TRASHFUTURE - MIT Media Lab After Dark Part 3: We Just Make Boxes here feat. Sarah Taber

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

You’re well accustomed to us just sort of riffing as we go along, but this week we speak with crop scientist Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) on the topic of the MIT Media Lab and their supposedly brilliant ‘food computer.’ Sarah joins Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Alice @AliceAvizandum as we discuss in even more detail why tech lords’ conception of the world’s problems are just, well, weirdly off the mark! If you want to hear part 1 of our MIT Media Lab series, get it here: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/mit-media-lab-after-dark-part-1/ Part 2 of the series is available on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/30213119 *COME SEE MILO* If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31753429

So there's a mystical land called Twitter and there, everything is magical and different and it's like hell world, but it's changed in some ways. And so recently, famed author J.K. Rowling decided to take to this Twitter place and just really go fully mask off about certain views about the immutable biological nature of sex and gender. And it's, of course, made a lot of people very angry as well. It might have done. I don't think anyone was surprised by this is the thing. No, no. I mean, J.K. Rowling just pulling out a big fat multi-million-dollar wand and being like, mascus, cusk, othicus, women, panticus, nuticus.

I think it's just worth noting that this is someone who like, so the last J.K. Rowling scandal that I remember was when she kind of said that like... Who can pick their favorite? And there's actually a lot. There's a lot of these, right? Like more than necessary, I think. But the last one that I remember was when someone kind of... She got involved in the Fred where it was like, no one in the Harry Potter universe like shits ever. Yeah, they do shit, but there are no toilets. So what the wizards do is that they shit on the floor and then...

Wait, she actually said this? Yeah, she actually said this on Twitter and it was just like the culmination of all the insane stuff that has happened since the books have come out where like, you have this... As a cross-scientist, I find this fascinating because like, does this shit disappear? Or does it go somewhere? Does it get recycled? This actually... No, I mean, she thinks... This actually costs a lot of money. It matters. Like it has to go somewhere or something equivalent has to happen, right?

Right. Well, as England switched to having a larger urban population in London instead of having people spread out in the countryside, like this actual thing caused huge problems. The soil in England was getting depleted because everybody was eating all the food in London and just shitting it down the Thames. And so this very thing caused very serious social problems. So I'm just, I'm very curious. Yeah. But I think this is just like symptomatic of the fact that like, as like a really... As like the most successful author in like the country, if not possibly the world, like you don't have to like create an extended universe if you don't want to.

You don't have to log on. You don't have to be on social media at all. I feel like that's something bigger. But like at some point, someone basically told of her like, she has to have the answers to every like stupid question that like the fandom has. And this has directly led her to this point. I'm just losing my mind at like imagining the minister for magic, like taking, taking a shit on the floor in his own office and then like solemnly magic-ing away. Yeah. And anyway, this is the person who's telling us that, you know, about biological sex and gender is the woman who made up the shitting wizard story.

Not a woman. I mean, it's true that like, you know, there are no trans people in the wizarding world, because you would have to like, if you're going to like publicly shit, like everyone has to see each other's dicks, right? It's what is the wizarding world, but one big unisex bathroom. That's true. And the unisex bathroom is called Glinda. Oh man. But no, we're, yeah, we're, you know, JK Rowling is just an example of the fact that

money doesn't make you happy because she's the richest person in the world for coming up with a bunch of facile children's books. And guess what? She's still angry posting from one of her many multimillion pound properties. So, I mean, honestly, congratulations, JK Rowling. You are the world's saddest, richest person. Oh, I don't know. That's a league table. Yeah, I was going to say, we've got some contenders over here. Hello, and welcome back to your free episode of TF for this week, your pre-Christmas episode.

Getting festive in here. Very festive. We're all jingling bells. We've decked all of the halls. It's just, in our case, we have decked the halls with soundproof baffling. Yeah, if your bells are jingling too much, that makes you a man, I'm afraid. I like the antithesis of festive tone you used for soundproof baffling. Yeah, it's like a parking officer, Mike Grubowski. That's what we're doing here. Yeah, so it's Riley. I'm here with Hussein. I'm back. I'm back in like the rainy turf island, which I think is actually genuinely

a lot better than New York, but yeah. You are no longer walking here? No, I'm no longer walking here because everyone keeps demanding that I pull my pants down for some reason. Our good friend, the hell dude at Alalike or on Twitter, had an extremely good take on JK Rowling when he just quote tweeted and just said, ah, the British Isles. It's true, that's us. We're all about that kind of thing. We also have Milo writing the boards today. Hey, it's me, your boy. Nate has gone home to have dinner with his wife. What a loser.

Sounds a bit sus to me. It could be sat in a basement with dudes doing a podcast with all of the women in other cities. Yeah, indeed. To prevent it being sus. We also, we have Alice calling in from Glasgow, which I will not say is sunny today. Oh, thank God. Yeah, dodge the bullet there. And we have as well joining us a crop scientist and general crop expert, Sarah Taber, calling in from the States. Sarah, how's it going today? So today, we're actually going to go back to a well that we've gone to before. So this is our third part of our MIT Media Lab exploration. But as in the first one,

we discussed the overall philosophy and founding history of the media lab. In the second, we explored a wide variety, a smorgasbord of its dumbest inventions. In this episode, we are going to go deep on the MIT Media Lab open ag or open agriculture initiatives project, the food computer, which was created by a man named Caleb Harper and has had something of a tumultuous history. Part three of our two part series. Look, we're going to keep doing parts until they shut down. This, we are going to try to hound the MIT Media Lab into, into shutting down completely just by continuing to mock it on this podcast.

And Sarah has written some very good articles about this subject, specifically with respect to the food computer, which was one of their big, hyped up, well marketed projects. And so, Sarah, I just want you to, you can get into this for us a little bit. What in brief is the food computer? And what in brief is it trying to reinvent? Why is it not a thing? Right. So in brief, what the food computer is, is it's just a little box that you can control the temperature and theoretically the humidity and the lighting and all these other things. So it's just like MIT decided to reinvent,

like the closet cannabis grow basically is what they did. And you have to put a transparent door on it so you can see what's happening inside, except that makes all the light leak out and it gives you insulation problems and all that stuff. In case they're masturbating in there, you've got to know, you've got to make sure they're not offending Jesus. Yes. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to grow weed in your closet properly, you need to give them privacy. So that's what it really was. It was just like kind of a smaller, not that effective version of, again, a closet marijuana

grow. I wouldn't call it that. And then, you know, it was weird because I saw him starting to talk about it like he's talking about it like it's a replicator, like you just program in the kind of food that you want and it'll make it. And I was like, he's kind of a racing, like he would talk about programming and exactly the kind of apple you want. And I'm like, well, even in your best case scenario, if you have an extremely super dwarf tree that produces really fast, you're still talking, you know, three years, that's not a replicator. It was just bizarre to hear the way he talked about it. And that was. When we say he, when we say he, we mean Caleb Harper, a very high profile,

