Frank von Hippel reveals how Nazi-developed organophosphates still poison migrant farm workers today, while WWII-era pesticides like glyphosate—originally weaponized in Vietnam’s Operation Ranch Hand—now persist in U.S. crops, linked to birth defects and childhood neurotoxicity. The "grasshopper effect" traps PCBs in Arctic wildlife, exposing indigenous hunters to dangerous levels since the 1980s. Military chemical legacies, from Fritz Haber’s chlorine gas to DDT-resistant malaria mosquitoes, show how science’s dual-use risks reshape health and economies, with Europe’s glyphosate ban contrasting sharply against U.S. corporate-driven agriculture. The cost of shortcuts—monocultures, systemic pesticides, and unchecked contamination—may outlast the crops they’re meant to protect. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, for me it was actually lots of hair and it was brown and then I had my first kid and then overnight it went gray and then I had my second kid and it went white.
Your book, The Chemical Age, touches on a lot of subjects that I find very fascinating, particularly pesticides.
I'm consistently terrified of pesticides.
I ran into a man once that I met on a ranch, and he had an artificial thigh bone.
his femur had been replaced with like a piece of metal and like a metal bone and he told me he got bone cancer from pesticides they use on a golf course that got into local water supply and a bunch of people in that area got cancer and there was like some large-scale lawsuit against the I don't know if it was against the chemical company or the golf course or both but I remember thinking Whoa!
Okay, I didn't even think of that.
Like, of course, if you're going to have all that green grass, you have to do something about the weeds, you have to do something about the bugs.
All that stuff is terrifying.
When I was listening to your podcast, the Science History Podcast, and your friend was interviewing you, who was it?
Pete Myers was interviewing you, and you were talking about the prevalence of these pesticides and chemicals that we use all over the world, and he said...
I think his exact quote was, am I wrong in saying that there's a square centimeter of this planet that's not somehow or another polluted by humans and our chemicals?
And you think of, you've been to Alaska, and you go to Alaska, it looks pristine, it's beautiful, and you think everything is perfectly clean, but in fact, even the most remote places in the world, like Alaska, are getting atmospherically deposited chemicals, including pesticides, that are used at lower latitude.
And so there really isn't anywhere on the earth that's not polluted, unfortunately.
And you're explaining the way these chemicals get into the atmosphere and then get distributed all over the world, akin to a still, like a whiskey or a moonshine still.
If you go back and you look at an old still, the way it works, you would have a heat source, like a Bunsen burner, that's heating up a liquid.
And that liquid volatizes.
Some of it evaporates into a gas.
And then that is connected via a glass tube to a glass ball that has cold water on it.
And that whatever vaporizes from that heat is going to condense on that cold surface where the cold water is.
So that's the basics of how you would make a distillery.
And the Earth works really in the same way.
So the equator is the part of the Earth that's most directly facing the Sun.
It's getting the most intense solar radiation.
So you have these contaminants, like many pesticides, PCBs, a lot of other things, that some portion of them will volatize.
They'll become a gas.
And they'll be in the atmosphere, they'll move in the atmosphere, and then they'll condense out of the atmosphere when it gets colder, so when it's wintertime.
And it'll be a little higher in latitude.
And the next summer, they'll volatize again, they'll evaporate again, and they'll move north again.
It's called the grasshopper effect.
And so over some number of years, they moved their way north.
When they get to the North Pole to the South Pole, those are hemispheric sinks for these contaminants.
It's cold year-round.
And so the amount of deposition from the atmosphere is far greater than the amount of evaporation.
And therefore, the poles have the highest concentrations of certain classes of these so-called persistent organic pollutants.
They're the ones that are relatively light that can move through the atmosphere.
As a result, and these are also fat-soluble, so they get into the food web, and as you go up each food trophic level, you end up with higher and higher concentrations.
So the animals with the highest concentrations of these certain kinds of persistent organic pollutants on Earth are these high-trophic level, long-lived animals in the Arctic, like the killer whale and the polar bear.
That'll have millions of times the background concentration of these contaminants.
Things like DDT, mercury, a lot of other chemicals, a lot of pesticides, flame retardant chemicals, and so on.
No, it's a really sad case of environmental injustice because you have subsistence peoples, the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, that they're living off the marine environment.
They're eating bowhead whale and walrus and ice seals and polar bear.
And every single one of their meals, they're getting in the fat, in the rendered oil.
They take the blubber and they render oil, which goes on to all of their meals.
Every single meal, they're getting hundreds of parts per billion of PCBs and pesticides and things like that.
So it's just grossly unfair when you think about it, because they never used these chemicals.
They didn't benefit economically from these chemicals, and yet they're subject to some of the highest concentrations in the world.
Yeah, actually the way this whole problem was discovered was in the 1980s, scientists in Canada wanted to understand breast milk contamination of women who lived in southern Canada in the industrial and agricultural areas of Canada.
And so they were thinking, where can we find a reference population of people who have no exposure to these chemicals?
So they decided to go to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada to look at the Inuit people that live there.
And they're surprised to find that the women on Baffin Island, their breast milk contained 10 to 20 times higher concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs and mercury than the women who lived in the industrial areas where these chemicals were used.
So that was the first kind of global alert that actually we're poisoning.
Our people of the Arctic were poisoning them.
And that's how the rights of indigenous people in the Arctic to live in a clean environment became part of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
There's representatives from these tribes who go to the negotiations every time.
It's because of this problem.
It's called global distillation because of this fact that it's like a still, the way that it works.
Yeah, and actually the problem is kind of twofold.
So we've talked about one aspect of it, which is this atmospheric transport of contaminants.
But the other aspect of it is there are also thousands of locally contaminated sites in the Arctic.
I do a lot of work on this.
Things like These sites have terrible problems with contamination and typically when the military pulled out of them, they just left everything behind.
We have sites we've worked in in Alaska where there's just fields of barrels, and you don't know what's in the barrels, and they're leaking, and you test it, and you find there's all kinds of nasty things, flame retardants and pesticides and PCBs.
So large-scale pesticide use started in the 1880s, and at that time they were based on metals and metalloids, so naturally occurring toxic metals that would kill insects or kill fungal pests, things like that.
And those are actually quite dangerous, things like lead and arsenic being used in these pesticides.
They were dangerous because they ended up on the food.
So you'd buy an apple and if you didn't wash it well, you'd get a dose of lead poisoning.
That continued until about World War II. And in World War II, we made a dramatic shift from using these metal-based products to using synthetic organic compounds.
So in World War II, we saw the origin of the organochlorine compounds and the organophosphate compounds.
And those really became the basis for pesticide use then.
And then they were broadcast all over the environment following World War II and until today.
So, the very first commercial pesticide was actually copper-based pesticide, and it was used in France to stop the mildew that was destroying the vineyards.
And once it was found that it could destroy, it was called a water mold, once it was found that it could destroy the water mold and save the vineyards, scientists realized you could also use it against the potato blight, which had caused the famine in Ireland in the 1840s and other famines around the world.
So it became a very powerful tool to prevent famine.
And one thing I like to look back on is you can think, why did people poison the world like this with these horrible things?
But really, Their motivations initially were quite positive.
They were trying to stop famine.
Ireland had just been through this devastating famine.
They were trying to stop infectious diseases that were vectored by insects, things like malaria and yellow fever.
So the motivation was good, but unfortunately the use for public health, instead of just using it for public health, we started using it in the house for convenience for everything.
It is really crazy when you think that the human species has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and it took till 1880 before we decided to fuck everything up with pesticides.
Yeah, and we fuck things up pretty fast because now we have a world that is, like you said, anywhere you go in this world you're going to find contaminated animals.
You go to Antarctica and you measure pesticides in penguins and their eggs and you'll find very high concentrations.
And, in fact, the cancer rates are quite high among the people who are subsistence hunters in the Arctic.
And that's really how I got involved with this kind of work, is that people reported very high cancer rates, also high rates of developmental disorders that could be due to these chemicals disrupting development in the womb.
And so there are groups that bring together teams of scientists to work on this.
I was brought in as an ecotoxicologist to work on some aspects of this.
But yeah, there's quite a few health problems associated with this.
And are these subsistence hunters, are they free of all the other problems that many Inuit folks have in terms of like cigarettes and alcohol and a lot of people that have been introduced to some of the vices of the Western world?
It's a contributing factor, and it's very hard to parse it out.
And actually, this is a justification the government often uses to say, well...
It's not the contaminants from this military site that's causing the problem.
They'll say, look, the cancer rates are no higher in this village that's next to the military site than they are in this village that's away from the military site.
