67: Spencer Roberts | Unpopular Science On The Horrors Of Agriculture From Soy To Fish To Cows To The Rest!

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/spencer-roberts/

Spencer Roberts is the guest on this episode of the podcast. Follow him on Twitter here.

Spencer Roberts is an ecologist, engineer, and science writer who often operates under the pseudonym… unpopular science. 

Spencer holds two degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder in both Ecology & Evolution as well as Atmospheric & Ocean Science. 

He has written for Wired, Current Affairs, The Ecologist and more where he routinely scrutinizes the animal agriculture and seafood industries.

You can expect to hear in this podcast about the following and more…

• Some Of The Horrors Of Fish Farming/Aquaculture
• The Role Of Antibiotics In Agriculture
• The Agricultural Red Pill 
• + More, More, And More

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• 00:00 – Introduction.
• 01:19 – The Dominant Narrative In Aquaculture & Greenwashing.
• 08:54 – Explaining The Horror Of Fish Farming.
• 20:14 – The Current State Of The Oceans.
• 25:59 – Antibiotics & Soy In Agriculture.
• 36:59 – How Farmed Fishing Effects Your Health.
• 41:59 – Seaspiracy.
• 44:24 – Nassim Taleb & Popular Science Communication.
• 57:06 – The Agricultural Red Pill
• 1:08:06 – Monoculture, Capitalism & More Issues In Agriculture.
• 1:14:14 – A Moment In Your Life You Cannot Believe You Were A Part Of.
• 1:20:09 – Country You Are Most Bullish On.
• 1:23:14 – Conversation Between Any Two People Of History.
• 1:24:34 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following is a conversation with Spencer Roberts, an ecologist, engineer, and science writer who sometimes operates under the pseudonym of unpopular science. Spencer holds two degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder in both Ecology and Evolution and Atmospheric and Ocean Science. He's written for Wide, Current Affairs, The Ecologist, and many more publications as he routinely scrutinizes both the seafood industry as well as more broadly animal agriculture at large. The disastrous state of salmon farming, particularly in OI, was brought to my attention a few years ago and has remained a keen interest of mine ever since. In short, it's filth all the way down. So in this chat with Robert, you can expect to hear uh about some of the following uh the horrors of fish farming, the role antibiotics and soy play in agriculture, the agricultural red pill, and then of course, uh many, many more things as well. So do stick around to the end uh to hear my afterthoughts from the conversation, as well as me to explain to you, hopefully, if you might be interested, my ambition for the podcast. And with absolutely no further ado, here is the man himself, Mr. Unpopular Science, Spencer Roberts. Well, Spencer Roberts, thank you so much for joining me, mate. Thanks for having me. It's really my pleasure. I like I was saying to you just off air, I um initially reached out to you based out of my interest in the depravity that is aquaculture largely, but specifically in Norway. Uh but as I started reading further into the uh numerous topics that you've uh touched, it became quite clear that the scope of the conversation had to be a little bit more than that. And so with that in mind, I wanted to start with something that I think we might be able to find fun, and that is asking you what the most egregious examples of greenwashing are that you've ever come across.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

That is there are so many good choices. Let's see, I'm very uh very fond in a in a ironic way, of um regenerative ranching. That's one of my favorite uh greenwashing narratives, this idea that cattle farming can um fight climate change by uh absorbing carbon in soil, just the and you know, obviously there's some truth to all these things, right? And that's that's how they start. But the way that this narrative has kicked off and spread around the world and just become so pervasive is uh really fascinating to me. So I've uh written and researched about that a lot. I'm still working on um an article, uh another one about that that'll be coming out. And uh I gotta say, uh doing a little bit of research uh about fish farming um here, there are some really uh really good ones, uh really good narratives here. That I mean you gotta hand it to these uh PR guys. They're they know what people want to believe, I think. And uh they're good at it. Yeah, in they can come up with some really convincing narratives, um, and they they spread like wildfire because they're appealing.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Give us an example of one of these narratives.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Yeah, so I guess I'd say in general, the dominant narrative in uh aquaculture science is that it's allowing us to decrease wild fish catch by offsetting demand for seafood production. But in reality, w it's actually increasing fish catch. Well fish global fish catch is declining, but it's preventing it from declining more by opening markets for increasingly smaller fish, right? So as it's harder for us to find and catch salmon, tuna, larger predatory fish, billfish, swordfish, etcetera, um we can just t catch small fish, bait fish, like sardines, anchovies, and then turn them into these big fish. So it's sort of keeping this fish far uh fishing industry alive in a big way that um today about a fifth of global fish catch is used for fish meal or fish oil, and 70% of that is for fish arm fish farming. So without fish farming, wild what we call capture fisheries, right, wild fish catch would be declining at a much steeper rate, but we're sort of keeping it alive with fish farming, and we're keeping the seafood industry alive as well. So I think it's a big mistake to think of it as separate or as an alternative to catching wild fish because it's very much a part and it's very much enmeshed within the um capture fisheries wild fishing industry.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

So convenient, isn't it, to uh only mention one part of the supply chain as the reason why you might be doing whatever your social good is. If you eat a farmed fish, that's one less wild fish caught. But it's not that simple. The second, third, fourth order effects at play. You know, you eat a chocolate bar, maybe that cacao is a grouping of 100, 200, 300 separate farms that range from small to large. A few of them have atrocious practices, and the majority of them have exceptional practices that meet all the international standards. But just because you have one of the good ones in the mix doesn't excuse the fact that the bad ones are also included in the mix. And so if you are wild fishery, you can, like you say, with a PR firm, hey, look how good we are, because by eating this beautiful farm salmon, which by the way is just as healthy, is just as pink, has the right natural fats on it, uh, you're actually saving a wild salmon in the beautiful Norwegian fjords. But the truth is, is that you're just depleting a fish species elsewhere, and they're still pumped with the antibiotics.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Yes, and there are a lot of other things that leaves out as well. That's how it always works, right? Lies of omission. So, if you want, we could go into that.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Let's bookmark that for later, but first I'd love for you to say specifically, call out a company, greenwashing that you see on your radar. I have a few lined up if you want to uh go off mine, but I'd love to hear that.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

The biggest one that comes to mind for me is Atlantic Sapphire. And this is a Norwegian fish farming company that's uh spread, spreading around the world, um, has a very high stock profile, very prolific and convincing greenwashing messaging, right? So they call their facilities blue houses, right? Uh as a sort of corollary to a greenhouse, or we're just growing fish in these blue houses, right? It sounds nice. Um, and you know, they have partnerships with uh ocean conservation NGOs like Pangea Seed, you know, basically running ads on their uh social media platforms, you know. And the reality is is far removed from the messaging. We're talking about so just in uh Florida, in uh so I live in the States, right? So uh they're building a massive a couple massive uh fish farming facilities in Florida, and they've been met with all sorts of uh massive uh fish die-offs, at least a million fish in just four events in Florida. I can't even keep up with uh these massive fish die-offs or eight, you know, 500,000, 300,000 fish dying at a time, and these are just the self-reported numbers. Um there was an incident where three workers were hospitalized from fumes, the bottom of the tank, cleaning the bottoms of the tanks, and literally passed out from the fumes and were hospitalized. Uh there was a huge fire and a chemical leak recently in Denmark. And uh when you know, this stuff doesn't really make uh mainstream news. A lot of the time you'll just see it in the uh industry news, and it's all about oh, what's gonna happen to the stocks now that the this massive chemical leak is draining into the sea uh offshore of Denmark, and I think it just you know people are very um not cognizant of this industry and you know what's really going on, so that's definitely uh one of the big ones that jumps out to me.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

