Joe Rogan Experience #1540 - Frank von Hippel

1. 0:01 – 3:03

   Austin studio changeover + catching up on family and aging

   1. NANarrator0:01

      (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. FHFrank von Hippel0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Boom. Hello, Frank.

   4. FHFrank von Hippel0:13

      Hi.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      This was a false start. That's why it's, like, weird.

   6. FHFrank von Hippel0:16

      (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      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.

   8. FHFrank von Hippel0:23

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:23

      That's what I'm, 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, I, from the time I was saying, "Maybe I should move to Austin," to we're in Austin in studio, it was, like, two months?

   10. FHFrank von Hippel0:41

       Less. Six-

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:42

       Less.

   12. FHFrank von Hippel0:42

       I think it was six weeks.

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       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. (laughs)

   14. FHFrank von Hippel0:52

       I think it's awesome.

   15. JRJoe Rogan0:54

       It's definitely weird. It's just a big shock from people that saw... Like, your brother was, uh, at the old studio, and the old studio was, you know, very conventional. It was like a curtain and a brick wall and the American flag. It was, like, pretty, pretty normal. This is, uh, there's a big difference. Some people are bad with change.

   16. FHFrank von Hippel1:15

       Well, you have this lovely, uh, Asian, uh-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:18

       That's Ganesh.

   18. FHFrank von Hippel1:18

       Ganesh, that's right, from India.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:20

       Remover of obstacles.

   20. FHFrank von Hippel1:21

       Yeah, my daughter actually went to her last year of high school in India.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:24

       I bought that in Thailand, actually.

   22. FHFrank von Hippel1:26

       Oh, okay.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:26

       Yeah, I bought it in Thailand and had it shipped over. Y- so what did your daughter do in India?

   24. FHFrank von Hippel1:31

       She did her last years of high school there.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:33

       That's crazy.

   26. FHFrank von Hippel1:34

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:34

       Why'd she do that?

   28. FHFrank von Hippel1:36

       Uh, my oldest went to his last years of high school in Costa Rica and loved it.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:39

       Wow.

   30. FHFrank von Hippel1:40

       And, and so she wanted to do something similar, and, uh, she went to this great school called, called Woodstock School, which is in the foothills of the Himalayas. Had a great time.
2. 3:03 – 5:37

   A surprising gift: fossilized walrus baculum (penis bone) reveal

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:03

      Yeah, it gets ya. So what's in the tube there? What you got there?

   2. FHFrank von Hippel3:05

      It's a present for you.

   3. JRJoe Rogan3:06

      Oh. Really?

   4. FHFrank von Hippel3:07

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan3:08

      Oh, wow. What is this? Is this a bone? Is this a human bone?

   6. FHFrank von Hippel3:16

      No.

   7. JRJoe Rogan3:17

      What, what animal is this?

   8. FHFrank von Hippel3:17

      So, so I'm a biologist, and I brought you a gift from my home state of Alaska. Can you figure out what it is?

   9. JRJoe Rogan3:24

      Well, first of all, it's fossilized.

   10. FHFrank von Hippel3:25

       It is. You're right.

   11. JRJoe Rogan3:26

       I can tell-

   12. FHFrank von Hippel3:26

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan3:27

       ... because of the weight.

   14. FHFrank von Hippel3:27

       Yes. Thousands of years old.

   15. JRJoe Rogan3:29

       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.

   16. FHFrank von Hippel3:35

       Right.

   17. JRJoe Rogan3:35

       It's a representation of the bone that's been absorbed.

   18. FHFrank von Hippel3:37

       It's been mineralized.

   19. JRJoe Rogan3:38

       Yes.

   20. FHFrank von Hippel3:38

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan3:39

       So I was trying to... She, she was like, "Wait, but it's a bone."

   22. FHFrank von Hippel3:41

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan3:41

       'Cause, uh, (clears throat) they have a fossil at her school, and I was trying to s- say, "See how that looks not like bone?"

   24. FHFrank von Hippel3:48

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan3:48

       "It's 'cause 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."

   26. FHFrank von Hippel3:56

       Yeah, so I love fossils. I collect fossils. And-

   27. JRJoe Rogan3:58

       This is so heavy.

   28. FHFrank von Hippel3:59

       Yeah, and I thought I'd bring you a fossil.

   29. JRJoe Rogan4:02

       Um, let me guess. Uh, I wanna say, like s- it's fairly thin, so I would say, like, some sort of, like, a, a horse or something or a cow or...

   30. FHFrank von Hippel4:12

       No, no.
3. 5:37 – 7:33

   ‘No square centimeter untouched’: global chemical pollution and Arctic deposition

   1. JRJoe Rogan5:37

      My pleasure. Your book, The Chemical Age, uh, touches on a lot of subjects that, uh, I find very fascinating, particularly pesticides. Um, I am, I'm con- consistently terrified of pesticides. I ran into a man once, uh, 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 the, a metal bone. And he told me he got bone cancer from, um, pesticides they use on a golf course that got into the local water supply, and a bunch of people in that area got cancer. And there was, like, some large scale, uh, lawsuit against the, I, I don't know if it was against the chemical company or the, the golf course or both. But, uh, I remember thinking, like, "Whoa." Like, I didn't, okay, I didn't even think of that. Like, of course if you're gonna have all that green grass, you have to do something about the weeds, you have to do something about the bugs.... that, all that stuff is terrifying. When, when I was listening to your podcast, the Science History podcast, and your friend was interviewing you. Who was it?

