McKay Jenkins | GMOs, Pesticides, & Toxic America

00:05 Puppet masters almost surely have a clearly maybe something heavy until you've thoroughly tested every last pulse just to think you know the less you really do. That's true, Dr. Seuss! Where would we be without TNT? Cause they're lying to us just don't know Without TNT The higher side chat show Alright, Hiresight Chatters. It's become quite obvious to most of us that our society is dominated by the will of a few megacorporations and a carefully crafted culture that puts private profits far above the public health Whether we're talking about energy transportation food or medicine We see a ton of cross-contamination Of the same shady organizations hellbent on owning controlling and monopolizing every last resource in revenue stream available

01:09 So when we approach subjects like GMOs in our food supply, chemical-soaked crops and toxins in consumer products it's not surprising that we look at these companies with a skeptical eye. Because we've watched them take the teeth out of regulatory agencies with Washington lobbying and a revolving door of their own agents We've seen them infiltrate the universities and news media with huge donations and massive amounts of ad money And were well aware of the billion dollar PR machine aimed right at us that says just consume no need to dig any deeper Well grab a shovel people because today we're doing that deeper digging with McKay Jenkins who is the Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English Journalism and Environmental Humanities at the University of Delaware, and the author of seven books including two were going to focus on today entitled

01:55 Contamination, My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World and his latest release Food Fight GMOs and the Future of the American Diet. A true champion of the people educating the masses and shining a light in darkness, McKay my man welcome to The Higher Side Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks a lot! Yeah man thanks for doing this I really enjoyed Food Fight and i think you make a ton of excellent points about the safety of our food and the toxins in our products but you're also careful not to get into the realm being anti-science or paint with such a broad brush that we lose sight exactly where the problems are who is causing them

02:30 because a term like GMO is very loaded these days and the situation is actually a lot more complex than most people give it credit for. And you kick off the book with a great point in that everyone's first question is, are GMO safe? And really that might not even be the right question to ask so maybe tell us why that is and what a better question might be. Well I think you've really asked one of the most important questions which What is our relationship with the things that we consume most intimately? And then what do we know about those things? What do we know about how our food is made, under what conditions by whom where with what kinds of chemical inputs by what kinds of corporations and then Of course How do we know how to trust when people tell us that this food is safe or unsafe

03:19 And we can talk about this later, but it gets very complicated and parallel to a lot of other issues which I'm sure you've talked about before including things like climate change where you have very powerful voices on all sides. Of the issue when you could have government on one side and you could have corporations on another side and you can have scientists on another side and regular people are really left scratching their heads trying to figure out who they can trust so the thing with GMOs is that you take it as a baseline And this is where my book really takes off, I think from this kind of foundation that people at this late stage of history in this country are extremely alienated from their food. They put stuff in their mouth

04:02 but they don't have any concept of where it came from and there's all kinds of interesting data for that. So, for example like back in the mid-19th century something like 53% percent of all Americans worked on a farm so in other words half of the United States worked on a farm now we have 300 million people living here an only 2% of the population works on a farm. So just from the get go if you think about San Diego where you are or Baltimore and Delaware, where I am. Up and down the East Coast which I know best major metropolitan population centers exist entirely separate from any kind of agriculture like most people that live in New York or Boston or Philadelphia, Baltimore DC they never see a farm they don't have the faintest idea where food is made so you take that as a fundamental fact of life nobody knows where their food comes from

04:56 And then when some specter of uncertainty or spectre of danger, worry crops up people don't have anything to actually point their finger at because they don't actually know where the food is growing. So if they're eating a packaged processed bag of some food product and they eat it happily for awhile and somebody says did you know that thing that you've been eating for several years is dangerous Like that's like a nonsensical question to them because they don't even know what it is. They were eating it happily and now they're eating unhappily but they don't know what the hell it is or you know, what even plants or animals went into it because they can't recognize from where...from the original source of it so just take that as baseline and I'd like tell my students if you think about

05:44 Well here's another interesting statistic if you take all of human history as a twenty four hour clock so human beings have been on the planet for twenty four hours let's say how long have human beings been farming now i don't mean farming with gm is any farming at all. And the answer is twenty four o'clock we've been human being to been farming for about six minutes So we were hunter gatherers for what is that twenty three hours and fifty four minutes and we've been farming for six minutes. So that's six minutes is equivalent about ten thousand years so, where do you take ten thousand years are you take the whole twenty four hours how many generations of human beings have not known whether food came from

06:25 Right about three generations right i mean even my grandparents would at least been able to tell you where the apple orchard was aware of potato farm was something and now it is us no college educated twenty year old, where their lunch came from and i mean i've done this a hundred times not one person in the room can tell you anything about. So that's what we're starting with right and will talk about everything else it grows on top of the but that's where we started without level of deep ignorance is not like lack of education and that is not somebody like personal fault. That is just a structure of the world we've come to live in. Well said, man! And yeah deep ignorance is quite a term and I would totally agree and before we do get too far down the rabbit hole... ...I am curious if you could talk to us about the process that you went through during the research for this book because it seems like you really immersed yourself in this stuff and traveled to places and talked to people on all sides of the issue right?

07:23 Yeah, I did. So like a little bit of personal backdrop so the other way...I guess we'll talk about this other book later with this book Contamination was all about the toxic synthetic chemicals that go into makeup all consumer products from cosmetics to drinking water bottles to carpeting you name it We can talk about that later but that book came out a couple years ago and I ran around interviewing people about the presence of chemicals in everything except food basically I mean, literally everything except food. So that left this whole big hole about what is going into our food and I confess, I say this with some confidence and safety or feeling of certainty now, I started the research into the GMO book being fairly skeptical of the whole thing like the whole GMO thing really like my little bit of knowledge that I had about it made me think that it was really something I was suspicious of and didn't trust and all

08:15 So I went in there with a fairly one-sided opinion about it and i said you know as a journalist, its really ethically critical that you look at all sides of this. Really the first people that I started interviewing and spending time with were pro GMO plant scientists who are basically saying anybody who's anti GMOs is stupid And these are brilliant people you're brilliant scientists i'm not talking about my crazy activists and talk about the scientist that are in the laboratory doing this work and they said, look you know a lot of the stuff you read on internet about about gm is all nonsense it's not based on anything except kind of loose opinions.