But you can't actually solve the problem with epidemiology.
We're talking about tiny communities.
The villages I work in typically are no more than 800 people.
And so how can you do a proper study of a rare health effect when you have a small population?
So I'm sure it's contributing to the health problems, and unfortunately people use the fact that there are these other issues that cause health problems like smoking in order to justify not doing anything about the pollution.
In fact, when we fly into these villages in small airplanes, there's typically a state trooper searching through, looking to see if anyone's bringing alcohol in.
So is there any where you can study that has this issue with the pollutants but doesn't have the issue with alcoholism and is there a village that's figured it out and has avoided the alcohol?
I just was wondering if there was a place where you could examine only the contaminants if somehow or another these people had figured out how to be free of the worst advice.
And we're working with migrant farm workers there.
And so if you think about the pesticides that were common when we were kids and a little bit earlier, these organochlorine pesticides like DDT, They were pretty safe to handle.
And the problem was that they were destroying wildlife, causing species to go extinct.
It's why the bald eagle almost went extinct, why the peregrine falcon almost went extinct.
It was from DDT. And so countries, including the United States, phased those chemicals out.
They were replaced by the organophosphate chemicals, pesticides.
And these were developed by Nazi scientists during World War II. They're very similar to the Nazi nerve gas poisons like tabin and sarin.
And those chemicals are incredibly toxic, but they break down faster in the environment.
So we ended up doing a trade-off where the organochlorines would end up as residues on food and consumers would end up with two unacceptable levels.
Like if you go back into the 1960s, The average American had 12 parts per million DDT in their body fat.
And that's the toxic level of DDT, and that was the average.
So really terrible consequences for health.
So in order to prevent that, we switched to organophosphates.
But then that caused another problem, because then we're asking the farm workers, instead of using this relatively safe chemical to use, to use something that's quite dangerous.
A lot of people get killed during application.
And the farmworkers are some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
They're typically migrants from Mexico or other parts of Latin America.
They're coming up.
They're working incredibly hard.
They don't have the right protective equipment.
And then they're spraying these chemicals that are incredibly poisonous.
So I also work on that, on health effects of pesticides in the border region, both with migrant farmworker communities and with some of the tribes there.
To kill the body louse because lice transmit typhus.
And so to prevent epidemic typhus during the war and after the war, we used massive amounts of DDT. To spray the people down?
Spray the people down.
In fact, the very first time a typhus epidemic was stopped in its tracks, It was in Naples in December 1943 to February 1944. Military just conquered Naples.
Neapolitans had been living in caverns by the tens of thousands under the city during the bombardment.
And so, of course, if you're crowded and dirty and you're living in a cavern with thousands of other people, there's going to be body lice.
And that caused an outbreak of typhus.
So, the U.S. military set up these de-lousing stations where we literally sprayed the DDT powder on every single person in Naples and stopped typhus in its tracks.
Very first time.
Before that, typhus had decided the outcome of more wars than any other factor.
It is the companion of war.
It's also, if you go back to the Irish potato famine, People don't really die of hunger when they're starving to death.
They die of disease.
So their immune system is compromised.
And the Irish died, over a million Irish died during the famine from typhus and from relapsing fever, both of which are vectored by the body loss.
People were terrified because, you know, there's some of the areas in Skid Row that are literally thousands and thousands of people in these areas are homeless.
I mean, it's the craziest scene you've ever seen.
It's just tents and garbage and it's horrific.
And apparently some of the people have tested positive for typhus.
Yeah, they actually weren't worried about shielding food back then, but if you were sprayed down with DDT, even if you had some food there, that one exposure wouldn't be that big of a deal.
And arsenic was actually one of the—it's a metalloid.
It's one of the metalloids that was used in fungicides, still is actually in many places.
So you can also get it from agricultural use.
And it's also in background levels, high in background levels in some places like Bangladesh, parts of Alaska, parts of Arizona, Navajo Nation, for example.
So there's places in— In the world where the natural levels are unacceptably high, and then that's where you get in your drinking water.
So people are usually exposed to arsenic through water.
But if you go back, say, 20 years, oftentimes they weren't.
You may remember the protest movement led by Cesar Chavez.
In Southern California for the migrant farm workers and the great boycott in the 1980s.
And what that was about was the spraying of these incredibly toxic chemicals without protective gear, without proper training, and people were getting exposed to really high levels.
But even today, if you're a farm worker with protective gear, and you're in a place like, I work in Yuma, Arizona, where there's agriculture all year round, and those people are getting exposed to aerial applications and handheld applications of pesticides all year round.
So even if you have gear, you take off your gear, you go home to your family, you're right next to the spraying.
So the one that most people talk about is integrated pest management.
And with that kind of alternative, you use the least amount and the least toxic pesticide and only where it's necessary.
So you're trying to completely minimize pesticide use.
And you use things like spiders and birds and other insects that will— They bring in spiders?
Yeah, that will eat the pest insects.
So if you think about spraying down a field with a nasty pesticide where you kill all the arthropods, all the insects and the spiders and so on, you're not just killing the pests like the grasshopper that's eating the food.
You're also killing the insects that eat the grasshopper.
You're killing the wasp that parasitizes the grasshopper.
So you're losing that biological control.
And so integrated pest management combines biological control of using animals to control the pest animals with minimal focused use of pesticides.
Well, if it's a massive flock of birds, like you see with starlings, where you have thousands of them.
But it's different with things like geese that are migrating or cranes that are migrating, where they're going for that aerodynamic position in the group.
Like if you look at honeybees, how do honeybees communicate and navigate about where their food is?
It's remarkable.
It was discovered by a guy named Von Frisch.
She won the Nobel Prize for this along with Nico Timbergen and Conrad Lorenz.
They were the only people that ever won the Nobel Prize in something to do with animal behavior.
And what Von Frisch found is that honeybees, when they go out, the workers are foraging, they're trying to find a good nectar source.
So they find some good flowers, they come back to the hive, and they then communicate where that food is with something called the waggle dance.
But it's remarkable because it's kind of an abstract language.
They do the dance on the vertical honeycomb.
And they transpose the angle from where you have to fly relative to the sun to the vertical honeycomb.
So they act like the sun is completely vertically above the honeycomb.
And let's say they had to fly 10 degrees to the right of the sun to get to the flower.
Then they dance 10 degrees to the right of the vertical of the honeycomb.
And they can dance for hours, but of course the sun is moving, but they move their dance to coordinate with where the sun would be.
They know where the sun would be internally in their brain, and they transpose their dance for that.
But they don't just communicate the angle to fly, they also communicate how far to fly.
And it's really about how much energy you need to fly.
Because if there's a headwind, it takes more energy.
And if there's a tailwind, it takes less energy.
So the intensity of the waggle dance tells the other bees how much energy you need to fly there.
And then when the workers leave the hive, they know the angle to go and they know how much energy to expend to get there.
But bees can also navigate by polarized light.
So if the sun is completely covered up with clouds, they still know where the sun is by the polarization of light.
They still do the waggle dance based on that.
And they can also navigate by landmarks, and the landmarks actually will take precedence, so you can screw them up.
You can have a landmark out there, and then they do the waggle dance, and then you move the landmark, and when they come out, they'll follow the landmark and go to the wrong place.
I've seen the leafcutter ants, when they take it and they fill it with concrete, and they show that there's areas that they have that are specifically designed to ferment the leaves.
I mean, I think they're some of the most complex and amazing life forms on this planet.
And it's just so weird that we know so little about particularly ants, like how they're communicating and how they're figuring out how to do this uniformly.
Like leafcutter ants that are nowhere near.
It's not like one colony figured it out.
The dad told the son, the son told the daughter.
No, they're far away from each other and they have the same methods.
Yeah, in a leafcutter ant colony, it'll stretch a huge distance through the rainforest.
They make these paths.
You can easily find a colony because they clear all the vegetation from their path, and the path will be several inches wide, and it's working its way to whatever tree they're working on and back.
You see these columns of millions of these ants marching along with flowers or leaves, and that poor tree is naked.
There's another weird one that happens when some of them get infected with cordyceps mushrooms.
It's different ants, but I think it's in the Amazon, where they realize that this ant is infected with these mushrooms, so they take it far out of town so that when it explodes and blows spores up in the air, they're not there.
They literally spring forth out of the ant's body like a leaf, like a tree.
Look at that.
That's a dead ant that has this cordyceps mushroom.
There's many types of cordyceps mushrooms, but some cordyceps mushrooms, they grow on caterpillars, and they're actually beneficial for humans for physical endurance.