I think it would be good uh to give a little bit more context to the audience and explain what we're talking about with fish farming. Because you just mentioned that these fish grew in tanks. Um that would be surprising to a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

True. So there are a couple ways to do it. Um there are open ocean pens, and there are problems with that as well. But um generally uh the Atlantic Sapphire method is the on land version, and there are there are different ways of um you know weighing the impacts of these uh different methods for farming fish, but on land, for instance, w uh yes, we're gonna be using tanks, right? And a recent study estimated it takes four billion tons of water to farm 75,000 salmon. And we're talking about facilities with contracts to produce 90,000 tons of salmon a year. So I just billions and billions of tons of water coming from you know municipal sources and uh fish being farmed in these tanks, right? And so we're talking about uh fish meal and also um typically soymeal, uh plant sources as well, being dumped in there, and so what happens is uh the fish food, all the food that the fish don't eat, and then all the fish that die, which is not insignificant. Sometimes 10-15% of the fish in the tank sink to the bottom and they're decomposing at the bottom there. So we were talking about the effluent from these fish farms, the water pollution, right? We're not just talking about like in terrestrial agriculture where we have nutrients from fertilizer and manure flushing into waterways, which beget these harmful algal blooms and these anoxic dead zones at the river deltas, right? We're not just talking about the nutrients, but the sludge at the bottom of these tanks is already decomposing. It's already anoxic. So we're flushing this anoxic water, which means it has no oxygen, right? So basically nothing can live in it besides anaerobic bacteria. So the effluent is actually much worse coming from these fish farms. But again, the open ocean uh fish farms have their own problem, particularly with pathogens and with um fish outbreaks of you know invasive fish species. So um in uh British Columbia, uh uh the west coast of Canada, right, uh open ocean fish farming is sort of the norm there. And um we've seen uh so uh so to give a broad perspective, uh more than a quarter of farmed fish are non-native to the ecosystems they're farmed in. More than a quarter or more than a third of marine ecosystems are estimated to be at risk of invasive fish escapes. So we've seen escapes of Atlantic salmon, 200,000, 300,000 or more, uh escaping into Puget Sound uh waters off the star. Yeah, exactly. Um uh back to Norway, um an industry report estimated more than two million fish escape from Norwegian farms in the last decade. And that's a self-reported number.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

So we can only imagine that the number in industry specifically is famously corrupt.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Uh open ocean fish farming. There's also concerns with um pathogens, right? So we have sea lice. Uh you may have seen these videos of um these light they literally eat the fish alive, right? And so an undercover investigator will get a camera in there and you see the flesh falling off of these fish, right? And it decomposes on the bottom. Um and then we have things like Pisces Rheovirus, which was introduced to British Columbia through fish farming, other viruses like uh IHN, um, and then we have studies showing that uh just like on land, uh new strains of bacterial and viral pathogens can breed in these um fish farms. And uh, yeah, researchers are not uncommonly finding new resistant strains of uh bacteria and viruses that infect fish that can be vectored and and they are vectored to wild populations through fish farming. So that's just some of the drawbacks of open ocean farming. There's really no way to weigh them uh in an apples to apples way. They're all bad.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

They're all bad. Um and some of the some of the key hotspots. So off Chile, they're growing it in Scotland, Norway, Vietnam, uh, British Columbia. I was unaware about Florida. I mean, how unnatural is the idea of salmon coming out of a Florida tank. I mean, that's disgusting the entire way around. Something that's such a downside of this is when I started learning about it, it just destroyed my appetite for fish. Because growing up in Australia, um my mum always put it on the on the dinner table. But um here in Sweden, I live in Sweden, I'm supposed to be able to eat this beautiful fresh Norwegian salmon, but I know it's toxic, it's got mercury leaking out of it, and it's just food dye that made it pink. So I really enjoyed that, your uh quick diatribe on what the sort of consequences are largely. Uh do you have a specific case that you want to lean on uh just in your research? I mean, if you don't, it's fine, but just in case you do, to say like highlight example one, this is what it's like.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Um I mean, yeah, there are other case studies we could look at, like in Chimbote, Peru, like you were mentioning earlier. So ecologists estimate that so ecologists have been sort of dredging the bay to look at what's coming out of these fish farms. Estimated uh recent study that there were 54 cubic meters of inoxic sludge at the bottom of the bay in a small bay. Um physicians and citizens are saying that they have elevated rates of childhood asthma and cancer. Uh doctors telling families to move away, you know, like you can smell it in the air. It's sort of a saying in Peru. It smells like chimbote, it smells something that smells fishy, right? Um, West Africa is a huge place. But West Africa is uh is not really a center of uh fish farming, but fish catching, but they're catching sardines, right? In a lot of places, sardines are the only fish left to catch. And so, yeah, we have these super trawlers off the coast dredging up, you know, tons, uh literal tons, every every haul of yeah, everything. So it one of the things that's uh particularly uh particularly horrific about shifting to smaller fish, right, for fish farming, is that how do you catch smaller fish? You used a finer mesh, right? So with that finer mesh, you're gonna catch everything bigger than a sardine, or everything the size of a sardine and bigger, which means you're gonna have much higher rates of bycatch. So you're gonna catch all the turtles, all the dolphins, and in West Africa, particularly, they see the effects of this, just hundreds of dolphins washing up dead on the shore. And all of these subsistence fishing communities, you know, that rely on those ecosystems are going hungry. They can't find jobs and they are you know moving away. And we have to ask, is there an is it any wonder you know that there are these massive emigration crises coming from Africa when we are sending these industrial boats to just you know destroy to plunder the ecosystems that they rely on so that we can catch these small fish, you know, the only fish we can find left to dump into tanks so that we can farm the bigger fish that we used to get.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

There's this superb graphic which I'll try and find and leave a link to in the description. But talking about these giant trawlers and what they pick up from the um seabed, essentially, you it's a superb graphic because it just shows highlight into different colours a net and the interior of the net, and say 40% of it is your ideal catch, which is already overfished, but nonetheless it's your ideal catch, which means as much as 60% of the rest is, as you say, the dolphins, the turtles, the other fish species which uh aren't commercially viable, they're perfectly fine to eat. If you caught it when you went out, you'd be fine, but it's not what your contract agreement is with the grocery store to sell to them exactly. And so these giant trawlers, I mean, it's very corrupt, right? Because they pick it up, they dump all the stuff they don't want back into the ocean, and then they rock up on the shore and they say, Hey, look, here's the exact catch, great, stamp of approval, there's not many dolphins in here. You have done a good job. Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Yeah, and bycatch, there's a there's a whole lot of uncertainty, right, around, and there's a lot of debate in academia around how much bycatch is there, what are the global rates of bycatch, and a lot of it depends on how you define bycatch. And one of the ways that these corporations can get around it is by cat, you know, using these small fish, for instance, that uh they don't say they're fishing for uh salmon or something, or uh or tuna or something, but uh they catch a bunch of bay fish, well they can just ground them up for fish meal, and the what what have otherwise be been bycatch is now another target catch, right? So we're sort of moving the goalposts on what is bycatch, and then the reporting rates are I mean, we're relying on the corporations, of course, to tell us how much bycatch they're having. We you know, we have fisheries observers, they're only on a small fraction of boats. There was a study of uh driftnet fishing off the coast of California recently that showed that the uh fishing vessels were catching fish at more than or they were catching marine mammals at more than fifty times the rate that they were supporting. That's what the observers showed. So it's really a huge question mark how much bycatch is there. And then another thing about bycatch is it's it's always described as unintentional, right? Which I think is a really pr uh pernicious myth. It's obviously part of the business model, right? If you are going out with a net small enough to catch uh, you know, a sardine, you know that you're gonna catch everything bigger than a sardine. It's not an accident.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