08:50 Is really important if you're gonna dig into this get deep into the actual science of it and so i immediately was not stride because that's not what i went out looking for when i look at her, you know what i found later which is a lot of people who are really pissed off or really suspicious or conspiratorial all that i've found plenty about but also found the opposite so. We are came down so i travel all over the country from up in east coast all the way to missouri and kansas. We can talk later about why there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with gmo's talk to everybody i could talk to pro anti scientist policy people activists farmers you name it, no all this stuff kind of percolated through my system and i ended up writing the book that you have which is something like i guess you could say agnostic about technology

09:40 other words the technology is what it is the question how was that technology used and we can talk at some length about. The beneficial ways they can be used or the very detrimental ways you can use them in my very strong opinion that its mostly used, no very detrimental way in this country i think there were to use it beneficially overseas that's being done right now maybe even been officially miss country at some point but right now The way I kind of came down is that it's mostly used to support, as you said in your intro big corporate industrial scale farming that is not healthy for our bodies and it's definitely not healthy for our land and water and air. Whereas overseas a lot of scientists non-profit university scientists are using this technology to create products that might be nutritionally beneficial or they can stand up to insect infestations or pathogens or funguses, you name it

10:34 But that's not really what it is being used for in this country. Right now, it's mainly in this country being used to create mountains and mountain of corn and soybeans which are basically being used to create cheap crappy hamburgers and cheap crappy process and fast food so the technology is what it is how its use that is really much more interesting I think Right, and that is a great point. And you are fighting the good fight man I mean you do write about these positive aspects of GMOs in some cases the noble scientific work that goes into improving crops resistance to certain viruses and insects and their tolerance to flood or drought These are massively important Aspects in a world where a lot of people are struggling to survive and it's exactly the type

11:19 criticism that a lot of us face when we try to have this discussion with people. And it's what the corporations hide behind, I mean what would you say to counter that big agro companies claim that their work is needed to feed the third world and fight global poverty? Yeah, I hate that. I hate that argument. Just like you see it all the time and i think is absolutely disingenuous It's incorrect on a variety of levels First of all The crops these companies are making Are not designed for the third world They're designed for us In fact The vast majority of the crops they're growing are grown in the United States For American consumers or our first-world

12:02 Trading partners so big percentage of the stuff we're going to talk about corn and soybeans or the meat that you know don't forget the corner soybean something like forty percent of it is being used to feed animals meet animals like chickens and cows and pigs. So either we're talking about the corn and soybeans or the animals that are fed the corn in soybeans. This is either being consumed by Americans, or it's being consumed by countries like Canada and countries in places like Central Europe so that part of the food is not being sent to as they say poor starving you know developing world people so that one falsehood The other falsehood of these companies are not in fact investing huge amounts of money into the science and technology that these third world countries actually need so like drought resistance or pesticide resistance, insect resistance, flood resistance. These kinds of things that these countries actually need whether you're talking about sub-saharan Africa or places like

12:58 India or other places in Asia where there are things like vitamin A deficiency, you probably heard about stuff called Golden rice is the process of taking a gene and putting it into a rice crop that turns the rice grain from white to orange, and therefore has beta carotene in it which allows especially young people babies and young children. To avoid vitamin A deficiency which prevents juvenile blindness like that that is a GMO project that plenty of people ethical people think is really cool idea this isn't not research being done by these companies

13:35 So it's a kind of double misleading marketing campaign they say the most of the world because what they want to know that the term gmo is toxic term and people don't like it and we don't want not only in this country but everywhere around the world. So what they're trying to say is GMOs are necessary to feed the world, but the reason that's not true is because the food They're growing isn't being used by the third world and the food that the third world needs is not being developed by these companies so it's basically false on both fronts and I get really tired of that. I mean I see like even here at

14:11 i'm just gonna see these like company sponsored vans will pull up on the college campus and give you some. No teaching demonstrations about how gm is so critical to feeding the starving world it describes me bananas because really misleading it's a very effective from their point of view it's a very effective technique because then everybody's conflating you know, GMOs with starving people and who wouldn't want that? But those things are not actually connected. I mean work is being done for them but not by these companies so I think your question is really right on the money Yeah, and like you noted one half of 1% of American food exports actually goes to developing countries with dire food needs. And these companies are spending more money on the PR machine to quote unquote educate the population on what they're doing in these positive areas than they are actually doing that stuff! It's just another bait-and-switch from

15:07 Corporate America, you know we've seen it before but I did want to ask a little bit more about the history here because we are in A fairly unique situation where the average American knows very little about growing food and where it comes from outside of the grocery store We have very few family farms anymore Like you mentioned earlier and we've given the power To take care of ourselves away two companies that don't really care about us outside of getting that green paper so So, what happened? How did our food supply become so centralized and out of our hands?" Well i'm glad you asked that to me like in all this is this topic has so many little weird interesting. No side streets but the one thing you just mentioned to me outside of the science and politics, this is the most interesting kind of historical question and this is where did the book really essentially begins which is weirdly describing the growth of the american interstate highway system

16:03 So just briefly what happened after World War Two is we came back from Europe where we had seen this horrendous German military machine moving troops and equipment around especially the country of Germany because they have these amazing Autobahn highways. So one of the first things that we did after the war is became back in the military it's important to remember on the government dime right on the government dime built what is now known as the eisenhower right the eisenhower five star. Interstate highway system that's really interesting if you drive down the interstates out where are you know i five out here ninety five seventy eighty up and down

16:44 You notice the little signs with a five star circle of the interstate highway. The Interstate Highway System was named after General Eisenhower later President Eisenhower. So what that allowed to happen is the highways got built primarily as what we would call now like a homeland security, you know defense mechanism to allow us to prevent being invaded That's the level of anxiety that we all had back then so What happened was we built all these huge roads which had never been built before this country did not have interstate highways before the 1940s So then what happened is this infrastructure of the super wide big beautiful roads without allowed to happen is when many people know do you know about that you know g.i.'s coming back from the war, suddenly started building houses out in the country so everybody knows it was living in old city has watched me been baltimore think about baltimore detroit philadelphia

17:41 You know, any of these big industrial cities they emptied out. The death of the American city happened at the same time because when anybody who had any money after the war came back and they started going out on these highways and building houses out in the suburbs like the American suburban landscape also essentially did not exist before World War II like all the suburbs that we've seen I know God knows in Southern California you've see this going crazy but all those houses have been built since the 1940s The reason they were able to be built is because people could live in the country and then drive their car on these big beautiful roads back into the city to work.