They optimize oxygen absorption.
My company, Onnit, actually, we sell a product called Shroom Tech.
That is a cordyceps mushroom-based product that has B12 and other adaptogens in it, but it's a great workout supplement, and it's based on the cordyceps mushroom.
And the way we get it, they farm it off of caterpillars, which is crazy.
And the way they found this is high-altitude herding populations were noticing that their cattle were eating these mushrooms, and they were more active.
And so then they're like, well, let's try it.
And they started eating them.
But these weirdos, they grow inside these ants' bodies.
And then they explode.
And they spray the spores.
And they infect more ants.
But it kills the ant.
And then look at that one in the upper middle, Jamie.
Look at that.
So it's just all these little arms of this cordyceps mushroom growing out of this ant's body.
See, they get infected, and then these things grow.
They do a time-lapse video of it.
Our planet, Fungus, and it's a clip from Netflix, so these spores grow in this time-lapse, and you get a chance to see how this parasitic fungus infects, and it's a murderous fungus.
I mean, it killed the ant, and then it infects his little body and grows out, and I guess it's just hoping there's other ants nearby so it can get them.
Yeah, and the amazing thing is we know very little about small and microscopic life.
And so, for example, there's something like 10,000 species of microbial fungi and things that are described and scientifically named.
But you can find 5,000 unknown species in a cc of soil.
Really?
Unknown?
Unknown.
Just, you know, people will sequence them to figure out, we don't know what this is yet.
You look at insects, and here are insects, you would think we would know all the insects.
But when scientists go down to the rainforest, they'll set up a net under a rainforest tree, fumigate it to kill the insects, collect all the insects that fall out.
And a lot of times, 30-40% of the insects are new to science.
So, you know, we know most of the mammals.
We know most of the birds.
We're down to maybe a new mammal discovery every year or two, a new bird every year or two.
The Amazon is such, well, any of the rainforests are so fascinating in that they do have this insanely dense population of life.
I have a friend who went to Guyana and he stayed in the rainforest for a couple of weeks and filming this, my friend Steve Rinello, this television show, Meat Eater.
On Netflix.
And one of the things that he said, the craziest part that was, you know, really surprising was how loud the jungle is at night.
He's like, you'd think, like, at nighttime, you go to sleep, it's going to be quiet like the forest.
He goes, it's screaming.
It's just bugs and birds and monkeys and all these nocturnal creatures.
If you're there when the cicadas are out, and oftentimes they're emerging on these prime number years, so some years will be low, some years will be very high, it can be deafening.
You can have to shout to hear each other when the cicadas are out.
And then you get to hour, hour and a half before sunrise, and you start to get the howler monkeys going off, and they have their morning chorus.
And then half an hour before sunrise, the birds are starting their dawn chorus.
And then everything quiets down about an hour, hour and a half after sunrise.
And it's pretty quiet until evening again.
And it depends which rainforest you're in.
So if you're in Africa, same thing goes on, different species.
So if you're in the Amazon, you're going to hear the howler monkeys in the morning.
If you're in Africa, tropical Africa, you'll hear the colobus monkeys in the morning.
And also, what's interesting is how many pharmaceutical drugs that can benefit people are derived from plants that they find in the rainforest, and they believe there's so many more to be discovered if we get there before they chop everything down.
Now, when they're extracting this stuff and they're turning these into pharmaceutical drugs, What is the impact that that has on the area?
Is there a danger when they find something that they can use and extract as a drug?
How do they parse that out?
How do they find when they have a spot where this particular plant grows?
Do they just take it, extract it, and then use it to make pharmaceutical drugs in a compounding pharmacy or through some scientific method?
What happens to all the other plants that are in those areas and is there a risk that as they're extracting the plants they use to make these pharmaceuticals that they're screwing up the whole ecosystem of this area and there might be other plants that can do different things that they're now dooming to death because they're focusing on this one drug that's really good for arthritis or whatever?
And so the most efficient way to find drugs in the rainforest would be to find what the locals use, what plants do they use for different things.
And there's probably a good chance that...
And then once that's done, unfortunately, the history has been that pharmaceutical companies then take those plants back to the lab, and then that's the end of the story for the locals.
And really, that resource is coming from them.
They should get some economic benefit from that.
There are some small companies that are trying to do this now.
They're trying to feed money back to the communities where they come from.
But if you want people to protect the rainforest, they have to have an economic incentive to do so.
And one of those incentives can be around pharmaceuticals.
I used to work in a rainforest in Western Kenya, and there were many problems associated with people girdling trees because a lot of the medicines come from the bark.
So they would cut the bark completely around the tree within reach.
All the bark they could reach, they would cut out.
And then you have this 500-year-old tree that dies because it doesn't have the bark anymore, which it needs for moving nutrients around.
So, yeah, it can, of course, damage the forest, but I think one of the most important things is not just taking that resource in a responsible way for the environment, but also in a responsible way for the people who live there, who made these discoveries over thousands of years.
Yeah, so how do you incentivize pharmaceutical companies to bring in these folks that live in this area and incorporate them and actually include them in the profits?
Because if they don't have to do it, especially when you're going to a place like the Amazon, which is notorious for them taking advantage of the indigenous people and having these horrific abusive relationships, I'm sure you're I'm aware of the guy who got murdered in the Amazon just the other day.
He got shot by this tribe and he was actually one of the people that's trying to protect these uncontacted tribes and just leave them alone.
Unfortunately, it's hard for them to recognize whether or not this is a guy that's there for the oil companies or the cattle companies because they've had these horrific relationships with these companies that are trying to exploit them and their resources.
And so they shot this guy and killed him with an arrow.
Usually it's the gold miners who are killing the environmentalists.
So I don't know the answer to your question because I don't know how to motivate businesses to do the right thing.
I think we have a long history on this planet of businesses doing the wrong thing when they get the power and not thinking responsibly about how to do what they're doing sustainably.
And also, I would worry that, I mean, I don't know if this is a good worry or if I'm being ridiculous, but that if they did hit some sort of a windfall, if they found some area of the Amazon where they have this plant that you can make pharmaceutical drugs out of and it's incredibly valuable,
and so there's an enormous amount of profit for this village, You don't want a situation like you have in these Native American communities where a tribe allows a casino to come in and then it sort of bastardizes what the reservation used to be or the tribe used to be.
Now you have all these people.
Running around driving Mercedes and making all this money off of people gambling, but the original way of life is gone.
Now, obviously, with Native Americans, there's a lot more complicated problems that go way back from, you know, the genocide, the fact that they were taken over by the settlers and all the treaties that were broken and all the various injustices that were done to them.
You've got this whole weird casino culture.
I don't want to live in a subsistence jungle tribe in the middle of the Amazon, but that's how they live and they love it.
They thrive that way and that's the only life they've ever known.
If we all of a sudden gave them money And you go back and now they're wearing Under Armour t-shirts and they have iPads and they're partying and playing music and they have internet connections and their way of life is gone.
The argument is, is that good or is that bad?
Is that progress?
I don't know.
I don't want to live in a hut.
I think it's awesome that there's people that live off the land the way they've lived for thousands and thousands of years.
When you see those photos of those uncontacted tribes, there's one incredible photo of these folks that are pointing their bows and arrows.
It's either a drone or a helicopter that's taking photos.
And I'm like, wow, what a weird convergence of the past and the present.
And how does this play out?
Would it be good if they were educated about modern electronics and medicine and the internet and all these different?
Or would it be better if you leave them alone?
It's a conundrum.
Is that the photo?
Yeah, look at that.
Goddamn, that's cool.
I mean, this dude has a big fistful of arrows.
There's a couple of them.
And that's the one that I've seen before, that one where these people all have body paint on.
I think part of the answer, though, is can the technology be integrated in a way that fits with the culture, and can they make it part of their culture?
There's, I think the guy's name is Commander Maurice Vidal Portman.
He was this English explorer slash pervert who would go to these islands and dress these guys up and take pictures with them and do all kinds of weird shit.
And weird sexual stuff too, like measuring their penises and their balls.
There he is.
And so he traveled around.
There he is right there.
Look at that guy.
Looks like a little freak.
He got a lot of people sick and kidnapped some folks.
And there was a lot.
And they wound up getting rid of him.
And now I think they probably have...
Some stories that they passed down about what happens when white people show up in boats.
So when that poor fuck got out trying to bring Bibles, they probably had this story about white people showing up in boats that ruin your life.
And it's probably a part of their history and their lore and their legends that they passed down.
Yeah, all the stuff that goes along with these sort of nomadic tribal people.
