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#015_ Food Independence _ Planetary Evolution! · INSPIRE STORY

0:24
Speaker 1: All right, let's get into it. Man, So glad to
0:27
Speaker 1: have you have you back, And I just wanted to
0:31
Speaker 1: before we even begin, thank you for all the wisdom
0:35
Speaker 1: that you shared last time you were on the show.
0:37
Speaker 1: To date, it is definitely one of the most impactful,
0:42
Speaker 1: if not the most impactful podcasts that I've done. It's
0:44
Speaker 1: been listened to by hundreds of thousands of people. Not
0:47
Speaker 1: a day goes by where I don't get a message
0:49
Speaker 1: about it or a tweet. Even today somebody tweeted about it.
0:55
Speaker 1: So it's exciting to have you back to go a
0:58
Speaker 1: little bit deeper.
1:00
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, it takes two to tango, and it's
1:03
Speaker 2: your wisdom that kind of pulls this out of your
1:06
Speaker 2: audience and your visitors. So I appreciate all that you
1:09
Speaker 2: bring to this mission of public education. Really that you
1:13
Speaker 2: bring to this podcast.
1:14
Speaker 1: Well, it's the least that I can do. But you're
1:17
Speaker 1: You're in the trenches doing the real work. So I'm
1:19
Speaker 1: just the cipher here.
1:21
Speaker 3: I couldn't do it without you.
1:23
Speaker 1: For those that are that are new, you know, we're
1:26
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna dive deep. But I don't want to
1:28
Speaker 1: entirely recap what we talked about last time. Everyone should
1:32
Speaker 1: definitely go back and listen to our first episode, which
1:34
Speaker 1: I'll link up in the show notes. But essentially your
1:37
Speaker 1: work kind of boils down to making the case for
1:42
Speaker 1: this profound link between environmental degradation and degenerative illness essentially,
1:47
Speaker 1: and the distinction between the science of disease and the
1:51
Speaker 1: science of health. And looking at all of this from
1:54
Speaker 1: a ten thousand foot view in a very holistic sense,
1:58
Speaker 1: from the soil oil all the way to cellular biology
2:02
Speaker 1: is fair enough.
2:04
Speaker 2: It is, yeah, And it's really a story of simplification
2:08
Speaker 2: in some ways, and so the education that we love
2:12
Speaker 2: to give our children as well as our doctors. As
2:15
Speaker 2: everything's complicated, and the more complicated you make it, then
2:18
Speaker 2: the more opportune there is for subspecialization and knowledge. And
2:23
Speaker 2: you know, over the last decade, my whole team, scientists
2:26
Speaker 2: and clinicians, you know, now farmers, everybody else using on
2:30
Speaker 2: the mission, we're finding out that biology in the end
2:33
Speaker 2: is the same thing over and over again at fractal levels,
2:36
Speaker 2: you know. But you can't have human health on a
2:39
Speaker 2: planet that floats in the middle of a vacuum space
2:41
Speaker 2: that's so vast and not have to come to terms
2:44
Speaker 2: with the fact that that human biology is just a
2:47
Speaker 2: small niche within this massive ecosystem of life.
2:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a conundrum because as human culture and society
2:59
Speaker 1: progress and evolves, it's almost natural law that we've become
3:04
Speaker 1: more and more specialized. And specialization has its advantages. It
3:08
Speaker 1: allows a single individual or a small team to go
3:11
Speaker 1: very deep on a particular issue, and we learn a
3:14
Speaker 1: lot about things that way. That is the scientific method.
3:18
Speaker 1: But what we sacrifice is that grander perspective, the interrelation
3:25
Speaker 1: between all of these systems and the interplay and how
3:28
Speaker 1: that all kind of works together in this symphony that
3:31
Speaker 1: either is moving us towards health or away from health.
3:34
Speaker 2: Perfectly said, and I think that lays out, I mean,
3:37
Speaker 2: in some ways, that is the mission statement of the
3:40
Speaker 2: next three four decades. In the last podcast together, we
3:45
Speaker 2: outlined the science and data that we have, mathematical models
3:49
Speaker 2: that we have around human survival and at our current pace,
3:53
Speaker 2: we've got one in three males in the United States
3:56
Speaker 2: now sterile, one in four women infertile, and so we're
4:00
Speaker 2: losing the ability to procreate as a species. And on
4:04
Speaker 2: our current trajectory, we've got about seventy years left of
4:07
Speaker 2: human life on Earth. And if you try to make
4:11
Speaker 2: the argument, well, only the unhealthy people are dying. So
4:15
Speaker 2: maybe it's the poorly educated, maybe it's those with poor
4:19
Speaker 2: access to food. And we can look across the sectors
4:23
Speaker 2: right now and say, well, it's just the Deep South
4:25
Speaker 2: that's really tipping off. Or maybe it's the Native Americans
4:28
Speaker 2: or the Native Hawaiians or the Eskimos. It's these native
4:32
Speaker 2: populations that are really suffering the worst. Well that was
4:36
Speaker 2: the case kind of in the initial decade, but now
4:38
Speaker 2: we see double PhD families with very high sociate income
4:42
Speaker 2: with a kid with autism and two other kids with
4:45
Speaker 2: debilitating asthma and allergies and anaphylaxis and learning delays and
4:50
Speaker 2: everything else. And so it's now crossed all sectors of
4:54
Speaker 2: socio socioeconomics. And it comes down to the fact that
4:59
Speaker 2: you might think that you can outsmart this thing. Maybe
5:02
Speaker 2: you've kind of found this niche socioeconomic niche or an
5:07
Speaker 2: educational niche that you feel like, wow, I'm going to
5:10
Speaker 2: be isolated. I understand human health is collapsing. I understand,
5:14
Speaker 2: you know, social structure is going to collapse, but there's
5:16
Speaker 2: gonna be an enclave of humans that are going to.
5:18
Speaker 1: Survive the air one crowd, Yes, exactly.
5:21
Speaker 2: And so there's that. I think there's a huge contingent
5:24
Speaker 2: that are in that hope. And we can see what
5:26
Speaker 2: our billionaires are doing, right, And so our billionaires are
5:29
Speaker 2: making that bet. And you got Elon Musk and you've
5:32
Speaker 2: got you know, bezos. They're buying a plan for space travel,
5:36
Speaker 2: you know, they're building space stations to leave Earth and
5:40
Speaker 2: go repeat somewhere else, you know. And so if that's
5:43
Speaker 2: the game plan, if that's the ATI is.
5:45
Speaker 1: Like you know, injecting himself with young people's blood and
5:49
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff. Crazy has gone on.
5:51
Speaker 2: And the hubers of this, or the short sightedness of this,
5:55
Speaker 2: perhaps is that it's not about if human health was
6:00
Speaker 2: an isolated event, that it would make sense to put
6:02
Speaker 2: young human blood inside of an older person.
6:05
Speaker 3: That should make you very youthful.
6:07
Speaker 2: But of course we've seen very little evidence that actually
6:09
Speaker 2: sustains life. The fact is that our biology keeps proving
6:14
Speaker 2: in the labs is it's the microbiome. It's these invisible
6:18
Speaker 2: ports parts of the biology on Earth that actually are
6:22
Speaker 2: the inherent physiologic building blocks of human health. The chronological
6:28
Speaker 2: age of a human being is not its biologic age.
6:32
Speaker 2: And so you might say I just got stem cells
6:34
Speaker 2: from a fifteen year old. Well, unfortunately a fifteen year
6:37
Speaker 2: old today as the biology of a sixty year old
6:39
Speaker 2: in the nineteen fifty You can see this degradation in
6:44
Speaker 2: all kinds of elements within the biology most of all,
6:47
Speaker 2: and in the rate of healing. And so we walk
6:50
Speaker 2: around with a very simple ratio, simple ratio of a
6:54
Speaker 2: rate of injury and rate of repair, and that's everything.
6:58
Speaker 2: That's a process, that's chronic disease, that's any process an
7:03
Speaker 2: acute injury. If your a healing rate is at the
7:06
Speaker 2: same pace as that acute injury, you might be sore
7:09
Speaker 2: for a couple hours, and then you're gonna be better.
7:12
Speaker 2: If you start to see that rate of injury outstripped
7:16
Speaker 2: the rate of repair, then you see degradation. You see
7:19
Speaker 2: rapid aging. In the nineteen sixties, the entire US population
7:23
Speaker 2: of all ages carried chronic disease diagnosis in four percent
7:27
Speaker 2: of the population. Today twenty fifteen numbers. We don't have
7:32
Speaker 2: anything more recent than to relign yet, but twenty fifteen
7:35
Speaker 2: we see forty six percent of our children with chronic disease.
7:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw that statistic. It's it's shocking. I mean,
7:41
Speaker 1: you paint a very dystopian, you know, almost sci fi movie,
7:46
Speaker 1: you know, view on the prognosis of the human race.
7:49
Speaker 1: Just to kind of go back to what we glossed
7:51
Speaker 1: over very casually a couple of moments ago, these infertility
7:55
Speaker 1: rates are insane, Like that's really true that, what is it?
7:59
Speaker 2: One out of one of three males and one in
8:02
Speaker 2: four women are having fertility issues.
8:05
Speaker 1: That's something that you don't hear a lot about.
8:08
Speaker 2: You would think that might be front and center of
8:09
Speaker 2: something like the Centers for Disease Control or the National
8:12
Speaker 2: Institutes of Health, you know, that.
8:13
Speaker 3: Might come out statistics for sure.
8:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean these are you know, these are large
8:18
Speaker 2: studies that are screening problems like and these are not
8:22
Speaker 2: even new statistics like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is the
8:25
Speaker 2: leading cause of infertility in women right now in the
8:29
Speaker 2: US and other parts of the world. It's actually chemical
8:31
Speaker 2: toxicity and other things coming into play. And I think
8:34
Speaker 2: chemical toxicity is kind of out the root of PCOS
8:37
Speaker 2: as well, but it's polycystic ovarian syndrome even background two
8:40
Speaker 2: thousand and eight twenty ten, we were seeing one in
8:42
Speaker 2: four girls in America, and so it's these are not
8:46
Speaker 2: even new numbers.
8:47
Speaker 3: They're not even numbers.
8:48
Speaker 2: That would be a statistic to throw up on a
8:51
Speaker 2: headline anymore, because the data is old. So the numbers
8:54
Speaker 2: may be more dismal than we see for the large part,
8:57
Speaker 2: because even our numbers that we see one in four
8:59
Speaker 2: girls with peace, well those are studies looking at girls
9:02
Speaker 2: that are captured through some sort of public health program,
9:06
Speaker 2: which of course we'd have a horrible track record in
9:08
Speaker 2: this country of doing universal screening. I think if you
9:11
Speaker 2: universally screened all the girls in an inner city environment
9:14
Speaker 2: right now, you would find even higher rates of infertility
9:17
Speaker 2: in that.
9:17
Speaker 3: Wow.
9:18
Speaker 2: And so we have a really stark reality today. But
9:24
Speaker 2: on the flip side of that dystopian possibility is the
9:28
Speaker 2: opposite view that if we change our relationship to nature
9:32
Speaker 2: such that we go into a cocreative process with Mother Nature,
9:36
Speaker 2: and we can do this through regenerat of agriculture at
9:38
Speaker 2: the foundation. So if we go into a regenera of
9:40
Speaker 2: agriculture concept, not just in our soil science, but in
9:43
Speaker 2: our human biology, I think we could vary rapidly in
9:46
Speaker 2: the next two hundred years see the entire earth be
9:50
Speaker 2: a verdant garden of Eden where humans have figured out
9:54
Speaker 2: how to co create within nature. That are technological advances
9:58
Speaker 2: and continued speciallyation perhaps, and all these things lead to
10:02
Speaker 2: co creative processes that augment nature or work within nature's processes.
10:08
Speaker 1: So dystopia meets extreme optimism.
10:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's the struggle, right And in
10:15
Speaker 2: some ways we're in a battle right now for morale,
10:19
Speaker 2: and we have a lot of people with brilliant solutions
10:23
Speaker 2: at hand, but they're fighting against a common paradigm that
10:27
Speaker 2: is keeping the rate of progress at a crawl.
10:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. I call it an arms race, it really is.
10:34
Speaker 1: And there's a ticking clock here. It's an interesting it's
10:38
Speaker 1: another conundrum. It's like this mashup of brilliant minds who
10:42
Speaker 1: are making giant leaps forward in terms of longevity science,
10:47
Speaker 1: you know, extraterrestrial exploration like you name it. We're in
10:51
Speaker 1: the midst of this extraordinary period in history where we're
10:54
Speaker 1: seeing breakthroughs at a break neck pace at the site
10:59
Speaker 1: excuse me. At the same time, there are such strong, powerful,
11:05
Speaker 1: well funded forces working day and night to enforce a
11:09
Speaker 1: status quo that is rapidly leading to the denigration of
11:14
Speaker 1: our environment, our planet, human health, all for the sake
11:18
Speaker 1: of short term monetary goals for lack of a better word,
11:22
Speaker 1: or quarterly earnings reports. And who's going to win, right,
11:26
Speaker 1: And I think if we have a chance at prevailing,
11:32
Speaker 1: it's going to require a grassroots movement of people really
11:37
Speaker 1: waking up and taking an active role and not only
11:40
Speaker 1: educating themselves about what actually is going on, but getting
11:44
Speaker 1: involved in making that change possible.
11:47
Speaker 2: Present agree And one thing that I continue to be
11:52
Speaker 2: encouraged and uplifted by is watching as you and many
11:57
Speaker 2: others help my message and science get out there wider.
12:01
Speaker 2: It's putting me in contact with circles of people that
12:05
Speaker 2: are more and more not only accepting, but really intentioning
12:09
Speaker 2: the discovery of what are the solutions that we need
12:11
Speaker 2: at hand. And so I'm increasingly encouraged that at all elements.
12:16
Speaker 3: Like last two.
12:17
Speaker 2: Weeks ago, I was in to Tell Your Ride and
12:20
Speaker 2: speaking to five classes of high school students, and these
12:24
Speaker 2: kids not only got the message they were they left
12:29
Speaker 2: feeling like there was a new sense of purpose at
12:32
Speaker 2: the high school level of what they need to do
12:34
Speaker 2: in the next thirty years to contribute to the survival
12:37
Speaker 2: of humanity.
12:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, you were at the what was the Ideas Fest.
12:42
Speaker 3: Or something like the Reginal Thinkers.
12:43
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I had a couple friends and podcast guests
12:46
Speaker 1: that were participating in that. My friend Colin was like
12:49
Speaker 1: a tea master and a Chinese traditional Chinese medicine doctor.
12:54
Speaker 1: Came back and he's like, man, or this guy's act Bush.
12:56
Speaker 3: He was going to blow your mind.
12:58
Speaker 1: I go, yeah, I know that guy's coming back to
13:00
Speaker 1: the podcast. So yeah, it's getting out there, which is cool,
13:04
Speaker 1: and I want to work our way towards towards the
13:07
Speaker 1: solution that you that you kind of introduced there, But
13:11
Speaker 1: let's immerse ourselves a little bit more deeply in the
13:15
Speaker 1: weeds of what's actually going on. I mean, you mentioned
13:18
Speaker 1: the fertility, the declining fertility rates. I looked at a
13:22
Speaker 1: couple other alarming statistics. One out of every two men
13:25
Speaker 1: and one out of every three women will suffer some
13:28
Speaker 1: form of cancer diagnosis during their lifetimes, not including skin cancer.
13:33
Speaker 1: The autism rates have doubled in the last six years now,
13:37
Speaker 1: it's one out of every thirty six kids, is that correct,
13:41
Speaker 1: that's correct? Of course, Depression, anxiety, these things are are ubiquitous.
13:46
Speaker 1: Forty six percent, as you mentioned, of kids have a
13:48
Speaker 1: chronic health issue, and there's projections that by twenty thirty
13:53
Speaker 1: one out of every three children will be diagnosed somewhere
13:58
Speaker 1: on the autism spectrum. It's insane. And that's not even
14:01
Speaker 1: getting into heart disease, diabetes, obesity.
14:05
Speaker 2: Common ones, right, yeah, yeah, it's not even getting into those.
14:10
Speaker 2: And so you know, we can debate the biology and
14:13
Speaker 2: the chronic diseases all day long, but even if we
14:16
Speaker 2: were off by one hundred percent on those numbers, like
14:19
Speaker 2: what if we were to logarithm off on those numbers.
14:22
Speaker 2: The fact is is even today, if we if we
14:26
Speaker 2: froze progress, where we are today, with the rates of
14:28
Speaker 2: chronic disease we have and the the financial burden that's
14:31
Speaker 2: putting on our country, we're in an insoluble state already.
14:36
Speaker 2: I think our national military and defense budget, which includes
14:41
Speaker 2: things like homeland security and a bunch of other stuff
14:42
Speaker 2: in there, it's somewhere around seven hundred billion dollars a year,
14:46
Speaker 2: and that's a lot of money to spend on being
14:48
Speaker 2: isolationists and maybe being a bully around the world, But
14:52
Speaker 2: it pales and can comparison to the three and a
14:54
Speaker 2: half trillion dollars that we're spending on chronic disease management.
14:58
Speaker 2: So we are, you know, sometimes, you know, somewhere in
15:00
Speaker 2: the ballpark of four to five times more on chronic
15:04
Speaker 2: disease than we are on defense. And I've spoken to
15:09
Speaker 2: one of the authors of Carter's two thousand reports. So
15:12
Speaker 2: Jimmy Carter in the late seventies commissioned a whole team
15:15
Speaker 2: of brilliant economists, agricultural experts, education experts, the technological experts,
15:24
Speaker 2: everything else, and they were supposed to write this two
15:27
Speaker 2: thousand report that would tell us in nineteen seventy eight,
15:29
Speaker 2: what's going to be happening in the year two thousand,
15:31
Speaker 2: what do we need to be ready for to be
15:32
Speaker 2: competitive as a nation on the national stage.
15:34
Speaker 3: So brilliant, forward looking thing.
15:36
Speaker 2: I think he's really one of the few presidents that
15:38
Speaker 2: had the foresight to look far beyond where his presidency
15:41
Speaker 2: could have ever been relevant to that story. And in
15:45
Speaker 2: that commissioning, when I talked to the author of it,
15:47
Speaker 2: you know, he's now in his mid to late seventies,
15:51
Speaker 2: and he said, you know, the biggest shocked everybody who
15:55
Speaker 2: wrote that paper was how they nailed everything they really
15:58
Speaker 2: didn't miss in nineteen They predicted the technological boom, They
16:03
Speaker 2: even had iterations of the Internet, predicted. They had all
16:06
Speaker 2: kinds of profound foresight into what was happening. And he said,
16:10
Speaker 2: the only thing they completely missed was the chronic disease explosion.
