Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino Bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. This
Speaker 1: is uh, this is on your Instagram, Johnnie, I haven't
Speaker 1: posted it yet. You fix it too, Yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about it. I will at some point
Speaker 1: in the next week, so if listeners were to go
Speaker 1: to your thing, they would find it. Yeah, Yanni, really,
Speaker 1: Yanni rehabilitated a did you tell me what you did? Yanni?
Speaker 1: You rehabilitated. It's a Reinhardt target I gotta use are
Speaker 1: our buddy Ben O'Brien gave it to me and uh,
Speaker 1: just after it was in pretty good shape when he
Speaker 1: gave it to me, but after explain Yeah, it's say
Speaker 1: three three dimensional um life size mule deer target. That's
Speaker 1: not life size. It is really. Oh yeah, I'm telling
Speaker 1: you it is. I mean it's that thing is hard
Speaker 1: to carry if you carry the body and the head
Speaker 1: and the piece of the antlers are attached to his
Speaker 1: ear forehead chunk. It's a lot to carry. It's it's
Speaker 1: a big it doesn't this picture makes it look out
Speaker 1: of scale anyways, close to life size mule deer three
Speaker 1: D target for shooting. You just changed it, yeah, to
Speaker 1: make you happy. So I want to hear about it
Speaker 1: here in five more minutes. If you say, well, it's
Speaker 1: actually only six which is a mule deer is high. Um. Anyways,
Speaker 1: after a couple four years of sitting out in the
Speaker 1: Montana sun and weather, at the foam was sorted certaining
Speaker 1: to degrade. So I called up Ryan Hart and she said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: no problem. This is what you do to bring it
Speaker 1: back to life. Take a can of spray paint whatever
Speaker 1: color you want to color your three D target, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, repaint it and then take some Thompson's deck
Speaker 1: ceiling like water ceiling, paint that over it. And you
Speaker 1: should be good to go and do that. You know,
Speaker 1: when you see it wearing off, and if you know,
Speaker 1: you know the water is not beating on it anymore.
Speaker 1: And uh so I went and got to think a
Speaker 1: can of khaki was the closest I could get to
Speaker 1: like the tan colored of a mule deer's body. Already
Speaker 1: had some black and white, and then I got a
Speaker 1: dark walnut because I wanted to as I was he
Speaker 1: I don't know what ran Hart was thinking, but when
Speaker 1: I got this buck and had these, the antlers are like,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing they model them after because they're giant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like one of the it looks like one
Speaker 1: of those deer that who's that ran looks like one
Speaker 1: of those dear Randy. Yeah yeah, yeah, type in Randy
Speaker 1: Almer mule deer. And then this is what this target
Speaker 1: is modeled after. Anyways, they're very yellow the antlers, and
Speaker 1: I didn't feel like they were very realistic, so I
Speaker 1: went to repaint those because I wanted to protect those two.
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, it would be kind of fun
Speaker 1: to turn him and turn him into the mythical timber
Speaker 1: buck that Stephen and I heard about when we were
Speaker 1: hunting Colorado together. Dark antler timber buck. Yeah yeah, I
Speaker 1: get buck fever looking at you and he's target. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: he's he's intimidating. Um here, friends, it is a high class.
Speaker 1: We're camping last weekend and I had my I had
Speaker 1: a three D target off in the meadow, you know,
Speaker 1: and I mean, there must have been ten times I
Speaker 1: come around the corner and kind I couldn't get used
Speaker 1: to that. It was quite the antlers they are. How
Speaker 1: long did that take you? Oh, I don't know. As
Speaker 1: long as it takes the spray Holcanus spray paint. It's pretty,
Speaker 1: it's pretty detailed. So we got a letter. We got
Speaker 1: a letter in. Oh, I'm gonna do it. Oh, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna introduce our guests, Fred Gould, Fred, Okay, here's how
Speaker 1: this goes. People will remember, people will remember a long
Speaker 1: time ago. If you've been, if you follow the show closely,
Speaker 1: U Karin, our beloved producer, had one day it was
Speaker 1: kind of spouting off about that fair Phil. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a great way to put it. Stopping spouting off. Karin
Speaker 1: was spouting off about GMOs genetically modified organism. It was
Speaker 1: well intentioned spouting off. She wasn't spouting off. She was
Speaker 1: just I don't know what she's doing. God's talking about
Speaker 1: GMO of like taking like arctic char and mixing it
Speaker 1: up with strawberries. I don't know. And then and then
Speaker 1: crackted herself a week later, and then corrected herself a
Speaker 1: week later. But the emails kept coming. The emails kept coming,
Speaker 1: and I said, well, Crim, why don't you go track
Speaker 1: down a GMO expert. He's here now, used to live
Speaker 1: in a Van University distinguished professor in the Department of
Speaker 1: Entomology that's studying bugs and plant pathology at North Carolina
Speaker 1: State University and rally right role, I though they're real
Speaker 1: particularly and the co director of the Genetic Engineering and
Speaker 1: Society Center. You got it. Um, once we get down
Speaker 1: with our up top stuff getting an interview, do you
Speaker 1: do you have any idea what we're talking about with
Speaker 1: the strawberries and the art at char Yeah, you know, phenomenal,
Speaker 1: genuine vegetarian, used to live in a Van. Self described
Speaker 1: former hippie. Krim sent me an article back, did you
Speaker 1: did you quit being a hippie? I guess I did,
Speaker 1: but like aged out. Um, yeah, that's gonna be a
Speaker 1: great conversation. Also, the other thing that inspired uh that
Speaker 1: the inspired justus want to have a conversation about GMOs.
Speaker 1: And we'll get to this is it's a very popular
Speaker 1: thing to have like a shirt or whatever it has
Speaker 1: a deer on it, like a white tailed deer. Who
Speaker 1: and white tailed deer? I love people, I mean they like.
Speaker 1: They like edge habitats, they like agricultural landscapes, they like
Speaker 1: disturbed landscapes. They like areas where the human presence uh
Speaker 1: decreases the predator load. Right, they like crows, Canada geese,
Speaker 1: what else, white tailed deer, magpies, magpies, just things that
Speaker 1: are sort of the winners of the anthrop a scene. Dogs, dogs,
Speaker 1: Increasingly coyotes are finding like fuge from persecution in urban
Speaker 1: in the sort of urban suburban landscape. I feel like
Speaker 1: increasingly a lot of more animals, especially predators. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, these people aren't that bad.
Speaker 1: You're gonna learn how to deal with them. Um. Anyways,
Speaker 1: people like to have a shirt or whatever, stickers and
Speaker 1: stuff they have a deer on it and it'll say
Speaker 1: like organic, or they'll have they'll talk about mallard ducks
Speaker 1: being organic. And we've we'll ask you about this, we've
Speaker 1: talked about increasingly. UM. I would say that if you're
Speaker 1: eating a mallard duck in North America in the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight, probably not man, probably not right right, They
Speaker 1: are all eaten corn out of a GMO field somewhere,
Speaker 1: soybeans like probably not organic. They probably wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to be certified organic. I don't think so that you probably,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know what, I don't have an
Speaker 1: answer for that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how
Speaker 1: how they would certify something like that. But it's a
Speaker 1: high The likelihood is that if you're gonna shoot it yourself,
Speaker 1: nobody's going to care. Yeah, but I mean meaning that
Speaker 1: if he's migrating through like if he's migrating from Canada
Speaker 1: to coastal Louisiana, UM, and it's utilizing air cultural fields like,
Speaker 1: it has a very high lighthood of stumbling into some
Speaker 1: kind of grain. Well, we need to get to all
Speaker 1: of this because it's really kind of curious. And I
Speaker 1: mentioned to you that on the US reserves for a
Speaker 1: long time you weren't able to grow genetically engineered crops.
Speaker 1: So if you shoot and a word of four reserve,
Speaker 1: right it was, it would have been non GMO. So
Speaker 1: that's that rule is has been changed and it's sort
Speaker 1: of filtering down, but it probably will change. Right So
Speaker 1: right now, if you want to get your non GMO ducks,
Speaker 1: you know, before we do our some of other stuff
Speaker 1: you got, we gotta talk about these jars here of
Speaker 1: bison garam darm. How do you pronounce that? I have
Speaker 1: no idea. That's a good research project. Someone find out
Speaker 1: how to pronounce that, so we don't sound stupid. You
Speaker 1: mind doing that film? Uh tell real quick? Talk about
Speaker 1: those the because you live in North Carolina, um, and
Speaker 1: you're talking about the the least corn land. Explain that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's an interesting thing because you know, I man,
Speaker 1: you have all these reserves, right, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of water, but there's I have a lot of land
Speaker 1: there and they want to have food for the ducks
Speaker 1: you know that migrate there. And what they've done is
Speaker 1: they allow farmers to grow corn on that land, right,
Speaker 1: and then they're allowed to harvest most of it, but
Speaker 1: they have to leave some of it behind, so they're
Speaker 1: not paying rent on the land like they would with
Speaker 1: a typical landowner. Right. It's kind of funny cause it
Speaker 1: winds up sounding like, um, it's reminiscent of the sharecropper system. Well,
Speaker 1: it is exactly, I mean, and they leave that amount
Speaker 1: standing and that's for the waterfowl. But you know, there's
Speaker 1: all of course, you know, given it it's a federal program,
Speaker 1: they have regulations and they don't want certain pesticides right
Speaker 1: that would hurt the aquatic animals and and so on.
Speaker 1: So they have regulations on what you're allowed to spray.
Speaker 1: And you know, there are a lot of good reasons
Speaker 1: for for having some of those regulations, but some of
Speaker 1: the others, you know, have sort of seeped in. And
Speaker 1: one of those was about using genetically engineered corn and
Speaker 1: so that was prohibited. So that has been prohibited. So
Speaker 1: you know, it's a problem for the farmers because some
Speaker 1: of the weed problems, for example, are kind of really
Speaker 1: tough on those refuges. So you know, they need to
Speaker 1: make a certain amount of profit off that amount that
Speaker 1: they're able to harvest. So you know, it gets a
Speaker 1: little bit tricky, but they have things worked out, but
Speaker 1: it will be The farmers would love it if those
Speaker 1: regulations were changed. And so during the Trump administration, they
Speaker 1: lifted the regulation on they lifted the prohibition, they lifted
Speaker 1: that The argument, you know what the argument for the
Speaker 1: foreign against arguments. You know, I wish I could give
Speaker 1: you all the rational but I don't think this was
Speaker 1: just a rational kind of thing. I think it was
Speaker 1: probably a lot political. But there is some some kind
Speaker 1: of rationale because indeed a lot of the crops that
Speaker 1: are genetically engineered genetically engineered for herbicide tolerance, right, so
Speaker 1: if you have herbicide tolerance, you can spray more herbicides
Speaker 1: on that. So if there if it's a herbicide that's
Speaker 1: not allowed or something like that, that's an issue. But
Speaker 1: I think more of it was really just that idea
Speaker 1: of of natural and I thought we could get to
Speaker 1: that because I think more of the GMO thing has
Speaker 1: to do with natural versus this whole thing about safety.
Speaker 1: And I think it's really useful, you know, especially with
Speaker 1: your guys. You know, it's it's really interesting to talk
Speaker 1: about that. But all I would say is that it
Speaker 1: will be great for the farmers, you know, if that changes.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's going to harm the refuges, but
Speaker 1: duck hunter and duck but presumably there will be more
Speaker 1: duck food. I don't think there'll be a big change
Speaker 1: in it. But I think you should tell all your
Speaker 1: listeners to will lobby against relaxing that law so that
Speaker 1: they can continue to get organic ducks. This is a
Speaker 1: called action. Yeah, this is a call to action. That's bold.
Speaker 1: Um you have are you protected in your job. You
Speaker 1: talked about, so this is a difference between having a
Speaker 1: federal and so you have. I thought you're gonna ask
Speaker 1: me if I'm protected from losing my job when I
Speaker 1: say things you have? Do you have? What the words
Speaker 1: escaping me? When you get immunity from prosecution? What you want?
Speaker 1: That's great. You're gonna get the straight story, right, Okay?
Speaker 1: Fred hank Ty, you got anything to add in? Add in?
Speaker 1: But we have. I didn't know this existed. I got
Speaker 1: a package in the mail from Lasiano Culinary School in
Speaker 1: the Latian Islands or in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the
Speaker 1: guy someone the director of the culinary school there, director
Speaker 1: and instructor of culinary arts at Lake Superior State University.
Speaker 1: I didn't know they had that program I went to that.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite a lung because I only did a
Speaker 1: semester there. I went to three schools before I finished,
Speaker 1: like regular college, Skeeing Community College, Lake Superior State University,
Speaker 1: Grand Valley State University. I did one semester at Lake
Speaker 1: State and had no idea that this exists. That was
Speaker 1: one of your brothers. They he runs the program there.
Speaker 1: He sent me a beautifully typed letter. And they've been
Speaker 1: experimenting with various forms of fermentation, and they have a
Speaker 1: they've been making koji mold. But he took this is
Speaker 1: this jar in front of you, honest, which looks like
Speaker 1: a jar of If I handed that to you with
Speaker 1: no label, what would you think you were looking at?
Speaker 1: Oh boy, I mean, it's like the color of molasses.
Speaker 1: But it just it's it's just liquid. Yeah, so sauce,
Speaker 1: soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, fish sauce. Maybe. So they've been
Speaker 1: they've been dicking around with kogi mold, putting it on
Speaker 1: various forms of grain. Okay, the mold itself is sweet
Speaker 1: and fruity. They've used it for many things, including toasting
Speaker 1: it for salads, making risotto, lacto fermenting it which I
Speaker 1: don't know about, making bread pudding. Koji mold is also
Speaker 1: an important greenia for many of the Asian pantry staples,
Speaker 1: such as here I'm in more familiar territory mi so
Speaker 1: fish sauce show you, or soy sauce and saki. They
Speaker 1: were making it with coffee. Then they took a freshly
Speaker 1: slaughtered and ground bison meat. So the meat from a freshly.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to say ground bison meat. And they put
Speaker 1: the cog on there which is grown on barley. And
Speaker 1: they put the bison meat, kogi, salt and water, place
Speaker 1: it in a rice cooker set to warm, and they
Speaker 1: skimmed it and stirred it for ten weeks, then strained
Speaker 1: out the solids, which they then dehydrated and made a
Speaker 1: bison spice with and jarred it for use. My goodness,
Speaker 1: I feel like maybe we should share one of these
Speaker 1: an auction one of them in the auction House Oddities
Speaker 1: or do you want your own jar? We have two jars. No,
Speaker 1: we could share. We could share a jar. Have you
Speaker 1: cracked that open yet? No? Man, just go open the
Speaker 1: box right now. This is like, this isn't even in
Speaker 1: the document. I challenge you to find this in the
Speaker 1: document and what we're are in what are It's not
Speaker 1: in there? Phil, Well, i'll see. Let me save you
Speaker 1: the time. It's not in there. That's how freshness is.
Speaker 1: H's open a damn thing up? Now? Well? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we should have a smell and maybe it takes.
Speaker 1: I want to save a jar for ther House Oddities
Speaker 1: to raise money for our access initiatives. Oh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't even have to put your nose to it. Here's
Speaker 1: what he says. He says, We've been marinating our bison
Speaker 1: backstrap steaks. This is probably making you want to make
Speaker 1: Fred friends over there, licking his lips. Yeah, we've been
Speaker 1: marinating our bison backstrap steaks in it for a few
Speaker 1: days before we sue, feed and butter base them. It
Speaker 1: does a really nice job of breaking down the muscle
Speaker 1: fibers in the steak and tenderizing it. We also use
Speaker 1: the sauce as the umami component in a saracho honey
Speaker 1: glaze for sashimi salmon. Can anyone hear anybody here? Fred,
Speaker 1: you might be Can anybody in Layman's terms, explain O Mommy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's hear it. Phil tell him it's so it's so
Speaker 1: easy Phil to do it. I was gonna say, it's
Speaker 1: one of those things like the meat. It's the meat sensation.
Speaker 1: It's it's like that Supreme Court justice who was asked
Speaker 1: to define porn. He just said, I just I know
Speaker 1: it when I see it. I feel like that's you, mommy,
Speaker 1: you know when you taste it. I can't describe it.
Speaker 1: Don't ask me. Well, this sauce. Definitely is ou Mommy.