MIT Media Lab, like, like Project Leader, whose whole idea was, what was this, this food computer. And it came, it can actually, I have a little bit on the biography of Caleb Harper, if we want to dive right into the notary nose over here. Sounds like he's a normal good, cool guy. Not like a Elon Musk guy who like invents a thing that doesn't work every six months. This guy seems to have invented one thing that doesn't work and then like worked on that for years. Yeah, Caleb Harper is a very powerful name. It's the kind of name that every sea of a company startup that will like has an app that enables you to rent your coffee machine from

your neighbor has. It is true. It's a very, it's a very techie name. Now, here's the thing though, Caleb Harper, this is from a fawning National Geographic profile from before his food computer, which as I read the regular National Geographic, as Sarah said, is a little box that you try to grow food in, but that doesn't work for a myriad of reasons, which we'll get into. Caleb Harper, who comes from a farming family, says he wants to grow food closer to where people live in cities and avoid environmental risks like droughts, storms and insects, which threaten the quality and quantity of the food that we eat. Which is why I'm from Fallville, North Carolina. Because he's the one who started nutrients into

like the water system, like they were doing illegal dumping of nutrient solutions. So anyway, carry on. We found that out after this, didn't we? You did all of this writing about why the food computer didn't work and then they sort of MIT after the fact that, oh yeah, by the way, we were dumping a bunch of fertilizer into this. Oh no, it was an MIT that said that it was a whistleblower in Harper's lab. Excellent. So far, for all of you keeping score at home for the food computer, we can have like two little cars or dogs racing around a track, right? So far, we have the harmful dog has just taken one very large step forward in as much as they have dumped a lot of fertilizer in a local river in an attempt to make the world healthier with a

plastic box that doesn't do anything. The harmful dog. It's just a little Churchill dog for some reason. The food, he says. Oh no. The food, he says, will not need pesticides or chemicals, and it'll be predictable 365 days a year. Sarah, no chemicals at all? Not even nitrogen? That's not been my experience with indoor agriculture. We'll just say that. So I've actually worked in the indoor agriculture industry for four to five years, which is an eternity in indoor agriculture. I've worked with a lot of the big names in the industry on getting food safety certified, kind of diagnosing and troubleshooting a lot of their problems, and chemical-free is really going outside the bounds of reality there. Number one,

there's your nutrients. You can do it organically if you want to, but that's still chemicals, and it's still nutrients, and if you dump them in the water supply, it's still nutrient pollution. A lot of them do wind up less than outdoors, but a lot of them do wind up having to use pesticides, at least when they're getting used to what they're doing. Sometimes you have to put a little hydrogen peroxide in the irrigation water, because otherwise stuff starts overgrowing your roots. You shouldn't have to do that too often, but especially as you're getting set up, that's an issue. So I feel like to kind of zoom out a little bit and to get away from a nitpicky in just time of talking about the bigger picture, the way indoor agriculture is kind of sold is that

it is more natural and kind of like the ag tech world in general. There's really kind of this mentality that Monsanto et al have screwed it up, and therefore we're going to come save the world from all the stuff Monsanto has done, except the problem, the big problem with Monsanto is the fact that they were kind of the first people to really use an IP rents business model in agriculture. They basically were the first to apply the tech business model to agriculture. That's the entire problem. And so now all these tech guys are coming in and saying, we're going to solve this problem of too much tech business model in agriculture by using the only thing we know, which is the tech business model that caused the problems.

What the fuck is that? You may have said a lot of stuff about very realistic applications of chemicals and nutrients and the problem with the tech business model in general, but have you considered that in the future, broccoli will have an IP address? That's literally something they say. When you say that they brought in a tech model, I just like the idea of Monsanto executives with the ones who started wearing hoodies and sneakers in the office, and then everybody started doing it. Well, we're coming up on January, and all I'm saying is that my broccoli will have a no IP address. So that is one for the old heads. So Harper was inspired,

this is back to National Geographic, to look more deeply into urban agriculture when he visited, every single tech doofus has a story like this. When he visited Japan after the 2011 Fukushima disaster and saw headlines that read, Japanese farmlands have no water, no youth, no land, and no future. Again, the solution, a clear plastic box. Yeah, why not? I love going to Japan and picking up on that is the problem. It looks as though there's been a nuclear meltdown, it's time for us to get serious and just pretend that food just comes from data and nothing. A seed and some data is all you need. To be fair, if there's any group of people that would love to eat food that comes out of their computer, it is the Japanese.

Few of you really understand that actually the Monsanto computer, not the Monsanto computer, but the food computer, actually did have a big success. And this was documented in the book James and the Giant Peach. How did the peach get so big? Yeah, I mean, did medical science go too far? Is it vor who knows? It got me thinking, speaking of the Fukushima disaster, it got me thinking, how can I put my different skill sets together to make a difference? Fuck you! Don't! What skill sets? Imagineering, being a grifter, ingenuitousness, marketing, right? Because this guy doesn't have like a background in farming. So I would love to address that. So I'm one of the few people out there who's got kind of one foot in the mainstream

agricultural world, like just the big field crop agriculture and then also in tech, right? There's a few of us out there, but not a huge number of people. And a lot of my, again, I started out in dirty jobs, like I started doing field work. And you get to know agriculture in a certain way that way, very hands-on, very dirty. And then later in life, I started working with food safety auditing, which is it's kind of like the reverse pizza boy. Like when you deliver pizza, people are happy to see you. When you audit farms, people are pissed off just because you showed up, right? You show up and tell people that can't eat that pizza. You show up and you're like, wash your hands. And people love being told that.

Just slap the pizza in the hands, yeah. Yeah. And so you kind of, you get to know agriculture in a very different way. You kind of, you have to look under the hood at farms. And so I think what a lot of us know about agriculture is very image-based. It's about like, I read Little House on the Prairie once, I saw some commercials about family farms, I feel good about pickup trucks, like that's the level that most of us are on. And that's not people's fault. Like if you actually look back at American history, we kind of have this narrative about how people used to farm and then they ran away to the cities because they wanted an easy life. That is not what happened. Most of those farmers were

actually sharecroppers. It wasn't just in the South. That's where we're known for it. But all across the US, sharecropping was very dominant. And then once automation showed up, then American landowners evicted their tenants. And that's how the countryside converted into densely packed with people, into being very sparse in everyone's in cities. They're refugees. They were evicted from the countryside. They didn't leave. So we really kind of have this story about how farmers are authentic and they know what's really going on. And people from an agricultural background really understand agriculture. In my experience from working in agriculture, that is often not very true. I will have to say that I've encountered a lot of really cool,

really perceptive, really thoughtful, forward-thinking farmers. And they are a distinct minority. A lot of them are just in the flim-fan business. We're an anti-farmer podcast. I was going to say, whenever I think of people with family farms, what I remember is the rich kids who go to Oxford and Cambridge, who come from farming families and wear barber jackets, and they look after one sheep. That's a UK thing, I think. The United States is becoming increasingly like that. We're acquiring a landed gentry. The number of landowning white families who have actually owned land has actually been very steady

for the last century or so. And so this mythos that we have of people fleeing the countryside because they don't want to work and they want to farm, or excuse me, they want to work in cities instead, is a very false narrative. And we have the land is kind of concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The number of farmers has stayed the same, but they're increasingly interrelated because you only want to bury other landowners. So we're kind of getting like... They're very game of thrones. It's very game of thrones. It's not very little house in the prairie. It's very game of thrones. And so the United States, now that we've been around for a while, is kind of starting to acquire