16:15
Speaker 2: Nobody could have possibly predicted that at that time that
16:18
Speaker 2: humans could have gone from four percent to forty six
16:20
Speaker 2: percent of our children with chronic disease, you know, or
16:24
Speaker 2: four percent entire population of forty six percent of our
16:26
Speaker 2: ch our children. And so that is why we're economic failing.
16:32
Speaker 2: Is the great minds that have been looking forward thirty
16:34
Speaker 2: to fifty years for saw a lot of what we
16:36
Speaker 2: would need financially to stay soluble. But nobody saw this
16:40
Speaker 2: doubling and doubling and doubling of the healthcare budget. And
16:46
Speaker 2: you know all of the reshuffling of the deck chairs
16:48
Speaker 2: that we've seen with Obama's administration. Well, of course, going
16:51
Speaker 2: back to the Clinton administration, their effort at healthcare reform,
16:55
Speaker 2: Obama finally pulling that together after Bush kind of disassembled
17:00
Speaker 2: the Clinton effort, and now we see Trump disassembling Obama's effort.
17:07
Speaker 2: The fact is not as single. At no moment in
17:10
Speaker 2: there did we create a soluble plan for the healthcare industry.
17:13
Speaker 2: And so all we're doing is re shuffling deck chairs
17:16
Speaker 2: on how are we going to continue to sustain this
17:18
Speaker 2: rate of growth of expense. It costs US six to
17:21
Speaker 2: eight percent more every year to take care of the
17:23
Speaker 2: chronic disease in this country.
17:25
Speaker 3: And so you.
17:27
Speaker 2: Fast forward at a decade and you can see that
17:29
Speaker 2: rate of doubling coming quick and so at this rate,
17:33
Speaker 2: we'll be spending somewhere around five trillion dollars a year
17:36
Speaker 2: on healthcare by twenty twenty five. So with our next
17:39
Speaker 2: president is going to face that kind of crisis at
17:42
Speaker 2: the financial level. And now you start to picture what
17:45
Speaker 2: would it look like if one in three children were
17:46
Speaker 2: autistic in twenty thirty five, Just if that was the
17:51
Speaker 2: only disease that existed, it would cripple us financially. It
17:54
Speaker 2: takes two to three people to provide for one disabled
17:58
Speaker 2: individual over the course of their life, and so you're
18:00
Speaker 2: taking out you know this huge you know, two of
18:03
Speaker 2: those children will have to take care of their peer
18:06
Speaker 2: for the lifetime of that peer. Meanwhile, being coupled with
18:10
Speaker 2: the largest geriatric population in history that has a cancer
18:13
Speaker 2: rate of seventy percent.
18:15
Speaker 1: And so that is a grim picture.
18:18
Speaker 2: Is it's beyond fathoming of what we would have to
18:21
Speaker 2: do financially right, and.
18:23
Speaker 1: Laying on top of that, just our basic systemic structure
18:27
Speaker 1: for dealing with this isn't healthcare. It's sick care. It's
18:30
Speaker 1: basically managing disease and diagnosing and prescribing without much thought
18:38
Speaker 1: or intention being placed into what's causing these illnesses and
18:43
Speaker 1: preventing them before they arise.
18:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
18:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if we tackle it from the Western medical standpoint,
18:52
Speaker 2: which is we need to figure out the biology of cancer,
18:54
Speaker 2: we need to figure out the biology of autism, We
18:57
Speaker 2: need to figure out the biology of all these differently
19:00
Speaker 2: disparate disease processes because they affect different parts of our body.
19:04
Speaker 2: That's been the billion dollar pursuit of all the pharmaceutical
19:08
Speaker 2: industries and all of our universities for fifty years.
19:11
Speaker 3: Now.
19:12
Speaker 2: If we had to wait for that to all entangle,
19:15
Speaker 2: we'll all be dead, long dead.
19:16
Speaker 3: Before that all happens.
19:17
Speaker 2: There's no way that our species will survive that slow
19:21
Speaker 2: pace of processing. Because what we're looking at is, scientists
19:26
Speaker 2: are human cells that are highly damaged in a petri
19:28
Speaker 2: dish that is sterile, completely isolated away from an ecosystem.
19:33
Speaker 2: By that very definition of how we do science, we
19:36
Speaker 2: don't understand what human life looks like in the contexts
19:38
Speaker 2: of an ecosystem. And so we're so flawed at the
19:42
Speaker 2: basic level of exploration that we will never.
19:46
Speaker 3: Find the solutions.
19:47
Speaker 2: And so we've known since two thousand and five with
19:51
Speaker 2: the first genetic untangling of the genome of the microbiomes,
19:55
Speaker 2: so looking at all the genes of all the different
19:57
Speaker 2: species of bacteria, fungi, parasites, everything else that lives in
20:01
Speaker 2: your gut, we got snapshots of that very clearly by
20:04
Speaker 2: two thousand and five. By twenty ten, it was very
20:06
Speaker 2: clear that every cancer that happens in the human body
20:08
Speaker 2: can be correlated with missing some portion of that microbiome.
20:14
Speaker 2: You know, here we are, you know, almost pushing on
20:16
Speaker 2: fifteen years later, and nobody in the cancer realm is
20:20
Speaker 2: talking about replacing your microbiome to get rid of your cancer.
20:23
Speaker 2: They are taking chemo surgery, radiation, exact same story that
20:27
Speaker 2: exists in nineteen sixty eight. And so we have not
20:30
Speaker 2: progressed the clinical science because we don't have a way
20:34
Speaker 2: to take this basic information of ecosystem data. There's an
20:38
Speaker 2: ecosystem of microflora, there's this isolated human being. Because our
20:42
Speaker 2: mechanisms of study are in this isolated space of the
20:45
Speaker 2: Petrie dish, we can't we can't put those two pieces
20:49
Speaker 2: of data together in anything coherent story. And so that's
20:53
Speaker 2: where our lab has tried to jump out of that
20:56
Speaker 2: Petrie dish space and start working instead with the farmers
21:01
Speaker 2: to start looking at the lineage of health and watching
21:06
Speaker 2: soil regenerate is very encouraging, and I think it tells
21:08
Speaker 2: us something about the human journey that we have. We
21:11
Speaker 2: can lay out ahead, which is where we built a
21:15
Speaker 2: nonprofit called Farmer's Footprint now and all of our money
21:18
Speaker 2: from our biotech companies and everything else is pouring into,
21:21
Speaker 2: you know, supporting this bigger mission of the farmers. And
21:24
Speaker 2: so we're now on the ground with farmers all up
21:27
Speaker 2: and down the Midwest from Minnesota down to the Mississippi Delta,
21:32
Speaker 2: where we've dumped the vast majority of the round up
21:34
Speaker 2: in Glave State and done the most decimation on Earth
21:38
Speaker 2: to any soil on the planet. And working with them
21:41
Speaker 2: on the ground, we've seen that you know, every year
21:43
Speaker 2: that they've done chemical farming, their crop yields fit drop.
21:47
Speaker 2: And I think we covered that a little bit in
21:48
Speaker 2: the last podcast, but that dropping yield was something I
21:51
Speaker 2: had read about. And by the time this, you know,
21:54
Speaker 2: this past February, we were shooting this documentary up there. We
21:56
Speaker 2: got to see it in real real time in June July,
22:00
Speaker 2: in the middle of the burden growing season. You try
22:03
Speaker 2: to throw a shovel in chemical farming soil and it's
22:07
Speaker 2: like concrete. There's no it's a solid brick that you're
22:11
Speaker 2: trying to push the shovel into. You have no aeration,
22:14
Speaker 2: you have no earthworms in there. A single application. This
22:19
Speaker 2: an amazing statistic that came from one of our farmers
22:22
Speaker 2: who's doing farm training for farmers. Stop spraying roundup. A
22:25
Speaker 2: single application of round up in a field will kill
22:27
Speaker 2: fifty percent of the earthworm population down with one spray.
22:33
Speaker 2: They spray multiple times a year, over and over and over,
22:36
Speaker 2: and you fast forward twenty years. You've got no earthworms left,
22:39
Speaker 2: which means you have no air down under the soil,
22:42
Speaker 2: which means you've lost the architecture and the aerobic environment
22:45
Speaker 2: you need for the microhise, which is it looks almost
22:49
Speaker 2: like coral reef. Microhise A are these beautiful hair like
22:53
Speaker 2: fibrils that grow up through the soil and they provide,
22:56
Speaker 2: just like the coral reef, the home for the bacteria,
23:00
Speaker 2: fungal elements, y.
23:01
Speaker 1: Solid things to be scaffolding, or the architecture upon which
23:04
Speaker 1: they adhere.
23:05
Speaker 2: It's the ultrastructure of life right down there in the soil,
23:09
Speaker 2: and that's gone in a chemical farm. So we went
23:14
Speaker 2: into this mission to say everybody needs to eat organic. Well,
23:17
Speaker 2: it was devastating. By the end of our trip in February,
23:20
Speaker 2: we find out that the organic farms throughout the vast
23:22
Speaker 2: majority of the US are using tilling, which is what
23:27
Speaker 2: all the chemical farms do too.
23:28
Speaker 3: They till their ground.
23:29
Speaker 2: So you drive by these if you've ever flown or
23:33
Speaker 2: driven over the Midwest in wintertime, it's just fields and
23:35
Speaker 2: fields and fields of black soil. There's nothing growing in it.
23:38
Speaker 2: It's not covered, it's totally exposed. That's a tilled field.
23:42
Speaker 2: When we till, we use a mechanical process rather than
23:45
Speaker 2: a chemical process disrupt all the earthworms, kill all the earthworms, kill,
23:49
Speaker 2: the microize all that through tilling. It turns out then
23:53
Speaker 2: when you switch from chemical farming over to an organic process.
23:57
Speaker 2: One of the things that tends to happen is you
23:58
Speaker 2: start to overtill. You start to more because you don't
24:00
Speaker 2: want to spray the weeds, you try to till the
24:02
Speaker 2: weed into the ground.
24:03
Speaker 1: So what is the intention behind tilling? What is that
24:06
Speaker 1: trying to accomplish.
24:07
Speaker 2: It's interesting when you ask the farmers, you know, because
24:09
Speaker 2: my mindset was it must be to get rid of
24:11
Speaker 2: the weeds, but it's actually an esthetic. The farmers actually
24:15
Speaker 2: just think it looks better. And so the landowners that
24:18
Speaker 2: the farmers are often leasing from want to see a
24:21
Speaker 2: well taken care of farm and in their mind massive landowner.
24:26
Speaker 2: And it's interesting that our farmers no longer own their
24:28
Speaker 2: land right and so we've taken that land away from
24:31
Speaker 2: the family farms, and they're not now owned by one
24:33
Speaker 2: hundred thousand acre million acre plots by some massive conglomerate
24:38
Speaker 2: or or maybe some wealthy person who doesn't have a
24:42
Speaker 2: clue really about farming, perhaps and often.
24:44
Speaker 1: Leads to some form of legal indentured servitude.
24:48
Speaker 2: It's indempured servitude. And we can go into detail on.
24:51
Speaker 1: The amount of death that the.
24:52
Speaker 2: Relationships between the banks the landowners and the farmers is
24:55
Speaker 2: extraordinarily insidious. It's just it's got everything for I was
25:00
Speaker 2: petrified in the ancient processes because they can't move forward financially.
25:06
Speaker 2: But if we just take a look at that simple
25:08
Speaker 2: belief that a plowed field or a tilled field looks clean,
25:13
Speaker 2: that's what the farmer says. I can't not till my
25:16
Speaker 2: land in the fall because then my landowner is going
25:18
Speaker 2: to think I'm a bad farmer. And so it's this
25:21
Speaker 2: just simple, and you're like seriously, like you know you're
25:23
Speaker 2: doing damage.
25:24
Speaker 3: To the soil, but you do it anyways.
25:27
Speaker 2: And then some of them say, it's also a great
25:29
Speaker 2: form of relaxation and meditation for me to be out
25:32
Speaker 2: in the field because this looks kind of messy, and
25:34
Speaker 2: I can just drive along for hours a day and
25:36
Speaker 2: I can.
25:36
Speaker 3: Look back and I said, I just did all that.
25:38
Speaker 2: I just clean that whole thousand acre swath of the
25:41
Speaker 2: last week, and it looks spotless now. And so there's
25:45
Speaker 2: They literally do it for entertainment. They do it for
25:47
Speaker 2: a sense of accomplishment. They don't do it because it's
25:49
Speaker 2: good for the soil. They don't do it because they
25:52
Speaker 2: think they should to grow more crops, so they know
25:53
Speaker 2: it doesn't increase their crop yield. And so when we
25:57
Speaker 2: go in to educate these farmers need support on every level.
26:01
Speaker 2: They need support to say a farm shouldn't look like
26:04
Speaker 2: what our modern farms look like. You have freedom to
26:06
Speaker 2: go make a farm look like whatever it needs to
26:08
Speaker 2: look like to grow healthy soil. But to do that,
26:11
Speaker 2: like we said, you got to get the banks involved.
26:14
Speaker 2: And these these farmers are, you know, the farmers that
26:18
Speaker 2: were featuring in our first docuseries with Farmer's Footprint are
26:22
Speaker 2: still own their family farm. And so these are three
26:24
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty to four hundred and three hundred fifty
26:26
Speaker 2: to one thousand acre farms that have been in their
26:28
Speaker 2: family for at least four or five generations.
26:32
Speaker 1: But are these on the like the sort of jewel
26:35
Speaker 1: solitan model.
26:36
Speaker 2: Or just trad big time GMO farmers, now gotcha, And
26:39
Speaker 2: so they drank the kool aid in the nineteen nineties
26:41
Speaker 2: that they were going to be able to grow more
26:43
Speaker 2: soybeaning corns. So these were already big, big time commodity
26:47
Speaker 2: growing farms by the nineteen eighties, you know, And interestingly
26:51
Speaker 2: it's been generations sometimes since these guys grew gardens. You know,
26:55
Speaker 2: they've been growing large monoculture commodities for one or two
26:59
Speaker 2: or three generations and so and you know, the first
27:04
Speaker 2: farm we are featuring were one of the first adopters
27:08
Speaker 2: of the round up ready GMO crop in nineteen ninety six.
27:12
Speaker 2: And farmers measure their entire not only success as a farm,
27:18
Speaker 2: but their self worth by how many bushels of swiping
27:21
Speaker 2: they get out of their swaping plants that year. And
27:24
Speaker 2: they'll all tell you they all lie, you know, and
27:26
Speaker 2: that's it's just this funny culture. Just like fishermen. They
27:29
Speaker 2: all get together and somehow the fish got four inches longer.
27:32
Speaker 2: It's this story of like, well it was really twenty
27:35
Speaker 2: nine bushels and acre, but thirty five sounds reasonable, So
27:37
Speaker 2: I'll throw that in at the bar.
27:39
Speaker 3: I got thirty five bushels and acre.
27:40
Speaker 2: And so they all kind of josh each other behind
27:43
Speaker 2: the scenes, like yeah, we always fudge each other because
27:46
Speaker 2: nobody wants to tell the real story, which is their
27:49
Speaker 2: dads were growing forty to forty five bushels and acre,
27:53
Speaker 2: and at forty and forty five bushels and acre, they
27:55
Speaker 2: were making ends meet.
27:57
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety two nineteen ninety three, six rolls around.
28:01
Speaker 2: Monsanta rolls in and says, we're gonna be able to
28:03
Speaker 2: increase your crop yield by six seven eight percent. Right,
28:06
Speaker 2: that sounds amazing because dad's not making much money and
28:09
Speaker 2: it's hard for me to think about staying on the
28:11
Speaker 2: farm as the next generation.
28:12
Speaker 3: So we'll do that.
28:13
Speaker 2: So they jump in and even within the first year,
28:16
Speaker 2: Swabey yields went down, not up. And so they went
28:19
Speaker 2: back to Monsanto, who comes to seldom seed the next
28:21
Speaker 2: year and say it didn't work like and Monsantra every
28:24
Speaker 2: year it turns out and I didn't know this as
28:26
Speaker 2: a consumer, but every year or every two years, they
28:29
Speaker 2: would continue to come back and say, we've regenetically modified this.
28:33
Speaker 2: This has got a new twist on it. That's gonna
28:36
Speaker 2: increase yields in the seed.
28:38
Speaker 3: In the seed.
28:39
Speaker 2: And so it was this this constant reiteration of the
28:43
Speaker 2: same story that never came to fruition. There are corn
28:47
Speaker 2: yields never went up, And that's not what we're told
28:50
Speaker 2: as consumers. We're told that we need GMO because it
28:52
Speaker 2: increases yelds.
28:53
Speaker 1: How we're gonna feed the planet, It's gonna have this
28:55
Speaker 1: is how we are feeding the planet. Seven increasing yields
28:57
Speaker 1: across the world, and we're you know, we are responsible
29:02
Speaker 1: for the ability for farmers to produce on a level
29:07
Speaker 1: that they would not be able to without us.
29:09
Speaker 2: Corn yields never went up, so ivan went down consistently,
29:13
Speaker 2: and so this farm, after fifteen years of GMO farming,
29:17
Speaker 2: had dropped to below thirty bushels and acre. They're at
29:21
Speaker 2: twenty six bushels and acre, so pushing half of their
29:24
Speaker 2: yield that Dad used to get with normal conventional seed
29:28
Speaker 2: that had no genetic modification process in it. Meanwhile, in
29:34
Speaker 2: that fifteen year period, the banks had drank the same
29:37
Speaker 2: kool aid that conventional seed was dangerous because it didn't
29:41
Speaker 2: yield as much. And the banks know that the farmer
29:43
Speaker 2: can't pay back their loans that they have to take
29:46
Speaker 2: out of a year to buy the commodities on the
29:48
Speaker 2: front end, and so they think that the farmer's going
29:51
Speaker 2: to go out of business if they use a low
29:53
Speaker 2: yield seed, which we've been they've been told just like
29:55
Speaker 2: the farmer is going to be a conventional seed.
29:57
Speaker 1: So the loans become contingent to chemical farming.
30:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so now the banks think you have to
30:03
Speaker 2: chemically farm if you're going to survive. And now, but
30:07
Speaker 2: you have farmers telling the banker, look, my yields are
30:10
Speaker 2: dropping every year. Apparently there's a few community banks that
30:14
Speaker 2: are starting to realize just watching the data come in
30:17
Speaker 2: that this isn't working. But they're having hard time getting
30:20
Speaker 2: out from under it because actually most of those small
30:22
Speaker 2: banks are actually you know, within the arm of some large.
30:26
Speaker 3: Bank that needs to be convinced otherwise as well.
30:29
Speaker 2: And so the bureaucracy is cranking along again super slow
30:34
Speaker 2: to see any need for change. Meanwhile, the farmers are
30:36
Speaker 2: losing their farms. And you really, you and I not
30:41
Speaker 2: being not carrying on our father's tradition of income, can't really,
30:48
Speaker 2: I think, psychologically understand the pressure these guys are.
30:52
Speaker 1: I mean, I am I am part of that, you know,
30:54
Speaker 1: air Wan generation. You know, I'm somebody who's so disconnected
30:58
Speaker 1: from what that life must be like. I can attempt
31:01
Speaker 1: to sympathize, but I can hardly empathize with how difficult
31:04
Speaker 1: that must be to even just survive under what is
31:11
Speaker 1: essentially the stranglehold of this gigantic, almost monopolistic corporate entity
31:18
Speaker 1: known formerly as Monsanto and now as bear that is
31:22
Speaker 1: pulling the strings and controlling every aspect of food from
31:29
Speaker 1: seed all the way to the pharmaceuticals to treat the
31:32
Speaker 1: diseases that it produces. And I think it would be
31:35
Speaker 1: good to we explored this at length last time, but
31:40
Speaker 1: if somebody's tuning in for the first time, they will
31:43
Speaker 1: be inspired to go back and listen to our first conversation.
31:45
Speaker 1: But I think it would be good to just briefly
31:47
Speaker 1: contextualize this whole debate and argument around Monsanto and glycosate
31:54
Speaker 1: by briefly tracking the history of how this came to
31:58
Speaker 1: be to produce the situation and that we now find
32:00
Speaker 1: ourselves in.
32:03
Speaker 3: Yeah.
32:04
Speaker 2: So, Monsanto was a chemical company that was developing chemical
32:11
Speaker 2: warfare throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties, and so they
32:15
Speaker 2: were very involved in the development of chemicals like agent
32:19
Speaker 2: orange and these things that we were using to defoliate
32:22
Speaker 2: the jungles of Vietnam so that we could see the
32:24
Speaker 2: Vietcong veteran, expose the Hochiman trail and do our bombings
32:27
Speaker 2: more accurately. And so they were part of this mission
32:31
Speaker 2: to you know, kill life before they got into the
32:35
Speaker 2: farming industry, and so there was a long track record
32:39
Speaker 2: there for that company wanting to kill biology. And they,
32:44
Speaker 2: you know, Vietnam was wrapping up in the early seventies.
32:47
Speaker 2: They were losing market share there quickly, and so they
32:49
Speaker 2: were looking for more mundane ways to make money, and
32:54
Speaker 2: they found this patent for what would become glyca stan
32:58
Speaker 2: roundup as old patent is from like fifty nine, nineteen
33:02
Speaker 2: fifty nine, created by a Japanese scientist who kept it
33:06
Speaker 2: on a shelf wisely and didn't think there was a
33:08
Speaker 2: safe human application for it, I think, And so that
33:13
Speaker 2: patent got purchased and they were trying to use it
33:15
Speaker 2: actually to declog sewer lines. Initially, it's a potent keylator.
33:20
Speaker 2: It pulls mineral out of whatever it touches, which is
33:23
Speaker 2: probably not what you want to do to soil, right,
33:25
Speaker 2: But nonetheless, they were putting this in pipes to keelate
33:28
Speaker 2: and try to clear clog pipes from mineral deposit. Turnout
33:32
Speaker 2: worked quite well for unclogging the pipes, but when it
33:35
Speaker 2: came out the other end of the pipe, it was
33:36
Speaker 2: killing all the life in the pond and around the
33:39
Speaker 2: ponds and everything else. And so then that gave them
33:41
Speaker 2: the idea of that looks like a pretty potent nerbicide,
33:44
Speaker 2: and so they put it back into play as a
33:46
Speaker 2: weed killer, and so that then quickly marched. In nineteen eighties,
33:50
Speaker 2: we see that get approved for direct consumer sales, and
33:53
Speaker 2: so you remember the big Super Bowl commercials with guys
33:56
Speaker 2: with backpacks of round Up with the pistol grip sprayers,
33:59
Speaker 2: and they walk up on they spray five dandelions in
34:01
Speaker 2: their driveway, and then they walked back in with dramatic soundtrack.
34:05
Speaker 2: And so that direct consumer message put a gallon of
34:09
Speaker 2: round Up in every single garage in suburban America. What
34:13
Speaker 2: wasn't mentioned in those commercials is water soluble toxin, and
34:16
Speaker 2: it just got sprayed onto your driveway, which is washing
34:18
Speaker 2: right down in your gutter, which goes right to your
34:20
Speaker 2: municipal water system. And so by the end of the eighties,
34:23
Speaker 2: we're drinking Roundup from I think the majority from homeowners,
34:28
Speaker 2: not even farmers. And so we start drinking this chemical
34:32
Speaker 2: not having any clue that it's there or any clue
34:34
Speaker 2: that it would be dangerous because the tagline from Monsanta
34:37
Speaker 2: was safer than water. Well at this point, Monsanto actually
34:42
Speaker 2: published in the late eighties the cancer causing effects of
34:47
Speaker 2: this compound glyc essaie roundup, and they were studying it
34:52
Speaker 2: in mice and they were showing major birth defects and
34:56
Speaker 2: cancers and sarcoma's weird things. And so this is their
34:58
Speaker 2: own data and they published that still in the public
35:00
Speaker 2: Domainion go find Monsanto's original things. If you can't find it,
35:04
Speaker 2: then Stephanie sine F from MIT has done a great
35:06
Speaker 2: job of kind of putting a library together of those
35:09
Speaker 2: those original Monsanto documents.
35:11
Speaker 3: And so they knew it was toxes.
35:13
Speaker 2: But I think the reason they were comfortable putting that
35:15
Speaker 2: out is the threshold at which they thought that was
35:18
Speaker 2: going to be harmful. They didn't think they'd ever reach,
35:21
Speaker 2: because in nineteen eighty eight and eighty seven, when they
35:23
Speaker 2: were publishing that stuff that I don't think they could
35:25
Speaker 2: have believed that they would be able to genetically modify
35:28
Speaker 2: a crop by nineteen.
35:30
Speaker 3: Ninety six that would handle that.
35:32
Speaker 2: And so it was just being used as a spot
35:33
Speaker 2: spray or the amountain water everything else was quite trace because.
35:37
Speaker 1: At that time, before they'd manipulated the sea population, if
35:40
Speaker 1: they used too much it would just kill.
35:42
Speaker 2: Them, kills plants, kills corn soybeing kills any plant you
35:45
Speaker 2: spray it on, right, and so it's a non selective herbicide, really,
35:49
Speaker 2: you know, And so I think that, you know, they
35:51
Speaker 2: couldn't have even foreseen their own success in some ways
35:55
Speaker 2: in the late eighties, and so they were publishing that
35:57
Speaker 2: data saying that it might be toxic at these higher levels.
36:00
Speaker 2: But when would we ever be able to use that
36:02
Speaker 2: much that glyphastate in the world. By nineteen ninety two
36:07
Speaker 2: was when we started spraying directly on crops, and so
36:09
Speaker 2: it started to be sold as a desicant or a
36:11
Speaker 2: drying agent to the wheat. Wheat is the only staple
36:15
Speaker 2: crop that you want dead before you can harvest it,
36:17
Speaker 2: and so they were spraying wheat in northern climates initially,
36:21
Speaker 2: and now it's kind of gone worldwide, and every single
36:24
Speaker 2: year since nineteen ninety two, we've sprayed more acres of
36:26
Speaker 2: wheat with glyphasate, and it dries it quick and it
36:29
Speaker 2: allows you if you have bad weather coming, you can
36:32
Speaker 2: kill it quickly and harpsta three days later, so that
36:34
Speaker 2: you can get your wheat harvested before it rains or
36:36
Speaker 2: before the water comes. So there's a lot of economic
36:40
Speaker 2: incentive to the farmer to desiccate the wheat.
36:43
Speaker 3: At times, not all wheat farmers.
36:46
Speaker 2: Use it, but enough American acre to got covered in
36:49
Speaker 2: this that we started to eat glyphissate and gluten in
36:52
Speaker 2: the same bite. And so that's really the development of
36:55
Speaker 2: gluten sensitivity started right around ninety two. And with each
36:59
Speaker 2: acre extra that we sprayed with round up, we saw
37:01
Speaker 2: the increase in not only in gluten sensitivity, but the
37:04
Speaker 2: autoimmune disease seeliac disease.
37:06
Speaker 1: So what is the interplay between glyphissate and gluten sensitivity.
37:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, So my PhD that works in my lab and
37:15
Speaker 2: at the University of Virginia is a brilliant, brilliant geneticist,
37:19
Speaker 2: doctor John gil Day. He has done extensive work in
37:23
Speaker 2: areas of hypertension and cancer and all kinds of things.
37:25
Speaker 2: But he really has been the smartest mind that we
37:29
Speaker 2: have behind understanding the role of glyphasate in the human biology.
37:34
Speaker 2: And his science has been incredibly landmark in that he's
37:39
Speaker 2: recognizing that the glyphasate injury of the gut lining, which
37:43
Speaker 2: is induced as a hypoxic injury. As soon as you
37:46
Speaker 2: expose the gut lining to the glyphisate chemical, you get
37:51
Speaker 2: this lack of oxygen injury to the gut lining. And
37:54
Speaker 2: one of the results of that seems to be the
37:57
Speaker 2: over expression of CXCR three, which is ace to the
38:01
Speaker 2: gluten compound gleaden. And so now you grab that with
38:06
Speaker 2: that gluten breakdown product, and it induces the production of
38:09
Speaker 2: something called zanulin. Zonulin opens up the tight junction. You
38:12
Speaker 2: get this unzippering of the whole gut lining, and now
38:14
Speaker 2: you have leaky gut. And so it's this sensitization of
38:18
Speaker 2: the gut lining to glyfe to say that creates the
38:20
Speaker 2: receptor that would even grab the gluten compound to cause
38:23
Speaker 2: a problem. And so this is really why we've been
38:27
Speaker 2: able to have gluten in our diet for thousands of
38:29
Speaker 2: years without any measurable, you know, immune impact, and then
38:32
Speaker 2: suddenly in the nineteen nineties we have a huge swath
38:34
Speaker 2: maybe fifteen twenty percent. By then, now we're looking at
38:37
Speaker 2: maybe sixty seventy percent of the American population with some
38:39
Speaker 2: form of gluten sensitivity, and so just an amazing you know.
38:43
Speaker 1: That's amazing, And that's is that also why you hear
38:47
Speaker 1: anecdotally like oh, I go to Italy and I have
38:50
Speaker 1: pizza or I have past and I feel fine.
38:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I go to home, I feel terrible.
38:54
Speaker 2: Crossan on the streets of France. You feel fine, no problem,
38:57
Speaker 2: come back to the States. You have one piece of
38:59
Speaker 2: bread and you got brain fog for three days. That
39:02
Speaker 2: that is the reality is that. You know, Europe's done
39:05
Speaker 2: a good job of reducing the amount of round up
39:08
Speaker 2: sprayed in their countries. Unfortunately they did get infiltrated by
39:12
Speaker 2: the GMO world. But you know, frances vowed that they're
39:15
Speaker 2: going to be you know, GMO free within the next
39:17
Speaker 2: couple of years. Russia has made actually the strongest stance
39:21
Speaker 2: on that that they're going to be GMO free and
39:23
Speaker 2: a fully organic nation.
39:24
Speaker 3: But I think they said twenty twenty five or something
39:26
Speaker 3: like that.
39:26
Speaker 1: So that's bananas.
39:28
Speaker 2: That's Russia having that mindset that, you know, this is
39:31
Speaker 2: the most important thing we could do for national security
39:33
Speaker 2: as Russia would be to create an organic thing. And
39:36
Speaker 2: I feel the same way for the United States as
39:38
Speaker 2: an American. I feel like my highest duty that I
39:41
Speaker 2: have is to help this nation get to health security again.
39:45
Speaker 2: If we don't, it doesn't matter what we do with
39:47
Speaker 2: the military, what we do with our stance on you know,
39:51
Speaker 2: our international political relationships or anything else.
39:54
Speaker 3: It just doesn't matter.
39:55
Speaker 2: We can't contend on an international level in ten or
39:58
Speaker 2: fifteen years because we're going to be broke. We're already
40:01
Speaker 2: the deepest in debtonation that exists. And yet you know,
40:04
Speaker 2: we continue to leverage, leverage, leverage, largely because we have
40:07
Speaker 2: so much DEBTA on the healthcare side.
40:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's devastating. But there's been some interesting developments
40:16
Speaker 1: since we last spoke, kind of fast forwarding through this
40:20
Speaker 1: Monsanto timeline to current. Of course, we have the big
40:26
Speaker 1: landmark Monsanto trial that resulted in a two hundred and
40:30
Speaker 1: what was it eighty nine million dollar verdict for that
40:33
Speaker 1: groundskeeper who had non Hodgkins lymphoma who prevailed a trial,
40:39
Speaker 1: and that spurred I think at the time there were
40:42
Speaker 1: maybe eight hundred or a thousand lawsuits pending. Now there's
40:44
Speaker 1: something like eight thousand, right, So what is there's a
40:49
Speaker 1: there's a couple of things I want to talk about,
40:50
Speaker 1: but like, what is the import of that decision? How
40:54
Speaker 1: is this going to play out? What's it going to
40:55
Speaker 1: look like when the rest of these the cases go
41:01
Speaker 1: before jury's.
41:05
Speaker 2: First of all, I don't I mean huge, huge, interesting
41:09
Speaker 2: landmark case, as you say, is the first case out
41:11
Speaker 2: of the many thousands that have been brought before.
41:15
Speaker 3: That one that was allowed to go to jury.
41:17
Speaker 2: And the thing that was, you know, really allowed to
41:21
Speaker 2: go to jury was not just the science of why
41:23
Speaker 2: this guy got non Hodgkins lymphoma, which is the most
41:26
Speaker 2: common cancer.
41:27
Speaker 3: Associated with glyphysate.
41:30
Speaker 2: The lymphomas and leukemias are the easiest ones to track
41:32
Speaker 2: back to the glyphysate injury. But the judge was the
41:38
Speaker 2: first to allow data to go forward that Monsanto had
41:41
Speaker 2: known that this was a cancer causing agent since the
41:43
Speaker 2: eighties and that that data could be put into the
41:46
Speaker 2: court place for the first.
41:47
Speaker 1: Time, and he didn't The burden of proof wasn't that
41:50
Speaker 1: he had to prove beyond beyond you know, he didn't
41:54
Speaker 1: have to definitively prove that is non Hodgkins resulted directly
41:59
Speaker 1: from lipha say, it had had to be a contributing factor,
42:03
Speaker 1: I think was how they adjudicated it. And it's very difficult,
42:07
Speaker 1: even if that is a clearer pathway than other cancers,
42:11
Speaker 1: how do you specifically, I mean, that's a very heavy
42:13
Speaker 1: burden shoulder to say, well, this is what you know.
42:17
Speaker 1: I mean if you're smoking, to say I got lung
42:18
Speaker 1: cancer from cigarettes, even you can't definitively prove that, right,
42:23
Speaker 1: and so exact that they prevail.
42:24
Speaker 2: We still haven't had a class action lawsuit on cigarettes
42:27
Speaker 2: and lung cancer, right, And so you're exactly right. And
42:30
Speaker 2: you know, as optimistic as I tend to try to be,
42:35
Speaker 2: I'm not sure that that verdict's is going to be
42:38
Speaker 2: allowed to stand. I mean, they're going to keep appealing
42:40
Speaker 2: until they can, until the cows come home, I think
42:43
Speaker 2: in the reality but the realist in my brain has
42:49
Speaker 2: to step back for a second and say, why, now,
42:52
Speaker 2: why suddenly, after thousands of efforts, did this case be
42:57
Speaker 2: allowed to go to trial? Why suddenly did Monsanto be,
43:01
Speaker 2: you know, let this thing get to the point where
43:03
Speaker 2: they're paying out two hundred million dollars to an individual?
43:06
Speaker 3: What could possibly be the rationale for that?
43:09
Speaker 2: And if we back up from maybe a less optimistic standpoint,
43:12
Speaker 2: we can say the major event that happened within weeks
43:15
Speaker 2: or months ahead of that trial going forward was the
43:19
Speaker 2: sale of Monsanta to a foreign entity, and so Beer,
43:22
Speaker 2: the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, arguably but certainly
43:27
Speaker 2: in Germany, purchased Monsanto for sixty seven million dollar dollars
43:32
Speaker 2: or something billion dollars, right, And so that sixty seven
43:34
Speaker 2: billion dollars moves you know, the the court environment, I think,
43:40
Speaker 2: to a different district, right. And so I think whatever
43:45
Speaker 2: you know, impending stuff we have right now is I
43:49
Speaker 2: don't know if anybody outside of the deal makers for
43:52
Speaker 2: the Monsanto bears they have seen it, but I have
43:54
Speaker 2: a feeling there's if we took a look at all
43:56
Speaker 2: that paperwork, we could see that there's going to be
43:59
Speaker 2: you know, a time period in which case these court
44:01
Speaker 2: cases will be allowed to move forward. And then suddenly
44:03
Speaker 2: Bear is going to be completely untouchable. And within days
44:08
Speaker 2: of the completion of the the merger or the purchase
44:12
Speaker 2: of Monsanto, they dissolved the legal entity of Monsanto.
44:16
Speaker 1: Right, They've retired that name.
44:17
Speaker 2: They retired the name, they dissolved the entity. They just
44:20
Speaker 2: made it disappear. And so now we have all these
44:23
Speaker 2: cases against Monsanto that is now no.
44:26
Speaker 1: Longer standity standing issue now.
44:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, And so I think it answered one of
44:33
Speaker 2: my biggest questions right before all of that unfolded. My
44:35
Speaker 2: biggest question was why is Monsanto selling itself for sixty
44:38
Speaker 2: seven billion dollars. They provide seed to eighty five to
44:43
Speaker 2: ninety percent of our commodities in the United States.
44:46
Speaker 3: Their worth has to be far greater than sixty billion dollars.
