if they've created something out of this, that they have some process where they create something.

And that's a very unique process to make a thing. And then they sell that thing. This is not a thing. This is a life. Right. It's plant life. Right. Right.

So the origins of it. And there were people who made that legal argument. They were like, this is crazy life. It's plant life. So the origins of it. And there were people who made that legal argument and were like, this is crazy. It's crazy, yeah, because it's like, I mean, it's a life form. Are we allowed to patent and own life forms? That seems. In this case, and what's weird,

here's the weird thing about that first case, the Supreme Court case, it's called the Chakrabarti case. The person developing it was trying to develop a microorganism that could clean up oil spills. So, again, like the human story, it was like, that's not bad. Right, right, right. But then they make monsters. Right. And then, you know, you think about the technologies that go haywire. I was reading something about they were trying to develop something to clean up the garbage patch.

You know, there's Boyan Slat, who's been on the podcast a couple of times, is a young wonderkind who's developed this machine to scoop all the plastic out of the... Yes, incredible. Yeah, it's incredible. And it's actually been implemented. And on top of that, he's actually now making products from that recycled plastic. And they're selling, I believe it's like sunglasses and a few different products that they're making from it. But then there was more talk of some sort of genetically engineered bacteria that was going to eat the plastic.

And I was like, and then when it runs out of plastic, then what happens? It starts eating whales. Like, what the fuck are you doing? Don't that like this is a movie yeah you're throwing this into the ocean it's gonna be a movie it totally yeah it always turns bad well it's just like it's this arrogance of not respecting nature and you know i think people think of that as like a hippie line or something i don't think it is i think it's just like it's not hippie it's like you know biomimicry like pay attention to it. You can see it everywhere. Like, Australia is a fantastic example of that. Do you know the history of

Australian wildlife? Not as intimately as I'd like. Wildlife in Australia and New Zealand as well. It's very, what they've done there is very strange. New Zealand's a different example, but wildlife in Australia, they basically brought a bunch of shit over there. Like a bunch of different deer and different things from Europe.

And then they started having these problems with certain animals. So they go, well, we're going to have to get some animals to kill those animals. So they brought over cats. And then the cats, the feral cats over there just fucking devastate everything. So now people go out and hunt cats. So, like, you know, if you have, like, a hunting magazine in America like you know if you have like a hunting magazine in america you would show someone who hunted a deer like look he's gonna eat their cheery hats dude they hold cats up i'm not exaggerating right they hold cats up the way we would hold

some sort of a horrible pest and you're like oh my god it's a fucking cat cat. Right. It's like, meow. Like you'd pet that cat. Like it's a fucking house cat. So they have this plague of house cats that are devastating ground nesting birds and all sorts of different types of wildlife. And they've brought in these cats to kill something else and then they have to bring in, they're trying to figure out how to kill the cats.

Here it is. Australia's cats kill 2 billion animals annually, which is actually not bad if you find out how much American cats, American feral cats kill more than that. Here's how the government is responding to the crisis. A new report from the federal parliament recommends cat registration,

nighttime curfews. Nighttime curfews. That's amazing. And spaying and neutering. Well, spaying and neutering would work. All that other stuff is fucking nonsense. But they've done this with animals in New Zealand as well. They have all these prey animals like stags and deer and all these different,

but they don't have any predators. Interesting. So what they have to do is gun them down from helicopters and just leave them there sometimes because they have overrun populations. And then they also have a bunch of people that hunt in New Zealand and it's a destination for, it was actually developed that way. Like in the, I think it was the 1800s. I believe it was hunters from Europe.

See if we can find like the history of New Zealand wildlife. But it's kind of the 1800s. I believe it was hunters from Europe. See if we can find the history of New Zealand wildlife. But it's kind of the same thing. These fucking people just, at one point in time when they didn't know any better, said, wouldn't it be great if we had this place and we just filled it up with a bunch of animals? Right, exactly. But we don't want any bad animals like wolves. So we're going to do this because we're smarter than the whole system. Exactly. animals like wolves we're gonna do this cuz we're smarter than the host exactly so they have fucking herds of wild stags and herds of deer and you know and then

Australia of course has their natural animals or their native animals like kangaroos and wallabies and all these different things are competing with these other new animals they brought in it's a disaster it is and you know it speaks to the same anger you could argue that's America in the early 1900s to where we're like wiping out wolves and then as a result we have like mice everywhere and then we gotta kill the mice so right you know it's it's just a broken way of looking at you know the world and I think that's why it's fun to do environmental history because we're always trying to say come back to nature it's actually not too bad you know it's it to go back to, like, no technology or anything like that.

It's just to respect it and to have – There's a balance that's achieved through natural, like, natural prey and predator balance is very important. And they're trying to do that, and there's resistance right now. They're trying to reintroduce wolves to Colorado. And it's resistance is like a bunch of different sources of resistance, but some of it is from ranchers that are like, listen, there's a reason why they killed off the wolves in the first place. They're devastating predators,

are really hard to manage. And then there's also the people that are the hunters that live in Colorado that are enjoying this sort of unnatural predator-prey balance. Like Colorado has more elk than I think all the other states combined. I think that's the – it for sure has the most elk of any state and doesn't really have things that eat elk. Right. Like coyotes have – they can't really eat elk. Right.

So they have coyotes, but coyotes mostly eat deer and rabbits and smaller things. It's very rare that they even get a calf right because the elk is such a large animal but they bring in wolves and you're gonna have a significant impact and so people are kind of fretting about that totally it's but you know they shouldn't have done in the first place exactly you shouldn't have killed them off in the first kind of disrupt it and then we're dealing with those legacies today. But when you bring them back, then there's a problem as well because you have animals

that really haven't adapted to being preyed upon. They don't know what the fuck is going on. They get wiped out. And that's what happened when they reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone.

Right. It just devastated the population. But then they eventually rather figured it out. Yeah. We were up in Yellowstone. Mosquitoes. That's the craziest thing in Yellowstone that we've done.

Really? Oh, my gosh. We went back on our honeymoon. My wife and I, we were back in the middle of nowhere in Yellowstone, and people were like, bears and all this stuff. We were like, these freaking mosquitoes, man. They are like ravenous in Yellowstone. So watch out for bears.

I've been to Yellowstone. I didn't experience the mosquitoes, but I did experience those kind of mosquitoes in, excuse me, Alaska. Yes, and they're crazy in Alaska. It's fucking wild to get back there. I was fishing with my friend Ari and we pulled into this spot

near like the trailhead and we went to get out of the truck. And as soon as we opened up the car the car filled with mosquitoes who were like what the fuck our idea was that we were going to get out of the car and spare ourselves down with repellent right we just opening the door oh yeah instantly they found us and there was a hundred mosquitoes in the car and they were huge it's it's super scary super scary. My brothers lived there for like 20 years and every time I go up I'm just like

you have to cinch down your jacket and stuff when you get in the back country with that stuff because it's nuts. I lived in Savannah. I grew up in Georgia. It's different. They can live a long time in Georgia. They're not so rushed. Exactly. Just picking people off. In Alaska they have

like a week. Yeah. They're only alive for like, you know, it's such a short amount of time where it's warm enough for them to live. It's about to get really freezing. Yeah. They just fucking go crazy. Dude, I was going to ask you though, like food stuff. I mean, how do you think about food? I mean, when, you know, I think hunting is a part of what you do, fishing and things like that.

Hunting is a part of what you do, fishing and things like that. I mean, how do you navigate this crazy food system that you've just said is not so broken? Well, I mean, I started hunting because of PETA videos, really. I mean, I watched some of those videos of factory farming, the ones that are now illegal, which is really crazy. The ag-gag laws, that is fucking crazy. Which is really crazy. Totally. The ag-gag laws. Yeah. That is fucking crazy.

If it's illegal to film something that would be abhorrent to most people. Right. There's a problem. Right. Why is it illegal to show people, like, hey, if you found out that the only way to make tires is to kill babies, and there was a factory where they're beating babies to death to make a tire, you'd be like, wait a minute. I'm not buying tires.

Yeah, why am i buying tires if you're finding out that the only way to get bacon is they have to stuff these pigs into these tiny cages and it creates these toxic lakes and you've seen those when they fly the drones over these these factory pig farms you're like what the fuck is that totally whether it's um cows or pigs or chickens when they're stuffing them into these places. And it's horrific. And I was like, you know, I watched a few of those videos and I said, all right, I'm going to either become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter. Like there's going to, I'm going to, cause you play with the vegetarian stuff. And it was like, I did when I was fighting, I was, I was trying to make a lower weight class when I was in my martial arts

competing days. And it just didn't work for me. And it's very arguable that I did it wrong. It's very arguable that it's possible to do it right today. Not that arguable that the elite of the elite choose to eat vegetarian or vegan. That's not really true. If you really follow the evidence, that's not true. That's argued by these really zealous vegan advocates and activists. And I see why they would think that way. And I see why they think that it's smart. But they're also unwilling to

look at monocrop agriculture, which is absolutely necessary for developing the amount of crops that you need to feed the entire country a vegetarian diet, you're going to have to use monocrop agriculture and it's going to have to be crazy. And also like farms work in a regenerative manner when they're done correctly, meaning that everything, just like we were talking about with nature and animals and predators and prey, the way farms are supposed to work, the way things are supposed to grow, you have ruminants and these animals and they shit and that shit is fertilizer and it's much more rich and it grows and it's actually a carbon neutral

environment when done correctly. Right. You know, like the way Joel Salatin does it with his polyface farms. And there's a few other really ethical people that have really thought this out and engineered their farms to rotate their crops and rotate the use of animal fertilizer, natural animal fertilizer with grazing. And they make sure that they do it all together. And it really can work. The question is, can it work at scale for the entire country? And I don't know if it can. It's an interesting question.