18:19 So the whole fifties generation think about all that stuff mad men era of you know the suburban schlepping into the city, where is jack carol acting driving around these highways all this stuff is built on highway culture that spring up at that time so everyone can get part of like the american store we know that but what. What we never thought release i never thought it was where are those houses billed All those houses on the highway were built on former farms. So all through the United States, it used to be that you had cities and then right outside the city you had farms and if you don't believe this go to Europe where you'll see cities that are much older than American cities like Rome or Paris or Lyon or any of these big cities You can still stand up on a tall building and see farms right outside the city They still grow their own food they feed their own people

19:05 Here, we built all these highways and then we built all these houses. And then we turned around and realized that we had no farms. So something like since 1930 I think the number is something like 4 million small family farms disappeared. So if four million farms disappear, we've got all of these houses on these former acres of farm people still have to eat. What happened to food production? Well, all the food production moved. It all moved to the Midwest And as these small family farms closed, the big industrial scale farm started to grow and grow and grow. They started to consolidate. They started to become under the control, as you mentioned earlier of fewer and fewer companies. The entire American food system grew out of this so now you had giant farms providing huge amounts of very few numbers of grain. So we're talking again mainly about soy and corn and wheat. Then these food processors cropped up

19:59 the world. is all made from these three grains or you feed it to this incredibly enormous industrial meet the system. Americans need something like nine billion animals can be fed grain that has grown below the cost of production right will get in later for whole garment subsidy thing but the government got a big time, supporting these giant farms and entire american food system got built on top of this So it really all starts, in my view with the buildings of the highways then the buildings at the suburbs and then the disappearance of the farms. Then migration food production out to Midwest and then we get the last 30 40 50 years worth incredibly crappy processed food that is you probably heard the average piece of food drive something like 1500 miles from the place where its grown into the place where it's eaten

20:57 Which is created a whole constellation of other problems including climate change because the agricultural system is one of the primary drivers greenhouse gases because it's so intensive and fossil fuels that uses to ship all this stuff all over the place instead of getting it where we used to from local farms back in sixty seven years ago. Yeah, that is a great breakdown. I really do like to reverse engineer how we got into the mess we're in and look back at all the different bullet points of how we got here and who's been responsible along the way it's just so interesting and another aspect of the history that i found really troubling that also kind of ties into World War II

21:37 is when you talk about these chemical companies and poisons like Agent Orange that were made in huge supply during wartime, and then like any good corporation you gotta find a way to sell that when the war is over. And it's poison so what could you do but re-market as herbicides and pesticides? Then these dangerous chemicals like 2,4D they end up in the food we eat I mean... We really should be considering a source that might be better shouldn't we What i think that's a really important point and it's one of the amazing facts in the world this is where to say my favorite that is a creepy fascination with all the stuff how you know these things were talking about her both totally everywhere and totally invisible at the same time which is really bizarre paradox but if you think about what you just said these companies

22:27 What we have been named yet when i don't name them right now so do part down chemical bear at the asf singentum you know several of these are american companies there and be a separate german company syngenta is a swiss company, you will not see the name on santo or dupont or down or bsf piece of food that you're eating. but they are, you know we think of them as chemical companies but they are some of the big, they are world's biggest chemical companies. But there also weirdly some of the worlds' biggest seed companies. So when your reverse engineering and say something like don't you think that we ought to be concerned that the biggest chemical company in the world is also one providing us with our food? And people would never even grock that, what are you talking about

23:12 You're absolutely right that these companies, almost all of them started out as munitions companies. They made dynamite or they made chemical weapons during World War II. Certainly they made chemical weapons during Vietnam and as you correctly point out when war is no longer ... War is a huge economic engine but when the war's over you're left with this stockpile of chemicals and you got to find new markets for them so as you point out Agent Orange was used in Vietnam to defoliate jungles when that war ends they look for new markets they find out that they can sell it. Not only the farmers but also two homeowners so you can walk in any hardware store home depot and you can buy two forty right now into four d during vietnam was

23:57 you know half of the agent orange now to be honest to be fair it wasn't the worst half the other half two four five he was much worse has been banned but two forty was a big part of. Agent orange you can buy by any hardware store and i know people that interview for The other book, Contamination that are professional landscapers that have given up the use of these chemicals because they got so sick. And they're like it's insane that we allow non-professional just regular old homeowners to walk into a hardware store and buy these chemicals there. They're marketed as safe which is a lie and then these people have no idea what quantities or how often or when to use them. They massively overuse them and as you point out Dan, the first time it rains all this stuff ends up

24:41 in our drinking water, in our streams gets into the fish and our creeks means that this is part of the reason we can't none of one in our country can even swim and our bodies are water because they're so contaminated with all this stuff. So 2,4-D is one that people ought to know about. You should look for it in a hardware store and avoid it and another one is called glyphosate which is the ingredient in the most common herbicide in the world called Roundup which people can also buy at any hardware store And you know its marketed as like a so called benign herbicide right? It's infact less toxic than other things but thats not to say its nontoxic The World Health Organization recently described

25:18 Glyphosate around as a probable that is not possible but i probably human carcinogen meaning it probably causes cancer and yet we're spraying all over the place i mean it drives me bananas. In the spring time to see the trucks driving up and down the neighborhood spraying roundup on everything its no secret that this is a problem now court documents are starting to show up saying that the company Probably new that these things were more dangerous they let on and we're starting to see, can i get tobacco industry dynamics start to play itself out again where understanding now the public health consequences of basically taking our eye off the ball with all these chemicals because these companies have been so powerful secretive for so long.

25:58 Right. And the tobacco issue is such a great case study of how this stuff works, how big money totally manipulates public opinion and education and how doctors are willing to sell their integrity out for a few bucks. I mean if they're going to get paid they might as well tell you it's gonna be good. Once that's happened and it's been so transparent you really have to be more careful about blindly trusting anyone who once told you cigarettes were good but Just to get back to the GMOs, are they safe question. There are a lot of ways to alter food and in many cases it's the chemicals and pesticides rather than the genetic modification itself that is the problem I actually think there might be a subset of issues where these chemical companies are actually hiding behind the larger umbrella of GMOs because it's hard to isolate the issue of the pesticides if you're

26:51 propagandizing people to look at a much bigger issue, you can kind of hide within there. But that's its own thing so I'm curious what types of alterations do you think we should be most concerned about or where do you see the biggest problems specifically on these issues? Well really your asking excellent questions and these are really getting at the heart of things and so i want not get away from your first question too quickly before we get to this second one is this idea hiding behind gmo safety to masquerade the harm of chemicals so interesting case your listeners are not aware this, the vast majority of global scientists that have studied gmo's i'm talking about gmos now at this moment i'm not talking about the chemicals and only about jim.

