Joe Rogan Experience #1540 — Frank von Hippel Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the Joe Rogan experience it was like two months? So if you think it sucks, that's okay. people are bad with change well you have this lovely uh asian uh that's ganesh ganesh that's Yeah. Had a great time. and you just wanted to have some independence and head out? I think we're born the same year. it's very disturbing now when it comes in i'm like whoa god damn just shaving all now and my face too

3:06 Oh, really? So I'm a biologist, and I brought you a gift from my home state of Alaska. Yeah. Yeah. So I love fossils. No. But I got it on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea where I do a lot of work. Oh, so it's like a seal. Oh, baculum. I thought that's what it was. Thanks for the big old walrus penis. That'd be from an extinct walrus probably. Thanks for having me on the show.

6:10 And there was like some large-scale lawsuit against the – I don't know if it was against the chemical company or the golf course or both. Who was it? And you said that's accurate. If you go back and you look at an old still, the way it works, you would have a heat source, And the Earth works really in the same way. pole to the south pole, those are hemispheric sinks for these contaminants. It's cold year-round.

9:36 that'll have millions of times the background concentration of these contaminants. render oil, which goes onto all of their meals. Every single meal, they're getting hundreds of So they decided to go to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada to look at the Inuit people to the negotiations every time. It's because of this problem. It's called global distillation

12:32 And typically when the military pulled out of them, they just left everything behind. And unfortunately, these chemicals, many of them persist for decades. to do to clean up. We're involved with that in some places, and it's an important thing to do, but we have to stop the That continued until about World War II. And in World War II, we made a dramatic shift from using these metal-based products to using synthetic organic compounds. So in World War II, we saw

14:52 it was called a water mold, once it was found that it could destroy the water mold and save Ireland had just been through this devastating famine. Yeah, and we fuck things up pretty fast because now we have a world that is, like you said, anywhere you go in this world, you're going to find contaminated animals. that could be due to these chemicals And are these subsistence hunters, are they free of all the other problems that many Inuit folks have in terms of like cigarettes and alcohol and a lot of people that have been introduced to some

17:31 But, you know, you can't actually solve the problem with epidemiology. And so when you go to these villages, is it uniform that most of them are using cigarettes and alcohol? Yeah, exactly. And so they have passed their own laws. They have their sovereign governments. So is there anywhere you can study that has this issue with the pollutants but doesn't

19:39 It's a great question, right? It would be a great way to study it, but I don't know. extinct. It's why the bald eagle almost went extinct, why the peregrine falcon almost went body fat. quite dangerous. A lot of people get killed during application. And the farm workers are some of the food. And if you go back and look at World War II photos where the army was spraying refugees and

22:55 there's going to be body lice, and that caused an outbreak of typhus. So the U.S. military set fever, both of which are vectored by the body loss. there's some of the areas in Skid Row that are literally thousands or another, right? they're just spraying them predator and you have an animal like an eagle that's a top predator, or a peregrine falcon,

25:22 I had my blood tested once, He goes, yeah, cut those out and come back in a couple months. It's one of the metalloids that was used in fungicide, still is actually in many places. exposed to it through respiratory. That's right. Right. So some pesticides, and people are getting exposed to really high levels. But even today, if you're a farm worker Or is there just no way around this?

28:55 food. You're also killing the insects that eat the grasshopper. You're killing the wasp that as of a couple hours ago, Just swarming. they move the way these big, massive clouds of birds On the outside, right? like you see with starlings where you have thousands of them, So they do sense the Earth's magnetic field. They were the only people to ever win the Nobel Prize in something to do with animal behavior.

32:02 Then they dance 10 degrees to the right of the vertical of the honeycomb. And they can dance for hours. But of course, the sun is moving, So if the sun is completely covered up with clouds, Wow. So they fucked with the bees to find out whether or not they could do that. Yeah, I've studied them a little bit when I was in school. And then the fungus grows in this nest with 7 million ants, and it grows these little fruiting

35:01 yeah like how and and we just kind of are like we know some things, we know how they communicate with pheromones they're all sterile. They don't have their own babies, right? It's only the queen that has half of her genes, which are in common with each of the workers. But the male who fertilizes those So that's why ants exist. tree they're working on and back. You see these columns of millions of these ants marching along

38:23 Like they know, oh up mike got the zombie and so this this that is a cordyceps mushroom-based product that has B12 and other adaptogens in it, they farm it off of caterpillars, But these weirdos, they grow inside these ants' bodies We've got to get him out of town. Yes. our planet fungus And see how it's just, they're starting to spray out into the air.