Speaker 1: I looked it up at Mariam Webster. I just want
Speaker 1: to drink that, like put a little bob or something
Speaker 1: in there. Miriam Webster says. It's the taste sensation that
Speaker 1: is produced by several amino acids and nucleotides such as
Speaker 1: glutamate and aspirate, and has a rich or meaty flavor.
Speaker 1: So you're right, characteristic of cheese, cooked meat, mushrooms, soy
Speaker 1: and ripe tomatoes, very very prevalent in Asian cooking. I
Speaker 1: feel like they're always talking about, mommy, have you found
Speaker 1: out how to pronounce what we're sitting on right now?
Speaker 1: I looked it up. I got I got two pronunciations
Speaker 1: gear room and ga room. But I think the biggest
Speaker 1: things that that you as an oo sound gar room,
Speaker 1: Like mommy, there you go. Um, So we're gonna put
Speaker 1: a jar of this. Someone's gonna tell us there's like
Speaker 1: some kind of legal problem with this. Yeah, That's the
Speaker 1: only thing I was thinking is you know, you can't
Speaker 1: auction off food? Why not? I don't know that's what,
Speaker 1: but I was thinking there might be a legal issue
Speaker 1: with it homemade, you know, not f d A U S.
Speaker 1: D A Inspects blah blah blah. I'm gonna I try.
Speaker 1: I try to. I try to put in my used
Speaker 1: T shirts with the essence of Yanni because I know
Speaker 1: that some folks like those T shirts. Steve, you know,
Speaker 1: they shot me down. Why. They didn't really give an answer.
Speaker 1: They just said, I think that's too much. It's like
Speaker 1: like like Ralph Nader works here now or something. Uh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna find out a way because I'm also planning
Speaker 1: on auction off my big court jar of python oil
Speaker 1: the auction house. Oddity's real quick is is we're starting
Speaker 1: an auction house and it will all fund access, like
Speaker 1: like we did the Shiloh Pon. We kicked in money
Speaker 1: to buy Shilo Pond and Maine to turn it into
Speaker 1: public land. Um, we just raised a bunch of money
Speaker 1: for UH to support state state level access initiatives like
Speaker 1: state level private land, you know, public hunter private land.
Speaker 1: What's the word I'm looking for hunting access? Yeah, issues, um,
Speaker 1: other projects. So we're starting to sing in the first
Speaker 1: thing when we launched the auction house is it's all
Speaker 1: going to be stuff like gear used on season ten
Speaker 1: of our our Netflix show Mediator, like actually used both
Speaker 1: my binal harnesses from that season, my backpack from that season.
Speaker 1: We got one of Clay's guns in that season hopefully
Speaker 1: the Raccoon hide. All that kind of stuff tanned and
Speaker 1: then we've got paintings, We got crazy stuff. I tell
Speaker 1: you that I reached out to our buddy Luke Colmbs
Speaker 1: and he's going to chip in for the auction house audit. No,
Speaker 1: but I meant you and forgot. Yeah, he's in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: Do you want to hear that? Do you want to
Speaker 1: hear the country singer your boys coming in big? What
Speaker 1: are you talking about? Luke's coming in big for the
Speaker 1: House of Oddities? Is he donating that tour bus? Okay,
Speaker 1: not that big, but a signed guitar that he's played
Speaker 1: on stage with your kids, along with T shirts from
Speaker 1: the tour Signed man. It was one text and he
Speaker 1: came back with I am so in here you go
Speaker 1: my favorite from that episode that we film a loop
Speaker 1: which is coming out with September. I was explaining him.
Speaker 1: I was explaining to Luke how I think pronghorn when
Speaker 1: you smell them like their fur, their hair, I think
Speaker 1: it smells like fried corn chips. It really does. And
Speaker 1: I told him, I said, when you smell that thing's
Speaker 1: gonna smell like freedo corn chips. And he said, we'll
Speaker 1: bust out the bean dud. Uh oh. Two more promo
Speaker 1: things we gotta do. So on a previous episode of
Speaker 1: the show, we played of our of our random house
Speaker 1: audio original, Meat Eater's Close Calls No camp Fire Stories
Speaker 1: right meters camp Fire Stories Close Calls, which I should
Speaker 1: point out is on its second month on the New
Speaker 1: York Times bestseller list. Congratulations for audio originals. We're doing more, like,
Speaker 1: we're doing more. Do we get that stamp as a
Speaker 1: company or does that count as like under your sort
Speaker 1: of list of author Uh. I would think it would
Speaker 1: be where the company would claim it. Nice. Anyways, we're
Speaker 1: doing more of those, and so we're looking for your stories.
Speaker 1: UM's so camp fire stories. So if you if you're
Speaker 1: familiar with the Campfire Stories and you have this camp
Speaker 1: Fire Stories audio original Meat Eaters camp Fire Stories close Calls,
Speaker 1: and you're like, holy ship, those boys should know about X.
Speaker 1: Send that to you camp Fire Stories at the meat
Speaker 1: Eater dot com. Um. Savannah, my beloved partner that work
Speaker 1: on all this with and Brody, Savannah was saying, if
Speaker 1: you want, you can give shout outs to folks who
Speaker 1: sent in their dad's stories and tell them we want more.
Speaker 1: She said, we have an overwhelming number from veterans, like
Speaker 1: she's glad we have so many stories from veterans, and
Speaker 1: a lot of stories about people's dads. And she said, uh,
Speaker 1: the old sweet dads give me life. And she said,
Speaker 1: it's also funny how everyone's subject line is crazy ass story,
Speaker 1: which I think we might have said to use that,
Speaker 1: don't we. Yeah, so keep them calm and as well.
Speaker 1: It kind of defeats the purpose when everyone is saying
Speaker 1: craziest stories. It kind of it loses its effect when
Speaker 1: everyone's using it. Do you get what I'm saying. It's
Speaker 1: like if you asked my kids if something was epic,
Speaker 1: like they go down the little five ft hill in
Speaker 1: the yard and it was a sled rug. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: other thing we're working on and we I don't know
Speaker 1: how many we have, but we need a lot more.
Speaker 1: Um keep sending in the keep sending your submissions to
Speaker 1: fund up Old Deer stands because I'm still pushing. Like
Speaker 1: now with the success of the calendar, tremendous success. Now
Speaker 1: no one can stand in the way of making it
Speaker 1: a fine art coffee table book. I'm proud of you.
Speaker 1: No one can stand in my way. I told Ross
Speaker 1: he'd have he'd encounter zero resistance on that project going forward.
Speaker 1: So send your pictures of crazy old deer stands two
Speaker 1: funked up old deer stands at the media dot com.
Speaker 1: We've gotten over. I don't know. That was a long
Speaker 1: time ago there, Now what that's a lot of pictures
Speaker 1: to look through. Seflixom he listens so like Walleye podcasts
Speaker 1: and this is the poet draws the salary dream job.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, kee paying him for this, Like
Speaker 1: I feel like I should be paying you guys. Um.
Speaker 1: A surgeon wrote in saying that he had a this
Speaker 1: comes off. We were talking about a cannibalism article that
Speaker 1: was in vice of a guy that had, like I
Speaker 1: can't remember why, he had an amputation and then had
Speaker 1: a party and made tacos and like his friends came
Speaker 1: over ate his arm foot right foot? Is that what
Speaker 1: it was was advice? Uh? A surgeon rode in and
Speaker 1: he had to go through a deal he had with
Speaker 1: a guy. He gave a hip replacement too, and the
Speaker 1: guy really wanted his ball joint back, So the doctor
Speaker 1: had humored him and went through a lengthy process of
Speaker 1: getting it checked out for hospital for the legality. Then
Speaker 1: she got it squared away, gave the guy his ball
Speaker 1: joint back and asked what he was gonna do with it,
Speaker 1: and he couldn't decide between turning it into the handle
Speaker 1: on a gun cleaning rod or the shifter for his truck.
Speaker 1: That's a redneck move right there. Toxo plasmosis, which we
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time on. Who oh, yeah, we
Speaker 1: had a do we have a yeah, we had an
Speaker 1: expert on for that. Toxo plasmosis. Did you ever hear that? Fred,
Speaker 1: I've heard of it. It's like bacterial infection that's passed
Speaker 1: through feline feces. And there's this interesting I was skeptic,
Speaker 1: but I've I've become not a skeptic. Telling my favorite
Speaker 1: quote of all time, Johnnie, Skepticism is the chastity of
Speaker 1: the intellect. I was telling my kids that there, and
Speaker 1: I try to explain after them, trying to teach six
Speaker 1: every night at dinner. There tell me something that some
Speaker 1: guy at school told him, some kids school, something like no,
Speaker 1: just no, it's like not, he's not telling the truth.
Speaker 1: Oh right, your kids are back in school already, so
Speaker 1: I started, Oh yeah, just the strachers. Joe was so
Speaker 1: and So's dad got a checked by a grizzly. I
Speaker 1: feel like I would have heard about them, man, you know.
Speaker 1: Um uh. Anyways, this is weird thing where it seems
Speaker 1: and there's like some research out of Africa that like
Speaker 1: toxoplasmosis is transmitted like the whole is through feelines. Even
Speaker 1: herbivores get it from just like grazing close to cat excrement.
Speaker 1: But it seems that an animal um infected with toxoplasmosis
Speaker 1: loses its fear of feelines reduced inhibitions. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's just reduced inhibitions or reduced inhibitions of feelines.
Speaker 1: But for instance, they were looking at what was that
Speaker 1: animal that the what's the like the thing that everybody
Speaker 1: in Africa's lie is mad at all times? It was
Speaker 1: in Africa. It wasn't a dingo dog. No no, no, no.
Speaker 1: That they're looking at like of hyena pops that are
Speaker 1: infected with toxoplasmosis that they track get killed by lions,
Speaker 1: ones that aren't infected. It's a very low percentage, but
Speaker 1: they did. There's a study in this journal that someone
Speaker 1: sent us um that risky business linking toxoplasma in fact
Speaker 1: and entrepreneurship behaviors across individuals and countries. WHOA, you lose
Speaker 1: your inhibitions, you become more entrepreneurial when uh not in fact? Yeah?
Speaker 1: When in fact with the toxic plasmosis. Yeah, well that's cool.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I mean there are a lot
Speaker 1: of these cases with plants, right that they have compounds
Speaker 1: in them that when a herbivore eats them, all right,
Speaker 1: they get a little bit of hallucinogenic kind of effect
Speaker 1: and they're happy and hang out. Well, oh he does
Speaker 1: want to get eaten to have his seed spread. No,
Speaker 1: he wants if if you're eating the plant and you
Speaker 1: lose your inhibitions and some carnivore comes in, that's what's
Speaker 1: pretty good for the plant. So you know, I told
Speaker 1: you I was a hippie, but I mean, you like,
Speaker 1: but the thing about it, right, hippie is just hanging out.
Speaker 1: Do we have that here in North America's prayer? Does
Speaker 1: that happen in North America? Yeah? Well I'm trying to think.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know psilocybina. That's pretty much rooms, right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read the first line of the abstract discipline
Speaker 1: such as business and economics often rely on the assumption
Speaker 1: of rationality when explaining complex human behaviors. However, growing evidence
Speaker 1: suggests that behavior may concurrently be influenced by infectious micro
Speaker 1: organisms toxico plasma infects and estimated man, how can this
Speaker 1: be true? Two billion people worldwide and has been linked
Speaker 1: to behavioral alterations in humans and other vertebrates. Are a
Speaker 1: quarter of the world's population? Is that correct? Seven billion
Speaker 1: people on the planet. Uh? You know Rick Smith's I
Speaker 1: know that number always because when someone's saying like, someone
Speaker 1: will mentioned like someone doing some crazy thing and people
Speaker 1: be like no, and Brick'll be like, there's seven billion
Speaker 1: people on the planet. Of course someone's into that. Mhm Um,
Speaker 1: that's really interesting. If you want to get, like your
Speaker 1: spouse onto on board with an idea that they can't
Speaker 1: get on board with. They think it's risky her hang
Speaker 1: out by the literal to get a little go over
Speaker 1: to the old litter box. Um, this is a great story.
Speaker 1: This is a this is legitimately fascinating story right here. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a research real quick though. It's not only a correction,
Speaker 1: but in twenty nineteen, we're up to seven point six billion,
Speaker 1: so you might as well just start saying eight. I'll
Speaker 1: switch round it up. We're getting there, Fred, This right
Speaker 1: is gonna tickle your fancy all right. Um I I
Speaker 1: know of this gentleman because my my brother in Alaska
Speaker 1: actually studied under him. Uh. There's a research named Matthew
Speaker 1: Wooler who interestingly, Matthew Wooler, who is doing work on
Speaker 1: woolly mammoth's at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. So this,
Speaker 1: this is interesting, This is good to look at. This
Speaker 1: guy focuses on stabile isotopes and he's looking at the
Speaker 1: isotope strontium. Might pronounce that right, straw stum. Now, strontium
Speaker 1: is is like a stable isotope that occurs and soils
Speaker 1: and comes from from the natural ground. Okay, And it's
Speaker 1: like the vegetation regimes change, but that stays the same.
Speaker 1: And it's one of these isotopes that varies across the landscape.
Speaker 1: But over time, right, the climate might change, vegetation regime change,
Speaker 1: animals change, it doesn't change, and it's in varying in
Speaker 1: uh densities across the landscape. So this guy first, these
Speaker 1: guys went and they were looking at some kind of
Speaker 1: shrew I think is it in here? They were looking
Speaker 1: at some kind of vol or shrew, and they were
Speaker 1: taking the teeth out of voles and shrews that are
Speaker 1: widely distributed across northern Alaska, and they have a very
Speaker 1: small home range. So when you catch one and take
Speaker 1: his tooth out the strontium, the stabile isotope in the soil,
Speaker 1: is grows into its teeth and he doesn't stray fire.
Speaker 1: So when you catch one, you can assume that he's
Speaker 1: always been in some tight little spot, and so you
Speaker 1: can look at how this isotope is taken up in
Speaker 1: this guy's tooth, and his tooth continuously grows right. So
Speaker 1: you can then measure that like the level of the tooth,
Speaker 1: and you can make a map of how much of
Speaker 1: this stuff exists across the landscape and various areas. They then,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about my explanation? That sounds great?
Speaker 1: Don't you don't want to repair it in anyway? They
Speaker 1: get a tusk off of mammoth. It's a big gas
Speaker 1: tusk um and they take that mammoth tusk and rip
Speaker 1: it in a band saw all the way around, so
Speaker 1: they like run it through a bandsaw, and they have
Speaker 1: this big, curly split tusk. And apparently this is the
Speaker 1: same thing on sheep horns too. When you cut it
Speaker 1: and look at it in profile, as it grows, it
Speaker 1: grows in what looks like stacked ice cream cones, and
Speaker 1: it's very clear on the inside, but on the outside
Speaker 1: that the differences get they get smoothed over from you,
Speaker 1: so you can't tell. But when you cut it looks
Speaker 1: like stacked ice cream cones. Where he's continuously putting out
Speaker 1: new tusk. So these things whatever, they get like an
Speaker 1: eight nine ft tusk over the course of the life
Speaker 1: this mammoth, their tusks they're looking at with him, he's
Speaker 1: a twenty eight year old mammoth. When he's a little
Speaker 1: baby sucking on his mother's milk, that's like the very
Speaker 1: tip of his tusk, and that grows out. And then
Speaker 1: when he's twenty eight years old, what's going on with
Speaker 1: his tusk is like emerging from his jaw. Then they
Speaker 1: can take and look at because they put together this
Speaker 1: map of this stable isotope and the soil and then
Speaker 1: they can take and look as he grew, where was
Speaker 1: he living and this thing. You look at the map
Speaker 1: they published, it's in it's in the journal Science. You
Speaker 1: look at the map they published the detail of how
Speaker 1: this thing spent the years of its life. It is incredible.
Speaker 1: It was born and raised and spent like its adolescents
Speaker 1: south of the Brooks Range when it hits around the
Speaker 1: time it was fourteen, I think they hit sexual maturity.
