Bartow Elmore reveals Coca-Cola’s ties to Monsanto, from cocaine-laced 1886 formula to synthetic caffeine sourced via WWII contracts, exposing how Peruvian coca leaf monopsony and secret ingredients kept costs low. Glyphosate-resistant weeds forced farmers back to Agent Orange’s toxic components like 2,4-D, while Monsanto’s radioactive slag dump in Idaho—dosed every 15 minutes—ignited legal battles over health risks. Bayer’s $63B 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, despite PCB controversies and $15B glyphosate lawsuits, underscores corporate greenwashing and systemic agricultural dependency on fossil fuels, with regenerative farming stymied by profit-driven resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
It really started with the first project I worked on, the first book I wrote, which was the history of Coca-Cola and its environmental impact around the world.
People equate the coca leaf with cocaine because, yes, you can make cocaine, like street cocaine, from processing all these coca leaves.
But if you go to Peru today or you go to certain parts of South America, people chew coca leaves.
It's a normal practice.
It's been going back thousands of years to the Inca even.
And so it's very small amounts.
We're not talking about, like, In fact, you'd probably get a bigger hit from experience from a cup of espresso from Starbucks.
But interestingly, the reason that cocaine became taboo and why it got pulled from the drink had nothing to do with national laws in the country, which was so interesting when I was studying it.
It had everything to do with racism, actually, in the South, because there was a concern that Cocaine was contributing to black crime in Atlanta, which was being, of course, blown up by segregationists and white supremacists.
And Asa Candler, who was a white guy in Atlanta, didn't want to have anything to do with that.
So he decides, kind of quietly, to take out the cocaine.
But here's the interesting thing, Joe.
They kept the coca leaf as one of their secret ingredients.
They said, so is there like a pile of cocaine somewhere up in New Jersey where this is happening?
I don't think that's the case.
But here's the crazy part, too.
This is what's fun about tracing these stories of ingredients because they lead you to places you never thought you'd go, like this book, which we'll talk about.
It got weird.
If that's not weird, it got weirder in the 60s because Coca-Cola wanted to figure out a way to make coca leaves in the United States, to grow their own coca leaves.
They weren't satisfied with this trade with Peru.
And these are declassified DEA documents at the National Archives.
This is not like, you know, something crazy.
You can see it and actually it's in the book.
But basically, They petition the federal government to start growing it.
At first, they're thinking like the Virgin Islands.
But then they're like, I don't know.
There's like all these tourists.
It's going to be crazy.
But they have to find a climate and a location, geography, where they can do this.
And they ultimately go, okay, what about Hawaii?
And they do, Joe.
They grew coca leaves secretly, a totally secret operation called the Alakea Project.
Also called alakeia.
What does that mean?
Exactly.
Nobody's going to ask questions, you know, obfuscate the story.
Legitimate, I think, is the right kind of question to ask.
I mean, I went down to Peru because I think it's important if you're going to write about people or you're going to write about a place that you go there.
Although it wasn't that safe for this book either.
But anyway, we go down and we look into this story.
And I think to kind of answer your question, I mean, There is a trade.
It's managed actually by a state agency in Peru called Anaco.
And exactly where the coca leaf comes from for Coca-Cola is a little bit unclear, you know, in the 21st century.
But if you talk to cocailleros or people who represent the cocailleros, the farmers who produce the coca leaf, a lot of what they're frustrated about is that Basically, Coke has this exclusive right to bringing coca leaves into the United States.
Now, if you and I were to try and do that, we'd be arrested at the border, right?
And it's one of the reasons why Coke, you know, they have a unique flavor, right?
They have something that no one else can get.
But here's the other thing, Joe, right?
So, like, think about Coke.
They're everywhere.
Like, you could sell this stuff.
In any part of the world.
And I think that's the trick for Coke.
How do you get stuff that's cheap?
Well, if everyone had access to coca leaves, you know the price of coca leaves might be pretty high.
You can't grow coca leaves everywhere.
And so because they only have access to that leaf, They get a great deal on the price of coca leaves, and that's what cocaeros don't like, right?
They would love to be able to sell coca tea in the United States.
They would love to be able to sell, you know, you name it, coca cookies, coca flour.
But because of international laws that ban it, by the way, that were in part brokered by Coca-Cola, that's part of the rub.
And they have it on their name, you know?
Think about that rub, too.
Here's a product that comes from your...
That deep history that goes back to the Inca, it's on the brand and they're preventing that trade, in part, historically, have been preventing that trade.
That's what I think unnerves people.
They don't see it as legitimate.
They think a lot of people would see it as some kind of theft.
The problem really is, sorry, the problem really is like people who step on it, right, and add things to it, like fentanyl, which is a giant issue now.
And, you know, it's used for high altitude exertion.
It helps people at high altitudes and things like that.
So I think one of the things in that book was trying to point that out, that, you know, we're having this discussion about cannabis, but we should have it.
And they are.
There are people that are trying to say, look, we should be revalorizing, is the word.
And I think, you know, again, there's a difference between that kind of purified powder that's going to have all this other stuff in it that can cause all these problems versus...
And a brilliant guy who was originally, he was a scientist who was working with drugs and he was a very straight-laced guy.
But then upon working with them and really understanding their effects and understanding what the propaganda had done in terms of changing the way people viewed these drugs, He then started taking these drugs regularly and is open about it, but is also brilliant.
And he's a genuine scholar.
So he's a guy who will sit on a podcast and tell you, I take cocaine.
I take heroin.
It's lovely.
He goes, regular heroin.
I'm like, how do you do it?
I sniff it.
And he goes, it's wonderful.
I love it.
It makes me feel good.
It helps, strengthens my relationships.
And he's like, you and I should do cocaine together.
I'm like, that is the craziest fucking thing anybody's ever said to me that's a professor from Columbia on a podcast.
You had Michael Pollan on, you know, and how to change your mind.
I mean, we're seeing, in other words, what you're talking about, that there was a history here.
That's why I think history matters, that this stuff hasn't always been perceived this way, and we got into this mess, and I think history can help us think about how I get out of it.
In the case of Coca-Cola, again, I think it's just a matter of, you know, rethinking this coca leaf.
I mean, here you've got a company that, again, has it on their name, and yet...
I did use an encrypted phone to talk to some sources inside Monsanto and stuff like that.
And look, I was just a historian coming out of grad school who had never had training in journalism or never really had training in the art of protecting a source.
And so I really had to...
And I give a plug to New America, this organization that gave me a fellowship and I got to hang out with writers from the Washington Post and from different places that helped me think about how do you do this the right way.
But they did.
I had permission.
And I started to see this caffeine story like Monsanto.
Because when Monsanto, this chemical company from St. Louis that started in 1901, it was like barely getting by.