And, you know, I lived in Charlottesville for a while. And my good, another Joel friend of mine has a free union grass farm. They actually learned a lot of their tactics from Joel Saladin, who's right over the hill, the mountain in Virginia. And, you know, I spend time with him and you're right. I mean, actually get meat from him. You know, it's actually, it's incredible to watch the amount of thought and, you know, having animals move on various grassland and trying to kind of create this system that is clearly not trying to take a freaking sledgehammer to the ground and

trying to be like, look, the soil is amazing. It's like this incredibly biologically diverse thing. And the fact that we would just, you know, yeah, as you're saying, like not pay attention to it and just spray stuff on top of it, I think it's part of the problem. Yeah, it all is supposed to work together, right? Like the chickens and the pigs and all these different animals. When you move these things around the way Joel Salatin does and use these sort of regenerative farming practices,

if done correctly, you really can have a harmonious environment for both animals and plants. Totally. And you can grow all these things together. And you can do it in an ethical way. And I think the ethics is part of it. For me, that's the thing that once you start seeing that, you can't unsee it.

Agreed. And it's the same way I feel that once you start seeing that, you can't unsee it. Yeah. And I think it's, it's. Agreed. And it's the same way I feel about some of these people too. Like in these factors, like I can't, like. Right.

When you see either the humans being treated that way or animals, it changes what you can eat. Yeah. I read something about this guy who was a journalist. I want to say it was in Esquire

and he worked, I don't remember what magazine it was. I might be making that up. It might have been another magazine. But he worked on the line at a butcher place, at a slaughterhouse, essentially. And he was essentially dealing with cows coming in and coming out. That's crazy. And he was talking about just the smell of death

That every day you would go in there and you would smell blood and Corpses and that was like this constant smell that was in you like which is not normal, right? It's not normal for a person to experience that every day Yeah, if you lived on a farm and you had to kill a cow you kill the cow once a year What are you know once every six months or whatever you did and you and you had to kill a cow, you kill the cow once a year or whatever, you know, once every six months or whatever you did. And you didn't just like kill a thousand cows a day and like cut them up and cut their organs out and just stand around with waiters because you're standing ankle deep in blood and guts,

literally like these guys do. Like what kind of psychological effect must that have on a human being that every day is just hooks and meats coming by and you're gutting it and spilling it out and cutting this and throwing it over there. And you're making no money. Right. And then you don't get paid anything. Yeah. When this guy wrote this article about it and also in the article he was talking about how this industry would completely fall apart if it wasn't for illegal aliens he was like you know there's i don't know how this is

working i don't know how this is but everyone's like these undocumented workers that are doing this horrific really intense labor that's bad for you like in terms of like gotta be bad for you psychologically totally Totally. Absolutely. I think that was the turning point for me is just thinking about, I think that's the problem is that nobody, part of it is just, is just being, being comfortable with being ignorant about it. Right. And then people say, well, whatever, I'll just, you know, once, once you start having

that connection, which I think is part of the history of the 20th century of our food system is we just got disconnected from that. Like we don't have that. Connection. Connection. Well, the good news about Texas is there's a lot of ranchers. And you can have a relationship with ranchers or you can buy food from ranchers that actually use ethical practices. And if you do a little bit of research and you find,

there's people that you can actually trust that do, like there's the Rome Ranch. I know they have, that's the one that Paul Saladino uses and they grow bison and cattle and it's all grass fed, grass finished. They roam through these fields and they just, they live like animals do and then they have like essentially one bad day. Right. But they don't live and they don't really have a bad day. They have a moment in a day.

They don't even know what the hell is happening. And all of a sudden they get that pipe through the brain. Yeah. And that's a wrap. Yeah. We've got to change it. It's not good. So that's how I got into hunting.

Yeah. And I've been doing that. I've been hunting since 2012. So the bulk of my diet is wild game. Wow. That's the bulk of my diet. And you feel good and it's great. I think it has a lot to do with my vitality.

I really do. I mean, it must. If you look at it like I had a friend over this weekend and I shot an elk last week and I was going over it and I vacuum seal all the cuts of meat and I was cutting up liver and vacuum sealing the liver and I was cutting up all these different pieces of the tenderloin and backstrap. And my friend was like, look how red this is. I'm like, this is what an animal is supposed to look like. This is a healthy animal. This is like a super athlete animal when you're getting a piece of like Wagyu beef right that is a sick fucking animal Like you're not supposed to have that much fat. You're basically eating like a slob

Yeah, like if it was a human that'd be a person who's really like depressed and something's wrong with them because they're like They're not supposed to be that overweight This is terrible for your body And that's why they have to introduce some of the antibiotics to these cows because they're like they're not supposed to be that overweight this is terrible for your body and that's why they have to introduce so many antibiotics to these cows because they're eating a diet that's not sustainable for long-term health and and vitality for the cow like when you get grass-fed grass-finished beef like one of my sponsors is butcher box and you'd get these steaks these ribeye steaks and butcher box they'd be smaller than a ribeye that you'd get somewhere else because they don't have all this fat in them.

And it's like, it's red. You get the meat, it's like a red meat. And people, they look at it, they go, oh, look how dark it is. Like that's what it's supposed to be. When you're seeing that sort of pale- In fact, there's been coloring added to meat at grocery stores to make it- Really? Oh yeah, totally. There's a whole history of color in food at grocery stores. Really? Yeah, totally.

There's a whole history of color in food. I know they did that with salmon. I didn't know they did that with meat. They did, in part to try and make things look fresher and things like that. Yeah, which is just kind of not so. Yeah, that's got to be bad for you. I think that's one side of the – because when I was writing about the Monsanto thing, it wasn't just that like if this is a story about genetically engineered seeds.

I mean, honestly, that comes later in the book. It's about all the other chemicals that end up, like, in our food system, you know, that aren't necessarily even chemicals designed for food. You know? Like phthalates and things like that. One of the ones that was crazy in this story is polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. It's good. Yeah. It's yummy stuff.

And this stuff is like- Dangerous shit. Super dangerous. Monsanto was the only producer of this stuff, of PCBs in the United States. They had two factories, one in East St. Louis and then one in Anniston, Alabama. And they made this stuff. And it was like a wonder chemical. It came out in the 30s.

And that's the shit that's in plastic bottles and stuff, right? Well, this is – it actually was banned in the 60s. So not BPA, which is in the plastic bottles, which comes later. But PCBs were like crazy. I mean they were in like artificial Christmas trees. They were in carbonless paper. They were in the paint that we lined our pools around. They were in the – actually in the paint in the silos that held grain.

Oh, my God. And this stuff was like so insane and everywhere. But then classic situation, 60s again. They're like, whoops. This stuff is like super toxic, 60s again. They're like, whoops, this stuff is like super toxic, like exceptionally toxic. And there's this document, I actually had it, I don't know Jamie wanted to see it or not, but that's handwritten notes from this meeting in 1969 inside Monsanto, confidential document that they had, where they're discussing like,

what should we do with PCBs like we now know it's a global contaminant it's super toxic it's in everything it was it's everywhere it's in breast milk you know at that time because it's just everywhere and they're discussing like okay what should we do and it says situation is snowballing 1969 handwritten notes in this big beating underneath it says alternatives well we could go out of the business is option one which is weird you know it's funny i told i was telling somebody about this document last night in austin and uh yeah here's the document

look at that and this is from 69 this is this like confidential document and what for people just listening it's just handwritten notes. And it says, subject is snowballing. Where do we go from here? Well, we have a couple alternatives. Look at that. We can either go out of the business. That didn't sound great.

Or we can quote, and this is what we're reading here, sell the hell out of them as long as we can and do nothing else. Well, it says sell as long. Oh, the hell out of them. long as we can and do nothing else. Well, it says sell as long. Oh, the hell out of them. Right, above it. What is amazing is that the guy took the time to like, no, wait a minute. Let's put a little thing up. And it's weird.

Like, I'm, you know, there's a chuckle to it because it just seems so freaking absurd. Because the problem is that it's honestly not that funny, right? It's horrible. This is crazy that the company does go on, by the way, to continue selling it. He wrote it, sell, and then it's, you got to look at this, folks, if you can find it online. Yeah, it's available online. It says, sell as long as we can and do nothing else. And then after the fact, he wrote the hell out of them and then inserted it in between sell and as.

And then at the big question, I like this, what do we tell our customers? And that's the big question. They're selling this to everybody and part of it was also when do we tell our customers? Which is like, and this is the kind of stuff you're seeing during this, during this period in the sixties, you're like, what is going on? Um, and yeah, they have a bunch of other things about dog studies and things like that. But PC, I mean, this stuff was crazy. It was in everything. It was in a, it's in transformers actually. And firemen fire rescue people. Even today can, you know, if there's a big big transformer fire or something, they can be

exposed to burning PCBs because they were allowed to remain in place. So this PCB contamination is still out there. And there are actually states, Washington State, I don't know all of them off the top of my head, Delaware, that are suing Bayer right now to pay for PCB contamination from that long ago because it's still out there. And they're winning. And by the way, Bayer made the worst decision ever. Can we just acknowledge that? Bayer buys Monsanto in 2018.

They were making aspirin. Everybody was happy. Woo-hoo! And they were making aspirin since the late 19th century. That's the crazy thing. We're not making enough money off this aspirin. Everybody was happy. And they were making aspirin since the late 19th century. That's the crazy thing. We're not making enough money off this aspirin. Fucking ibuprofen's taking the legs out of us, boys. It's time to step up. Let's go buy the most toxic

liabilities we possibly can think of. Oh, where's that? Monsanto. They bought them. For how much? About $63, $64 billion. It was the largest merger, I think, in German history, a merger in a German firm. Of course it's German. Well, here's the thing.

