Name: Joe Rogan Experience #655 - Kevin Folta
Uploaded: 2015-06-05T01:44:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #655 - Kevin Folta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-06-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #655 - Kevin Folta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-06-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #655 - Kevin Folta

All right. I'm here with Kevin Fulta. Kevin, you're a scientist, a 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 going to happen and all the
horrible
things, GMO foods are probably one of the most confusing and also one of the
most hated
things in the world today, but also one of the most common and most
misunderstood, right?
I mean, almost everything. There's a... Neil deGrasse Tyson did a video about
this where
he was kind of explaining, like, the term GMO foods. Like, virtually everything
you see,
including things that are quote unquote organic at a supermarket have been
modified in some
way in order to prolong their shelf life, in order for them to taste better,
including corn
and tomatoes and oranges and you name it. Yeah. And I think that's the big
problem is that
you frame this very well. The problem is that we confuse this idea of GMO,
which is kind of
a pejorative term. That we've derived to kind of misrepresent this kind of
technology, which is
really just plant genetic improvement. Like you say, we've been improving
plants for 10,000 years as a species.
We find the ones that work best and we continue to select those particular
lines that have benefits for us.
And we've been doing this for a long time. So everything is different than it
was in the wild.
If you look at the natural forms, they're nothing like what you see today in
the store.
So this GMO thing is just the most recent way that we've been able to modify
the way a plant behaves and what plant products are.
And it just is a much more precise extension of conventional breeding.
There is a company that looms like the Death Star out there in the world of GMO
foods.
And that company, I don't even have to say the name. It's spoken in hushed
terms around hippie campfires.
Monsanto. Yeah. Right. And well, Monsanto is also responsible for a lot of good
things.
I'm sure. They have done some creepy shit and they have gotten, especially in
India, I mean, they're directly connected to the suicides of countless farmers
who can't afford to use their seeds that they have to replace every year.
I mean, there's there's good and bad when it comes to the ability to modify
things.
And I think what terrifies some people is that a company like Monsanto, which
has just ungodly amounts of money and influence and power.
I mean, they've been sued by the Brazilian government and Brazil sued them and
won.
And I don't know the exact specifics of the case, but it's essentially about
those seeds that explain those Terminator seeds, if you could, and how those
things were created.
OK, so you touched on three important points there and we can come back to the
suicides and also Monsanto being a giant company.
And I should note right off the top, I have nothing to do with Monsanto.
I'm not you know, I don't work for them. I'm a scientist.
But wait a minute, I've read online that you are a shill.
That's right.
You are not a shill.
I am not a shill. I'm actually I'm a shill for you.
Actually, I'm a I'm a I'm a public scientist.
I work for the University of Florida.
I'm the chairman of a horticultural sciences department in a state where we
grow almost no GM crops.
The difference is, is that I see tremendous potential for how these
technologies could be helpful for our farmers.
And we try to get them excited about ways we can apply them in the future.
But let me go back to your last question about, because I don't even know much
about this Brazil issue either.
Jamie, I'm sure you could pull up the article if we could see it on the big
screen.
Yeah. So your last, the last question out of that was the Terminator Seeds.
The Terminator Seeds.
And the Terminator Seeds, this is something that never existed in terms of a
product that was available.
A company called Delta Pine and Land back in the 1990s developed the technology
to ensure that genetically engineered seeds would stay in the fields they were
planted.
That you wouldn't have pollen leaving and pollinating something else and
creating plants in other places.
Pretty good idea for containment.
And Delta Pine and Land had this technology where basically the embryo of the
seed didn't develop properly.
So it was a dead end.
You couldn't replant it and get it to grow.
So when Delta Pine and Land later was bought out by the Big M, by Monsanto,
everybody saw the Terminator, well, it wasn't called the Terminator Seed, it
had some other name, but it quickly gained the name Terminator.
And so these were never grown outside of a greenhouse, and the company has said
they never will grow them outside of a greenhouse just because of the overlaid
implications of what they might mean.
But there have been instances of GMO crops by pollination infecting the lands
of people who are not supposed to have these Monsanto crops on, and they were
sued for having these crops growing on their land, correct?
There's examples where people have had litigation because they've generated the
seeds that are a licensed product.
So in other words, when you're a farmer, you buy the seeds from the company.
And it's Monsanto or any of the companies that sell the seeds.
There's six different companies now.
You buy the seeds from any of those companies.
You fill out a form saying, I agree to not grow more of this.
And so there are cases where people have grown more of it.
And it hasn't been from a little bit of pollen drifting into a field.
The court cases are all public record.
In the ones where they've been successfully tried and litigated, they've been
for thousands of acres of plants that somewhat would knowingly grow, and maybe
even treat with Roundup in many cases, so that they were selecting for the
trait.
The intent was to sell the seeds that they agreed not to sell.
Oh, okay.
So these stories about farmers that were getting sued because of cross-pollination,
because the GMO crops have infected their land, is not true.