kind of a more calcified landed gentry. And they'll never admit that. That's a big part of the flim flam business of agriculture is projecting this image of the common men and like, we're the working class and we do the dirty jobs and I'm like, you're fucking landowners. Hereditary. Well, it's the all-time American thing of like, no, no, no, we're still working class because we drive a hundred and fifty thousand dollar pickup truck and I listen to music about how racism's good. And so you look at Harper and he really kind of comes from one of these families. I don't know how many thousands of acres his family has in Kansas, but it's at least one, which is not like salted the earth kind of people. You don't hold on to a thousand acres for multiple generations

because you're nice and you don't hold on to it for a thousand acres. Certainly not in Kansas. Oh boy. Have to survive all of those tornadoes picking up your daughters and their dogs, taking them to a mysterious magical land. Yeah. And his dad's got some kind of like food distribution executive position, right? So these are people with connections and these are people with lands and property and kind of going around presenting themselves as the man of the earth and like, I understand how agriculture works because I came from a gentry family is very much in keeping with how there's really kind of

people talk about the urban world divide United States and I think it's largely cooked up by these kinds of people to present themselves as more knowledgeable and more authentic and all the while they're going around flimflaming like this. Like this is actually, we kind of talk about this as being, this is like this new facet of agriculture that is technology and it's kind of trying to eat agriculture. I'm like, no, this is just more of the same shit. That's what it is. So in fact, this is what he says after this is because he asked this question, how can I put my different skill sets together to make a difference? Clearly,

he's a STEM doofus and history. So understanding what has actually happened in American agriculture has not been among those skill sets. Damn, this guy is a STEM doofus in two different senses. His solution is, I realized that what we needed is a data center for food, one that is not exposed to the natural environment. Think about how much knowledge traditional farmers pass down from generation to generation. There's no blueprint for vertical farming. Sorry, go ahead. Can we just bottle Sarah's derisive laughter for this? Yeah, that's quite useful. Yeah.

We've been passing down knowledge for generations, like how to approach a sheep calmly from behind. The knowledge that he seems to have passed down is the fact that like, is that you can own the patents for certain vegetables or fruits or whatever. And also, that if you say that you're a legitimate farmer, people will buy any old shit. That's the one. That's the big one. He's farmland Wyatt Kirk. Yeah, essentially. You can grow crops in the boardroom and the discotheca.

Alice, you joke. That's the idea of the food computer that you could grow crops in the boardroom or the discotheca. What's the disco ball like shining through the transparent door? Fuck with your light levels. And we don't know why it won't, but it just won't. So shut up about it. Just end up with very disco vegetables. I like that idea. We want to, and again, Sarah, I'm pretty sure you're going to want to hold on to something for this next one. We want to create an open source digital recipe for climate where you can control the light.

Replicator talk right there. We're just going to have a recipe. As a crop scientist, obviously, you know, it takes time to grow a plant. He's obviously talking about growing plants, but the way he talks about, you can tell he's trying to sell a replicator. And I'm like, that's when I kind of, I just looked at the equipment and I was like, that's weird. That already exists. I worked in room size versions of that in 2001 that were old and broken down. So he didn't invent shit, first of all. And then second of all, he's talking about them like they're a replicator. And that's when I went, oh, okay. You know, oh, it's a scare.

Wait a second. All of these buildings are made out of cardboard. It's like a Potemkin farm, but for your desk. That's exactly what it is, though. Yeah. It's the idea. So the whole point is he said, this is from another piece together, a lot of different fawning articles about this. And this is where he says, in the future, even broccoli will have an IP address because these... Why not? Why don't download some porn to your broccoli? Why not? Nothing means anything anymore.

You wouldn't download that. You wouldn't download a broccoli, would you? Why should your parents have Bluetooth? I hate when my broccoli gets like a crop of light, but instead of like aphids or something, it's being used to mine Bitcoin for a guy in Turkmenistan. I hate trying to torrent broccoli and carrots and having to get a bootleg copy of the fucking Joker again. Yeah. Who say? You joke, but that's like explicitly addressed in this article.

Well, but to be torrenting... Templates for the perfect hazelnut could be copyrighted by Ferrero Rocher. Oh, great. That sounds good and normal. But remember... It's one of two things like this. It's not just this project, but a few other things on the high end of science that don't actually grab with reality. It's like, what I'm hearing right now is like the sound of cocaine that took human form. That's what I'm hearing right now.

What growing conditions for the perfect cocaine? I mean, that's also valid. It's a little box on your desk that like turns the coca paste into... Il computerino colombiano, if you know what I'm saying. It's a thing who's saying, I say that all of these things were like, it was their ambition to do, but remember, don't worry. It's a scam. It doesn't work. Just bags of fertilizer. So what you're saying is that I can't torrent hazelnuts and end up accidentally getting Riley Reed videos?

Not yet, no. Damn. Okay. So here you can torrent nuts in the soil. The idea is ultra efficient sensor packed urban farms will collect huge quantities of information in every crop they grow and develop data driven insights into what makes a tomato tastier and ahead of broccoli grow faster. That information will be shared among a distributed network of other urban farms and global agriculture will improve.

Okay. So I want to inject something here. Please. Yes, please Sarah, please. So I've actually run into this with a couple of indoor farm operations. They're not the only ones who do this, but inevitably they will start talking about like, we found a way to make basil taste better. I'm like, yeah, dumbass. We've known that since the 1980s. You put more salt in the water. That's it.

That's just how plants grow. Like if you give them a little bit of salt, they get a little bit dehydrated and so their flavor compounds are more concentrated. That's like first fucking grade for hydropotics. And so you have these tech people kind of like, oh, we discovered how to do it. And you're like, oh my God, you read a paper from the 1980s is what you did. Anyway, I love the idea that they're trying to do big data to farms. And what they've come up with is a combination of tasting things and a farmer's almanac.

Yeah. I'm waiting for a bunch of guys with like huge dyed, permed mullets going, we've been doing some groundbreaking haircut research. Also like the idea of like, so if I got this right, his prints, his, one of his things was that he wanted to share a bunch of data with other farmers so they could grow like the perfect tomato, right? Which like, or tomato, whatever you want to call it. And I'm just like remembering, wasn't there like a Simpsons episode about this? Were they accidentally like a tobacco?

Yes, tobacco. Except tobacco didn't have to like fucking require like an indoor. No, it just happened. But that's the other thing, right? They've said like, Sarah, again, you sort of, you said this, right? Where it's like, well, we've known that salt makes things tastier because it just does this one thing. And they've taken that one piece of information,

which is that you can alter the, alter one property and then get a pretty predictable result. And they have extrapolated that to pretend that we've never just like shared that information with one another before. But it's not common knowledge already in the horticultural community. And if you think you invented it, you clearly don't know what the fuck you're doing. Yeah. And it's where it's like, they just don't, where they just don't,

they have not at all even guessed that like this is possible outside the framework of a magic box. It's Colonel Sanders has hoarded the agricultural secrets for long enough. Yeah. Well, a lot of the things that the indoor agriculture industry in general is doing are actually kind of retro. They just haven't seen them personally. Like these tech gurus haven't ever seen that in action.