The great irony of this is John Queenie, the guy with Olga Monsanto, his whole point for being was he wanted to beat the Germans. Wow. He wanted to be his independent American chemical company, patriotic, you know? And then they get bought out. Poor guy, if he was alive, right? He'd be like, oh man, the Germans got me. But then I think the Germans would be like super sensitive to anything that would be

kind of like at least semi-genocidal. Well, and Bayer, you know, of course the chemical company was associated with this, right? Nazi Germany and the chemicals that were created in that time. So that chemical industry has a really sordid history of their own. But in terms of Bayer now, it was nuts. They buy the company. And by the way, the CEOs at the time, one guy coming in, one guy going out. The guy going out was like, don't do this, bro.

I'm sure they said bro. You know, like like don't do this bro i'm sure they said bro you know like don't do it bro and and the the new guy warner bauman was like they've got some pretty cool technology you know look at all this stuff how did the germans get so advanced when it comes to chemicals because like if you go to fritz haber and basf part of it had to do they've been in the game for a very long time they were the kind of front runners in organic chemistry in the late 19th century. And a part of it had to do with a lot of great research institutions that were close to coal deposits, which were the source of all that organic chemistry. And they just took off. And so, you know, they had a leg up.

Though I will say the oil boom in the United States in the early 20th century gave the Americans a chance because we had all this oil that we could use to make chemicals. And companies like Monsanto started to catch up. But what's crazy is Warner Bauman buys Monsanto in 2018. Like literally a couple months later, the first roundup case goes against Bayer, now Bayer. later, the first roundup case goes against Bayer, now Bayer. It's $285 million for one guy in that case, Dwayne Johnson, $285 million. The Rock? Exactly. Is that how The Rock got started? Well, he actually prefers Lee Johnson because of that reason, Dwayne Lee Johnson. But he had terminal cancer at that point when he goes to trial, and it was the first kind of case that went against Bayer. And it was right after Warner Bauman bought the company.

And everyone's like, oh. And you can look at their stock price. It's nuts. They lose a third of their value within a couple months after that. And then two other cases happen happened and they're dropping. They actually, by the end of 2019, Bayer was worth the amount of money they paid to buy Monsanto.

Holy shit. It was that bad. And so the CEO, Warren Obama, goes into the shareholders meeting and have some pictures of the book where he's like, sorry, you know, and he's standing in front of the stock price that looks like this and trying to explain it to his shareholders. And the shareholders aren't having it.

They issue a vote of no confidence in the CEO and the board of management, which had never happened in the history of the DAX. Yeah, this is a picture from that meeting. And that's him thinking about his future. Yeah, it's kind of an amazing picture. Before that, he was thinking about buying a yacht. Exactly. He's like, no yacht. There will be no yachts. Things aren't looking so good. And so, you know, I think this is a situation where they don't know what's going to happen because they're not only facing lawsuits. Agent Orange is also still, you know, that's still an issue. What do they do with those?

They just hold those off while the people die? Well, like basically that's what they're trying to do in some ways, you know, is kind of delay, delay, delay. But the problem is these people aren't going away. There were 120,000 Roundup litigation cases that were filed or either were going to trial when I last looked back when I was writing this book. This was people who are coming on hard. And it's just – that's not just Roundup. PCBs. So is that like the only thing that can stop a company that is – it's hard to say that a company is evil. Yes. That's right.

I don't think it's fair to say it's evil, right? It's made up of people and there's good people and bad people. And there's some people like that guy who ended up writing, let's sell the hell out of them as long as they can. That's evil. That's evil. Yeah. Yeah. And it's clearly that does happen when you have these corporations that are acting to just have this constant never-ending

profit stream and they look at that and there's the diffusion of responsibility that comes with having a large corporation you're not thinking of it as an individual but when you're thinking about a company that also is like responsible for a lot of the food that feeds all these animals and a lot of the food that feeds people. It's like, okay, how much evil? Is it 30% evil and 70% good? What's the net result of Monsanto existing? I think my feeling about it was simply,

I wanted to answer that question. That was the driving question in the book. Wait a minute, how did a company that had all these, the most toxic compounds the world's ever seen, basically help design our food system? Do you think you, to your own personal satisfaction, did you come to a conclusion? I mean, to that question, I think the answer is pretty clear.

And the answer is that they never really held accountable. Not by the EPA, not by the USDA, not by- Do you think they're going to be now with all these different cases? It did feel weird. I mean- There's a precedent, right? It's been set with that enormous payout. And then- And then all these cases in the wings. Yeah. I mean, you know, Bayer is trying as hard as it can to try and settle all this. I mean, you're talking about $15 billion. I mean, it's an insane amount of money to try and settle all this. I mean, you're talking about $15 billion. I mean, it's an insane amount of money to try and settle something like this, but it reflects the scale

of what's going on. How did they not see that coming when they bought it? I'm telling you, there were people like the guy going out that I was telling you about, who was like, don't do this. You know, like, do you understand? I, you know know what I would say, Joe, is partially I think people don't look to history. They don't sit with it to say, look at how long this goes back and look at how persistent this stuff is. We're still dealing with it. Agent Orange is a good example. I mean, I went to Vietnam. We are now, most people don't know this, we are currently cleaning up Agent Orange in Vietnam for the first time.

The dioxin contamination in Vietnam that was sprayed by the U.S. military. On the jungle? Yes. How are they cleaning that up? And just so people that, you know, to fill in Agent Orange, why it was used in Vietnam, it was used as this defoliant. Exactly. As you said, to kind of expose these jungle areas so that we could fight more effectively. And it was sprayed in an enormous quantity across the country.

That dioxin persists and it stayed in the environment through the end of the 21st century and 20-teens, and it's still there. Is there a half-life of it? I don't know what the half-life is, and I don't know how, in a lot of cases, it will denature, but a lot of this stuff is still there, and there's hot spots. There's research that was done that I talk about that shows all these hot spots. And so I flew there because I couldn't believe it. I was like, all right, what's happening? And no one's talking about it.

Like we actually, you and I, Jamie, everyone in this room is paying, you know, taxpayers, U.S. taxpayers are paying for it. That's part of the thing, I think, going back to how do you get away with this? Right. You don't end up having to pay for stuff. Like Monsanto has not paid a cent for that. Was that a part of the agreement that they had with the military when they sold them the stuff? Part of the argument that they used in court and things like that is like, we sold this to the government for the government's purposes. And

we can't beheld the contractor's defense. We're just a contractor here doing the bidding of the federal government. We have a certain degree of insulation. But what I'm trying to show in the book is they saw things internally and knew things about their product that I think should blow that out of the water. Just because you sell something to the federal government, but if you know that it's making your workers look like the people we saw, are you not in some way liable for trying to clean that up? And so in this case, it's totally nuts, Joe. So if you fly into Da Nang in Vietnam, which is one of the former air bases of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, when you fly into that airport, on the south end of the airport tarmac is this huge concrete structure that we just have dumped soil into that has tremendous high concentrations of dioxin. This just finished, 2012 to 2017.

This is how it works. They put all this soil into this huge concrete structure. They put all this soil into this huge concrete structure. Then they put electrodes, like 1,000 of them, into that concrete structure and heat it up using electricity to like some insane thing, like 300 degrees Celsius, to basically cook the dioxin. Oh, my God. And it costs like $130 million or something for that one site. And that's how they do it. They have to put this dirt into a big concrete structure, burn it. And that's how we're going to go around Vietnam and clean up a lot of this dioxin contamination. But that also must kill all the biological material in that dirt.

All that stuff. Like all the stuff that grows life. Sure. It's a total mess. So it's going to be a desert. Well, but again, you're looking, you know, they're looking at

concentrated areas. How do they know? How do they know if it's completely denatured? No, I mean, how do they know where the concentrated areas are? Well, part of it

was where they stored a lot of the Agent Orange. So air bases were really bad hot spots because they were just having those, you can think of, especially when you leave an area, it's just like all these big old tanks of Agent they were just having those, you can think of, especially when you leave an area,

it's just like all these big old tanks of Agent Orange. And they just left them there. Leaked and did all this kind of disastrous stuff. So yeah, this is- Oh my God, what the fuck? 22 photographs of Agent Orange inventory in 1974. Oh my God. This was a crazy trip for me because-

Look at all those barrels. That's insane. When I went to Da Nang, we didn't have access to go on site. Look at that. That's crazy. It is crazy. You're looking at folks. You're looking at-

Oh, there it is. There it is. Sorry. The medium.com one, Jamie. Right below that to the left. Overcoming the legacies. That's that concrete structure I was telling you about. You see all those electrodes going in?

Yeah. Basically, they put – this is crazy. They have to do it in batches. So they have to cap it, put all the soil in, and then decap it, and then put in a new batch of soil, heat it, then take it off. And what do they do with the old soil? You know, I don't know where they dump it, but it doesn't have to happen. Click on that again, Jamie, that same picture up right there.

See, they're capping it right there. Look at that. That's all dirt. It's nuts. We got the same picture, by the way. We couldn't get access to the site, so my buddy who's a photographer and I, John Zadar, we went and got up on this hotel, and there was this crazy pool up up there and people were drinking.

It was the weirdest thing. I'm like filming this like insane story about dioxin. This is happening as we speak. Yeah. This particular site just completed. Almost no one talks about it here in the country. it here in the country. And it was a partnership between USAID and the Vietnamese government to finally start cleaning up some of the dioxin that was there. And by the way, by this point, we've of course given benefits to veterans. We've done all sorts of things to try and,

as the US government, to try and write this. But in terms of Vietnamese citizens, and that was part of the deal. Whenever we were trying to do negotiations with the Vietnamese, they're like, hey, we'll negotiate once you clean up this mess. So it became like this huge problem. But if you ask, where's Monsanto? And here's the crazy thing. Monsanto's now there. They just got permission to begin selling, guess what? Glyphosate?

And genetically engineered seeds. Oh, my God. So the story comes back, right? And it's like, what? Well, they say, good news. We have Agent Orange resistant. Right, exactly. Well, and in a way, I mean, in a way, Joe, again, like it's so crazy.