Speaker 1: He migrated up through a pass to the north side
Speaker 1: of the b Range and then later made another migration
Speaker 1: near the Colville River. He it seems like he walked
Speaker 1: enough to have traveled around the Earth twice in his
Speaker 1: migrations and then died of starvation along the Coalville. And
Speaker 1: they can tell he died of starvation because his diet
Speaker 1: changed to just like to look like a carnivore. And
Speaker 1: it was when he was he somehow it had an injury,
Speaker 1: couldn't eat anymore, it seems, and just self digested and
Speaker 1: was taking in no vegetation and that's where he died.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible map. Was the map in the male
Speaker 1: was Matt Beth Shapiro who's been on this show. It
Speaker 1: was her lab that determined some of the some of
Speaker 1: the demographics about the animal years old, seventeen thousand, one
Speaker 1: years ago, a male mammoth. You look at the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: link or the the Science link. I read about it
Speaker 1: in Science. So you had to pay to get access
Speaker 1: to the whole thing. No, someone sent me one of
Speaker 1: those J store or whatever links. I'd show you the map, Fred,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. I've seen that. It's an incredible
Speaker 1: bit of work, man, excellent, very cool piece of work.
Speaker 1: So I guess you talked to Beth about bringing back
Speaker 1: that mammoth. She's great. We're trying to get her back
Speaker 1: on the show. One more thing, Fred, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: one extremely quick. One's extremely quick. Hey, whatever, this is fun.
Speaker 1: Guy wrote it about why do you trapp Why do
Speaker 1: conna bears have the desert the size destination they have.
Speaker 1: I called some experts. No one knows. So conna bears
Speaker 1: like generally like traditionally, conna bears are coming like one tent.
Speaker 1: Everybody knows one ten body gripping traps. I called a
Speaker 1: trap expert. I call him Joe Beaver, but his name
Speaker 1: is Mike. Uh. He said, I have no idea, man,
Speaker 1: he goes it's a very confused system. It's like a
Speaker 1: one ten n a bear has a four inch jaw
Speaker 1: spread unless you buy a blile one ten, which is
Speaker 1: a four point five inch straw spread. Now if you
Speaker 1: can't say it, so, a one ten zero has one
Speaker 1: spring and a four inch spread, A one two zero
Speaker 1: has two springs four inch spread. And there's a one
Speaker 1: fifty with a five inch spread, one sixty with a
Speaker 1: six in spread. So at this point you're thinking like, okay,
Speaker 1: one five five inch spread, one six zero six in spread.
Speaker 1: Well that goes to hell when you hit a two
Speaker 1: twenty which has a seven inch spread, to eighty at
Speaker 1: eight three thirty at a ten, he's like, there's no rhymer.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean anything. If anyone has corrected this, it's
Speaker 1: Minnesota Brand traps. They launched a trap called them m
Speaker 1: B twelve sixteen j C. And that's like a rifle
Speaker 1: caliber because it actually means something, m B Minnesota Brand
Speaker 1: twelve sixteen. It's twelve by sixteen j C. It was
Speaker 1: invented by John Kratty of Michigan. So you got a
Speaker 1: couple of those, don't you. So in short for your answer,
Speaker 1: the best I can tell in my casual research that
Speaker 1: I don't know. No one knows what the hell it means.
Speaker 1: It's like one of small three is big to his
Speaker 1: medium enough. Yeah, I was trying to find something on it.
Speaker 1: I was looking all over the place, couldn't find anything.
Speaker 1: A guy from East Texas wrote in He's conflicted about
Speaker 1: the use of orange plastic trailmarking tape surveyors tape that
Speaker 1: hunters used to navigate their way to and from their
Speaker 1: hunting areas. This is he says, On one hand, I
Speaker 1: understand that everyone has the means to purchase a GPS
Speaker 1: or even a smartphone to utilize mapping apps that have
Speaker 1: become so accessible. On the other hand, I hate walking
Speaker 1: through the woods and seeing orange flag and tape littered
Speaker 1: all throughout. Some of it's been there for years. Something
Speaker 1: looks like it was just put up, he says. When
Speaker 1: I see it, I put in my pocket and throw
Speaker 1: in the garbage. Am I bad? Am I doing my
Speaker 1: fellow hunters wrong? I pick up every scrap I see.
Speaker 1: I do the same thing, Josh. I've left a lot
Speaker 1: of it throughout my life because we used to mark
Speaker 1: blood trails with it. Um not go back and pick
Speaker 1: it up whatever, you're lazy. Most of it's plastic, right man,
Speaker 1: It's just plastic, orange svarrious tapes. I hate seeing. It's
Speaker 1: not okay to leave plastic in the woods. I hate
Speaker 1: seeing it. Always go grab it much if you're using
Speaker 1: it to mark ways in. I think a much more
Speaker 1: a nicer spot is just get those little glow in
Speaker 1: the dark thumb tacks. You can see it in the daylight.
Speaker 1: At night, your flashlight hits it. We used to use
Speaker 1: those to get into duck spots. Just stick thumb tacks
Speaker 1: and trees. We used to also walked through was a
Speaker 1: a machette and blaze all the trees. That was common practice.
Speaker 1: Just being dumb. But yeah, I've hung a lot of
Speaker 1: that tape. I don't like it. This guy be other
Speaker 1: ways well, obviously on X tracking function is definitely the easiest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he's trying to be he's trying to be compassionate
Speaker 1: and empathetic. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know acknowledging.
Speaker 1: Maybe not everyone has. Sure you got like a roll
Speaker 1: of surveyors tape laying around. I can't like, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't blame someone for using it, but I just
Speaker 1: think you should when you're done. Grab But yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you're done grab all right? Fred? You're queens, Yeah, New
Speaker 1: York City. Yeah, you began your career. Explain this studying
Speaker 1: spider might evolution. Yeah, and insecticide resistance? Is that a
Speaker 1: good avenue into this or what's the best avenue to
Speaker 1: get into your work? Well, that's not a bad one
Speaker 1: to get into how to get into the ems? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I'll tell you, you know, the way I got
Speaker 1: into this whole thing is through that work and spider mites.
Speaker 1: So the thing is is that you know, plants are
Speaker 1: attacked by herbivores, right, and spider mites are one of them.
Speaker 1: Spider mites are actually you know, I think you know
Speaker 1: that it's really tiny, right, like aphids and such. A
Speaker 1: really tiny big caterpillar is different, right, A single spider
Speaker 1: night they're attacked by the spider mites attack plants, all right.
Speaker 1: So the spider mites feed on lots of crops. And
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, spider mites, a single spider
Speaker 1: mite species one called a two spotted spider mite attacks
Speaker 1: plants in your house and attacks crops like corn or soybeans.
Speaker 1: And it's not an ai it's not an a it's
Speaker 1: actually not even an insect has it has eight legs.
Speaker 1: But the important thing is that it attacks these crops
Speaker 1: and plant breeders, today's plant breeders try to breed their
Speaker 1: crops so that to be resistant to the attack of
Speaker 1: the spider mite. All right, so they wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: spray insecticide or carraside as it would be. So what's
Speaker 1: interesting carrasite is because erachnant, right, so as opposed to insects. Um,
Speaker 1: So what is the what is the base word you using?
Speaker 1: Like insecticide? I get it, it's like a thing that
Speaker 1: kills insects, But what is the word a caraside? But
Speaker 1: what is the cas a caraside? That must be my
Speaker 1: leftover queen's act. I don't know. Yeah, you're saying, like right, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So in any event that you know, breeders breed that
Speaker 1: into their plants. I do this all the time for
Speaker 1: pathogens as well. You know fungi that you know that
Speaker 1: caused the Irish potato famine. Right, breeders will breed potatoes
Speaker 1: so that they won't be attacked by that fungus. Right.
Speaker 1: The problem is that these are living organisms and they evolve,
Speaker 1: and so those spider mites evolve to become able to
Speaker 1: feed on those crops that the breeder so carefully bred
Speaker 1: to be resistant to them. Let's spider mites are interesting.
Speaker 1: All right. Let me just say this. I worked on cucumbers. Right.
Speaker 1: Have you ever eaten a cucumber and the peel is bitter? Listen? Yesterday,
Speaker 1: Oh I had I left one of my garden too long.
Speaker 1: My daughter. My daughter was like not into it and
Speaker 1: wanted me to peel it. Right, yeah, Okay, that's due
Speaker 1: to cucurbitations. See right, it's a compound. It's a terpenoid compound,
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't really matter, but it's a chemical, right, it's
Speaker 1: a chemical that is making that cucumber toxic to those
Speaker 1: spider mites. Yeah. So for my thesis, well, that's what
Speaker 1: makes it. That's what that bitterness when you well, so
Speaker 1: this is the right. So, but the thing is that
Speaker 1: that cucurbitation is in the leaves as well, So the
Speaker 1: spider might speed on the leaves. So if you want
Speaker 1: to protect them, that would be that's a great resistant
Speaker 1: cucumber variety. So for my thesis, the question was, wait,
Speaker 1: you're gonna put all these years and it could take
Speaker 1: ten years to breathe these cucumbers to be resistant. Well,
Speaker 1: I looked at those spider mines. They have a generation
Speaker 1: every week or two a right, how long is it
Speaker 1: gonna take them to become adapted to it? And I
Speaker 1: did experiments in my thesis and show that they could
Speaker 1: become adapted to that toxin and then you know, then
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have any utility to that cucumber. But okay,
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to be I'm trying to be considered
Speaker 1: of people tracking along talk about by what mechanism they
Speaker 1: become adapted to explain that, Like they're having many offspring
Speaker 1: that are all a little different. Yeah, okay, So spider
Speaker 1: mines like human beings, right, we're all different, right, blue eyes,
Speaker 1: brown eyes, whatever. We have genes that control that. So
Speaker 1: with spider mites, they have genes that differ in terms
Speaker 1: of the metabolism of that itider mite and spider mans
Speaker 1: have evolved over millions of years, right to feed on plants,
Speaker 1: so they've always had to be dealing with toxins before
Speaker 1: humans existed. Right that plants are always producing toxins to
Speaker 1: kill off the things that feed on them. It just
Speaker 1: makes sense. That's why you have all these spices right
Speaker 1: in the grocery store. Then plants did not make spices
Speaker 1: for you. They made it to protect themselves or and
Speaker 1: and some other things, but mainly to protect themselves right
Speaker 1: against uh, either insects or mammals or against um, you know, pathogens.
Speaker 1: Imagine how helpful capskin is, right, you know how many
Speaker 1: things are gonna want to eat? How many wild animals
Speaker 1: are gone into a haberdactly? Right? And then of course
Speaker 1: you have insects that have adapted to a certain plant
Speaker 1: and they sequester that company. They put that compound into
Speaker 1: their bodies like a monarch butterfly does. Right. They take
Speaker 1: from the milkweed that they feed on, they take the
Speaker 1: cardenoloids that obviously cardiac effects, and they put them in
Speaker 1: their body. So when a bird feeds on them in
Speaker 1: Mexico where they all migrate, they would spit them out.
Speaker 1: Of course, there are birds that have adapted to be
Speaker 1: able to deal with that toxin as well. But anyway,
Speaker 1: it's a whole coevolution, right of the plants and the
Speaker 1: insects that I studied when I was in graduate school.
Speaker 1: But the whole idea is for have applied implications, right,
Speaker 1: so that you know, how could you have a sustainable
Speaker 1: agricultural system where you use less insecticide and the plants
Speaker 1: protected themselves. So that's what I was studying, going about
Speaker 1: by business, and some people cared about it. Most people
Speaker 1: didn't write, but it was an important thing for sustainable agriculture, right,
Speaker 1: I mean at the big level. Two. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: we were having a real problem with wheat with the
Speaker 1: hessian fly, right, would adapt so quickly to every time
Speaker 1: in the Midwest. So they put out a new variety
Speaker 1: of wheat that was resistant to this hession fly. That
Speaker 1: really is problematic. It would last for four years or so,
Speaker 1: and then the hessian fly would adapt to it. Well
Speaker 1: that's not sustainable, right, you gotta So that's what I
Speaker 1: was studying because because the ultimate goal is it's like
Speaker 1: the ultimate goal is too pronged. It's continue to produce
Speaker 1: food to feed people, and to reduce how much chemical
Speaker 1: you need to spray, right, Yeah, And and to get
Speaker 1: back to your question of what what happened there was
Speaker 1: that some of the mites had different metabolic pathways than others,
Speaker 1: just as in the same way that our digestive systems
Speaker 1: are different one human to another, and those that were
Speaker 1: able to deal with that cucurbitation, that compound that stays
Speaker 1: so bitter to you, we're able to survive. And the
Speaker 1: ones that didn't die it off. So over time the
Speaker 1: population shifted from the majority of dying because they were
Speaker 1: when they feed on a cucommer plant to the end
Speaker 1: the majority of them survived and did just fine because
Speaker 1: they had the enzymes or whatever it took to deal
Speaker 1: with that c curbutation. I think a good way here.
Speaker 1: I want you to explain this whe you correct me
Speaker 1: if it just doesn't work for people. I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to put in human terms, um a human but no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I don't mean I'd just be like terms not might,
Speaker 1: but check me out on it, right, Uh. I imagine
Speaker 1: most people will accept the idea. There's a thing called
Speaker 1: celiac disease. Okay, wee allergy. Imagine we were living in
Speaker 1: an environment where all we ate was wheat. Um something
Speaker 1: switches and only humans only eat wheat. Now you would
Speaker 1: find in the future that you had run out of
Speaker 1: people with Celiac disease, and you would have uh, there
Speaker 1: would be a strong selective pressure against people that had
Speaker 1: Celiac disease, and you could envision the future in which
Speaker 1: that had gone away. That would be us evolving, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in the same way we're talking about. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: of course, you know, think about people who are lactose intolerant. Right,
Speaker 1: A lot of cultures Almost everybody is lactose intolerant once
Speaker 1: they are adults. Right, when you're young, you need to
Speaker 1: be able to deal with your mother's milk. But unless
Speaker 1: you're a milk drinking culture, you lose that. So certain
Speaker 1: groups in Africa that use milk, and certain groups in
Speaker 1: Europe that use milk have those genes, but in other
Speaker 1: places you don't because that wasn't adaptive to have, right.
Speaker 1: So the story, right, So I'm just working on my way,
Speaker 1: but then all of a sudden people develop these genetically
Speaker 1: engineered crops, right, and all of a sudden, well that
Speaker 1: brown okay really yeah, it was earlier later, Okay, So
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to get into definitions, right, right, what
Speaker 1: is the GMO and all that. I'll tell us a
Speaker 1: little story and then we'll get back to that, right.
Speaker 1: But the whole thing is that there had been and
Speaker 1: organic insecticide called bacillustheringens or BT, and it was sold
Speaker 1: called dipel and organic farmers used that. And basically it
Speaker 1: was a fermented soup and dried down of bacterial spores, right,
Speaker 1: but organic farmers used it because it was natural, right.
Speaker 1: It was it was a bacteria that kills insects, produced naturally,
Speaker 1: you know. Abbott produced it in these big fermenters that
Speaker 1: they used for pharmaceutic you know, like this big industry
Speaker 1: and organic pharmacusic. But also back in my state of
Speaker 1: North Carolina, tobacco farmers used it against caterpillars, you know,
Speaker 1: and this is you know, pretty intensive, and you put
Speaker 1: it in the tobacco and when the you know, caterpillars
Speaker 1: feed on it, they get disease and they die. Right.
Speaker 1: But they're one of the things about that bacterias it
Speaker 1: had a single protein that it produced. It was toxic
Speaker 1: to the guts of the insect that actually made holes
Speaker 1: in the cells. Right. So folks from Montsanto and other
Speaker 1: people were working on that. But what they did was
Speaker 1: they found the gene that codes for that protein. And
Speaker 1: we'll get into this a little bit. When you want
Speaker 1: to say, what is the GMO and what is an
Speaker 1: organic duck? All right? Because what they did was they
Speaker 1: took the DNA code from that bacteria and they moved
Speaker 1: back back one step all right, good, good? What's what
Speaker 1: one step one step back? What had the okay? What
Speaker 1: had the thing that rots the hole through the gut?
Speaker 1: This protein? All right, there was proteins. It's part of
Speaker 1: that bacteria. Every time that bacteria, you know, makes a spore,
Speaker 1: so it could last, you know, when there's no food around,
Speaker 1: it would sort of protect itself by making this toxin.
Speaker 1: And it was a protein toxin. Okay. So that so
Speaker 1: that's what the farmers were using. Right, they spray it
Speaker 1: and when the catapety living protein, well, they spray how
Speaker 1: do you call a living a protein with in a
Speaker 1: living bacteria and sometimes they kill the bacteria to process it.