27:38 They say that GMOs are not harmful for human consumption. Now, the first thing that anti-GMO people will say is, ìThatís BS! I donít buy that! I donít believe itî you know blah blah blahÖ But Iím just telling you that the fact is like it or not that the vast ñ Iím talking about mid 90% of scientists who have studied genetically altered plants say that eating a genetically altered plant is NOT a health problem Now, as long as you keep that sentence right there then we're good. That's fine I believe that and have no problem with that but as you mentioned the problem with many of these GMO crops especially ones used in such huge quantities they are actually literally designed to be sprayed with chemicals They are not planted unless they also sprayed with this chemical so saying a GMO is safe

28:28 And then spraying the crop with a known or probable carcinogen is again entirely disingenuous. It's saying this thing is safe and not acknowledging that the thing that is married to that thing, it's not safe So, I think that point is really worth making clear. Like if you say oh it's GMO soybeans, GMOs are safe. Well if you're not including the fact that GMO soybeans are sprayed with probable human carcinogens then you're not actually asking the right question or if you want to think of from a company's point-of-view they would desperately like the conversation to end with the fact that GMOs are safe

29:07 because that means as you mentioned earlier they don't have to bring up the question of the whole reason there are demos in fact very cynical critics of this and say the gm was actually designed as a vector to sell more chemicals. In other words if you have all these chemical stockpiles like you mentioned earlier trying to figure out ways to push them out on the market so it doesn't hurt to create a seed but she can plant and spray it with all these stockpiles of chemicals, and have it effectively kill everything else except the crop that you're planting. I mean, it's an ingenious selling idea. And as long as you limit the conversation to the GMO thing and not bring up the question of the chemicals then in this sort of fake honesty say GMOs are safe."

29:52 but you're not asking the whole question. So I think that's really important to cement, so yeah i think your second question was which of these genetic alterations should we be worried about and you know how? I'll just tell you what the scientists told me which is that the pro-GMO scientist will hear this repeatedly they will say that altering a plant genetically in a laboratory is no different than hybridization techniques that we've been using for 10 000 years So, you know go all the way back to the beginning of our agricultural process and think about some prehistoric farmer planting a bunch of maize. Let's say he is in Mexico somewhere and plants a bunch of seeds and this plant grows to be three feet high and this other plant grows to be two feet high which plant is he going to gather the seed from to plant next year? He'll take the ones from the strongest most productive

30:45 And you do that over and over again, and eventually you're going to hybridize and select for the very most productive plants that you can. So what you'll often hear scientists say is that the corn we eat today looks nothing like the corn that was prehistorically native to Central America. That's absolutely true! Everything that we eat now has been hybridized or has been selected for beneficial properties So, you name it. Tomatoes and carrots and everything else has all been altered so that's true and as far as that goes they are absolutely right about that then the question is does your instinct, does your gut, does your intuition whatever you say agree with that statement? That getting into a laboratory for six or eight weeks or couple of months or whatever is in cranking something out really speedily and turning out

31:36 new genetically altered plant, is that the same as evolution or the same as generations of farmers slowly season by season hybridizing and selecting? People have different points of view about that. I don't think that there's any danger in eating the genetically altered plants. I don't particularly intuitively like the idea of eating something that has been so cranked up in its kind of evolutionary process, you know? The scientists will always say it's just like nature only faster What to me that is like counterintuitive because nature isn't fast right that's part of. The way the nature works nature works very slowly and methodically and overtime things adapt you know when change in mutate but over long periods of time thing that, no anybody i know you done probably many programs about technology on your program this. You know session we have with technology being a fix it

32:33 You know reliable fix for every problem that we have a problem with create is ludicrous and my opinion of the cliche is it every generation technology really isn't invented to fix the problems created by the previous generation technology so like finding new ways to invent waste eat does not. Strike me as the very best use of our intelligence in some cases it might be But I'm not looking for the you know, the fastest way to get another bag of corn chips You know which is basically what we're looking at right now Right and well said this of course gets into a lot of the stuff. You have in your plain Prometheus chapter that This kind of stuff is way more complex than people really realize or there is a lot of human arrogance and thinking that you can meddle with the natural process and everything's gonna be alright and

33:23 one issue is that even if there is complete integrity in the lab testing, which we know there really isn't in every case. Labs are isolated and they don't always reflect effects on a complex real world environment Right, so this is where you get ecologists. There's a new kind of sub-discipline called agroecology which is people trying to apply the wisdom of ecology to the growing of food. So right now what we have is most of our industrial crops are grown on these enormous monoculture farms. You have a farm with 10 thousand acres of nothing but a single kind of plant corn

34:06 You know there's so many problems with that like the sure it is absolutely. Undeniably true that we can grow what is it now 200 bushels of corn on a single acre of land. That's great It's super efficient They're growing tons and tons of calories on very little land that that is true They have accomplished that and then they have to ask the question like how did they accomplish that at? What cost did they accomplish that well that 200 bushel per acre requires enormous petrochemical inputs of things like fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and stuff like that It also requires, if you're going to grow monoculture crops. Monoculture means nothing else grows except the one crop you're growing so for example if you were spraying thousands or in this case millions of acres of soybeans with an herbicide that kills everything except the soybean one other thing is it's gonna die is milkweed now milkweed I don't know if your listeners are hip to this they probably are because you guys are close enough to Mexico to know about this but the monarch butterfly

35:04 has this glorious migration from Mexico all across North America and monarch butterfly populations have crashed. There's something at like 4% of their normal population, the reason for that is because we wiped out all of their food and milkweed is what they eat so milkweed is a weed it grows you know it's a very beautiful plant actually especially when its in flower and you know the caterpillars eat leaves and adults the pollen and there you are, they've got a perfect system. When you eliminate all the milkweed because your spraying herbicides to support your soybeans, the milkweed disappears and monarch butterflies collapse so that's a byproduct of this food system that we've got

35:48 So the technology that we're so obsessed with can in fact achieve very isolated goals that may be extremely profitable but they have what are known as like these cascading problems to come down from it so spraying herbicides on monoculture kills the monarch butterfly population. That stuff runs off into our water so we have drinking water contamination, you know we spray this stuff so the soil is dying like when you talk to agroecologists they'll talk about the greatest resource that any farmer has is the health of their soil not the health of their crops but the health in the soil and American soil is wrecked It has been so chemically addicted now for so long that it is barren. And this is a problem, I mean there's only so many years that you can continually blast the soil to crank out these petrochemical reliant monoculture crops. There's another chapter in the book that talks about a guy in Kansas his name was Wes Jackson he runs something called The Land Institute which is an incredibly cool, I think someday Nobel Prize winning kind of