41:37 If you think that all this somehow or another through natural selection Just, you know, people will sequence them to figure out, new mammal discovery every year or two, a new bird every year or two. But you get to, Beatles. well, and filming this, you know, He goes, it's screaming. prime number years, so some years will be low, some years will be very high. It can be deafening.

44:41 So if you're in Africa, same thing goes on, different species. on earth in terms of supporting life. So it is awful. And also what's interesting is how many But if you look at it, most people don't realize how much of our medicine comes from plants. We have no idea what drugs might be incredibly valuable in the future Yeah, and it may be a lab now,

46:51 what is the impact that that has on the area? that they're screwing up the whole ecosystem of this area and there might be other plants And there's probably a good chance that that works. But if you want people to protect the rainforest, because it doesn't have the bark anymore, which it needs for moving nutrients around. So yeah, these uncontacted tribes and just leave them alone.

50:29 about how to do what they're doing sustainably. And also, I would worry that, I mean, I don't you don't want a situation like you have back for the genocide, the fact that they were taken over by the settlers and all the treaties that were broken and all the various injustices Is that progress? And I'm like, wow, what a weird convergence of the past and the present.

53:15 better if they got i mean i don't know i don't yeah i i think that communities have to decide Maybe, maybe not. Whereas this is, they're isolated. Yeah. Look at that guy. people showing up in boats that ruin your life yeah and it's probably a part just in time when the north sentinel people were making their way to the boat they extracted them decade-long obsession

57:21 that means for people yet. It's just all happened so fast. It's a bummer. as infants and right yeah all the stuff that goes along with these sort of nomadic tribal people earlier about the indigenous people in the Arctic. And when European explorers first got to They get the pesticides and then they get all our vices as well. people because like wait a minute these folks don't eat any vegetables.

59:58 and they collect also aquatic vegetation in the intertidal zone. like literally one of the best examples because he was being he was going to be awarded the nobel And Germany had the best chemistry in the world, the best physics in the world, nitrogen could be extracted from the air. human corpses for fertilizing. or whether he just didn't want to do it, and so he purposely failed. So when he failed,

1:03:49 And, in fact, his assistant was my great-grandfather, James Franck. And so then they went to Belgium, to the battlefront in Belgium, and waited until the wind was just right. And then they released the chlorine gas from cylinders, thousands of And it's a horrific way to die too, right? chemist herself. She gave it up to Mary Haber. And he was part of it. But also, she was a prominent chemist herself.

1:06:30 than the chlorine-based, which is incredible, right? were munitions people. They were going out there to look for unexploded ordnance Aleut tribe from whom they had taken it. And they had to find the unexploded ordnance, so that when forces come in, they get impaled on these things. Can you imagine out in the middle of the Aleutian chain? They're flooded with water, and there's still beer sitting on the counter.

1:10:16 So when you say you found a lot of unexploded, what is that? that was the farthest west in the world Because there was a lot. you go to places where mines are you know that's a million times more dangerous i have no idea Like the Mayan ruins that they find that way, They wanted those trees there. And then that rainforest engulfed their civilization.

1:13:06 and he found this lost tribe, yeah i did see the mcconaughey was a movie called gold that was sort of like that no no not quite it was a another gentleman who was a not well known the lost city of on my Apple, my movies that I kept. fuck i hate when this happens we're not gonna find it either that's what we're seeing. Slay trade. One year, 2 million people in Mexico, indigenous people, died from typhus.