And then some bycatch rates, like in uh shrimp fisheries, they can 98% of the ca of the hall, right? Only one in fifty of the mass of the actual animals are pulling up. And these are, you know, just like regular averages, too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

Yeah. My goodness. Do you know what um you know, because all of this paints a very bleak picture of the oceans, and obviously C Spiracy did a lot recently to make a lot of noise about that, but they're not the first to draw people's attention to overfishing. Do you have on hand, and forgive me if I'm putting you in deep water, but do you have on hand statistics over the state of the oceans at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah, so I think uh one of the best um one of the most broad and highly uh cited and regarded databases we have is called the RAM Legacy Database, right? It's named after this guy, Ransom Alfred Myers. He was a famous fishery scientist, actually, who uh sort of um called out his own um his own uh academic discipline for the corruption. That's I think very obvious today. But um he's sort of idolized by both sides of the of the fishery scientists and the conservation, which is interesting. Anyways, that's a big side note. Um it sort of looks at the fishing uh the fish populations, the major ones that were fishing around the world, and estimates uh how much are left, essentially, based on several different things are catch rates, uh radar, um things like that. And it's often spun in a way. I think it's really important to understand this. So you'll hear uh major uh organizations like the um FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and it's very common in fishery science to uh cite this statistic. Two thirds of fish populations are sustainably managed, right? Well, what does that mean? The definition of sustainably managed is 40% of historic levels or more. So another way to look at this database is that at least half of the fish populations, which we have data on, which is only about half, are at least half gone. So it's really important to understand how the framing of these issues and these data can affect the way um it can affect the statistics that we see. And a lot of the time the picture that we see painted not just by the industry but by, you know, major regulatory agencies is very rosy and it's very uh distorted.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

But what about at the moment statistics on the ocean?

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Okay, so a couple stats just offhand and this is from the uh plantbasebeta.org uh state of the ocean report that uh I contributed to with um some other uh colleagues in 1950 we were catching approximately 200 million tons of fish from the ocean uh in 2016 we're talking about 140 million tons of fish and that number is actually declining since about the mid-90s fish catch peaked we're still sending out more boats every year they're going further from shore every year they're staying out longer than they ever did and we're catching less fishing less which indicates something about the state of the ocean I'd say yes it's not a very good signal however go on yeah uh there's an estimated additional eleven to twenty six million tons of illegal or unregulated unreported fishing um some estimates say that illegal catch is thought to some pri uh thought to comprise up to twenty percent instead of five to ten percent of global fish catch. Again really hard to get solid numbers on this because we're relying on industry reporting um over ninety percent of uh large fish populations in the oceans uh oh I'm sorry large fish populations like tuna sharks billfish have declined by an estimated ninety percent in the last century um or more than a third of or yeah more than a third of sharks and rays, right or lastma branches are threatened with extinction main threat being overfishing. You know we could talk about aquaculture as well um let's see what other stuff we got here.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yeah if you could find what percentage of fish overall is wild versus farmed whether it's measured in tonnage or as a percentage measured by tons it's uh recently fish farming recently surpassed um capture fisheries right I something like fifty five forty five don't quote me on that exactly but uh yeah that's that's one of the things uh that the industry reports very positively right we're we're sort of taking the you know w it seems like we're catching less um we're we're fishing less right and we are catching less fish but we're not fishing less and it's consistent with this pattern uh ecologists call fishing down the food web right so when you run out of your big apex predators the fish that want people want to eat you'll go for the smaller stuff that's still there and we can use that for fish farms or you might start catching the crustaceans on the seafloor.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

And so we have this picture that we're still constantly extracting fish from the ocean the ocean still has this uh you know prolific bounty to offer us for food but we're actually you know sort of systematically hacking away the different pieces of the ecosystem.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

To return to the aquaculture the farmed fishing could you uh explain to the audience the significant role that antibiotics plays in this and then consequently what the food might actually be that you're eating uh at the end of the day um yeah so I don't have too much statistics on antibiotics I know that in fish farming just like in terrestrial farming the fish have a like we ta touched on a tendency to become infected and to become sick so we are uh uh augmenting the feed with antibiotics significant amounts of them depending on the country depending on the regulations for antibiotics which could be very different um yeah we're dumping huge amounts of antibiotics into the fish which um I don't know if it would I mean it I don't know if there's a big risk of the antibiotics like accumulating in the tissues of fish but what this does is it sort of degrades the efficacy of the antibiotics right um a recent study I read estimates more people are dying now from antibiotic resistant pathogens than um with AIDS. So it's a huge problem and it's getting worse and as we use more antibiotics we breed more resistant strains of viruses and bacteria that um you know that our antibiotics are less effective against and there are major you know public health ramifications of this overuse of antibiotics yeah and I suppose that's also a reflection more broadly of agriculture especially uh what what would you call it the the animal side of agriculture does that have a specific name you know the pork the pigs the chickens I mean animal agriculture animal agriculture terrestrial agriculture we could say or I no I'll yeah animal agriculture animal yeah so that would be uh specific to the animal agriculture and I'm not sure maybe you can fact check me on this but I remember reading and I included in the food waste manifesto that I was talking about earlier but um as much as eighty percent of the world's antibiotics is used in agriculture. I believe that's a US statistic but um the world is uh little less but it's still an enormous enormous I mean it's a it's a mic drop amount because if you just randomly polled a person on the street that that would that would sound like a lie. It's like well I've never seen a cow take a you know a pill what's going on yeah okay uh here's the global estimate is 73 so very close 73% of all animal antimicrobials sold are used to raise animals for food and yeah we don't see them eating them but that's the whole point we don't see these farms right and let's talk about that as an issue you just brought up the the uh probably the biggest takeaway from that which is that you form this antimicrobial I don't know what the exact word was but a resistance to antibiotics essentially um these large farms and let's just stick to the fish say this example that I'm thinking of up in the north of Norway Tromso wild salmon fish farm the reason why they're being pumped with so many antibiotics is uh from the very first it's a preventative measure so it's not a reactive measure you don't find a sick fish treat him accordingly and then get get on with your day instead you are giving them all this cocktail of drugs that just obliterates whatever immune system they might have had otherwise and pray that the sea lice doesn't get involved or that they don't sort of evolve to uh resist these sort of antibiotics and so what you do is you just raise this yield you know one season's yield of of fish that are sick so sickly you know to the point where their flesh is falling off and they're miscoloured and so they put food dye into their f into their feed so they can look like a salmon and not like a brown fish. And all types of just completely foul off putting uh stuff to anyone who eats fish or meat. And then I'm not sure if you have on hand statistics about the pork industry, but I know that that is probably the most egregious that when it comes to this antibiotics.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