36:52 agricultural research and he says this guy west jackson is not only genius scientist one of the great philosophers you ever talk to me says. As we mentioned earlier the ten thousand year experiment with agriculture has been a problem since day one And the reason for that is a farmer's early on put all their chips in not just monoculture but most importantly annual crops so i can mention earlier the corn thing you can continually upgrade your corner make your corn more and more productive year by year by year what has happened as we threw in soul hard with annual crops that have to be planted and harvested and tilled up every single year, that we have destroyed all kinds of natural systems. Systems of soil, systems of water through irrigation like I said before the climate has been massively impacted by this. And what he's trying to do out in Kansas is come up with what he has called perennial polyculture

37:47 Perennial polyculture would be to take a field and model of food production field on, in his case, a prairie. So a prairie in Kansas has many different kinds of plants all interacting with each other some of them fixing nitrogen out the air some of them shielding out weeds some of them attracting pollinators all these plants interact beneficially with each other have evolved to do just that So, if you could hybridize... Now this guy he does not use GMOs. He's doing traditional plant breeding but if you could create a food system that had multiple plants all functioning with each other, you could reduce runoff, you can reduce water use, you can reduce herbicides and pesticides because they're helping each other. You can reduce the use of fertilizer because you have nitrogen fixtures in among those crops.

38:40 It's almost like the old three sisters model that we learn from americans where you have, no one plan is providing nitrogen one plant is providing shade what is providing you know vertical altitude for the beans to climb up. You know that as a system that is sustainable was sustainable for many many many thousands of years and when do we have we have a system that has burned itself out in about fifty years So what we're doing is not working. It's producing a ton of food, but it is not working in the long run and this is what we need to be turning our attention too. Yeah man I actually loved that section of the book that possible solution of perennials and mimicking prairies you talk about biomimicry in this area alone could eliminate half of the soil erosion and nine billion a year just in the tilling equipment used to make the soil usable it just seems like so

39:31 So ridiculous that they don't do it, but these companies are so huge. They don't pivot easily there. So one track mind with their playbook that's been in place for quite some time. They just don't change their ways even if something like this even if they see that it's kind of a dead end road. But I'm also curious you mentioned all the corn And soybean is GMO. Obviously, that's mainly what we grow but I find it interesting that with as much wheat as we grow in America it isn't GMO why hasn't wheat become genetically modified like the rest of the crops in America? Well you know that's a really interesting question and i think a lot of people me included are surprised to hear that we is not gmo in other words you can buy bread and say no it is not genetically modified. And doesn't stand a reason like he does make any sense because all the same companies are involved in reproduction just as they are with the others

40:27 And my sense is that the reason there's no GMO wheat is that the public distaste for GMOs is so strong and so visceral, that the companies that were thinking about introducing GMO wheat got really gun-shy. I will tell you that GMO wheat has been invented—I mean it's ready to be planted—but there have been some cases where they planted experimental plots of GMO wheat and some of it blew onto non you know, non-experimental wheat crops and got mixed up with non GMO wheat. And the farmers and the consumers went bananas they just like this is not cool we're not going to allow this to happen so

41:07 You know it wasn't regulated out of existence you just market driven at least market driven put on hold so this is an interesting story it's not we did in fact its about gmail rice which has also been invented and his, is out there and rice is also a major global crop even in the united states don't think of it as american crap that's a huge crop here. I think it was in Missouri that they wanted to start doing some experiments with GMO rice. And if i recall correctly, it was Anheuser-Busch you know the great big corporate brewer found out that GMO rice is going to be grown near where they were growing rice for the beer that they make and they put up such a fuss he said if you allow GMO rice to get into this state... In other words, they were so paranoid about GMO

41:54 rice blowing into their non-GMO rice and somehow getting into their beer, that they said if you allow this GMO rice we're going to move our breweries out of state. Missouri would not be too happy if Anheuser Busch left the state because it's like a brand very much associated with that state so my sense of it was that anxiety about the prospect of GMO rice getting into a product like Budweiser You know that gives you the evidence about the anxiety of gmo's if a major beer company is so freaked out. About the prospect to people boycotting beer because it got gmo's in it, that tells me some of the anxiety that I think is play also with the week which is dated seems to be these companies are reading marketplace and seeing that its not ready for another major introduction of gmo did like the corn image soybeans kinda slips

42:46 Into our system before people really knew what was going on. It got so entrenched There was no undoing it, but I don't think that there they have the stomach for introducing GMO wheat just now Those are great points and that does actually give us some positive hope that public opinion does mean something to these companies if it's gonna affect their money And you mentioned subsidies earlier, and we should elaborate on that. I mean what should be said about the subsidy aspect or other areas where government is actually exacerbating the problem? Well, you know I tend to be like a structural thinker. To me the symptoms of this issue like the symptoms and other big complex issues are not really where we should be focusing our attention on the structures that allow all the symptoms to occur. Amen So what we have are if you think back on the stuff we talked about with the highways and farms

43:44 The centralization of power and money in these companies these companies as you point out have become so big and so profitable. That logically you know the way that our economic system works is that money and how are gravitate towards washington so, When these companies want something they have very effective and very well financed lobbying arms in washington and they get the policy that they want weather the policies about agriculture for talking to her whether it's possible. Regulating chemicals,

44:19 Whether it's a policy about regulating fracking, whatever you're talking about. The companies that we're talking about are huge and profitable and they have enormous influence in Washington so when people complain about federal subsidies for food companies or seed companies or chemical companies the reason that happens is because these companies have such influence in the halls of power in Congress And in the white house and this is a i hate to say this but this is very much true regardless of who he is in power like it doesn't matter whether democrat or republican, the same dynamics have been at play for decades in fact really at least since nineteen seventies if you think about.