Yeah.
But it's also cool to see...
When you see those guys with the painted bodies pointing the bows and arrows, those folks are probably living exactly the same way people 10,000 years ago lived.
It seems like they don't have any metal.
It seems like they're using the natural materials to make their bows and arrows, and they're covering themselves with pigments that they make from plants.
You're kind of reminding me of our discussion earlier about the indigenous people in the Arctic.
And when European explorers first got to Greenland and Baffin Island and places like that, the locals basically didn't have any heart disease because their marine diet was so protective of the heart.
All of these omega-3 fatty acids, all of the wonderful things you get from fish.
And so here they had one of the healthiest diets in the world, and then now it still has those healthy elements, but it also has unhealthy elements because of the way that we've polluted the world.
So it's kind of the same sort of change where things are dramatically different than they were not very long ago.
It's crazy that we have them a double whammy too, right?
They get the pesticides and then they get all our vices as well.
And the Native Americans, same thing in terms of the vices.
It's such a bummer.
When you think about alcoholism amongst Native American populations and also Inuits, Eskimos, there's so many different folks that have problems with all these things that we've brought to them.
And it ruins our understanding of their health.
Because as you were saying, the low instances of heart disease, that was confusing to people because they're like, wait a minute, folks don't eat any vegetables.
You were also, in your book and in the podcast, you guys brought up Fritz Haber.
He's a guy that I've talked about on this podcast multiple times because I listened to a Radiolab podcast where they...
I think the podcast was called Good and Evil, but it was basically highlighting...
People that have done amazing things but also awful things.
And he's like literally one of the best examples because he was being...
He was going to be awarded the Nobel Prize for this method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere at the same time he was wanted for crimes against humanity.
So, the backstory of this is that the two greatest physical chemists in the world before World War I were Fritz Haber and Walter Nernst, both in Germany.
And Germany had the best chemistry in the world, the best physics in the world, the best biology in the world.
It was the highlight of science around the world.
And Haber and Nernst were racing each other to see who could be the first one to extract usable amounts of nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer, to make ammonium.
And they were playing around with incredibly high pressures, incredibly high temperatures, and Haber got there first.
And so he figured out how to do this.
And that really averted world hunger because before nitrogen could be extracted from the air, the air is 80% nitrogen.
So before we could pull that out of the air, fertilizers came mostly from caliche deposits in northern Chile.
They had to be, the old bird droppings and things that had to be, they were accumulated over millions of years, had to be shipped to wherever you wanted to do your farming.
And also, even people, they would use remnants from battlefields, human corpses, for fertilizing.
So we were in a situation where the world was constantly hungry.
People were starving every year because of a lack of food.
And Haber solved that problem.
So that initiated the Green Revolution, the mining of nitrogen from the air, the making of artificial fertilizers.
And so that was done a few years before World War I. And when World War I broke out, the Kaiser first assigned Nertz to develop chemical weapons for the German military, and he failed.
He was unable to make effective chemical weapons.
We don't know whether he was unable because he was one of the two greatest chemists in the world.
It seems unlikely to me that he couldn't figure it out, or whether he just didn't want to do it, and so he purposely failed.
So when he failed, Haber had just succeeded in his assignment for the German military of making an effective antifreeze for the German military vehicles that were operating in the winter fighting against Russia.
And so they had this problem that had to be solved and Haber solved it of making antifreeze.
So the Kaiser assigned Haber the task of developing chemical weapons for the German military.
And he started working with chlorine gas.
And chlorine gas, because it's heavy, so if you release it, it'll stay near the ground.
It's completely lethal.
And started testing it.
And in fact, his assistant was my great-grandfather, James Franck.
And Franck and other scientists would put on gas masks, and they would expose themselves to these These chemical weapons and figure out how effective the gas masks were, how effective the- They self-tested.
They self-tested, and it was incredibly dangerous, as you can imagine.
So through these tests, Haber figured out that you need a slight, slight breeze to deliver this weapon.
If you could see grass bending in the wind, it was too strong of a wind.
And so then they went to Belgium, to the battlefront in Belgium, And wait until the wind was just right.
And then they released the chlorine gas from cylinders, thousands of cylinders.
Then this gas just started marching its way slowly towards the British lines.
And it was mostly British colonial troops, Algerians and And British soldiers.
And at first, the British soldiers started firing their weapons into the gas.
So the soldiers on the German line said they'd never heard so much gunfire in the war, as happened when that gas was coming to them.
They tried to stop it by shooting machine guns and everything they had.
Of course, that wouldn't stop it.
And then some of the troops fled.
Some of the troops charged into the gas, and those died.
So there were probably 10,000 People who died, soldiers who died immediately, and that tens of thousands of casualties.
And that was the beginning of...
That was the first use of a weapon of mass destruction, and it was the beginning of the modern use of chemical weapons in war.
After that victory at, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, Y-R-P-E-S in Belgium, where that battle took place, after the victory there, he and his colleagues celebrated at their home.
And his wife went outside with his service revolver and shot herself in the head, killed herself, in front of their son, Herman.
So she was completely opposed to the use of development and use of chemical weapons.
That was part of it.
But also, she was a prominent chemist herself.
She gave it up to Mary Haber.
And he was also having a dalliance with his future wife.
So there are lots of things going on, but she killed herself.
He left that very night to deploy gas weapons on the Eastern Front against the Russians.
You know, speaking of pollutants and war and chemicals, there was this area that we were talking about once in the podcast that's the size of Paris and France that is uninhabitable because of munitions.
I think it's from War War II.
And there's so much unexploded munitions and so many bombs were dropped there and so much chemicals got released into the environment and in the atmosphere and into the soil and everything that it's uninhabitable.
Yeah, so the first time that I went out to work in the Aleutians, you know, the chain of islands that go off of Alaska, I flew out there with a couple of other biologists – Everyone else on the plane were munitions people.
They were going out there to look for unexploded ordnance because the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands during World War II as the only American soil taken over by a foreign power.
And that's how the war in the Aleutians happened.
The reason why there's a road from the lower 48 to Alaska is the U.S. Army built the ALCAN, the Alaska-Canadian Highway, to get the military up there to fight the Japanese.
And so when I flew out there the first time, the military was giving the island back to the Aleut tribe from whom they had taken it.
And they had to find the unexploded ordnance, all these bombs and things that were left there.
So we were told, look, when you're doing your biology out there, please let us know if you find the ordnance.
We had GPSs with us because we were doing the science.
We found a lot of unexploded ordnance and just marked everything with GPS, gave it to the military so they could go out and clean.
But you'd also find bombs, not just from World War II, but then afterwards in the Cold War, this particular island, Adak, became a very important Navy site.
And during World War II, Adak Island actually was the largest community in all of Alaska.
That was a staging ground for the American armada that then attacked the Japanese fleet and fought together Japanese out of the Aleutians.
So given that there were 65,000 soldiers there during the war and after the war was a very important Cold War military base, there's just incredible stuff there.
We found these bunkers that That, you know, you could go in.
Military wasn't there anymore.
You go in these bunkers, they're flooded with water, and there's still beer sitting on the counter.
There's still plates of food from decades ago that are just sitting there.
So when the tribe went back to this island, you have 120 people maybe go back, and they get to choose from housing that used to house 65,000 people.
It was the farthest west McDonald's in the world.
I just saw you go by.
There it is.
It's not there anymore, but there was a McDonald's there that was the farthest west in the world because this island is just a couple of degrees from the hemisphere.
That a lot of the rainforest is actually because people grew those plants specifically.
And it created a rainforest.
And then that rainforest engulfed their civilization.
Well, when you find – also they have these irrigation channels that they find with the LIDAR when they realize, oh, look at this.
There's grids.
Like these people who live there and they're not even sure who those people were.
What was the movie that came out a few years ago about the guy who found the gold city?
It was a few years ago about a traveler from England, from Great Britain, that had come down to the Amazon and he found this lost tribe and there was all this gold there and I think the original guy had lost city of...
So, this is actually kind of an interesting movie about this guy who goes down there and the idea is there was a city that existed and then by the time he had returned...
I think the theory is that European explorers had given these people diseases and smallpox and the like and it wiped out like enormous swaths of the population almost instantly within you know 10 years there was nothing left and then the jungle just overtook whatever civilization they had and then when you know we're going back and looking at it through lidar that's what we're seeing we're seeing hundreds of years later that there's very little evidence And that's
When Europeans came over with slaves, they brought over typhus, they brought over yellow fever, they brought over malaria.
There was one year in the 1500s when 2 million indigenous Mexicans died from typhus.