44:51
Speaker 2: And so how could they be selling themselves for pennies
44:53
Speaker 2: on the dollar to a foreign entity. What would be
44:55
Speaker 2: the impetus behind that number one? Maybe they saw the
44:58
Speaker 2: writing on the wall said this is not looking good.
45:00
Speaker 2: There's too much data. Public sentiment is stacking up against
45:04
Speaker 2: US hire and Hire every year. We need to just
45:06
Speaker 2: cut and run, get out from a underneath this situation.
45:09
Speaker 2: But it's also possible that there's a bigger situation at play,
45:12
Speaker 2: which is again the international commodities market and the monsanto.
45:19
Speaker 2: You know, by two thousand and two, we had hit
45:21
Speaker 2: eighty five percent of our corn and ninety five percent
45:23
Speaker 2: of our sway being grown by GMO. If that wasn't,
45:26
Speaker 2: if it wasn't that hit those number of two thousand
45:28
Speaker 2: and two, So only two thousand and six we had
45:29
Speaker 2: hit those And so we've seen this huge domination of
45:33
Speaker 2: this single seed source for US commise. But now if
45:36
Speaker 2: you look in the developing world, it's India, you've got China,
45:39
Speaker 2: you've got Australia buried in New Zealand.
45:43
Speaker 3: Brazil is one of the largest importers of it.
45:45
Speaker 2: And so you've got swaths of the entire seven billion
45:49
Speaker 2: people in the world that are consuming some sort of
45:52
Speaker 2: GMO crop from this single source.
45:56
Speaker 3: So sixty six billion dollars it.
45:58
Speaker 2: Sounds like a lot of money to you and I,
45:59
Speaker 2: but it's a pittance compared to that global commodities environment.
46:04
Speaker 2: In the years right before the move for Bayer to
46:08
Speaker 2: go purchase Monsanto, they got approval from EU regulators as
46:12
Speaker 2: well as the US EPA and USDA to go in
46:15
Speaker 2: with a new genetically modified crop. And nobody's talked about
46:19
Speaker 2: this crop in the US. Our farmers know it's there
46:22
Speaker 2: because we're growing it in the Midwest already. It's called
46:24
Speaker 2: Liberty Link, and so it used to be round up
46:27
Speaker 2: ready crops from Monsanto, but now it's Liberty Link from Bayer.
46:31
Speaker 2: Liberty Link is a creepy enough name to it anyways,
46:34
Speaker 2: But Liberty Link, it turns out, is a different genetic
46:37
Speaker 2: modification to allow for a different herbicide to be applied
46:41
Speaker 2: to the crop, and the mechanism of action is same
46:45
Speaker 2: concept where it's blocking the production of amino acids, which
46:48
Speaker 2: are the building blocks for life, but it's blocking a
46:51
Speaker 2: very specific one in this case, it blocks the enzyme
46:55
Speaker 2: that makes glutamine.
46:57
Speaker 1: And this.
47:00
Speaker 2: This happens to be an extremely important piece of innumerable
47:05
Speaker 2: endocrine functions, innumerable functions of you know, cellular biology, but
47:10
Speaker 2: most profoundly perhaps is fertility. Human fertility depending on this
47:14
Speaker 2: amino acid.
47:15
Speaker 1: So this is the this is the next evolution of
47:18
Speaker 1: round up.
47:19
Speaker 2: This is the next evolution of GMO crops. And it's
47:22
Speaker 2: growing in your Midwest, United States right now, and it's
47:24
Speaker 2: owned by Bear and so that's weird in the place.
47:27
Speaker 2: It's a corn soybean across they can put it in
47:30
Speaker 2: any you know, anything they want at this point, I think.
47:34
Speaker 2: But it's the big staple crops that they're growing, corn
47:37
Speaker 2: soybean particularly, but sugar.
47:39
Speaker 3: Beets and all those are well in the way, you know,
47:41
Speaker 3: so but.
47:42
Speaker 2: Qurn soybean already being grown in the US under this
47:45
Speaker 2: new new crop treatment, which is blocking the ability of
47:50
Speaker 2: that food to carry these essential amino acids into the
47:53
Speaker 2: into the food chain.
47:56
Speaker 3: So we have.
47:59
Speaker 1: Simultaneous fronts on affronts on our soil systems, and then
48:05
Speaker 1: we have the human health impact of ingesting all of
48:09
Speaker 1: these crops on a mass scale, which is disrupting our
48:13
Speaker 1: endocrine systems, It's destroying our microbiome. Like, explain a little
48:17
Speaker 1: bit about how this is leading to all of these
48:22
Speaker 1: degenerative chronic illnesses that we're seeing.
48:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, yeah, I think to finish off that political thought,
48:30
Speaker 2: I guess before my brain can move on, is it
48:33
Speaker 2: makes sense that if you've got a new commodity that
48:36
Speaker 2: could take over the majority of the world, but you're
48:39
Speaker 2: in direct competition with Monsanto, who's already mastered eighty five
48:42
Speaker 2: and ninety percent of the farm environment, to make the
48:45
Speaker 2: move to purchase that company's a no brainer because it
48:48
Speaker 2: gives you the opportunity to become a monopoly across both.
48:52
Speaker 1: It's amazing that it passed antitrust muster.
48:56
Speaker 3: I don't think it got to even evaluate it.
48:58
Speaker 2: I don't understand how somebody could have honestly said they
49:00
Speaker 2: did an anti trust evaluation.
49:02
Speaker 1: I mean, I think when we were here before the
49:04
Speaker 1: when you were here before the merger was pending, but
49:06
Speaker 1: it hadn't folding off.
49:07
Speaker 3: I thought it was going to fail because of the
49:09
Speaker 3: endi trust issues.
49:10
Speaker 2: I didn't think there was a way that we not
49:12
Speaker 2: only that, I just assumed, especially because of our current
49:14
Speaker 2: administration having such a nationalistic agenda. Apparently I couldn't believe
49:21
Speaker 2: the last time we talked that it was going to
49:22
Speaker 2: be allowed to go through, because what American president would
49:25
Speaker 2: want to have that on their track record that they
49:27
Speaker 2: allowed eighty five to ninety percent of our our commodity
49:30
Speaker 2: crops to be owned by a foreign entity.
49:31
Speaker 1: And it's patently anti competitive because there is no competitor.
49:35
Speaker 2: No competitor, no competitor, and so how it could not
49:38
Speaker 2: have been considered monopoly is beyond me. I think they
49:41
Speaker 2: must have found some loophole around that issue as well.
49:43
Speaker 2: We have to feed the world. I have a feeling
49:45
Speaker 2: that's how they snot it through.
49:46
Speaker 1: Well that what is the lobbying budget of Monsanto or
49:49
Speaker 1: Bayer for that matter, the GDP of a small European nation.
49:54
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, and they're at multiple levels, right, because it's
49:58
Speaker 2: not just food command they're also in energy, right, because
50:02
Speaker 2: we've used up and raped our most fertile soils in
50:06
Speaker 2: the United States for the production of ethanol for our cars,
50:09
Speaker 2: and so Monsandra has been playing on multiple sectors politically,
50:14
Speaker 2: and so they're not just food an ag their energy
50:18
Speaker 2: and you know, spread across into even military budgets, I'm
50:21
Speaker 2: sure because of the provision of ethanol to the military.
50:24
Speaker 2: So and now it's pharma and now it's pharma, and
50:27
Speaker 2: so you've and Farmer's not new to Monsanta, by the way,
50:30
Speaker 2: Pharmaco owned Monsanta all the way back in the nineteen nineties.
50:34
Speaker 2: And so when we went to genetic montoficiating cation of crops,
50:38
Speaker 2: we already were owned. Our food chain was already owned
50:41
Speaker 2: by the pharmaceutical industry by that time. And so Monsandra
50:45
Speaker 2: has been owned repetitively by the pharmaceutical companies. And so
50:49
Speaker 2: I think Bayer's making the play now, is a big
50:51
Speaker 2: pharmaceutical company to own the global food chain and make
50:56
Speaker 2: this weird play for liberty link.
50:57
Speaker 3: It's just you know, gonna block this amino.
51:01
Speaker 1: Have I never heard of that? Have they purposely just
51:04
Speaker 1: not publicized it and given it this jingoistic patriotic name
51:08
Speaker 1: to make people feel good about it.
51:10
Speaker 2: Well, I think now I'm predicting the future, and I
51:13
Speaker 2: don't know, but my prediction is we're going to see
51:16
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of color cases now allowing to go
51:19
Speaker 2: to case to go to court, because I think Bear
51:21
Speaker 2: wants everybody to now admit that that GMO ground up
51:25
Speaker 2: crops are terrible for your health, so they can pull
51:27
Speaker 2: it off the market quicker and look like the White
51:30
Speaker 2: Knights coming in with liberty.
51:31
Speaker 3: Lenkacy, You're absolutely right, we see you know, mon Santa.
51:35
Speaker 2: We refuse to tell you this, but we own them now,
51:37
Speaker 2: and we're telling you our science and our review of
51:40
Speaker 2: all of their data saying it's definitely causing cancer.
51:43
Speaker 3: We're sorry, Meya Kalpa. And that puts an end on
51:46
Speaker 3: all of the.
51:48
Speaker 1: Setting aside some crazy war chest to settle all these
51:50
Speaker 1: cases they had.
51:52
Speaker 2: I'm sure they did because if I mean, look at
51:54
Speaker 2: how much they're making just off of gmo crops that
51:57
Speaker 2: are still selling on Santo seed. And so even if
52:00
Speaker 2: sixty six billion bought the company, they can they've got
52:02
Speaker 2: the income to offset the court cases with that they
52:05
Speaker 2: may have. You know, if you looked at the amount
52:07
Speaker 2: of income expected from Monsanto and multiply that by the
52:10
Speaker 2: typical five x for the valuation of their company, we
52:14
Speaker 2: might find that the war chest was built right into
52:16
Speaker 2: that as a fudge factor. So so they may have
52:18
Speaker 2: been worth two hundred billion dollars and they sold for
52:22
Speaker 2: sixty six billion, said hey, we could.
52:24
Speaker 3: Pay one hundred billion dollars of lawsuits.
52:26
Speaker 2: And still at the end of all that, we pull
52:29
Speaker 2: that Monsanto GMO crop off the market and we put
52:31
Speaker 2: liberty link in play, and so they already have I
52:34
Speaker 2: think the end There's no way a company as big
52:36
Speaker 2: as Bear is not going to have an endgame in
52:37
Speaker 2: play when Monsanta was already all tied up in these lawsuits.
52:40
Speaker 1: Well, the lobbying arm is certainly healthy at this point.
52:43
Speaker 1: I just got an email today from EWG Environmental Working Group.
52:48
Speaker 1: It was a letter penned by Aaron Brockovich about how
52:57
Speaker 1: how the farm bill that's that's up for renewal has
53:02
Speaker 1: a provision in it that would allow locality that would
53:05
Speaker 1: strip away the purview of localities to ban c life estate.
53:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.
53:12
Speaker 1: So this is still you know, this is a war
53:14
Speaker 1: that's being fought constantly on multiple battlefronts.
53:18
Speaker 3: Yeah.
53:19
Speaker 2: I mean, I've had people at the municipal level, at
53:22
Speaker 2: city levels begging for our science to be taken to
53:25
Speaker 2: their local school board to stop spraying the schoolyard with
53:28
Speaker 2: round them, you know, and you know, are not There's
53:32
Speaker 2: hundreds of scientists around the world that are trying to
53:35
Speaker 2: help with this mission.
53:36
Speaker 3: But to see so much resistance down there.
53:39
Speaker 2: You know, I got to call a couple of weeks
53:40
Speaker 2: ago from this woman who was trying to make this fight,
53:43
Speaker 2: and they presented all this science to the school board,
53:46
Speaker 2: and they brought in a Monsanto sales rep to be there,
53:53
Speaker 2: and the mon Santles sales rep just got pulled the
53:56
Speaker 2: trump maneuver. It sounds like we just got more and
53:58
Speaker 2: more angry the whole time.
53:59
Speaker 3: Red f this is foolish.
54:01
Speaker 2: This This woman's a you know, has no educational background,
54:04
Speaker 2: and she's bringing all the science like she knows that
54:06
Speaker 2: she's talking about blah blah doing this. And his final
54:10
Speaker 2: closing statement was round up is so safe that I
54:13
Speaker 2: would be happy for my son to lick the grass
54:15
Speaker 2: right after it's sprayed. And so, as a scientist, having
54:20
Speaker 2: looked at life, that's child abuse. Yeah, that's flat out
54:25
Speaker 2: ridiculous statement, knowing what we know about this. But that
54:29
Speaker 2: emotional argument overcame everything and schoolyard still being sprayed with roundup.
54:35
Speaker 2: And so it's it's the emotionality of the human brain
54:40
Speaker 2: that's one of our biggest challenges.
54:41
Speaker 1: Right and so we also don't want to really believe
54:45
Speaker 1: that this is going on on such a mass scale,
54:48
Speaker 1: Like we want to just say there's no way it
54:51
Speaker 1: could be that unsafe. We would never have allowed it
54:53
Speaker 1: to get to this point. We're smarter than that.
54:56
Speaker 3: Certainly pull the cover.
54:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the EPA has looked at the there's been
55:00
Speaker 1: a million trials. Everybody says it's safe. You guys are
55:04
Speaker 1: crazy conspiracy theorists. And I think that's been kind of
55:07
Speaker 1: the paradigm for a long time, and we are seeing
55:10
Speaker 1: that shift. You know, people are taking your point of
55:13
Speaker 1: view and the point of view of so many scientists
55:15
Speaker 1: that are allied with your perspective in a way that
55:22
Speaker 1: we weren't seeing even a couple of years ago. And
55:24
Speaker 1: I think that court case, you know, goes a long
55:27
Speaker 1: way towards lending credence to what's actually happening.
55:31
Speaker 3: I totally agree, and I think the snowball is rolling.
55:34
Speaker 2: That's why we've seen this transaction from months Anto Debayer,
55:37
Speaker 2: I think that the public sentiment, as the public continues
55:40
Speaker 2: to educate itself more and more through you know, open channels,
55:44
Speaker 2: will realize that we've known this for a long time
55:46
Speaker 2: and it's no different than the tobacco situation was in
55:49
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties to two thousand. That forty years scientists
55:53
Speaker 2: were trying to sue the tobacco companies for lung cancer
55:57
Speaker 2: and for the damage to kids' immune system, and you know,
56:01
Speaker 2: all kinds of horrible things for forty years that we were.
56:04
Speaker 3: At it, you know, with the tobacco cut is our product.
56:08
Speaker 2: And you know, it was that emotional thing of like
56:11
Speaker 2: tobacco's how we built our nation, you know, the Deep
56:13
Speaker 2: South and everything else, like it was part of the
56:15
Speaker 2: American and the Marlborough Man was the image of American strength.
56:20
Speaker 2: And so it was so entwined in our psyche and
56:23
Speaker 2: in our identity that it took a long time to
56:25
Speaker 2: untangle that. And the same way, our identity is so
56:29
Speaker 2: tangled up around this belief that we are the best
56:33
Speaker 2: food growers in the world. And so to dismantle that belief,
56:38
Speaker 2: that humility that it takes to say we're growing the
56:41
Speaker 2: worst food on the planet, the least nutrient delivery of
56:45
Speaker 2: any food system in the world. Perhaps the only other
56:48
Speaker 2: place where we see where health comes nutritionally are people
56:51
Speaker 2: that just can't get access to food, period and I
56:55
Speaker 2: want to bring it to that because again this argument
56:57
Speaker 2: that keeps coming up in the world of well, we
56:59
Speaker 2: have to feed seven billion, so we have to do
57:00
Speaker 2: chemical farming. Hey, crop yields decline, not increase when you
57:05
Speaker 2: do long term chemical farming. B one of the great
57:09
Speaker 2: farmers that we're working with in the Midwest now Ohio.
57:12
Speaker 2: He says today in the world, seventy percent of humans,
57:16
Speaker 2: of the seven billion people on the planet, are fed
57:18
Speaker 2: by a peasant farmer.
57:20
Speaker 3: And that's humbling.
57:21
Speaker 2: You know, if only thirty percent of humanity is actually
57:25
Speaker 2: eating from a large scale farm, then what is the
57:28
Speaker 2: hubris that we need organic or non organic chemical farming
57:32
Speaker 2: to feed the world.
57:33
Speaker 1: So what is preventing these farmers from making this switch.
57:36
Speaker 1: It seems like they're aware that their yields are going down.
57:39
Speaker 1: They have some you know, sense that this is not working.
57:43
Speaker 1: Is it because they're locked in through debt structures that
57:47
Speaker 1: they can't escape this paradigm to do it another way?
57:51
Speaker 2: Debt structure one percent, Yes, But there's something more insidious
57:55
Speaker 2: at play that we didn't understand until we were on
57:57
Speaker 2: the ground with these farmers. Is that in a culture
58:01
Speaker 2: and in the state where you know, eighty five to
58:03
Speaker 2: ninety percent of the ground is under chemical farming. There
58:07
Speaker 2: is a collective, subconscious agreement or contract socially in that
58:14
Speaker 2: farm community that you don't talk about this. You certainly
58:17
Speaker 2: don't tell anybody that your crop yield has been decreasing
58:20
Speaker 2: for fifteen years. You certainly don't tell anybody that you
58:23
Speaker 2: think chemical farming is hurting your children and causing the
58:26
Speaker 2: birth defects that you're seeing in your kids. And certainly,
58:28
Speaker 2: you know, we've seen the most horrendous of disease happening
58:31
Speaker 2: on these farms. These farmers' families are so sick, major
58:35
Speaker 2: brain malformations, and these children that are being born while
58:39
Speaker 2: their father, you know, had this tearful father come up
58:42
Speaker 2: to me when I was giving a talk, the Science
58:45
Speaker 2: Talk on round Up in Minnesota. It was in July,
58:51
Speaker 2: and he and his wife came up right after my talk.
58:53
Speaker 2: And by this time, it was dark. We were out
58:55
Speaker 2: in a field when I was giving this talk, in
58:56
Speaker 2: a field and birds and settleists, and it was like
59:01
Speaker 2: crickets at night, and it was just this a bucolic stuff.
59:03
Speaker 2: But the tension in the dark with all these farmers
59:07
Speaker 2: are about a hundred farmers sitting around in the dark
59:09
Speaker 2: listening to this, and they came up in the dark
59:12
Speaker 2: and said, you know, you just answered the biggest question,
59:16
Speaker 2: but we have to ask this just straight to you.