   2. FHFrank von Hippel6:39

      Pete Myers.

   3. JRJoe Rogan6:40

      Pete Myers was interviewing you.

   4. FHFrank von Hippel6:42

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan6:42

      And you were talking about the prevalence of these pesticides and chemicals that we use all over the world, and he said... I, I think his exact quote was, "Am, am I wrong in saying that there's not a, 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.

   6. FHFrank von Hippel7:06

      Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

   7. JRJoe Rogan7:08

      That's insane.

   8. FHFrank von Hippel7:09

      Yeah. And you think of... You've been to Alaska.

   9. JRJoe Rogan7:12

      Yeah.

   10. FHFrank von Hippel7:12

       And you, 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.

4. 7:33 – 9:46

   Global distillation / grasshopper effect: why the poles become chemical ‘sinks’

   1. JRJoe Rogan7:33

      And you were explaining the, the, 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.

   2. FHFrank von Hippel7:45

      Yeah, exactly. If you go back and you look at an old s- 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 volatilizes, some of it evaporates into a gas. And then s- 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 m- 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, that some a- some portion of them will volatilize. 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 volatilize 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, 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, the... 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 mo-... The animals with the highest concentrations of these certain kinds of, 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.

5. 9:46 – 11:58

   Environmental injustice in Arctic communities: contaminated traditional foods and breast milk

   1. JRJoe Rogan9:46

      Wow, so polar bears. So and, so when they, they test these animals... So if the people in, 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 gonna harm them?

   2. FHFrank von Hippel10:04

      No, it, it's a, it's a really sad case of environmental injustice, because you have subsistence peoples, the, 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, 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, it's just grossly unfair when you think about it, because they never use these chemicals. They didn't benefit economically from these chemicals, and yet they're subject to the, some of the highest concentrations in the world.

   3. JRJoe Rogan10:45

      And you were also saying that their breast milk is contaminated with it.

   4. FHFrank von Hippel10:50

      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, the women on Baffin Island, their breast milk contained 10 to 20 times higher concentrations of chemicals like DDT and PCBs and, 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, that actually were, were poisoning the peop-... Or 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. Uh, it's because o- of this problem. It's called global distillation because of this fact that it's, it's like a still, the way that it works.

6. 11:58 – 13:31

   Local Arctic contamination: Cold War defense sites, leaking barrels, and ‘green chemistry’ solutions

   1. JRJoe Rogan11:58

      Now, w- we know this problem exists. Is there a solution that's on the table or a possible solution, a theoretical solution to try to extract that?

   2. FHFrank von Hippel12:07

      Yeah, and actually the problem is kind of twofold. So we've talked about one aspect of it, which is this atmospheric transport of contaminants. But the other aspect of it is there are also thousands of locally contaminated sites in the Arctic. I do a lot of work on this, things like formerly used defense sites from the Cold War. So the military built thousands of these, US military, Europe, Russian military. And these sites have...... terrible problems with contamination. And typically, when the military pulled out of them, they just left everything behind. We have sites we've wor- worked in Alaska where there's just fields of barrels, and you don't know what's in the barrels, and they're leaking and, and you know, you test it, and you find there's, there's all kinds of nasty things, flame retardants and pesticides and PCBs. So-

   3. JRJoe Rogan12:51

      So it's been there a long time.

   4. FHFrank von Hippel12:52

      Been there for decades. And unfortunately, these chemicals, many of them persist for decades. That's why they were so wonderful, you know. PCBs were so wonderful because they were stable, they could last for decades, but that's also why they're so bad, because they're carcinogenic, they disrupt the hormone system, they cause a lot of different problems. So in terms of what can we do about it, the main thing is to not be using these chemicals and to be using... There's a field called green chemistry which seeks to instead use safe chemicals in place of these toxic chemicals. But in terms of cleaning up, yeah, there's also things to do to clean up. We're involved with that in some places, and it's an important thing to do, but we have to stop the problem even before it gets going.

7. 13:31 – 19:43

   History of pesticides: from arsenic/lead to WWII-era synthetics and DDT’s tradeoffs

   1. JRJoe Rogan13:31

      When did this problem start? Like when did human beings start using large-scale pesticides?

   2. FHFrank von Hippel13:36

      So large-scale pesticide use started in the 1880s, and at that time, they were based on metals and metalloids, so naturally occurring toxic metals that would kill insects or kill fungal pests, things like that. And those were actually quite dangerous, things like lead and arsenic, uh, being used in, in, uh, these pesticides. They were dangerous because they ended up on the food. So you'd buy an apple and if you didn't wash it well, you could get a, a dose of lead poisoning. That continued until about World War II. In World War II, we made a dramatic shift from using these metal-based products to using synthetic organic compounds. So in World War II, we saw the origin of the organochlorine compounds and the organophosphate compounds, and, and, and those really became the basis for pesticide use then, and then they were broadcast all over the environment following World War II and until today.

   3. JRJoe Rogan14:30

      So in the 1880s, when they were using, they were using lead and they were using arsenic, what were they, were they combating locusts? Like what were they, what were they trying to kill?