But in a way, that's probably true down the road. Because, and I'm going to be clear, it's not necessarily Agent Orange. But 2,4-D, that's that second half. That's not the Agent Orange, but 2,4-D. That's that second half. That's not the dioxin one. This is the other one that didn't have dioxin. But it's still part of that Agent Orange. And it's not like it's more toxic than glyphosate in a lot of ways, right?

It's a toxicity profile. But it's not the 2,4,5-T with dioxin. But anyway, so it's still being used, 2,4-D, that other half of Agent Orange. So it's 2,4-D and 2,4-5-T? I know. It's like my mind was swimming in numbers because of these chemicals. And that's part of it. I think a lot of these chemicals are named stuff like this, like, eh, whatever. Like, who's paying attention, right? Polychlorinated biphenyls. Who wants to talk about that? Yeah. Well, it's all around us, you know, and we have to pay attention to it because we're exposed to it. And in this case, you kind of saw that there, Jamie, no reason to bring

it back up, but there was the like lake at the end of the, you were talking about fishing and, you know, a lot of people in Vietnam, they're fishing in those ponds and things like that. And that was the problem. They were being exposed to super high levels of dioxin. So by the way, we're cleaning up the dirt, but we're not necessarily taking care as effectively as we could be of the people themselves who could be exposed to dioxin in Vietnam, which is a big debate right now. How do we take care of the legacies of that war? And one could argue, well, given what we know about the history, shouldn't there be companies that take... And you could say this,

okay, screw liability. Forget the legal argument that whether, okay, they have the contractor's defense or whatever. But if you're a company like Bayer and you want to come in and sell seeds, I mean, I'm just talking out of goodwill. You know this is part of the history. You know that we didn't clean this up. You're a multi-billion dollar firm shouldn't you have some responsibility for going back and taking responsibility for that you know fuck so then all those people all those all those lives lost all those people that had horrific diseases directly connected to agent orange and there's been some really brave riders you know that have been riding some op-eds recently from Vietnam

who are trying to just continue to make sure that people don't forget about this and tell this story. And just to put a fine point on it, that right now, you said, is it happening right now? I just want to be clear on it. Right now, they've moved to another American air base that's just outside of Ho Chi Minh City, former American air base, in Binh Hoa. So if you're interested in this topic, right now,

there's a massive dioxin remediation project that, again, USAID and the US government's doing. The companies that sold this stuff are nowhere to be seen, but we're paying for it. And it's a much more expensive project because it's way more expansive. So this Da Nang project is completed? It's completed. So does that mean you can go there and eat off the ground? Well, you know, there's other contaminants I might be concerned about too. Does the five second rule count? Yeah, I don't think it's a five second rule, but I do think it's gone a long way to prevent this leaching of dioxin into those lakes and leaching other contaminants in there. And I think it's made it a much safer place.

So I think that human health costs need to be taken care of. So to be clear, the cleanup is essentially just the storage areas. It's not the areas they sprayed. Right. You know, a lot of areas, these are hot spots in part because the heavy, you can think that the Vietnam War has been, you know, over for a long time. So the hottest spots were places where there was storage, not so much necessarily where the spraying went. Right. We were looking at this again, for the folks that are just listening,

we looked at like multiple football fields filled with stacked drums of Agent Orange. That's what the images were. That's scary shit. And you said that is small in comparison to the new project that they're- Right. The Da Nang site was a much more, I mean, like most projects governments take on. Yeah, this is down in, it looks like Benoit. That's the whole site that's contaminated?

All that's blocked off? that's contaminated. Yeah blocked off We had a lot of these dip Yeah You can see pacer ivy was also the name of the kind of removal of Agent Orange from that's bigger than Austin the u.s Well, that's this about the about the green line is the boundaries the boundary Is the boundary the hotspots the hotspots? Oh, I see so the red areas of the hotspots Yeah, so they have to and of course that's leaching into the ground. So any well water. All these things.

Yeah. It's, it's, you know, and, and they've been, there's studies. I mean, it's not like it's, we don't know. We, one of the reasons we've gone in is because we know that people have exposure to it. You know, it, it spreads and. And there's little lakes there too. See the lakes that are right next to it. Yeah, exactly.

There's all these waterways and things like that it's kind of nuts so mr. Hawk Lake mr. Hawks goes on Lake mr. rock exactly we actually it was crazy I remember this day cuz I thought that mr. Coy has his own lake too but his lakes not fucked up mr. Hawks lakes all in the hot zone that's a lake yeah imagine being mr hawk is like he's americans i had a nice lake we went on motorcycles to get there and all i remember was we were just covered and just like dirt because we we couldn't figure out how to get out there were you worried um this these were a couple of hectic days for me because i you know i was just a historian i i i i was not an experienced journalist at that time and hadn't really learned some of the trade.

And I was kind of showing up and knocking on doors. I went to the headquarters of Monsanto in Vietnam to ask questions. But what I meant is you worried about exposure from driving around with the dirt. Oh, that. Yeah, no. More about like Monsanto or being in trouble in some way. Not necessarily the dioxin exposure there. I will say this.

This is crazy. So I did get really worried. I went to the site where Roundup is manufactured. And so does Springs, Idaho. So this is where the elemental phosphorus that goes into glyphosate to make the herbicide is. And it's crazy because it comes from phosphate rock that's mined from the mountains there. And as a byproduct of producing elemental phosphorus, it's radioactive waste that's generated. This is definitely viewable, Jamie, on Google, you can look like Soda Springs slag pile phosphorus. I think it'll pop up.

So, and it'll be helpful just to talk about when we can see it, but basically, there it is. That's my piece, the Descent Magazine piece there, the second one. My buddy, John Zader, took that picture. So what you're seeing here is this mountain of charcoal waste. That's the leftover slag. This is done every 15 minutes. Every 15 minutes, there's dumping of this slag waste. This is how you produce, they make Roundup. This is the elemental phosphorus that goes into glyphosate that makes Roundup.

And what we're seeing is these cauldrons that are dumping like lava-like, yeah, you can see a good shot there, sludge down this mountain. You can see that barbed wire fence. So we stood there for a long time and took pictures of all of this. But basically, this waste, as you can see, it's now just this mountain because they can't put it anywhere. It's essentially, you know, it has radionuclides that make it dangerous if you're going to use it. So is that an artificially created mound? Yeah. It looks like a mountain, but there's nowhere to put it.

So we're just dumping more and more of this waste higher and higher. This is insane. So this initially was flat ground? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. It's the south end of the plant. You can see the plant up there. That's kind of the plant. Where is this again?

This is in Soda Springs, Idaho. We camped out there at a Superfund site. That's fucking crazy. My friends always say, my students always say, Superfund? And I'm like, not super fun. The opposite of super fun. Super fund.

Like the most toxic sites. Look at them dumping that lava shit and creating these mountains. So that's one of the most toxic sites. So what happens when that stuff gets rained on? Well, you know, there's all sorts of questions about the long-term effects of this. And so let me just make little weirder, okay? Oh, boy. So this pile of slag, okay, is a pile because in the 70s,

they finally prevented Monsanto from selling this stuff as aggregate to build things out of, okay? So the town of Soda Springs in Idaho and Pocatello nearby used the slag waste, the slag waste, as an aggregate to build, basically to build basement foundations and roadways and their sidewalks and stuff like that. And the, let me make sure I get all this because it's just so wild. So basically, the EPA comes in in the 80s.

Remember, a lot of this stuff is happening even before there's even an EPA, you know, in the 70s. So things are just going kind of wild. But they come in in the 80s and they do these radiological surveys. They actually fly over

and look for gamma radiation. I'm like, oh, folks, like there's elevated levels of gamma radiation coming out of like basement foundations. Oh, Jesus. And school buildings and whatever else they've used for its streets and things like that. And, you know, they're like, you can't do this, you know. And so one of the reasons there's that pile is because it was like, well, we can't sell it anymore. So it's just kind of getting higher and higher. And it was really a weird story.

We went there and kind of stayed there for a couple of days just to kind of get a sense of it. And the mine sites themselves where they mine the phosphate ore are all Superfund, were Superfund sites. And Superfund goes, comes from the Superfund Act of 1980 that designates the most- You need a hard D there, sir. Superfund, exactly. Is this Superfund? And I'm like, it seems like- Not for the people living there, you know? It's a problem, that word. But those sites are, so what happens there is the

overburden piles, the waste piles from mining the rock have heavy concentrations of selenium. And you were talking about hunting. So what happened there was these overburden piles leached selenium into the grassland. Grassland picked up that selenium and animals died as a result of eating that selenium. By the way, Monsanto called this at the time, this is our sustainable, environmentally friendly herbicide. Oh, of course. And you're like, this is how it's manufactured. So when they made basements and these various structures out of that stuff, that waste, they recognized eventually that this is a problem. And then what do they demo everything and then put it onto that pile?

No. So this is what like was the weirdest thing. And that's why I think you have to go as a writer to these places because you have to kind of listen to what happened. And I was expecting like Love Canal. You know, expecting like, you know, the town rises up and you've got Lois Gibbs and others, they're going to say, hell no, we're not going to have this. But what happens is the EPA comes in and they're like, get the heck out of here.

You know? They kick the EPA out? You know, not physically, but when they came in to do the hearings, they were like, we don't want you to designate our town a Superfund site, which there was a suggestion that the EPA might do that for the whole city. And we're not talking about high levels of gamma radiation. I want to be clear. It was fairly low levels, but it was still above background. And the EPA thought it was a problem. They said, look, we've got to do something about this. But the town kind of rebels against the EPA. It's not like they're welcoming the regulators coming in. And that's partially because town of 3000 people, this is a huge plant. There are other phosphate

plants for making fertilizer and other things from other companies that are there too. And I think part of it is a story of these companies have, you know, they're all lifeblood. Yeah. And we're okay with this low level of radiation. You know, think about radon in basements and things like that. We'll just deal with it. And so the EPA is kind of like, oh, what do we do? And they kind of listen. They try this decentralized strategy of like, all right, we'll work with this town.