The American chemical industry almost didn't exist.
The Germans were really in control.
They ran the organic chemistry.
We were getting all of our chemicals from overseas.
Monsanto, we think of it as like this monopoly.
It controls everything.
Back then, they were nothing.
And so they needed a big contract.
And so their initial buyer was Coca-Cola.
And they sold Coca-Cola two things.
They sold them saccharin, the artificial sweetener, which ultimately comes from coal tar.
We can talk about that.
And then caffeine.
This is the crazy part.
This is how they did it.
I would have never figured it out.
So basically, they took tea leaves that were broken and damaged around the world on tea exchanges, like the garbage of the tea trade, and they realized no one was going to consume that.
So it was just waste.
And they basically swept that stuff up and processed out the caffeine from the garbage, from the waste tea leaves.
But it was, like, a huge catastrophe because they were trying to totally reshape the flavor in 1985. Nobody liked it?
Nobody liked it.
You can go to the museum and they had, like, a voicemail machine that you could pick up that is, like, people being like, When they had new Coke, did they still have old Coke available?
No, that's the thing.
They literally said, we're going to completely wipe out the old Coke.
I mean, one of the biggest things that made Coke so big and where they basically just outpaced Pepsi was World War II. They got government contracts to provide Coke to the troops.
And this was coming from the top.
I have the letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower saying...
They just drink it after 5 because they don't want to say it.
They definitely hate it in the early part of the 20th century because they had no real good system for getting out the caffeine and it made it taste terrible.
And decaffeinated, you would imagine, actually is decaffeinated, but it's not.
It's like the difference in milligrams is like, I think like a cup of decaf has like 15 milligrams or something like that, as opposed to like, you know, 100. I don't know what it is, but I do know that there's still, yeah, there's caffeine in there for sure.
So it's basically the byproduct of processing coal into coke, which is coal without its impurities, often used in the steel industry.
And it's literally a black tar-y substance that's the byproduct of that process, kind of the waste of processing coal into coke.
And in that tar is all these different chemicals that you can make because it's all these different carbon compounds that you can tease out and then do things to make all sorts of things.
And actually, one of the points of this book is that all this stuff around us ultimately comes from fossil fuels, whether it be coal tar byproducts or petroleum.
And that's why I think when we transition, if we do, to a fossil fuel-free economy and try and reduce greenhouse gases and things like that, People are talking about cars and power plants.
After writing this book, I'm like, no.
I'm thinking about everything else.
I was literally just looking at all the equipment in here and things.
Yeah, and ultimately it's natural gas largely now, but at that time it was coal tar originally for Coca-Cola.
And talk about kind of some shady stuff.
You know, Coke has had these long contracts with Monsanto at this point.
This is the 40s.
And they're like, hey, could you make synthetic for us?
But if you look internally at Coke, they're like, well, I don't even know if we're going to buy it.
But we just want more caffeine in the market because more caffeine means other buyers who are getting caffeine may use that caffeine, which keeps the price of caffeine down.
Because Coke's real model was not owning stuff, making other people do stuff.
They were a business that basically just Monsanto was a middleman in the economy.
They didn't actually grow the ingredients in their product, and they didn't distribute it.
It was independent bottlers who did it.
They were kind of like this middleman in the economy.
And so for Monsanto, they were like, hey, go experiment with this, see how it goes.
And Monsanto does it.
They figure out how to synthesize caffeine from coal tar.
And they have to use a base molecule found in that coal tar called urea.
And this is true, okay?
They make it, and they're like, hey, Coke, look, we've got this synthetic for you.
Comes from urea, found in coal tar, and Coke's like, Nah.
This is exactly what the chemists, there's this great oral history at one of these archives I went to, from one of the chemists who knew what was going on inside the company who said, internally, when we were talking to them, they said, that sounds too much like urine.
They're going to think it's pee.
And they legitimately initially say, we're not going to do it.
And they stick with natural source caffeine, again, coming from the coffee bean and things.
Now, they ultimately decide to pivot because, to your point, they're growing at such a pace, they need to have synthetic.
And I can't prove this, but it seems logical that their thinking is...
Wait a minute.
Consumers are never going to ask where their caffeine comes from.
Look at everyone I've ever talked to.
No one knows where their caffeine comes from.
And so they do switch to synthetics.
And if you go to their website, it's great.
It says, we source our caffeine from...
Tea leaves, so that waste tea leaf story is still part of it.
The coffee beans, decaf coffee, and then appropriate sources.
P! Well, you know, and a lot of things are made from this, but ultimately then natural gas became the feedstock and things, and a lot of it's produced in China, but anyway, it's crazy.
Shout out to my friend, Jesse Pappas, who came up with that title and was like, it was brilliant because it did reflect what I wanted to tell, which is that there is going to be this seed company, but it's not a seed company when it starts.
It's only making chemicals.
And at the very beginning, it's only making chemicals for Coca-Cola.
So this came from a technology called what they called Terminator technology from 1990, you know, the 1990s film.
And it was owned by Delta and Pine and Land Company that they ended up acquiring in the early 2000s.
And at that time, Delta had this technology, but they didn't deploy it.
And one of the things that raised all this fear about this company getting bigger and bigger was, oh my gosh, they're going to get this technology and they're going to use it.
There's no evidence that we have that they have actually deployed that.
The way that they prevent farmers now from resaving their seeds and planting them is through an extremely intense contract called a Technology Use Agreement, or TUA, that farmers have to sign.
Like a soybean farmer has to sign it and say, I will not replant seeds that come from this harvest.
Farmers had never seen something like this in the 90s.
They were like, wait a minute.
So you're going to license this technology to us, and we can't save the seeds and replant them?
And that's what led to all this havoc and chaos in farm country where farmers were saying, This goes against, like, centuries-old practices where we're always saving seeds and experimenting with them and challenging them.
So that was a huge change to the food system.
But way later in Monsanto's story, I mean, they weren't even in the ag business.
And I think that, you know, it's hard to parse out that story of what's causing these suicides.
And there's some, you know, people who say the suicide rates, you know, when they look at it, well, did it increase when these seeds came in?
Or is it because of those seeds?
I think the debt issue is the bigger issue, right?
That you have this kind of industrial-scale agriculture and the pressures on these rural farmers that leads to these problems.
But there's a lot of other ways in which I think Monsanto kind of creates this, This system that prevents farmers from doing something they'd always done, which is saving seeds.
And the debt story is also true in the United States.
I mean, these seed costs go through the roof.
The more genetically engineered traits that are added to them and stacked in, we see this dramatic increase in those prices.
And the only way to really keep up is to keep trying to grow as big as you possibly can and using as much petrochemical Pesticides and fertilizers as you can to increase your productivity.