Speaker 1: But whatever it was, that yeah, and actually it would
Speaker 1: only stay out there for about four days because with
Speaker 1: sunlight and everything else, it would decompose. But the main
Speaker 1: thing is that's how they kill caterpillars, right, using that
Speaker 1: protein which was toxic. Right, once the caterpillar ate it,
Speaker 1: it died. So so what these technology people did was
Speaker 1: they took the gene that codes for that protein. So right,
Speaker 1: let's just go back to you have Every organism has
Speaker 1: d N A, and the d n A is read
Speaker 1: you know, in in the cell by and becomes rn A, right,
Speaker 1: and that becomes protein. So for every gene, everybody says
Speaker 1: you get one protein a. Right. So that's the whole
Speaker 1: translation of you have a People would call it like
Speaker 1: a blueprint is the DNA and the house is the protein.
Speaker 1: So you go from that blueprint to the protein. So
Speaker 1: the protein is what's killing that insect. So what these
Speaker 1: technology people did was it took that blueprint and moved
Speaker 1: it from the bacteria into a tobacco plant. At first,
Speaker 1: that was the that was the like the original one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tobacco was like the white rat of plant biology because
Speaker 1: we so eased to work with. I know, I know
Speaker 1: it's weird, but that that's that whole was largely driven
Speaker 1: by Chester. Okay, whoa wait a minute here what noll
Speaker 1: I listen? So here these boys started chewing as young babes. Okay, well, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm not the GMO in you just just all right,
Speaker 1: So let me tell you about that, all right, Chester,
Speaker 1: So here we have this, right, the first plant, the
Speaker 1: easiest thing to make to be toxic to these catapults,
Speaker 1: and it was. And anybody who grew up in North
Speaker 1: Carolina some of your listeners know this that if you
Speaker 1: grew up in North Carolina for years ago and you
Speaker 1: were a little kid, you got paid money for every
Speaker 1: caterpillar that you pulled out of a tobacco plant and squeezed,
Speaker 1: because they you know, and stead before all this insectici Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. So that was like, that's like, that's that's
Speaker 1: like the wait wait wait, okay, that's the first I mean,
Speaker 1: that's like like the first thing like what people would
Speaker 1: have called a genetically modified organism. Well that i'd have
Speaker 1: to say in terms of something that could have been
Speaker 1: a commercialized crop. Yes, that's probably so let me tell
Speaker 1: you all right, all right, Well, the is a reason
Speaker 1: why you don't know about it, and that is they
Speaker 1: developed that. And we were working actually with some of
Speaker 1: the companies to test some of this because so these
Speaker 1: are companies that no longer exists Romans Do you know
Speaker 1: Roman has? Yeah, Well you wouldn't because they don't exists
Speaker 1: a tobacco producer. Well, no, they were a chemical producer. Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean you know these these things really complicated. When
Speaker 1: you get to these companies. You know, there's no more Monsanto, right,
Speaker 1: Oh there is, it's gone. Bayer bought them. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's what happens. But to get back to the story,
Speaker 1: was that we we tested some of these tobacco plants
Speaker 1: and they were like a mortality of the caterpillars. Right now,
Speaker 1: this is a protein that comes from an organic thing
Speaker 1: that people have been using in tobacco, right, and they
Speaker 1: put protein and they put that natural protein into that
Speaker 1: tobacco plant. Okay, And we actually did have a meeting
Speaker 1: with Reynolds Tobacco company to talk about this as to
Speaker 1: whether that would be a good idea for their tobacco.
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't want to swear to this,
Speaker 1: but the word that came back to me was they
Speaker 1: considered it, but their pr people figured that they're smokers
Speaker 1: would not want to because because it would have the
Speaker 1: hand out. My right, I'll smoke, I'll smoke twenty these
Speaker 1: things a day, but there's just some things I won't do.
Speaker 1: Right exactly. But now wait a minute, now, have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of organic tobacco? Yeah, yeah, right, you've heard
Speaker 1: of organic tobacco because it's out on the market, but
Speaker 1: not transgenic tobacco because that will kill you. No anyway,
Speaker 1: I mean people are fine, even though they could have
Speaker 1: killed of those caterpillars. Right, So so I just this
Speaker 1: is why this human nature. Did any tobacco Did any
Speaker 1: big tobacco company pick up on it? Nobody did. They
Speaker 1: don't want it. It's never I mean, we grow tobacco
Speaker 1: in North Carolina, you know, big Lake creage. Still they
Speaker 1: still spread it. Yeah, really yeah, okay, real about that, Phil.
Speaker 1: I can't tell Phil's pay attention. No, I'm I'm paying attention.
Speaker 1: I just when you were talking about Yeah, these health
Speaker 1: conscious smokers just reminded me of all the guys in
Speaker 1: my dorm room rolling their own cigarettes. But oh it's
Speaker 1: it's loose leaf tobacco, so it's good for you actually,
Speaker 1: right exactly, So so just you know, get around. We'll
Speaker 1: get to this health thing. Right. But but what got
Speaker 1: me involved? Right, because I'm interested in using this stuff,
Speaker 1: but using it so it's sustainable. And I learned from
Speaker 1: those spider mites it only took them like two months
Speaker 1: to adapt to this cucurbitation thing right back in you up,
Speaker 1: how would when it when it makes sense to you
Speaker 1: get into how you wouldn't have had the same problem
Speaker 1: with your tobacco leaves. Well that's what that's where I
Speaker 1: come in. So I'm actually trained as an applied evolutionary biologist, right,
Speaker 1: so I'm interested in how these things evolved. Right, So
Speaker 1: the idea is how can we stop evolution? Right? So
Speaker 1: it was clear to me that if all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: so the organic tobacco people when they put out their
Speaker 1: bt the dipell and stuff like that, it only lasts
Speaker 1: for a couple of days, right, so it's not out
Speaker 1: there all the time. But what the Monsando people were
Speaker 1: doing was using a promoter that turns on this gene
Speaker 1: that makes that protein all the time from the time
Speaker 1: the seedling comes out until it dies. Right, So the
Speaker 1: insects are exposed to it all the times, like taking
Speaker 1: antibiotics all the time, right, good or not good? Well,
Speaker 1: it's going to cause the bacteria resistance in the same way,
Speaker 1: right that. So we were sort of saying, gee, this
Speaker 1: could be a good thing, but not the way you're
Speaker 1: doing it. We need to come up with a way
Speaker 1: that you could use it and have more sustainable agriculture.
Speaker 1: So the insects won't adapt to it, and so that's
Speaker 1: my area of interest. But when I was doing this
Speaker 1: before GMOs, there were plenty of other things to work on,
Speaker 1: like the Hessian fly that I mentioned before that I
Speaker 1: was working on and who's that of pain in the
Speaker 1: ask you again, wheat growers. Yeah, but the amount of
Speaker 1: money that's available for crop breeding for Hessian fire resistance
Speaker 1: is not huge, so you know, getting making headway with
Speaker 1: that was kind of slow. But when transgenic crops came out,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, there was all this controversy about them, right,
Speaker 1: and so there were the people who said you needed
Speaker 1: to feed the world, and people said it's gonna poison you.
Speaker 1: And we were saying, hey, wait a minute, we've been
Speaker 1: using this for organic stuff, but if you use it
Speaker 1: too heavily, it's gonna go away and it's not going
Speaker 1: to be sustainable. And so we were in the middle,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden there was a lot of
Speaker 1: attention to this, to the point that when the first crops,
Speaker 1: the first cotton in the first corn came out with
Speaker 1: BT in it, the Secretary of Agriculture label that those
Speaker 1: crops a public good. That right, it's going to decrease
Speaker 1: the amount. Oh god, I gotta go back. It was
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six that that came out, something like that,
Speaker 1: Phil look down there, okay, But but the main the
Speaker 1: piece on that that was really important was he says,
Speaker 1: a public good, so we have to protect it. So
Speaker 1: he involved or the U. S d A, involved our
Speaker 1: group and some others to come up with what approach
Speaker 1: could you take to slow down the evolution of resistance
Speaker 1: to this? And I could go into a bunch of detail,
Speaker 1: but I think I don't hop if you want it.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's basically a way of actually, like
Speaker 1: with an antibiotic, right, the doctor who says take it
Speaker 1: until the very end, right as many days as you
Speaker 1: want give it, give those back to a really high dose.
Speaker 1: A huge evolutionary challenge that hopefully they can't meet. So
Speaker 1: our whole we came up with lots of different approaches,
Speaker 1: but the one that the companies thought they could meet
Speaker 1: was coming up with a very high dose and the
Speaker 1: plant of this protein that's not at all toxic to humans,
Speaker 1: not at all toxic to humans, right, and it can't
Speaker 1: be carcinogenic in a sense because it breaks down. But
Speaker 1: we get into that, but the main thing was that
Speaker 1: you could have a high dose but also leave some
Speaker 1: of the crop without any of the BT talks and
Speaker 1: at all. So that would produce susceptible insects that would
Speaker 1: then mate with any few resistant insects. So it's called
Speaker 1: the high dose refuge approach. And the U s c
Speaker 1: A made that uh and and the e p A
Speaker 1: made that code. You know, that was what was needed.
Speaker 1: Of course, that you have to have enforcement. And that's
Speaker 1: the problem, right, I mean, people are planning refuges and
Speaker 1: using the high dose for some insects, but it hasn't
Speaker 1: turned out quite as good. But when it's used over
Speaker 1: the last twenty years, since nineteen nine, well since nine, um,
Speaker 1: in those insects haven't become resistant. In cases where it
Speaker 1: hasn't been used, insects have become resist. So that's been
Speaker 1: you know, a nice story at least, you know in
Speaker 1: terms of you know, if you think and you plan carefully,
Speaker 1: you can do something more sustainable. Uh. Let's approach this.
Speaker 1: You're smiling. I want to approach this whole subject from
Speaker 1: a different angle from all right, Um, when you go
Speaker 1: to the whole foods store, not like whole foods where
Speaker 1: you go to like a you know, like a fancy
Speaker 1: s fancy store. Here in this town. We have what's
Speaker 1: there with the co op? Yeah, I one time saw
Speaker 1: an advertisement in in the co op. I don't like, really,
Speaker 1: I don't really going into that much, but um, it's
Speaker 1: just a little too special. There was an advertisement in
Speaker 1: there for a cat psychologist. But it was one of
Speaker 1: those ones where you you know, you cut the fringe
Speaker 1: and write your number on all the fringe pieces on
Speaker 1: the paper and tear them off. All of them had
Speaker 1: been torn off. A cat psychologist. Okay, somebody could have
Speaker 1: just been upset with that and then just like seeing
Speaker 1: an orange tape in the woods, you gotta tear that.
Speaker 1: It was just people calling her to goof on her.
Speaker 1: But um, anyhow, you go down to this place, okay, whatever,
Speaker 1: and you buy a box of cereal and bold letters
Speaker 1: on no GMOs? What are they signaling to? Like? What
Speaker 1: are they what are they telling people that people think
Speaker 1: they're hearing? What are they telling people that they actually
Speaker 1: need to know? Is it? Uh? Is it a non point?
Speaker 1: Oh man? Yeah, you can get non gmo water. Really,
Speaker 1: someone who bother to put that out there? Well, you
Speaker 1: get no water that has no calories in it too,
Speaker 1: So it's a back up. Most of the stuff you
Speaker 1: buy in the grocery store, you couldn't get GMO if
Speaker 1: you want it because it's not there. So, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people think that when they go to
Speaker 1: the grocery store, if they buy peppers, they buy carrots,
Speaker 1: they have to look out that they're not getting GMO. Vegetables. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of vegetables that have been you know,
Speaker 1: that our GMO, but mostly it's just corn and soybean
Speaker 1: and cotton. In the US, there are sugar beets, there's
Speaker 1: a specialty apple that doesn't brown, and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but very little. Would you like one of those special
Speaker 1: apples taste good? Yeah, well apparently apparently they Yeah, they
Speaker 1: don't brown. You know, you could put lemon on them.
Speaker 1: Now that's another way of doing it. But you know,
Speaker 1: you could send your kids to school and they would
Speaker 1: have apples it wouldn't brown, sliced apples, or you could
Speaker 1: have it in a salad bar and you could lead
Speaker 1: it out for two days and nobody would know u. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but anyway, but there are a lot of good things
Speaker 1: coming along in those ways, but it's not out there
Speaker 1: so much. But to get to the corn, soybean, cotton,
Speaker 1: sugar beets, um, canola, Uh, mostly the big crops and
Speaker 1: the big pest because you know a lot of it's
Speaker 1: been done for her beside tolerance, um, for g life's sake.
Speaker 1: Now that the weeds is somebody of your people know
Speaker 1: have become resistant to life sit because it's been overused,
Speaker 1: same same old, same right, so they're going to other
Speaker 1: other compounds. But um, basically you have to think about
Speaker 1: it commercially. You know what's the market for these different things, right,
Speaker 1: I mean the amount of market for sea quarn seat
Speaker 1: is huge in the United States, So that's where you
Speaker 1: want to make your investment, not in blackberries. Right so so,
Speaker 1: but but so to get to your point, let me
Speaker 1: get to your point. But I want to on top
Speaker 1: of that, it's more like, um, it's not that you
Speaker 1: couldn't that that someone couldn't mess around with carrots and
Speaker 1: find some improvement if they wanted to. It's just like
Speaker 1: it's it's more like it's it's out there for things
Speaker 1: that there's been a need. It's not that there's a
Speaker 1: reason why in the future you wouldn't have GMO carrots yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you could, and people are working someone incentivized people are
Speaker 1: people are working on that. There's been a recent article,
Speaker 1: I guess, in the New York Times about somebody working
Speaker 1: on tomatoes that would be more nutritious, right, And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of that going on, but they haven't hit
Speaker 1: the market. But to go back to your thing about
Speaker 1: going to the grocery store, go to any old grocery
Speaker 1: store and look at cheerios in the cereal section, right,
Speaker 1: and you'll see that they're on the boxes of cheerios.
Speaker 1: If you look at the regular old cheerios, you know,
Speaker 1: like good old what oats, you look on the box
Speaker 1: that said no GMOs on it, you'll see the label. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know what it's like in Montana, but in
Speaker 1: North Carolina, you go to the grocery store, in the
Speaker 1: box says no GMOs. But you go and look at
Speaker 1: some of those fancier cheerios that have some other things
Speaker 1: in them, maybe corn syrup, um, maybe you fanci, oh,
Speaker 1: probably maybe honey nut, whatever it is, something that has
Speaker 1: corn in it or soybean in it, and those say
Speaker 1: contain some GMOs. Right, So they're being honest with you.
Speaker 1: Of course, the regular cheerios that are made out of
Speaker 1: oats don't have any GMOs. And because there aren't any
Speaker 1: oats that are produced that have GMOs in them. But
Speaker 1: you could go down the aisle to another sort of
Speaker 1: like cheerio e kind of sweet sweetened with some kind
Speaker 1: of corn, then then it's going to have GMO in it.
Speaker 1: Now we can get to the question of as corn
Speaker 1: syrup a GMO. Right, So if you have corn that's
Speaker 1: been genetically engineered, right, somebody put herbicide tolerance into that corner.
Speaker 1: Somebody put that protein I was talking about into that
Speaker 1: corn all right, Well that protein was there, what makes
Speaker 1: it a GMO? Right? Well, of course we can go
Speaker 1: back just to quickly. I think all your folks know
Speaker 1: that genetically modified is any crop that we grow? Right?
Speaker 1: Corn was developed from teosinte thousands of years ago by
Speaker 1: cut farmers in Mexico, right, And it was like a grass,
Speaker 1: right it was. Yeah. I mean so all of these
Speaker 1: things anything you have, potatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes grow wild in
Speaker 1: the andes, these little things that might kill you because
Speaker 1: of the content. Yeah, all of those things have been Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's something that's really really exciting. The apple is
Speaker 1: some little ship and thing from Kazakhstan or something, right, right,
Speaker 1: all of these things that oh yeah, well they it
Speaker 1: really is. It's really grass from the western hemisphere, so potatoes,
Speaker 1: you know, you well, the main thing is, you know
Speaker 1: this is way back at the turn of the century.
Speaker 1: You know, this is like you had Darwin right discovered
Speaker 1: all this stuff about natural selection and this uh Russian
Speaker 1: agricultural evolutionary biologists um got interested um in g can
Speaker 1: I use evolution to understand how to get better crops
Speaker 1: for Russia at that time before the revolution. And his
Speaker 1: whole thing was going all over the world to collect
Speaker 1: the most diverse germ plasm he could German pleasant meaning
Speaker 1: the most netic diversity. Right, So he's going to Kazakhstan,
Speaker 1: he'd go to the United States or Mexico, collect all
Speaker 1: these seeds and bring them back to his operation, huge
Speaker 1: operation to save those seeds and breed better crops. Right.