And so demos don't happen. Like most people just have those houses and- Just deal with it. And just, and so for example, deal with it. Are there health consequences because of this that you can track? I don't, I haven't seen any data that says, you know, we've seen precipitous increase in cancer rates or things like that. But I'm, I want to follow that because, you know, we're looking at how over the long-term are we going to see, you know, long term health issues.

But what I will say is, you know, the public health agency in the town, in the recommendations, and you can see this online too. It says, well, folks, if we're going to live with this, it literally says, spend less time in your basements. Oh, Jesus Christ. Imagine, Joe, you've just remodeled your house or whatever. It's like, just don't go down there. Oh, my God. That is so crazy.

Spend less time in your basement. Oh, my God. We don't want you to die, so just leave some stuff. Don't leave food down there, by the way. Don't put Nintendo down there. Oh. The kids will not be happy with whatever happens. And we even – I was going to say that we even tried to get into a river

and kayak in to see one of the mine sites because they were closed off. And we thought the only way we could get there is if we paddled. And so we had these boats and we like put them in. And this person came up beside us and was like, you're not getting in that river. And my photographer buddy, who I think just spaced for a second, was like, why? Is it polluted? You know, what's going on? And I was like, John, he's saying we're not getting in that river because he didn't want us to get in that river, you know.

And I'm not so – I can't confirm that like that's why he was telling me not to get in there. Was it his – did he think I was going to be going through his property because we were on a public land access point? But did he not want us to go by his property? Or was it that he was like, who are these out-of-towners to do this? Well, we weren't going to go on the way the river was going to go. So was he threatening? I'm confused here. Was he threatening you?

Yeah, it was one of those things where I thought it was clear that he was like, we don't want you to go in that river and go on whatever journey you're going to go on potentially to see this story. And I don't know whether it was he was worried about us exposing something or seeing something or whether it was just you shouldn't be here. You're not from here. I don't know why you're getting in this was just, you shouldn't be here. You're not from here. I don't know why you're getting in this river, and you shouldn't do it. But it wasn't that he was worried about your health. No, exactly.

It wasn't that. That's what John thought. I guess maybe it was logical. I was just so paranoid at the point that I knew immediately that it was not about— But he didn't have any authority to keep you out of that river. In my opinion, no, because you can paddle in the middle of a river. You have a right of way to do that. Right, but you just listened to him?

I did. Do you wish you didn't? Like maybe you would have saw something? I think I saw what I needed to see. Do you think that's part of the story? Well, it's a small town. Yeah. So when you start asking around, people start talking,

and because of the fact that they're so reliant on these plants, do you think that they were concerned that you guys could screw it up and they would lose their livelihood? So they saw you and you're about to get in that water and like, this guy's going to cause trouble. I don't know. You know, Joe, I don't know. It's guesswork. It's guesswork. But it was one of those moments. All I'd say, Joe, is that given what I had seen of the town's response, it seemed plausible to me, right? That was what was so surprising about that chapter. You said earlier, like, how did Monsanto survive, you know, to become the seed company? Or how did they get away with it, I guess, right? It's one of the things. And that chapter is about, like, the loyalty of some of these smaller towns, you know, that like, and the kind of, this is our lifeblood.

Well, you see that in, I'm sure you've seen Roger and me, right? You see that in these towns where a big company does pull out of the town, and if they're dependent upon that town economically, it's devastating, it's a horrific thing. Totally, and you think, you were talking about remodeling. I mean, I mentioned this in the book.

Like, what are you going to do? Right. So like, okay, you've got kids. So you're going to have them come in and rip out your foundation. You know, and that wasn't, there were options proposed by the company. Look, if you really need us to do this, we'll go, we'll take out your foundation and do that. But most people aren't going to do that. And also, they're the homes, the home value.

Like, part of it was, we don't want to be a Superfund site because, you know. Right. It'll fuck up everything we've invested my time and effort into, my mortgage, my house would be worth nothing. This is what I mean by like a human story. Like, you know, I don't blame a lot. Sometimes it was hard to blame people for what's going on. It's like, you know, it's systemic in some ways. Yeah, it's not great, but it is all they

have. That's their town. Small towns that are relying on a big company to take care of them like that, it's a very precarious situation. If that company goes under, good luck moving your family. You have your kids go to school in that town. Your entire income is based on that company. That said, and this is important to point out, there were people that were like, hell no. You know, this is not right. The biggest group of people that I found, I followed the Freedom of Information Act request to get these documents. filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get these documents. But were the landowners around the plant who were farmers, ranchers, or whatever,

who were like, uh-uh, we don't work for this plant. And what are you talking about? This is going to get cleaned up. In fact, it was like this family feud. It was an amazing family with like the grandmother who was like 80 years old was writing to the EPA and her letters were amazing. Fortunately, you can get them because they're public records. And I was like, she was like, I feel like I'm trespassing on my property to get to, you know, past all this pollution that's on my land. And you're telling me I have to deal with it?

Because for those owners, they were saying, well, look, you just have to have like, you can't do certain things on it. And they're like, what are you talking about? I can't do stuff on this part of my property. Just because you guys have more money than us? Yeah, exactly. This is not a deal that works for us. And ultimately what happened to this family, they fought and fought.

Actually, it was so crazy. Because I gave a talk. I gave very few talks when I was writing this, by the way. Because I wanted to be able to talk to people both inside the company and outside it without being a public figure talking about Monsanto. I wanted to be able to go to places and be relatively anonymous. But I gave one talk in Utah about what I was finding at this site. talk in Utah about what I was finding at this site. And after I gave the talk,

I'd shown that FOIA letter about that family that I'd found of, you know, that was fighting. And I swear to you, this guy comes up to me at the end of the talk and he goes, dude, they're my neighbors. And they're like now in their eighties or I don't even know, maybe even nineties, they were super old and they were still alive. The people had written those letters. The kids of that older grandmother were still alive. And I was like, oh my gosh, let me go interview them. Because I wanted to figure out like, so what happened?

Because like the archives only go so far. And we sat down and had dinner with them. They were like an amazing couple and super sweet. And they were talking to me and they were like, they bought our property. You know, they bought us out basically. And for a good price, like they gave us. And so one of the ways that they, that Monsanto, you know, suppressed the resistance from people like the landowners was to buy their properties and offer them a lot of money. And some of these families agreed to that. Interestingly, by the way, after that talk, just so you know, the university I gave the talk at,

their caller ID the next day, they told me this. They said, they got a call and it just said Monsanto. And I was, you know, look, I got two kids, you know. I'm writing this as a relatively unprotected person who goes out and tells these stories. And I was nervous, you know. Just a sheer amount of money that's involved. Yeah, like I don't have billions of dollars to go up against a company like Bayer. And is it a concern that they would sue you or kill you?

Less kill. I think my mother, who's passed, but used to say, I'm worried you're going to get snuffed out. And I always used to say, mom, it's okay. I'm not going to get snuffed out. That's such an old school way of saying it. Snuffed out, yeah. It's like, no, mom.

But more just, yeah, what could be the ramifications of that? And the same thing kind of happened with Coke, you know, when I was talking about coca leaves and all that stuff, you know, which is all there and backed up in the archives. This is not stuff that's not provable. You know, you just feel a certain degree of like, ugh, what could happen? And when they called, I was like, ugh. And they wanted to do like a rebuttal to the story to be like, you know what? We've actually fixed a lot of the mining problems and things are getting better in Soda Springs. I would love to hear their conversation about that pile, the mountain. Yeah, like explain to me how that's sustainable, you know, is really what I would love.

You're just going to keep building that until it reaches the moon? Yeah, I mean, what's the story? And it's getting, you know, one of the arguments is that, you know, at some point you're expanding closer to the actual facility. So we're looking at a video here of it. It's really wild. It's really wild at night, actually. Oh, because you see the molten lava? Look how they're pouring it.

Lights up the sky. Now, what the fuck is going in the air when they're doing that? Good question. Look at that stuff the stacks i know that they're the some of the stacks looking at the data they were releasing you know low levels of polonium and various things in the air and it's just a crazy site and and it goes back to like come on a fifth grader can look at that and say, this is the future of agriculture? Like this is sustainable?

Right. How long can you do that for? How long can you do that? Well, and it also goes back to a finite resource, phosphate. Right. This herbicide is going to sustain us forever is coming from this. But also, like how do you do that and not have a sustainable plan for getting rid of that pile? Yeah.

Maybe Jeff Bezos can shoot it into space. Exactly. Space dust. Just sell it to Amazon. Maybe Amazon could buy Monsanto cheap now and go, this is what we're going to do. Well, weirdly, I'm writing a lot more. I'm writing this project right now that's about all these logistics companies

and thinking about the environmental footprint of firms that we don't traditionally think of as firms that have big environmental footprints, including banks, by the way. I'm writing environmental histories of banks. We don't think about banks as having an environmental footprint, but they do. They have a huge environmental footprint. They have to ship money around. They have to ship money around, but it's also just the incredible capital they have to be able to decide whether there's going to be an oil rig here or, you know, a deep water horizon.

Well, here. Did you talk to anybody from Monsanto about all these various issues? Yeah. Did you talk to them about this mountain of shit? Internally about this particular thing, I didn't talk to them about that. But I did talk to people about a lot of different things. And it was interesting. Some of the people in Monsanto actually reached out to me.

And I had to kind of learn a little bit on the fly about how to talk to sources that were really sensitive like that. And I had a bunch of lawyers for the first time that I would talk to about, how do I protect these people who want to talk to me inside the company because I don't want anybody to get hurt. And there's a section in here about a person who wanted to tell his story in this book and I included it in the book, but I ultimately, he ultimately couldn't go on the record like he I couldn't actually include what he wanted to say I could just talk about our debates back and forth about whether he was going to go on the record in the book and it was about a chemical that is currently being used. And it was about how it got approved and how he felt things should have gone. And the evidence that was used to get that approval from the government, he knew things about that that he thought were deeply problematic. But by going any deeper than that, on that specific

piece of evidence, I would identify him because he had such close access to that. And he was the person who would know that. And so here's a person who's got a pension, who's got kids, college age and things like that. And he's trying to figure out, okay, do I go on the record or do I not? And we went back for months on this. Like, do we talk about it? What do we do? He got his own lawyers. We talked about it. And ultimately he said, I just can't do it. And I think that's also part of the story. It's just like regular people in these companies who actually do have a pretty good conscience, but who are like, the risk reward here is so extreme. You know, if things go bad, I've signed an NDA, you know, and we, you know, what happens to little old me?