And these were all brought over by Europeans.
One year.
One year, 2 million people in Mexico, indigenous people, died from typhus.
And, you know, these were people who were, you would say, they're epidemiologically naive to the disease.
So people colonized the Americas from Asia, you know, whatever, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 years ago, and they hadn't experienced these diseases in that entire history.
So they had no resistance to them.
So when yellow fever came over, when influenza came over, when all of that, it just wiped out these populations.
And so that's why Europeans were able to conquer the Americas so quickly because the people were dead mostly before the battles could even take place.
Most of the population had been wiped out.
And this happens even more recently, like St. Lawrence Island, where I do a lot of work in the Bering Sea.
In the 1918 influenza epidemic, the Spanish flu epidemic, that wiped out most of the island.
Malaria has actually killed more people than any other disease in human history.
And the origin of that is when, about 10,000 years ago, when people started agriculture, then people were clustered around water sources because you need water to grow crops.
So you have a relatively dense population of people around water sources.
The mosquito that vectors malaria is called anopheles, which in Greek means good for nothing.
And it was actually named before it was discovered to be the vector of malaria.
And so malaria has been an epidemic proportion disease for humanity for about 10,000 years since the origin of agriculture.
Then as people moved around, the malaria moved with them.
In around 1828, I think it was, two French chemists extracted quinine and cinchonine from the cinchona plant, which came from Peru.
And the indigenous people of Peru had already been using this plant to treat what they called relapsing fever, which is malaria, a fever that comes and goes and comes and goes.
And the first European to use it was the Spanish viceroy's wife was treated with this to cure her of malaria.
That was in the 1500s.
So Jesuits brought cinchona bark from Peru to Europe, but it took a couple of hundred years before these French scientists were able to extract two of the four active ingredients in the bark, which is quinine and cinchonine.
And they then were able to use that to diagnose malaria and also to treat malaria.
And once there was a treatment available for malaria, then not much happened in terms of how it led to separation of people until it was discovered that Anopheles vectors malaria.
So Ronald Ross made that discovery in India in the 1890s.
Once that discovery was made, it was quickly realized that there's a disease reservoir.
So all of these diseases have a reservoir.
Typically, it's animals that carry them that can infect people, but also people who can infect other people.
And some people don't get sick.
Even with COVID, some people, maybe half, people don't get sick, and they serve as a reservoir for the disease.
So once scientists realized that there's a reservoir for the disease, they actually discovered in Africa that children act as a reservoir for malaria.
So they get a more benign form of malaria, typically.
And in sub-Saharan Africa, the people also have genetic resistance to malaria because many people are heterozygous for sickle cell genes.
So they have One normal copy of the sickle cell gene and one mutation for the gene, which gives them resistance to malaria.
So when the colonists realized that native children were the reservoir for malaria and there was a treatment for it, they segregated the European population, the colonists, from the Africans.
And they even destroyed indigenous huts that were too close to the European colonists' homes.
And that was the origin of modern segregation, modern in the late 1800s, early 1900s, of segregation in Africa, in colonial Africa.
It started with trying to separate the source of malaria, the African children, from the European colonists.
So even before it was known that mosquitoes vectored malaria, you can find cultural differences.
You go to malarious regions where there's mountains, and you'll find that the people who live in the mountains have a different language than the people who live in the valleys, and they have a different culture, and they separate from each other.
And the only time the people in the mountains would interact with the people in the valleys was in the non-malaria season.
They wouldn't come down when there was malaria.
So there you have a disease that's basically culturally separating these people from the mountains and from the valley.
Also in America, it also entrenched slavery.
So when the Europeans first colonized America, they first enslaved the indigenous population, and they had indentured servants who were Europeans.
But both the Europeans and the indigenous population were getting wiped out by these diseases.
They didn't have resistance to them, to the yellow fever, the malaria, all of these other ones.
And so when they started bringing over African slaves, black African slaves, these were people who had natural resistance to malaria because they had the sickle cell gene.
And they also had acquired immunity to yellow fever because they typically would get it as a kid when the effect is less pronounced.
And then they'd have resistance to it for the rest of their life.
So the resistance of the African slaves to these diseases entrenched slavery because they were the valuable workers.
So that really made this continent spiral down into slavery.
It also led to the cultural separation between the North and the South because In the South, there was much more malaria than in the North in the United States.
And so that meant that the working population there, the slaves, they were more valuable because they had the resistance to malaria and to yellow fever.
And so it drove a lot of the cultural divide in this country.
I've spent time with shaman in rainforests, both in Africa and in Latin America, the real deal, you know, where they have thousands of different plants they use for things, and they know every single plant, they know every single treatment.
I actually hired one when I was working in Kenya in 1992 to teach me the plants of the rainforest because I had a translation book.
I was working in a part of Western Kenya.
The tribe is called the Luya tribe, and I had a translation book from their language to English.
And so I had them teach me all the plants in their language, and then I could figure out what it was.
And that's how I was able to work on the plants that I was working on there.
that it's amazing that there's a lot of people that in the western world they're highly educated would look at those people in terms of you know like what what their knowledge base is and kind of like dismiss it They're shaman.
So we couldn't eliminate malaria until it was discovered that the Anopheles mosquito is the vector for malaria.
Once that happened, the very first eliminations actually took place in Egypt and in Cuba.
So that was 1902, basically.
And so the United States conquered Cuba in the Spanish-American War.
And as we took over Cuba, many of our soldiers were getting yellow fever.
So, the United States military set up the Yellow Fever Commission of four scientists who went to Cuba, led by Walter Reed, and they very quickly figured out that Aedes aegypti, another species of mosquito, was the vector for yellow fever.
Once they figured that out, there was a guy named Gorgas who was hired to solve this problem.
And what he did is they went through Havana and they broke open every pot that held water, because these both Aedes aegypti and, which vector is yellow fever, and chikungunya, and what's the other one?
There's another nasty tropical disease that's affected by Aedes aegypti.
Anyway, that mosquito and the Anopheles mosquito, they breed in stagnant water.
So they started breaking open all of the containers of stagnant water.
Anything that was too big, they screened.
They treated with kerosene.
In the space of a couple of months, they completely got rid of yellow fever from Havana, which had had yellow fever every single year and killed thousands of people every year.
And they got rid of almost all the malaria, about 80% of the malaria, by getting rid of their breeding habitat.
Once they accomplished that, Gorgas then moved over to the Panama Canal Zone.
So the French had tried to build the Panama Canal, but they had so much mortality from malaria and yellow fever that they gave up.
And so the United States bought the rights from the French.
The French wanted to get out of there and get what they could out of it.
We bought the rights from them.
Gorgas went through, got rid of all the standing water to get rid of malaria, yellow fever, and that made it so that we could finish the construction of the canal.
And then, of course, we backed these Panamanian rebels to steal Panama from Colombia because it was part of Colombia, create the new country of Panama so that we could have exclusive control of the canal zone.
Once that was accomplished, this is all between 1902 and 1910, Then we started eradicating these standing water sources in the United States and by doing that and treating them with what are called callicosides, which are pesticides that kill larval mosquitoes.
So through drainage and through using pesticides, we got rid of malaria from this country.
No, the problem is that the mosquitoes very quickly evolve resistance to the chemicals that we use.
So things like DDT was very effective for a few years, but then the mosquitoes evolved resistance and it's no longer effective against malaria.
And so in the United States, we were able, through our infrastructure, through our ability to To drain the water and to cover water and treat water, we were able to get rid of it.
But not only the resistance, but also like you're saying, the infrastructure is hard and you have much more of it there.
You go to Africa, it's the origin of malaria.
There's far more malaria there.
There's four different varieties.
Some are more deadly than others.
So it's a more difficult problem.
It's still the number one killer of people as far as an infectious disease goes.
So there's a gene that relates to the shape of the hemoglobin and its ability to carry oxygen.
And a mutation in that gene, a sickle cell gene, it causes the, if you have two copies of that mutation, one from mom, one from dad, it causes that you get this sickle shape, and those people are anemic and typically don't live.
But if you are the heterozygote, if you have one sickle cell mutation and one normal, you have a normal ability to carry oxygen, but the parasite, it's a...
Now I'm having one of these brain freezes.
The parasite that causes malaria is an amoeba-like parasite.
It's not able to penetrate the hemoglobin if you have that gene.
So these people are protected from malaria.
They have the advantage of that.
And so it was a mutation that was a random mutation that had this huge selective advantage for the people who lived in these malarious regions.
Then those are the people that were brought over as slaves to the New World.