45:00 like the president who started the EPA weirdly enough was richard nixon not only was republican but he was not an environmental guy in the least, when you start at the eba because they were like rivers burning and in ohio you know what heat it was so bad earth day happened to me basically felt like we had to do something so we started the EPA but since today's beginning of the EPA. The EPA has been totally captured by industry i another book called poison spring was written with the guy who worked at the EPA for twenty five years and we talk about how, from the very get go like the minute he started and we were gonna focus you know regular regulatory energy in washington companies realize that that was where the real battles are going to be fine so what is happened for forty years

45:49 Is that we have seen company stuff these agencies with their own people so like these agencies are talking about the usda and fda. Do you kind of split because they have a lifetime career people that are there no matter who's in power, You can be a scientist there for 30, 40 years or whatever. But then you have political appointees at the top of these agencies so new administration comes in and they put their own people in charge of it like this new secretary, the new director all the sub-directors all the political appointees are what are layered on top of these agencies and all the staff people live there regardless who's coming into power

46:28 So what you have is you have this culture where the staff people are doing legitimate work, right? Not political work do legitimate science and policy and then their research percolates up until it hits the glass ceiling of The political appointees so most recently I mean we saw this in a very vivid way recently with the Trump administration Before all these scandals with Russia was happening. A big one that occurred about a month ago was an agricultural chemical known as chlorpyrifos, which is known to cause... if you can believe this right? It's known to cause brain damage in children. So like what could possibly be more of a poster for regulation so the EPA had been working on regulating this chemical for some time and then the Trump administration came in and Scott Pruitt at the EPA director said You know what we're not going to focus on that anymore And basically drop-kicked the whole chlorpyrifos regulatory impulse

47:24 out of sight. So now that this known cause of brain damage in children is not going to rise to the level actually being regulated, and why do you suppose that happened? It happened because you have a very powerfully industry-friendly guy who was running the EPA so people have been doing research for a long time get stuff to bubble up to the political level where these decisions have to be made and then it gets killed and this happens over and over again so when people get pissed about subsidies on one hand in other words huge rivers of money going to these companies or the lack of regulation they get all angry at government

48:05 You know i never my energy is never been directed to government has always been directed at the company so control government and i basically have come to believe the government essentially a puppet of these companies, not everyone in government like this but im talking with the power structure actually functions. It is controlled by private industry and no matter what we're talking about, what industry they have their hands around the neck of these regulatory issues. Which by the way I'm kind of rambling here but this is why some of the most effective work against this stuff happens at the state level or even smaller government because these companies can't control states the way that you can control the feds. They still control the states to some level

48:50 But they can't control them the way they can control Congress. They control Congress absolutely Mm-hmm. I mean that is all well said and I agree with your assessment of government just being used as a tool Of course, I was a teenage anarchist But you grow up a little bit and you realize that's not a very nuanced or mature way to look at things And maybe it's the centralization Not necessarily government itself that creates a lot of these problems You talk about the fact that these food companies and these chemical companies want to keep the conversation in in the federal government so they can make blanket laws that affect all 50 states where if we had more state power, they'd have to go and fight these individual battles. And that would really hurt their business and so maybe that's something we should consider but it is also a shame about that EPA issue you brought up but these regulatory agencies are also a false sense of security because you talk about

49:45 The eighty eight thousand or so chemicals that are just in our culture not only and food but in consumer products and so few of them have actually gone through rigid testing ones you have a lot of times internal studies which is a huge conflict of interest so. I mean, i don't know it's just a tangled web because you don't obviously want to get rid of regulatory agencies but just their presence there being so toothless causes so many people to use these products willy-nilly because they think oh it's been handled. It's been solved. It must be safe Yeah, I mean I've never quite said it that way but i think that's probably the best way to say which is these agencies in a way. You really just lit a light bulb for me like in a ways these agencies are making the problem worse because they're giving people false sense there somebody actually looking out for them like you know if you buy a product at least most people intuitively think either of the company

50:44 Will prevent them from buying something harmful or the government will and the truth is that neither is true But you know, you can be hoodwinked into thinking that because there's such a thing I mean You can even have a product with an EPA stamp on it And that is supposed to make you feel good. But if you know how the EPA actually worked like you should be kind of more skeptical Because, you know just because there's an EPA stamp of approval on it does not give you any sense or shouldn't give you any sense that it has actually been credibly tested. You mentioned the chemicals out of the 80 thousand chemicals that are in use today I think something like 200 have been ever tested for any health consequences which like you can even literally do a pie chart sometime with that and that little sliver of 200 over 80 thousand does not even show up

51:33 doesn't even show up and i think only out of a thousand i think only about seven chemicals have actually ever been banned what did he being one of them famously you know what happened with the right to use, like when was common insecticides and then rachel carson thank god blue that whole thing up with silent spring This is one of the most vivid examples of this but the bald eagle itself right here in america icon whatever represents strength and independence all that was good literally on the verge of extinction because i want to chemical ddt which. You know, what happened is it got into their hormone system and when the mama birds went to sit on their nests. Their endocrine reproductive system had been so messed up by DDT they'd sit on their eggs and the eggs would break because the shells were so thin So you had generations of eagles that could not reproduce because of DDT we banned DDT

52:26 The East Coast, like I take my students canoeing up and down the East Coast. We see bald eagles every single time we go out right? There's so many bald eagles now that they're actually showing up in bird rehab centers because they're fighting over hunting and nesting space right? They completely come back! And it's because of one chemical. Now there are 80 thousand out there you know? So we can talk about that later but that's a whole another can of worms I like that story specifically because of the irony of damaging the bald eagle. How un-American? You got a company like Monsanto making DDT, probably sponsoring sporting events where people are standing up waving an American flag singing the national anthem and this very company is killing off the bald eagle. It doesn't get more ironic than that but...

53:19 I don't know if you'll be interested in this, but I just had a senior thesis student who wrote a whole piece about what's called pink washing which is like telling the NFL players to wear pink cleats and all that nonsense. She got so exercised she was like these companies that are sponsoring all of this breast cancer awareness stuff they're making products that cause cancer right? They're cosmetics companies that have known carcinogens in their products and yet they're putting out all this you know pink bats for major league baseball and pink clean i think football players wearing pink which is one of those ridiculous things And you know what, she told me I'd never heard this before but there was a basketball player or football player. He told the league he's like look my mom has breast cancer and I want to wear whatever it was pink cleats or pink wristbands all year and whichever sport it was said no! You can only do it on one day like the whole thing is gotten so compromised by this corporate... The pink thing which people sort of vaguely feel good about is still we've talked about another

54:18 Context is allowing companies to hide behind the fact that they're making stuff that causes cancer which is just you know It's embarrassing really like the irony of that. It's just embarrassing Yeah, man. It is that's a great point and We really have just been bombarded with so much at once that we really just don't know what causes What and you have a great quote from a plant biologist from Miami University in Ohio Alfredo herta I believe it's how you pronounce it He says we tend to blow off the reason for a migraine or an ill feeling Or the little things we can identify

