Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1540 - Frank von Hippel
Uploaded: 2020-09-23T17:00:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1540 - Frank von Hippel' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1540 - Frank von Hippel' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1540 - Frank von Hippel

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Boom, hello Frank.
Hi.
It was a false start, that's why it's like weird, right?
I have to go ready and go.
Welcome to our polarizing studio.
A lot of people don't like it here.
A lot of complaints, Jamie.
That's what I'm hearing from people that read the comments.
Folks, relax.
We had to bang this together in a month because we moved here.
Like literally, from the time I was saying maybe I should move to Austin to we're
in Austin in studio, it was like two months?
Less.
Less.
I think it was six weeks.
Six weeks.
So all this was created, shout out to Matt Alvarez, all this was created in
like two weeks.
So if you think it sucks, that's okay.
I like it.
I think it's awesome.
It's definitely weird.
It's just a big shock from people that saw, like your brother was at the old
studio and the old studio was, you know, very conventional.
It's like a curtain and a brick wall and the American flag was like pretty
normal.
This is a big difference.
Some people are bad with change.
Well, you have this lovely Asian.
That's Ganesh.
Ganesh.
That's right.
From India.
Remover of obstacles.
Yeah.
My daughter actually went to last year as a high school in India.
I bought that in Thailand, actually.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
I bought it in Thailand and had it shipped over.
So what did your daughter do in India?
She did her last year as a high school there.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Why'd she do that?
My oldest went to his last year as a high school in Costa Rica.
Loved it.
Wow.
And so she wanted to do something similar.
And she went to this great school called Woodstock School, which is in the foothills
of the Himalayas.
Had a great time.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
Pretty awesome.
Did you visit her out there?
We did.
Yeah.
Multiple times.
That's got to be weird, too, to be the last two years of high school, 15 or 16
and 17.
Yeah.
And just leave your family and be in another continent.
But don't you remember being that age and you just wanted to have some
independence and head out?
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess so.
I think.
I'm so old.
It's hard to look back when I'm 16.
I mean, I have some vague memories.
Well, if you're so old, I'm so old.
I think we were born the same year.
67?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're both old.
Yeah, totally.
Look at my hair.
It's all white.
Well, mine would be white, too, if I had it.
I have the side hairs are pretty white now.
It's very disturbing now when it comes in.
I'm like, whoa, goddamn.
Just shave it all now.
And my face, too.
I get a lot of gray hairs on my face, too.
It's like.
Yeah, they come in either black or white.
You know, it's this mix.
Father time doesn't give a fuck.
It's like, sorry, kid.
Yeah, for me, it was actually lots of hair and it was brown and then I had my
first kid and then overnight it went gray.
And then I had my second kid and it went white.
Really?
So just the lack of sleep, stress.
Yeah, getting sick when you have a kid and all of that.
Yeah, it gets you.
So what's in the tube there?
It's a present for you.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
What is this?
Is this a bone?
Is this a human bone?
No.
What animal is this?
So I'm a biologist and I brought you a gift from my home state of Alaska.
Can you figure out what it is?
Well, first of all, it's fossilized.
It is.
You're right.
I can tell because of the weight.
Yeah, it's thousands of years old.
Yeah.
And for people that don't, I had to try to explain this to one of my kids that
a fossil is not the actual bone.
It's a representation of the bone that's been absorbed.
It's been mineralized.
So I was trying to, she was like, wait, but it's a bone.
Yeah.
Because they have a fossil at her school.
And I was trying to say, see how that looks not like bone?
Yeah.
It's because it's not really bone.
It's what, this is what the bone, the bone used to be there.
And then this is the shape of the bone that's been mineralized.
Yeah.
So I love fossils.
I collect fossils.
This is so heavy.
Yeah.
And I thought I'd bring you a fossil.
Let me guess.
I would say like, it's fairly thin.
So I would say like some sort of like a horse or something or a cow or a deer.
No.
I'd give you a hint.
Okay.
So I got it on St. Lawrence Island.
Jamie, any ideas?
A bear?
No, I got it on, there are polar bears there, but there's no other bears.
But I got on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea where I do a lot of work.
And the people there are subsistence hunters.
Oh, caribou.
Not caribou.
No.
No?
There are reindeer on the island that come from Siberia, but there's no caribou
there.
So they're subsistence hunters.
They're marine hunters.
Oh.
So it's like a seal.
And it's not a seal, but you're close.
Walrus?
Walrus.
Is it?
Yeah.
Oh.
What part?
The baculum.
Oh, baculum.
If someone said, I hurt my baculum, I'd be like, shut up.
You don't even know what you're talking about.
It's not even a bone.
So the baculum is a penis bone.
Oh, Jesus.
I'm holding a big old dick.
I wanted to wait for him to say it.
That's enormous.
I thought that's what it was.
Wow.
Imagine.
All you fellas out there complaining.
Look.
Okay.
Thank you, sir.
Yeah.
Thanks for the big old walrus penis.
Yeah.
I was trying to think of what you might not already have.
I definitely don't have that.
Yeah.
Look at that one.
Whoa.
That's crazy.
That'd be from an extinct walrus probably.
I bet that's why it's extinct.
Yeah.
All the ladies were like, get out of here with that.
You're going to kill me.
Well, thank you, Frank.