And so, of course, they have their genetics they bring with them.
And once there's no longer malaria here, it's not an advantage to have that gene because there's no malaria to get sick with.
And if you're a heterozygote and you marry someone else who's a heterozygote, one quarter of your children will have sickle cell anemia.
They'll have both of the mutations that leads to this pretty terrible anemia condition.
So it's more common among African Americans, like you're saying, because it's a mutation that arose in Africa.
But it's relatively rare to have the disease because you have to have two people who each are carriers to have children together before you'll get someone with the disease.
It's a terrible disease that causes the kid to die when they're three or four years old.
And it's caused by a single recessive mutation.
And so if you have two carriers who have kids, then a quarter of their kids will have that disease.
And it's completely lethal.
So it's relatively common among Amish, among Jews of European descent, and among French Canadians.
And those are the main groups.
But, you know, you could take whatever genetic disease you want.
You'll find different ethnic groups have different frequencies of having that.
And we have that allele in my family.
We have that gene.
We don't have anyone with the disease, but if you have that gene, you have to then get your spouse has to get tested to see if they have it as well so you know if you might have kids with it.
I grew up with a guy who had it and he died from it.
He was a guy that I used to do martial arts with.
It was a real bummer because he was this really dynamic, super powerful, athletic guy and then he would get really sick and then he would come back and he'd be okay again and then he'd get really sick again.
It was a reoccurring thing with him.
When you're talking about eradicating malaria in the United States, how they did that, is it 100% eradicated or are there occasionally cases of malaria in America?
My friend Dave Foley, who was on news radio with me, who's the nicest guy in the world, like couldn't be a sweeter guy, was on that because his family was going to Africa and he had to meet them there.
And so he was taking this anti-malarial drug.
And I guess you're not supposed to drink when you're on that stuff either.
Maybe Dave was on another medication, but we were at this party.
It's one of these weird press parties that they would have, these press junkets where the actress from the show would mingle with the press and people would be drinking alcohol.
They would come by and just ask you questions.
They would have tape recorders in your face.
It's a really terrible idea.
But back then, this is pre-internet.
You kind of get away with doing it.
Not pre-internet, but pre-social media.
The internet really hadn't been exploited to its full extent yet.
So some guy came over and asked Dave a question.
He took his tape recorder and shoved it in his drink and told him to fuck off.
This is unheard of Dave Foley behavior and was like yelling at the guy and I had to stand between him and the guy.
Yeah, so I was there for three months the first time, and the second time two and a half months, and I was getting a little uncomfortable taking it that long.
People take it for much longer.
But on the other hand, you're going to get malaria if you're there and you don't take something.
That's the problem.
I do the other things, wear mosquito repellent, wear long sleeves, all of that, but it's just impossible to not get bitten by a mosquito.
It's great if you're in an area that has, like for camping, if you're in an area that has a lot of mosquitoes.
I don't know how bad it is for you, though.
It's one of the things I wanted to ask you.
We were actually talking about it just before, because we were talking about doing podcasts outdoors, and Jamie was like, we're probably going to have a net to try to keep the mosquitoes out.
And I'm like, what about a thermocell?
But then I said, well, maybe ask Frank how bad this shit is for you.
Thermocells, it's a small device, and it is a lifesaver.
Especially, I've used them in Alberta, which Alberta, the mosquitoes know, somehow or another, they only have three months to live, and they fucking go ham.
So the very first insecticide was derived from the chrysanthemum plant.
It's pyrethroids.
And so actually, it relates back to the World War II era we were talking about before, because...
There were two important things going on with preventing malaria before the advent of DDT. There were the chrysanthemum-derived pyrethroid insecticides.
So these are naturally occurring from the flower.
They're extracted from the flower.
You can imagine it's labor-intensive and it's expensive.
And then there was a cinchona plantation.
So you could grow cinchona trees, use the bark to make the quinine to treat yourself.
90% of the world's cinchona supply was on a single island, and the Japanese took it over right after they invaded Pearl Harbor.
So they then held basically the world's cinchona supply.
There was a little bit in Vietnam that they'd started growing there.
They took that over.
And then the supply of quinine that was in storage, most of it was held in Amsterdam, and the Nazis seized that.
So the Americans didn't have the plant anymore, they didn't have access to the plant or to the extracted drug product for treating malaria.
And at the same time, there was labor unrest in Kenya, and so the chrysanthemum crop from Kenya was basically nonexistent at that time.
So the U.S. Army prioritized we need to make a synthetic version of quinine to treat for malaria, and we also need synthetic insecticides because the pyrethroids are not available anymore.
So they ended up going through thousands of chemicals looking for the right thing, and they settled on a chemical the Germans had actually developed called atabrine.
And the soldiers didn't like it because it caused what they called the atabrine tan.
It would make you kind of yellow.
And some people also went psychotic on it, just like we're talking about with mefloquine.
And then there was a rumor going around that it would make you impotent.
Nine out of ten would be in the hospital with malaria.
And so, you know, how can you fight a war?
That's why we—the Bataan Death March, we lost that battle because our soldiers were sick with malaria.
area.
They were so sick that they were not allowed to leave their patrol duty unless their temperature was above 102 degrees because everybody was sick.
So we tested these chemicals.
We came up with Atrebrine.
The soldiers wouldn't take it.
So then the U.S. military decided, okay, we need a really good advertising campaign to convince soldiers to take it.
The most effective one was actually developed by an Australian commander who took a couple of skulls and put them on top of a sign and said these men didn't take their Atrebrine.
And that's what happens.
But they also started saying malaria will make you impotent.
And that was what convinced people.
So the U.S. Army recruited Dr. Seuss, Theodore Giesel, to make these.
In fact, there's a whole category of pesticides now that are artificial version of tobacco.
They're called neonicotinoids.
And they're the most used insecticide in the world now.
So first it was the things like DDT, the organochlorine insecticides, were the most used in the world up until they were banned in most of the world in the 1970s.
And then the organophosphates became the most used insecticides in the world.
Those were the ones derived from the Nazi nerve gas weapons.
And those reached their peak around 1999. They were the most used.
And now it's the neonicotinoids, which are the synthetic version of nicotine.
So nicotine is lethal if you have too much.
It's highly toxic.
It's just the right amount of cigarette, right?
But if you have too much, it's highly lethal to insects.
There's an issue with cell phones in bees as well, right?
I don't know anything about that.
I don't know if it's speculative or what, but they believe that there's something about the particular frequency of cell phone signals that might disturb bees.
They might be able to hear those signals or perceive those signals that disrupts their natural understanding of the world.
You could imagine it because you have animals, like we were talking about before, they're using the magnetic field, they're using polarized light, they're using...
They're using so many different signals.
Like you can take a homing pigeon and you can put it on a turntable and cover its head so it can't see anything and fly it from the United States to Europe.
Let it go and it will fly right back to where it came from.
And then it's got this bufotoxin on their head, and then the native marsupials eat it and they die, and now they're extinct or on the endangered species list.
Yeah, and in fact, if you're talking about invasive species, so species brought from one place to another, if you're on islands, like the Hawaiian Islands, invasive species are the number one cause of extinction.
If you're not on islands, they're usually number two or number three after habitat loss, other things, but on islands are number one.
The highest extinction rate, known extinction rate of anywhere in the world is in Hawaii, in the Hawaiian Islands.
And it's because the Hawaiian Islands, they rose out of the sea from nothing.
So the species that are there are typically there and nowhere else.
So they go extinct there.
They're globally extinct.
And it's all these animals that are brought in.
The pigs, the cats, the mongoose, the rats, you know, they're wiping out the native species.
But invasive species, we really never have learned our lesson in terms of bringing them to places where they don't fit into the ecosystem, whether it's what's going on right now in Florida.
I think they just extracted and killed something like 5,000 pythons from the Everglades, and they didn't put a dent in it.
And the Everglades, there was a study where they went and they were tracking the populations of deer and raccoons and all these different animals over the past couple decades.
We're so weird that we don't learn from that, that it takes so much for us to get it into our head that that's a bad idea.
Yeah.
One more thing I wanted to talk to you about is glyphosate.
And I've read some things about the dangers of glyphosate, which is Roundup, which is a very common pesticide.
But one of the things that I read that I don't know if it's true, that there's an issue, some people believe, in animals eating plants that have been sprayed with glyphosate.
Like say if you eat a cow, That's been grazing on grass or grains that has been sprayed with Roundup.
That you could potentially develop gut issues because your body is reacting to the toxins that's in the animal flesh from them eating this glyphosate sprayed plant.