And it's kind of a rat race where farmers don't necessarily feel like they're incredibly profitable, but they feel like they're just trying to keep up.
Corn is a unique situation because you were talking about This terminator gene that could be added.
And again, we don't really have evidence that they did that.
But with corn, going back to the 20s and 30s, we developed what was known as hybrid corn.
And the weird thing about hybrid corn is that when you plant When you take the seeds that are produced from that harvest, they will not be as prolific as the seeds you originally bought.
So with corn, it's weird.
Even going back to the 20s, there was a system in place that was just part of the genetic peculiarity of corn that meant that farmers had to buy corn over and over again.
But what was different was soybeans, cotton, and a lot of other products.
If that is the case, if the corn, like when you try to replant the corn, it's not as prolific, where are they getting the original corn that you can plant?
Yeah, and you're seeing experimentation with With the top seed companies trying to figure out, okay, which parent crosses are going to produce the best yield.
But then if you try and save that seed and replant it, you're not going to have the same vigor is what it's called.
You don't have the same productivity.
So weirdly with corn, There was kind of a corporatization of the seed business baked into the peculiarities of crossing corn.
Whereas with soybeans, cotton, and other crops, you had to have an agreement that Monsanto created to make farmers come back and buy those seeds every year.
And I think about it, I'm so puzzled right now because I'm trying to figure out how would you have enough of these two different strains to cross them to make enough seeds to grow all this corn?
And, you know, often in these cafos, which is just such a broken system, these, you know, consolidated feeding lots where you're producing so much waste and manure and things like that that it becomes quite toxic.
But it's kind of, you know, I think for me, the story about food with Monsanto that was interesting was I wanted to kind of know, did these genetically engineered crops actually produce much higher yields?
Did we see this massive growth in the productivity of genetically engineered crops?
And maybe I should back up just to say like when that happened.
You know, the first large-scale introduction of genetically engineered crops, commodity crops like soybeans, like corn, like all these things, they were introduced in 1996. So one of the interesting things about sitting here today is that we're kind of at the 25-year mark of genetically engineered crops being introduced in the United States and ultimately around the world.
Brazil, Argentina, some 28, some state countries around the world that now have genetically engineered crops.
And so I looked at it as a historian and said, okay, well, what can we say about that?
You know, what did these crops actually do?
And when they were introduced, you know, the idea was, and just to be clear, this was a new technology.
It's often said, well, we've always been changing, you know, crops and things like that.
What was different in this era, 80s and 90s, was, you know, we were taking genes from a bacterium, for example, inserting it into a plant, taking things from one species, putting it in another, and changing the makeup of that crop.
In 96, when we see this happening, they're trying to do two things.
The main genetically engineered crops were Roundup-ready crops that were designed to tolerate heavy dosages of herbicide called Roundup, that interestingly, of course, Monsanto owned, right?
And they had been making since the 1970s.
But at this point, they're thinking, this could be amazing.
If we can genetically engineer crops to be resistant to Roundup, Wow.
You can spray Roundup on your fields, and this is the key, during the growing season, when your crops are growing, kill any weeds that are in those fields, and wow, you know, the plants will survive with the crops.
So let's go back just a little bit more to get to that.
So, and I talk about the whole story of Agent Orange in here in this book.
They first start making, and by they I mean Monsanto, 245T. It's a chlorinated hydrocarbon that's an active ingredient in Agent Orange.
In 1949, in a little town called Nitro, West Virginia, which I traveled to, because nobody went to go talk to the workers.
Nobody went to the actual place where the people who made the herbicides To me, my dad was in Vietnam, and those stories are important, and I want to talk about that as well.
But it also mattered to me that we need to go to the root of the story, the people who actually made these chemicals.
What happened there at that plant?
So Monsanto was making it in 1949. This chemical goes back to the 40s, wartime, World War II. In some ways, there were some experiments with it.
Monsanto's doing it in 1949. 245T, the active ingredient in Agent Orange, it's actually two chemicals in Agent Orange.
2,4-D, 2,4-5-T, and about 50% of each of these compounds.
And the problem was with 2,4-5-T. That chemical had a contaminant known as dioxin.
Which Dow Chemical writing to Monsanto in 1965 said, this is the most toxic compound we've ever seen.
And again, this is what they're seeing internally, you know, inside the firm with their workers.
And I think I just wanted to stress this, you know, 40, 51, 52, this is years before Agent R is going to be sprayed in Vietnam and before veterans are going to be exposed to this.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to take a generous interpretation of this, they're saying, well, I don't know, it's acne, but maybe it's not going to have these systemic effects.
Yeah, I mean, they had different buildings, and it seemed to depend on if you were working closely with those chemicals or not, because they're producing other chemicals there, rubber chemicals and other things.
Interestingly, I should say this about one of the doctors who was overseeing the company at the time, he often said that people that were complaining of health problems were what he called kind of the disgruntled tent.
You know, this is the people who are just unhappy with working here and things like that.
And that's kind of how he saw workers.
If they're coming in to complain about their health problems, it's probably because they have a bigger problem with management or something like that.
Which is part of the problem.
I think they probably overlooked things because that's how they saw people complaining about health issues.
But this is hard to overlook.
You're seeing workers that are systemically coming down with problems.
You're hiring people to test them and look into this.
And instead of saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, before we've got this all figured out, Maybe we should keep pushing this stuff out.
I know a guy who lived in a community that was connected to a golf course and he grew up drinking water from a well.
And him and a large number of people in the community got cancer.
And they firmly believed that it was because of whatever pesticides that they were using or herbicides that they were using on the golf course that it leaked into the wells.
By 2017. And that's because you've made crops that are now resistant to glyphosate.
So you can spray it as much as you need to kill your weeds.
And Jamie, you had that weed resistance graph going up.
But a fifth grader can tell you, well, when you spray that much Roundup, On something or glyphosate on something, you're going to start seeing resistance.
Like what's happening with antibiotics, where you're seeing these, like, MRSA, like these medication-resistant staph infections that are insanely difficult to treat.
You know, in fact, some of the weed scientists I talked to, I'll be honest, when I first was going to a talk at Ohio State that they said the weed scientists are talking, I thought, oh.
But these weed scientists at Ohio State who are great and helped out with a book, fantastic folks, you know, some of those, you know, they're like glyphosate was like penicillin, man.
It was so powerful.
It was so effective at killing weeds.
And we burned through it because these weeds became resistant to it.
And so And that's where we're at now, kind of going back to your point about chemicals and exposures.
Roundup was introduced because it was seen as an environmentally more friendly herbicide at the time in the 70s.
Than Agent R. Yeah, you're comparing it against some pretty bad...
So what we're looking at is pounds of herbicide per acre of soybeans.
So this is just looking at soybeans as a case study.
And we're looking at the amount of herbicides that's being used on farms per acre.
