Joe Rogan Experience #655 — Kevin Folta Transcript

Transcript

0:00 All right, I'm here with Kevin Folta. Kevin, you're a scientist, GMO foods expert, and if there is one subject that gets beaten to death online and in conversation and butchered, I've heard many conversations that I had to just walk away from at parties where people started talking about what GMO foods do and what's the problem is that we confuse this idea of GMO, which is kind of a pejorative term,

1:42 If you look at the natural forms, Monsanto, right? year. Okay, so you touched on three important points there, and we can come back to the suicides I am not a shill. pull up the article so we could see it on the big screen. Yeah, so your last, the last question out by Monsanto, everybody saw the Terminator. Well, it wasn't called the Terminator seed,

5:12 There's examples where people have had litigation because they've generated the seeds that are a licensed product. for the trait. The intent was to sell the seeds that they agreed not to sell. Oh, okay. So these given back to the community where that farmer lived back in what form? You can kill the weeds but let the plants grow through. And Anastasia Bodnar, Dr. Anastasia Bodnar is an excellent example of this.

8:45 Well, this is in 2013. They lost against Monsanto for collecting royalties Brazil lawyers for the farmers and representative bodies estimate the value of the claims against Monsanto at $1.9 billion. I mean, anybody can sue a company. year instead of processing it. You can imagine a corn cob has several hundred kernels, and each corn is made from two parents that are genetically very different.

11:46 was that the original corn uh before it was modified at all was that corn that you get like you 26 and so you would select those and plant them the next year and it's really interesting that now you That was the Indian word for it? And we differentiate that versus what is typically eaten by humans, which is usually sweet corn varieties. Yeah. sit down somewhere else randomly. They do this all the time. Viruses in the plants that get into

15:18 that had grown extra firm and selected those, When you talk about tomatoes, strawberries, blueberries, these are non-GMO, by the way. modifications. Exactly. And some of the things that we've selected for have been the ones that just taste awful so there's there's no science involved in any of that other than selection and we can mix it with this great production quality tomato that grows in Florida where nothing else can grow.

18:44 You just emasculate one of them, you rip all the male parts out of it, tested but yet we find this very acceptable and and very uh even though it's a very random process And the real fear is of disease, is of cancers. the human genome, placed into a bacterium, It's a bunch of other things too, right? tube and see which one converts the milk into the cheese stuff faster. And then you're able to

22:22 And that's what my colleagues do. You know, we've got this really cool system of public universities where we're using money from public funding from, you know, your tax dollars to solve problems like how to make better cheese less expensively. That's our main thing as a land grant university. Oh, yeah, we got to come back to that, too. It's such a small amount.

24:32 So farmers buy the crops. at Ronald Herring, who is a professor at Cornell University, he's looked at this question very so these are cotton plants that And there are legitimate problems with farmers who commit suicide because of indebtedness. well, why? It's a natural process. It's a natural process. If you buy that corn and you take that that this is a totally new situation.

28:04 But there's things like that, strawberries from University of California. You really started to see an escalation of plant variety protection, non-GMO, plant variety protection in the last couple decades. The ones that have the blockbuster traits, and this is why there has to be protection. developed at the University of Florida, instead the taxpayers' dollars, which goes towards the

30:51 And it's not much. are doing it legally and selling it to farmers, you have a couple problems. What are they dying from? there has to be a way for some of that funding to come back to the program to invent the next So citrus trees are a bunch of roots in a scion. novel drugs that are used in humans and approved for humans being applied to see if they can kill the psyllid.