Speaker 1: But to get to your point, you know where all
Speaker 1: these things came from. So he was really one of
Speaker 1: these people who went back to find the grasses or
Speaker 1: to find what was the original potato thing that led
Speaker 1: to a potato um so that you could find things
Speaker 1: in the andies. So they came from different parts of
Speaker 1: the world. Right, I wish I could give you all
Speaker 1: of the diesels. But obviously rice, you know, came from Asia.
Speaker 1: Soybean came from China, right, and then they spread over
Speaker 1: the world. You know, we think of Italians being into
Speaker 1: tomato sauce, right, Well, they didn't have tomatoes. Do you
Speaker 1: want to hear these stories in my first book? All right,
Speaker 1: all the Italians got turned and worried about them in
Speaker 1: the beginning, and right, so, I mean this is the
Speaker 1: story of of this is early interesting and even more
Speaker 1: interesting of the person aonalities to study it. There was
Speaker 1: this controversy about the origins of corn for like thirty years.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I thought it still was. No, I
Speaker 1: don't think so it's quieting though, Well, michell, when Michael
Speaker 1: Pollan wrote that book, the Hell's that book called, it
Speaker 1: was about weed, about her marijuana, taters apples, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: boy desire. Yeah, it was about we think that we're
Speaker 1: using these plants, and it was about how they're using us.
Speaker 1: And it's like how these plants conquered the world, right,
Speaker 1: you know, conquered the world by appealing to humans. But
Speaker 1: you were just talking about that, right, in terms of
Speaker 1: animals that love hanging out, Right, all those squirrels in
Speaker 1: my backyard, Eastern Eastern grays. How many acres you got, No,
Speaker 1: I'm in this, I'm in this, I'm in the city.
Speaker 1: You want to go ahead. My squirrels they're pretty smart.
Speaker 1: So let's get back of that thing, right. So, um,
Speaker 1: all these crops are really you know, we're genetically modified, right,
Speaker 1: they're genetically modified from something wild again, like those spices.
Speaker 1: They didn't come to you as the bounty of nature.
Speaker 1: They came to you screaming and hollering as as you
Speaker 1: got them to come, or they got us to breathe
Speaker 1: them so they could live nicely in a big, huge cornfield. Here,
Speaker 1: now I'm getting okay, here's where this, here's where you
Speaker 1: gotta get clear. If there's a difference between like if
Speaker 1: I whatever, I'm messing around my garden. Yeah, okay, and
Speaker 1: I'm and I'm whatever messing around with pole beans, and
Speaker 1: I mixed the different kinds of pole beans, and and
Speaker 1: I stumbled across and also I realized I got some
Speaker 1: kind of weird variety that loves my yard. Okay, no
Speaker 1: one is gonna be like I'm not eating that something
Speaker 1: bits pole beans. Those are GMOs right there, head, Like,
Speaker 1: what is the difference? There's a difference. I don't know
Speaker 1: what it is. I'm I honestly don't know, but I
Speaker 1: know that GMO. I don't say GMO apologists is GMO
Speaker 1: explainers like to point to, well, everything is because everything's
Speaker 1: been manipulated, right, So but um, all right, so let
Speaker 1: me let me you know, you're having me on your
Speaker 1: show because I was in charge of writing this six
Speaker 1: page report on GMO. And we don't use the word GMOs. Don't.
Speaker 1: We use genetically engineered crops and genetically engineered foods. And
Speaker 1: the reason we do that is to stay clear of
Speaker 1: this as we can, because it is such an odd definition.
Speaker 1: It got. It was a label that sort of stuck,
Speaker 1: you know, like frankin foods or something, you know, like
Speaker 1: it's just the one that sucked. But it muddles the
Speaker 1: water because indeed, people sort of what's happening here is
Speaker 1: you know, we've been engineering, you know, genetically modifying food
Speaker 1: for a long time. We've sometimes made mistakes in the breeding.
Speaker 1: You know, there was a potato that came out that
Speaker 1: had more alkaloid in it that had to be taken
Speaker 1: off the market because what would it do. It would
Speaker 1: make people sick. You know, Alkaloids are I don't know,
Speaker 1: They're just toxic to a lot of things, right, And
Speaker 1: that's why when we bread, when the original people bread
Speaker 1: those tomatoes sol in a city that that like copersicum,
Speaker 1: they got you know, they kept breeding for the ones
Speaker 1: that wouldn't produce as much alkaloid. Right. Mostly what happens
Speaker 1: in tomatoes or in some potatoes is they'll produce the
Speaker 1: alkaloid until they get ripe, and then they get rid
Speaker 1: of it over time. Well, so that makes it well.
Speaker 1: One of the things is they defend themselves against birds
Speaker 1: eating the fruit too early before it's mature. Right, So
Speaker 1: once that seed is mature, then they want the bird
Speaker 1: to disperse it, so they make the fruit taste sweet
Speaker 1: and nice. Those plants are smart, right, or whatever evolution
Speaker 1: is has worked. But but again that's happened a lot.
Speaker 1: So what we differentiate that because people are interested is
Speaker 1: this new technology with the first applications coming out. I've
Speaker 1: where some commercially bread potatoes that had this protein, the
Speaker 1: BT protein that from that bacteria. When that first came out,
Speaker 1: the idea was, Wow, this is so new that genetically
Speaker 1: engineering this, and we don't know if in putting that
Speaker 1: gene into the plant, they have caused some disruption of
Speaker 1: the plant's physiology and now maybe it's making an alkaloid
Speaker 1: that's going to kill us because we've disrupted the genome
Speaker 1: of that plant. I mean, we didn't know much about this.
Speaker 1: I mean it was really interesting when they first put
Speaker 1: that bacterial code, that blueprint from a bacteria into a plant.
Speaker 1: It didn't work very good because those things have been
Speaker 1: separated so long that the plant didn't know how to
Speaker 1: interpret that blueprint very well. So they readjusted the blueprint,
Speaker 1: made it red. I don't know what, you know, they
Speaker 1: adjusted how those codes were so they could get the
Speaker 1: same protein out and the plant would recognize it. So
Speaker 1: that was like an early fear was I don't know
Speaker 1: what that is, right, And you know, in a certain sense,
Speaker 1: it was such an early fear. I mean, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: trained as an evolutionary biologist, and when that was happening,
Speaker 1: I said, oh my god, wait a minute, this is
Speaker 1: not gonna work. You have well no, I was just
Speaker 1: thinking of it like this is stupid. You know, you
Speaker 1: have these bacteria that evolves millions, billions of years different
Speaker 1: from the plants that these they haven't seen each other's
Speaker 1: code and forever you're gonna take something, throw slap it
Speaker 1: in there and somehow it's gonna and it worked, you know,
Speaker 1: And it was like taking an old cassette tape trying
Speaker 1: to get it your computer though, right, yeah, but anyway
Speaker 1: that that sort of stuff happened, and but people were
Speaker 1: still especially think if you're not that tuned into all
Speaker 1: the ramifications of the DNA and the protein and the evolution,
Speaker 1: or you think, man, this is wild ass stuff, right,
Speaker 1: you're gonna put that in there and expect everything to
Speaker 1: be copasetic, you know. So a lot of the early
Speaker 1: concern well, what some of it was about the protein itself, right,
Speaker 1: was well, that protein is fine if you put it
Speaker 1: on the top of a plant and you eat a
Speaker 1: little bit of it, but now it's going to be
Speaker 1: concentrated and you're gonna eat it. Do we have enough
Speaker 1: studies so the washing, right, no washing that off. So
Speaker 1: you know, the studies had to be done to make sure.
Speaker 1: And some people didn't trust the FDA or the U
Speaker 1: s d A or the E p A you know,
Speaker 1: to do it well or something like that. So there
Speaker 1: was a lot of controversy in the in the first years. So,
Speaker 1: but I think that the issue was if it was
Speaker 1: bred by you in your garden or by a company,
Speaker 1: uh like Harris or whatever. You know, some companies using
Speaker 1: traditional means to breed it. Well, we trust that. We've
Speaker 1: been trusting that for a hundred years, right, We've always
Speaker 1: had that kind of agricultures. But this is brand new,
Speaker 1: and I don't trust it. And by the way, I
Speaker 1: just generally don't trust the government, you know, or whatever
Speaker 1: it would be. And I think it's going to poison
Speaker 1: people over time. Right, I think that was a major concern. Now.
Speaker 1: The other concern, and that's one thing I want to
Speaker 1: talk about, is the issue of damn, this is not natural.
Speaker 1: I'm eating bacteria. I'm eating char in my strawberries, you know,
Speaker 1: strawberries at the char and it you know, like, what
Speaker 1: is this? So there was this great sort of uh
Speaker 1: bio design art group that designed the thing that would
Speaker 1: be called the mayo tomato. Right, tomatoes don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of protein in it, so we'll take mayacin as
Speaker 1: a good protein and put that Gane in tomato, So
Speaker 1: when you eat the tomato, you could be a good vegetarian,
Speaker 1: not become a n e maker or whatever. Um So,
Speaker 1: so that could be kind of weird, and that that's
Speaker 1: some of the safety stuff. But the other part is
Speaker 1: that is natural. So I would want to say that
Speaker 1: over time, those things have been tested, that the ones
Speaker 1: that are out there have been tested over and over again,
Speaker 1: some by the industry and you might not trust industry,
Speaker 1: but some by academic labs or other groups, or government
Speaker 1: groups and European groups, right, Europeans are very worried about GMOs,
Speaker 1: so they've done a lot of testing. When we wrote
Speaker 1: the six hundred page report, we had a huge number
Speaker 1: of references about safety testing, and in the back of
Speaker 1: that report we separate each of those references in terms
Speaker 1: of who did the study and who funded the study.
Speaker 1: So if somebody doesn't trust industry or government, you know,
Speaker 1: like they can pick and choose. But I think you
Speaker 1: find that if you go over the all those studies,
Speaker 1: you still come to the same conclusion that that corn
Speaker 1: in the Midwest is not going to affect your health
Speaker 1: in any measurable way. I mean, there's no way with
Speaker 1: anything for us to know if it's going to take
Speaker 1: a year off your life, right, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it's too many other variables, but we have that all
Speaker 1: the time. We don't know if a Mediterranean you know,
Speaker 1: Mediterranean diets supposed to be good for you, but eggs
Speaker 1: were good for you then they were bad for you.
Speaker 1: And cholesterol. You know, there are a lot of things
Speaker 1: where it's very hard to get that douta because it's
Speaker 1: so little. So you can say I don't trust it.
Speaker 1: But why would you then trust something that Steve Brendan
Speaker 1: his garden, right, it was weird, right, you find this
Speaker 1: mutant and you didn't find it, but you found that
Speaker 1: mute int your garden. How would you know that that
Speaker 1: mutation hadn't done some weird thing to the temples that
Speaker 1: the plant uses to kill its enemies. It wouldn't occur
Speaker 1: to you to be suspicious. It might occur to me,
Speaker 1: but it won't occur. It won't occur, It won't It
Speaker 1: won't occur to the U, S d A or f
Speaker 1: d A in any big way. Um. They do test
Speaker 1: things to make sure that they're substantially equivalent, they call it,
Speaker 1: you know, they look to see that they have the
Speaker 1: same amount of vitamins and so on. But only when
Speaker 1: it's something big, not something where somebody comes up with
Speaker 1: a new heirloom variety. They're not going to test that.
Speaker 1: So the deal is is that, um, you know, over time,
Speaker 1: there's been enough testing on the things that are there now.
Speaker 1: But when people start messing around with the pathways them selves.
Speaker 1: So let's say somebody wants to give you a better
Speaker 1: tomato and this was his article, I guess in the
Speaker 1: New York Times, um about I think it was New
Speaker 1: York Times um making a better tomato that would have
Speaker 1: more of these antioxidants in it. Right, Well, when you
Speaker 1: do that, you change the pathways. Because plants. Every plant
Speaker 1: makes five to a hundred different of these compounds that
Speaker 1: serve them in some way, right, So when you shut
Speaker 1: off the pathway to make one of them, you're gonna
Speaker 1: make more of something else. So we don't know in
Speaker 1: the future. You know, I don't want to say that
Speaker 1: just because we've proven that these few crops are safe
Speaker 1: that in the future you wouldn't be able to make
Speaker 1: a crop that would be genetically modified and would have
Speaker 1: health implications. So that's that is feasible that that could happen,
Speaker 1: So you just have to monitor well. And now compared
Speaker 1: to we have great tools, you know, the same way
Speaker 1: you do personalized medicine. We could get a blueprint of
Speaker 1: a person, right, and now you can do the whole
Speaker 1: genome of plants and find out if there's anything strange
Speaker 1: that's been affected by putting that gene in. So there's
Speaker 1: more of that I would my personally, I think that
Speaker 1: would be needed, uh, to figure this out, you know,
Speaker 1: to make people, you know, feel that due diligence has
Speaker 1: been done about safety. Do you think that the organic
Speaker 1: label is Do you think it's nonsense? No, I don't
Speaker 1: think they were getting laybals nonsense. But do you feel
Speaker 1: that if but but being a being a GMO whatever
Speaker 1: the hell? What the word you like? Better? Genetically engineered?
Speaker 1: Yea genetically a genetically engineered organism or an organism that's
Speaker 1: been fed genetically engineered organisms isn't eligible for organic labeling. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: so this you asked me if I thought organic labeling
Speaker 1: was a problem. But I think organic labeling is not
Speaker 1: just for GMOs. So the issue? Yeah, yeah, what all
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's you know, it's it's a value system, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I really like to get things that have
Speaker 1: grown locally just because I want. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: we really need our agriculture and we don't want it
Speaker 1: all to be grown in some desert in Arizona somewhere. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, so there are reasons why people do things.
Speaker 1: But in terms of the safety issue, if that's all
Speaker 1: you're concerned about, right, I don't think that the things
Speaker 1: you buy in the grocery store that our g M
Speaker 1: O versus non GMO are going to be any different
Speaker 1: in terms of your health. Okay, I'll give you one exception,
Speaker 1: but um, I think that the important piece that you're
Speaker 1: getting to though, is in terms of eating a duck
Speaker 1: that had fed on GMOs. Right, is that? So think
Speaker 1: about this duck, Okay, goes into a corn field out
Speaker 1: in North Dakota right where you did a show, right,
Speaker 1: and you shoot, these ducks were on soybeans and corn
Speaker 1: right exactly, and almost certainly all of that was probably engineered,
Speaker 1: at least most of it was engineered, right corn right,
Speaker 1: And so to worry about eating that duck because of
Speaker 1: the GMO that it's GMOs as opposed to the lead
Speaker 1: that it was exposed or whatever, maybe in your shotgun shell.
Speaker 1: You know, I mean it's it wouldn't be an issue
Speaker 1: to me. And let me explut the sound of your
Speaker 1: body shock and going off next next your ear. That's
Speaker 1: a whole other part. Right, what kind of risks are
Speaker 1: you willing to take? Right? But the thing is is
Speaker 1: that think about that duck. Right, So the plant makes
Speaker 1: a kernel. Let's you know, the corn kernel that it's eating, right,
Speaker 1: it takes it in gizzard. You talk about how you know,
Speaker 1: grinds it all up, it digests it that it's that
Speaker 1: d NA gets degraded, right, that DNA gets you know,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of enzymes, and people have done testing
Speaker 1: to show that those that DNA gets degraded in the gut. Right,
Speaker 1: the digestive process digests that DNA and digests that protein
Speaker 1: to make great I mean no ascids to build duck.