59:18
Speaker 2: Is that the week that we conceived our child, I
59:21
Speaker 2: was spraying round up and I was literally drenched in it.
59:23
Speaker 2: I was my clothes had come in in the evenings,
59:25
Speaker 2: and I was covered in everything else. And our child
59:28
Speaker 2: was born with this defect where it has no connection
59:31
Speaker 2: between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and
59:33
Speaker 2: so he's very has all these developmental delays and has
59:36
Speaker 2: difficulty walking and all these things that he'll have to
59:38
Speaker 2: face the rest of his life. Do you think it's
59:40
Speaker 2: possible that and me being covered with chemicals throughout that
59:45
Speaker 2: those weeks previous to conception, I did my sperm or
59:49
Speaker 2: her egg or did that damage happened due to the
59:51
Speaker 2: chemical exposure, And just you know, being present and saying,
59:56
Speaker 2: you know, just like the lung cancer, we don't need
59:58
Speaker 2: to put the responsibility on this second of your action
1:00:01
Speaker 2: with life, say, but what we can say is as
1:00:04
Speaker 2: a population, this is exactly what's happening in all of
1:00:06
Speaker 2: us under the pressure of the chemicals, and so the
1:00:09
Speaker 2: farmers are not it's not theoretical for them, it's not
1:00:12
Speaker 2: a banking problem. They have a collapse of their own
1:00:14
Speaker 2: family infrastructure going on. Their children have attention deficit allergies, asthma.
1:00:20
Speaker 2: Many of the farmers that have children under the age
1:00:23
Speaker 2: of teenagers who we talk to won't let their kids
1:00:25
Speaker 2: out during the summer because the planes spray are flying
1:00:29
Speaker 2: over all day long, spraying their neighbors crops and their
1:00:31
Speaker 2: crops and everything else. And so if their kids go out,
1:00:35
Speaker 2: they've got asthma, they're have breathing problems by the evening
1:00:37
Speaker 2: that were eyes or bloodshot because there was just so
1:00:39
Speaker 2: much chemical.
1:00:40
Speaker 3: In the air.
1:00:41
Speaker 2: And so the kids are we think of this, you
1:00:44
Speaker 2: call it farmland kids running around in the countryside. They're
1:00:47
Speaker 2: locked in these you know, you know, mildew filled trailers
1:00:52
Speaker 2: basically all summer long, trying to survive the chemical warfare
1:00:56
Speaker 2: that's happening around them throughout the summer growing months. Then,
1:01:00
Speaker 2: so you've got this financial lock in with the banks,
1:01:03
Speaker 2: You've got health collapse happening in the family. You've got
1:01:06
Speaker 2: the emotional tension of I have to look at my
1:01:09
Speaker 2: dad every day and tell him that we're losing the
1:01:10
Speaker 2: farm that he's had since his great grandfather farmed this land.
1:01:14
Speaker 2: So you got all this emotional family tension, and then
1:01:17
Speaker 2: on top of that you have the community pressure, the
1:01:21
Speaker 2: pure pressure. And so if you decide to make the
1:01:24
Speaker 2: jump and stop chemical spraying and go to a regenitative agriculture, you're.
1:01:28
Speaker 3: Immediately socially ostracized.
1:01:31
Speaker 2: Nobody will talk to you at church, nobody's talking to
1:01:33
Speaker 2: you at the bar, nobody's talking to the bank, because
1:01:36
Speaker 2: just by making that jump, you just made a judgment
1:01:39
Speaker 2: call on everybody else.
1:01:41
Speaker 3: Wow, that's the perception.
1:01:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wouldn't have even thought of it.
1:01:44
Speaker 2: We didn't even think of it, and to the last
1:01:47
Speaker 2: farm when we talked to that's the biggest number one
1:01:50
Speaker 2: reason they won't go regenitaive bag as they have no community.
1:01:53
Speaker 1: And even if they did, or they could, if they
1:01:56
Speaker 1: could break free of the debt structure, if they could
1:01:59
Speaker 1: navigate the you know social land mines that are involved
1:02:02
Speaker 1: in that. They're dealing with a plot of land that's
1:02:07
Speaker 1: been depleted. They would have to regenerate the soil before
1:02:11
Speaker 1: they could even conceivably grow anything in an organic manner,
1:02:15
Speaker 1: right like short of moving and finding a new parcel.
1:02:20
Speaker 1: It's a burden that I would imagine is just too unmanageable.
1:02:25
Speaker 2: They can't see the way out because the chemical industry
1:02:28
Speaker 2: has told them that it takes more than ten years
1:02:31
Speaker 2: to build half a centimeter of soil, so to regenerate
1:02:35
Speaker 2: half a centimeter to a centimere of soil, they're said
1:02:38
Speaker 2: ten years. Well, they're losing inches of soil a year.
1:02:41
Speaker 2: We're in the biggest dust bowl in history right now.
1:02:43
Speaker 1: And how much of that can be is attributable to
1:02:48
Speaker 1: chemicals versus just monocropping and not allowing you know, not
1:02:53
Speaker 1: rotating crops and all of these other overtillings.
1:02:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, the overtilling is equally as damaging to the soil
1:03:00
Speaker 2: architecture as the spray.
1:03:01
Speaker 3: That's quite clear. And so we can't just be organic certified.
1:03:05
Speaker 3: That's not enough.
1:03:06
Speaker 2: We have to go to regen AG standards where we
1:03:08
Speaker 2: actually build soil, not till soil. And so we need
1:03:11
Speaker 2: to go to a no till organic technique. And this
1:03:14
Speaker 2: is being taught all over the country by some very
1:03:17
Speaker 2: intrepid farmers who are out there. They've converted over a
1:03:19
Speaker 2: million acres quietly over the last decade fifteen years to
1:03:23
Speaker 2: regenerate agricultural practices till no spray. That is the promised
1:03:29
Speaker 2: land for how we get ourselves out of this situation.
1:03:32
Speaker 2: So we went to shoot a documentary series and we
1:03:35
Speaker 2: came back knowing we had to start a nonprofit. We
1:03:37
Speaker 2: needed to get money into these farmers environments, and more
1:03:41
Speaker 2: importantly than the money, we needed that money to build
1:03:43
Speaker 2: an architecture for a new community. If these farmers have
1:03:47
Speaker 2: community and they can talk to each other and say, Okay,
1:03:50
Speaker 2: the six of us are going to make the jump.
1:03:52
Speaker 2: They can now talk to each other daily. They can
1:03:54
Speaker 2: now compare notes at the end of every week. That
1:03:57
Speaker 2: I think is the secret we have. So we've launched
1:03:59
Speaker 2: a nonprofit. We're in the process of our five one three.
1:04:03
Speaker 2: We're partnering with another Virginia group to go ahead and
1:04:05
Speaker 2: start taking money in for the operation the next couple
1:04:08
Speaker 2: of weeks. It's called Farmer's Footprint. The website's Farmers Footprint
1:04:12
Speaker 2: dot us and the mission here is to tie consumers
1:04:16
Speaker 2: back to the agricultural land itself, with the goal of
1:04:19
Speaker 2: converting five million acres of farmland that's currently under GMO
1:04:23
Speaker 2: chemical farming back to not just organic but exceed that
1:04:28
Speaker 2: with this new hotel no spray mandate, and we're going
1:04:33
Speaker 2: to do it through a number of different fashions. Certainly
1:04:35
Speaker 2: the docu series that we're creating Farmer's Footprint is there
1:04:37
Speaker 2: to educate us as consumers, is what is the plight
1:04:40
Speaker 2: of the farmer? How do we come alongside that group
1:04:43
Speaker 2: to create a viable solution. We haven't even touched on
1:04:46
Speaker 2: the farm bill and how that's playing in for the
1:04:48
Speaker 2: last forty years into farming practices and is get another
1:04:51
Speaker 2: barrier to success. And so we've decided that if we
1:04:54
Speaker 2: can bring one hundred dollars per acre from the consumers
1:04:57
Speaker 2: into the farmer's environment, we can overcome the farmville. We
1:05:00
Speaker 2: can overcome this banking juggernaut, and hopefully we build that
1:05:04
Speaker 2: community to allow the farmers to overcome this ostracized status
1:05:08
Speaker 2: that they get from making the jump. And so a
1:05:12
Speaker 2: Farmer's footprint is seeing that operting to do that. So
1:05:14
Speaker 2: what do we see actually happen? So does not till
1:05:17
Speaker 2: no organic or no spray actually work? Like you said,
1:05:21
Speaker 2: these farmers are looking at dead, dead soil. One of
1:05:26
Speaker 2: the things that I have the highest conviction over now
1:05:30
Speaker 2: as a scientist is the concept of grace in biology.
1:05:35
Speaker 2: I grew up in kind of a Christian environment and
1:05:37
Speaker 2: kind of hippie church and Boulder and great people around,
1:05:40
Speaker 2: and so I had kind of a lexicon of kind
1:05:42
Speaker 2: of a relatively open minded church doctrine, and the word
1:05:47
Speaker 2: grace got thrown around in this faith community all the time.
1:05:50
Speaker 2: And now I'm exposed to a lot of people from
1:05:53
Speaker 2: all types of spiritual backgrounds and go into the Muslim
1:05:56
Speaker 2: or the Buddhists or the Jewish communities, and you hear
1:05:59
Speaker 2: this word grace with differing frequency, but it's out there
1:06:03
Speaker 2: in our glexicon. I think it can maybe both best
1:06:07
Speaker 2: be defined now in my mind, at least scientifically, which
1:06:11
Speaker 2: is heal faster than you injure.
1:06:14
Speaker 3: And that's what we see in the soil, and that's
1:06:16
Speaker 3: what I get to see my clinic.
1:06:18
Speaker 2: I see people who have abused their bodies for decades,
1:06:21
Speaker 2: and if they just give a pause, they do a
1:06:23
Speaker 2: couple of short term fast They give their gut a break,
1:06:26
Speaker 2: they give the immune system a break, they get away
1:06:28
Speaker 2: from chemicals, they start growing some of their own food.
1:06:31
Speaker 2: They make these simple little decisions, and suddenly decades of
1:06:35
Speaker 2: damage is reversed in hours, weeks months.
1:06:39
Speaker 3: That's grace at the cellar level.
1:06:40
Speaker 2: And there may be a better spiritual definition of it,
1:06:44
Speaker 2: but from a biology standpoint, I see grace as you're
1:06:48
Speaker 2: going to make mistakes and you're going to heal faster
1:06:50
Speaker 2: from them when you make the change. And that's what
1:06:53
Speaker 2: we see in the soil and so these farmers who
1:06:56
Speaker 2: are making the jump again, we've seen a million acres
1:06:58
Speaker 2: make this transition, and so Soil Health Academy as our
1:07:02
Speaker 2: partners in this group, and there are four phenomenal farmers
1:07:05
Speaker 2: who really are have been cutting the edge of this
1:07:08
Speaker 2: no tail, no spray effort. And what we're seeing is
1:07:14
Speaker 2: that within a single growing season you can go from
1:07:17
Speaker 2: this dead monoculture of corner so I mean to cover
1:07:20
Speaker 2: cropping with sixteen different species and getting a notel environment.
1:07:24
Speaker 3: You'll see the fungal elements, You'll see.
1:07:26
Speaker 2: The microwrise a in there, the bacterial populations returning the soil,
1:07:31
Speaker 2: and you see biodiversity returning in the form of earthworms
1:07:34
Speaker 2: within a single growing season of rest.
1:07:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the environmental, planetary version of what you just
1:07:42
Speaker 1: explained in the human body.
1:07:44
Speaker 2: It's fasting, yeah, fast for just a moment, stop doing
1:07:48
Speaker 2: the damage for just.
1:07:49
Speaker 1: A short resiliency is amazing.
1:07:52
Speaker 2: It's amazing, and it would have to be. There's a
1:07:55
Speaker 2: book recently out and I'm going to scrip up the title.
1:07:57
Speaker 2: I think it's something like Earth without Humans or something
1:08:01
Speaker 2: like this, and it describes how fast the ecosystem is
1:08:04
Speaker 2: going to recover when we disappear. It describes New York
1:08:08
Speaker 2: City two weeks without humans, and you see every element
1:08:13
Speaker 2: of the concrete infrastructure of Manhattan disappearing under biology and
1:08:19
Speaker 2: within two months and two years, and you see how
1:08:21
Speaker 2: fast life leaps out of this planet.
1:08:24
Speaker 3: And it has to be that way because it's Mother Earth.
1:08:27
Speaker 3: That's how we got here.
1:08:28
Speaker 2: This planet has been exploding with life for millions and
1:08:32
Speaker 2: millions of years before Homo sapiens showed up.
1:08:36
Speaker 1: We got to combat this problem. I mean, one of
1:08:38
Speaker 1: the things that we talked about last time that was
1:08:40
Speaker 1: so shocking for me to hear was just the pervasiveness
1:08:46
Speaker 1: of chemical spraying. So even if you are an organic farmer,
1:08:52
Speaker 1: or you are a consumer buying organic, or you're trying
1:08:56
Speaker 1: to live in a clean environment, that glyphosate and various
1:09:02
Speaker 1: other chemicals are so pervasive they found their way into
1:09:05
Speaker 1: our drinking water. It's in the rain water, it's raining
1:09:09
Speaker 1: down onto these organic farms. So despite trying to hermetically
1:09:13
Speaker 1: remove ourselves from this problem, it's still something that we
1:09:18
Speaker 1: have to contend with, even when we're doing everything in
1:09:21
Speaker 1: our power to avoid it. I mean, I know that's
1:09:23
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that you move to a remote
1:09:26
Speaker 1: location in Virginia is to try to find a pristine
1:09:29
Speaker 1: place to live and have a family.
1:09:32
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:09:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's getting hard, right, It's getting hard to find
1:09:36
Speaker 2: anything that would be considered pristina in the world, let
1:09:38
Speaker 2: alone in the US.
1:09:39
Speaker 3: But I think it is.
1:09:42
Speaker 2: I mean, first of all, why is that? Why is
1:09:44
Speaker 2: GlyP state everywhere? It's the nature of the molecule itself.
1:09:47
Speaker 2: It's an amino acid backbone with a phosphate group and
1:09:51
Speaker 2: a carbon group on the other end, and you get
1:09:53
Speaker 2: this thing called an organophosphate, and organophosphates in this form
1:09:57
Speaker 2: are extremely water soluble. Percent of earth is water, and
1:10:01
Speaker 2: it turns out that's seventy percent of your body is water.
1:10:04
Speaker 2: And so we've put into play a chemical that is
1:10:08
Speaker 2: water soluble that can now travel through all levels of
1:10:11
Speaker 2: the water ecosystem, and so in the evaporating water coming
1:10:15
Speaker 2: off the Mississippi River. As we collect some eighty percent
1:10:17
Speaker 2: of all of the round up sprayed in our country
1:10:19
Speaker 2: into a single water system through the runoff that happens
1:10:23
Speaker 2: when we water or when the rain falls, or whatever
1:10:25
Speaker 2: it is, we consolidate that into the great muddy. It
1:10:28
Speaker 2: shouldn't be muddy, but it's carrying all of our top
1:10:30
Speaker 2: soil in it now because all our top.
1:10:32
Speaker 3: Soil is dead and it is eroding away.
1:10:34
Speaker 2: An amazing estimate on that, Actually, I just read that
1:10:37
Speaker 2: eleven percent of our GDP is being wasted every year
1:10:41
Speaker 2: in top soil. The amount of monetary loss from our
1:10:44
Speaker 2: top soil washing away is equal to eleven percent of GDP.
1:10:48
Speaker 1: Because it's so unhealthy that it doesn't adhere exactly.
1:10:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no root structure to keep it there.
1:10:54
Speaker 2: There's no microorisea, there's no mycelium, there's no fungal structure
1:10:59
Speaker 2: in the soil to keep the top soil where it
1:11:01
Speaker 2: needs to be. And so every time it rains, the
1:11:04
Speaker 2: rain can't even penetrate the soil, which is ridiculous. It's
1:11:07
Speaker 2: so hard that the water when it finally rains on
1:11:09
Speaker 2: your crop can't get into the soil. Instead, it takes
1:11:12
Speaker 2: the top centimeter of your soil away and washes it
1:11:15
Speaker 2: to the nearest gully and out into the water system,
1:11:18
Speaker 2: which of course ends up in the Mississippi River and
1:11:20
Speaker 2: then into the Delta. And at the end of the
1:11:23
Speaker 2: Mississippi River, we now have a dead zone that's larger
1:11:25
Speaker 2: than the state of Rhode Island because there's so much
1:11:28
Speaker 2: herb side pesticide and chemical fertilizer in that water. And
1:11:32
Speaker 2: so we've got this huge dead zone in the ocean
1:11:35
Speaker 2: right at the mouth of the Mississippi, and not a
1:11:37
Speaker 2: single politician as talking about that. It's the dumbfounding that
1:11:41
Speaker 2: we can be this myopic. So soil is disappearing. All
1:11:46
Speaker 2: of this is broken, yes, yes, yes, yes, But I
1:11:49
Speaker 2: still want to bring it back to the simple reality,
1:11:51
Speaker 2: as the brokenness in the system has to do with
1:11:55
Speaker 2: the isolation of human relationship. If we connect the farmer
1:12:00
Speaker 2: back to the consumer, and we cut out the banks,
1:12:03
Speaker 2: we cut out the farm bill, we cut out the
1:12:05
Speaker 2: big chemical industry that's trying to educate them incorrectly, we
1:12:10
Speaker 2: have cut out all those players. The amount of money
1:12:12
Speaker 2: we save is extraordinary, first of all, but the amount
1:12:16
Speaker 2: of money we can bring into those lands is extraordinary.
1:12:20
Speaker 2: So there's such a huge economic incentive right now for
1:12:23
Speaker 2: farmers to make this jump. They just need support for
1:12:25
Speaker 2: about three years to make the transition because after three
1:12:29
Speaker 2: to five years they can take crop yields. Right now,
1:12:31
Speaker 2: if they're under GMO crop, they can expect to yield
1:12:34
Speaker 2: maybe forty bucks an acre after they subtract out all
1:12:37
Speaker 2: of their inputs and everything else. So typical family farm,
1:12:40
Speaker 2: you're growing maybe three hundred acres of corn, soybean, some
1:12:45
Speaker 2: mix thereof three hundred acres times you're forty dollars. You're
1:12:50
Speaker 2: at a dismal annual income. And to achieve that, you've
1:12:53
Speaker 2: woken up every morning at four am, you go to
1:12:55
Speaker 2: sleep at ten pm. You cry yourself to sleep every night.