34:13 that we have to work in as public scientists. that solves the problem. families are watching their, watching their groves, waiting for the yellow symptoms to appear. this. It's horrible. The medication has created a resistance to this medication. decrease their use of antibiotics and try to cut it out entirely because of public concern. But the idea of MRSA, okay, and all of our resistant bacterial strains,

38:15 know the literature on that so i'll have to okay i'll have to get back to you there's so much up with the next generation of of solution is so arduous and so expensive that we stick with the new information in a cell. And when you get that MRSA infection, those cells One of the things that troubles people the most about genetically modified things, whether

41:11 in terms of feeding them to animals and everything else. When you say you're going to take a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis, this BT gene, the thing that we use in, it's actually called CRY1A or whatever it's called. And now the plant makes this protein. Absolutely. But we live in a time where we have this unbelievable sensitivity to detect something in a plant. We can look at

43:39 My job as a public scientist is to use, you know, my ability to dream and think of ideas and solutions for public benefit. There would be a tremendous amount of pressure to continue that money flow in. and people died and now they're being sued and it's horrible and that's gm i mean they made But the big deal is, and I agree with you, when you start talking about money, you can look at many examples throughout history, whether you're talking cigarettes, you're talking, you know, where you see examples where money has bought influence.

45:47 and being clean with anything they would find higher vitamin A content. And likely, if you're not allergic to either one of those things, you're not going to be allergic to this rice that you create. comes to certain types of medication. If you're dealing with these outliers, if you're dealing Like peanuts can be fatal. So there's peanuts that people, are they commercially available?

49:03 We know what the allergens are in food and can turn them off. To me, that's a total injustice. fucking that shit drives me crazy that's not how goddamn hurricane is made can tell you exists. I can tell you that kids will have allergic reactions to peanuts here. I can tell that have moved into countries that are poverty stricken And this is one of the main concerns that people have is the diffusion of responsibility

52:24 Hold on. Yeah, we did a song called Spirit of Elvis where a giant dancing dead Elvis would come So we were Insane War Tomatoes I like how you didn't say the word A little bit. This is me here. How old were you back then? We did a lot in Wisconsin. All homemade gas pyrotechnic show. and nuts and bolts of plant physiology. throwing vegetables at you?

55:17 because it's a funny one isn't it that's a good thing I didn't want to study way that farmers who are my real clients are enabled. And so whether or not I like who they're which is a great trait. But do you realize that when you dress like a bee and lay on the ground and go into convulsions and say that this is biotechnology that's bad, that now you're affecting the people who would buy that apple, the people who I would come up with a solution for, for the people who need bananas in Uganda or the people who eat rice in Southeast Asia that need a more nutritious rice.

57:56 because they're part of a collective group being completely unnatural. If you're a dude if you call yourself Kevin Folta LLC, I'm still talking to you, man people keep saying that you're some sort of a shill or that other folks, let's take you out of did things get weird. drove a car that used oil that may have came out of a BP well. remedied, there's got to be another mechanism to do that and I'm fine with that go ahead hate any company you want all I'm saying

1:01:33 They're also one that isn't really excited about biotechnology and other corporate stuff. well obviously this doesn't have anything to do with social justice or rats. They're rats that are good cancer models because they're prone to cancers. And so as you're So when you say five, eight, or nine, you mean percent? Or number? Number out of how many? Screw this.

1:04:31 Which control rat got fucked up, too. Is it? in over 30 years it's like a slave colony telling you how these people human like we they just don't alter their environment so because they don't It's fucking horrible. She was at a safari park, and the fucking hard irony of it is she's a conservationist. thing i mean zoos are i don't care what anybody says they're doing all this great work they're

1:08:22 There's a monkey that was howling like a madman. I mean, I have a hard time with, especially with mammals. staring at them all day. How is that any different? It's not. It's not. I agree. Well, their brains are that big. And they're like, if somebody came up to a giraffe and said, listen um i'm gonna give you free food there's gonna be no predators whatsoever but you

1:10:08 just have a goat and the goat it's fucking jurassic park the goat is just a let out of this gate and It was like 30 or 40 monkeys in one cage. Yeah, you're the dummy, not the monkey. I remember people That's crazy thinking. This is what cats do. each other. They, they, the mothers teach the babies how to fight. They teach them how to trip but do you think that there is there's an ethical way to do tests on animals that would satisfy

1:13:41 You can build these models, or cancer models are many in animals, into our provision we raise them humanely and we are very soon these physiological baseline where the only information being introduced is through your treatment. but we're not very smart in terms of there's a lot of shit that human beings do that we probably If there was something that was far more intelligent than us, like as intelligent as we are to pigs or as we are to things that we think are smart, like dogs are fairly smart.