In the US, in specific states, just because they had data for this, for us to compare.
And what we're seeing is this, like, explosion in Roundup, glyphosate, that big dark line going up like that.
And notice, look, We started seeing the decline in all these other herbicides that are really toxic stuff, like chlorinated compounds and things like that.
They're going down and down and down, but check out weed resistance.
2004, 2005, 2006. Boom!
All those herbicides that were really toxic, including, by the way, the other half of Agent Orange, 2,4-D, is now being used to try and beat back Roundup-resistant weeds.
And interestingly, Bayer, the company that now owns Monsanto, they bought Monsanto in 2018. They're going to pull Roundup from Home Depot and Lowe's voluntarily in the next two years.
So they're not even going to sell this stuff for like regular consumers like you and I who might...
Now, the EPA, of course, after that 2015 decision by the WHO, they produced a study and said, we disagree.
We don't think it's carcinogenic.
But then within that agency, there are scientists that disagree on that and debate that.
There have been three major cases out of California, all of which have gone in favor of the plaintiffs who have charged that Roundup exposure has been linked to their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
I have to say, looking at it very closely, it's a mess.
I'm trying to figure out, what does it do?
Does it cause it?
Does it not?
All I'll say is, given the uncertainty, looking at that graph, it's like, come on.
If you want to produce the kind of crops that we produce in this country, if you think about how many animals that we have to feed and how many acres of soy and corn they're growing, what would be the options in terms of if they need some sort of an herbicide and they don't use Roundup, they're not going to go out there and Pick the weeds.
I think we have to fundamentally rethink the way that we're doing agriculture and definitely think about how much of our agricultural land is going towards these CAFOs and fodder.
Well, even just agriculture in general, people need to understand that monocrop agriculture, like having these massive fields filled with corn is completely unnatural.
Now, there was also a story where farmers were sued because it showed that they had Monsanto crops growing on their field, even though they had never purchased or had a contract with Monsanto, because of just this natural thing that happens, whether it's the wind carrying these seeds or animals or what have you, right?
So again, one of these ones that I really went in close on because I wanted to get it right.
And it's the drift, the idea that there's been a lot of cases where the drift of pollen has led to that.
I haven't seen cases of that.
I have seen lots of cases of what you're talking about where a farmer...
For whatever reason, comes into possession of Roundup Ready Trades and plants it on his crop without signing an agreement with Monsanto and gets sued for doing that.
Now, the question is, how do they get it?
And that's a little bit unclear.
Did they get it from a neighbor?
Did some maybe drop the actual seeds onto their farm, and then they end up seeing that it's Roundup ready, and then they use it?
I don't know, but you're absolutely right, and in the book we talk about it, the detectives that Monsanto sends out to enforce this.
Like, are you using our seeds illegally?
You can actually do it.
I don't know if we could do it, but you can call a hotline, like today, like right now, and rat out your neighbor if you think that they are planting seeds illegally And let's be honest, it's a construct that it's illegal.
Farmers have been saving seeds or borrowing from their neighbor or whatever.
I mean, it's one thing if it's an actual intellectual property, like if they've created something out of this, that they have some process where they create something, and that's a very unique process to make a thing, and then they sell that thing.
So what they have to do is gun them down from helicopters and just leave them there sometimes because they have overrun populations.
And then they also have a bunch of people that hunt in New Zealand and it's a destination for...
It was actually developed that way.
Like in the...
I think it was the 1800s.
I believe it was hunters from Europe.
See if we find like the history of New Zealand wildlife.
But it's kind of the same thing.
Like these fucking people just at one point in time when they didn't know any better said wouldn't it be great if we had this place and we just filled it up with a bunch of animals?
So they have fucking herds of wild stags and herds of deer.
And then Australia, of course, has their natural animals or their native animals like kangaroos and wallabies and all these different things are competing with these other new animals they brought in.
There's a balance that's achieved through natural prey and predator balance is very important.
And they're trying to do that.
And there's resistance right now.
They're trying to reintroduce wolves to Colorado.
And its resistance is like a bunch of different sources of resistance, but some of it is from ranchers that are like, listen, there's a reason why they killed off the wolves in the first place.
They're devastating predators.
They're really hard to manage.
And then there's also the people that are the hunters that live in Colorado that are enjoying this sort of unnatural predator-prey balance.
Like Colorado has more elk than I think all the other states combined.
I think it for sure has the most elk of any state and doesn't really have things that eat elk.
Coyotes, they can't really eat elk.
So they have coyotes, but coyotes mostly eat deer and rabbits and smaller things.
It's very rare that they even get a calf because the elk is such a large animal.
But they bring in wolves and you're going to have a significant impact.
You know, my brothers lived there for like 20 years and every time I go up, I'm just like, you know, you have to like cinch down your like jacket and stuff when you get back in the backcountry with that stuff because it's nuts.
And I grew up in like, I lived in Savannah, you know, I grew up in Georgia.
If you found out that the only way to make tires is to kill babies, and there was a factory where they're beating babies to death to make a tire, you'd be like, I'm not buying tires.
Yeah, why am I buying tires?
If you're finding out that the only way to get bacon is they have to stuff these pigs into these tiny cages and it creates these toxic lakes.
You've seen those when they fly the drones over these factory pig farms.
I was trying to make a lower weight class when I was in my martial arts competing days and it just didn't work for me.
And it's very arguable that I did it wrong.
It's very arguable that it's possible to do it right today.
Not that arguable that the elite of the elite choose to eat vegetarian or vegan.
That's not really true.
If you really follow the evidence, that's not true.
That's argued by these really zealous vegan advocates and activists, and I see why they would think that way, and I see why they think that it's so smart.
But they're also unwilling to look at monocrop agriculture, which is absolutely necessary for developing the amount of crops that you need to feed the entire country a vegetarian diet.
You're going to have to use monocrop agriculture and it's going to have to be crazy.
Also, farms work in a regenerative manner when they're done correctly, meaning that everything, just like we were talking about with nature and animals and predators and prey, the way farms are supposed to work, the way things are supposed to grow, you have ruminants and these animals and they shit and that shit is fertilizer and it's much more rich and it grows and it's actually a carbon neutral environment when done correctly.
You know, like the way Joel Salatin does it with his polyface farms, and there's a few other really ethical people that have really thought this out and engineered their farms to rotate their crops and rotate the use of animal fertilizer, natural animal fertilizer, with grazing, and they make sure that they do it all together.
And it really can work.
The question is, can it work at scale for the entire country?
And, you know, I lived in Charlottesville for a while, and another Joel friend of mine has a free union grass farm.
They actually learned a lot of their tactics from Joel Saladin, who's right over the hill, the mountain in Virginia.
And, you know, I spend time with him, and you're right.