54:57 Who knows if any of those are hidden symptoms from some encounter with chemicals in the food or GMOs or any of these things. And that is a great point, we have all these little quirks I mean how hard was it to reverse engineer the fragility of bald eagle eggs? assess it to DDT. I mean, we get all kinds of little things in our body we don't feel good this day our stomach hurts our head hurts and who knows who knows where it's coming from but it is a great point that we should look at that stuff and consider the connection more carefully. Yeah, yeah, I really like that point. If you think about

55:33 like the idea of ecology in the broadest sense, like ecology is the study of how systems function. So if you think about it, how do you convince a guy who's spraying DDT on his lawn that a bald eagle that lives 10 miles away and he never sees or will see, that his spraying of the lawn has killed the babies or eggs of that eagle? Well, he'll never understand until he understands that the DDT that goes on the grass or into his woods, or whatever it is. When it rains, it goes into the creek and when it goes to the creek, it gets saturated into microorganisms that get eaten by bigger things which gets eaten by bigger and bigger and bigger things until a bioaccumulates up the food chain into a big old fish that a bald eagle then comes and eats and then the bald eagle digests this now all these bio accumulated chemicals are now in the bald eagles body and therefore when she lays the egg

56:27 the that you know the ignorant person who is i mean i don't need any of his majority literally like the unknowing person can connect this was something that is like twenty five steps down ecological change so i think what out great or where does point is it our bodies are also ecological system so if u eat something, no it's gonna percolate through your body and the purple thing that is pretty clear your body has also percolated through the actual world right it is connected despite the fact that you've never seen it, right? As we talked about early. You may never have seen the fact that this potato was growing in dirt somewhere and was sprayed with something and was then harvested and shipped and it finally became a french fry and then whatever it was boiled in GMO canola oil or whatever it is and finally you eat it

57:23 That's a system. So somewhere along the line, if that system is being compromised by genetic engineering if you want to think of it that way or certainly by chemicals if we want to think about that way that that is going to enter the system and how that then interacts with your own very complicated ecosystem of your body. You know, the gut biome is like this entire universe of mystery just to begin with like how all the bacteria, beneficial and not beneficial. All these bacteria how they're interacting with you and the food... that's coming in. We're just beginning to understand what is going on there, to say nothing of then you eat this and process it and then what are these chemicals whether they are hormone disruptors or carcinogens or endocrine disruptors or reproductive problem causing chemicals how they interact with your own biology your own hormones system your own cells I mean all the stuff is extremely mysterious which allows

58:17 skeptics to dismiss it right there like you know you can't prove that how do you prove to me that drinking water out of that water bottle which has no bpa plastic and how are you able to prove that is what caused you to get some kind of health problem course you can because you can connect a single active consumption with the single Like that is never, well who knows? It's not currently provable. But if you take the systems approach then you have to raise these questions and I think Alfredo Huerta was mentioning is that even though wheat is not GMO, wheat is still very frequently sprayed with glyphosate roundup

58:56 Right before it's harvested because the glyphosate is also used as a what's called a desiccant It dries out the seed head of wheat crops, right and they do that right before harvest So even though wheats not GMO. It's still being sprayed with this chemical often used on GMOs right before harvest so if you You know you develop some kind of GI problem and you attribute it to wheat Who knows? If it's actually attributable to the glyphosate, you know your body is reacting your body reacts to everything So this is all very complicated and this is why we started out talking about the general level of ignorance and alienation. When that's true, that's true when things are simple. Wait until things get complicated then it's impossible to connect these dots

59:40 Right, right. And to wind this down with a little positivity and to talk about some solutions that might move us in the right direction you mentioned the experiments that you did with your students I mean the program you have going but is there more you can tell us about that maybe how it actually affected the students who've partake in it? Dr. Kahneman Well, remind me which one you're talking about I've had students working on farms for example where they are trying to connect with local food is that what you mean? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Dr. Kahneman Yeah so as we talked about all through this my strong sense is that the structural problems are really where you need to go get real solutions not tell–I actually have to tell you drives me crazy when student walks into my class at the beginning of semester and say to them like what do you think

1:00:25 caring for the environment means and they say, oh recycling. And I'm like, that is the tiniest, tiniest snowflake on the top of the iceberg. Like I really don't want to talk about recycling what i wanna talk about is structures not only economic structure but also structures knowing how do you know what you know and are you aware of what you don't know for example? So the whole food system thing instead just raging about GMOs and big companies in big government can you tell me where potato grows And some kid will raise their hand and say, I think they grow on trees. Huh? You know? And you're like OK well let's start with that. Let's start with that. Like the fact that you eat potatoes all of time and you've never seen one obviously

1:01:10 and you say well i don't grow trees actually growing the ground and then they like a gross in there is dirt on potatoes like when you realize that's where your starting from you realize that you got a whole lot more to work on than just putting this plastic bottle in that blue container instead of the green container whatever it so. My solution to this or my effort at this is not just a new book learning in the class but also take them to farms and have them actually work on farms. And the other big thing i do as i take him on river trip so that's what he remembers beautiful when we all just rivers in the world in fact the sasquatch river was a river before panjia broke up right it was here when the word one land mass

1:01:53 It's like one of the most beautiful rivers on the East Coast. We go paddle on that thing and it drains a whole lot of agricultural land, and we sit there and water test to find out what is in this water? This is like a main trunk line. The Susquehanna River is actually what becomes the Chesapeake Bay. And we tested and said well, what's in this water? What creatures are here and what creatures aren't here? What about those four hydroelectric dams that are generating what they call green energy but have also completely compromised migratory fish, you know so we take a good hard look at all these Structural systematic things and try to ask deeper questions and not where to put the bottle Right. So you have my idea is that I want to get 19 and 20 year olds to start thinking structurally? So they know enough to ask the right questions and don't waste their time asking all the wrong questions beautiful man

1:02:46 Well, again I think both Contamination and Food Fight are great books. They're rational well laid out and i'd recommend them really as ammunition for any listeners who might have people in their lives who still don't see the problems because you make a great balanced case that is really just hard to argue against and from one college dropout to a college professor, I have learned a lot. But before we go would you mind filling the people in on anything else you got going on your website future projects all that good stuff? Sure so my website is just my name mckayjenkins.com and there's plenty of information about talks that i give interviews i've given articles i bring quite a few little pieces on these larger books, that's it and the only dimension to book poison spring is the third in this trilogy that's the book about the EPA and these companies trying influence