1:16:50 like St. Lawrence Island, where I do a lot of work in the Bering Sea. In the 1918 influenza That's an amazing, horrific number. So that's a really great question. Malaria has actually killed more people than any other disease Then as people moved around, the malaria moved with them. In around 1828, I think it was, was a treatment available for malaria, then not much happened in terms of how it led to separation

1:20:03 discovered in Africa that children act as a reservoir for malaria. Africans. And they even destroyed indigenous huts that were too close to the European population, the colonists, from the Africans. And they even there's mountains, and you'll find that the people who live in the mountains have a different the indigenous population were getting wiped out by these diseases. They didn't have resistance to

1:22:30 because they were the valuable workers. So that really made this continent spiral down tell the difference between malaria and all the other febrile illnesses. Lots of illnesses cause How did they figure that out? Yeah. It's amazing when you think about it. I've spent time with shaman and rainforest, And that's how I was able to work on the plants that I was working on there.

1:25:29 to eliminate it? Right. So we couldn't eliminate malaria until it was discovered that the And what he did is they went through Havana and they broke open every pot that held water. water, because both Aedes aegypti and, which vectors yellow fever and chikungunya and what's States bought the rights from the French. The French wanted to get out of there and get what

1:28:03 we got rid of malaria from this country. Damn nature. And so in the United States, we were able through our infrastructure, Yeah. one from mom, one from dad, it was a random mutation that had this huge selective advantage for the people who lived that arose in Africa. But it's relatively rare to have the disease because you have to have two people who each

1:31:33 Like I'm Jewish and we have a lot of Tay-Sachs disease then a quarter of their kids will have that disease. And it's completely lethal. So it's so you know if you might have kids with it. would get really sick and then he would come back and he'd be okay again. Then he'd get really sick. And then he would come back and he'd be okay again. Then he'd get really sick again. It was a reoccurring thing with him. When you're talking about eradicating malaria in the United

1:33:50 six, seven years later, you have to take a different medicine because they're already... It doesn't have to be a new infection. getting sick. And he wound up getting really fucked up from that too. It was probably mefloquine. and tans there in the rainforest. You could get Guinness Stout in Kenya, and you can also get And the guy said, where are your bottles?

1:36:10 So I went to the next shop and I said, I want to buy a case of Tusker and a case of Guinness. So then I said, could I buy a case of bottles off of you, Yeah. Well, I might be wrong. You can kind of get away with doing it. It was at the point where I was like, okay, hey, sorry. Yeah, so that's what happened to me. Like it lingers in your system, right?

1:39:14 but there's, it's just impossible to not get bitten by a mosquito. And so, so that's why if you're in an area that has a lot of mosquitoes. And I've never even heard of it. And it's a device, and you have these little, like, sheets, a natural pellet found in oh it's probably christine it's probably a pyrethroid yeah yeah And then there was a cinchona plantation. So you could grow cinchona trees, use the bark to make the quinine

1:41:49 And so the chrysanthemum crop from Kenya was basically non-existent at that time. just like we're talking about with mefloquine. And then there was a rumor going around that it we tested these chemicals. We came up with atrobene. The soldiers wouldn't take it. So The guy who wrote the books. Wow, that's crazy. And that one is before DDT was incorporated.

1:44:43 I mean, that is so unique. Slay it. Like, look at that. I mean yeah he was he was that's not him but somebody drew it in his style right oh look at that wow that's crazy that's really it's just a fine mist but boy mosquitoes fucking hate it yeah like what I was thermosel cooking right here, we'd be good. So that's going back to the origins of pesticides, right?

1:47:03 In fact, there's a whole category of pesticides now that are artificial version of tobacco. They're called It's just the right amount in a cigarette, right? But if you have too much, it's lethal. It's highly toxic. It's just the right amount in a cigarette, right? But if you have too much, it's lethal. It's highly lethal to insects. And so how do they use it as an insecticide?

1:48:18 I don't know anything about that. You're spinning around. A Swiss researcher placed cell phones next to hives He did report that the colony didn't return to baseline normal state Yeah, and I wonder too, And I'm like, hmm, maybe. If you kill all the mosquitoes, the question was, do we need mosquitoes? Yeah. They brought in the cane toad. Even with natural animals, what are you talking about?

1:52:41 And it's because the Hawaiian Islands, they rose out of the sea from nothing. I have, yeah. I mean, it's amazing. And when our kids were little, we were on Lanai. And he's like, cool. And he goes down this hill and then his, his, his handlebars are wobbling And everywhere we went, people would say, And they just, they're everywhere. I think they just extracted and killed something like 5,000 pythons yeah from the Everglades and

1:55:59 And pythons are now eating alligators. that it takes so much for us to get it into our head that that's a bad idea. that you could potentially develop gut issues of pressure from the company that makes it. From plants. spot treatment here because of yellow fever. But we couldn't stop ourselves. So we put it in It's the same thing with these herbicides.