But um Yeah I I I don't know what sector of what I'd broadly call livestock industries are uh uses the most antibiotics. It's it very well may be uh pig farming but like you said it it's it's not a preventative measure but it's also not an unnecessary measure right they know it's not that they uh are being over cautious they are they are reacting because they know that the fish will be infected right and they're assuming that the fish will be infected whether it's sea lice whether it's Piscine Rheovirus so they'll feed them these antibiotics and yeah these fish are not meant to be healthy right they're meant to get big enough to eat and whether 15% of them fall apart before we get to that uh we get to that stage that's just part of the business model right and um in terms of the coloration that actually so wild salmon are are typically their flesh is pink because they're eating crustaceans right kind of like flamingos do you know um but we're feeding these fish a mix a sort of slurry of it might be sardines it might be anchovies and a lot of soy soy right and a big thing about the soy so a big thing about the fishing and uh the fish farming industry is that there's this narrative right we're using less uh wild caught fish they have this metric called fish in fish out that they use whereas other industries might use like a feed convergency ratio or a caloric efficiency ratio uh fish farming is very fond of this fish in fish out which omits so many things principally the plant inputs so when we're talking about we're oh we're using less fish uh wild fish to feed these farmed fish we're shifting what we're omitting is that we're using more and more soy for instance and of course the number one global export of soy is Brazil so we're talking about deforesting the Amazon right and that's a huge issue in the Amazon deforestation for soy it's I think it's a second leading cause of Amazonian deforestation behind beef. And um so we're talking about just shifting this impact from the ocean to the Amazon right and that's what's one of the things the many things that's left out of this fish in fish out narrative.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

Yeah. And uh whether it's ironic or not I'm not sure but in addition to beef being the biggest reason for the deforestation largely the soy uh crops are then for the feed of the beef. So it can all be sort of wrapped up into that beef statistic and I'm not sure if this if this is something you have on top of hand as well. Forgive me if I'm going like asking you to be a complete sort of know it all in on on the a in the agricultural industry but I remember reading earlier this year in a book by Peter Zihan as a geopolitical analyst but basically he was just talking about Brazil and he was explaining the process that the Brazilian state has to go through to make their certain parts of deforested Amazon harvestable to get the soil to the point where a monoculture could survive and it was quite a depressing takeaway quite a depressing message basically the like nutrient the nutritious uptake from the soil was such that whatever you are growing on there is going to be rather low quality. And so if you think about the full supply chain you're growing shit soy which you're then going to feed to either the lower the cheapest cows or the cheapest fish in the world who are then going to be underfed with crap and then slaughtered frozen and sent to your nearest supermarket as whatever the budget meat is. What we end up eating at the end of the supply chain is not only tasteless but really bad for our health right um I I you just I wonder what the long term consequences are going to be of something like this. To bring it back to fish in Sweden if you're a pregnant woman there is like a uh public health advice to not eat fish more than twice a week right for this exact reason. If it was all wild catch they'd say eat it up you know that's good for you.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

But um yeah well there's a number of things that go into that wild fish as well so just to backtrack uh on the soy topic um another statistic just want to throw out there I think the estimate is 77% of global soy is uh used for animal feed right um and then we're talking about deforesting the Amazon the techniques yeah they'll use everything from slash and burn to defoliance um and um you know clear-cut logging and a big thing that people don't realize about tropical soils is that they're actually quite nutrient poor compared to temperate soils and that has to do with um sort of how tropical forests grow they uh pull uh nutrients out of the soil plants are always competing and they they rarely burn right so they're rarely um go they're rarely putting their nutrients back in the soil. Anyways back to what you were talking about with uh public health advisories in terms of eating fish um the big thing uh is when we eat fish at the top of the food chain and this is true of wild fish and farmed fish we are uh we're at high risk of accumulating of consuming these compounds we call bioaccumulants in the fish's tissue so we're talking about heavy metals like mercury we're talking about uh contaminants like microplastics and things that when you eat there's some contaminants that you can flush out of your body and there's others that you can't these bioaccumulants you can't so as we go up the food chain these uh concentrations of mercury and things become higher and higher and especially at the top of the food chain when we're talking about dolphins and tuna the yeah meat can be very toxic and there can be high levels of mercury a lot of uh public health agencies and physicians advise against eating it.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

Aaron Ross Powell Which speaks volumes about the practices of creating those uh livestock in the first place. It's like a massive ironic slap to the face of anyone who cares to listen.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Uh of health and and public health like you were uh talking about just now so a big thing uh another popular narrative about um farming fish and a big reason that fish are farmed is for their oil right and these fish oil supplements the pills that uh uh we take and they're um they're full of omega-3 fatty acids right which are of course prevalent in plants algae avocado etc but um there's uh you know a narrative you gotta eat fish oil to get your omega threes and that helps to um uh it helps to brain function and stuff right brain function and coronary heart disease is the big one but uh there have been more than twenty studies and meta-analyses in the last 15 years showing that fish oil has actually little to no effect on coronary heart disease risk and in addition a recent study came out showing one in ten common omega-3 uh fish supplements are rancid they're rotten because of like we were talking about the supply chain being so long and uh yeah the fish just rotting uh on the way to your pill um another thing I'd like to say about the uh fish in fish out narrative it's it's so funny like you'll hear um corporations will say these things like oh we put one fish in and get three fish out and maybe that could make sense if the one fish they put in is really big and the three fish that came out are really small but they they're talking about this in terms of mass right and so when they're omitting the uh plant inputs the other feed inputs the the narrative they're giving us it doesn't even it's just not only does it defy the basic laws of ecology but the physical laws of conservation of matter right like how are you gonna double the amount of fish mass that you put into the fish farm then you get out but you know people and media outlets will credulously report this stuff but when you but there's another a whole other um aspect of measuring the fish by weight rather than number right so I think when you say fish in fish out some a lot of people are thinking of a number of fish going in.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

So you can actually use and I did a little exercise uh of this online once you can actually use the industry reported fish in fish out ratios and if you uh correct them with the or if you multiply them and divide them by the weight of the feed fish and the weight of the farmed fish we're talking about hundreds or thousands of anchovies or sardines to create a salmon or a tuna right so the fish in fish out you know could be hundreds or thousands depending on how you define what fish is right and then one last stat on um fish farming that I think is really interesting is uh recent study sh estimated that salmon farming alone cost the world fifty billion US dollars in external costs which was forty percent of well if you added it to the industry costs that was forty percent of the whole so basically the deal they're giving us is 6040 we'll pay uh sixty percent of the cost of producing and you'll pay almost half the costs in public health and environmental impacts man that's so fascinating if and obviously I hear that and you know you have to be skeptical you have to take it all with a grain of salt uh especially also calculating the public externalities because it's such a you know finger to the air what what was the the wind blowing but still how fascinating would more of those sort of studies be when you look at whatever the potential uh cost benefit trade-off was and you think oh wow you know maybe uh maybe the externalities of building more railways could have potentially done X to the environment versus building more airports just as a random example I'm pulling out of my ass. But um that's uh that that's that's really fascinating that last thing you're left with potentially fifty billion dollars of external costs. And who knows? It could be more than just salmon farming too. Yeah and exactly that's economists are not famous.