It was slated to be banned at the end of the Obama administration, beginning of the Trump administration, and then that was pulled off the What was the evidence that was indicating that it should be banned?
So evidence of harming children and especially animal models in the laboratory showing toxic effects on animals in the lab that relate to things in children's health.
So if there's residues left on food, you can get it from plants.
You can get it from water if you're in a place where it's getting into the water supply.
If you're living in a place where it's being sprayed, you'll get it that way.
And again, it kind of goes back to this issue we were just talking about.
We use so much of it.
Like if we go back to the story of DDT, DDT would have been a wonderful public health tool if we had just used it for that.
We probably could still use it today against malaria and yellow fever if we had only just restricted its use for these public health emergencies.
And you have a spot treatment here because you have an outbreak of malaria and a spot treatment here because of Yellow fever, but we couldn't stop ourselves.
So we put it in wallpaper for nurseries so that babies wouldn't have flies on the wall.
We put it in paint and we covered everything with this paint.
We put it everywhere.
If you went on an airline in the 1950s and 60s, the flight attendant would walk down the aisle spraying DDT. What?
So you wouldn't have to be bothered by any mosquitoes or flies on the flight.
That's the problem.
It's going from, here's this precision tool that we should keep.
It's awesome, right?
You want to use this to stop an epidemic.
Well, we can't.
We have to use it everywhere, and then it's no longer effective because the pests have evolved resistance.
It's the same thing with these herbicides.
There's some uses for it, you could say, are probably good.
You have invasive plant species in Hawaii.
We were just talking about Hawaii.
A lot of the extinction there is from invasive plants.
So you have invasive plants, and they can kill it with Roundup, and then they can plant the native plant and restore that forest.
So you have this very small-scale kind of precision use.
But that's different than just broadcasting it everywhere, and then we all get exposed to it.
So some of the crops are actually genetically engineered so that they can handle the herbicide.
So they are not damaged by the herbicide.
The pest is, and then they out-compete the pest to grow that way.
Some species are less damaged by others by these herbicides.
And there's actually really interesting history that deals with warfare with this stuff too, because the herbicides were first developed at the beginning of World War II. And the idea was, back then, we have plant hormones.
Plants also have hormones.
They cause the plant to grow in the way that they're going to grow.
Is if you could make an artificial version of that plant hormone, you can make it grow too fast so that it dies.
And this was proposed to be used during World War II as a weapon to kill the rice of the Japanese.
So you could wipe out their food supply so that they starve.
And then they're obviously less effective at fighting if they're starving.
After World War II, it was actually used by the British and the Malay Peninsula, and then we used it at a massive scale in the Vietnam War, in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, in Operation Ranch Hand, where we sprayed 20 million gallons of defoliants over the rainforest.
And what we were trying to do is we were trying to wipe out the food supply of the Viet Cong, so starving these people, and we were also defoliating the forest so we could see the Viet Cong forces from the air.
Well, there are actually two chemicals that were used in Agent Orange that are still in use today in herbicides, but the process for creating them creates a less toxic compound now.
The problem is that we're using so much of it.
And so it's sort of like the DDT problem.
You could get sprayed with DDT. It kills the body loss on you.
You don't get typhus.
You're not harmed by it, even though you're covered with this stuff.
But you're eating it day after day for years.
You're going to be harmed by it.
And it's the same with wildlife.
We have a global decline of amphibians going on.
Amphibian species are getting wiped out around the world.
And a lot of it has to do with pesticides.
So amphibians are aquatic herbivores when they're larvae, and then they're predatory terrestrial animals when they're adults.
So they're affected by everything in the water, they're affected by everything on the land, and their development is screwed up.
So you end up with males becoming females, you end up with all kinds of thyroid diseases from these various pesticides.
So what exactly is Roundup doing to us and these genetically modified plants that accept the Roundup, that don't have an issue with glyphosate, that are able to thrive when they're being sprayed by glyphosate?
What problems are we having digesting those things?
Well, a lot of the concern is around the development of the brain for the child.
And so the child in the womb and then the young child growing up.
So a lot of these chemicals are neurotoxicants.
They affect brain development.
And actually the same with a lot of the metals we were talking about earlier.
The primary toxic problem with things like arsenic and mercury and the organophosphates, they're nerve poisons.
They're neurotoxicants.
So the main concern is with children's development.
And of course, if you mess with a children's brain, it's permanent, right?
This is like the lead problem, where I talked about this actually in the very beginning of the book, in the preface, that Thomas Misley Jr. was working on this engineering problem of how do you make it so automobile engines don't knock?
And they were knocking, it lowered the power, it lowered the efficiency.
And he figured out if you added tetral ethyl lead to gasoline, you could make this internal combustion engine that wouldn't knock.
He got lead poisoning in the development of this.
Some of the workers died from lead poisoning when they were developing this gasoline.
They called it ethyl gasoline.
They tinted it red as a market employee.
And then for the next 80 years, Millions of people were using leaded gasoline.
The entire Earth's atmosphere was polluted with leaded gasoline.
We have untold millions of children in the womb and in early development whose brains were permanently altered.
IQ permanently degraded from this.
Impulsivity permanently increased.
You remember the crime wave in the 1980s, and you talk to, say, the police chief of New York City.
They'll say, well, it was crack, and we solved it with this zero-tolerance policy.
I think, and a lot of scientists think, what actually led to that crime wave was lead poisoning and poisoning by people.
By other neurotoxic metals.
Because if you look at the lead pollution in the United States, and then you put on an 18 to 20 year delay, because those boys have to grow up into young men, and the men are the ones who are doing the crime, you see that there's this perfectly matched curve between lead pollution in the atmosphere you see that there's this perfectly matched curve between lead pollution in the atmosphere
And then when we took lead out of gasoline, when we were kids, lead was removed from gasoline during the Carter administration, lead started coming down the atmosphere, and then you see a 20 year lag, crime rates come down.
It's not just crime, it's also unwed pregnancy, it's also all the juvenile delinquency, it's murder, it's rape, all of these things track lead poisoning in the atmosphere.
So for pesticides that are on the surface of the plant, you can wash them, right?
And so you can clean your food, or if it's something like a banana that you peel, you can do that.
The only problem there is that a lot of pesticides are so-called systemic pesticides.
They're actually taken up from the plant's roots and the plant's circulatory systems, delivering it throughout the plant.
This was actually a technology that was developed by Gerhard Schrader during World War II. He was a Nazi scientist who invented sarin and tabin and all these nerve agents.
He also invented systemic pesticides.
And so if a systemic pesticide is incorporated into the plant, then the only way to not get it is to wait long enough that it breaks down.
And so they're supposed to not harvest that crop until the systemic pesticide is broken down.
If it's one that's sprayed on the outside of the plant that is surfaced, you can wash it.
What I like to do is there's some good online calculators you can look at.
Most of us can't afford to only buy organic, and that would be the best thing to do.
But most people can't afford it.
So what you can do is you can look at how much pesticide residues are in different kinds of plants.
Strawberries have a lot.
So strawberries are a good one if you're going to invest, you know, if you have a limited budget and you want to get one thing organic, strawberries would be a good one to get organic.
And so, you know, the pesticide industry would argue, look, we're not starving anymore.
You go back to before we had these modern pesticides.
And there was mass starvation, and there was also much more disease.
Like, you go back into the 1800s, you could expect you're going to lose, if you have 10 kids, you're probably gonna lose three or four of them when they're kids to disease, maybe half of them.
And now we live in this world where, you know, your kids can make it.
They're not all going to die from disease.
They're not going to starve to death.
So there's great things that have come from this, but at the same time, we are overusing these pesticides and we're relying too much on them, and then we end up with these problems.
There's great things that have come out of vaccines and great things that have come out of all these pesticides and herbicides and all that stuff.
But knowing that this is doing damage to children today and the fact that this is illegal in Europe now and should have been illegal at the end of the Obama administration if not for political influence, how is that tolerated?
And so, if you go back to the Incan Empire, a single farmer, Incan farmer, pre-contact, would have a few acres of land, they're growing potatoes.
They would have 200 varieties of potatoes on their land.
And then you go to Ireland at the time of the famine, one variety of potato, you know, the whole country.
It's 95, 90, 95% of the nutrition of this entire population of 8 million people.
Well, of course you're going to have a disaster.
And so part of it is we have to go back to a kind of agriculture that's much more diverse, rotating crops, all of these other things, and then we could use these chemicals but use them in a very smart, targeted way.
It's just so disturbing that this is used all over the United States on crops and we know it's damaging.