I mean, I actually get meat from him.
You know, it's actually incredible to watch the amount of thought and, you know, having animals move on various grassland and trying to kind of create this This system that is clearly not trying to take a freaking sledgehammer to the ground and trying to be like, look, the soil is amazing.
It's like this incredibly biologically diverse thing.
And the fact that we would just, you know, yeah, as you're saying, not pay attention to it and just...
That every day you would go in there and you would smell blood and corpses.
And that was like this constant smell that was in you, which is not normal, right?
It's not normal for a person to experience that every day.
If you lived on a farm and you had to kill a cow, You kill the cow once a year, once every six months or whatever you did.
And you didn't just kill a thousand cows a day and cut them up and cut their organs out and just stand around with waders because you're standing ankle-deep in blood and guts, literally, like these guys do.
What kind of psychological effect Must that have on a human being that every day is just hooks and meats coming by and you're gutting it and spilling it out and cutting this and throwing it over there and you're making no money.
Yeah, when this guy wrote this article about it, and also in the article he was talking about how this industry would completely fall apart if it wasn't for illegal aliens.
He was like, you know, I don't know how this is working, but everyone's like these undocumented workers that are doing this horrific, really intense labor that's bad for you.
Like in terms of like, gotta be bad for you psychologically.
Part of it is just being comfortable with being ignorant about it.
And then people say, well, whatever.
Once you start having that connection, which I think is part of The history of the 20th century of our food system is we just got disconnected from that.
The good news about Texas is there's a lot of ranchers and you can have a relationship with ranchers or you can buy food from ranchers that That actually use ethical practices.
And if you do a little bit of research and you find...
There's people that you can actually trust that do...
Like there's the Rome Ranch.
I know they have...
That's the one that Paul Saladino uses and they...
They grow bison and cattle, and it's all grass-fed, grass-finished.
They roam through these fields, and they live like animals do, and then they have essentially one bad day.
If you look at it, like I had a friend over this weekend and I shot an elk last week and I was going over it and I vacuum sealed all the cuts of meat and I was cutting up liver and vacuum sealing the liver and I was cutting up all these different pieces of The tenderloin and backstrap.
And my friend was like, look how red this is.
I'm like, this is what an animal's supposed to look like.
This is a healthy animal.
This is like a super athlete animal.
When you're getting a piece of like Wagyu beef, that is a sick fucking animal.
You're not supposed to have that much fat.
You're basically eating like a slob.
If it was a human, there'd be a person who's really depressed and something's wrong with them, because they're not supposed to be that overweight.
This is terrible for your body.
And that's why they have to introduce so many antibiotics to these cows, because they're eating a diet that's not sustainable for long-term health and vitality for the cow.
When you get grass-fed, grass-finished beef, like one of my sponsors is ButcherBox, And you'd get these steaks, these ribeye steaks from ButcherBox.
They'd be smaller than a ribeye that you'd get somewhere else because they don't have all this fat in them.
And it's like, it's red.
You get the meat, it's like a red meat.
And people, they look at it, they go, oh, look how dark it is.
I think, you know, that's one side of the—because when I was writing about the Monsanto thing, it wasn't just that, like, if this was a story about genetically engineered seeds.
I mean, honestly, that comes later in the book.
It's about all the other chemicals that end up, like— In our food system that aren't necessarily even chemicals designed for food.
So not BPA, which is in the plastic bottles, which comes later.
But PCBs were like crazy.
I mean, they were in like...
Artificial Christmas trees.
They were in carbonless paper.
They were in the paint that we lined our pools around.
They were actually in the paint in the silos that held grain.
And this stuff was like so insane and everywhere.
But then, classic situation, 60s again.
They're like, whoops.
This stuff is like super toxic.
Like exceptionally toxic.
And there's this document, I actually had it, I don't know if Jamie wanted to see it or not, but that's handwritten notes from this meeting in 1969 inside Monsanto, a confidential document that they had, where they're discussing like, What should we do with PCBs?
We now know it's a global contaminant.
It's super toxic.
It's in everything.
It's everywhere.
It's in breast milk at that time because it's just everywhere.
And they're discussing, like, okay, what should we do?
And it says, situation is snowballing.
1969. Handwritten notes in this big meeting.
Underneath it, it says, alternatives.
Well, we could go out of the business as option number one.
Which is weird.
You know, it's funny.
I was telling somebody about this document last night in Austin.
And they have a bunch of other things about dog studies and things like that.
But this stuff was crazy.
It was in everything.
It's in transformers, actually.
And firemen, fire, rescue people, even today, if there's a big transformer fire or something, they can be exposed to burning PCBs because they were allowed to remain in place.
So this PCB contamination is still out there.
And there are actually states, Washington State, I don't know all of them off the top of my head, Delaware, that are suing Bayer right now To pay for PCB contamination from that long ago because it's still out there.
And they're winning.
And by the way, Bayer made the worst decision ever.
Can we just acknowledge that?
Like, Bayer buys Monsanto in 2018. They were making aspirin.
They were the kind of frontrunners in organic chemistry in the late 19th century.
And part of it had to do with a lot of great research institutions that were close to coal deposits, which were the source of all that organic chemistry.
And they just took off.
And so, you know, they had a leg up.
Though I will say the oil boom in the United States in the early 20th century gave the Americans a chance because we had all this oil that we could use to make chemicals and companies like Monsanto started to catch up.
But what's crazy is Wernherbaughman buys Monsanto in 2018. Literally, a couple months later, the first Roundup case goes against Bayer.
Now Bayer.
It's $285 million for one guy in that case, Dwayne Johnson.
And so the CEO, Warner Bauman, goes into the shareholders meeting and I have some pictures of the book where he's like, sorry, you know, and he's standing in front of the stock price that looks like this and trying to explain it to his shareholders.
They've issued a vote of no confidence in the CEO and the board of management, which had never happened in the history of the DAX. Yeah, this is a picture from that meeting.
Well, basically, that's what they're trying to do in some ways, you know, is just kind of delay, delay, delay.
But the problem is these people aren't going away.
There were 120,000 Roundup litigation cases that were filed or either were going to trial when I last looked, you know, back when I was writing this book.
This was, you know, people who are coming on hard.
It's made up of people, and there's good people and bad people, and there's some people like that guy who ended up writing, let's sell the hell out of them as long as they can.
And just so people that, you know, to fill in Agent Orange, why it was used in Vietnam, it was used as this defoliant, exactly, as you said, to kind of expose these jungle areas so that we could fight more effectively.
And it was sprayed in an enormous quantity across the country.
That dioxin persists, and it stayed in the environment Into the 21st century, into the 2010s, and it's still there.
Part of the argument that they used in court and things like that is, look, we sold this to the government for the government's purposes, and we can't be held in the contractor's defense.