To the history of those people that got dioxin poison and they lost the case and then they took leans out against their homes. That is some messed up stuff. Here's the crazy thing about that case. I want to get this right. I'm sorry. I get a little bit fired up on some of these things because part of it is it matters. I feel like there's a certain degree of onus I have to tell some of these people's stories who don't get to tell it now because they're not here. And in this case, let me tell you about the end of that case. Because when you look at it on Google, it'll say Monsanto wins. And they did. They won technically

that case. But here's what happened. I went into every single note in that particular case. All the documents were housed at the Philadelphia National Archives. So I went through them. The jury, when they issued their decision, they did something not unprecedented, but super rare. They're like, we want this document read into the public record. Didn't end up in a lot of the newspapers or anything like that. But this is the documentities of West Virginia law. The technicality was they had to prove that Monsanto willfully, recklessly, and wantonly hurt these people. Those were the words, willfully, recklessly, and wantonly.

And that bar, these jurors felt, was just a little bit too high. Now, you could argue, wait a minute. Look at what they knew. How could they not say this is reckless? But the jury felt that that bar was too hard to hit. But they said in this document, there is no doubt that these people were harmed by these chemicals that were in this plant. So we want this read into the record, that we feel this way about it. The foreman of that jury worked at Union Carbide.

He was a chemical person. You could tell he was torn. You know, he wasn't an anti-chemical person, but he even was struck by, like, how nasty this stuff was. Get this, though. So after that happened, as I said, Monsanto says, you either pay us our court fees or we take your house. And I interviewed the lawyer who knew all these people, Stuart Caldwell. And he told me, he said,

to a man, I sat him down, I said, look, they're going to take your house. What do you want to do? And he said that one of them said to him, said, they could take my house, but can they give me 30 days to get out? I mean, they were ready to go to it. But the judge, Caldwell went back and said, judge, you can't let Monsanto do this. And ultimately, the judge was like, yeah, this is unconscionable. No. And ultimately reversed it. I think Stewart had to make an argument to get that released.

But ultimately, it was I think Stewart had to make an argument to get that released, but ultimately it was. But get this, a couple years later, that foreman I was telling you about from Union Carbide, he finds out that there was evidence in that case that because of technicalities, they weren't allowed to see as the jury.

And I don't know the legalness of it, but there was a document from the EPA that showed just how expansive the pollution was and all this stuff. And he says this clear as day. If I had seen this document, my verdict would have been different. And he says, I hope that all my other jurors, and he was the foreman, would have said the same thing. And at the end of that interview, which almost no one had seen, because it was buried, he said, I just can't get it out of my head. I feel like I just can't get it out of my head. I think what he's saying there is to let people down. So when you see that case, the Monsanto case in West Virginia related to these nitro workers, it looks like,

well, I guess Monsanto did anything wrong. Even the jurors who let Monsanto off in a way later say, we shouldn't have done it, right? So what was the reason why they were allowed to withhold that evidence? I don't know the exact actual kind of legal reason why. That just freaks me out. But this happens a lot, right? There's just a reason that, no, that evidence could be confounding. I think it had to do with the fact that it was relatively present day at that time, it was like 80s, report on the persistence of the pollution problem. And I believe the judge was saying, look, this evidence has no bearing on what was going on 50s and 60s. It's not admissible. There might've been another legal reason I'm not

aware of, but ultimately they weren't allowed to see that. But the point is that that evidence would have been pretty powerful to say, look at how contaminated the site was. And how, again, reckless that is if you're going to have that kind of contamination. We're already three hours in almost, two hours and 20 minutes in. So I want to get to this. Is there a way that anyone can distance themselves from this company? Like, is there a way you can not contribute economically? Is there a way you can protest what this company has been involved in, what they're doing? Is there a way you can do something?

Yes. I do think there are things you can do. There are small things and there are big things. I've thought about this. I mean, I think one thing that you can do if you don't think this type of agriculture as we saw that graph petrochemicals we're growing in our petrochemical dependency

and you don't want to be a part of that I do think you can choose if you have the means to buy organic foodstuffs to support as we've talked about, farmers who are doing regenerative agriculture, trying to grow things and produce meat and food in a different way.

And some people would poo-poo that and say, okay, what does that really do? I think it matters. I think as a consumer, you can make a choice to try and support farmers and to get connected to farmers in some ways. But if you live in, like, Detroit or something like that or a big city, it's so hard. It is. And I think that's why I think because it's a matter – it's also a class issue.

It's also an access issue. And a financial issue, right? Totally a financial issue and all these things. So not everyone can support that. financial issue and all these things. So not everyone can support that. So I'd also say the onus is on people who do have the time to try and fight for change, that we have to stand up. And we're seeing that right now. I'm sorry, keep going. I was just going to say, we're seeing right now thousands of cases being brought by people. And not just people that are saying, my cancer was caused by this, but we're also seeing cases that are trying organizations, Center for Food Safety, for example, among many others, that are trying to say,

look, these chemicals are questionable. We're petitioning the EPA to stop registering these chemicals and to try and change these things. I think getting in that kind of structural level of trying to change, getting in some of those battles is important for us, especially for those who have the means and ability to fight those larger fights. And also talk about the farm bill, you know, put pressure on congressmen to say, wait a minute, why are we subsidizing the, you know, corn and soybean? I mean, the only reason that a lot of these farmers are able to make profits is because they're getting massive subsidies to do so. And aren't these subsidies that were left over from World War II?

You could even go back even further in a way to the New Deal, you know, in the 30s. I mean, this was all a response. And this is what's so crazy. Like, we were already producing too much. The whole problem was we had a surplus, the idea that we need to like, we've got to grow more, we've got to grow more. We were growing too much. That's why the price of wheat and everything was plummeting because we had this just huge bounty. Wasn't the origin of it, though, that they were preparing for war?

Yeah. That was the subsidies, right? The whole idea was to subsidize the farmers to make sure that we had an abundance of food because they were preparing for war and they wanted to make sure that they could feed everybody. There's a little bit of that for sure. That's part of the story. There's also the story of these government programs coming in to try and give farmers a kind of support in times where there was so much surplus. kind of support in times where there was so much surplus. There was so much being produced in the 30s and 20s, a lot like the AAA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed as a means of being able to allow farmers to keep producing a lot of corn and commodity crops, but give them loans and

support that could sustain them when the price of those products plummeted. And then to your point, the real big change was in the 70s actually, when Earl Butts, a great name, USDA agricultural secretary, really put gasoline on our farm policy saying, okay, what we need to do now is grow, as he put it, crops, fence row to fence row. We're going to start subsidizing the production of all these different commodity crops and not putting any restrictions on the acreage or getting rid of some of these acreage restrictions that were often tied to those subsidies. That was the big shift in the 70s, saying, you don't have to reduce your acreage. You know what? We're going to give you these subsidies and you can grow, as he put it, fence row to fence row.

Grow as fast as you can. We're going to subsidize that. Part of that was because of the 70s. At that time, there was a concern about our surpluses dropping. And so we kind of started the system that has continued where we're subsidizing the production of really animal fodder. That's what we're doing on most of our land. And is there an abundance to the point where it's wasteful? Is there abundance to the point where we have more that we can use?

Totally. I mean, we're... What do they do with it? When I joke to people all the time, I say, when I talk to the weed scientists, you know, when we're out there and people are saying, well, this is about feeding the world. We need this genetically engineered trait to feed the world. He's like, oh, this is going to feed all of this stuff.

What are we doing with it is a great question. We end up putting it into different programs. Ethanol is a great example of this. We have so much corn. We've got to figure out a way to put it somewhere. We'll put it into a fuel program. We'll start putting it into gasoline. It's not an issue of productivity.

We've got a lot of productivity. I think that's part of the myth of our food problems is that productivity is the problem. Productivity really isn't the problem. Our bigger problem is distribution, the types of crops we're growing on the land that we have, and the ways in which we're equitably distributing it and also food waste, just tremendous amounts of waste of the average consumer. You think about even our own practices at home today. We have a lot of food.

It's now about figuring out how to grow the right types of crops, growing these more biodiverse fields as opposed to these monocrops and changing the game. That to me, I think is the future of food. It's not about, can we produce more corn and soybeans next year than we did last year? Is there a way to incentivize people to do that, to grow these biodiverse sort of farms? Absolutely. I mean, look at it. As I said, and I wish I could pull up the numbers

for how much a soybean farmer gets in terms of a per acreage subsidy from the federal government, or listeners can do that themselves, or corn. It's a lot of money. And what if we took that money and instead of subsidizing a system that we know is out of control, or we're growing way too much of this stuff, and turn it towards subsidies that supports the types of foods that's going to nourish our bodies, instead of necessarily going to animal fodder and nourish our country. The farm bill can be radically changed, and it should, I think, to reflect that interest and getting away from some of that monocrop cultivation. So this is all relatively new in human history, right? This way of growing things, it really started in the 20th century and now we're continuing it now. Is it possible within

a reasonable amount of time to shift the way we do things? And do people know about this? Like, I didn't know about these gigantic mountains of toxic shit and this molten shit. Like how much is this just because they've been able to kind of do it without people being aware of the consequences? I think it's huge. I think that's 90% of the reason I'm here, I think, is because I think people don't have a connection to their food. You know? Two percent, well, less than two percent of people in the U.S. are farmers. You know?