1:16:49 reasons those are for us. Nick DiPaolo, one of my buddies, hilarious standup comedian had some joke. I don't want to fuck the joke up, but it was about, uh, doing tests on a What's important is the results. grants are evaluated, and they're debated in the scientific literature. And so when we're making steps in progress, these are very careful, guarded,

1:19:52 in it, the average person who didn't take science other than the classes where you dissected frogs Well, in other fields, it's a much bigger issue. We trust you. the day, you know, I'm not a religious guy. I'm not, I don't believe that there's some great reward for me. what they're worried about is evil scientists that's what fucks up every science fiction movie

1:22:18 then these chimps get it, they bite people, the people get that's the kind of scientists that people are worried about people worried about the evil people Yeah. They call it Agent Blue, Agent Green. That is one of the scariest things about human beings, that we're willing to kill your whole forest to find you. You know, basically, you know, the chemical daisy cutter.

1:25:05 corn. You know, we're not using Agent Orange. It's a growth regulator that was part of Agent Orange Yeah, but we can't go forward worrying about the small number of evil infect people with a virus that would kill them because it would paralyze them. These kinds of things were discussed and biological agents and biological weaponry is It seems to make sense.

1:27:19 about that I could fix or scientists could fix? And now he works in the Congo building wells. Somebody obviously had to invent these water pumps and filters and figure out how to make these these wells and dedicate his life to that and a bunch of other brave people that are doing the exact same thing. beautiful people that look like they're from the Game of Thrones they all had

1:29:40 to fix the world and stop this whole killing other people shit. African bananas. And bananas get, have two problems. One of them, well, two bacterial, is a Gates Foundation sponsored stuff and other people have done this. So now they have a banana They know that if Uganda develops these products and is allowed to give them to their people and they solve a problem, that now the house of cards in the Western world falls down.

1:32:25 if it's true. It's clear as day. And in China, they tell people that it'll cause infertility. That's what they're worried about. Are they trying to license this technology and profit from their use of it? but you can't grow enough plants of the types that are resistant to the diseases. they are and you dedicate yourself to um And you feel just an ignorance of the technology.

1:35:42 Yes. up front. Then over the years, there's been a machine of documentaries, books. The people who sell the books and documentaries about the dangers of this, that they didn't need i turned off more people than i than i converted and only in the last Do you think it was, was there any particular story that came out that misrepresented it, And the shit that they used to spray on the golf course got into the well water.

1:38:29 They still do this. Absolutely. former foes in the environmental movement would produce. You know, Monsanto could have came out with a, you know, the duck that makes gold, golden chemicals. Well, it's because of what we discussed earlier. I should say it could be because of what I mean, this is not outside the realm of possibility this buying more presents at christmas for your you know multiple parents or the kid will yeah a lot

1:41:20 Is it broken down? effluent is uh is a problem and to have keep it out of the half the resources to make the equivalent amount of protein. You let one of those things loose and all of a sudden it becomes like a crocodile man. way that this can break bad yes that's how i look at things and and and i'm being an eternal optimist I don't buy it. I mean, I think something happens in the genes.

1:44:54 Yeah, that's a hybrid vigor. Meat on a stick? Seedless bananas, which all the ones we have are, have an extra set of chromosomes. They can't escape. Sure. But these are the kind of breakthroughs that we take for granted and we ignore always. Like, you could probably explain this shit to me for months, and I would just be slowly working its way into my understanding.