We're just a contractor here doing the bidding of the federal government.
We have a certain degree of insulation.
But what I'm trying to show in the book is they saw things internally and knew things about their product that I think Should blow that out of the water.
Just because you sell something to the federal government, but if you know that it's making your workers look like the people we saw, are you not in some way liable for trying to clean that up?
And so in this case, it's totally nuts, Joe.
So if you fly into Da Nang in Vietnam, which is one of the former air bases of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, When you fly into the airport, on the south end of the airport, tarmac, is this huge concrete structure that we just have dumped soil into that has tremendous high concentrations of dioxin.
This just finished 2012 to 2017. This is how it works.
They put all this soil into this huge concrete structure Then they put electrodes, like a thousand of them, into that concrete structure and heat it up using electricity to like some insane thing, like 300 degrees Celsius, to basically cook the dioxin.
And it costs like a hundred and, I forget, $130 million or something for that one site.
And that's how they do it.
They have to put this dirt into a big concrete structure, burn it, And that's how we're going to go around Vietnam and clean up a lot of this dioxin contamination.
And there's been some really brave writers that have been writing some op-eds recently from Vietnam who are trying to just continue to make sure that people don't forget about this and tell this story.
And just to put a fine point on it.
Right now, you said, is it happening right now?
I just want to be clear on it.
Right now, they've moved to another American airbase that's just outside of Ho Chi Minh City, former American airbase, in Binhua.
So if you're interested in this topic, right now, there's a massive dioxin remediation project that, again, USAID and the US government's doing.
The companies that sold this stuff are nowhere to be seen.
But we're paying for it and it's a much more expensive project because it's way more expansive.
Yeah, I don't think it's a five-second rule, but I do think it's gone a long way to prevent this leaching of dioxin into those lakes and leaching other contaminants in there, and I think it's made it a much safer place.
So this pile of slag, okay, is a pile because in the 70s, they finally prevented Monsanto from selling this stuff as aggregate to build things out of.
So, the town of Soda Springs in Idaho and Pocatello nearby used the slag waste as an aggregate to build basement foundations and roadways and their sidewalks and stuff like that.
Let me make sure I get all this because it's just so wild.
The EPA comes in in the 80s.
Remember, a lot of this stuff is happening even before there's even an EPA, you know, in the 70s.
So things are just going kind of wild.
But they come in in the 80s, and they do these radiological surveys.
They actually fly over and look for gamma radiation.
I'm like, oh!
Folks, there's elevated levels of gamma radiation coming out of basement foundations and school buildings and whatever else they've used for its streets and things like that.
And they're like, you can't do this.
And so one of the reasons there's that pile is because it was like, well, we can't sell it anymore.
So when they made basements and these various structures out of that stuff, that waste, they recognized eventually that this is a problem and then would they demo everything and then put it onto that pile?
You know, not physically, but when they came in to do the hearings, they were like, we don't want you to designate our town a Superfund site, which there was a suggestion that the EPA might do that for the whole city.
And we're not talking about high levels of gamma radiation.
I want to be clear.
It was fairly low levels, but it was still above background.
And the EPA thought it was a problem.
They said, look, you know, we've got to do something about this.
But the town kind of rebels against the EPA. It's not like they're welcoming the regulators coming in.
And that's partially because town of 3,000 people.
This is a huge plant.
There are other phosphate plants for making fertilizer and other things from other companies that are there, too.
And I think part of it is a story of these companies, they're all lifeblood.
And we're okay with this low level of radiation.
Think about radon in basements and things like that.
We'll just deal with it.
And so the EPA is kind of like, ugh, what do we do?
And they kind of listen.
They try this decentralized strategy of like, all right, we'll work with this town.
Yeah, it was one of those things where I thought it was clear that he was like, we don't want you to go in that river and go on whatever journey you're going to go on potentially to see this story.
And I don't know whether it was he was worried about Us exposing something or seeing something or whether it was just, you shouldn't be here.
You're not from here.
I don't know why you're getting in this river and you shouldn't do it.
So when you start asking around, people start talking, and because of the fact that they're so reliant on these plants, do you think that they were concerned that you guys could screw it up and they would lose their livelihood so they saw you and you're about to get in that water and like, this guy's going to cause trouble?
But more just, yeah, like what could be the ramifications of that?
And the same thing kind of happened with Coke, you know, when I was talking about coca leaves and all that stuff, you know, which is all there and backed up in the archives.
This is not stuff that's not provable.
You know, you just feel a certain degree of like, ugh, what could happen?
And when they called, I was like, ugh.
And they wanted to do like a rebuttal to the story to be like, you know what, we've actually fixed a lot of the mining problems and things are getting better in Soda Springs.
I'm writing this project right now that's about all these, like, the logistics companies and thinking about the environmental footprint of firms that we don't traditionally think of as firms that have big environmental footprints.
Including banks, by the way.
I'm writing environmental histories of banks.
Like, we don't think about banks as having an environmental footprint, but...
They have to ship money around, but it's also just the incredible capital they have to be able to decide whether there's going to be an oil rig here or a Deepwater Horizon well here.
Internally about this particular thing, I didn't talk to them about that, but I did talk to people about a lot of different things.
And it was interesting.
Some of the people in Monsanto actually reached out to me.
And I had to kind of learn a little bit on the fly about how to talk to sources that were really sensitive like that.
And I had a bunch of lawyers for the first time that I would talk to you about how do I protect these people who want to talk to me inside the company because I don't want anybody to get hurt.
And there's a section in here about a person who wanted to tell his story in this book.
And I included it in the book, but he ultimately couldn't go on the record.
I couldn't actually include what he wanted to say.
I could just talk about our debates back and forth about whether he was going to go on the record in the book.
And it was about a chemical that is currently being used and it was about how it got approved and how he felt things should have gone and the evidence that was used to get that approval from the government.
He knew things about that that he thought were deeply problematic.
But by going any deeper than that, On that specific piece of evidence, I would identify him because he had such close access to that.
And he was the person who would know that.
And so here's a person who's got a pension, who's got kids, college age and things like that, and he's trying to figure out, okay, do I go on the record or do I not?
And we went back for months on this.
Like, do we talk about it?
What do we do?
He got his own lawyers.
We talked about it.
And ultimately, he said, I just can't do it.
And I think that's also part of the story.
It's just like regular people in these companies who actually do have a pretty good conscience, but who are like...
The risk-reward here is so extreme.
If things go bad, I've signed an NDA. What happens to little old me?
Well, if you go all the way back to the history of those people that got dioxin poisoned and they lost the case and then they took liens out against their homes.
I get a little bit fired up on some of these things because part of it is It matters.
I feel like there's a certain degree of onus I have to tell some of these people's stories who don't get to tell it now because they're not here.