Wow. Most people just have no sense of the world that's out there. When I drive around in Ohio farm country, I see advertisements you've probably never seen, right? Extendamax, you know, seed thing, this cool herbicide. They're marketing. The companies are marketing to a very small clientele. And those decisions that are being made to that small clientele affect all of us. And I think that's why we live removed from that and just simply don't have that connection to it.

And I think you're absolutely right. I think part of you said, what can people do? Ask questions. Like when you're eating somewhere, where does this come from? If you're talking to a farmer, what's your farm like? If you have the ability to go to a farmer's market and talk about those things. And again, I think that connection is key to the story. But you said something like, can we pivot? Here's the big problem, Joe, okay? All of what we've talked about is based on petrochemicals and on fossil fuels.

80% of what Monsanto was making came from oil, natural gas, or coal. By the 80s, 80% of their product lines were coming from fossil fuels. The reason they became a seed company was because they saw that. They knew that so much of what they were making was coming from petrochemical feedstocks. So they started trying to make more money off selling seeds and getting into the seed business, which they didn't even own a single seed company before the 1980s. So they pivoted in part because of the energy crisis of the 1970s when oil prices rose. They're like, oh my gosh, 80% of what we make comes from this raw material that's now really expensive in the

70s. And that's why Monsanto said, oh, we've got to get out of this business of making all these PCBs and all that stuff. They hung on to some of their brands, Roundup, for example, because it was so profitable for them. But they tried to get rid of a lot of the other chemicals. And so they got it. They knew that there's this dependence on petrochemicals and fossil fuels that we still have the problem is the market is not going to force industry to change right now because we've seen this boom in oil and gas production in the united states and part of that's because of fracking that's happened over the last several decades, right? We see this huge spike. So the economy is saying, keep on producing petrochemicals.

It's safe. It's great. But the ecology is saying, you cannot, the environment is saying, you cannot keep doing that, right? If you keep doing that, we're going to keep seeing the cycle of weed resistance developing and farmers are going to be kind of locked into that system. So the biggest thing I'd say is that if we're going to fix our food system, we have to get away from that fossil fuel dependency, right? We have to get away from this economy that was built at a time when there was so much oil, right? In the 20s and 30s, we're producing all this stuff that made everything around us, including our food, and recognize that we

have to start shifting to regenerative agriculture because ostensibly we won't have to be so dependent on those fossil fuel feedstocks. How much of fossil fuel products can be replaced with organic things, like things like, I know that there are certain plastics that are made with plant fibers. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's actually, on the one hand, it sounds like we're making progress. You said the plant, let's just say a plant bottle is a great example. Coca-Cola has the plant bottle. Do they?

Yeah. A biodegradable plant bottle. Yeah, and if Jamie, there is a label for the plant bottle. That's really interesting. Now, are they making this out of hemp or are they using other plants? That's what I asked, right? So I started looking at it and I was like, okay, what is this made out of? Yeah.

Sugar cane byproducts. Sugar cane. So pause, right? Oh. I mean, think about environmental sustainability of sugar cane production. Probably in the scale of history, one of the worst monocrop. Oh, really? I mean, when you think about not only the ecological, we're talking about tropical

regions that have to be completely changed into these monocrop farms, it's a huge impact, not to mention the health cost of all the sugar that's out there. So sugarcane byproducts. And the only reason you can make a plant bottle out of that sugarcane is because of that fossil fueled agricultural system that makes sugarcane so big and so, you know, that it's everywhere,

right? Because it's inefficient. Yeah, because now you have, the only reason you can make a throwaway plastic bottle made of sugarcane is because you're producing so much sugar cane from all that synthetic petrochemical agricultural system. Jesus. Yeah. What a bummer. So it's pretty crazy.

And, you know – What about hemp? By the way, I don't know if you're – They do make plastic. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to see if this one over here. Jamie, sorry, the third over. Yeah, one more.

I just want to see if this one has. The Coca-Cola biodegradable packaging. Not a viable option, it says. New Coke bottle made entirely from plants. Okay, I just want you to notice a couple of things on this bottle. So when we're looking at it, it says 100%. It's kind of blurry, but it's okay. 100% recyclable plastic.

And I always joke with my students, what does recyclable mean, you know? Well, it could be recycled. Part of this is greenwashing labels. Like, it's 100% recyclable. Well, technically, almost anything is 100% recyclable. Like, you could – it's a bowl. You could recycle it, but is it actually recyclable? Right.

The other thing it'll say on there, and for years it said up to 30% plant-based materials. Up to. Well, up to could mean zero plant-based material. Oh, there you go. There. Up to 30% made from plants. Oh, man. Do you see the cleverness of it?

How dirty. It's like, well, it could be 1%. Yeah, or it could be one half of 1%. Or zero. Oh, God. Up to, right? It could be zero. It could be zero.

It could be just plastic. That's where I'm – we have to – going back to asking hard questions. We've got to get beyond this BS, right? All the labeling should be illegal. It's misleading. That's like up to 0% poison. Right. Up to 30%.

And then recyclable. You see what I'm saying? Like you've got a trademark on it. You could recycle. Oh, look how they did it. Yeah, exactly. Leaf turns into bottle, turns into leaf. And look, I'm sounding pretty pessimistic here.

And you mentioned hemp, right? But like, I mean, you're right. There are certain products. I think that's what we want And you mentioned hemp, right? But like, I mean, you're right. There are certain products. I think that's what we want to say. Okay, cool. So what plant-based material is sustainable to grow where you could potentially make these products? That's the kind of questions I think all of us should be asking. And I think hemp, it sounds interesting for me.

I don't know all about science. Have you looked into that at all? A little bit. I had a friend who actually, after I wrote the book, wanted to go into this industry. And he was like, what do you think? And I was like, sounds interesting to me. I'll say it's a lot better than sugar cane when I think about environmental footprint. Well, in the years back, my company Onnit, when we were first starting to sell hemp protein, we had to buy it from Canada.

We couldn't grow it in America. So we had to buy it from Canada. We couldn't grow it in America. So we were getting our hemp from Canada and then we were re-importing it into the United States because it was illegal at the time to grow hemp here, but it was legal to have it and sell it. Yeah. It's just goofy. Hemp is a really good source of protein. It's filled with amino acids. It's got a full amino acid profile. And if you get good hemp hearts, like a good high quality hemp seed, when they break it down, it's very biodigestible.

It's very easy for your body to break down. Yeah. I think to your point, we've got to make – if we're going to use plants, it's got to be the right plant. Yeah. Corn is the other thing you often hold out. I just talked to you. We just talked about corn.

It's just a disaster because it's all tied into the same system. And the only reason it's so cheap that you can have a throwaway container like that and throwaway, I mean, like you can drink it once as we do at a party or whatever and like, oh, well, it's done. Well, some would seem to – So go ahead. Part of it I would just say is like, I actually saw this when I first started,

you know, listening to your podcast and watching, I noticed that you have this metal cup. Yeah. And I was like, awesome, reusable. And like,

you know, we have a filter machine that filters our water and we used to have plastic bottles. And then I was like, what are we doing? We fucking just throwing bottles away every day. And those bottles, by the way, even though you throw them in the recycle bin, they don't really get recycled. It's too expensive. I found that out that they mostly get thrown into landfills. Yeah. So I read a lot about recycling and plastic bottles and here's the data. I mean,

30% of plastic bottles used in the United States, PET plastic bottles get recycled, 30%. So 70% ends up in landfills and everything else. But to that point, I'll just say this, you know, part of it is about what you're doing here. Like, so do we need that throwaway container? Right. container right and asking those questions most of the most of the time it's you know it's it's a shift in in thinking as opposed to we need a new technology or the new plant-based material but is it possible to use plants for all the shit we use fossil fossil fuels for and not be tied into this monocrop agricultural system that relies on herbicides? Because it seems like, I mean, I don't know much about growing hemp,

but I got to imagine that if you're growing 100,000 acres of hemp, you're going to have a lot of fucking pesticides and herbicides. And you're going to have... Well, part of it is trying to work with nature. One thing to do is trying to versify a little bit your agricultural system so you don't create that buffet for pests. But would you be able to get the same sustainable yield, like a yield that you could use to make all these bottles of Coca-Cola and all that?

Predicting whether you could do all the bottles of Coca-Cola, I don't know. Are we fucked? That's my question. No, we're not. You don't think so? I don't. You know, it's funny. I'm actually a big optimist, but after writing this book, I was like, man, I come off as a pretty bad pessimist. But I don't think so. I think what we're seeing right now is some pretty smart things happening in agriculture. Regenerative agriculture, as you know, as you've been talking about, is actually not becoming a niche thing. It's becoming like a much broader accepted way of doing things. It's an option for a percentage of the people.

It is. But I think your point's well taken. Can we create billions of throwaway plastic bottles that are made of plants? I actually think the question is, we shouldn't do that. We should rethink the way we consume. Like what's wrong with having a reusable container as opposed to needing a throwaway. That throwaway culture was a product of that period of we could just produce whatever we want because we've got tons of oil. We're moving away from that because we have to. It's funny because when I was a kid no one had a water bottle yeah you just drank water out of a glass like it didn't exist and then all of a sudden it's like

they were everywhere like cell phones right there's no cell phones now cell phones are everywhere when we were kids we just had a glass of water like no one took a fucking water bottle like a weirdo if your friend showed up at your house with a water bottle, you're like, Bob, what are you doing? Why do you have a water bottle on you? Yeah. But also think about how silly we're going to look. I think as a historian, I look back at our time. What are people like 100 years from now going to look back at us?