Speaker 1: It doesn't wind up putting that protein from the bacteria
Speaker 1: straight into the meat. So by the time you actually
Speaker 1: get that duck. And people have done testing more on cows, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't find that in the milk. You
Speaker 1: find little fragments maybe, but you're not going to find
Speaker 1: a whole gene in there. And then you know, so
Speaker 1: that you know, it's that question of what makes it
Speaker 1: not be organic? Yeah, what does make it not your Well,
Speaker 1: I think the idea is it's not about biology as
Speaker 1: much as a social issue. Like organic beef. Okay, so
Speaker 1: you're so organic beats beef? Oh beef, Okay, there are
Speaker 1: if you buy I'm a vegetarians, I think beats when
Speaker 1: you say beef. If you buy organic beef, you're looking
Speaker 1: for a handful of things, right, It'll have to do
Speaker 1: with medications and all that. But um, if someone did,
Speaker 1: let's say a beef producer did everything organic except one
Speaker 1: detail they fed it GMO corn, genetically engineered cor that
Speaker 1: beef would be ineligible for organic labeling. But you're saying
Speaker 1: that a chemist wouldn't be able to go into that
Speaker 1: flesh and find the incriminating DNA. If they found it,
Speaker 1: it would be little pieces. I mean, they would not
Speaker 1: find something right, right, they wouldn't find functional protein or
Speaker 1: functional DNA and that meat. Right. But let's get to
Speaker 1: the issue here. I mean, you know it's not you know, like, well, well,
Speaker 1: it's not an issue about science, I think sometimes, right,
Speaker 1: I think, why why is it that you know you
Speaker 1: don't want to use certain antibiotics or certain like the
Speaker 1: antibiotics are not going to be in that beef either, right,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, yeah, then you know you're gonna
Speaker 1: feed them to that cow to keep it healthy. Right,
Speaker 1: But the antibiotic breaks down as well. But there against
Speaker 1: isn't the worry like the growth hormones. Okay, so that's
Speaker 1: a whole other thing, the growth hormones. So again, I
Speaker 1: don't think that there's any evidence that using the growth
Speaker 1: hormones is going to make that meat bad for your health. Now,
Speaker 1: of course the way that it's produced might make it
Speaker 1: bad for your health. Right, So if you put all
Speaker 1: this santbiotics and and all these growth hormones in it,
Speaker 1: so you can put all these animals together and not
Speaker 1: worry about them getting infections and stuff like that, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a whole production system. So I do think organic
Speaker 1: as a statement, you know, about a production system as
Speaker 1: as opposed to only health. Now, I'm not saying that's
Speaker 1: what every person who buys organic is feeling, right, I
Speaker 1: think there are a lot of people who buy organic
Speaker 1: because they worry about the health effects. You know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like, there's so many things. But I think
Speaker 1: I mean that you might be making a sort of
Speaker 1: landscape animal welfare decision, or you're making a personal health decision,
Speaker 1: or you don't even know, you just know that it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be right. It's like it's supposed to it
Speaker 1: and you can afford it, right. Yeah, So it could
Speaker 1: be a lot of things to a lot of different people.
Speaker 1: But um, I know that there are you know, um,
Speaker 1: some organic farmers who think that you should be able
Speaker 1: to use genetically engine here at corn Rye. But but
Speaker 1: that's not the rules, that's not the way it's set up.
Speaker 1: But you know, actually, and if you thought about each
Speaker 1: of these individual groups, you'd have eight different kinds of
Speaker 1: organic labels, right. So I think that's just the way
Speaker 1: it is. And there was a definite, big debate with
Speaker 1: you in U. S. T A about to include genetically
Speaker 1: modified corn and soybean as being okay to be organic.
Speaker 1: There was a there was a debate and it came
Speaker 1: out with that not being in the you know, the
Speaker 1: rule being not No. I was not un gladly well,
Speaker 1: because it's it's an issue about really again not about
Speaker 1: the science, about values, right, I think that um, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, it could have said something about the safety,
Speaker 1: but I don't think that was the big issue. Let
Speaker 1: me just bring this around to you, all right about
Speaker 1: the natural part, right, Um, I think about your followers
Speaker 1: and people who are hunters who care, right, who are
Speaker 1: conservationists as well, right when you go out to hunt. Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's bring it back to fishing. Okay, So if
Speaker 1: you go fishing for trout, we you rather would you
Speaker 1: feel better about yourself? Have you caught a natural trout
Speaker 1: or one that was released by hey? Whatever? The breeding?
Speaker 1: Absolutely natural? Oh? Natural? I prefer native. Um. Like, to me,
Speaker 1: there's like extra points um in my mind, if it's
Speaker 1: a native animal native to the landscape, meaning a rainbow
Speaker 1: trout in Alaska, um, to me has far more value
Speaker 1: than a rainbow trout in Montana. M Um. I view
Speaker 1: a rainbow trout in Montana as being like a corrupted
Speaker 1: h It came from a hatchery, it's corrupted, it was
Speaker 1: brought in by man. I hunt turkeys in a lot
Speaker 1: of areas where they're not native, and when I'm hunting
Speaker 1: turkeys where they are native, it feels more special to me. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's what I want to I mean, I'm sure that
Speaker 1: a lot of your listeners feel that. I can tell
Speaker 1: you a hell a lot of trout fisherman like native
Speaker 1: brook trout, steelhead, a steelhead out of Lake Michigan. Is
Speaker 1: it a steelhead? I understand all of this, and I
Speaker 1: agree with you, but I think that it would almost
Speaker 1: be down the middle two people that are like, man,
Speaker 1: it eats the fly, it jumps, looks pretty captured. Like
Speaker 1: I just don't know. I don't know if there's that
Speaker 1: many people that have your value system, because when they're
Speaker 1: looking at trout, let me fishing generally. Put this way,
Speaker 1: you're probably right Chester. You're a big fish, big fisherman. Here.
Speaker 1: I want you to speak to because he's a guide
Speaker 1: who takes oh and so somehow his opinions. Let me
Speaker 1: let me you'll get your chance. Let me explain why
Speaker 1: I think that that's true. I don't know what the
Speaker 1: hell he's gonna say. If you talk to a person who,
Speaker 1: let's say you talk to a person who lives and
Speaker 1: breathe steelhead, a steelhead fanatic, Okay, I don't know how
Speaker 1: many there are. Let's there's ten thousand steel in the
Speaker 1: northwest part of the steel head fanatic anywhere Great Lakes Region,
Speaker 1: Pacific rim you go find me a hundred steel head fanatics,
Speaker 1: randomly sampled Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Okay, Oregon, Washington, a very
Speaker 1: small subset of fisher I'm choosing people who have who
Speaker 1: are steel head fanatics. You don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: steelhead fanatics from Kentucky. I don't have access to Go ahead,
Speaker 1: and you said to these steel head fanatics, Uh, would
Speaker 1: you rather catch a native steel head or a hatchery
Speaker 1: steel head? Ninety nine out of a hundred, ninety out
Speaker 1: of a hundred, it's gonna say, oh, native one of
Speaker 1: the fanatics. Now you've got all these people that don't
Speaker 1: know I will say, I don't know there, but I
Speaker 1: can't think of oh, you know, the all the ones
Speaker 1: I know are not friendly to not kid friendly. You
Speaker 1: don't think i'd agree with that, No, because you're guiding
Speaker 1: people who probably don't even know that rainbow troll aren't
Speaker 1: from here. I tell him all the time, like, that
Speaker 1: is a native fish you caught. That's way cooler than
Speaker 1: that one. You're that way cooler. Yeah, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: so here we are right in a way in my
Speaker 1: mind is I think it's cool you bring it up.
Speaker 1: Did they taste better? No, that's not saltwater. Okay, Sam
Speaker 1: out of the salt water tastes better Sam out of
Speaker 1: fresh water. But that's not that's nothing to do with
Speaker 1: just die right, right. But I guess I just want
Speaker 1: to bring this around to the cheerios, right. I know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm tracking. I want to lay a very solid
Speaker 1: foundation for whatever you're gonna say. Okay, so, but those
Speaker 1: are your values, right, I mean you and there's a
Speaker 1: reason behind your values. I could explain it, but it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be like terribly convinced. And that's where I think
Speaker 1: we get in trouble with trying to get an somebody
Speaker 1: who wants to buy organic, Because Steve, I think it
Speaker 1: feels like to you probably feels like you're cheating or
Speaker 1: you're taking a shortcut when you're not. But when you're,
Speaker 1: when you don't catch like it's something that's native, right,
Speaker 1: like kind of in your head? Is that how you
Speaker 1: would frame it? No, it's um. I view. If I
Speaker 1: was going to say, what was like, what is the
Speaker 1: most purest form of nature? Okay? I love nature? Okay,
Speaker 1: I regard it as a sacred thing. Um, even though
Speaker 1: we are part of nature, right, We're like a component
Speaker 1: of nature. I somehow have more respect and admiration for
Speaker 1: the sort of natural mechanisms of Nate that the non human,
Speaker 1: non intentional mechanisms that drove the distribution of species around
Speaker 1: the planet. Okay, it's just like to see to be
Speaker 1: on the landscape with things that arrived in some way
Speaker 1: that was outside of my species manipulation seems to me
Speaker 1: more admirable. It's just the story is more intriguing to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I think where this metaphor comes in is that
Speaker 1: where you kind of touched on it earlier, where you
Speaker 1: sort of said, well, Fred brought up the fact, well,
Speaker 1: we've been doing we've been doing GMOs for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: but like in your head, long term selective breeding is
Speaker 1: not the same as I think what people picture when
Speaker 1: they picture GMOs now is someone in like a lab
Speaker 1: with a hazmat suit on and like some syringes and
Speaker 1: a petri dish creating corn and then yeah, exactly, but
Speaker 1: that's but I think Fred is kind of looting the
Speaker 1: fact that that's that's not what it's really happened. Well,
Speaker 1: but but that's this is this whole issue, right, that's
Speaker 1: really interesting what you was just saying. So it goes
Speaker 1: back to these kind of values that people have, you know,
Speaker 1: like you're kind of connection to it, something that really
Speaker 1: was on the land, and you're connected to it, and
Speaker 1: you go out there and you do it yourself in
Speaker 1: a sort of natural way. You're out there trying to
Speaker 1: deal with this dead carcass that you're trying to bring
Speaker 1: back a thousand miles or whatever. Right, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: you're you're out there in that natural situation, and that's
Speaker 1: valuable to and and so getting around this whole thing
Speaker 1: about genetic engineering and natural you know, that thing of
Speaker 1: the people in the lab coats. This seems to be
Speaker 1: I think to a lot of people who want an
Speaker 1: heirloom variety or as you were saying, you know, that's
Speaker 1: pretty intriguing to hear how plants evolved, Right, people who
Speaker 1: want to have that connection to not being natural but
Speaker 1: being our cultures have over time. The Chinese culture did
Speaker 1: one thing, the Mexican culture did something else. Right, That's
Speaker 1: why Mexican hate GMO corn. Right, you know, we bread
Speaker 1: this stuff. Our ancestors bred gmo corn, you know, and
Speaker 1: now you're taking it an injecting it with all the
Speaker 1: stuff and sending it back to us. You know, we don't.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not natural, it's not our culture anymore.
Speaker 1: So I want to bring it connected to conservationists. Right.
Speaker 1: So you know the story of the chestnut tree in
Speaker 1: the US. But it was a major part of the
Speaker 1: forest in the US and it got wiped out by
Speaker 1: a fungus chestnut chestnut blight. You still can find it
Speaker 1: out there, but it's only little stumps because once it
Speaker 1: gets big enough, it gets knocked out, all right. So
Speaker 1: people have taken Chinese chestnut and crossed it with American
Speaker 1: chestnut to try to bring the Chinese chestnut's resistant to
Speaker 1: that fungus. Right, try to bring that in and then
Speaker 1: plant that out, so you have a hybrid of a
Speaker 1: Chinese chestnut and an American chestnut. You try to get
Speaker 1: rid of as many of the Chinese genes. And it's
Speaker 1: very interesting that we call them American and Chinese. Right.
Speaker 1: But now genetic engineers have come up the way of
Speaker 1: moving I think it's a wheat gene into the native
Speaker 1: American chestnut to protect it against the blight. And this
Speaker 1: has been going on for a while and there are
Speaker 1: a huge number of people, some probably some of your
Speaker 1: listeners who are real proponents of getting the chestnut back
Speaker 1: into our forests. And the way to do that is
Speaker 1: to genetically engineer the chestnut tree. So you know, it's
Speaker 1: a whole. It's a chestnut tree, more of a chestnut
Speaker 1: tree than the Chinese American hybrid. It's just put you know,
Speaker 1: a little bit of DNA in there and it protects
Speaker 1: that chestnut tree. But it's a genetically engineered, transgenic chestnuts tree.
Speaker 1: So the question the landscape back when Daniel Boone came
Speaker 1: down through the Cumberland gas right, look more like that,
Speaker 1: and look more like that, but it would be transgenic
Speaker 1: and it bears eating right right. And so what I
Speaker 1: bring up to people is how you know, like also,
Speaker 1: you know about the kittured fungus right with amphibians kittrid
Speaker 1: fungus now, but the kittured fungus has been causing the
Speaker 1: extinction of a lot of amphibians, especially in the tropics. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know about this. I don't know the name
Speaker 1: of it, but anyway, I mean it's a it's a
Speaker 1: big deal. So you know, one of those kind of
Speaker 1: things is wow, what about if you genetically engineered all
Speaker 1: these frogs pieces to be resistant to the kitchened fungus.
Speaker 1: So I think twenty years from now, one story is,
Speaker 1: oh no, people didn't want that genetically engineered frog, and
Speaker 1: the other as they did. So you go to the
Speaker 1: forest on one side and a no frog, not much
Speaker 1: in the way of frogs. You go on the other
Speaker 1: side and you got all these incredible frogs. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've seen some of these incredible frogs, right, But
Speaker 1: what does it mean to you to go out into
Speaker 1: a forest and have this experience and come back and
Speaker 1: see that? Wait? Was I in a natural forest or
Speaker 1: was this just a Hollywood movie? I just was in. Right,
Speaker 1: what does that mean in terms of nature? And where
Speaker 1: is genetic engineering taking us? And actually, I have to
Speaker 1: say there is right now that I see in the
Speaker 1: International Union of is having a meeting to discuss use
Speaker 1: of synthetic biology for conservation. Really, yeah, it's a very
Speaker 1: controversial issue. You know. I'm working with a group that's
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of rats and mice from islands
Speaker 1: where they cause loss of biodiversity, and we're using a
Speaker 1: novel technology called gene drive. Well, we're trying to it's
Speaker 1: far away. It's not there. Basically, well, basically it's a
Speaker 1: way of having inheritance that pushes the gene into a population,
Speaker 1: and in this case, we'll be pushing a gene into
Speaker 1: population who caused the eradication of the mice on that island.
Speaker 1: The gene it's a gene that makes males instead of males,
Speaker 1: and females have a whole bunch of males, Are it?
Speaker 1: I mean, this is just it's not there. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't want to. I don't want anybody to think
Speaker 1: that that's the The other is just to have basically
Speaker 1: in fertility genes, right, so those won't go, but you
Speaker 1: want to restricted to the island. But there are all
Speaker 1: sorts of things going on in terms of synthetic biology
Speaker 1: about just making the arits or something like that blackfoot
Speaker 1: to be resistant to the diseases, right, so that you
Speaker 1: can save biodiversity using genetic engineering. But the conservation biology
Speaker 1: group is really struggling with this, right I think, because
Speaker 1: and think about it. You know, it goes back to
Speaker 1: your thing about the fish, right, you know, what kind
Speaker 1: of natural world do you go out into? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it? What what makes it natural? If you guys
Speaker 1: need someone to do this, I'll do it. Just bring me.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you chest nuts a okay, yeah, okay. The
Speaker 1: mouse thing, I think real careful how you can keep
Speaker 1: those mice and getting yeah yeah, yeah, well I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of work being done. I can handle all. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well I think, man, I would be very nervous about
Speaker 1: right right swimming off, you're leaving, you're leaving, and he
Speaker 1: jumps on the boat right right right, So actually, ill
Speaker 1: you know that actually the work of the people I
Speaker 1: work with at NC State are trying to work on
Speaker 1: one of these gene drives that won't escape from the island. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't want to go into this, but it's a
Speaker 1: great it's a great question. Yeah. But I mean that's
Speaker 1: that's has been. I mean I have to say that
Speaker 1: of all the genetic engineering stuff, the scientists themselves are
Speaker 1: probably more worried than the public in some ways. So
Speaker 1: think about this thing about you have a gene that
Speaker 1: could spread into the island and get rid of all
Speaker 1: those rats and mice and and really be good for biodiversity.