   4. FHFrank von Hippel14:39

      So the very first commercial pesticide was actually a copper, uh, based pesticide and it was used in France to stop the, the mildew that was destroying the vineyards, and once it was found that it could destroy, it's, it's called a, uh, a water mold. Once it was found that it could destroy the water mold and save the vineyards, scientists realized you could also use it against the potato blight, which had caused the famine in Ireland in the 1840s and other famines around the world. So it became a very powerful tool to prevent famine. And you know, one thing I like to look back on is, is you can think, "Why did people poison the world like this with these horrible things?" But really, their motivations initially were quite positive. They were trying to stop famine. Y- Ireland had just been through this devastating famine. They were trying to stop infectious diseases that were vectored by insects, things like malaria and yellow fever. So the motivation was good, um, but unfortunately, the use for public health, it, it became... Instead of just using it for public health, we started using it in the house and for convenience for everything.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:40

      It is really crazy when you think that the human species has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and it took till 1880 before we decided to fuck everything up-

   6. FHFrank von Hippel15:49

      (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:49

      ... with pesticides.

   8. FHFrank von Hippel15:50

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:50

      That's a long time.

   10. FHFrank von Hippel15:52

       Yeah, and we fucked things up pretty fast-

   11. JRJoe Rogan15:54

       Yeah.

   12. FHFrank von Hippel15:54

       ... because now we have a world that is... Like you said, anywhere you go in this world, you're going to find contaminated animals. You go to Antarctica and you measure pesticides in penguins and their eggs and you'll find very high concentrations.

   13. JRJoe Rogan16:07

       And are they seeing, uh, health effects of the Inuit people and the people that eat these animals? Is it... Is it having a detrimental effect on them?

   14. FHFrank von Hippel16:16

       It does. Uh, and in fact, the cancer rates are quite high, uh, among the, the people who are subsistence hunters in the Arctic. And that's really how I got involved with this kind of work is that people reported very high cancer rates, also high rates of developmental disorders that could be due to these, these chemicals disrupting development in the womb. And, and so there, there are groups who bring together teams of scientists to work on this. I was brought in as an ecotoxicologist who worked on some aspects of this. And, uh, but yeah, there's quite a few health problems associated with this.

   15. JRJoe Rogan16:48

       And are, are these subsistence hunters, are they free of all the other problems that many Inuit folks have in terms of like cigarettes and alcohol and a lot of people that have been introduced to some of the vices of the Western world?

   16. FHFrank von Hippel17:01

       No. You know, it's the same kind of problems also with these communities in Alaska. There's high tobacco use and, and a lot of problems with alcohol, and-

   17. JRJoe Rogan17:08

       So how do they parse whether or not it's-

   18. FHFrank von Hippel17:10

       Yeah. It's-

   19. JRJoe Rogan17:11

       Is it, is it a contributing factor, you think?

   20. FHFrank von Hippel17:13

       It's a contributing factor, and it's very hard to parse it out. And actually, this is the justification the government of- often uses to say, "Well, it's not the contaminants from this military site that's causing the problem." They'll say, "Look, the cancer rates are no higher in this village that's next to the military site than they are in this village that's away from the military site." But you know, uh, it, it's, it's a... You can't actually solve the problem with epidemiology. We're talking about tiny communities.

   21. JRJoe Rogan17:38

       Mm-hmm.

   22. FHFrank von Hippel17:38

       It might be... The villages I work in typically are no more than 800 people.

   23. JRJoe Rogan17:42

       Oh, wow.

   24. FHFrank von Hippel17:42

       And so how can you do a proper study of a rare health effect when you have a small population? So I'm sure it's contributing to the health problems, and unfortunately, people use the fact that there are these other issues that cause health problems like smoking in order to ju- justify not doing anything about the pollution.

   25. JRJoe Rogan17:59

       And when you... So when you go to these villages, uh, is it uniform that most of them are using cigarettes and alcohol? Is it-

   26. FHFrank von Hippel18:08

       So I- it's not uniform. So in Alaska, actually most of the villages are legally dry, and, uh, and so it's, it's illegal to have alcohol, it's illegal to bring in alcohol.

   27. JRJoe Rogan18:18

       Really?

   28. FHFrank von Hippel18:18

       But many people do or they home brew and-

   29. JRJoe Rogan18:20

       Is this because the village has realized the problem with this in the community?

   30. FHFrank von Hippel18:25

       Yeah, exactly. And so they have passed their own laws. They're, you know, they're... They have their sovereign governments and they've passed their own laws to make their villages dry. Uh, but there are still problems, of course, with alcohol and drugs, even in dry communities.
8. 19:43 – 28:08

   Farmworker exposure and ‘regrettable tradeoffs’: DDT → organophosphates (nerve agents)

   1. JRJoe Rogan19:43

      Um, now, you were telling me before that you also work with some Native American tribes as well. Is this, uh, for the same issue?