SPEAKER_01 41:11

Salmon's also not even the most sorry go on. Economists aren't famous for you know putting high value on externalities so it's in their interest uh or maybe it's not their interest who knows whose whose interest there's in.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

But they want to be cautious. Right exactly you're not gonna find like too many hyperbolic economists. Well on externalities at least Spencer um to round out the fish chat I would like you to comment on Sea Spiracy and I only ask that because it did it did what ruffle a lot of feathers to drop a ridiculous cliche.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

I love Sea Spiracy honestly and I'll tell you why it's not because it was the most accurate documentary I've ever seen in terms of uh just the stats. Well it was predominantly very accurate and I've written about this and uh written about the industry responses and how many of those were less accurate than the film. Um you know there are some oversimplifications and things in the in the film but to me it's so rare to see a fishing documentary and I watch all of these when they come out that doesn't end with be a sustainable seafood shopper. You know and it actually interrogates these sustainable certification systems where they come from who's paying for them who they serve and that was so refreshing to me. So um yeah I appreciated it a lot and uh yeah I think it's a great film everyone should watch it you know it's not um it's not like a an academic thesis obviously but you can go on their website and you can see all the sources like the academic sources that they cited and if you want to know the details you can find them. I think the backlash to C Spiracy is also very informative of a pattern that a a pattern of corporate corruption in marine science that I think is very concerning. We see it in other industries too it's very strong in marine science and I know that from experience and um you know it's sort of exposed this rift between what we broadly call fishery science and uh marine ecology or conservation biology. Right? And um it sort of showed how a lot of the um a lot of the narratives that we uh are constantly consuming that we're hearing in media are things that are sort of spun by the fishing industry and the seafood industry that has a lot of interest in Getting us to keep eating the their products. So yeah, just keep that in mind as well.

SPEAKER_00 44:05

Yeah. It's good to hear some positivity around it because I know it got just loads and loads and loads of backlash. But I I quite enjoyed it as a totally impartial outsider. Well, I don't know, how impartial am I? I mean, I am at least invested in feeding myself good fish, because fish is nice, I suppose, but I don't know. I read that your pseudonym unpopular science was your own sort of ironic response to the damage that popular science had done to scientific communication. Um can you open up on this? Because that's not obvious to me what the damage might be that they've done.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

That's a thing I've been thinking about for a while. And uh I'm thinking about perhaps writing maybe a book on this. I think of it as uh so uh we have this pseudonym for science communication called uh SICOM, right? And there's so much academic um discussion on how to do effective science communication, right? But um there, I think, especially in the last 20 years, was a significant turn of what what I call a significant development of what I call psychon, right? Science condescension, where science communication became, and I I don't it's hard to pinpoint where it starts, right? It sort of starts with in a lot of times in a good place, right? Uh responding to uh false narratives about climate change, about vaccines and things like that. But I think corporations latched on and they noticed how these um sort of clap back, um condescending responses about science, you know, believe in science, don't be a science denier, how effective those were, and adopted them to weaponize their own propaganda. And we see this kind of condescending messaging used all the time in corporate propaganda. In like if you look at the uh the sustainable fisheries UW response to C Spiracy, like we were talking about. I think that's an excellent example of Sci-Con. This biting sort of like I don't know. I think you know what I mean, right? You think of like I fucking love science, right? Or you think of like uh Neil Tyson and Bill Nye, these like big science communicators who sort of got more sour over the years, but people loved it, right? They realized that they had tapped into something, and um it became really popular. So I think uh popular science and especially the monetization of science media has opened up these channels for corporations to push their own narratives.

SPEAKER_00 47:08

Give me um give me an example of the condescending response that you have in mind. You said like uh trust all science as one, but maybe open up on that a little bit more because I think that's a that's a sick insight for you to have.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

Um that you know it's hard to articulate these types of things, but because we kind of instinctually know it, but if you could try not to I mean we could look at so many different industries and the narratives, but a big one I think a lot of people will be familiar with is the controversy around genetic engineering. So um there was a big backlash, right, to the development of genetic engineering um and the food or humans? Uh food. Yes, so we're talking o's, right? Talking about GMOs. And um, you know, in in many ways, the scientific community's response was uh correct and well-founded. You know, there's no like there's no data to suggest that consuming something that's genetically engineered just because it's genetically engineered, is going to adversely impact your health, right? But what are they using genetic engineering for? The primary two things they're using it for are to develop herbicide-tolerant crops and to develop crops uh with uh what they call BT crops, which produce their own pesticides essentially. And there are major legitimate concerns about the way that this genetic engineering has um increased the use of herbicides, right? And it's not just talking about what we're ingesting in our food, but what it's actually designed to do, kill plants, right? And we're spraying it from planes, and we are killing, we're watching the monarch butterflies disappear, for instance, in um where I live in the States, because these uh because we're spraying glyphosate all over the place and we're killing milkweed, right? And that's what it's designed to do. And um we're watching uh bees disappearing, uh, native pollinators because of neonicotinoids, right? And so all of those nuanced, finer, very legitimate uh criticisms to the use of GMO and uh sorry, genetic engineering by um agricultural corporations are sort of buried under this hysterical media frenzy over GMOs. Right? And so uh we have you know people I think who uh you know may uh you know take those things seriously. Instead, they're sort of seeing these uh popular science um popular science publications saying, you know, the anti agribusiness people are just like anti-vaxxers, uh anti-vaxxers, right? And it we're sort of just like flattening this conversation, polarizing it, and that plays into corporate propaganda beautifully, I think.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

Just saying you're uh you can't understand it the same way we understand it because we're scientists, like that type of condescending message.

SPEAKER_01 50:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:26

This is uh it's great. It's a great coincidence you brought up GMOs. I mentioned to you uh before we started recording whether I could bring up Nasim Taleb, the precautionary principle in relation to Monsanto and G and GMOs, so it sounds perfect. Uh just to make sure I asked the right question. Are you familiar with Nasim Taleb?

SPEAKER_01 50:45

Um not by the name, but if if you describe it, I think I'll know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 50:49

He's the author of Full By Randomness, Black Swan, Anti-Fragile Skin of the Game. Okay. He's a finance guy, right? But he's also a mathematician, sort of academic mathematician. Anyway, he wrote an article, uh not an article, a scientific study, along with several other mathematicians, um, about this thing called the precautionary principle, which is just the idea that if you expose your if your risky exposure has the potential of ruin, you know, so death or complete wiping out of uh whatever it is the subject is that you're looking at, then the precautionary principle should be enacted, which is basically just to say, like, although you might not be able to prove something, you know, because the scientists will come back and say, look at all of our tests, they've been absolutely fine. If the risk is of is such, then you should enact the precautionary principle. And he uses specifically the case of GMOs, genetically modified organisms, which is food, um, to do this with. So it actually sounds like it's totally in your wheelhouse. Um he's another one of these not necessarily He's not a trust or science guy, but is a heavily he's heavily a scientist. You know, so it's like another another arm of this type of scientific communication that would strike against, I say, the Neil deGrasse Tyson, who just says, like, you're an idiot for believing something that doesn't strike exactly against the city. And he's not a biologist, right?