And in this case, let me tell you about the end of that case.
Because when you look at it on Google, it'll say, Monsanto wins.
And they did.
They won, technically, that case.
But here's what happened.
I went into every single note in that particular case.
All the documents were housed at the Philadelphia National Archives.
So I went through them.
The jury, when they issued their decision, They did something not unprecedented but super rare.
They're like, we want this document read into the public record.
Didn't end up in a lot of the newspapers or anything like that.
But this is the document that was in the archives.
And they said...
We're finding that Monsanto technically, based on West Virginia law, cannot be held liable here because of the technicalities of West Virginia law.
Which the technicality was they had to prove that Monsanto willfully, recklessly, and wantonly hurt these people.
Those are the words.
Willfully, recklessly, and wantonly.
And that bar these jurors felt was just a little bit too high.
Now you could argue, wait a minute!
Look at what they knew.
How could they not say this is reckless?
The jury felt that that bar was too hard to hit.
But they said in this document, there is no doubt that these people were harmed by these chemicals that were in this plant.
So we want this read into the record, that we feel this way about it.
The foreman of that jury worked at Union Carbide.
He was a chemical person.
You could tell he was torn.
He wasn't an anti-chemical person, but he even was struck by how nasty this stuff was.
Get this, though.
So after that happened, as I said, Monsanto says, you either pay us our court fees or we take your house.
And I interviewed the lawyer who knew all these people, Stuart Caldwell.
And he told me, he said to a man, I sat him down, I said, look, they're going to take your house.
What do you want to do?
And he said that one of them said to him, said, they could take my house, but can they give me 30 days to get out?
I mean, they were ready to go to it.
But the judge, Caldwell went back and said, Judge, you can't let Monsanto do this.
And ultimately, the judge was like, yeah, this is unconscionable.
No.
And ultimately reversed it.
I think Stewart had to make an argument to get that released.
But ultimately, it was.
But get this.
A couple years later, that foreman I was telling you about from Union Carbide, he finds out that there was evidence in that case That because of technicalities, they weren't allowed to see as the jury.
And I don't know the legalness of it, but there was a document from the EPA that showed just how expansive the pollution was and all this stuff.
And he says this clear as day.
If I had seen this document...
My verdict would have been different.
And he says, I hope that all my other jurors, he was the foreman, would have said the same thing.
And at the end of that interview, which almost no one had seen, because, you know, it was buried, he said, I just can't get out of my head.
You know, I feel like I just can't get it out of my head.
I think what he's saying there is to let people down.
So when you see that case, the Monsanto case in West Virginia related to these nitro workers, it looks like, well, I guess Monsanto did anything wrong.
Even the jurors who let Monsanto off in a way Later say, we shouldn't have done it.
I mean, I think one thing that you can do if you don't think this type of agriculture, as we saw that graph, the petrochemicals, we're growing in our petrochemical dependency and you don't want to be a part of that.
I do think you can choose, if you have the means, to buy organic foodstuffs to support, as we've talked about, farmers who are doing regenerative agriculture, trying to grow things and produce meat and food in a different way.
I was just going to say, we're seeing right now thousands of cases being brought by people.
And not just people that are saying, look, my cancer was caused by this.
But we're also seeing cases that are trying organizations, Center for Food Safety, for example, among many others, that are trying to say, look, These chemicals are questionable.
We're petitioning the EPA to stop registering these chemicals and to try and change these things.
I think getting in that kind of structural level of trying to change, you know, getting in some of those battles is important for us, especially for those who have the means and ability to fight those larger fights.
And also, talk about the Farm Bill, you know?
Put pressure on Congressmen to say, wait a minute, why are we subsidizing?
The, you know, corn and soybean.
I mean, the only reason that a lot of these farmers are able to make profits is because they're getting massive subsidies to do so.
And aren't these subsidies that were left over from World War II? You could even go back even further, in a way, to the New Deal, you know, in the 30s.
I mean, this was all a response.
And this is what's so crazy.
Like, we were already producing too much.
The whole problem was we had a surplus.
The idea that we need to, like, we got to grow more.
We got to grow more.
We were growing too much.
That's why the price of wheat and everything was plummeting because we had this just huge bounty.
The whole idea was to subsidize the farmers to make sure that we had an abundance of food because they were preparing for war and they wanted to make sure that they could feed everybody.
There's also the story of these government programs coming in to try and give farmers a kind of support in times where there was so much surplus.
There was so much being produced in the 30s and 20s, a lot like the AAA, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, was passed as a means of being able to allow farmers to keep producing a lot of corn and commodity crops, but give them loans and support that could sustain them when but give them loans and support that could sustain them when the price of those products
And then to your point, the real big change was in the 70s, actually, when Earl Butts, great name, USDA Agricultural Secretary, really put gasoline on our farm policy saying, OK, what we need to do now is grow, as he put it, crops, what we need to do now is grow, as he put it, crops, fence row
We're going to start subsidizing the production of all these different commodity crops and not putting any restrictions on the acreage Getting rid of some of these acreage restrictions that were often tied to those subsidies.
That was the big shift in the 70s, saying you don't have to reduce your acreage.
You know what?
We're going to give you these subsidies and you can grow, as he put it, fence row to fence row.
Grow as fast as you can.
We're going to subsidize that.
Part of that was because of the 70s.
We were, at that time, There was a concern about our surpluses dropping.
And so we kind of started the system that has continued, where we're just subsidizing the production of really animal fodder.
When we're out there and people are saying, well, this is about feeding the world.
We need this genetically engineered trait to feed the world.
He's like, oh, this is going to feed all of this stuff.
What are we doing with it is a great question.
We end up putting it into different programs.
Ethanol is a great example of this.
Like, we have so much corn, well, we've got to figure out a way to put it somewhere.
Ah, we'll put it into a fuel program, so we'll start putting it into gasoline.
It's not an issue of productivity.
Like, we've got a lot of productivity.
I think that's part of the myth of our food problems is that productivity is the problem.
Productivity really isn't the problem.
Our bigger problem is distribution, the types of crops we're growing on the land that we have.
And, you know, the ways in which we're equitably distributing it and also food waste, just tremendous amounts of waste of the average consumer.
You think about even our own practices at home today.
We have a lot of food.
It's now about figuring out how to grow the right types of crops, growing these more biodiverse fields as opposed to these monocrops and changing the game.
That, to me, I think is the future of food.
It's not about Can we produce more corn and soybeans next year than we did last year?
As I said, I wish I could pull up the numbers for how much a soybean farmer gets in terms of a per acreage subsidy from the federal government.
Or listeners can do that themselves.
Or corn.
It's a lot of money.