   2. FHFrank von Hippel19:51

      Uh, so different kinds of contaminants. I'm doing work down on the Arizona-Mexico border that's mostly on pesticide, uh, use and we're working with migrant farm workers there. And so if, if you think about the, the, um, pesticides that were common when we were kids and, and a little bit earlier, these organochlorine pesticides like DDT, they were pretty safe to handle and, uh, the problem was that they were destroying wildlife, causing species to go extinct. It's why the bald eagle almost went extinct, why the peregrine falcon almost went extinct. It was from DDT and, uh, and so countries including the United States phased those chemicals out. They were replaced by the organophosphate chemicals, pesticides, and these were developed by Nazi scientists during World War II. They're very similar to the Nazi, uh, nerve gas poisons like tabun and sarin and, uh, those chemicals are incredibly toxic but they break down faster in the environment. So we ended up trade- doing a trade-off where the, uh, the organochlorines would end up as residues on food and consumers would, would end up with, to unacceptable levels. Like if you go back into the 1960s, the average American had 12 parts per million DDT in their body fat and that's a toxic level of DDT, and that was the average. So-

   3. JRJoe Rogan21:09

      Wow.

   4. FHFrank von Hippel21:10

      ... really terrible consequences for health. So in order to prevent that, we switched to organophosphates but then that caused another problem because then we're asking the farm workers instead of using this relatively safe chemical to use, to use something that's quite dangerous. A lot of people get killed in, uh, during application and the farm workers are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They're typically migrants from Mexico or other parts of Latin America. They're coming up, they're working incredibly hard, they don't have the right protective equipment and then they're spraying these chemicals that are incredibly poisonous. So I also work on that, on, on, uh, health effects of, of pesticides, um, in the border region both with migrant farm worker communities and with some of the tribes there.

   5. JRJoe Rogan21:54

      Now are these... Are they absorbing this stuff through the respiratory system? Is it in their skin? Like what, what is getting them sick?

   6. FHFrank von Hippel22:01

      So it depends on the pesticides. Some pesticides like DDT you actually get from food and-

   7. JRJoe Rogan22:06

      Right.

   8. FHFrank von Hippel22:06

      ... if you go back and look at World War II photos where the army was spraying refugees and soldiers with, with DDT powder, that's actually pretty safe. You're not going to get DDT poison by having it on your skin.

   9. JRJoe Rogan22:19

      And they were doing this for what reason?

   10. FHFrank von Hippel22:21

       To kill the body louse because-

   11. JRJoe Rogan22:23

       Oh.

   12. FHFrank von Hippel22:23

       ... uh, lice transmit typhus and so to prevent epidemic typhus, um, during the war and after the war we used massive amounts of DDT and-

   13. JRJoe Rogan22:32

       To spray the people down?

   14. FHFrank von Hippel22:33

       Spray the people down. In fact the very first time a typhus epidemic was stopped in its tracks was in Naples in, uh, December 1943 to February 1944. Military just conquered Naples. Neapolitans had been living in caverns by the tens of thousands under, under the city during the bombardment and so of course if you're crowded and dirty and you're living in a cavern with thousands of other people, there's going to be body lice and that caused an outbreak of typhus. So the US military set up these delousing stations where we literally sprayed the DDT powder on every single person in Naples and stopped typhus in its tracks, very first time. Before that, typhus had decided the outcome of more wars than any other factor. It is, it is the companion of war. It's also... If you go back to the Irish potato famine, people don't really die of hunger when, when they're starving to, to death. They die of disease, so their immune system is compromised and the Irish died, over a million die- Irish died during the famine from typhus and from relapsing fever, both of which are vectored by the body louse. So that's why we were using DDT during the war.

   15. JRJoe Rogan23:38

       Typhus is actually something that they've discovered recently in Los Angeles in the homeless community.

   16. FHFrank von Hippel23:42

       Oh wow.

   17. JRJoe Rogan23:43

       Yeah, it was a big shock. It was a real stunner. (laughs) People were terrified because, you know, there's some of the areas in Skid Row that are literally thousands and thousands of people in, in these areas are homeless. I mean, it is the craziest scene you've ever seen. It's just tents and garbage and it's horrific and apparently, uh, some of the people tested positive for typhus.

   18. FHFrank von Hippel24:06

       It's a terrible one and in some of the wars where typhus broke out like in the Crimean War, the mortality rate could get to 70% of the people who were infected. So it makes COVID look like nothing.

   19. JRJoe Rogan24:17

       Whew. So the DDT that they're spraying these people with, um, so they shielded their food somehow or another, right? They're just spraying them physically with it.

   20. FHFrank von Hippel24:26

       Yeah, they actually weren't worried about shielding food back then but if you were sprayed down with DDT even if you had some food there, that one exposure wouldn't be that big of a deal.

   21. JRJoe Rogan24:35

       So the toxic levels of DDT coming from-

   22. FHFrank von Hippel24:38

       It's from-

   23. JRJoe Rogan24:38

       ... long term exposure?

   24. FHFrank von Hippel24:39

       Exactly.

   25. JRJoe Rogan24:40

       Okay.

   26. FHFrank von Hippel24:40

       Yeah. And so for wildlife too because it persists in the environment for, for decades then that led to the poisoning of a lot of wildlife.

   27. JRJoe Rogan24:48

       And when you're saying eagles, so are the eagles getting it from the prey animals that are eating it?

   28. FHFrank von Hippel24:52

       Yeah, so-... top predators are the ones that get the highest concentrations because it's fat soluble.

   29. JRJoe Rogan24:57

       Mm-hmm.