1:03:38 policy in Washington, but those three books together are my best effort to try to paint this picture. But I also want to thank you for asking me maybe a college dropout but you ask questions that are better than almost any I've done so thank you for your interest and being so perceptive about what I think really the real issues here. Awesome! I appreciate that man well McKay, it has been a real pleasure. Keep doing what you do out there We're lucky to have a guy like you in the education system so big thanks again and keep it up man Hey, thanks a lot It's been great talking to you right on Holy hell people, McKay Jenkins bringing it in a big way. Man I thought that one went really well because a lot of the time we do need to cut through some of the noise and get into the details and i hope that was appreciated. I know it got a little thorny right out of the gate talking about GMOs and trying to define exactly where we thought the problem was

1:04:33 I know a lot of people have really black and white ideas on these things, and they just can't stand to hear something like not all GMOs are bad. And i bet a few dozen people did shut the show off at that point! And it's a shame because they would have missed the real meat and actually hurt their ability to make strong arguments in the face of real opposition I know we talked about it in the episode, but if you think about the idea that broadly speaking, a lot of the topics we discuss don't get into the mainstream. Yet the GMO conversation does all the time! Yet the pesticides and chemicals conversation makes it on The Nightly News quite a bit less, I'd say. So there's the indication to me that we have a real problem that has hidden itself

1:05:15 inside a broader subject matter like a lead-painted Russian nesting doll. And I hope that point is clear, i'm not a GMO apologist, I just think we might be playing into the enemy's hands a little bit by letting them frame the conversation the way they have And something that I always circle back to with this show, because i do have so many friends who think I'm crazy conspiracy guy is that I want to get deeper into information. So that we have actual things to say when we get in these conversations and I love that We got into the history early on the swapping out of farmland for suburban strip malls. Ouch!

1:05:52 And if you live in a suburb, you know outside of housing what's there is 90% corporate options for food for car maintenance. For a goddamn haircut! There is like no soul on that If you ask me and I'm sort of just rambling but I guess my point Is that I don't want to come off as a militant radical fringe conspiracy nut who can't have A rational conversation because that's how a lot Of people think of us thanks To Alex Jones and how the conspiracy archetype has been presented over The years so So these become some of my favorite episodes because the perception is that we run around shouting these wild statements and accusations, but if you get into the details with us the arguments all fall flat. And exactly the opposite is true... If you take time to learn the details

1:06:38 So do throw out a thank you to McKay if you can. We're lucky to have a guy like him teaching in the university system, we should support that and show him appreciation maybe give his book to your close-minded parents because it's gonna get through them a lot better than something with a skull and flames on the cover that's going for that sensationalist perspective which I appreciate too different strokes for different folks And as you know by now, the Hireside Chats gets by because I put out the first hour of this show for free hoping that you'll sign up for the second where the conversation naturally gets deeper and you learn a lot more. In today's second hour we got into The Bee Armageddon legal food battles fought in Hawaii and Maine how we could possibly go back to the old ways other toxins in our culture particularly how bad it is in the largely unregulated cosmetics industry

1:07:31 Safety regulations in other countries versus America, restoring the true picture of pre-colonial America. You know I like that ever since Shemanginir. Well McKay's actually into that too and brings that up in his classroom which is pretty cool to hear And we talked about random things like lawns astroturf and water bottles and changes that maybe should be made in those areas. A lot of stuff from his older book, Contamination. But sign up if you've become a regular listener of the show because you are missing half of it! And at a time where a lot of people in my kind of position are suffering because they depended on AdSense revenue which is now being taken away I

1:08:11 I said, no we don't need advertisers. I want to have a one-on-one relationship with the listeners and i'm going to learn how to build a technical infrastructure to do that and I am very lucky and I hope even though we haven't met that you appreciate the way I did it and out of respect for that will support this thing I've been so much more fortunate than a lot of other personalities in this genre, but i hope that some of that is based on the very conscious things that I do try to do. To take this genre forward a little bit remember when we did The Money Bomb? We were giving out a lot of money to listeners and I don't know if that's ever really been done at all although we did have to stop doing it

1:08:55 But subject matter wise, I know we cast a pretty wide net and yeah. We do go in cycles of wilder and wilder and eventually too wild And then we recalibrate It might be fair to say that every 10th show is in the realm of a prank on you guys! but we're in an age where a show can't really be put in the typical boxes that were used to it might not be an either or it might be a both and I think that's a good thing What else can I say? You've heard this all before. Sign up for the Hiresight Chats Plus, please! And I know again we're a little behind on the releases but a big part of that this time is because i spent the last week at a pretty interesting conference- The Science Of Consciousness Conference put on by the University of Arizona

1:09:41 I figured i would try something different as a plus member bonus. I went to this conference only actually because Graham of Gramerica sent me the link and said, hey man look at this it's going on right in your backyard! And I was like holy shit yeah it looks kind of interesting. I went, I took a lot of notes and I'm going to put together a little conference review bonus show because a lot of what people tell me they like about the higher side chats is how I with the guest of course synthesize complex material for busy people. And that's legitimate, this show often is thought of as pretty good cliff notes to complex and lengthy topics so I'm gonna put together a little crash course of what this conference was to me the good the bad and the ugly because at $500 ahead This wasn't really a conference for everyone it was Google executives and Noam Chomsky and quantum physicists discussing the latest in things like making machines conscious or

1:10:37 detailing various aspects of brain function, some interesting at face value and some interesting because we get inside the minds of some people whose work we disagree with. All that stuff! So right now I'm trying to get back on the right show schedule but iIm also putting this together too so there's another reason to sign up for PLUS and we'll see how it goes but I guess i don't have a whole lot more to add. So, I'm gonna get out of here thanks for listening! I've done my part your move pesticide peddlers corporate crop creators and facilitators of the American farmland famine you're fucking moved. Well they tie that yellow ribbon round the oak tree They've worn out all their prayer in their heart All along thought they were rooting for the home team

1:11:29 As they're sent to the game and torn apart We twist this tourniquet upon the pipeline That it carries all the pain in the world As we blindly clap and cheer from the sidelines It's clear, Arnold was intrigued from the very start And that's where they found me In a life cemetery A smoking gun in my hand Now I'm down for end of the free THC The American scream They took that faded ribbon off the oak tree They've worn out all the hope in their hearts For long thought I was doing right

1:12:39 Now I'm lying in a pool of my blood And that's where they found me In the cemetery A smoking gun in my hand From the land of the free Sing with me, and that's where they found me In the cemetery A smoking gun in my hand Now I'm damned from the land of the free

1:13:21 THC, the American Scream! The American Scream! And that's where they found me In my cemetery A smoking gun down from the land of the free Sing with me The American Scream