1:59:51 that's different than just broadcasting it everywhere, and then we all get exposed to it. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a few reasons for it. developed at the beginning of World War II. And the idea was back then, we have plant hormones, the rainforest. And what we were trying to do is we were trying to wipe out the food supply of the who were in the womb when, you know, their mothers were sprayed with this by the U.S. military.

2:03:43 with DDT. It kills the development is screwed up. So you end up with males becoming females, you end up with all kinds toxic problem with things like arsenic and mercury and the organophosphates. They're nerve you could make this internal combustion engine that wouldn't knock. the, you remember the crime wave in the 1980s, and you talk to, say, the police chief of New York

2:07:00 lead was removed from gasoline during the Carter administration. Lead started coming down in the atmosphere, and then you see a 20-year lag, crime rates come down. So the impulsivity and aggressive behavior? What else do they spray Roundup on? I don't know all the crops they use it for. And so you can clean your food, He was a Nazi scientist who invented sarin and tabin and all these nerve agents.

2:09:09 can't afford it. So what you can do is you can look at what, how much pesticide residues are in God damn it. How is this stuff still legal? I mean, is it that much of a They're not all going to die from disease. illegal at the end of the Obama administration, if not for political influence, how is that way too much power, and their money is warping our politics.

2:11:38 So it's integrating the pesticides would have a few acres of land that are growing potatoes. develop issues from eating that meat? Yeah. And so it has to do with how long is it from when had, and eating the crops that had this thing on it. So we have shifted to pesticides that break Environmental Policy Act in 1968, Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act,

2:14:47 position now in this country. And everything's, all these conversations are toxic, and there's and then 10,000 acres of soybeans here and then 10,000 acres of wheat over here. You make this a more diverse chest-like and he was growing a diverse set of crops. of their corn every year, and this is what's valuable to them. How do you get that guy? I without polluting the world, and in the process make a more productive, diverse economy for them.

2:18:40 workers, transferring the risk to farm workers. Those have mostly been replaced by the new Like you like to hunt, right? Have you been to Kodiak Island in Alaska? You see this deer. You don't want it to be full of chemicals. And DDT actually greatly increased the yield of meat in cows. The fact that it's banned other places but not banned in America is a disgrace.

2:21:55 but it's saying it's found in up to 90% of all food we eat, Same with the animals you hunt, right? Are you aware of that? Jakob Kretzfeld? Right now it's not, it doesn't jump species. Right now it's isolated in cervids. The same disease that cannibals get yeah you There's more evidence that it comes out of a lab in Wuhan that somehow or another when they were doing these.

2:25:35 seeing more and more of these diseases because we're punching into this habitat we've never been but he's fairly convinced that it came from a lab. You'd be like, oh, great. And it stymies progress on so many fronts when when things get polarized like yeah it's even though people didn't like him, the economy was kicking ass. But there was the beginning of the Trump administration, even though people didn't like him, the economy was kicking ass.

2:27:43 And then COVID threw gasoline on the fire. years reading these historical accounts of society falling apart during the bubonic plague, Yeah. And so it is a worrisome time. And I'm also concerned about a new disease. I mean, agency that deals with this, that prepares for it. We've covered it all from toxins to disease to... And so, of course, it killed all the fish.

2:30:58 engineered mosquitoes and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it's a great thing, And we don't really – we really don't know what – we don't know what happens if you take that piece out any wiser. We know a lot more, but are we equipped to deal with these things? I mean, we made nuclear weapons during World War II. And we had bomb shelters and all of that.

2:33:34 I suspect we are, but I suspect that the progress is incremental. I think just based on, I know we have more information, but I think we've absorbed a lot of it, i would say maybe uh if you go back 150 years they were wiser than we are now because they lived in a Pollution levels have been going down. There's more forests now in this country than there was

2:35:50 you having me. It's awesome. My pleasure. And people, is there an audio book of this? I hope if you're a reader. Goodbye, everybody.