They've never been to the Netherlands. They don't know the Netherlands invented all that stuff back in, again, the 80s. And so they think they invented it and their investors don't know any better. And so they can tell their investors, we invented this and have complete credibility. And as a crop scientist, you know, again, you look at this and you're like, everything you're doing is retro. The secret to indoor farming is we all wear these wooden shoes. Harbour's team have entered.

Blackface. Hydroponic speed. It makes the basil taste better. Harper's team of engineers, architects and scientists have developed an open source agriculture operating system. A prototype was built. Yeah. It's nothing.

That's nothing. A plant operating system. I don't know. That's such a stupid metaphor. The closest thing you could say is what? Jeans. Yeah. A hipster broccoli that runs BSD.

That's what you'll see in the indoor. And kind of the agriculture tech industry in general is, and this is an outgrowth of how agriculture has worked in the U.S. for a very long time, is the way you make money in agriculture, you don't farm. You farm the farmers, right? So you invent some technology that they're going to use and you collect, again, basically IP rents. And so that's a lot of what you see going on in the agricultural tech industry right now,

is people just kind of inventing ways to collect data and sell and distribute that data. It's not, to me, that exciting a business model because I don't think the potential to actually enhance yields and productivity is really that high. It's just a way to collect IP rents. So again, like, that just might be my bitch ass knowing what I'm doing and thinking, I don't need a computer to tell me what to do here. But what if your tractor had an iPad in it and also you couldn't repair it? Cool.

Yeah. Hey, Sarah, how did this thing called Farmville? One of the project's big goals is to create one billion new farmers, each running a tiny self-contained facility in cities in town. Oh, my God, it's literally the thing from... Look at the mouth thing. Yes, everybody has a tiny blast furnace on their desk, and it's a big little cup of steel.

But now it's everyone just has what? A box that grows one tomato every two months? Like, what problem is that even going to solve? Please, Ma, I have a cup of tomato. The problem where once every couple of months you don't have a tomato, and then you have a tomato, so it's solved. So what do you have? I feel like what that comes from is, again, if you're a tech wizard and you're trying to

make a name for yourself and collect a lot of money from investors, they don't understand the agriculture space very well, but they understand consumer products very well. And so if you can take your quote-unquote agriculture revolutionary tool, which is not. But if you can take that and you can tell them I can use this to make a consumer product, then it's just like, here's some money for you. So in a lot of ways, I think what's going on here is just a complete deficiency of information on the investing class, which is a whole other realm of stuff we can talk about.

It's like, if you don't know fuck all about agriculture, then why are you controlling millions and billions of dollars going into R&D? It makes no sense. Let's talk about that. Oh, Sarah, I have the answer for that. I have the answer for that one. It's because they succeeded and are the best. Okay. It's because they're obviously.

They're just smarter. Yeah, they're smarter. And this is the most rational allocation of resources. We couldn't do this any other way. Wait, sorry. Are you saying that it's possible to have an economy where three zillionaires who've never left San Francisco or Little St. James Island aren't making decisions about how we grow and distribute tomatoes, but also media,

but also cars? No, that's ridiculous. But with this, you could grow a tomato in New York City that has the perfect conditions for Little St. James. What you have is every single broccoli by IP address says, Harper, gesturing to a screen on which data from one of the prototype farms have been collected. More than 30 sensors.

Was this data just a large amount of scrolling loremips and bush? Well, here's the thing. It probably would have been because one of the key elements of this thing, I think that we've been teasing, is that I don't think it ever worked. When they were demonstrating it, they would just go and purchase some basil or a tomato or whatever from like a shop, put it in the box and then heavily imply but never actually state that it had been thrown in the box. I joked about WeWork fucking up being a landlord, the easiest way of making money.

I feel like this is fucking up the second easiest way of making money, which is just an old Michelin web joke about it grows out of the fucking grounds. You just put the thing in the weights. Chickens, they're made of chicken. Kill them. That's chicken. One of the biggest boondoggles for people trying to get into agricultural technologies, they assume that it's easy and the justification for it is like,

well, look at all these yokels. They're doing it and they don't think, wait a second, all these yokels are having a really bad time financially. Like number one, they're not as stupid as you think and number two, they still ain't making it. So what makes you think you can succeed in this business that you don't understand at all? Like kind of what you mentioned is it's the second easiest way to make a living. As an agriculture person, I would disagree with that.

It's enormously complicated and there's a huge amount of, there's a huge amount of knowledge work that goes into making agriculture work. That's really erased. I think we have kind of this popular image of like Farmer Brown gets up, Farmer Brown does their chores, Farmer Brown goes to bed. They don't understand that at least in the US, most farmers are more like a general contractor and they're hiring in all these specialized knowledge workers to do their tasks.

It's not just manual labor. There's a lot of knowledge going on. Oh no, we're doing identity politics with all those now. Cut her mic, cut her mic. This episode is over. I was not owned. Well, I mean like you're not alone there, right? Okay, because again, like when I talk about misperceptions about agriculture,

I want to be really clear that I feel like we're often told as non-farmers, we're often told to like, well, you're stupid and you don't know how it works because you're not a real man of the earth like I am. Again, most of us, at least in the United States, no longer live on farms because we were evicted. It was not an issue of choice, right? And so to evict people and then a couple generations later, talk shit at them for not knowing how agriculture works. Like what is that?

That is a power move is what that is. It is bullying and it's just negging people for the sake of establishing yourself as more powerful, more knowledgeable, more relevant and more valuable. It sounds to me like there's a word. It starts with an E and ends with an ozure. Sounds like it's enclosure. Nice turning for a city slicker. If only some of the Sherman guy had written about this.

Yes. Yeah, some kind of like a Charles Marcus of some sort. But here's another quote from Harper. Sarah, I'd like to get, this is actually a crop science quote. This is where he gets his most crop scientist. Okay. You are your genetics, but you are equal part your lifestyle. That's the same for a plant.

So that's some crop science right there. So I spent a couple years as a plant breeder. I actually did a postdoc in plant breeding and genetics at the University of Florida. We bred blueberries. And that is literally day one of plant breeding. That's the first thing you ever learned. So I'm glad that he's called. That's fantastic.

He attended day one. That's good news. That's the start. He drew it like all the best innovators. He dropped out of university because he was like, well, that's all I need to know. Time to put it in a box. It doesn't do anything. Just doing a Ted talk about Greg or Mandel and his peas.

I would like millions of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein to continue this vital work, please. So the system creates what Harper describes as actionable recipes. So if your neighbor always grows the best tomatoes, you could simply download the data and grow them for yourself. Damn, you wouldn't steal a tomato recipe. We've created a systematic architecture around this for testing lots of things, Harper said. We give the plant everything it wants in very low quantities. In these conditions, broccoli grows four times faster going from seed to head in just eight weeks.

If you could code the climate, then you could code the nutrition that's expressed in every single plant. And again, that sounds to me like, obviously, it's just science. Just like when he said plants have a lifestyle. The worst part of this is, one of the biggest determinants of plant growth is how they don't have a circulatory system like we do. It's all passive flow from the roots to the leaves. I don't think Caleb actually sat in for that part of the class.