And what if we took that money and instead of subsidizing a system that we know is out of control, or we're growing way too much of this stuff, and turn it towards subsidies that supports the types of foods that's going to nourish our bodies, instead of necessarily going to animal fodder, and nourish our country?
You know, the Farm Bill can be radically changed, and it should, I think, to reflect that interest in getting away from some of that monocrop cultivation.
Most people just have no sense of the world that's out there.
When I drive around in Ohio farm country, I see advertisements you've probably never seen, right?
Extendamax, you know, seed thing, this cool herbicide.
They're marketing.
The companies are marketing to a very small clientele.
And those decisions that are being made to that small clientele affect all of us.
And I think that's why, you know, we live removed from that and just simply don't have that connection to it.
And I think you're absolutely right.
I think part of you said, what can people do?
Ask questions.
When you're eating somewhere, where is this coming from?
If you're talking to a farmer, what's your farm like?
If you have the ability to go to a farmer's market and talk about those things.
And again, I think that connection is key to the story.
But you said something like, can we pivot?
Here's the big problem, Joe.
All of what we've talked about is based on petrochemicals and on fossil fuels.
80% of what Monsanto was making came from oil, natural gas, or coal.
By the 80s, 80% of their product lines were coming from fossil fuels.
The reason they became a seed company was because they saw that.
They knew that so much of what they were making was coming from petrochemical feedstocks.
So they started trying to make more money off selling seeds and getting into the seed business, which they didn't even own a single seed company before the 1980s.
So they pivoted in part because of the energy crisis of the 1970s when oil prices rose.
They're like, oh my gosh, 80% of what we make comes from this raw material that's now really expensive in the 70s.
And that's why Monsanto said, ooh, we've got to get out of this business of making all these PCBs and all that stuff.
They hung on to some of their brands, Roundup, for example, because it was so profitable for them.
But they tried to get rid of a lot of the other chemicals.
And so they got it.
They knew that there's this dependence on petrochemicals and fossil fuels that we still have.
The problem is...
The market is not going to force industry to change right now because we've seen this boom in oil and gas production in the United States.
And part of that's because of fracking that's happened over the last several decades, right?
We see this huge spike.
So the economy is saying, keep on producing petrochemicals.
It's safe.
It's great.
But the environment is saying you cannot keep doing that, right?
If you keep doing that, we're going to keep seeing the cycle of weed resistance developing and farmers are going to be kind of locked into that system.
So the biggest thing I'd say is that If we're going to fix our food system, we have to get away from that fossil fuel dependency, right?
We have to get away from this economy that was built at a time when there was so much oil, right?
In the 20s and 30s, we're producing all this stuff that made everything around us, including our food, and recognize that we have to start shifting to regenerative agriculture because, you know, ostensibly, we won't have to be so dependent on those fossil fuel feedstocks.
The only reason you can make a throwaway plastic bottle made of sugarcane is because you're producing so much sugarcane from all that synthetic petrochemical agricultural system.
Okay, I just want you to notice a couple of things on this bottle, so when we're looking at it, it says 100%, it's kind of blurry, but it's okay, 100% recyclable plastic.
And I always joke with my students, what does recyclable mean, you know?
Well, it could be recycled.
Part of this is greenwashing labels, like, it's 100% recyclable.
Well, technically, almost anything's 100% recyclable.
Like, you could.
It's a bowl.
You could recycle it, but is it actually recyclable?
I think, to your point, if we're going to use plants, it's got to be the right plant.
Corn is the other thing you often hold out.
I just talked to you.
We just talked about corn.
It's just a disaster because it's all tied into the same system.
And the only reason it's so cheap that you can have a throwaway container like that, and throwaway, I mean, you can drink it once, as we do at a party or whatever, and you're like, oh, well, it's done.
But is it possible to use plants for all the shit we use fossil fuels for and not be tied into this monocrop agricultural system that relies on herbicides?
Because it seems like...
I mean, I don't know much about growing hemp, but I gotta imagine that if you're growing 100,000 acres of hemp, you're gonna have a lot of fucking pesticides and herbicides, and you're gonna have...
But would you be able to get the same sustainable yield, like a yield that you could use to make all these bottles of Coca-Cola and all that, you know?
It turns out it was just like totally a marketing thing.
They sat in a room for hours.
They're like, Dasani, it sounds refreshing.
It comes from nothing.
I went and looked at this.
Okay, so I went and looked because I live in Atlanta.
So I went and looked at our water bill and we're in Fulton County.
So I looked at what that water bill was for a gallon of water or whatever.
No, I must have looked at something smaller.
And then I went to the Kroger and got a Dasani bottle of water.
And at same volume and quantity, I compared the price, okay, of how much you're paying for bottled water versus if you just drank that water out of your tap.
And here in Austin, the water's great.
So, you know, people do that.
So what would happen if you did that?
What was the comparison?
I crunched the numbers.
It was like, okay, Whoa.
It wasn't 10 times more expensive, which would have been like a huge markup for the company.
It wasn't 100 times more expensive.
It wasn't even 1,000 times more expensive.
It was 1,900 times more expensive to drink that bottled water than to drink that water out of the tap.
And it's like, why on earth would I ever pay for that, considering just how expensive it is?
And if you look at the bottle, it says, repurposed public tap water.
It is tap water.
You know, they put it through a filtration system.
It's like a five-layer reverse osmosis filter underneath my sink and parsley because I've been researching about water supplies and lead and water and stuff, and it's kind of nuts what's out there.
Yeah, for sure the plastic is gonna be a thing where they're gonna be Baffled like how we allowed the Pacific garbage patch to get so big before we did anything and how literally a 19 year old kid figured out how to make this machine and He's a boy in slot.
It's the only guy that I know that's figured out how to do something to mitigate it But even then like how much can he mitigate like how?
We're still making plastic.
And then they find birds with all these bottle caps.
If you had a water bottle that was made out of paper and just started deteriorating at the rate that straw did...
You'd never even be able to keep water on the shelf.
The water bottles that are made out of paper, they're like waxy, you know, they have like that stiff and it seems like there's metal in the paper and there's like an aluminum surface to it or something.
We're using less water to produce the bottled water.
There's a concept called Jevons Paradox in economics.
This guy from the 1860s, he said, efficiency is going to kill us, folks, because his argument is that when you start making something more efficient, you actually have incentivized the use of that natural resource.
Yeah, it's really, like, jarring, actually, to walk in there, and I'll be like, okay, here's this thing, and it's a problem, and they're like, We know.
We're on it.
On the other hand, I don't think it's fair for us.
I'm stealing this from somebody who made me see this, actually, because I was like, it's your generation.
You're going to help us.
You're going to solve it.
And this person told me, she said, don't put this on them.
Let them go have a party.
Let them go have some fun.
There is a certain degree of people who are like, the new generation is going to solve everything, instead of being like, well, we're still here.