Speaker 1: That's pretty clear that, you know, some people say, oh,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get rid of them, and they're part of
Speaker 1: the food chain. Now, now it would lead there's evidence
Speaker 1: that getting you know, getting rid of those leads to
Speaker 1: higher biodiversity. But you go, ask anybody who rides the
Speaker 1: New York City subways about getting rid of you know,
Speaker 1: using this technology, should get rid of the Norway rats? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And what do they say, say do it right? Because
Speaker 1: they hate rats and it's a non native and it's
Speaker 1: and and but you know it's gonna move back to Norway,
Speaker 1: no doubt, right, I mean, I guess the thing is
Speaker 1: people the scientists who do it, who have ecological backgrounds,
Speaker 1: they're like you, they're worried about this stuff. But the
Speaker 1: public has different opinions. You know, if you don't stereotyping
Speaker 1: me man generally not like on the food thing. It
Speaker 1: doesn't like just I could. It doesn't matter to me
Speaker 1: if my kids I had a bowl of cereal, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't really like cereal. I mean, I'll eat it,
Speaker 1: but like it has no barrier whatsoever? What I do
Speaker 1: watch out for? And I should ask you about this? Um.
Speaker 1: Somehow I got in my head in some kind of
Speaker 1: convincing way that I don't like him. Uh, I don't
Speaker 1: like them, the milk with bull vine growth hormone. I
Speaker 1: was like, we can afford the other kind, so't I'm
Speaker 1: not saying I don't know. I don't know, but I'm like,
Speaker 1: it's just not a big deal. We can buy the
Speaker 1: other They don't go through that much, but we can
Speaker 1: buy the other kind. And I don't need to, like,
Speaker 1: wonder if there's something I'm supposed to pay attention to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's probably a lot of people, like I don't really know,
Speaker 1: but it's know something that I don't have the energy
Speaker 1: to go find out right. And that's that whole thing
Speaker 1: again that the people in the developed world to get
Speaker 1: accused of. Wait a minute, you know, it's easy for
Speaker 1: you to be against genetic engineering because you've got the
Speaker 1: extra money to buy that stuff, the extra whatever, like,
Speaker 1: but people in the developing world needs g amounts. That's what.
Speaker 1: That's what. That's That's a great segue. And what I
Speaker 1: want to ask you next seven and a half billion people,
Speaker 1: seven point three what is it? Like I said, just
Speaker 1: round up to COVID trimmed off. So no, no, not,
Speaker 1: I mean I mean not enough. I mean that not
Speaker 1: enough to change not enough to change a decimal. I
Speaker 1: don't think so whatever some seven and a half billion
Speaker 1: people on the planet, and buy your understanding if we
Speaker 1: were going to globally Okay, we're gonna we we come
Speaker 1: to this global decision. Uh, we're done with GMOs. No more.
Speaker 1: I can't put them in the ground. Um. Is it
Speaker 1: true that we would that you would buy necessity, need
Speaker 1: to Probably you would buy necessy probably be starving off
Speaker 1: a couple of billions of that seven and a half
Speaker 1: billion people, that you would starve them off. How do
Speaker 1: I answer that? I think it's like yes or no.
Speaker 1: I mean, if I had to give you a yes
Speaker 1: or no, I'd say no, you wouldn't You wouldn't necessarily
Speaker 1: be starving them off, all right? Um, But I think
Speaker 1: it's it's a lot of people use that as an
Speaker 1: argument for GMOs. That's the that's the one that resonates
Speaker 1: with people. So I guess this is this is a
Speaker 1: tough one for me because I want to go back
Speaker 1: in the place where genetics were, which is pretty incredible, right.
Speaker 1: I told you when they made that tobacco plant, I
Speaker 1: was like, whoa, But things are changing that you know what,
Speaker 1: genetic engineering. We've got better go back to what is
Speaker 1: genetic engineering? Right, it's those people in the white coats
Speaker 1: right who are doing this, right, But people in white
Speaker 1: coats do a lot of things, and one is to
Speaker 1: actually take a gene from a bacteria and stick it
Speaker 1: in a plant. Another thing that they found that they
Speaker 1: could do is take a gene from a wild tomato
Speaker 1: that made the tomato resistant and just put that gene in, right,
Speaker 1: So they're not taking it from something really weird to
Speaker 1: taking something similar, so that where you're taking it, yeah,
Speaker 1: tomatoes and putting tomatoes and tomatoes. Right. So if you
Speaker 1: start out with the bacteria, it's called transgenic. Moving something
Speaker 1: trans across the species barriers, right, So that's transgenic. This
Speaker 1: is called cysgenic because it's similar, right, So you put
Speaker 1: it in and it's not so weird system. And now
Speaker 1: the big thing is something new. Instead of moving char
Speaker 1: into strawberries, you'd be moving like char into another charge right. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: char from you know, one region of the country into
Speaker 1: another one to make it more tolerant um. But now
Speaker 1: there's something called gene editing, right, and this is something
Speaker 1: that's happened with humans in China, right where you go
Speaker 1: in and you actually just tweak a human gene, right,
Speaker 1: But can you tweak just a plant gene? Right? It's
Speaker 1: you're not doing anything coming from any place else. You're
Speaker 1: just changing that gene. And that's called gene editing, and
Speaker 1: it's just one kind of genetting. You use genetting for
Speaker 1: a lot of new things. It's this thing called crisper
Speaker 1: that everybody talks about now, right, So that scene is
Speaker 1: somewhat different by some people because it's more natural because
Speaker 1: it's not transgenic. Right. But in terms of what you
Speaker 1: can do to the plant, you can do a lot
Speaker 1: of new things. But what's coming along behind I ain't.
Speaker 1: That is something even to me more interesting because as
Speaker 1: you know, like with human diseases, some human diseases are
Speaker 1: caused by one gene. So you can think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: we could fix that one gene, yeah, right, But most
Speaker 1: human diseases are caused by ten to a hundred genes
Speaker 1: acting together. You can't make a cure where you're changing
Speaker 1: a hundred genes at least with the technology we have now.
Speaker 1: And the same thing with a plant. If you want
Speaker 1: to increase plant yield, it seems real simple. Oh, we're
Speaker 1: just gonna put this one gene and it's gonna be
Speaker 1: salt tolerant. Well, that happens once in a while. But
Speaker 1: the way progress is really being made now by the
Speaker 1: big companies is they're doing something called genomic selection. And
Speaker 1: again we can get into a lot of diesels, but
Speaker 1: they're looking at the whole genome of the plants they're
Speaker 1: selecting and coming up with the best combinations that fit together.
Speaker 1: And it requires a lot of computer power, a lot
Speaker 1: of this whole thing about um, machine learning and and
Speaker 1: all that artificial intelligence has come up with the best ways.
Speaker 1: So plant breeding to get higher yields is happening because
Speaker 1: of high tech. But the new high tech is not transgenics.
Speaker 1: That's way back. So the you know, so when people say, oh,
Speaker 1: we're never going to feed the world unless we have
Speaker 1: genetic engineering, and say, well, what do you what do
Speaker 1: you mean by genetic engine You mean good plant breeding.
Speaker 1: Let's have good plant breeding, right, and so good plant
Speaker 1: breeding can do a lot, but it's no longer this
Speaker 1: narrow thing that happened that everybody was focused on, and
Speaker 1: this other stuff is going on, and again nobody knows
Speaker 1: about it. It's like the genetically engineered tobacco, right, it's
Speaker 1: in the background. It's it happened now, but this stuff
Speaker 1: is coming, and you know, for good or bad. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of the big companies are hiring a
Speaker 1: lot of computer people to help them with this stuff
Speaker 1: as opposed to people out in the field, because you
Speaker 1: can improve a plant without looking at it. There's another argument,
Speaker 1: another their pro gmo argument, and I keep using that's okay,
Speaker 1: we all know, we don't talk about is that from
Speaker 1: a conservation perspective? Is that I've heard people say from
Speaker 1: a wildlife conservation perspective, Um, they work better, they put
Speaker 1: off more bushels per acre, so it winds up being less.
Speaker 1: Land needs to be converted into monoculture. Agriculture to meet
Speaker 1: our needs because it's just more efficient. And if you, uh, look,
Speaker 1: if you're a duck hunter and that you and you're
Speaker 1: worried about the prairie pothole region, and when when grain
Speaker 1: prices are high, more of the prairie pothole region gets tilled,
Speaker 1: and it gets tilled closer to the pond's edge, and
Speaker 1: more duck habitat is lost. Um, why not solve that
Speaker 1: with more efficient agricultural systems so we have more ducks.
Speaker 1: That's another argument right. I like the efficiency argument and
Speaker 1: conserving land. But let's ask that question about what has
Speaker 1: jen engineering done so far since to increase yields of corn,
Speaker 1: soybean and cotton. I can a lot no, alright, so,
Speaker 1: so yields of corn per acre? Let me yeah, hold on,
Speaker 1: let me give you the deal here, right, Yeah, So
Speaker 1: Monsanto had an article published in a peer review journal
Speaker 1: showing how this has been increasing. That so when we
Speaker 1: were doing the six d page study for the National
Speaker 1: Academy of Sciences, right, we got down on it, right.
Speaker 1: We looked carefully at the data, same data they used,
Speaker 1: all right, And if you look at yields of corn,
Speaker 1: soybean and cotton over time, right, and we were looking
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty to two thousand fifteen. I think it
Speaker 1: was where we ended to look at what's happening to yields.
Speaker 1: They're going up, you know, this fluctuation from year to year,
Speaker 1: like like per unit of space, like per per acre yield.
Speaker 1: Yield per acre for cotton, soybean, cotton have been going
Speaker 1: up since nineteen eight They've been going up since nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: But I mean we were looking at the data as
Speaker 1: was months out off about nineteen eighty and you see
Speaker 1: the yields going up on all three crops. And then
Speaker 1: happens and all those crops are now genetically engineered in
Speaker 1: the US. Not every one of them, but most of them.
Speaker 1: And you ask, well, the the yields going up faster
Speaker 1: because I spiked, Yeah, not at all. Really, that's the data.
Speaker 1: Then I can show you that line, that is a
Speaker 1: straight line. Now some people will say, so what did
Speaker 1: we gain? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some people say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: if we have climate change and all of that, if
Speaker 1: we didn't have genetic engineering, would be going down. But
Speaker 1: if you look at wheat or oats, remember not genetically unshared,
Speaker 1: those yields are still also going up the same way.
Speaker 1: So there really isn't the evidence in the United States
Speaker 1: so far. I'm not saying it can't happen. People have
Speaker 1: been trying since the nineteen eighties to increase the efficiency
Speaker 1: of photosynthesis, but it's a hard problem. They haven't solved it.
Speaker 1: So let me put I want the same thing. Maybe
Speaker 1: you guys got into this or not. If you looked
Speaker 1: at amphibians that or pollinators or whatever the hell monarchy waterflies,
Speaker 1: I don't know, And you look at like amphibian counts
Speaker 1: from adjacent wetlands over from fifteen in does that pivot
Speaker 1: some way? Good? Good question. Okay, So there I can
Speaker 1: give you another answer, not for those amphibians, but for insects. Okay,
Speaker 1: So by not using as much insecticide, there's more bio
Speaker 1: diversity of insects in the non you know, in the
Speaker 1: GMO fields than in the fields that are not GMO
Speaker 1: that are spread with the insects side of course, right,
Speaker 1: I mean that that is there. So so you are
Speaker 1: helping in the way of concertion. But then there's an
Speaker 1: efferent different question here about you wanting to keep your
Speaker 1: little areas that are natural from going into farming. So well,
Speaker 1: I'm good, and I build this genetically engineered crop that
Speaker 1: is highly tolerant or it's fair. It's fair, it's fair,
Speaker 1: like prayer po whole region whatever. Sure, I would like
Speaker 1: to I would like to retain as much waterfowl nesting
Speaker 1: habitat as possible. So I all I wanted to bring
Speaker 1: up is if some scientists uses genetic engineering in a
Speaker 1: way to make those areas commercially useful, because now they
Speaker 1: have a plant that will survive better and also produce
Speaker 1: something for humans so we could have more meat and
Speaker 1: not worry about efficiency of eating being a vegetarian. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, so I guess what I what we get to?
Speaker 1: You know, of course I'm with this Genetic Engineering and
Speaker 1: Society Center, you know, to keep asking these questions as
Speaker 1: deeply as we can to ask Wait a minute, you
Speaker 1: have a nice story, but is that the only way
Speaker 1: the story unfolds? Where it could unfold in a different way.
Speaker 1: I think what we find is that we need a
Speaker 1: lot of brains to be thinking about how it's going
Speaker 1: to be used, not whether we can make it. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you have examples as in hunting, right. You know,
Speaker 1: you can make something, it's how you use it that determines,
Speaker 1: you know, whether it's an ethical way animals and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. So I think that's important. Let's say we're hiking, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you you fall off a cliff there's no chance
Speaker 1: of surviving, and I yelled down, Um, so are GMOs
Speaker 1: good or bad? What would you yell back? Yes? And no?
Speaker 1: But I mean that's the deal, right? Yeah? I had
Speaker 1: that with some students, right, they had this, So let's
Speaker 1: come to the chase, right right? Huh? So I would
Speaker 1: would say anybody who says to me should have a
Speaker 1: moratorium on genetic engineering research. I think such a more
Speaker 1: term would be a very bad idea, right, But I
Speaker 1: think that we need to be very careful in the
Speaker 1: way we use these things. And I think there are
Speaker 1: examples of these where if it's not interesting. Example, in
Speaker 1: in Africa, Burkino Fosso is the first country that said, hey,
Speaker 1: bring me genetically engineered cotton that has that BT and
Speaker 1: that has that protein that it kills caterpillars, and we
Speaker 1: won't be able to won't be using as much insecticide,
Speaker 1: which we can't afford anyway. Right, So they get this
Speaker 1: genetically engineered cotton, they start growing it, and they produce
Speaker 1: more per hectare then they would have without it, and
Speaker 1: they used less insecticide and a since you think the
Speaker 1: farmers are really happy about that, right, and everybody should
Speaker 1: be happy about it, except that they didn't breed it, right.
Speaker 1: They brought over sort of an American variety that they
Speaker 1: back crossed into the cross sit into the African type.
Speaker 1: The African type in the Franco African countries produces longer
Speaker 1: fread to count, right, and so they were producing more,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't of the quality that was needed, so
Speaker 1: it sat on the market and the country then banned
Speaker 1: it again. Right, So it's it's how you do it.
Speaker 1: It would have been a great thing if they had
Speaker 1: done it right. And other examples had a lot of
Speaker 1: shitty cotton a lot of Americans. But but I just
Speaker 1: want to bring another really interesting example to me is
Speaker 1: about corn. Is that actually using traditional breeding they Jeanette,
Speaker 1: they bread corn to be more drought tolerant, and who
Speaker 1: could be against drought toners like mother and apple pie, right,
Speaker 1: But what it was interesting was that when they gave
Speaker 1: it to farmers to farm, and you think, oh, this
Speaker 1: is gonna be good because it's gonna lower the impact
Speaker 1: of drought. But there's a spacing that most of your
Speaker 1: you know, some of your listeners know when they're planting corn,
Speaker 1: they planted a certain spacing. But if you plant the
Speaker 1: corn too close, you get to a point in a
Speaker 1: normal year, you cause drought to happen because the corn
Speaker 1: plants are just sucking up all the order. So there's
Speaker 1: a certain optimal distance. Well, if you have drought tolerant corn,
Speaker 1: you can plan it closer in a good year and
Speaker 1: get higher yield and then the field though still drought sensitive.
Speaker 1: Is it making sense right? Each plant is drought tolerant,
Speaker 1: but it's the way the farmer plants it. So this
Speaker 1: is why yes and no, is that we have to
Speaker 1: figure out what is our goal with this genetically engineered stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, is it for more sustainability of specific farmers
Speaker 1: or global issues. I don't know that that's a bad
Speaker 1: thing that there that you're having higher yields and it's
Speaker 1: still sensitive to drought because we do have crop insurance
Speaker 1: in the U S. It's underline. And also you're talking
Speaker 1: about it, you know global economy where wealth too bad
Speaker 1: for Iowa? But man am I making a killing in
Speaker 1: North Carolina because they haven't a problem. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, there's all I'm trying to get
Speaker 1: out here is I don't have an So it's it's
Speaker 1: a in the system. It's a whole system that you're
Speaker 1: dealing with. So when we talk about what are the
Speaker 1: issues with GMOs, and this is this whole thing about
Speaker 1: our group, the Genetic Engineering Society Center, is to sort
Speaker 1: of dig a little deeper. And it's not just about
Speaker 1: the genetic insurance any technology as they're coming on. We
Speaker 1: have to think about them more in terms of what
Speaker 1: the repercussions are. I don't. I'm not, you know, against risk.