1:12:59
Speaker 2: Your relationship with your wife is so stressed because she's
1:13:03
Speaker 2: yelling that change has to happen, because the kids are sick.
1:13:06
Speaker 2: She doesn't have money to pay the health bills, can't
1:13:08
Speaker 2: fill the pharmacy prescriptions. Dad's chomping at you because you
1:13:13
Speaker 2: know you must be doing something wrong. So it's not working.
1:13:15
Speaker 3: You need to change, and for that you get your
1:13:19
Speaker 3: your dismal.
1:13:20
Speaker 1: You know return, it goes to just service the debt
1:13:23
Speaker 1: service is the debt.
1:13:24
Speaker 2: Right, And so then you have to borrow money to
1:13:26
Speaker 2: buy the sea, to buy the fertilizers for your next crop,
1:13:29
Speaker 2: and you're back in the cycle again. And so this
1:13:31
Speaker 2: is the reality for so many of these farms. And
1:13:36
Speaker 2: you know, I just have to be amazed at the
1:13:40
Speaker 2: economic incentive on the other side of this is these farms.
1:13:43
Speaker 2: You know, therese over a million acres that have made
1:13:45
Speaker 2: the transition back to regenagg over the last fifteen years.
1:13:49
Speaker 3: These guys are sitting returns per acre of five hundred
1:13:52
Speaker 3: to nine hundred dollars an acre.
1:13:53
Speaker 1: From forty to forty Oh my god.
1:13:57
Speaker 3: And so it's.
1:13:59
Speaker 2: We want to believe that there's some impossible way it's
1:14:03
Speaker 2: too hard to get money for organic food. No, it's
1:14:07
Speaker 2: so much more lucrative for these farmers. Wow, they could
1:14:11
Speaker 2: be the most lucrative generation of farmers in their entire
1:14:14
Speaker 2: family if they can get to a regena agg practice.
1:14:17
Speaker 1: And what you said earlier is that to make that
1:14:20
Speaker 1: transition costs about one hundred dollars per acre. In order
1:14:24
Speaker 1: to kind of help these people make that switch.
1:14:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, and one hundred dollars. It doesn't even need to
1:14:30
Speaker 2: go to being a safety net income entirely. So the
1:14:32
Speaker 2: third of it we see going to their education, a
1:14:35
Speaker 2: third of it we see going to consumer education, and
1:14:37
Speaker 2: then a third of it we see becoming a safety
1:14:40
Speaker 2: net income for them where they're not not even get paid.
1:14:42
Speaker 2: But we say, if you were to fail, because that's
1:14:44
Speaker 2: their fear, if I don't do what I've been doing
1:14:46
Speaker 2: in the last fifteen or twenty years of chemicals, my
1:14:49
Speaker 2: crop next year is going to fail and I'm going
1:14:50
Speaker 2: to go bankrupt. And so we don't even need to
1:14:52
Speaker 2: give them an income necessarily. But what we can say is, look,
1:14:56
Speaker 2: you know, we've now raised enough private funds for you
1:14:59
Speaker 2: that we can give you a safety that says, if
1:15:00
Speaker 2: you're actively in this transition of no spray, no till,
1:15:03
Speaker 2: and you happen to fail one of those years we
1:15:05
Speaker 2: can get We'll meet you at forty dollars an acre.
1:15:08
Speaker 2: We'll meet you there. You can't you will not go
1:15:11
Speaker 2: down an income. That's what we need to do is
1:15:12
Speaker 2: create that safety net. Right, that safety net I don't
1:15:15
Speaker 2: think isn't even to have to be tapped into because
1:15:17
Speaker 2: the farmers that are making the transition are already seeing
1:15:19
Speaker 2: improved yields year one of going back to a non
1:15:21
Speaker 2: GMO seed on the same plot of land, same plot
1:15:24
Speaker 2: of land, no till, no spray, a non GMO seed,
1:15:28
Speaker 2: and suddenly they're back to forty bushels and agg That's amazing.
1:15:32
Speaker 1: So you're making this documentary or docuseries, like how far
1:15:36
Speaker 1: is to do it? Are you? And what is the
1:15:38
Speaker 1: plan for that? Because to me, this is an education thing.
1:15:42
Speaker 1: It seems like right like the more people can understand
1:15:46
Speaker 1: what is actually going on, we can create a groundswell
1:15:49
Speaker 1: of support for these farmers.
1:15:51
Speaker 2: My goal is that by the end of twenty nineteen
1:15:54
Speaker 2: we'll have three of the docuseries wrapped. By then, the
1:15:57
Speaker 2: first one's been all shot. We're in post with that
1:15:59
Speaker 2: one should be out by January of twenty nineteen. As
1:16:02
Speaker 2: we debut that docuseries, I don't think it's going to
1:16:05
Speaker 2: take any imagination. That's a thirty minute docuseries. Each element
1:16:09
Speaker 2: thirty minutes, So it's easy digestion when you meet these
1:16:12
Speaker 2: farmers and see the passion and desire in their eyes
1:16:15
Speaker 2: and in their hearts to do the right thing.
1:16:17
Speaker 3: Here.
1:16:19
Speaker 2: We need to stop damning the farmer first. The farmers
1:16:21
Speaker 2: are the biggest heroes I've ever met. I've never met
1:16:23
Speaker 2: a more resilient, courageous group of human beings in my life.
1:16:27
Speaker 3: My brother's in the military.
1:16:28
Speaker 2: I think I would have said that about the military
1:16:30
Speaker 2: right up until I met the farmers. I have huge
1:16:32
Speaker 2: respect for anybody in any military in any part of
1:16:35
Speaker 2: the world. Those are courageous human beings that do some
1:16:37
Speaker 2: of the worst of the worst. However, the farmers, I think,
1:16:42
Speaker 2: have been locked in a chemical warfare that's nie on
1:16:45
Speaker 2: to what we did in Vietnam as far as the
1:16:47
Speaker 2: amount of planetary damage times ten or times one hundred,
1:16:51
Speaker 2: or times one thousand, and so. These guys have been
1:16:52
Speaker 2: locked as the brute force to destroy nature, and they
1:16:57
Speaker 2: know it on some level.
1:16:58
Speaker 3: They all know it.
1:17:00
Speaker 2: Why they have to ostracize each other when somebody comes
1:17:02
Speaker 2: to the light is because it immediately convicts everybody else,
1:17:06
Speaker 2: and there's this huge guilt that's riding underneath the surface.
1:17:10
Speaker 2: These farmers already changed, though, and to see the success
1:17:15
Speaker 2: where you can see it on our trailer on our
1:17:19
Speaker 2: website on Farmers Footprint.
1:17:23
Speaker 3: Alan Williams is one of.
1:17:25
Speaker 2: The PhDs it with Soil Health Academy, and he tells
1:17:28
Speaker 2: the story that you know, ten years ago they could
1:17:30
Speaker 2: have put ten farmers in a room in the entire
1:17:32
Speaker 2: country that could have cared about regenera of agriculture. Now
1:17:36
Speaker 2: they do health academies all year round all over the country,
1:17:39
Speaker 2: and they've about sixty one hundred farmers in every single room.
1:17:43
Speaker 2: And so there's an inevitable demand happening, a grassroots swell,
1:17:48
Speaker 2: as you said, from the farmers. If we don't meet them, though,
1:17:52
Speaker 2: as consumers right there at that moment in the field,
1:17:55
Speaker 2: it's going to take too long. It could be thirty
1:17:58
Speaker 2: to fifty years before we see enough people can over
1:18:00
Speaker 2: to ag The amazing thing, though, is here we are
1:18:04
Speaker 2: laying out a recipe for success for Regina agriculture and
1:18:08
Speaker 2: recovering soil health. If we convert five million acres we
1:18:12
Speaker 2: solve greenhouse gas problems in North America, we will absorb
1:18:16
Speaker 2: more green pass gases than we produce. And so every
1:18:20
Speaker 2: acre of land, the largest CO two consumer in it
1:18:24
Speaker 2: is the phone fungal community within the soil layer. We
1:18:29
Speaker 2: have global warming because we depleted the vast majorities of
1:18:32
Speaker 2: soil on Earth. I think we're down to two percent
1:18:35
Speaker 2: of riitable land is now viable still we've killed ninety
1:18:39
Speaker 2: eight percent of the soil on Earth, and that's China
1:18:41
Speaker 2: to the US to Africa, we've killed it. If you
1:18:44
Speaker 2: you can just google this, actually big AG community will
1:18:48
Speaker 2: follow depleted soil records and so you can see like
1:18:51
Speaker 2: satellite kind of map images of where the depleted soil
1:18:54
Speaker 2: patterns are throughout the world, and the midwest of the
1:18:56
Speaker 2: United States is one of the most depleted areas worldwide,
1:19:01
Speaker 2: and so you then then track that with global warning patterns.
1:19:05
Speaker 2: And the single biggest producer of greenhouse gases is methane. Actually,
1:19:10
Speaker 2: they are the biggest contributor interestingly, by volume, by kind
1:19:15
Speaker 2: of cubic meters of methane. It's only about fifteen percent
1:19:19
Speaker 2: of global greenhouse gas, but it's six times more potent
1:19:22
Speaker 2: than CO two as a greenhouse gas, and so as
1:19:25
Speaker 2: its impact on biology or on global warming, methane's number
1:19:29
Speaker 2: one enemy. Interestingly, methane is primarily produced through the eg industry,
1:19:35
Speaker 2: and so it's through cattle farming cattle farms, but primarily
1:19:39
Speaker 2: through poor management of the soil and the crops there on.
1:19:43
Speaker 2: One of the biggest producers of methane is actually the
1:19:46
Speaker 2: decaying slowly rotting piles of sugar beet cane that we
1:19:49
Speaker 2: have throughout the South.
1:19:51
Speaker 3: I did not know that, So that's called bagas that byproduct.
1:19:55
Speaker 2: We have seen piles of bagoths that are in the
1:19:57
Speaker 2: billions of pounds size. They take up city city city blocks.
1:20:03
Speaker 2: You drive along these huge street long, dusty roads down
1:20:07
Speaker 2: through Alabama and Louisiana, Mississippi, and they're piled as high
1:20:10
Speaker 2: as you can imagine as these massive piles of sugarcane
1:20:13
Speaker 2: that don't compost well, and so they just sit there
1:20:15
Speaker 2: in these giant piles under the sun and off gas methane.
1:20:19
Speaker 2: Sugar beets are have zero role in human nutrition. There's
1:20:24
Speaker 2: no piece of the sugar beet that's a good for
1:20:26
Speaker 2: human being. The sugar industry has been producing that since
1:20:30
Speaker 2: you know, the fifties as a primary crop, and it
1:20:33
Speaker 2: turns out they most subsidized crop in the farm bill
1:20:37
Speaker 2: is the sugar beet. It's gotten so dismal growing corn
1:20:41
Speaker 2: and soybean in Minnesota and the North where we have
1:20:44
Speaker 2: all these rich soils that they're actually now intentionally destroying
1:20:48
Speaker 2: the soil structure so that it can be poor enough
1:20:51
Speaker 2: to grow sugar beet. In sugar beet likes poor soil,
1:20:54
Speaker 2: and so we have farmers that are killing their soil
1:20:56
Speaker 2: intentionally so that they can get subsidized one hundred dollars
1:21:00
Speaker 2: on the acre to grow sugar beets in Minnesota where
1:21:03
Speaker 2: it should have never been grown.
1:21:04
Speaker 1: So the incentivization structure is wrong. It's backwards, going both
1:21:09
Speaker 1: ways always.
1:21:11
Speaker 2: Every single structure that we have to support big ag
1:21:14
Speaker 2: in this country is forcing the farmer's hand into pour
1:21:18
Speaker 2: agriculture and biologic decisions.
1:21:21
Speaker 1: Can we combat this problem without overhauling the farm bell?
1:21:27
Speaker 1: I mean that seems to be front and center of
1:21:30
Speaker 1: you know, a large percentage of what's gone awright.
1:21:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if you'd ask me ten years ago, that
1:21:35
Speaker 2: was my focus. Like when I was thinking about nutrition
1:21:37
Speaker 2: in the late two thousands, I thought, well, we just
1:21:39
Speaker 2: need to fix the farm bill, and this thing's going
1:21:40
Speaker 2: to be over in a day.
1:21:42
Speaker 3: I've given up on that.
1:21:43
Speaker 2: I've seen the most disparate political positions, you know, between
1:21:48
Speaker 2: you know, Bush to to Obama to you know, now
1:21:52
Speaker 2: this amazing journey of Trump, not a single whisper of
1:21:57
Speaker 2: a change in the farm bell going on, and I've
1:22:00
Speaker 2: given up on that transformation. That's why we're creating farmers
1:22:02
Speaker 2: footprint with the realization is actually, even if we revised
1:22:07
Speaker 2: the farm bill, it's not a big enough single incentive
1:22:09
Speaker 2: to change the way things are done.
1:22:11
Speaker 3: We literally need to cut out all of the middlemen.
1:22:13
Speaker 3: If we cut out all the middlemen i e.
1:22:15
Speaker 2: The banks alone that are charging these incredible interest rates
1:22:18
Speaker 2: to farmers, if you just remove the interest rates that
1:22:21
Speaker 2: are costing our farmers to grow their food, we are
1:22:23
Speaker 2: going to see a very lucrative shift happen. And so
1:22:26
Speaker 2: my belief is we need to cut out all the middlemen,
1:22:28
Speaker 2: get the farmer connected to the consumer directly, and we'll
1:22:32
Speaker 2: see an economic advantage so much larger than the.
1:22:36
Speaker 3: Current farm bill that we don't need to fix the
1:22:38
Speaker 3: farm bill.
1:22:39
Speaker 2: It's literally a private sector, capitalistic solution to the problem.
1:22:44
Speaker 1: But if sugar beets are so lucrative and so incentivized
1:22:48
Speaker 1: and will literally grow anywhere in terrible soil, how are
1:22:52
Speaker 1: we going to overcome? I mean, the desire, the market
1:22:55
Speaker 1: desire for that product is astronomical, and if it's such
1:22:59
Speaker 1: a large contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, we have to
1:23:03
Speaker 1: create disincentives for that, do we not?
1:23:07
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
1:23:07
Speaker 1: Better incentives for them to grow something.
1:23:09
Speaker 2: Because if we can make five hundred and nine hundred
1:23:11
Speaker 2: dollars an acre doing regenerative.
1:23:13
Speaker 1: Acts, so what's the yield from from sugar beats?
1:23:16
Speaker 2: You're down around one hundred dollars an acre or something
1:23:18
Speaker 2: like that, you know, typically, and it's going to vary
1:23:19
Speaker 2: depending on where you are, and there's you know, the
1:23:22
Speaker 2: farm bill is the most complicated piece of legislation we have.
1:23:24
Speaker 2: So to say it's one hundred dollars an acres overly simplistic,
1:23:27
Speaker 2: but it's not at an economic level that we can't
1:23:30
Speaker 2: overcome it. It wasn't at such a high economic benefit
1:23:34
Speaker 2: that that five years ago everybody up north was growing
1:23:36
Speaker 2: sugar beat. They had to get to such a desperate
1:23:38
Speaker 2: level with the corn and soybean yields that they started,
1:23:41
Speaker 2: you know, this new practice of dead soil or killing
1:23:43
Speaker 2: the soil further to grow the sugar beat. So, you know,
1:23:47
Speaker 2: I think I'm encouraged at the end of the day
1:23:50
Speaker 2: that we can put into play a free market, capitalistic solution.
1:23:56
Speaker 2: The concept of a nonprofit here is just to accelerate
1:23:59
Speaker 2: the farmer to it, you know, give them a safety
1:24:02
Speaker 2: net for those few years they need. I would love
1:24:06
Speaker 2: to see the situation where in a few years we
1:24:08
Speaker 2: have corporations coming along farmers to say we would like
1:24:12
Speaker 2: to buy up a million acres and we're going to
1:24:15
Speaker 2: pay you to do no till.
1:24:16
Speaker 3: Regenag on it, you know.
1:24:18
Speaker 2: And that's the that's the switch that I think is coming,
1:24:21
Speaker 2: because right now we have all these Fortune five hundred
1:24:23
Speaker 2: companies that are polluting the world and buying CO two offsets.
1:24:27
Speaker 3: Well, the CO two offset of.
1:24:28
Speaker 2: An acre of regenag could offset you know, way more,
1:24:32
Speaker 2: you know, bang for the back. And so I think
1:24:34
Speaker 2: that if our companies can start to recognize soil as
1:24:37
Speaker 2: their number one CO two sinc. Then our airlines, for example,
1:24:43
Speaker 2: need to be the number one investor in soils in
1:24:45
Speaker 2: the Midwest and be working directly with these farmers to
1:24:48
Speaker 2: make lucrative situations for the farmer and massive CO two
1:24:53
Speaker 2: dumps for the industry.
1:24:55
Speaker 1: You made an interesting point before we started the podcast.
1:24:58
Speaker 1: I mean, clearly, what we're talking about this is in
1:25:01
Speaker 1: our economic interest, it is in the interest of human health,
1:25:05
Speaker 1: environmental global environmental health. But there's also this additional point
1:25:11
Speaker 1: about national security. So explain that.
1:25:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, I mean I think the national security threat
1:25:18
Speaker 2: if you haven't started to see it. In the course
1:25:20
Speaker 2: of this conversation, we can kind of point out those
1:25:22
Speaker 2: elements too, But what an extraordinary thing, So an extraordinary
1:25:28
Speaker 2: slippage of our concept of monopoly to allow one company
1:25:31
Speaker 2: to own ninety percent of our staple crops, which is
1:25:36
Speaker 2: affecting our fuel everything from our fuel production for the
1:25:40
Speaker 2: energy sector to our big egg which of course feeds
1:25:44
Speaker 2: the fish, the chickens, the pork, the beef, those are
1:25:48
Speaker 2: your genesties all being fed the GMO commodities. So a huge,
1:25:52
Speaker 2: huge control of this massive, massive industry of human food.