1:48:01 goats on the land so that they could come back and they have a food source when they would land on the island And you got a whole irrigation system. So then they brought over foxes yes animal to a place where it didn't belong. Because I like strawberries. bred so you would establish that these seeds will grow this big, fat, juicy, apple-sized strawberry.

1:51:11 Every plant comes from other plants. So they're vegetative. But all of this stuff is so carefully evaluated. And with GMO, it goes through FDA to make sure you can eat it. Then it goes through EPA decent product, these things are extensively tested. So what do you think is, what are the top Roundup is the brand name. It's off patent now, so many companies make glyphosate. So I tend to go with

1:53:45 that disrupts a very specific part of the plants biochemistry it can't make there are weeds that can grow through glyphosate. The plants are all coming from clones, but you sell people seeds. And we're talking about soybeans or corn. well, not we, not me, but our nurseries. So if University of Florida comes up with a new descent in other words you have a tomato that has some good qualities then its

1:56:46 tomato plants they would not be similar to the initial tomato well the heirlooms Because they can suck. No, no, this is amazing. And it's one of these heirlooms bred against the University of Florida production tomato. Well, the two parents are very standard genetically. And then those two parents get So they're making these seeds by hand germinating?

1:59:49 Like what are the components of a tomato or a strawberry that people just love? You know, they're not, they don't do the best job, but they don't know what the fuck they're So if you emasculate all of the plants that you plan to be the female parent, if you cut out all the little stamens and anthers, the male parts, you know, you take out all the… How rude am I?

2:01:29 So these people hand pollinate these plants, then grow tomatoes specifically from those plants, and then sell those seeds or use those seeds to grow more? So that's the problem. That's fucking nuts. It's a very specific type of vegetable or it's fruit, right, technically? I mean. So now when you cross it against one that has the I mean the world has has a biological system,

2:04:19 You're going to play God with tomatoes. I like that guy, too. It's just that he worries about this in this one aspect of food production that humans have always changed food. I mean, we have, like, dedicated numbers or prescribed numbers that you shouldn't go over. a part, but we also have fucking power maybe a million, might be a million, a 7 billion, right? That have been responsible for putting

2:06:47 You're more important than Jay-Z. Norman Borlaug was a wonderful, simple, came from a farm background, became a scientist and studied ways that he could try to solve problems on the face of the earth for the hungry, and especially in India and Mexico. He's a guy who should be a household name here. despite the fact that he was a Nobel laureate. That's the kind of role models that we have in

2:08:42 and fed people because of it. Well, yeah. Wow. But the idea is to get into those rooms and get into those spaces, she said here's what your company did to my child and um what company and I wanted to talk to the people who were be. It needs to be one-on-one over a pizza and a cup of coffee. It can't be on the Internet where there's noise from documentary sellers and people with agendas.

2:12:24 I said, here's the person you call and tell them where you live and have them come talk to you about it and analyze the patterns. So was she living in Hawaii when this happened? She was, I had a conversation with her and I think I got that information from her at our our farmers rely on on this because hawaii you can grow three seasons of corn a year so you can

2:13:56 but it also employs lots of people on the islands. I think one of the things that you, Absolutely. nothing that comes from here. No tomatoes are from South America, potatoes, peanuts, Certainly, there's sorghum. South, well, it's also from Mexico Like any kind of cucurbits like pumpkins and like the squashes, crookneck It's over in Indonesia or something there.

2:16:37 Oh, so there's some yams that are also from South America, it seems. So there's two different kinds of yams You can't go on to you can't go on CNN and debate Nancy Grace about pot you don't even you don't have a real name Are they interchangeable? Why isn't 1D Let me tell you the strawberry story is so cool there's lots of them going back And he brought this thing back to Europe.