That's not – there's no evidence in the record to show that this is substantiated.
And what's even more scary about that is that when the company has litigated
any of these and won favorable court decisions, they haven't kept the money
that any damages went back into the community.
So, again, that seems –
What do you mean by that, like damages went back in the community?
Meaning that if they sued a farmer and actually won the case, any of the
funding that was won as a penalty from that case was given back to the
community where that farmer lived.
Back in what form?
I guess just financial support for whatever.
It was just the idea they wanted to get around was that they were somehow suing
farmers to get rich or to pocket the funds.
And so they created this – well, this plan or this program to put the money
back where it came from.
So where do these farmers get the seeds then?
If they had – they illegally acquired these seeds somehow?
Is that what's the implication?
Well, if you were to go buy corn from, let's say, Monsanto or Dow or any of the
companies that make it, and you were to grow, say, soybeans that were Roundup
resistant, so they resist the herbicide.
You can kill the weeds but let the plants grow through.
If you were to buy those and you were to spray them and then keep the seeds and
then grow – bulk them up and then start selling them out of your garage, the
company would come and say, no, you can't do that.
So this is – what you're doing is you're taking the corn, and the corn itself
is essentially a seed, right?
Right.
Like the actual – the ears of corn, you can grow corn from that corn, and
that's what they're doing.
Yeah, so they're essentially – and maybe not corn as much, and I can get to
that in a second, but things like cotton and soy, you can't – it's a lot like
software.
And Anastasia Bodnar, Dr. Anastasia Bodnar, is an excellent example of this.
You can't go buy a copy of Microsoft Office and go home and make 1,000 copies
and sell them on eBay without Microsoft knocking on your door.
Right.
This is a technology that takes years and years to develop.
It's a really expensive technology to deregulate, something like $130 million
sometimes to deregulate one of these genetically modified lines.
So the company needs to make money to maintain its R&D.
And so they ask farmers, who are the beneficiaries ultimately of this, to sign
an agreement saying that they'll buy it every year.
So this is the lawsuit, the Brazilian lawsuit.
If you scroll up, Jimmy, if you read this whole thing, it's – they face a $1
billion – well, this is in 2013.
They lost the lawsuit.
But this is not a recent article.
But the farmers that were suing for abusive purchase contracts – scroll down
a little bit there.
Brazil Farmers Court actions are piling up against Monsanto for collecting royalties
on RR1 – is that Roundup?
Yeah, Roundup Ready 1.
Regarding – regarded as illegal and for conditioning the sale of new GM seeds
– I don't know what that word is – in TACA – in TACA RR2 – to the
signing of a contract seen as abusive, according to an article for Valor Online.
On Brazil, lawyers for the farmers and representative bodies estimate the value
of the claims against Monsanto at 1.9 billion, Brazilian hiales, which is about
U.S., 1 billion.
Processes have not been completed, but preliminary estimates say that the
claims may affect the company's profits.
See if you can find a more recent article, because they lost that lawsuit.
And I have no clue.
This is also coming from Sustainable Pulse and GM Watch, two sources which have
nothing positive to say about biotechnology.
And it wouldn't surprise me if other countries did try to litigate these kinds
of examples.
I mean, it's – anybody can sue a company.
You know, anybody can do it.
Right.
So it's possible that these things were brought before these governments,
saying that these were unfair practices to farmers to make them sign a contract
and then repurchase the seed later on.
So these seeds that you were talking about before, how did these folks get them
then?
If they're getting enough seeds to plant thousands and thousands of acres
illegally, how are they doing that?
Well, you just save the seeds from the previous year instead of processing it.
You know, you can imagine a corn cob has several hundred kernels, and each one
of those represents a new plant.
So you can have X amount of your acreage dedicated to seed production.
So essentially all you would have to do is buy, you know, a few thousand ears
of corn, and you would be able to plant just a giant area of land.
You know, and I wish I knew the number off the top of my head, but I don't.
But it would be able to plant, replant more seeds.
Now, corn's a bad example, because corn are hybrids.
And without going into a whole genetics whiteboard thing here, every corn is
made from two parents that are genetically very different.
But when you combine them together, give you a hybrid that when you cross a
hybrid with a hybrid, gives you a mixture of seeds that don't give you any
uniformity in the next generation.
So since the 1930s, the seed companies have been able to resell that hybrid
seed to farmers every year because there's nothing to be gained in producing
your own.
And so corn isn't always the best example.
And the companies have used genetics for going on a century now to protect
their breeders' interests.
So the original corn, is that someone's phone? What was that?
The original corn, before it was modified at all, was that corn that you get,
like, for Thanksgiving, that you hang on your door, that nobody eats?
That weird, colored, funky-looking corn?
It was even smaller than that, right?
Oh, yeah. The original corn was called tiosinte.
And tiosinte was basically growing on a bush in Mexico, and it gave you 13
little hard kernels on a stick.
And a plant would produce some of this, and it's now being thought, from