SPEAKER_01 52:14

And he's sort of famous for having bad biology takes. Behind a brilliant astrophysicist, of course. Um, and there's uh yeah, there's there's a lot of uh elements to this. And I I, you know, I'm not familiar with all of them, but we obviously I mean, we have these massive class action lawsuits, tens of thousands of uh agricultural and grounds workers who were exposed to high concentrations of not just glyphosate, but um compound compounds like Roundup, you know, which involve several uh different pesticides, right? And they can have sort of synergistic effects that can um you know induce I mean well we have tens of thousands of people with the same rare blood cancer, non-hoginous lymphoma, who have all been exposed to high concentrations of glyphosate. And they're and you know, uh Bear Monsanto lost every lawsuit they took to court and settled out of core with the rest of them. But we're still saying, oh, there's no health risk to to humans from these um yeah, from from glyphosate from Roundup. There's a lot of evidence to the contrary. And you know, there's oh yeah and they they like to focus on these things like, oh, is it in your Cheerios? You know, are you getting enough trace amounts of glyphosate to give you blood cancer in your Cheerios? I don't think I they're probably right when they say uh that you'd you're not at high risk for developing uh blood cancer from eating, you know, the from the consumption of these products, because obviously the rates of those uh we could we would imagine the rates of uh that condition to be higher because it's it's everywhere. But what they don't want us to look at are these, you know, massive class action lawsuits of these uh agriculture and groundskeeper workers. So yeah, I would say as a precautionary principle we should and many countries have banned uh a lot of these pesticides, but they just have incredible political influence in uh the United States, especially, and uh a lot of countries as well. But like we have, you know, they they've literally gotten people uh removed from EPA evaluations, they've ghost-written scientific studies and articles in major publications like Reuters. So yeah, there's a ton of corruption going on. And then of course they'll hire, you know, like our beloved science communicators like Neil Tyson to do their documentaries and stuff. And if you watch the document of food evolution I'm talking about, it's again, it's primarily correct, like I say, but there's it the the lies are by omission, right? The things they leave out, so you don't hear about these other things.

SPEAKER_00 55:22

You uh explaining just then how say a big class action might be settled outside of court. Um it strikes me of I don't know if you saw Black Waters recently, it's a um new movie. Oh yeah, it looks at DuPont Teflon and DuPont, exactly. But it looks good. So it's f it it it it's it's amazing because I I forget when it's set, but my gut wants to tell me it's 60s, 50s, 60s, maybe later actually, 70s, 80s. Anyway, um you know it tells this great story of obviously a giant multinational who creates chemicals, which you could easily just supplement in as a giant multinational agricultural firm who might make pesticides or who might just produce corn themselves, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 56:08

Um a lot of them do both, right?

SPEAKER_00 56:12

The Yeah, and the amount of the amount of uh money, time and deception and PR agencies that went into them uh to allow them to continue to make Teflon for as long as they could, and they even got the local community on their side where the whistleblower became the enemy, you you know it's impossible to not look forward into the future and imagine similar things happening when people start talking about genetically modified food. Oh no, we'll just take out this strain because hey, that's bad for you.

SPEAKER_01 56:42

And um, right, or we'll stop using this pesticide and we'll use this other one, or like what they did with the um polyfluorinated alc or polyfluoroal alkylated the PFAS chemicals, right, like Taflon. Finally put some regulations on there. Great, and now they have this very similar polymer that's legal to use, and we just can't but they're always just moving the goalposts.

SPEAKER_00 57:07

Well, with all that in uh mind, obviously, now we've probably hit on a lot of the key strokes that explains the agri the supply chain of the agricultural industry, you know, from a large sort of viewpoint. I was wondering if you could do something for me, and forgive me if there does if this doesn't make any sense, but if you could give the audience the agricultural complex red pill. You know, what is the what is the truth? What is the you know, because obviously the blue pill is the idea that all of our food is amazing, the farmer gets paid well, the animal is healthy, he's killed in a humane way, and it's fresh when it comes to your plate. That's the blue pill. What's the agricultural red pill?

SPEAKER_01 57:57

I think it's essentially what uh we all know deep down, and it's the opposite of everything you said, right? The the farmer is well, the farm worker is exploited, right? It's obvious we often t refer to the landowner as the farmer who's sort of the boss, right? But the farm workers are exploited horrifically, right? A lot of them are um a lot of them are enslaved. This is very common in the fishing fishing industry. Um uh very commonly undocumented, they don't have uh legal rights to get um to vote, to you know, do all sorts of things to participate in society if they're feeding us. Um the food is you know treated with all sorts of um pesticides and things that are having huge global scale effects on flora and on global ecology. We're using excessively using fertilizers, flushing into our uh oceans, sucking the oxygen out of the water through this process of uh harmful algal blooms like we mentioned earlier. The animals are effectively tortured. They're slaughtered at a you know, fraction of their natural lifespan. Um they're only kept alive long enough that t to be slaughtered, to get fat enough that we would want to eat them.

SPEAKER_00 59:37

The female cow is pregnant her entire life.

SPEAKER_01 59:40

Right. And then the male cow, if he's born into the dairy industry, he becomes veal, right? They're the same industry. And that's the same in the egg laying industry. So like these industries where we're exploiting the reproductive systems of animals. We don't like the males are regarded as waste, so we'll just throw the b uh the male chicks into a grinder, and maybe they'll come out in a pink sludge that will turn into a chicken nugget or something, or a small part of a chicken nugget. Um Yeah, and then at the top, of course, we have these massy massive multinational corporations that control our politics, control our media, and I'm not saying they like own that, but in in a lot of senses they do. Like so um they have tremendous influence over our politics and media, and we're also um killing wildlife, right, to make space for agriculture, whether it's in on land or in the sea, right? We're constantly burning down the Amazon, we are shooting the wolves, we are uh catching all the dredging up the sardines with fine meshnets and catching all the dolphins so that we can develop fish farms. So the food system is horrific, honestly, and the you know the antidote is um, you know, it's hard to agree upon, but I look at I look at it from fundamental principles, principles of ecology, right? So the lower that we eat on the food chain, the less waste we incur. So and I think this is a basic concept that we don't really get taught in school, but it's really important for understanding how the world works. Every level you go up in the food chain, uh you create waste, right? Like as a human, you digest your food, and it's typically 10% between trophic levels. So when we're eating at the second level of the food chain, if we're eating cows or something, we're creating a tremendous amount of waste. If we're eating salmon or uh tuna or something, or we're talking about like the fourth, fifth level of the food chain, the waste is enormous. So, yeah, we gotta shift to plant-based foods, and this is uh plant-based agricultural systems, right? It's not just about our consumer choices, although in a lot of cases that's the only thing we can do as individuals, but we gotta advocate for political change as well. We need to um yeah, and this is this is mainstream science, you know, it's not like vegan agenda. We're talking about, you know, our leading ecologists and climatologists saying like we that agriculture is the number one threat to uh ecosystems around the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:42

Uh like soil biod oh sorry, soil biodiversity is the most uh at-threat tipping point, I think.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:51

Yeah, it's I mean it's hard to gauge them, but yeah, people have definitely made that argument. Uh meat industry is could if if we eliminated fossil fuel, it could put us over 1.5 degrees warming by itself by 2050. So, yeah, we've got to change the system, and there are millions of people, corporations, and media outlets out there who will tell you what you want to hear, that we can that we can keep on going the way that we're going, and we can keep on eating and farming and fishing the way that we are, and they are lying.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:28