So that's how plants grow. It's like water sucks stuff up. And the faster you can get water to evaporate from their leaves, the faster they're going to grow because the faster nutrients are moving into them. So in order to get your plants to grow super fast, you have to have really high airflow. Like you've got to have kind of like a wind going in that chamber. And I didn't see any fans. I'm just going to say, like, that's your number one thing.

Where is it? Where's your fans? What we're saying is plants can self suck. Yeah, so that's it, right? It's just like, again, it's a plastic because it's like he was, he got something sort of summarized to him really fast. He got plant science summarized to him incredibly quickly, and then was given millions and millions and millions of dollars, possibly by Jeffrey Epstein.

Just invent a box that is a small version of some old technology that kind of works, but the difference is the box definitely doesn't work. Well, all these people are Wikipedia guys, right? Because their whole business model is that like they start a new company every year and then run it into the ground, but they walk away with a load of investor money. And then on the basis of their pedigree of running a business into the ground, all the same investors are like, well, invest in this guy again, because we know him, we've invested in him before.

And if we didn't invest in him again, that would mean we were wrong when we invested in him before. So we must have been right. So we should invest in him again. And so therefore they don't have time to actually go into a business they know anything about. That's old fashioned. That's 19th century shit. That's for people in stovepipe hats. No, what I do is I read about a thing on Wikipedia or on Business Insider.

And the next day, I'm already the world's leading entrepreneur in that thing. This reminds me so much of Theranos is the thing, right? Yes, it's plant Theranos. So fun story. When I finally watched the Theranos documentary, I was like, this is what I've been seeing. There's finally a word for it. So I just I just want you to keep that in mind.

So having worked because like the same the same old technology that works, like phlebotomy, like drawing blood. No, we're going to make it clean and streamlined. And it's going to be like it's going to be like an iPhone box now. I want to be able to go into a clinic that rebalances my humors. Thank you. It's called Plasma Freezes and it'll pay you to do it. So he carries on.

Rust Belt cities like Detroit and Cleveland stand to benefit too. With available space, high unemployment rates and a lack of fresh produce, these places are ripe for vertical farming. Hey, real quick. Do you need fresh water to grow plants and does Detroit and like the more deprived areas of Michigan have a lot of that? I mean, look, as far as I know, you know, I just like cracking a tooth on the tomato that's most lead.

Very interesting flavor. Very interesting recipe. That's the other thing. Let's even let's imagine for a second. Let's imagine for a moment that this actually did somehow magically work. Is he is being taken seriously with a plan to save the Rust Belt economies of the Midwest by turning everybody into a vertical small hold farmer? You love to say it.

You really fucking love to say it. With boxes where you can grow a single basil plant at a time. What if you were a sharecropper again, but this time for one box? Oh, no, like that's like some folks are bringing sharecropping back. I just thought you should know. We had an episode where a company called Zoom that's being invested in by SoftBank is trying to create something called a gigafarm that's just sharecropping. Yeah, exactly.

The thing is, look, technologies and trends and stuff, they come and go, but racism, that'll be there forever, baby. Yeah, just as somebody who's actually worked in Rust Belt factories. I don't know, just it's so add-ons. Could have used a vertical farm. No, it's so add-ons. Every time, it's like the Ford plant, except instead of a V8 rolling off the production line, it's a tomato.

All of this could just be summed up just by saying, what if your phone was a farm? I think in its best version, if indoor agriculture actually became its best self, anything else, economies of scale apply, so you're going to want it to be in a big factory, which we have some spaces left open now. If somebody were to actually apply themselves and run one of those effectively, and make a big indoor farm that's got economies of scale, so it's productive, so you can pay your people well. So there's low turnover, and there's high productivity,

and you make a lot of goods per square foot. I think you could in the Rust Belt actually do pretty well for yourself, because we have a lot of empty space. We have a lot of need for produce, like having lived there. We go to the grocery store, and the produce there is shit. It's so funny, because if you talk to Californians, they're like, I just love fruits and vegetables. I'm like, well, that's because the ones you have here are fresh.

I live in Wisconsin. I did it that time, and it just wasn't good. And so I think if you could actually competently execute one of these things, there is actually some potential there. And yet at the same time, we have this huge need for competent execution, and all we're getting is complete con artists, and that is very upsetting to me. Catch me in the replies that all of Elon Musk's tweets begging him to do this as a favor. I like the idea that in the grim future of fully leftism,

where we get everything we want, the two jobs are you work in the Detroit Giga farm, or you're a podcaster. Or the Dick Sucking Factory, of course. I'm exempted from farming juicy because of my vital role podcasting with my friends. I'm also looking forward to when everyone has their own little tiny farm in their one bedroom apartment, and everyone therefore has to get these crop recipes that like, you know, for the bougie among us, the New York Times starts doing crop recipes. And like the recipe for growing a tomato plant begins like,

we all remember the day of the Srebrenica massacre. I for one. So here's the thing, Milo. Once again, I'm afraid you've done the thing where you know not the lathe. I'm afraid you've done it. A man being tortured by a lathe forever. Where I've got a pig iron lathe in every home. I have in a section here, and I'd like to sort of get into this, then jump sort of into taking

this back in the context of the media lab itself, right? Where I say, well, what is the commercial vision? How does this thing intend to make money? Because you can't just give away empty plexiglass boxes that don't do anything for free. Well, they have two major opportunities for what you might call for commercial, for you to have two commercial visions. One is premiumization, where they say, Harper envisions a future where grocery stores stock regular tomatoes next to more expensive

ones that are specifically high in lycopene that also tastes like they were grown in your neighbor's garden. If you wanted to be high in lycopene, you just cooked them. Like that's how that works. Chemistry wise. Anyway. We haven't invented that yet, Sarah. As DNA sequencing becomes more inexpensive, it's not a far leap to think about the day

when it's not just diabetes, Basil, but the Smith family's diabetes, Basil. Number one, all of this is a far leap to think of. Literally every single element of what they're saying is a far leap to think of. There's no single element of this that is not that. I just love the idea that we would be end up like pirating things like, oh, I can grow champagne grapes in Maine now. No, yes, that's what they say. That's what they say, that you could have Tuscany, Napa, or...

No, as if some French men would come round to my house and break my legs if I try and do that. They said you can have Tuscany in a box, Napa in a box, or Bordeaux in a box. Yeah, because there's no commercial interest there that you're going to have to play games. You can have the Niagara Peninsula in a box. No, you cannot box the Niagara Peninsula. You will never replicate the Niagara Peninsula. It's fantastic for growing Cabernet from. Yeah, there's really an interesting point to be made here, which is

when you're talking about making wine and other, most things you actually eat, there's some intervening steps between harvesting it and eating it, right? When people say things like, food comes from farms. I'm like, all right, you see that cow over there? I want you to walk up to it, and I want you to take a bite out of it and tell me how that works for you. Typically, there's some intervening steps between the farm and the eating. And so if we're talking like wine country in a box, right?

Okay, it's like, so number one, are you growing enough grapes in there to make a useful amount of wine? And then number two, you know what to do with those grapes? Like you have the right fermentation tech. There's all these... I've watched a YouTube video where like some prisoners made wine in a toilet. Yeah, I was trying to find out if that works great for like, you know, the... Inside the blossom hill or refinery.