I don't know if there's evidence of this, but does it make sense that if you ate a cow that had been eating grain, that had been sprayed with glyphosate, that you could potentially develop issues from eating that meat?
We had the National Environmental Policy Act in 1968, Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, all of this, all the major environmental legislation, they were all passed by a democratically controlled Congress, and they were signed by a Republican president.
So the environment was politicized after that.
Why don't we still live in a world where everybody cares about the environment and children's health?
Why should this be a partisan issue?
I just find that ridiculous, right?
We should all care about this, and we should all be working together to try to solve it.
But now it's, like everything else, it's become partisan.
We're in such a strange position now in this country.
And all of these conversations are toxic, and there's no middle ground.
There's no room for nuance.
But the idea that we're doing this with our food supply is very disturbing.
But is there, other than these bringing in bugs, how would you do that with a monocrop?
If you have thousands of acres of corn, say, how would you deal with the issue of plants that you don't want there, or weeds, or whatever they're trying to kill?
Yeah, but there's plenty of other crops that we need too.
So instead of having 10,000 acres of corn here and then 10,000 acres of soybeans here...
And then 10,000 acres of wheat over here.
You make this a more diverse chest-like board of crops so that you're not creating this situation where the pests can just explode in their population.
Right, but if you have a farmer and, you know, his company or his family's business has been growing corn, growing corn for animal feed or for, you know...
Corn syrup or whatever they use it for.
If that's your family business, now you have to diversify your family business.
You have to start growing soy and alfalfa and all these different things just because of this roundup issue?
But you know as well as I do that most farmers are like on the verge of bankruptcy already.
It's a really tough business.
You work really hard and you barely make any money and you get subsidized by the government if you grow certain crops like corn.
But if they're already in a tough spot, and then they have distributors that accept a certain amount of their corn every year, and this is what's valuable to them, how do you get that guy?
I mean, how do you say, hey, buddy, you know, you got to stop using Roundup, and instead you're going to grow wheat, and you're going to grow asparagus or whatever?
It is a tough sell, but every time that there's a challenge like this, it also creates opportunities for how do you improve your market.
We actually had a farm when I was a kid.
We had an 80-acre farm in Alaska, and we lost money on it every year.
It's a very tough thing to do, especially in a place like that where there's a three-month growing season.
We were the only Jewish pig farmers in Alaska.
And we had hay, and we had potatoes, and chickens, and geese, and ducks, and pigs, and it was great.
But I understand it's a tough life, and it's a tough way to make a living.
And we need to have policies that help people, that help people to do their farming without polluting the food supply, without polluting the world, and in the process make a more productive, diverse economy for them.
Yeah, so the decision to ban it was based on the toxicity and the effects on children.
You're also bringing up another really important issue, which is this concept of regrettable replacements.
So, for example, we were talking about DDT, and when DDT was phased out because it was showing up in food supply and women having breast milk with unacceptable levels of DDT in it, then that was replaced by the organophosphate chemicals.
But then we talked about how they're toxic.
That led to a lot of poisoning of farm workers, transferring the risk to farm workers.
Those have mostly been replaced by the new nicotinoids, these artificial versions of nicotine.
So we also have this history in our human history of replacing something with something else without thinking through the consequences.
And in the process, that's why we call it a regrettable replacement.
We keep substituting one thing we don't know what it does for something else we don't know what it does.
So I don't know the answer really to your question, but I think that we need to be supporting our agricultural industry, diversifying it, using integrated pest management, minimizing the use of these pesticides, And it's not just for our own health, it's also for the health of the environment.
Obviously, the politicization of our regulatory process is a huge part of it because that shouldn't be political either, right?
If something is not safe, it should be regulated.
And so I think the drivers of this, we need to get out of this thing where the politics are driving decisions that are public health decisions or environmental decisions.
The thing I keep finding, which is repeated, but it might be because there's been multiple lawsuits about this, which causes lots of websites to pop up, but it's saying it's found in up to 90% of all food we eat, including vegetables and flesh of meat.
Well, that was the argument that I was reading in an argument for grass-fed cattle, that you're much better off eating animals that are just eating natural grasses because there's been no pesticides and they're just basically free-ranging.
So cattle might be able to get it, but deer get it.
They've found instances of mule deer that get it, elk get it, different animals get it, but it hasn't jumped to humans.
But it has jumped species to mice.
And so it's a very disturbing idea that you could eat something today.
You go hunting in the woods and you find a deer, you shoot that deer, and you think, oh, I have this clean, organic meat.
But someday, whether it's next week or 20 years from now, it might be that you could get a brain disease, the same disease that cannibals get.
This neurological disease that's coming from this...
The prions that are in this disease.
By the way, they've done these sterilization processes on the tools that they use to determine whether or not they have this disease.
These fuckers, you could take these medical instruments on a deer that has this CWD with its prions and they can be exposed to thousands of degrees and the prions stay alive.
There's more evidence that it comes out of a lab in Wuhan that somehow or another when they were doing these, because you know there's a level four lab in Wuhan.
Brett Weinstein, who's also a biologist, was on my podcast.
He was explaining I would butcher it if I went into detail about it, but it's explaining all the indicators that point to the fact that this was a virus that was used for research, and that they were using it to learn more about or come up with strategies to defeat coronaviruses, and that the same lab that's in Wuhan in 2018, just two years ago, was cited for safety violations.
Yeah, and there have been cases in the past, even with bubonic plague, where research labs actually inadvertently released the plague into the local population.
My guess is, though, when this is all said and done, it's going to be from eating bushmeat in China, that people will have eaten bats or they've eaten pangolins that got infected by bats.
HIV is the same kind of thing, right?
People eating chimpanzees, they're getting this infection, and then it causes a pandemic around the world.
So we're seeing more and more of these diseases because we're punching into this habitat we've never been in before.
People are eating the animals and getting sick from it.
Steve Bannon linked groups' push study claiming China manufactured COVID. Yeah, but see, the thing is, even if China did, and this guy pushed it, you would be suspicious.
You'd be like, oh, great.
Now it's politicized.
Again, they've politicized a fucking pandemic disease.
And now it becomes this thing about the trade war with China, or coming up with reasons why people should be suspicious of China.
The crazy thing is if you went back before Trump was president, you went back to the last years of the Obama administration when the economy had done the turnaround from 2008, and things were looking pretty good.
Everything was nice.
And even during the beginning of the Trump administration, even though people didn't like him, The economy was kicking ass.
But there was the beginning of the polarization because there's so many people who didn't like him and the people that did like him were like, fuck you!
They had someone on their side now that they could thumb their finger up at the liberals and then...
It just got worse and worse and worse.
And then COVID threw gasoline on the fire.
And now half the country's on fire.
I mean, it's just like when you think it couldn't get any worse.
You have record wildfires where you have the worst air quality on earth in Portland, Oregon.
All that being said, though, when this started and we first started getting cases in the United States, I was really concerned that society would fall apart.
And I was partially, I think I was concerned about that because I just spent eight or nine years reading these historical accounts of society falling apart during the bubonic plague, during yellow fever, and so on, where literally the society fell apart.
it yeah that's what really pissed everybody off when they found out that the pandemic response team had been sort of redistributed yes banded and what Is there anything else that should freak people the fuck out?
Yeah, and let's make it so you can never fish here again.
Fuck!
I would like to see us being careful and thoughtful.
You were talking about genetically engineered mosquitoes and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Maybe it's a great thing.
Maybe if we genetically engineer anopheles, we can get rid of malaria and not harm mosquito populations and not Harm nature, but we better figure it out before we release these things and before we try it.
Well, it just seems like we have an amazing amount of knowledge, comparatively, to people that lived thousands of years ago.
But when you think about how little we know just about ants communicating or various bugs and how they operate, And that we're going to fuck with mosquitoes?
And we really don't know what happens if you take that piece out.
Like, let's take that piece and throw it over there.
What happens?
Well, there's a void now.
And what fills that void?
And what are the domino pieces that fall into place?
Do we know?
I can't imagine if we don't know how ants are so smart that we really know what the fuck happens if we kill all the mosquitoes.
So I would assume, I think we're probably wiser than people that lived in the 1920s.
I think we are.
I think just based on, I know we have more information, but I think we've absorbed a lot of it, more so than we probably understand it.
And that if you look at the violence statistics, rape statistics, racism, all the different statistics, like if you look at Pinker's work, it shows that things are getting better even though they still suck in a lot of cases.
And then it just takes, we're a big ass battleship and every turn takes a long time.
I think we're wiser, but I think it's a long process to educate this dumb monkey.