You know, Spencer, I think you said uh I think you sort of broke the fourth wall perfectly at the start there, where you said we all we all sort of know it to be the case. Which is probably largely true. The specifics, not as much. I doubt the audience knew just how foul, you know, say a farmed fish might be. But they know that their cow is foul, their chicken is raised in a coop with 10,000 other chickens, and he never in his entire life goes one second without touching another chicken, it's so crowded, for example. Um but I think ultimately what you're talking about at the end there, you know, this idea of change, I'm afraid that, and this might just be a pessimistic worldview, but I'm afraid that demand is always going to be a stronger force than supply. And you can think about it similarly with the drug trade. No matter if you just look at the drug trade, the amount of money, time and effort and bodies that has gone into trying to restrict the supply of the drug trade, salting giant swathes of the Amazon, destroying and removing cartel after cartel after informant, the vacuum just allows for another because the demand is still strong. And so I'm afraid that as long as people still decide to eat as much meat as they do, I think uh no matter how bad the practices are, no matter how close to the tipping point and over the tipping point we go, they will still eat. I actually think the strongest argument shouldn't be a climate one, it should be a health one. It should be like, look at the food you're eating and look how bad it is for your body, and look how bad it is for your brain development, for your child's body. I really think that is the strongest argument just because uh the last 20, 30 years, Cowspiracy is an old movie now. I thought that was like going to be a big sort of change. Um But ultimately it didn't do much, did it?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:18

I mean, well different strokes for different folks, as they say, and there are lots of uh new uh health documentaries and and things like that talking about these issues that uh you're talking about, and I'm not an expert in that stuff, and you know, people should check those out too, and you know, there's rigorous debate around all these things. Um in terms of the allegory, though, to the the drug trade, I don't know how much our approach is uh perhaps you know we're taking the wrong supply side approach, right? We're using these carceral punitive systems like the drug trade. is uh or the the war on drugs, right, as we call it in the United States, is intimately related to the um the huge increase in mass incarceration, right? So the the prison industry, right? And they're they're they work together. They're intertwined. The drug industry in the prison industry, I mean we have examples of cops putting the drugs on the streets and arresting people. And so are we are we really going after the cartels? Or are we just going after the drug users or the coca farmers and things like that. So um yeah I mean perhaps there are uh are better uh ways to approach structural solutions from the supply side but obviously demand is i incredibly important as well and I think that can be also underemphasized. It's a hell of a problem.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:54

Everything it's it's a it's a hell of a problem isn't it and uh I suppose the sad state is sad the sad state of affairs is that it's actually just another one of these horrible problems which we can go every single day of our lives totally ignorant to and not really realize um I have a video on my channel which is like things that actually matter and you know it talks about the fact that human trafficking is as large as it's ever been um you know the threat of North Korea is as large as it's ever been it's a lit it's a legitimate famine state. You know the best the strongest North Korean soldier who stands on the demilitarized zone across from the South Korean soldier is six inches shorter. That's the best the strongest one they have uh you you know you talk about that we've spoken a lot about the um uh the agricultural industry I think that's for sure up there um you know and we can really go on you talk about the kleptocracy of offshore finance and financial secrecy that's probably the biggest cancer on the world it enables the scale of so many criminal organizations so yeah like you can get a little bit depressive when you think about these giant problems of the world. I was recently in Veracruz in Mexico which is on the Caribbean's um side and a mate of mine r runs a runs a cafe there and so we went up uh to see where he got his coffee beans from and it was from these super organic farmers and it was such a great day because we got to sort of walk through his farm and his mates' farms because they all sort of pull their beans and super organic more expensive coffee you know 100% Arabic stuff and he showed his farm side by side with other farms that were growing the robuster the monoculture like they had chopped down all of the um they had chopped down all of the plant species essentially that wasn't directly in benefit of the coffee bean and what you're left with is just this like um what do you call it when someone's so skinny you see their bones? emaciated emaciated exactly you have this emaciated soil and the water just runs right through it because the root life isn't there and obviously the final product is of far less quality they're using a lot more pesticides and you see the farm side by side I have a photo of it it's like mind blowing because you see healthy unhealthy yet the unhealthy makes more or more of the money and now Nestlé's coming in and asking to buy all of their land together and they're probably going to sell because hey they're the first step on the supply chain and money's the biggest hardest thing for them to fight. And it's kind of just like a it was a sad experience to go through because you see firsthand how someone trying to do it the right way is just going to fail in the face of big business.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:42

Yeah there's a million examples like that and um yeah I mean generally I think this is the problem of um this is proper the the problem of uh building our food system on profit in capitalism right are we going to do what's the most efficient yes always what's good well not necessarily even what's the most efficient but what's makes the most money right most financially efficient that's always the answer. If it has benefits to environmental public health those are not considered in the equation so as long as the only deciding factor is profit that's that's going to be the result.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:32

Yeah um just it came to my mind just then but before I go into the final questions what it do you have examples top of mind of um non-monocultures that have achieved economies of scale I mean yeah well it depends what you define as scale right but obviously like we could say I mean we could look at uh the the biggest thing that comes to my mind is the uh you know indigenous tradition of three sisters farming right this corn squash and beans it's a crop rotation the corn stalk provides a scaffold for the beans and then the beans fix nitrogen into the soil and the squash grows through the winter and it's a self-replenishing cycle and this was widespread across uh what they call Turtle Island.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:27

Yeah which is the North American continent um and yeah fed millions and millions of people before uh European contact and um yeah they um obviously still practice it today and um yeah you know did achieve a I guess you you could call an economy of scale um yeah and there you know there's other things like that um I'm not incredibly well versed in them but yeah that that would be the first thing that comes to my mind.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:01

Nice fascinating well Spencer look I I think that was uh really really insightful and I'm sorry if I asked you to go into too many places that you weren't ready to go but like I said I've been hungry to have this sort of chat for such a long time and I guess there's just so few experts out there. I emailed that woman you suggested I did and I'll follow up but thank you I really do appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:23

Cool yeah you bet. What's your closing question?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:27

Closing questions it's a couple um you know obviously I can get rid of this one specifically if there's nothing from it but is there any significance to the capybara to you since it's the your backbone on Twitter?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:38

Yeah yeah so the capybara is or um in Latin America and Spanish they called um they call them right um there is in particular a uh yeah there's a Ritzy housing development outside of Buenos Aires in Argentina um on a wetland called the Parana and uh it's the native it's the ancestral home of Los Carpinchos, right? The Capibaras and um these uh this wealthy housing development has uh increasingly have this problem where the capabaras are coming in and they're uh just eating everyone's lawns because you know they have uh they have nothing to eat otherwise you know so they're going in and you know basically saying uh this is I'll just eat this lawn then and people try to shoe them away and they don't give a shit. They're fearless. And so the Carapinchas have sort of become a symbol of um working class resistance against um against powerful against you know elite against power um in Latin America and um yeah you you'll see 'em online it's a big thing in Latin America.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:07

So nice cool. That was funny I had no idea. Um what is a moment in your life which when you're looking back on it you just can't believe that you are a part of it and let me know if you want more context for the question. In a good way or a bad way?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:25

It's up to you um I'll do a good one. Um I think back to uh the Standing Rock resistance in 2016 into the Dakota Access Pipeline. Um the time that I spent there was life-changing and surreal and I learned so much and was was really humbled. It I sort of uh I sometimes compare it to the rebel base on Hoff. I was there in the winter and you know everyone was building everyone had different roles some people were uh working in the kitchen and feeding people and some people were um doing frontline direct action and some people were medics taking care of people who were injured, you know, shot with rubber bullets or inhaled a bunch of tear gas and stuff like that. And uh it was just incredible to see um so many thousands of people come together to um take direct action against something that we knew it was um you know gonna kill us ultimately from climate change, from water pollution, you know just another drop in the bucket obviously but um yeah it it was incredible and um yeah it changed the way that I I think about a lot of things that's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:02