But if we're talking... I'd say like, there is a perfectly... There is an existing thing of making alcohol in small batches from readily available ingredients with little work. And it's called spirits. That's why everyone and their uncle knows how to make fucking like, Pacine or Moonshine or something like that. Doesn't it all like taste terrible as well?

Like it all just like, it just wasn't even worth making. Yeah, I present to you the country of Russia. With a long history of people just drinking and eating things that taste horrible because it's what's available. Like more to the point, again, like the place where our food system breaks down is not at the farm level. Like, yeah, we have some shitty farming practices, but the place where it really breaks down is processing and distribution.

I feel like everyone knows this. In terms of agriculture, we're overproducing, we're making way too much food. And so it's bizarre to me that there's so much money in the food system being invested and it's all going to the farm part. Nobody's investing in better processing and distribution because nobody understands that part of the system and nobody understands that like we have deep needs there. So I give you an example, I'm working with,

you know, I had been working with an indoor farm and their farm part, you know, it takes some time to get up and running, but they did. And then their big struggles were with the back end when they have to pick it and then they have to like get it cooled and then they have to get it into little plastic boxes and you have to seal the lid on. And they could not for the life of them find a production line

that can competently seal the lid onto a plastic box. That was their biggest technological hurdle. And so you have all these companies like fiddling around with the grow part and they're like, we can make it in a box, but nobody's talking about how are we going to harvest, cool it, how are we going to distribute it, and how are we going to get that plastic box to get its lid sealed on correctly? No one even knows that's a problem.

You can't learn about that on Wikipedia, that's the trouble. It's not like that plastic's ever going to come back to haunt us in any sort of climactic way either. Right. So like even better, let's come up with an alternative form of packaging. But like how much money is going into that very serious need as opposed to like 60 different ways to dig around with a light box? And this is kind of where I want to get to bringing it back to the Media Lab

because the major part of the commercial vision is actually to get co-investment in the MIT Media Lab from either big philanthropists. So to be clear, it's not known as to whether or not Jenny of Jeffrey Epstein's money went to this project. I mean, I funded the lab generally, didn't it? But a lot of how this project was funded, and I'm looking at this here, as a leader of an initiative at the Media Lab,

which has more than 90 corporations as member companies, Mr. Harper has been personally responsible for raising funds. In addition to getting backing from Target, Open Ag has received financial support from Ferrero, the maker of Nutella and Wellspun, a conglomerate based in Mumbai. For Ferrero, he created a tree computer. In the cube, he'll recreate 30 different climates, seeing how trees grow and produce the highest quality hazelnuts

that are not only tasty, but also use the least amount of water, fertilizer, and pesticide. So I think we have to see this in terms of not how it is going to participate in the food system, but rather how it's going to basically be ways for the MIT Media Lab to market itself to companies, and then for companies to turn around and use this, we're using a fancy grow box to make better hazelnuts

that's more green, to then market a premium and greener product to consumers that doesn't exist. It's basically a human centipede of bullshit. Yeah, I don't think that hazelnut example is actually fantastic because, so the reason Ferrero was shared, if I'm not mistaken, was interested in that

is because most of the world's hazelnut supply at this time comes from Turkey with a little bit of secondary supply from the Medford, Oregon, Willamette Valley region. And every once in a while, one of those regions will get hit by a massive frost and lose its entire hazelnut crop. So there are a few different solutions.

You can preserve this that apparently is one of them. The other is like for decades, plant breeders have been breeding hazelnut varieties that are resistant to what they call hazelnut blight. That's a disease that's native to the Eastern US, which is a great place to grow hazelnuts other than this disease is there and will eat your entire planting up.

So I think they've actually gotten to or they're just about to get hazelnuts that are resistant to that. So if you can plant the entire Eastern US with this hardy variety that doesn't get attacked by disease, you can massively increase your yields of that crop and then also not have it dependent on these two tiny regions.

Why in the hell would you grow stuff in a box if the entire Eastern US is available to you? It just makes no sense. That's my personal beef with this guy is he's making the fucking Ferrero Rocher upon which I depend for sustenance, more expensive. But Sarah, that's lame inside the box thinking there. You got to think of what's a cool way of doing it.

That's kind of the question, right? There are so many different ways to solve agricultural problems and the ag tech industry is only interested in the ones that you can extract IP rent from. And it's funny because breeding plant varieties is also something you can extract IP rents from. You get a royalty on every seedling that you sell, right?

So if you're talking about a specific problem, there's this whole portfolio of solutions you can pursue and the ag tech industry is only interested in a very, very small subset. It's the sexiest subset. It's the one that's got the most attention from like, you know, the Epstein's and the Movers and the Shakers of the world. That's probably why.

Yeah, but in terms of actually solving the problem, it's not that great. And so it's kind of disturbing to have this much of our societal problem solving held hostage to this kind of thinking. Well, I genuinely think, and I don't know if I'm wrong, so please do own me again if I am. But I think that irrespective of its actual merits, I think there's genuinely a push amongst those kinds of investors

for vertical farming just because it looks cool. Well, it sounds awesome at a cocktail party, right? And I feel like that's a lot of what has always, at least in the U.S., driven agriculture. We actually, there's a fantastic book called Red Meat Republic about how the beef industry spread into the Great Plains of the U.S. with a lot of East Coast and European investment money.

It was a giant land grab. And these people built all these gigantic ranches and just stuffed the Great Plains with cattle and they never thought to themselves, again, you can't just walk up to that cow and take a bite out. There's some things you've got to do between growing the cow and people eating the cow. They never took care of that as part of their business model.

They're just like, grow the cows, that's it. Someone also take care of it. That's fine. That is how Chicago Meatpacking happened. That is how Chicago Meatpacking happened. With a giant rail yard. Oh, no. That didn't exist yet.

That did not exist yet. And so once it came into being. You have to build that. And you have to stuff it with weird serbs and stuff. And then eventually, yeah. Once they started making ranches, all of a sudden that's around the time that Chicago Meatpacking came out.

And then these giant corporate ranchers who are the pioneers of this ranching enterprise bitched and whined that Chicago Meatpacking was squeezing them out of business. And I'm like, well, did you ever build your own meatpacking plant? Like what did you think was going to happen? They didn't have a box. Yeah.

Chicago Meatpacking is one of my favorite clubs. So essentially, I think that the way to understand this, right, and this goes back to what we were talking about, the MIT Media Lab for in the very beginning, which is that it is marketing disguised as problem solving. That's literally all it is. And the fact that it takes so much money is emblematic of what you, Sarah,

have called sugar daddy science. Yeah. So, you know, if we're talking, I just, I kind of started looking at this and I'm like the business model here, it looks a lot more like sex work than it does like science. And it's especially problematic because there's actual human trafficking involved

on Epstein's side of things. Like that's a business that he knew very well, right? And so you have people being trafficked without their consent. And then like that's just kind of how he rolls is like, I'm here for profile. I'm here for flashiness. Like I just, I get a lot of like the party guy vibes from Epstein. You'll see a lot of men that network by partying.