   30. FHFrank von Hippel24:58

       And so, it ends up getting passed from the prey to the predator. And you have an animal like an eagle that's a top predator, or a peregrine falcon, or a polar bear. So a- a pole- a single polar bear will eat hundreds of seals, and each of those seals has eaten thousands of fish, and those fish have eaten thousands of small fish and zooplankton. So by the time you work your way up through that food web, you're at a million times the background concentration.
9. 28:08 – 43:15

   Integrated pest management and a detour into swarm behavior and insect ‘collective intelligence’

   1. JRJoe Rogan28:08

      And, um, so there's- is there an alternative that's more expensive that's healthier? Or is there just no way around this?

   2. FHFrank von Hippel28:18

      Yeah, so there's- there are a number of alternatives. Um, so the one that most people talk about is integrated pest management, and with that kind of alternative, you use the least amount and the least toxic pesticide in only where it's necessary. So you're trying to completely minimize pesticide use and use things like spiders and birds and, uh, other insects that will-

   3. JRJoe Rogan28:40

      They bring in spiders?

   4. FHFrank von Hippel28:41

      Yeah, that will eat the- the pest insects.

   5. JRJoe Rogan28:44

      Mm-hmm.

   6. FHFrank von Hippel28:44

      So if you think about, uh, spraying down a field with a nasty pesticide where you kill all the arthropods, all the insects and the spiders and so on, you're not just killing the pests like the grasshopper that's eating the food. You're also killing the- the insects that eat the grasshopper. You're eating- you're killing the wasp that parasitizes the grasshopper.

   7. JRJoe Rogan29:02

      Mm-hmm.

   8. FHFrank von Hippel29:02

      So you're using that biological control. And so integrated pest management combines biological control of using animals to control the pest animals with minimal focused use of- of, uh, of pesticides and-

   9. JRJoe Rogan29:15

      What do you got there, Jamie? What is this?

   10. NANarrator29:16

       Conveniently on Twitter, as of a couple of hours ago, there's 10,000 ducks being released on a field in China for pest cleaning.

   11. JRJoe Rogan29:25

       (laughs) Look at all those fuckers.

   12. NANarrator29:25

       Rice fields.

   13. JRJoe Rogan29:26

       Look at them go. (laughs)

   14. NANarrator29:28

       (laughs)

   15. JRJoe Rogan29:28

       That's a lot of ducks, man. Wow, just swarming. It's almo- and they're almost like a... They know where they're go- like they're- they're all following each other. Like look how crazy that is. That- that always... Oh, that has... Oh, I know this is not your field of study, or maybe you know something about it, but it's fascinating to me how birds move in unison. Even ducks on the ground, they move the way these big massive clouds of birds move in the sky. Look how they move.

   16. FHFrank von Hippel29:57

       Yeah, and it's like fish.

   17. JRJoe Rogan29:58

       Yeah.

   18. FHFrank von Hippel29:58

       Same thing. And so what- what's apparently happening with schooling or- or this kind of behavior is where do you not want to be if you're in a school of fish? Where's the worst place to be?

   19. JRJoe Rogan30:11

       On the outside.

   20. FHFrank von Hippel30:11

       On the outside, right?

   21. JRJoe Rogan30:12

       Right.

   22. FHFrank von Hippel30:12

       That's where the sharks are gonna get you.

   23. JRJoe Rogan30:14

       Ah.

   24. FHFrank von Hippel30:14

       Everyone's trying to get to the middle at all times. And so that causes the whole thing to be this boiling mess where all the animals are trying to get to the center, and it makes it look coordinated, but really it's- it's just everyone's trying to get away from the edge.

   25. JRJoe Rogan30:27

       Is that the same thing with birds when they're flying around those beautiful clouds?

   26. FHFrank von Hippel30:30

       Well, if it's a- a massive flock of birds like you see with starlings where you have thousands of them.

   27. JRJoe Rogan30:35

       Mm-hmm.

   28. FHFrank von Hippel30:35

       But it's different with things like geese that are migrating or cranes that are migrating where they're going for that aerodynamic position in the group. So, uh, the V that you see.

   29. JRJoe Rogan30:44

       Right.

   30. FHFrank von Hippel30:44

       Yeah.
10. 43:15 – 49:17

    Rainforests: biodiversity, medicine from plants, and protecting indigenous knowledge

    1. JRJoe Rogan43:15

       The Amazon is such a, um, well, any of the rainforests are so fascinating in that they do have this insanely dense, um, population of life. I have a friend who went to Guyana and he stayed in the rainforest, uh, for a couple of weeks-

    2. FHFrank von Hippel43:29

       (clears throat)

    3. JRJoe Rogan43:29

       ... and filming this, uh, t- my friend, Steve Rinella, this television show, Meat Eater on Netflix. And, uh, one of the things that he said, the craziest part that was, you know, really surprising was how loud the jungle is at night.

    4. FHFrank von Hippel43:41

       Mm-hmm.

    5. JRJoe Rogan43:42

       He's like, "You'd think, like, at nighttime, you go to sleep, it's gonna be quiet, like, the forest." He, he goes, "It's screaming." It's just bugs and birds and monkeys and all these nocturnal creatures just scr- it's just, uh, deafening.

    6. FHFrank von Hippel43:58

       Yeah.