Speaker 1: I mean, we always have to take risk. You always
Speaker 1: have to answer ask that question if you don't use GMOs,
Speaker 1: are we're gonna be able to feed the world? Right?
Speaker 1: So you better have an answer to that about how
Speaker 1: you're going to do that if you don't use GMOs.
Speaker 1: And I would say that there are some places where
Speaker 1: you really GMOs have decreased the amount of pest side
Speaker 1: used by farmers in um, certain in certain countries in
Speaker 1: South Africa's an example where decreasing pest side use meant
Speaker 1: that fewer farmers round up in the hospital at the
Speaker 1: end of the season. Well that's the safety of GMOs.
Speaker 1: That's interesting, And I said, I'd come I should make
Speaker 1: this one comment. Uh, there's a group called Simplot in Idaho. Right,
Speaker 1: they breed potatoes. Well, they bread a potato that has
Speaker 1: lower acrylamide in it. Acrylamide when you fry your potatoes
Speaker 1: or toast your bread, turns into something that is considered
Speaker 1: a probable carcinogen. So those potatoes are possibly less Carson
Speaker 1: and genetic if you're eating French fries. Yeah, but then again,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't eat French fries. Right, Your simplot gotta start
Speaker 1: you hear that story? Simplot was his due Jr. Simplot,
Speaker 1: and it was during the depression. Teachers were being paid
Speaker 1: with these bonds and Idaho, okay, they're being paid with
Speaker 1: bonds and the bonds had to mature over some period
Speaker 1: of time. It was like a deferred payment. Simplot. He
Speaker 1: wanted to like, I'm not sure about the sequence, but
Speaker 1: basically started buying these bonds and people fifty cents on
Speaker 1: the dollar because they need money, gets himself a bunch
Speaker 1: of pigs piglets, and takes him out in the desert,
Speaker 1: gets a big cauldron, takes him out in the desert
Speaker 1: and starts shooting wild horses to fatten those hogs. That's
Speaker 1: how he got to start an egg And that's Simplot today.
Speaker 1: My goodness, Well I didn't know that story. I pad
Speaker 1: toxic plasma risk aversion. That's how he got his That's
Speaker 1: not that's what started that. Yeah, my buddy's kids just
Speaker 1: want to work for Simplot. I bet he don't even
Speaker 1: know that. Yeah, well the world is complicated, so I think,
Speaker 1: you know, taking a certain amount of step back and ask.
Speaker 1: You know, when somebody gives you these lines, you know,
Speaker 1: these simple answers. GMO is a good, GMOs are bad,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know. It's it's harder to when
Speaker 1: you jump off a click. Okay, they're okay to eat.
Speaker 1: So I think the ones that have been tested and
Speaker 1: are on the market today, I would agree that those
Speaker 1: are fine to eat, and I eat them all the time.
Speaker 1: I probably have eaten more GMO sweet corn than most
Speaker 1: people because we were growing that stuff. So I didn't mind.
Speaker 1: I I you know, for ethics or health or combination.
Speaker 1: I told you I was a hippie, so I was well.
Speaker 1: I was. I was hitchhike and cross country wound up.
Speaker 1: But somebody's farm out in Nevada, and he wouldn't need anything.
Speaker 1: He didn't kill himself. I thought, now that made sense
Speaker 1: to me. I'm not gonna eat anything less kill it myself.
Speaker 1: That's how I started. And I got a bunch of chickens,
Speaker 1: and after they stopped laying eggs, I couldn't kill the suckers.
Speaker 1: So that was the end of it, and I became
Speaker 1: a vegetarian. How many years ago was that when I
Speaker 1: was nineteen? No kid, yeah now now now I'm just
Speaker 1: a vegetarian, right, I don't think about that every day.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, I'm not gonna let me ask you.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this one because I was we
Speaker 1: got my friends, got some kids that are vegetarians, and
Speaker 1: I was messing with them because they always eat marshmallows.
Speaker 1: Neat marshmallows. No oh wait, wait wait, vegetarian, vegetarian eat marshmallows.
Speaker 1: I'm a vegetarian who eats more shows on campfires because
Speaker 1: that's natural. Yeah, oh man, you guys got anymore? This
Speaker 1: has been great. This is what I knew, what happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what this is. This tells you the power
Speaker 1: of krint. I told crim to find someone said I
Speaker 1: don't want like an ideologue? G m O ideologue? Did
Speaker 1: she say, Steve, He's gonna want to know what that
Speaker 1: word means. Like a person driven, a person driven by
Speaker 1: a sort of like severely drawn perspective. Would happen ilogue ideologue? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Like a person who's you know, full of fired brimstone.
Speaker 1: I've got a question. So in Wisconsin, if you look
Speaker 1: at a lot of these corn fields, they all look
Speaker 1: the same. And some of these little farms where I
Speaker 1: grew up are organic dairy farms and they have, you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred two hundred acres, and their corn that they're
Speaker 1: feeding their cows looks exactly the same. Is the neighbor
Speaker 1: next door who does not have an organic dairy farm.
Speaker 1: Is that corn that those because it like looks exactly
Speaker 1: the same? Probably gmo corn. Well it could be, of course,
Speaker 1: I can't tell you. But you could have two fields
Speaker 1: next to each other, one being GMO and one being
Speaker 1: non gmo, and they will look the same. So let's
Speaker 1: go back to when we said, how do you get
Speaker 1: it so that you could have this SPT this protein
Speaker 1: in the corn and not have the insects adapt to it.
Speaker 1: The way that that would be done is by having
Speaker 1: the BT corn that you know that produces that protein
Speaker 1: and the non BT corn. Right, So, farmers, even if
Speaker 1: you're a conventional farmer in the Midwest, many of them
Speaker 1: plant that refuge. Some planted to ones that are herbicide tolerant,
Speaker 1: but some planted to non gmo. So the companies have
Speaker 1: decreased the effort they put into producing new non GMO varieties,
Speaker 1: so the yield on a non GMO variety has become
Speaker 1: a little bit less than what you get from a GMO.
Speaker 1: Forget about the insects and anything, just because the breeding
Speaker 1: effort isn't is as great. But they typically are are
Speaker 1: not that different. So yes, you could be looking at it.
Speaker 1: A breeder, you know, as great eyes were looking at
Speaker 1: the differences, might see it, but you probably wouldn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: the differences among varieties about hybrids is greater than the
Speaker 1: difference between the GMO and the non GMO. I know,
Speaker 1: go ahead, you gotta follow up. I got a question.
Speaker 1: I got a question for Phil. Yeah, when you're shopping
Speaker 1: for groceries, do you are you like when you're picking
Speaker 1: cereal out? Are you keeping an eyeball out on GMO?
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, I mean I'm glad you's gonna
Speaker 1: see if I was. I was looking to see if
Speaker 1: this has changed your mind about it. I do occasionally
Speaker 1: shop at the co op Steve, and I've got a
Speaker 1: great cat psychologist if we need one. There's just so
Speaker 1: many buzzwords these days that people are people are are
Speaker 1: afraid of, uh, you know, like GMO, gluten, MSG and
Speaker 1: for various reasons. Uh. So it's it's nice to sit
Speaker 1: down and like and actually just throughout the facts and
Speaker 1: have you you know, like Steve said, you're falling off
Speaker 1: a cliff. I still don't have the answer for you.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's because it's it's just to the point
Speaker 1: where you can look at a can of mountain dew
Speaker 1: and it says gluten free and it's like, yeah, no, ship,
Speaker 1: just like like that's how that's how these companies have
Speaker 1: to label things these days because they're people are afraid
Speaker 1: of things and they don't know why. I don't know why.
Speaker 1: And they have the money to pay the extra two cents. Right,
Speaker 1: it's not such a big deal and whatever if Company
Speaker 1: A is doing it, company they all jump on you.
Speaker 1: But you're gonna ask something else. No, No, I'm okay,
Speaker 1: Well no I don't know what was it. Well, I
Speaker 1: was just saying like like all that all that corn
Speaker 1: is modified over time, no matter what. So like I
Speaker 1: just don't quite I don't quite get it, you know,
Speaker 1: like in a way. So so it's become a big
Speaker 1: deal because of the pressure on it. Right, Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you have white corn and yellow corn, right, Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: more different. Yeah, you're married, Fred No, No wait, wait,
Speaker 1: a minute. Wait, that's it, you're out. Yeah, I get
Speaker 1: to talk to someone always might not want to know.
Speaker 1: I know that we've covered it, and we've had some
Speaker 1: people right in with the good answers, but I think
Speaker 1: we should hear Fred's take on it. But like, I
Speaker 1: think the question around, if we have all this power
Speaker 1: to just like mess around and make things like better
Speaker 1: to grow, how come no one's doing that just to
Speaker 1: make my strawberries always taste like fish. Did you ever
Speaker 1: get around with the child strawberry? Yeah, so that was
Speaker 1: another thing. Your strawberries taste like what? Just like the
Speaker 1: strawberries out of my garden or for whatever. I just
Speaker 1: feel like in general, out of all the regions I've
Speaker 1: lived right now, I lived in the worst region ever
Speaker 1: for like the quality of produce. I get, everything just
Speaker 1: taste like bland. Just give me some good berries. I
Speaker 1: can't tell if it's a You might I mean, if
Speaker 1: you if it wasn't for texture and and looks inside,
Speaker 1: you might confuse the asparagus with the Brussels sprouts, or
Speaker 1: the asparagus with the green bean. I mean, everything just
Speaker 1: seems to be just there. That's all this whole thing started, too,
Speaker 1: is that that Steve was talking about growing strawberries outside
Speaker 1: his house in Seattle and how they tasted so good,
Speaker 1: and you can go to the grocery store and things
Speaker 1: just kind of taste bland, and you go to the
Speaker 1: farmer stand there and all I do is I eat
Speaker 1: tomatoes and the water mills and all that great produced here.
Speaker 1: But I haven't had a good tomato in Montana since
Speaker 1: I moved here. But yeah, we had a we had
Speaker 1: a produce, we had a produced supplier. Well, I want
Speaker 1: to interject my own and say that I could win
Speaker 1: the county fair with the strawberries I'm growing right now, Okay,
Speaker 1: but produce supplier rolled in. And he was saying, because
Speaker 1: we were talking about that, and he was saying, the
Speaker 1: industry has optimized for shelf life and visual appeal. He's like,
Speaker 1: you put a big, gass, shiny, waxy apple that's bland
Speaker 1: and flavor next to a superb apple that's like blemished, smaller.
Speaker 1: It's colors aren't his vibrant. They're just gonna pick up
Speaker 1: the big shiny one. Yeah, I know we were putting
Speaker 1: a b And also, taste is subjective, but Fred, I
Speaker 1: don't know if if you can touch on that at all,
Speaker 1: Like you, are there any studies about how GMO affects
Speaker 1: the flavor of something or I I don't have not
Speaker 1: people have studied that and not seen an effect on
Speaker 1: the flavor of these things that are not flavorful to
Speaker 1: start with. So this was the whole thing. One of
Speaker 1: the first products was a flavor savor tomato and you
Speaker 1: can look at it, remember that term. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is a great story. I mean, these these folks were academics,
Speaker 1: I think, I think you see Davis, and they made
Speaker 1: this tomato that would stay good on your shelf. So
Speaker 1: that means that you could pick them when they were
Speaker 1: closer to being ready, you know, so that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: pick them so green. So the idea was you would
Speaker 1: save the flavor that you had in that tomato. They
Speaker 1: were very careful to advertise that they were genetically engineered.
Speaker 1: They went through all of the testing. They were not.
Speaker 1: They were genetically so they went through all of the
Speaker 1: regulations to make sure everything was okay. But the marketing
Speaker 1: didn't work and the whole thing fell apart. And there
Speaker 1: is a great film that anybody could probably find on
Speaker 1: YouTube about the labor Saver tomato and what happened with that.
Speaker 1: But that was a great example of you know, the
Speaker 1: first things being tried was this little for your tomato.
Speaker 1: But now there definitely are people who are trying to
Speaker 1: use regular breeding things, you know, this genomic selection thing
Speaker 1: I mentioned, and other things to improve the taste that's
Speaker 1: been lost over time. So if you read academic journals,
Speaker 1: you'll see that there are a lot of small academic
Speaker 1: groups working on these things to try to make those things.
Speaker 1: But the question is how do you get that through
Speaker 1: the regulations? And you're not going to be as a
Speaker 1: small academic and a market that stuff. It's gonna wind
Speaker 1: up with a big company, and that big company has
Speaker 1: got to make sure that it ships right and it
Speaker 1: looks right and all of that kind of thing. So
Speaker 1: there are some hurdles. But with this whole crisper new
Speaker 1: approach to genetic engineering, you know, and gene editing, we
Speaker 1: may be able to come up with some of those things.
Speaker 1: But then I do want to ask, you know, where
Speaker 1: is the public going to be on the natural versus artificial? Okay,
Speaker 1: I think if this thing tasted wonderful, oh there you go.
Speaker 1: I think it would be a green versus purple state. No,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know what it would be,
Speaker 1: but it would be you know, people would differ. Right
Speaker 1: and wait a minute, this is totally unnatural. This is
Speaker 1: not a strawberry, but it tastes great. I think people
Speaker 1: will take this tastes great, and I'm buying it, you know.
Speaker 1: So you know, I think that if you could produce
Speaker 1: something really good, and there are companies doing this now,
Speaker 1: some of them are venture capital companies have gotten investments
Speaker 1: from big companies. My senses, in the next ten years
Speaker 1: we will see um, some fruits and vegetables coming out
Speaker 1: that really do taste better. I sure hope. So just
Speaker 1: that might be your next investment, man, I'm into it. Okay,
Speaker 1: last question, last question for Crins. Say, all right, now,
Speaker 1: what's going on with the strawberries and the fish? Okay. So,
Speaker 1: so one of the big deals is that sometimes you
Speaker 1: get a frost in the early season or something like that,
Speaker 1: and you don't want your produce to just turn to mush,
Speaker 1: right because of ice crystals forming. So I think there's
Speaker 1: been some of this kind of talk that you know,
Speaker 1: some of these very arctic fish and stuff have anti
Speaker 1: freeze proteins, and the idea would be, can you move
Speaker 1: those genes for this anti freeze into something else right
Speaker 1: and make it? But the first that's not on the market,
Speaker 1: That is not I've never been on the market. There
Speaker 1: was a guy who early on, many many years ago
Speaker 1: came up with what's called ice minus bacteria that wouldn't
Speaker 1: nuclear you know, so when you know, one thing that
Speaker 1: happens is you know, in terms of that frost affecting
Speaker 1: your crop, is that it nucleates, you know, so the
Speaker 1: ice forms and then it proliferates. So if it's certain
Speaker 1: bacteria that allow that to happen more than others, so
Speaker 1: you could replace one with another. I mean they use
Speaker 1: it apparently now where they have strains of when they
Speaker 1: make ice, you know, snow, artificial snow, they put some
Speaker 1: bacteria and it makes it work better. Yeah, spraying spray
Speaker 1: stuff on the wing of an airplane or something. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm talking here this bitter sweet and timber ridge. I
Speaker 1: can't remember the Boying Mountain when they got to make snow.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm saying. If you had something
Speaker 1: that would inhibit ice grol inhibit yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm talking a little out of turn. This is not
Speaker 1: my area. But just to say that that that that bacteria.
Speaker 1: You know, the story early on was, you know, because
Speaker 1: of regulations, the sky shows up in like space suit
Speaker 1: to put out these bacteria on the plants, and everybody
Speaker 1: thinks it must be really dangerous because space. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to see a space suit on your
Speaker 1: farm field. Something's going wrong, right, yeah, all right, man,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joined elves. Great, okay, thank you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is fun. I'm feeling better about everything. Good, I'm
Speaker 1: feeling more complicated about everything. We're definitely have to have
Speaker 1: Fred on again. This is fun. Come out to my
Speaker 1: taste time with the meat tasty finally get that laughing
Speaker 1: around meeting here and we'll we'll have fred on talking
Speaker 1: about that. Oh yeah, maybe you should gear up for
Speaker 1: a lab grown a whole bunch about start up. You
Speaker 1: can come back up part all right, stay too, Part
Speaker 1: two Fred and Lab grown Meat alright, coming soon