1:25:57
Speaker 2: And then to make the move where you allow a
1:25:59
Speaker 2: German company, regulated in a completely different environment than anything
1:26:03
Speaker 2: in the US, now outside the regulative control really of
1:26:06
Speaker 2: the US, makes the move to purchase this country. I
1:26:09
Speaker 2: think it's again one of those most myopic things. If
1:26:12
Speaker 2: the world works like we think it does. Now that
1:26:15
Speaker 2: I've seen this thing actually come to fruition, which I
1:26:17
Speaker 2: really didn't think was getting the government was going to
1:26:19
Speaker 2: allow to happen, I have to wonder if maybe that
1:26:23
Speaker 2: international scene and the relationship between the US government and
1:26:26
Speaker 2: the EU and these other big factions must be a
1:26:29
Speaker 2: little different than we thought there must be some back
1:26:32
Speaker 2: room agreements happening across the world as to what the
1:26:37
Speaker 2: powers that be would like the world food change to
1:26:39
Speaker 2: look like in twenty years, and they're making some sort
1:26:41
Speaker 2: of geopolitical decisions based on something much bigger than the
1:26:45
Speaker 2: United States of America.
1:26:46
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, Europe historically has been more much more resistant
1:26:51
Speaker 1: to the use of glica sate and GMO crops, and
1:26:55
Speaker 1: as much has been more progressive in terms of being
1:26:59
Speaker 1: pro organic. But we're seeing that start to slip away a.
1:27:03
Speaker 2: Little bit huge erosions, I mean, and we have GMO
1:27:05
Speaker 2: crops in every European country. That's why France has to say, well,
1:27:08
Speaker 2: may by twenty twenty, we're gonna be non GMO. I'll say,
1:27:11
Speaker 2: you're not gonna be non future means your GMO right now.
1:27:14
Speaker 2: And so even these countries that we think of as
1:27:17
Speaker 2: being clean are not at all clean. And it's not
1:27:20
Speaker 2: just glive sate. And that's my concern. If we make
1:27:23
Speaker 2: this just an argument over life, say, then Bear just
1:27:26
Speaker 2: simply presents liberty link and see we're life is safe free.
1:27:30
Speaker 2: So now France gets to say we're life safe free or.
1:27:32
Speaker 3: Whatever it is.
1:27:34
Speaker 2: If they really hold the line and say we're gonna
1:27:36
Speaker 2: be GMO free, and they can hold that line not
1:27:39
Speaker 2: just you know, quote unorganic, but they're they're gmo free.
1:27:42
Speaker 2: That will be an interesting shift because now you've got
1:27:44
Speaker 2: contention within the EU of what the European regulatory body
1:27:49
Speaker 2: that's equal to what we would call the EPA.
1:27:51
Speaker 3: Here has already proved liberty links.
1:27:54
Speaker 2: So we'll start to see some huge court battles I think,
1:27:56
Speaker 2: between the nation states of the EU and the big
1:28:00
Speaker 2: EU regulatory bodies and Mayer over these next years to
1:28:04
Speaker 2: battle that.
1:28:04
Speaker 3: Out to see where that goes.
1:28:08
Speaker 2: I still have hope because there's economic incentive that is massive.
1:28:12
Speaker 2: There's hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next thirty
1:28:14
Speaker 2: to fifty years that could be made by an intelligent
1:28:17
Speaker 2: approach to this process, and so the right answers are
1:28:21
Speaker 2: lucrative and that gives me hope.
1:28:23
Speaker 1: But there still has to be political will, and the
1:28:27
Speaker 1: strategy of trying to go top down, for example tackling
1:28:32
Speaker 1: the farm bill have proved non fruitful. So now the
1:28:37
Speaker 1: focus is more on a bottom up incentive, incentivizing these
1:28:41
Speaker 1: farmers and creating a ground swell of popular support for
1:28:44
Speaker 1: this to then exert some pressure on the top levels,
1:28:49
Speaker 1: on the legislative level, on the regulatory level, and on
1:28:51
Speaker 1: the political level.
1:28:53
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and for whatever concerns we might throw onto the
1:28:57
Speaker 2: area in a podcast around the loss of freedom and
1:29:02
Speaker 2: security for the United States. As we sell off our
1:29:05
Speaker 2: staple crop production, we have just as much opportunity to
1:29:10
Speaker 2: give the beautiful picture of what if the United States
1:29:14
Speaker 2: became the most resilient and deeply rooted agricultural land in
1:29:18
Speaker 2: the world that no matter what drought hits us, no
1:29:21
Speaker 2: matter what happens, and we're going to have such resilience
1:29:23
Speaker 2: and such redundancy within our farmland that we become food independent.
1:29:29
Speaker 2: And so the catchphrase of farmer's footprint is a pathway
1:29:32
Speaker 2: to human health and food independence, because food independence needs
1:29:36
Speaker 2: to be the political mission. If we create food independence,
1:29:39
Speaker 2: greenhouse gas problems go away. We will absorb all that
1:29:42
Speaker 2: CO two and methane. We will stop producing so much
1:29:44
Speaker 2: CO two and methane. We will fix that problem. And
1:29:47
Speaker 2: so my message is one of real empowerment to the
1:29:51
Speaker 2: heartland of the United States. Are you a farmer right now?
1:29:54
Speaker 2: Do you know a farmer? If you don't know a farmer,
1:29:56
Speaker 2: meat one and become part of the most important and
1:30:00
Speaker 2: American thing will ever do. It's time for us to rebrand.
1:30:03
Speaker 2: And we've done this many times as a country. You know,
1:30:05
Speaker 2: we were America, Land of the Free, We've been land
1:30:08
Speaker 2: of liberty, We've been you know, we've had all these
1:30:10
Speaker 2: you know, clever catchphrases that you can change out every
1:30:12
Speaker 2: generation or two in the United States, Land of the fed,
1:30:17
Speaker 2: I don't know, land of the healthy, land of thrive.
1:30:20
Speaker 2: You know, what are we going to rebrand? As Russia's
1:30:23
Speaker 2: doing it? Folks, And you know, you can have whatever
1:30:26
Speaker 2: geopolitical viewpoint you want. But if Russia succeeds in being
1:30:31
Speaker 2: organic agriculture by twenty twenty five, they've got us beat
1:30:35
Speaker 2: in space. They now just have to wait ten more
1:30:38
Speaker 2: years for us to financially completely collapse ourselves with our
1:30:42
Speaker 2: horrendous health problems, and they're going to win this this
1:30:45
Speaker 2: economic battle on the big, big picture here, keep in mind,
1:30:50
Speaker 2: China is not likely.
1:30:51
Speaker 1: I'd say, yeah, what's going on in China right now?
1:30:54
Speaker 2: It's the horrendous situation in China. China makes more g
1:30:57
Speaker 2: life estate than Monsanto ever. Did you know GLFE estate
1:31:00
Speaker 2: as a molecule went off patent in two thousand and seven,
1:31:03
Speaker 2: and the vast majority on the international market is now
1:31:05
Speaker 2: made out of China. China has the highest rates of
1:31:08
Speaker 2: pre diabetes and cancer in the world, and they aren't
1:31:11
Speaker 2: publishing that stuff. And so I really believe that the
1:31:15
Speaker 2: smoking gun in Western civilization right now. Nobody understands I think,
1:31:19
Speaker 2: and maybe I'm completely naive because I'm just a doctor,
1:31:21
Speaker 2: but I think that the biggest player in Western economics
1:31:26
Speaker 2: is China, and we don't.
1:31:27
Speaker 3: It is not an Eastern force. It's a full on
1:31:29
Speaker 3: Western force now.
1:31:31
Speaker 2: Perhaps in the nineteen eighties and early nineties you could
1:31:33
Speaker 2: call it an Eastern economic force, but they diversified all
1:31:36
Speaker 2: of their money into the West, and so they own
1:31:39
Speaker 2: the vast majority of gold and minerals and all of
1:31:41
Speaker 2: that the gold rights through South America and Africa throughout
1:31:45
Speaker 2: the West, and so they are an economic power from
1:31:49
Speaker 2: the west. From my viewpoint, I would say Russia, the
1:31:51
Speaker 2: Eastern Bloc, maybe parts of Northern Africa are are kind
1:31:55
Speaker 2: of the Eastern economy now, and so you've you've got
1:32:00
Speaker 2: this situation where the Eastern economy that now becomes dominated
1:32:04
Speaker 2: in the next fifteen years is China and the US
1:32:06
Speaker 2: collapse in our healthcare and Russia rises. Maybe that's I mean,
1:32:11
Speaker 2: that's going to happen if we don't change directions.
1:32:14
Speaker 1: As far as it's so strange to contemplate.
1:32:16
Speaker 3: That, it's so strange that I think nobody can take
1:32:19
Speaker 3: it seriously.
1:32:20
Speaker 2: I think people are listening to this right now, blowing
1:32:22
Speaker 2: off everything I've just said in either of these podcasts.
1:32:24
Speaker 2: It's like, Zach sounds completely crazy now because that's a
1:32:27
Speaker 2: jump where you can't imagine that. You know, in our mindset,
1:32:33
Speaker 2: Russia's got this you know, backwards economy and everything else
1:32:35
Speaker 2: and the corruption, sure, but nowhere worse than I think
1:32:39
Speaker 2: what we've got so many levels of our government here.
1:32:41
Speaker 3: So but they made this call.
1:32:45
Speaker 2: They said, the most important thing for national security of
1:32:47
Speaker 2: Russia is go GM free organic food, make real food
1:32:51
Speaker 2: by twenty twenty five and will win the game. And
1:32:54
Speaker 2: if we don't step up and meet that call, we're
1:32:57
Speaker 2: going to lose the economic game.
1:33:00
Speaker 1: There was an article sometime in the last month, a
1:33:03
Speaker 1: bunch of articles came out about this study that came
1:33:06
Speaker 1: out of the EU about the deleterious impact of glyphysate
1:33:12
Speaker 1: on the bee populations. Did you see this yes, And
1:33:16
Speaker 1: the reason I bring it up, I don't want this
1:33:18
Speaker 1: to be all about glyphysate, like you said, but it
1:33:22
Speaker 1: goes back to how we kind of originally opened this,
1:33:25
Speaker 1: which is that the earth and humans are holistic systems
1:33:30
Speaker 1: that are interdependent. And if it is indeed true, if
1:33:34
Speaker 1: there's some validity to the fact that glyphisate or these
1:33:38
Speaker 1: other chemicals are responsible for the depopulation of bees, we're
1:33:49
Speaker 1: seeing the beginnings, or perhaps the adolescence, of a cataclysmic
1:33:55
Speaker 1: house of cards falling in upon itself where it becomes difficult,
1:34:02
Speaker 1: if not impossible, to stop to arrest. Like once this
1:34:06
Speaker 1: starts to happen, how much of it then becomes self
1:34:10
Speaker 1: perpetuating and difficult for us to put the brakes on
1:34:14
Speaker 1: because so many things are obviously dependent upon what the
1:34:18
Speaker 1: bees are doing. You know, where are we with that?
1:34:22
Speaker 2: And they're absolutely right, And this does kind of mary
1:34:24
Speaker 2: us back full circle where it was kind of pointing out.
1:34:26
Speaker 2: You know, you may think you found yourself to a
1:34:28
Speaker 2: niche that's going to survive this onslot of human health,
1:34:30
Speaker 2: chronic disease, you know, all this stuff, But the fact
1:34:33
Speaker 2: is we now know that your health is not independent.
1:34:36
Speaker 2: You can't be independently healthy as a family. And we're
1:34:40
Speaker 2: in the sixth grade extinction on the planet right now.
1:34:42
Speaker 2: There's been five other great extinctions in the fossil record
1:34:45
Speaker 2: on our planet. It's been sixty million years since our
1:34:48
Speaker 2: last great one with the dinosaur collapse and everything else,
1:34:50
Speaker 2: which happened to be a destruction of the top soil,
1:34:52
Speaker 2: which is interesting really, so the top because of the ash,
1:34:56
Speaker 2: the ash that covered that dust layer that covered the
1:34:58
Speaker 2: planet killed the top soil, and we had this huge
1:35:01
Speaker 2: collapse of the ecosystem. And so here we are back
1:35:04
Speaker 2: destroying the top soil and seeing the sixth extinction happen.
1:35:08
Speaker 2: We're losing one species to the point of extinction every
1:35:11
Speaker 2: twenty minutes now, and so in the course.
1:35:13
Speaker 1: Of it, I think you said, we've lost fifty of
1:35:16
Speaker 1: the ars biodiversity in the last I don't know.
1:35:18
Speaker 3: Ye fifty years.
1:35:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, so by a diversity on Earth gone in fifty
1:35:24
Speaker 2: years is the current estimates. With one species disappearing every
1:35:28
Speaker 2: twenty minutes. In the course of our conversation, hey, we've
1:35:31
Speaker 2: lost three or four species that we don't even know
1:35:32
Speaker 2: how to name.
1:35:33
Speaker 3: We don't know who they.
1:35:33
Speaker 2: Were, but they disappeared and the bees are a perfect
1:35:36
Speaker 2: example of that. We're seeing we are pushing our bee
1:35:39
Speaker 2: population of the point of extinction. They're really being kept
1:35:43
Speaker 2: aligning in a lot of parts of the country by ship,
1:35:45
Speaker 2: by moving bees in on trucks. And so we have
1:35:48
Speaker 2: these huge trucks that are moving bee hives around the
1:35:50
Speaker 2: country to go pollinate the almond trees in southern California
1:35:54
Speaker 2: or you know, the staple crops in the Midwest where
1:35:58
Speaker 2: we've killed all the bee population.
1:35:59
Speaker 3: And so we have our driving this these bees there.
1:36:04
Speaker 2: And I don't think Einstein may have been the one
1:36:05
Speaker 2: to coin the term or coin the quote, but he's
1:36:08
Speaker 2: been credited with it in the nineteen thirties saying that
1:36:12
Speaker 2: humans will survive for about three years after the bees
1:36:14
Speaker 2: are gone. I don't know who was the clairvoyant guy
1:36:17
Speaker 2: to come up with that, or there's probably a woman
1:36:19
Speaker 2: who was nurturing enough to come up with that at
1:36:22
Speaker 2: the time, and guy Kivin Einstein there, but whoever said it,
1:36:26
Speaker 2: you know, really understood the role of these pollinating species
1:36:31
Speaker 2: in the human survival. And amazingly this is being talked
1:36:36
Speaker 2: about a lot in academia and the technology circles is
1:36:41
Speaker 2: that you know, we can't survive the loss of the bees.
1:36:45
Speaker 2: And so one of the most astounding examples of our
1:36:48
Speaker 2: hubris again is a couple of articles have come out
1:36:52
Speaker 2: in the last couple of years saying the solution for
1:36:54
Speaker 2: the future of humanity is these robotic bees. And so
1:36:58
Speaker 2: they're building these little drone ease that are supposed to
1:37:01
Speaker 2: replace bees as pollinators, and that's our solution.
1:37:05
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just a classic example of what we're
1:37:08
Speaker 1: seeing all over the place. I think there's a there's
1:37:09
Speaker 1: a level of apathy and powerlessness that most people feel.
1:37:14
Speaker 1: And it's convenient and comforting to think that, you know,
1:37:18
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is just going to innovate us out of
1:37:21
Speaker 1: whatever problem that we have. We're going to go colonize
1:37:24
Speaker 1: Mars when we can't even figure out how to properly
1:37:27
Speaker 1: terraform our own planet. Correct, Right, this idea that we're
1:37:31
Speaker 1: we're divesting ourselves of responsibility and just looking past to
1:37:35
Speaker 1: the next opportunity or the next technological breakthrough, and we
1:37:39
Speaker 1: can all go to sleep at night, you know, comforted
1:37:42
Speaker 1: by that. But the truth is, like that is not
1:37:45
Speaker 1: the way forward.
1:37:47
Speaker 2: Yes, it's not the way forward. And if we don't
1:37:50
Speaker 2: reconnect to nature will just destroy it again. I want
1:37:54
Speaker 2: to I want to try to bring this to some
1:37:56
Speaker 2: sort of closure that doesn't feel like I'm the most
1:37:59
Speaker 2: oppressing person you've ever listened to. And so I'm kind
1:38:02
Speaker 2: of battling in my mind now to kind of get
1:38:04
Speaker 2: us back to this space where we can say it
1:38:06
Speaker 2: is doomsday.
1:38:07
Speaker 1: Me it's like unbridled optimism, Like I don't really know
1:38:10
Speaker 1: where you're going.
1:38:11
Speaker 3: It's like you don't know where to go with this one.
1:38:14
Speaker 2: So let me take you back to kind of where
1:38:16
Speaker 2: how do you reconcile those two things? And I do
1:38:19
Speaker 2: it actually through my experience as a position in the ICUs,
1:38:23
Speaker 2: and in the ICUs, when I was practicing intentsive hospital medicine,
1:38:28
Speaker 2: I got the privilege of being around human beings at
1:38:31
Speaker 2: the end of life. And I was so compelled by
1:38:34
Speaker 2: this experience that I ended up getting another subspecialty in
1:38:36
Speaker 2: hospice and palliative care and dealing with the end of
1:38:39
Speaker 2: life things for four years with a hospice group.
1:38:42
Speaker 3: And at the end of life, we've termed it death.
1:38:49
Speaker 2: And what I've laid out for you today is the
1:38:51
Speaker 2: possibility of the death of our species. And seventy years
1:38:54
Speaker 2: on hundred years. Who cares it was two hundred years
1:38:56
Speaker 2: is still pathetic, And so we have we're looking at
1:38:59
Speaker 2: the last chapter of life on earth with our current
1:39:01
Speaker 2: course of action. But let me tell you about what
1:39:04
Speaker 2: my experience has been in those last moments with patients
1:39:07
Speaker 2: who are dying. We have the belief, I think, in
1:39:12
Speaker 2: our subconscious because of the movies we watched, because of
1:39:15
Speaker 2: the TV shows we watch, because of our big divorce
1:39:19
Speaker 2: from the death process, it's become sterilized. You have probably
1:39:23
Speaker 2: not seen many people die. You've probably not seen your
1:39:26
Speaker 2: loved ones die. They've probably died in operating rooms or
1:39:30
Speaker 2: a nice use, or they died before you could fly
1:39:32
Speaker 2: across the country and see them or be And so
1:39:35
Speaker 2: very few human beings are now watching this process of death,
1:39:38
Speaker 2: and it's allowed death to be defined as an endpoint,
1:39:43
Speaker 2: as a contraction or a disappearance, rather than what I've
1:39:47
Speaker 2: actually seen it to be. And what I've seen it
1:39:49
Speaker 2: to be is a massive expansion of consciousness, of reality,
1:39:55
Speaker 2: of awareness, and ultimately of love. And the most point
1:40:00
Speaker 2: examples of this are people that actually die biologically. And
1:40:03
Speaker 2: we spend fifteen or thirty minutes in ICU resuscitating them
1:40:07
Speaker 2: with drugs and shocking their chests like you see on
1:40:09
Speaker 2: the TV shows and everything else. And we have a
1:40:11
Speaker 2: dismal track record of pulling those people act. It's not
1:40:14
Speaker 2: like TV. We lose the vast majority. It's around six
1:40:16
Speaker 2: percent of cardiac arrest in the hospital will actually be resuscitated,
1:40:21
Speaker 2: six percent will survive, ninety four percent will die. So
1:40:25
Speaker 2: you have somebody who's now biologically dead and your artificially
1:40:28
Speaker 2: sustaining life. You've got them on a respirator and you're
1:40:30
Speaker 2: pounding on their chest and compress and you're pumping drugs
1:40:33
Speaker 2: in their vein to try to get their heart restarted
1:40:35
Speaker 2: and doing all of this, and they've meanwhile been in
1:40:38
Speaker 2: the ICU for a week or a few days, or
1:40:40
Speaker 2: weeks and months in some cases before they have this moment.