    7. JRJoe Rogan43:58

       It's all around you just (screeches) there's all this noise.

    8. FHFrank von Hippel44:01

       Yeah, so it starts at night with the insects. There's, it's, it can be incredibly loud. Like, if you're there d- when the cicadas are, are out, and, and oftentimes they're emerging on these prime number years, so they're, some years will be low, some years will be very high. It's, it can be deafening, like you can have to shout to hear each other when the cicadas are out. And then you get to hour, hour and a half before sunrise and you start to get the howler monkeys going off and they have their morning chorus. And then half an hour before sunrise the birds are starting their, their dawn chorus. And then everything quiets down about an hour, hour and a half after sunrise, and it's pretty quiet until, till evening again. So and it, and it depends which rainforest you're in, so if you're in Africa, same thing goes on but different species. So if you're in the Amazon, you're gonna hear the howler monkeys in the morning. If you're in Africa, tropical Africa, you'll hear the colobus monkeys in the morning.

    9. JRJoe Rogan44:53

       God. What's a real bummer is that there's people that want to chop that shit down just to grow crops or, you know, make, make it for, uh, cattle graze, or-

    10. FHFrank von Hippel45:04

        Yeah, it's particularly tragic because that's where most of the world's biodiversity is, is in these rainforests. They're the most valuable habitat on earth in terms of supporting life, so it is, it is awful.

    11. JRJoe Rogan45:15

        And also what's interesting is that how many, um, pharmaceutical drugs that can benefit people are derived from plants that they find in the rainforest and they believe there's so many more to be discovered if we get there before they chop everything down.

    12. FHFrank von Hippel45:29

        Yeah, and it's not just before we chop everything down, but before we lose the indigenous knowledge of what plants are good for what. You know, there's, the shamans who know from thousands of years of, of, of, uh, practicing what, what's good f- for what, and a lot of that knowledge is already gone. But if you look at... Most people don't realize how much of our medicine comes from plants, and, uh, if you look at Western medicine, which I think of all the medical traditions in the world probably has the least drugs coming from plants, it's still about half of our drugs are derived from plant products. And you go to traditional Chinese medicine, it's almost all of it. You go to traditional Indian medicine, it's almost all of it. So yeah, there's a, there's an incredible knowledge base and an incredible diversity of species that we have to protect for our future. We have no idea what drugs might be, uh, incredibly valuable in the future from the rainforest.

    13. JRJoe Rogan46:18

        It's so interesting too if you talk to people about where drugs come from, like where do, where do pharmaceutical drugs come from? They think it's a laboratory.

    14. FHFrank von Hippel46:24

        Mm-hmm.

    15. JRJoe Rogan46:24

        Most people do, right? Y- if you say, "Well, they come from plants," like, "Get out of here, hippie." You're talking about nonsense.

    16. FHFrank von Hippel46:29

        Yeah, and it may be, it may be a lab now but originally it was synthesized from a, it was extracted from a plant-

    17. JRJoe Rogan46:34

        Right.

    18. FHFrank von Hippel46:34

        ... and then synthesized. Some of them you can't synthesize, it can only come from plants. Some of them can be synthesized and then, and in the lab, but still it had to come from a plant to begin with.

    19. JRJoe Rogan46:43

        Now when they're extracting this stuff and they're, um, turning these into, uh, pharmaceutical drugs, w- what is, what is the impact that that has on the area where, like i- is there a danger like when they find something that they can use and extract as a drug, w- how do they, how do they parse that out? Like how do they, how do they find this, that when they have a spot where this particular plant grows, do they just take it, extract it, and then use it to make pharmaceutical drugs in a compounding pharmacy or through some scientific method or... What happens to the, all the other plants that are in those areas and is there a risk that as they're extracting the plants they use to make these pharmaceuticals that they're screwing up the whole ecosystem of this area and there might be other plants that can do different things that they're now dooming to death because they're pulling out, they're, they're focusing on this one drug that's really good for, you know, arthritis or whatever?

    20. FHFrank von Hippel47:45

        Yeah, there's a lot, a lot there, so, um-

    21. JRJoe Rogan47:47

        What I'm getting at is that they're, were monkeying with these-

    22. FHFrank von Hippel47:49

        Right. And, and-

    23. JRJoe Rogan47:50

        ... environments.

    24. FHFrank von Hippel47:51

        And so the most efficient way to find drugs in the rainforest would be to find what the locals use, what plants do they use for-

    25. JRJoe Rogan47:58

        Mm.

    26. FHFrank von Hippel47:58

        ... for, um, different things and, and there's probably a good chance that, that that works. And then once that's done, unfortunately, the history has been that pharmaceutical companies then take those plants back to the lab and th- and then that's the end of the story for the locals. And really, that resource is coming from them. They should get some economic benefit from those plants being derived. There are some small companies that, that are trying to do this now, they're trying to g- feed money back to the communities where they come from. But if you want people to protect the rainforest, they have to have an economic incentive to do so, and one of those incentives can be around pharmaceuticals. Um, I used to work in a rainforest in western Kenya and there, y- th- th- there were, there were many problems associated with, uh, people girdling trees because a lot of the medicines come from the bark.

    27. JRJoe Rogan48:45

        Girdling?