I had no idea you were part of that. Did was it successful?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:06

Well yes um it's kind of complicated because originally O Obama cancelled the um pipeline and then um Trump reinstated it but then uh the courts ordered it to shut down and the last I've heard is that it still hadn't been but essentially yeah the courts ruled on the side of the um standing rock nation who is obviously according to the US Constitution a sovereign nation we have a treaty with them um and they said yeah we don't want the pipeline on our land and that's essentially the end of that it's the law it's very simple. The treaty is the ultimate law of the land. So um yeah I think it was successful and not just because of Standing Rock the not just this pipeline. I think it sort of sparked this global mass movement uh direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure and we've seen all sorts of uh pipelines and oil fields uh defeated by using the same tactics and I think it's perhaps one of the most effective uh or the most effective um strategy that we have to resist fossil fuel development. There was a recent um report by the Indigenous Environmental Network that used uh news reports and and put together a list of all these uh you know indigenous led direct action campaigns against fossil fuel infrastructure and estimated that they had prevented 779 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution um through these strategies and tactics. So I think it was incredibly successful. Nice who was the who was the corporation on the other end of it Energy Transfer Partners was the corporation behind it but um you know they're part of a larger network of the the ones that build the infrastructure are connected to the ones that uh extract the oil right in the tar sands and everything. So there's a massive network and it's it's not just the corporation you know and the government was on their side of course that they pulled cops from like I want to say it was like 14 different states to protect this corporation.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:28

And yeah just brutalized people like a woman got uh almost lost her arm with a concussion grenade like uh saw people get shot in the face with rubber bullets and you know they like laced the water cannons with tear gas and were spraying them and they had this massive um uh counterintelligence um uh surveillance campaign and I you know I I saw some of this there and I didn't even realize until the investigations came out later but you know you would see obviously this helicopters flying over everywhere but dudes walking around with like 360 cameras just looking like yeah you know you could walk in of course and that you know it's very hard to like screen out infiltrators and stuff but um yeah that was a huge problem but yeah just sort of revealed the extent to that to which they would go to uh stop it just doing completely illegal shit it's wild it makes me think so much about how much crony capitalism uh was how much the crony capitalists got away with you know just even twenty years ago let alone in the fifties sixties let alone at the turn of the century you know it's um it's interesting or now I don't know if it's I don't know if it's better now yeah or now uh true true but but I I would definitely say it's better now because there's just way more access to information and is right they get away with I mean the response to that. Exactly exactly um Spencer looking forward into the future what is a country that you're extremely bullish on a country Olivia I I'd say over everything um the the way that they overcame like the un the United States just two years ago successfully enacted a coup and installed and this has been done hundreds of times by the United States, you know, throughout the especially in Latin America but throughout the world um and they beat back the coup and they took their government back and they formed a plurinational state of all these indigenous nations and they wrote a new constitution and the uh Cochabamba Accord that they um developed I think serves as a excellent foil to um our Paris Agreements and the COP, you know, like the uh industrialized nations and what we think of as taking climate change and our environmental crises seriously are not really doing so.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:20

And um yeah I just really um admire a lot of the social programs and environmental programs and um public service programs that the country has put together and obviously they're not perfect and there's things to criticize and they're they've had failures. But you know a lot of those are in the face of uh massive resistance from global capital and from global uh governments from you know from powerful nations and um yeah I you just gotta you just gotta hand it to them.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:57

I think it's uh really inspiring watching them uh you know forge their own path nice amazing that is the first Bolivia entrance we have uh so I'm stoked to see it hasn't been too many Latin American unfortunately my my own pick is Mexico so I think the two of us are really in the Latin American there's I a lot of positive uh developments in Mexico in recent years I think in uh in in Mexico but in Latin America in recent years. Yeah I'm also bullish on Belize uh Costa Rica and I'm really excited to see uh what happens um in um uh not Peru but yes Peru but particularly um Honduras where uh the people just elected uh the wife of the guy that we cooed right amazing like similar thing to Bolivia so yeah I mean of course there's gonna be it's gonna be incredibly difficult in the face of uh you know the real power centers and everything but yeah um it's positive to see what's going on in Latin America nice uh finally Spencer this is my favorite question if you could listen to a conversation between any two people of history dead or alive no language barriers so if you were to listen to a podcast who would uh it be between between two people I think it'd be really interesting to hear a conversation between someone like and this is you know my bias living in this part of the world but you know sort of two uh very opposing worldviews um someone like Sitting Bull and Andrew Jackson right and I would I would like to hear what he has to say okay well Andrew Jackson was one of the presidents of the United States uh massacred the indigenous people uh um and Sitting Bull was a um a chief who you know um sort of withstood that um that genocide and um I would just be interested to see what he would say to him or if he would talk to him at all.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:17

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:18

That's a really hard question. Cool. That's a fascinating one. That's a fascinating one. Um well look Spencer thank you so much man I appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:26

Yeah thanks for having me again uh it was a good it was a good time. Nice one glad people hear about these issues.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:33

Yeah totally me too. Well I hope you still have uh your appetites honestly at the end of the day we just have to sort of be honest about the food that we eat. If as much as 75% of the world's antibiotics are used to as pr as a preventative measure in our agriculture in the pigs we eat in the cows we eat in the fish we eat in the chicken that we eat uh then what are we really eating? We're just uh sort of developing these back um these bacteria resistant animals that we're then consuming ourselves and so uh it's quite disgusting the whole way down you start looking at the supply chain more closely it gets even more horrific you learn that most of the deforestation happens simply for the case of growing soy in the Amazon and the soil um and the soil density nutritious value is as such in the Amazon since it's a rainforest there's not as Spencer said there's not burning that sort of replenishes the nutritious uh soil you end up just growing super low quality not nutrient dense soy that's then shipped across the world fed to our uh animals that we end up eating who are prevented from being sick at all costs you know female cows are pregnant their entire lives um there's just nothing natural about it anywhere so it's all quite disgusting uh but nonetheless uh I hope that was interesting to you and if you want to hear another interview with Spencer he was featured on the Jordan Harbinger program which is probably my favorite podcast so definitely check it out uh there as well finally um since you are still here listening to me my very generous and dear listener I want to just make the appeal to you to subscribe like comment review and uh make some noise in the various algorithms because as you know as I've said before the algorithms are in the Stone Edge and the only uh variable that they're looking at is how many five star reviews or written reviews are attached to a podcast. So if you're listening on Spotify do me a solid and just review it. Just leave the star review and set it and forget it. You never have to do it again. Once it's once it's done it's one and done. On the Apple same story if you could just swipe into that app, leave the stars and write something as well it carries extra weight there. But it doesn't matter on the appeals is just to I don't know pat my own ego to have the show build a little bit but ultimately it's cool. Just lucky and happy that I happen to have people listening. Anyway so yeah cheers to you you're a legend and um I suppose I've written this here I may as well just double down on it you know pull people over on the street um go to a traffic jam knock on windows um knock on doors go door knocking and just uh spread the good word hey have you subscribed and left a review on the Curious Worldview. So give that a go and junior for next week I think Danny Miranda the NFT podcast next week but who knows I got a big backlog now so I have to sort of get the work to get them out there. Nonetheless cheers ciao your legends