Again, how much cocaine went into this decision making, I don't know. But that's kind of what he was looking for. We crucially do not know how much it was growing in a box. We can't say. Yeah, carry on. Yeah. And so you just kind of get like it's,

I'm seeing the traces of a lot of guys partying and coming up with like really cooked up decisions. And a lot of that approach to life is kind of based on image. And we want things that look cool as opposed to systemic analysis and finding out where the problem is and solving it. And if people want to party, I mean, they can do that. That's fine.

But let's not be using like our research institutions as the location for that. I personally though love to live in the future where, using a load of funding acquired from a billionaire pedophile, a bunch of people are using the university's resources to build a computer that makes the world's best nutella. I actually think it's a very normal thing that our economy does extremely well

and doesn't make me think we're all going to die in a fiery hell. Yeah. So I think that what you say is that it's a horrifying vision of Jeffrey Epstein confronted with like a pile of Ferrero Rocher. Mr. Epstein, with these Ferrero Rocher, you are spoiling us. I mean, you know what's going to happen, right? There's going to be like some QAnon guy who's listening to this right now

and all of a sudden Ferrero Rocher is going to like become part of the... Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. Of the comfort universe. Part of, yeah, part of... You're rushing out to buy more registering. But I want to say also, Sarah, I think your comparison of sugar daddy science to sex work is an interesting one because it is,

or at least in the sense of like, someone's like an escort where it's like, yeah, you're purchasing the services of someone who's basically there to flatter and advertise you to others. You're in the fantasy industry. And no friend experience. Yeah. You have a girlfriend experience, but for broccoli.

Yeah. And so it's like, while it lacks, say, many of the material, many of the material realities of sex work, it is delivering a very comparable end result. I mean, like to be fair, like there was actual sex work going on, right? There were women being trafficked. So it's not, that's not sex work that's human trafficking,

but there is like, there's actual sex being sold, right? As a part of Epstein's business model. So like, it kind of started off as a joke, you know, because I'm like, these guys are clearly in the fantasy business, the MIT Media Lab. That's why we had to have you on the podcast is because you have access to the laze of heaven that makes horrible jokes become real.

Is that what that is? Is that what that thing does? But only horrible ones. Yeah. Nope. Look, everyone's like, laze of heaven, laze of heaven. There's a reason that the leftist irony podcasts all have the laze of heaven and that we're all materialists. Yes.

And why are terrible jokes come true? Easy modes. Like seriously, in a world of vice and virtue analysis, if you have any kind of materialism in you, you just, it's hacks. You have all hacks. Yeah. Yeah. We're all aim-bottling.

That's why we all have the laze of heaven. All right. So before we close ourselves out on this, the sort of detailed investigation of the open ag project at the MIT Media Lab and Caleb Harper's box that does nothing, I found just another little treat because this is what I do. You're so good at this. I have found the publisher's blurb for Caleb Harper's unpublished

and let's be honest, probably permanently unpublished book. Oh, no. It is called 72, no. It is called the future of food. hilarious. Set himself a sort of manageable target there. Oh, yeah. He, by the middle of the century, he says,

we will have nine billion mouths to feed and nobody who wants to be a farmer. Yep. Damn. That's the problem. Yeah. None of that materialist stuff that Sarah said earlier. Definitely not. No, it's just no one wants to be.

And so all these companies just... Just robot combine harvesters, just going back and forth laser guided forever. Yeah. And so all of these companies, they just have to do something with all this land because no one wants to farm it. Oh, no. Projections suggest white people want to farm. Even worse.

Projections... If you think nobody wants to farm, try getting that food process and distribute it. Even fewer people want to do that. So nobody wants to put a plastic lid onto a box for eight hours a day. Projections suggest we might not have enough water to drink, let alone grow crops within a decade. From climate change to pollution to aging farmers, our global food system is in crisis.

And as the planet heats up, it will only get worse. It seems like arson murder and jaywalking, right? Like, yeah, climate change, like topsoil erosion, water, like droughts, bushfires. And then also the farmers are getting quite old. And they will keep voting for Brexit, which is a bit annoying. But also it's one of these things where it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You say all that's the problem and your solution's a box.

Yes. Small box. Magic box. My boys are box. My boys are box. I don't... I just... We just make boxes here.

It seems like... It seems like the... Okay, number one title, MIT Media Lab Part Three. We just make boxes here. Two, it seems like if you step back and look at this, without the IQ reduction helmet that tech people seem to need to wear, it seems very obvious that a box is not going to solve these complicated interlocking problems. It won't even alleviate some of their symptoms.

It seems like a nice way to convince yourself nothing's wrong. Well, no, see, because the problem is climate change, right? Inside, if you grow food inside in a box, there's no climate because climate's outdoors. Exactly. Or you can grow food on Mars. When Jeff Bees or some Elon Musk have to do that sort of like romantic homesteading on Mars and they're growing everything indoors, they're going to need this shit. Well, not to state the obvious on this stuff, but I think there's a certain class of folks

who just kind of see climate change as like, oh, people are panicking. That's an opportunity. I can go in and explain that. I can tell people I've got the solution. It's just the same old hustle. I wish fewer of them worked at oil companies. I love to watch the film Children of Man and then go, hey, looks like we've got ourselves a probability, folks.

So, while the problem is clear, the blurb continues, the solutions have been scarce. Sarah, have the solutions been scarce? Not at all. The solutions have not been easily marketable to Ferrero Rocher. But then I can see. Yeah. All right. Or to just mad psychopathic billionaires.

It's not even about Ferrero Rocher. They are like, they are a second order concern. That's true. Like their first order concern is getting investment from mad psychotic narcissist with too much money. Like it doesn't actually- I would love to sit Ferrero Rocher down because they have to know better than this. It's like any company that's involved in the food supply chain. Any company involved in the food supply chain has a little bit more info.

They've got to know people are breeding blight-resistant hazelnuts, right? So, I have so many questions on how the decision was made to fund this. That's probably some fail-sun. There is probably a senior Ferrero who is just like, I don't know, swiping through notifications. But this had to be a decision made over some cocaine. Like some, again, like you said, fail-sun. Guys, we have to bear in mind that these people are Italians. They are currently allegedly probably maybe, I don't know, hypothetically

at a party with a bunch of 17-year-old girls doing cocaine, you know, kind of eating pizza off of each other. With the gigantic pyramid of Ferrero Rocher. Exactly. With the president for some reason. Everyone knows that Ferrero Rocher, if you rearrange all of the letters and move, remove some letters and bring in a lot of new letters, spells propaganda duet. So, that's the other thing, right?

I don't think that they've invested in this because they're stupid. I just think they've invested in this from their marketing department, not from their crop science department. And the problem is that fawning writing over stuff like the MIT Media Lab exists to sort of allied the problems of an actual nature and replace them with solutions of a marketing nature. It exists, it's basically an obscurationist entity that exists to trick and lure journalists into covering it uncritically.

It's a Venus light trap, but for fast company writers. It's the Tory party. Like as a crop scientist, I've approached a lot of journalists or they've asked me for an interview about something. It's usually food waste, they want to hear all about food waste and I'm like, just so you know, that's not nearly the problem that who owns the land and what they're doing with it is. So, if you want to do something to really shake up agriculture, do that.