    28. FHFrank von Hippel48:46

        So they would, so they would cut the bark completely-

    29. JRJoe Rogan48:48

        Oh, around-

    30. FHFrank von Hippel48:48

        ... around the tree within reach, you know, all the bark they could reach, they would cut out. And then you have this, this 500-year-old tree that dies because it doesn't have the bark anymore which it needs for moving nutrients around.So yeah, they can... It can, of course, damage the forest. Um, but I think one of the most important things is just... Not just taking that resource in a responsible way for the environment, but also in a responsible way for the people who, who live there, who made these discoveries over thousands of years.

11. 49:17 – 1:00:16

    Uncontacted tribes, exploitation, and culture shock: ‘Should we leave them alone?’

    1. JRJoe Rogan49:17

       Yeah. So how do you incentivize pharmaceutical companies to bring in these folks that live in this area and incorporate them? Like, and, and actually include them in the profits. Like, how do you... 'Cause f- if they don't have to do it, especially when you're, you're going to a place like the Amazon, which is notorious for them taking advantage of the indigenous people and, uh, you know, having these horrific abusive relationships. I'm sure you're aware of the guy who got murdered, uh, in the Amazon just the other day. He got shot by this tribe, and he was actually one of the people that's trying to protect these, uh, uncontacted tribes and, and just leave them alone. And-

    2. FHFrank von Hippel49:54

       Yeah.

    3. JRJoe Rogan49:54

       ... unfortunately, they... It's hard for them to recognize whether or not this is a guy that's there for the oil companies or the cattle companies 'cause they've had these horrific relationships with these companies that are trying to exploit them and their resources. And so, they shot this guy and killed him with an arrow.

    4. FHFrank von Hippel50:10

       Yeah. And it... And, uh, usually, it's the other way around.

    5. JRJoe Rogan50:13

       Yeah.

    6. FHFrank von Hippel50:13

       Usually, it's the gold miners who are killing-

    7. JRJoe Rogan50:15

       Yeah.

    8. FHFrank von Hippel50:15

       ... the environmentalist. And, um, so I, uh, I don't know the answer to your question because I, I don't know how to motivate businesses to do the right thing. I think we have a long history on this planet of businesses doing the wrong thing when they get the power and, and not thinking responsibly about how to do what they're doing sustainably.

    9. JRJoe Rogan50:32

       And also, um, I would worry that... I mean, is... I don't know if this is a good worry or if, if I'm being ridiculous. But that if they did hit some sort of a windfall, like if they found some area of the Amazon where they have this plant that you, you could make pharmaceutical drugs out of and it's incredibly valuable, and so there's, uh, um, enormous amount of profit for this village. You, y- you don't want a situation like you have in these Native American communities where a tribe allows a casino to come in and then it sort of bastardizes what the reservation used to be or the tribe used to be. Now you have all these people running around driving Mercedes and making all this money off of people gambling, but the original way of life is gone. Now obviously, with Native Americans, there's a lot more complicated problems that go way back for, you know, the genocide, the fact that-

    10. FHFrank von Hippel51:24

        Mm-hmm.

    11. JRJoe Rogan51:24

        ... they were taken over by the settlers and all the treaties that were broken and all the various injustices that were done to them. Then on top of that, you've got this whole weird casino culture. It would be, uh, uh, y- you know, like, I don't want to live in a subsistence jungle tribe in the middle of the Amazon. But that's how they live and they love it.

    12. FHFrank von Hippel51:48

        Mm-hmm.

    13. JRJoe Rogan51:48

        And they, they thrive that way, and that's the only life they've ever known. If we all the sudden gave them money and you go back, and now they're wearing Under Armor T-shirts and, you know, they have iPads and th- and they're partying and playing music and, you know, they have internet connections and their way of life's gone. Like, the, the argument is, is that good or is that bad? Is that progress? 'Cause I don't know. I don't want to live in a hut, but I think it's awesome that there's people that live off the land, you know, the way they've lived for thousands and thousands of years. When you see those photos of those uncontacted tribes, there's one incredible photo of these folks that are, uh, pointing their bows and arrows at... It was either a drone or a helicopter that's taking photos. And I'm like, "Wow, what a weird convergence of the past and the present." And how does this play out? Like is... Would it be good if they were educated about modern electronics and medicine and the internet and all these different... Or would it be better if you leave them alone? Like, it's, it's a, it's a conundrum. Is that the photo? Yeah. Look at that.

    14. FHFrank von Hippel52:55

        (laughs)

    15. JRJoe Rogan52:55

        God damn, that's cool. I mean, this dude has a big fistful of arrows. There's a couple of them.

    16. FHFrank von Hippel53:02

        Yeah.

    17. JRJoe Rogan53:02

        And he's, uh... And they're... That's the one. That's the one that I've seen before. That one where these people are all... They all have body paint on. And I mean, there's something really wild about that. But would it be better if they got medicine? Would it be better if they got... I mean, I don't know. I don't-

    18. FHFrank von Hippel53:18

        Yeah. I, I think that communities have to decide for themselves, right? What they want, yeah.

    19. JRJoe Rogan53:23

        But they don't know. They don't know the consequences of bringing in the re-

    20. FHFrank von Hippel53:26

        Yeah.

    21. JRJoe Rogan53:26

        ... the Western world-

    22. FHFrank von Hippel53:27

        Right.