Oh, yeah. Think about how insane this is. Wait a minute. They took a finite natural resource and they turned it into a container that they used once right and then they threw it away right like who were these people from 2000 and whatever yeah it's weird and also like a lot of the drinking water that people buy is not from a spring it's just tap water they take tap water and they filter it and then they sell it to you. Oh, let me tell you that. This is nuts. Okay. I'm going to give you a number of this. If you're drinking bottled water out there, listen up. This is important. Okay. Dasani bottled water,

which is Coca-Cola's brand. It was called Dasani, but I had to look this up. Why are they calling it Dasani? It turns out it was just like totally a marketing thing. They're like, they sat in a room for hours and they're like, Dasani, it sounds refreshing. It comes from nothing. I went and looked at this. Okay. So I went and looked because I live in Atlanta. So I went and looked at our water bill and we're in Fulton County. So I looked at what that water bill was for a gallon of water or whatever. Now I must, I must've looked at something smaller. And then I And then I went to the Kroger and got a Dasani bottled water. And at same volume and quantity, I compared the price, okay, of how much you're paying for bottled water versus if you just drank that water out of your tap. And here in

Austin, the water's great. So, you know, people do that. So what would happen if you did that? What was the comparison? I crunched the numbers. It was like, okay, whoa, it's not, it wasn't 10 times more expensive, which would have been like a huge market for the company. It wasn't a hundred times more expensive. It wasn't even a thousand times more expensive. It was 1,000, like 900 times more expensive. It was 1,900 times more expensive to drink that bottled water than to drink that water out of the tap. And it's like, why on earth would I ever pay for that, considering just how expensive it is? And if you look at the bottle, it says repurposed public tap water. It is tap water. They put it through a filtration system. But not much different than a Brita, right?

Exactly. Actually, I use an APEC filter. It's like a five-layer reverse osmosis filter underneath my sink, partially because I've been researching about water supplies and lead in water and stuff, and it's kind of nuts what's out there. I'm not sure which system we use, but it is some sort of a it's a big machine that filters our stuff out that we have here. Yeah, yeah. That you just, you know, you press

a button and the cold water comes out or the hot water, but it's all filtered out. Yes, and you know, and you don't have to constantly go get that bottle that cost 19, whatever it was, 1,900 times more. And that's at a time, by the way, where our taps are, you know, our pipes are kind of crumbling.

It's like, why are we spending so much money on this stupid bottle of water when we could be fixing our taps and cleaning it up as well? So, yeah, the bottle water thing, it's just kind of – and then you've got the plastics. It's like this, again, 100 years from now, we think of it as just so normal. And it's like they're going to think this is insane. Yeah, for sure. The plastic is going to be a thing where they're going to be baffled, like how we allowed the Pacific garbage patch to get so big before we did anything.

And how literally a 19-year-old kid figured out how to make this machine. And he's a boy on slot. He's the only guy that I know that's figured out how to do something to mitigate it. a boy in slot it's the only guy that i know that's figured out how to do something to mitigate it but even then like how much can you mitigate like how we're still making plastic and then they find birds with like all these bottle caps and what does california do well no more straws man i saw a straw in a turtle's nose and there's the discussion about the how many uh, those canvas bags do you have? It's like, wait a minute.

There's now more, like, canvas bag plastic pollution than – Canvas bags? You know, like, when you have those bags that you take to the grocery store that are reusable. Oh. They're canvas. But the problem is, like, every conference, every show, everyone's giving out these reusable canvas bags. And it's like – It's got to be better than plastic though.

At least that's recyclable. Yeah. I mean, but the problem is like it's the same problem of like, you know, that kind of we've got to produce more of this stuff one year than the next. Well, the crazy thing is the paper straw. The paper straw is going to solve it all while you have plastic water bottles. Like this is nuts. Like you have all these plastic water bottles, but you've just done with, what's the ratio

of straw to water bottle? I don't know. It can't even be close. It's got to be like 30 to 1. Yeah, exactly. But you get the straw. As long as you get the straw, have at it. Those straws suck, too.

They're not as good. If you had a water bottle that was made out of paper and just started deteriorating at the rate that straw did, you'd never even be able to keep water on the shelf. The water bottles that are made out of paper, they're like waxy. They have like that stiff, and it seems like there's metal in the paper. It has like an aluminum surface to it or something. Yeah, back to your point, like I'm fine drinking. But I will say that it is funny.

The other thing that's happening with the plastic bottles is we're getting more efficient. We're making bottles with less plastic. That doesn't mean anything. And the same thing with water. We're using less water to produce the bottle of water. There's a concept called Jevons Paradox in economics. Now this guy from the 1860s, he said, efficiency is going to kill us, folks, because his argument is that when you start making something more efficient, you actually have incentivized the use of that natural resource. And he's like, this paradox is, yes, you're more efficient, but over time, you're actually going to use more of it. So I think we're at a point where we just have to fundamentally rethink things, I guess is what we're getting to here.

Instead of saying, how do we design that throwaway container? Say, do we need that stupid throwaway container? This is just fine. I think the message needs to get out at scale. It needs to get out to a large number of people. I don't really see that happening right now. It seems like the message is really with a few conscious people that are kind of aware of it that make choices that are different, but overall there's more people than ever before and more people that aren't making those choices that are.

It seems like the consumption continues to increase exponentially. It does. I mean, I will say I will say a shout out to students again at Ohio State. Again, CBUS a Columbus shout out that, you know, I get to walk into that room, and you have younger

guests on the show too, where do you get to talk to them? I think they get it. Yeah, they probably get it more than the older folks do. Yeah, it's really like jarring actually to walk in there and I'll be like, okay, here's this thing and it's a problem. And they're like, we know. We're on it.

And on the other hand, I also think it's a little bit, I don't think it's fair for us. I'm stealing this from somebody who maybe see this actually because i was like it's your generation you're gonna help us you're gonna solve it and this this person told me she she said she said don't put this on them yeah you know like let them go have a party let them go have some fun you know there is a certain degree people are like the new generation is going to solve everything instead of being like well we're still here yeah and we were part of that problem it's like you know making the military go now and clean up the vietnam war agent orange shit you know you motherfucker should have taken

care of that a long time ago exactly and maybe there's another hopeful thing we're seeing this company finally maybe not with agent orange but but with some of these other chemicals. Look, a vote of no confidence from your shareholders is not a good thing. In other words, the pressure, as you said, what can you do? Well, what people are doing is they're filing lawsuits. They're putting pressure, and we're seeing an effect with Bayer. They were literally worth the price they paid for Monsanto. I mean, they lost like half of their value. I mean, it was incredible. And they have all these pending lawsuits.

And they're still there. It's still there. But the crazy thing is the thing that's killing them is the thing they're still selling. So it's essentially that handwritten note, sell the hell out of it for as long as we can. That's what they're doing still. I mean, it's essentially a version of what we saw. They were like, oh, my God, read that 1969 note. Well, read the fucking 2021 note.

Right. They're on the same game plan, right? Yeah. It's interesting. I was sitting in that. I bought a share of bigger stock so I could get a shareholder training. Oh, really? Yeah.

I was like, okay. How much does the share cost? It was like $60 then. I think it's like, I don't know, it was running on like 40s. So, I mean, it keeps going down. And I remember being like, I got to do this. So, I did. And the pandemic hit, so actually they did everything on Zoom.

So, I ended up being able to watch it from home, which kind of sucked because I was looking forward to going to Germany. But I watched it and and oh, my gosh. And this three hours went by like that. But they got questions from shareholders for three hours, 250 questions, where everyone was like, what's going on? Why do we buy this company? What's up with Dicamba? What's up with Glyphosate?

What's happening? In other words, we're seeing people asking those questions to the people on top. And, you know, I never expected this. You got to understand when I started writing this, none of those cases had happened. The 2015 decision by who? That wasn't even there. I was really pessimistic then. I was like, dude, these guys got away with so much stuff.

I was really pessimistic then. I was like, dude, these guys got away with so much stuff. So to be a slightly optimistic, like I'm impressed with how much pressure they're feeling right now. Like, you know, it feels almost like something's changing. And I don't know whether it's the chaos of the times or what, but this as a historian, this is somewhat unprecedented. I mean, that had never happened on the history of the German exchange where the shareholders had given a vote of no confidence. That never happened. Wow. So we'll see what ends up transpiring. But in that meeting, sorry that you said they're still doing the same thing. It was crazy. They're like, glyphosate, whatever. We've got all these new technologies, but then they have to say,

we're going to sell this herbicide because you're talking to your shareholders and you've just lost everything. To your point, what are you going to say? We're going to pull it and one of our most profitable products? They're in that pinch. It's like, we've lost everything because of these legacies. We've got this thing that makes us money. What do we do? And you're getting sued from that thing that makes you money. I know. And there's thousands of we do? And you're getting sued from that thing that makes you money. I know. And there's thousands of pending cases. And you're willing to settle $15 billion because it's that profitable.

That Joe, I think shows you how stuck we are in a way, right? That shows you just how dependent we are on these petrochemicals, that a company would go to that extreme. I mean, if we weren't dependent, screw it. Just get rid of it. But even the firm itself is just so connected to that petrochemical past. It can't let go. And on that note, ladies and gentlemen. Well, it seems like because they are being held accountable and there are thousands of cases pending. Let's end on that. Let's end on that.

It seems like progress is being made. So could you hold up your book and let people know? Put it up in the camera so we can see. Seed Money. Did you do the audio version of it? Did you read it? Yeah, there's an audio version. Did you read it?

I didn't. Fuck! I get so mad. They always want actors to read it but I will say the person who read it Sean is an amazing actor fuck Sean

I'm just kidding great great great reader and did a better job than I would have done no you would have done

a perfect job if you just read it the way you talked today it would have been perfect thank you very much man I really appreciate it and that's out now and the audio book is out now. It's available. Do you have

social media? I'm on Twitter, yeah. At Bart Elmore. Spell it out for people. At Bart, B-A-R-T E-L-M-O-R-E. Okay. And Instagram, do you have an Instagram? I don't. Good for you. Yeah. Stay the fuck away from Facebook. Thank you very much. Really appreciate

what you've done. Thank you, Jeff. And I appreciate all your hard work, and thanks for coming in here, man. Thank you. It's a pleasure. My pleasure. All right. Bye, everybody.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.