Crickets, every time. There is so much interest in kind of talking about GWIS solutions and nobody. Like will you eat crickets? Yeah, and then I've literally pitched the story to people of, hey, we need to talk about when I was pitching my book proposal around. There's a publisher who's published a number of things, like kind of in sustainable kind of foodie area. And I was like, just so you know, family farming is not really the solution.

It's actually the source of most of the problems. And they were like, oh, hell no. So, there's a huge amount of data to be involved here. Sarah, did you have to open your book with all of those pictures of Stalin liquidating the Kulaks? Yeah, you know, it's really interesting because American family farmers keep going like, how dare you treat us like the Kulaks? And I was like, well, for one thing, the Kulaks were financially self-supporting.

So, it's really flattering that you think of them. The Soviet Union, but worse and expensive. The fails on Kulaks. So, while the problem is clear, the solutions have been scarce. Now, thanks to Caleb Harper and his vast indoor farm in MIT's famed media lab, a revolution in agriculture is taking place. Not any of the ones, not any of the 19th or early 20th century ones. Taking his toil from the field to the lab, horrible clause,

he has been able to monitor the variables that affect a plant's health, water, light, CO2, temperature, and nothing else. Because you can't monitor those things in a field. You have to be wearing a lab coat. Yeah, you have to be wearing a lab coat inside. Because it requires numbers over 100, which is sign. Nobody knows what the temperature is outdoors. You couldn't possibly know.

And you couldn't possibly plant your thing in another place. I don't ever want to come off as an actual Luddite. I don't know. We probably do need to think of ways to have more controlled farming, or indoor farming. Sarah, I'm sure you know all about indoor agriculture, but like... Yeah, there's actual applications here, but this ain't it. Doing it this way, where it just doesn't solve any of the problems,

but it's pure marketing, seems to just be working backwards. And to poison the well for those good solutions. And to also literally remember, poison a river. Also literally poison the well. Yeah, no, but I feel like if we were... If we had the IQ reduction helmet on, if we were a little bit dumber, then we could quite easily be like... Indoor agriculture must all be like this grifter in his Perspex box,

and it must not be worth pursuing at all. Or we'd be like, damn, this shit's a good idea. Where do I sign? At least now we know what David Blaine was doing in that box. You can throw the perfect David Blaine anywhere in the world. And using machine learning to analyze the vast amount of data being collected, he and his team calculated how to grow the healthiest, tastiest, fastest growing and most sustainable produce in history.

Okay, I'm just gonna throw this out there. They didn't even fucking use machine learning. They just used data. And so the machine didn't have to learn anything. No, you don't... Like having big data and then using a machine to winnow it down is sometimes less efficient than just collecting targeted data. No, no, Alice.

I'm pretty sure that they needed some kind of gradient descent to figure out that food, that plant like water. Absolutely. I love to harvest data. Like we harvested wheat where we just like side the whole thing off and don't separate it at all. And just cram stalks into my mouth. Someone at some point once told Caleb Harbour,

you know you could harvest data like you harvested wheat, and now millions of dollars have gone into this. And that's rough too. I'm just kind of like, how do you go... Like how do you get yourself at this end over your head? You know what I mean? Like I just, I look at Harper and I have to say, I see myself a little bit because again,

he's not a crop scientist, but he's acting like a crop scientist. So you're just like, how do you get in this far of your head? Like how does this happen? And it is, I don't know, it haunts me a little bit. I'm not gonna lie. There but for the grace of having been born with millions of dollars, any of us could have been. If anyone could have benefited from a little imposter syndrome,

it's fucking this guy. Yeah, when they talk about imposter syndrome, I'm like, a little bit is okay. Crop scientists can have a little imposter syndrome as a treat. So soon he was working with NASA to learn how to grow crops on Mars and with Syrian refugees to grow food in camps that reminded them of home. That's the one that pisses me off. Holy fucking shit.

It looks like some trash to a refugee camp to these people who are already suffering. Them in Detroit, right? You couldn't have chosen more vulnerable people to try this on. Yeah, it's just posing. It's bad. It's real bad. He must have known it doesn't work because whenever they demonstrated it in front of investors,

they would just buy food and put it in the box. So at the very best, the best possible thing he could have done is briefly given some Syrian refugee children false hope. And a little basil plant. And just some extra trash to kick around. If you're trying to run a refugee camp, the logistics of running one of these places are very complicated. You don't need more garbage.

There's enterprising people in the world. I'm sure someone by now will have had the door off of that and that prospects will be doing something useful, hopefully. Yeah, probably. And I think that that brings us to the end of the book. Well, actually, no, I had one more thing. I had one thing to ask. So our fearless leader Riley has an insistence that Canadian wine

from the Niagara Peninsula has a unique microclimate that makes it particularly subtle and delicious. Is there any agricultural or scientific basis to this whatsoever? Uh, I couldn't say. I don't do wine. Okay. I'm not on one side. Let's say no.

No, no, no. Alice, Alice. Alice, you stepped into the Thunderdome and I'm about to tell you what's going on right now. I always stand in every episode all over again. No. So what happened? The Niagara Peninsula combines several different factors

that are very important. And wow, what an interesting conversation about wine. Now we all agree with each other. I hope it didn't accidentally get faded out. Anyway, the real Canadian wine was the friends who made it along the way. Sarah, I just wanted to thank you for calling into our podcast today to set us straight about farming, agriculture, food, and all that good stuff. Yeah, no problem.

It was it was super fun, you know, again, chaotic and confusing, but that's how life do. And is there would you like anyone to follow you by something, subscribe to something? Uh, yeah, I'm on Twitter at SarahTaber underscore BWW. I have a book coming out at an undisclosed date and yeah, we'll talk about that later if it happens. So when it happens.

We have a book coming out. We have a book coming out at a CIA black site. That's right. That's the way to do it though. Um, and also we've got a Patreon five bucks a month. You know the drill. You can sign up to it. Yeah.

You know, you also, like we said at the beginning, this is the third part of our MIT Media Lab series. So we'll link the first part, which is on the free feed and the second part, which is on the Patreon, in the text of this, in the text of this episode. So do check those out because this place is just, it is the world's strongest well of comedy. It's amazing.

Yeah. Also, if you like, if you like comedy, I now have all my tour dates collated in one place. There'll be a link in the description. Please buy tickets to those, especially if you live in Liverpool. Dear God, if you live in Liverpool, I have an ill advised tour date in Liverpool on the 17th of January. If you live in Liverpool, if you know someone who lives in Liverpool,

if you live a commutable difference from that distance from Liverpool, please do come to that because one of my mates just did the same thing and he said that he sold seven tickets, which is not enough. It's not enough. Yes. Liverpool, come on. You're a great socialist city. Go see Milo.

Please do. Otherwise, Alice, people can find you on Well There's Your Problem as well with Do Not Eat. And I think that's all we have for plugs, other than our theme song as ever is Here We Go by Jinsang. You can find it on Spotify. But from the first free episode of Trash Future Season 2, we would like to bid you a good evening and see you in a couple of days.

Yeah, happy holidays also. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Happy holidays, everybody. We don't recognize Christmas on this one. Yeah, we don't recognize holidays because we're always grinding business. They used to go to a Christmas dinner in a box. Boxing day, of course. Why did we not think of this?

There we go, episode title. How could we be so foolish?