1:40:44
Speaker 2: And by this time they've been isolated away from humans
1:40:47
Speaker 2: for quite some time. They're only touched by latex gloved hands.
1:40:51
Speaker 2: Only people with gowns on will come and see them.
1:40:53
Speaker 2: They have masks on. They haven't seen a human face
1:40:56
Speaker 2: close up in months. You know, they're just so isolated
1:40:59
Speaker 2: and low, and they go into this moment on the
1:41:02
Speaker 2: other side, and then we start working on them and
1:41:07
Speaker 2: doing our code, and as the hero depicted on TV,
1:41:11
Speaker 2: you become that doctor that pulled.
1:41:12
Speaker 3: Somebody back from that other side of the veil. And
1:41:16
Speaker 3: it was startling.
1:41:17
Speaker 2: As you know, I moved past my internship and started
1:41:20
Speaker 2: to be kind of a senior resident these environments and
1:41:22
Speaker 2: really responsible for being around these these patients for hours.
1:41:25
Speaker 2: After these experiences, they all told such a similar story
1:41:29
Speaker 2: on the other side of biological life, and it had
1:41:33
Speaker 2: to do with a little bit of a typical story
1:41:36
Speaker 2: that you might see in the movies or something where
1:41:38
Speaker 2: they saw white light and there's a sense of expansion
1:41:40
Speaker 2: and all this. But there's one sentence that came back
1:41:44
Speaker 2: again and again, and I had one ICU shift that
1:41:46
Speaker 2: was very weird.
1:41:47
Speaker 3: I had the one ICU.
1:41:48
Speaker 2: Shift where I worked for thirty six hours shift and
1:41:51
Speaker 2: during that night and the middle of my thirty six
1:41:53
Speaker 2: hours shift, I see three people die and I bring
1:41:55
Speaker 2: them all back with my team. And to the last
1:41:59
Speaker 2: one of those three, every single one of them, their
1:42:01
Speaker 2: first sentence had was always why did you bring me back?
1:42:07
Speaker 2: Which always kind of deflated my way in and said
1:42:09
Speaker 2: that they all said why did you bring me back?
1:42:12
Speaker 3: And the variety was huge.
1:42:13
Speaker 2: One of these was an African American pastor had had
1:42:16
Speaker 2: over two hundred visitors in his ICU room in the
1:42:18
Speaker 2: days before he passed away. And the other one was,
1:42:21
Speaker 2: you know, this very isolated, kind of ostracized gentleman in
1:42:26
Speaker 2: his communities was dying of complications of AIDS. And then
1:42:30
Speaker 2: I had this kid who was who had genetic defects
1:42:33
Speaker 2: and all this stuff, and he was dying of complications
1:42:35
Speaker 2: of pneumonia because he couldn't breathe anymore because his skeleton
1:42:38
Speaker 2: of colloup. So you just couldn't pick three different medical
1:42:41
Speaker 2: cases or three different human beings, and every one of
1:42:44
Speaker 2: them first sentence, why did you bring me back? And
1:42:46
Speaker 2: then as they start to get oriented and in the
1:42:49
Speaker 2: in the hours that followed, they are telling their loved ones.
1:42:52
Speaker 2: I went into this space and it was bright white
1:42:55
Speaker 2: light everywhere, and I, in that moment, felt completely accepted
1:42:59
Speaker 2: for the first time of my life. And that was
1:43:01
Speaker 2: an unexpected sentence to hear out of multiple accounts. I
1:43:05
Speaker 2: felt completely accepted for the first time in my life.
1:43:08
Speaker 1: So what do you make of that?
1:43:10
Speaker 2: I think we're all walking around lonely as hell, and
1:43:15
Speaker 2: our opportunity to rebirth because death is not an endpoint.
1:43:20
Speaker 2: It's a transformation moment that's an expansion beyond the limits
1:43:23
Speaker 2: of this frail biologic shell that we carry around, and
1:43:28
Speaker 2: the instant that we step out of that we find
1:43:30
Speaker 2: out that the universe embraces us in every single second
1:43:34
Speaker 2: of our existence and complete acceptance of who we are.
1:43:37
Speaker 2: We are enough in and of our own identity of
1:43:40
Speaker 2: I am at every second of every point of our existence.
1:43:44
Speaker 2: And it's the disbelief of that that's keeping us locked
1:43:49
Speaker 2: in these stupid conversations we just had for last hour
1:43:51
Speaker 2: and a half. That is myopic conversation in and of itself.
1:43:55
Speaker 2: When you back up for a moment, say, okay, we're
1:43:57
Speaker 2: killing ourselves, but what if we need a death moment
1:44:02
Speaker 2: to transform completely, to let go of all of the
1:44:06
Speaker 2: preconceived notions of what it is to be human, and
1:44:08
Speaker 2: to say what we are beings of light and we
1:44:12
Speaker 2: are completely accepted at every moment, including this moment. When
1:44:15
Speaker 2: we would rape the Earth of what it we're raping
1:44:17
Speaker 2: it of, when we would kill each other at the
1:44:19
Speaker 2: rate we do, when we would destroy the entire ecosystem
1:44:23
Speaker 2: of a green planet in the middle of a black space,
1:44:25
Speaker 2: when we would have that level of hubris. We're still
1:44:28
Speaker 2: completely accepted and our journey is somehow understood by something
1:44:32
Speaker 2: more benevolent and more complete than we can see as
1:44:35
Speaker 2: human beings. And so let's not beat each other up
1:44:38
Speaker 2: over this issue. Let's not see this as a failure.
1:44:42
Speaker 2: Let's see this as an obvious next step in our journey.
1:44:45
Speaker 2: And death is the inevitable thing marching at us. That's
1:44:48
Speaker 2: gonna say. Are you going to wake up and see
1:44:51
Speaker 2: the transformation at that moment of death and transformation and
1:44:55
Speaker 2: you're going to say goodbye home was sapiens? Or are
1:44:57
Speaker 2: you going to do it a moment before that in
1:45:00
Speaker 2: the body, before the doctor starts the resuscitation.
1:45:05
Speaker 3: Are you going to say?
1:45:05
Speaker 1: You know what?
1:45:07
Speaker 2: What if we all looked at each other in wonder,
1:45:10
Speaker 2: in awe and said, you're enough. I accept you completely,
1:45:14
Speaker 2: I want to be with you, I want to live
1:45:16
Speaker 2: with you. I want to be a live period. And
1:45:19
Speaker 2: if it's with you, then it must be on purpose,
1:45:20
Speaker 2: because we're in the same room, and the odds of.
1:45:23
Speaker 3: That is zero, And so we are here.
1:45:25
Speaker 2: Seven billion of us showed up right now, which is
1:45:29
Speaker 2: really odd because I just laid out a horrific story
1:45:32
Speaker 2: of what's happening on the planet. And yet seven billion
1:45:34
Speaker 2: of those white souls that seconds after death are going
1:45:37
Speaker 2: to realize that they are who they've always been. They're
1:45:40
Speaker 2: fully accepted, and they are moving in true love, and
1:45:44
Speaker 2: that white light is the love and they're in that space.
1:45:49
Speaker 2: What if we can transform before we die, then there's
1:45:52
Speaker 2: no reason to go to Mars, there's no reason to
1:45:54
Speaker 2: go anywhere else, because we will do absolutely every single
1:45:58
Speaker 2: thing differently here on Earth, and we're going to do
1:46:00
Speaker 2: it differently by just that simple recognition of I am
1:46:04
Speaker 2: who I am, You are who you are. That's enough,
1:46:06
Speaker 2: and I accept you completely, and let's figure out how
1:46:10
Speaker 2: to do this within the design of nature. There's enough energy,
1:46:13
Speaker 2: there's enough food, there's enough soil, there's enough commodities, there's
1:46:16
Speaker 2: enough resources for everybody on the planet to thrive at
1:46:19
Speaker 2: a level that's never been experiencing human history. We cannot
1:46:24
Speaker 2: continue any form of human economic systems that have ever
1:46:27
Speaker 2: existed before and expect us to escape the death moment.
1:46:31
Speaker 2: We literally have to reinvent everything. And so if you
1:46:34
Speaker 2: are under the age of eighteen right now, you are
1:46:36
Speaker 2: the last generation that may live to the fullest extent
1:46:39
Speaker 2: of the human potential. It is you who are being
1:46:43
Speaker 2: called to transform because you showed up right when you did.
1:46:47
Speaker 2: If my generation is to do anything, it was to say,
1:46:50
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, we're going in the wrong direction. But
1:46:53
Speaker 2: my generation doesn't have enough time now to turn the
1:46:56
Speaker 2: boat around reinvent everything. And so our mission is not
1:46:59
Speaker 2: to inspire the farmers that are currently fighting the good fight.
1:47:02
Speaker 2: It's to inspire their children to do the right thing
1:47:05
Speaker 2: and do it differently. Connected to new children who are
1:47:08
Speaker 2: in the cities, who are in the tech world wherever
1:47:11
Speaker 2: they are, connect those kids back, give them a sense
1:47:14
Speaker 2: of that unity, give them a sense of the oneness,
1:47:16
Speaker 2: and give us all a sense that this is the
1:47:19
Speaker 2: inescapable optimism as we are going to transform period. And
1:47:23
Speaker 2: it may be I'd out to the point of our death,
1:47:26
Speaker 2: or miraculously, it might just happen right before it.
1:47:30
Speaker 1: That was one of the best monologues I've ever heard
1:47:32
Speaker 1: of my life. Appreci it, brother, that was amazing. Oh
1:47:36
Speaker 1: my god, you're this incredible contradiction in terms with the
1:47:43
Speaker 1: day and the optimism and the deep rooted experience and
1:47:49
Speaker 1: knowledge in science, and yet somebody with a vast capacity
1:47:54
Speaker 1: for spiritual exploration wizard, You're against all friend, we all are.
1:48:04
Speaker 3: And that's the excitement that I have is.
1:48:08
Speaker 2: You can't actually come close to the science of atomic physics,
1:48:13
Speaker 2: astrophysics or human biology without an overwhelming sense of we
1:48:18
Speaker 2: are just so far beyond logic, We're so far beyond
1:48:23
Speaker 2: the material world.
1:48:24
Speaker 3: We are these entities that are moving.
1:48:26
Speaker 2: With such power, and we have been kept from that power,
1:48:30
Speaker 2: and we've been kept from it so that power can
1:48:32
Speaker 2: be taken from us and consolidate in the hands of
1:48:34
Speaker 2: a few.
1:48:35
Speaker 1: Right, So the trick is, can we come to that
1:48:38
Speaker 1: realization that that dawning moment of consciousness expanding short of
1:48:47
Speaker 1: the death experience? Can we find the wherewithal the facility
1:48:52
Speaker 1: to tap into that sense of what it means to
1:48:55
Speaker 1: be alive while we are in the present moment.
1:48:59
Speaker 2: Three words first, then gratitude and love, and if we
1:49:03
Speaker 2: can just practice that at the scientific level, at the
1:49:06
Speaker 2: technological level, at everything at other levels.
1:49:08
Speaker 3: Thank thank you for what we've been given.
1:49:11
Speaker 2: Thank you for the horrendous jour journey we've had, thank
1:49:14
Speaker 2: you for the atrocities that we've had to sustain as
1:49:17
Speaker 2: a people, and thank you for a mother nature that
1:49:20
Speaker 2: would continue to be graceful to us. Why does she
1:49:22
Speaker 2: let her soils recover in eighteen months? Why why haven't
1:49:27
Speaker 2: you just wiped us off the face of the planet yet?
1:49:29
Speaker 2: Why haven't you smudged us out?
1:49:31
Speaker 3: We are out.
1:49:32
Speaker 2: There's ten to the thirty one viruses on Earth, ten
1:49:34
Speaker 2: to the thirty one. That's one with thirty one zeros
1:49:36
Speaker 2: after it. Why didn't they just knock us out? The
1:49:40
Speaker 2: flu viruses? Nothing, There's ten to the thirty one other
1:49:43
Speaker 2: viruses on the planet. There's more biological life around us.
1:49:47
Speaker 2: We are one billionth of the life on the planet.
1:49:49
Speaker 2: Why hasn't it all just crumped us out, pushed us out,
1:49:52
Speaker 2: crushed us. There's a crazy ass paper that I wish
1:49:59
Speaker 2: I had already won the NOBE Prize. But it's called
1:50:01
Speaker 2: the Universal scaling Law. It's by an astrophysicist and the
1:50:04
Speaker 2: seam hair Maine and the X axis the vertical axis
1:50:08
Speaker 2: on the graph looks at the frequency of resonance of
1:50:11
Speaker 2: every structure, starting at the universe itself with its resonance frequency,
1:50:15
Speaker 2: all the way to Plank's constant, which is the vibration
1:50:18
Speaker 2: of the electromagtic field and vacuum space. Tiniest little thing
1:50:23
Speaker 2: we can measure, and on the y axis the horizontal axis,
1:50:27
Speaker 2: you've got the diameter or the radius, and maybe it
1:50:30
Speaker 2: is of every one of those structures. And it turns
1:50:33
Speaker 2: out if you plot the radius versus frequency of resonance,
1:50:36
Speaker 2: you get a straight line from Plank's contes constant all
1:50:39
Speaker 2: the way to the universe dead center between the smallest
1:50:43
Speaker 2: thing we've ever known and the largest thing, the universe
1:50:46
Speaker 2: itself is human biology. Where the mathematical center point.
1:50:53
Speaker 1: Of the universe the average size of the human being.
1:50:57
Speaker 2: Is that what you're saying, our frequency of resonance plotted
1:51:00
Speaker 2: against our size.
1:51:02
Speaker 1: What is How do you measure frequency of resonance? What
1:51:05
Speaker 1: is that?
1:51:05
Speaker 2: It's we all emanate electromenetic frequency. So anything does, rock does,
1:51:10
Speaker 2: a tree does, any solid form will resonate an electromagnetic
1:51:15
Speaker 2: field off of it. And each of those like lighting frequency,
1:51:19
Speaker 2: red light having a different frequency than blue light.
1:51:23
Speaker 3: So that's the visible spectrum.
1:51:24
Speaker 2: But then you've got spectrum of frequency going all the
1:51:27
Speaker 2: way out in every direction to the almost infinity points
1:51:30
Speaker 2: on those two directions. And so if we're the mathematical
1:51:35
Speaker 2: center point, it has something to do with the fact that.
1:51:40
Speaker 3: Everything wants us here. The universe wants us here.
1:51:43
Speaker 1: It's that beautiful thing of the more you know about science,
1:51:48
Speaker 1: the more room there is for wonder and awe. Right,
1:51:52
Speaker 1: that is amazing. So from the smallest measurable sub atomic
1:51:56
Speaker 1: particle all the way to what we estimate to be
1:52:00
Speaker 1: the size of the universe, we're exactly in the.
1:52:02
Speaker 2: Middle plot that against the frequency and weird dead center. Yeah,
1:52:07
Speaker 2: and so it should be mind blowing. It should recorrect
1:52:13
Speaker 2: our understanding of what our purpose is. Our purpose is
1:52:16
Speaker 2: not to be against nature. We are of nature and
1:52:19
Speaker 2: we're at its center point with great purpose. And it
1:52:22
Speaker 2: has to be that we would have the consciousness that
1:52:25
Speaker 2: we would be able to participate on the level of
1:52:27
Speaker 2: consciousness to understand the concepts of gratitude and love.
1:52:31
Speaker 1: It's beautiful. I can't think of a better way to
1:52:34
Speaker 1: end this. It's fantastic. Man. I could talk to you
1:52:39
Speaker 1: for like eight hours. So please come back, Yes, I mean,
1:52:43
Speaker 1: just agenda free, come back and we'll just like let
1:52:46
Speaker 1: it go wherever it wants to go. That was that
1:52:49
Speaker 1: was really beautiful. Thank you for that. Thanks for you
1:52:52
Speaker 1: are a gift to humanity, and please keep doing what
1:52:58
Speaker 1: you're doing. It's super important work. Let me know or
1:53:02
Speaker 1: let the listeners know how people can find you, connect
1:53:05
Speaker 1: with you. You know, where can they learn more about
1:53:08
Speaker 1: this docuseries and the nonprofit and all the good things
1:53:13
Speaker 1: that you're doing.
1:53:15
Speaker 2: Long list of websites there, Www dot Farmers footprint dot
1:53:19
Speaker 2: us is the docuseries and the nonprofit entry point for you.
1:53:25
Speaker 2: Www dot Zach Bush z A, C, H b U,
1:53:28
Speaker 2: s h MD dot com. You can find a lot
1:53:32
Speaker 2: of my educational material there in all these different areas
1:53:34
Speaker 2: of health, energy, ecology are my three main fo site.
1:53:37
Speaker 2: But I also have a huge interest in changing my
1:53:41
Speaker 2: business is done and plit, politics and the rest and
1:53:43
Speaker 2: so Zach Bush is kind of your biggest clearinghouse of
1:53:46
Speaker 2: bizarre ideas, the agricultural stuff and the soil science. You
1:53:52
Speaker 2: can find more at restore the number four life dot com.
1:53:57
Speaker 2: Too many other websites really named, but that'll get you.
1:54:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'll link up in the show notes a
1:54:03
Speaker 1: variety of other resources so you can go down the
1:54:06
Speaker 1: rabbit hole on Zach's world.
1:54:08
Speaker 3: Thanks so much, Thank you.
1:54:09
Speaker 1: My friend. Yeah, until next time, my friend, all right,
1:54:13
Speaker 1: Peace plan, Regenerative Soil