I appreciate it, man.
Of course.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on the show.
My pleasure.
Your book, The Chemical Age, touches on a lot of subjects that I find very
fascinating,
particularly pesticides.
I'm consistently terrified of pesticides.
I ran into a man once that I met on a ranch and he had an artificial thigh bone.
His femur had been replaced with like a piece of metal, like a metal bone.
And he told me he got bone cancer from pesticides that they use on a golf
course that got into
local water supply and a bunch of people in that area got cancer.
And there was like some large scale lawsuit against the, I don't know if it was
against
the chemical company or the golf course or both.
But I remember thinking like, whoa, like I didn't, okay, I didn't even think of
that.
Like, of course, if you're going to have all that green grass, you have to do
something
about the weeds.
You have to do something about the bugs.
Like, all that stuff is terrifying.
When I was listening to your podcast, the Science History Podcast, and your
friend was interviewing
you, who was it?
Pete Myers.
Pete Myers was interviewing you.
And you were talking about the prevalence of these pesticides and chemicals
that we use
all over the world.
And he said, I think his exact quote was, am I wrong in saying that there's a
square centimeter
of this planet that's not somehow or another polluted by humans and our
chemicals?
And you said that's accurate.
That's accurate.
Yeah.
It's amazing, isn't it?
That's insane.
Yeah, and you think of, you've been to Alaska, and you go to Alaska, it looks
pristine, it's
beautiful, and you think everything is perfectly clean.
But in fact, even the most remote places in the world, like Alaska, are getting
atmospherically
deposited chemicals, including pesticides that are used at lower latitude.
And so there really isn't anywhere on the earth that's not polluted,
unfortunately.
And you were explaining the way these chemicals get into the atmosphere and
then
get distributed all over the world, akin to a still, like a whiskey or a moonshine
still.
Yeah, exactly.
If you go back and you look at an old still, the way it works, you would have a
heat source,
like a Bunsen burner, that's heating up a liquid.
And that liquid volatizes.
Some of it evaporates into a gas.
And then that is connected via a glass tube to a glass ball that has cold water
on it.
And that whatever vaporizes from that heat is going to condense on that cold
surface where
the cold water is.
So that's the basics of how you would make a distillery.
And the earth works really in the same way.
So the equator is the part of the earth that's most directly facing the sun.
It's getting the most intense solar radiation.
So you have these contaminants, like many pesticides, PCBs, a lot of other
things that some portion
of them will volatize.
They'll become a gas.
And they'll be in the atmosphere, they'll move in the atmosphere, and then they'll
condense
out of the atmosphere when it gets colder, so when it's wintertime.
And it'll be a little higher in latitude.
And the next summer, they'll volatize again, they'll evaporate again, and they'll
move north
again.
It's called the grasshopper effect.
And so over some number of years, they move their way north.
When they get to the north pole, to the south pole, those are hemispheric sinks
for these
contaminants.
It's cold year-round.
And so the amount of deposition from the atmosphere is far greater than the
amount of evaporation.
And therefore, the poles have the highest concentrations of certain classes of
these so-called persistent
organic pollutants.
They're the ones that are relatively light that can move through the atmosphere.
As a result, and these are also fat-soluble, so they get into the food web, and
as you go
up each food trophic level, you end up with higher and higher concentrations.
So the animals with the highest concentrations of these certain kinds of
persistent organic
pollutants on Earth are these high-trophic-level, long-lived animals in the
Arctic, like the killer
whale and the polar bear, that'll have millions of times the background
concentration of these
contaminants.
Things like DDT, mercury, a lot of other chemicals, a lot of pesticides, flame
retardant
chemicals, and so on.
Wow.
So polar bears.
So when they test these animals, so if the people in these areas eat these
animals, are
they at risk of being infected by these contaminants, or is it not at a level
where it's going to
harm them?
No, it's a really sad case of environmental injustice, because you have subsistence
peoples,
the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, that they're living off the marine
environment.
They're eating bowhead whale and walrus and ice seals and polar bear, and every
single
one of their meals they're getting in the fat, in the rendered oil.
They take the blubber and they render oil, which goes onto all of their meals.
Every single meal they're getting hundreds of parts per billion of PCBs and
pesticides and
things like that.
So it's just grossly unfair when you think about it, because they never used
these chemicals.
They didn't benefit economically from these chemicals, and yet they're subject
to some of the highest
concentrations in the world.
And you were also saying that their breast milk is contaminated with it.
Yeah, actually, the way this whole problem was discovered was in the 1980s,
scientists in Canada
wanted to understand breast milk contamination of women who lived in southern
Canada in the
industrial and agricultural areas of Canada.
And so they were thinking, where can we find a reference population of people
who have no exposure
to these chemicals?
So they decided to go to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada to look at the Inuit
people that lived
there.
And they were surprised to find that the women on Baffin Island, their breast
milk contained
10 to 20 times higher concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs and mercury
than the women
who lived in the industrial areas where these chemicals were used.
So that was the first kind of global alert that actually were poisoning the
people, our people
of the Arctic were poisoning them.
And that's how the rights of indigenous people in the Arctic to live in a clean
environment
became part of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
There's representatives from these tribes who go to the negotiations every time.
It's because of this problem.
It's called global distillation because of this fact that