2:19:44 It's got four complete sets of chromosomes. Like I said, I know guys who grow marijuana, and they use clones. But if they were like in bulk, if there was all on one plant, it would be legal or it genes associated with flavors and strawberries and things like this using genomics tools but i I never was able to That's right. at different times of the day, we can change the way a plant grows, what metabolites it accumulates,

2:23:24 longer in your better and last longer Because it goes bad? washes or whatever, this is one part of it. where they grow plants in city centers where you don't have the transportation costs and the carbon footprint. the light that we use for plants? And if so, actually thinking and where we've applied the idea of manipulating the spectrum to change the way the

2:26:52 So it's controlled at a certain, what would you say, amperage? information you can't see so you can't really call it you know intensity the Is there anything about this light that changes the actual food that you eat? That'll probably give you cancer. that gives you essentially eight different kinds of lettuce leaves. But you know what I'm saying? If you look at LED and plant growth, you'd see all kinds of different ways that people do this.

2:29:34 you does that make any sense at all or is that just total nonsense well it could it could be to mitigate or prevent any negative aspects of it? You know, the negative aspects of it being Where you train the students, you help the farmers, you do the research that puts you at the cutting edge to help the farmers and train the students. A lot of labs are closing up. We're not training students like we used to.

2:32:05 Does that happen, or do you go to them and look to get a job? employ well monsanto is i think,000 employees. How many of them are That is insane. like people come through my lab, the two plant breeders through my lab, one of them got snapped Right. You know, for me, it's about that role. there are openings. So is that difficult to encourage young people to get into science

2:36:23 That must mean everything you say has to go. No, that's beautiful. It's not about making anybody happy. I have no idea and most people are in that same place. Yes, like I've been accused of Untold thousands of people in a very But I can tell you as a scientist that if I were to find something, like just through I wouldn't be in that 5% anymore. you don't think there'd be negative repercussions?

2:40:27 And that's because they would have disproven, though, by history. I know. and tie it to the ignition and did a study that analyzed the mechanism of failure. And you'd write an awesome book, and the book would get published, and you'd make about it. And I would blow the lid off of that and I'd get a Pulitzer Prize. And you'd write an awesome book and the book would get published and you'd make

2:42:03 any normal person just with lawsuits. to be the scientist who actually understands the mechanisms involved in the creation It is an opportunity, anytime we can talk about this and get people to understand, is how we're going to change it. It comes from talking to people who have concerns and people The best way to deal with science is to fund science.

2:44:56 They can be very beneficial. idea of genetic engineering isn't a big deal to them, that they kind of get it. Third graders. nutrition. And then another one will say, uh, maybe you could, uh, cross it with a tree that Yeah, but the cool part about that, though, is that he's right. A dome under the ocean. What do you because there's so many fucking problems with that idea.

2:48:10 The kid made a whole fucking ocean garden that way. You know, but and you got to figure out a way to reward them for taking that chance to come up with this dome under the ocean. children, when they're born and through the next few months, are actually the smartest they've ever through life thinking science is evil and done by evil people with evil intentions.

2:50:39 Yeah, I think it's really important that people recognize that science has brought us virtually every single thing that you enjoy today. I think a lot of people need to hear what you have to say, They're all written very softly. There's some funny things about that. How dare you? You can't hide things from the internet. What's it about? But I'll keep it going anyway.

2:52:53 Do you play a dummy or a smart guy? completely off the wall and it's but it's it's really fun because it's a great way to get the The yam and then they have the other thing? It's one of those things? I won't violate your trust. it too well why don't we why don't we talk about that we'll talk about that it's so easy to do the The problem is, is I have three full-time jobs.

2:55:16 Seems like a lot of work. That's all you need to do. And just ramble into the microphone, and I'm telling you it would be popular as fuck. Oh, so you know how to do this stuff? It would be a really easy thing for me to do. Yes. always felt like the guy on the all-star team who just gets put on the team because he's, you know, You should get together.

2:57:40 Cowboys. I go, oh, please don't be here. Yeah, it's all true. And you look at the citrus industry, strawberry industry, what the competition they're getting is unprecedented. I think you can help a lot of people by answering a lot of questions like you did today. Beautiful. Is there a link to that from your Twitter feed? Yeah, somewhere.