    23. JRJoe Rogan53:27

        ... into their way of life. Like it's-

    24. FHFrank von Hippel53:29

        But, uh-

    25. JRJoe Rogan53:29

        It's cool that you can see that still.

    26. FHFrank von Hippel53:31

        Yeah. It is cool. Um, I think the, the... Part of the answer, though, is can the technology be integrated in a way that fits with the culture and can they make it part of their culture?

    27. JRJoe Rogan53:39

        But isn't it a slippery slope?

    28. FHFrank von Hippel53:41

        M- maybe, maybe not. Like, wouldn't... If you were, if you were living on a reservation, wouldn't you still love to have your Porsche? I mean-

    29. JRJoe Rogan53:49

        But that's a reservation.

    30. FHFrank von Hippel53:50

        Yeah.
12. 1:00:16 – 1:06:53

    Fritz Haber: fertilizer that fed the world—and chemical warfare that changed war

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:16

       Yeah. It is, uh, pretty amazing. Um, you were also, uh, in your book and in that, that podcast, you guys brought up Fritz Haber. And, uh, the... He's a guy that I've talked about on this podcast multiple times because, uh, I listened to a Radiolab podcast where they d- It was... I think the podcast was called, uh, Good and Evil. Uh, but it was basically highlighting people that have done amazing things, but also awful things. And he's like literally one of the best examples because he was being... He was going to be awarded the Nobel Prize for this method of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere. At the same time, he was wanted for crimes against humanity.

    2. FHFrank von Hippel1:01:01

       That's right.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:01:02

       Which is pretty, pretty bonkers.

    4. FHFrank von Hippel1:01:04

       In fact, he had the only Nobel Prize in the sciences ever contested. There were French scientists who refused to accept the Nobel Prize that year because he was getting the Nobel Prize.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:01:14

       (sighs) So explain why-

    6. FHFrank von Hippel1:01:17

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:01:17

       ... for, for people that-

    8. FHFrank von Hippel1:01:18

       So the backstory of this is that the, the two greatest physical chemists in the world, uh, before World War I, were Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst, both in Germany. And Germany had the best chemistry in the world, the best physics in the world, uh, the best biology in the world. It was the highlight of science around the world. And Haber and Nernst were racing each other to see who could be the first one to extract usable amounts of nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer, to make ammonium. And, uh, they were tr- they were playing around with incredibly high pressures, incredibly high temperatures, and Haber got there first. And so he figured out how to do this, and that really averted world hunger because before nitrogen could be extracted f- from the air, the air is 80% nitrogen, so before we could pull that out of the air, uh, fertilizers came mostly from caliche deposits in Northern Chile. They had to be... The old bird droppings and things, it had to be... They were accumulated over millions of years, had to be shipped to wherever you wanted to do your farming. And also, even people w- they would use remnants from battlefields, human corpses for fertilizing. So-

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:02:26

       Oof.

    10. FHFrank von Hippel1:02:27

        ... we were in a situation where the world was constantly hungry. People were starving every year because of a lack of food. And Haber solved that problem. So that initiated the Green Revolution, the, the mining of nitrogen from the air, the making of artificial fertilizers. And so, uh, that was, uh, done j- a few years before World War I. And when World War I broke out, the Kaiser first assigned Nernst to develop chemical weapons for the German military, and he failed. He, he was unable to make effective chemical weapons. We don't know whether he was unable because he was one of the two greatest chemists in the world. It seems unlikely to me that he couldn't figure it out, or whether he just didn't want to do it, and so he purposely failed. So when he failed, Haber had just succeeded in his assignment for the German military of, um, making an effective antifreeze for the German military vehicles that were operating in the winter, fighting against Russia. And so they, they had this problem that had to be solved and Haber solved it at making antifreeze. So the Kaiser assigned Haber the task of developing chemical weapons for the German military, and he started working with chlorine gas. And chlorine gas, because it's, it's heavy, so if you release it, it'll stay near the ground, it's completely lethal, and, um, started testing it. And, uh, in fact, his assistant was my great-grandfather, James Franck. And-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:03:54

        Wow.

    12. FHFrank von Hippel1:03:55

        ... uh, and Franck and other scientists would put on gas masks and they would expose themselves to these, these chemical weapons and figure out how effective the gas masks were, how effective the, the, uh, the, uh-

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:04:08

        They self-tested?

    14. FHFrank von Hippel1:04:09

        ... chemical... They self-tested, and it was incredibly dangerous, as you can imagine. So through these tests, Haber figured out that you need a slight, slight breeze to deliver this weapon. If you could see grass bending in the wind, it was too strong of a wind. And so then they, they went to Belgium, to the battlefront in Belgium, and waited until the wind was just right, and then they released the chlorine gas from cylinders, thousands of cylinders. Then this, this gas just started marching its way slowly towards the British lines, and it was mostly British colonial troops, Algerians, and, and British soldiers. And, uh, at first, the, the, the, um, the British soldiers started firing their weapons into the gas. So the soldiers on the German line said they'd never heard so much gunfire in the war as happened when that gas was coming to them. They tried to stop it by shooting machine guns and everything they had. Of course, that wouldn't stop it. And then some of the troops fled, some of the troops charged into the gas, and those died. So there were probably 10,000, uh, people who died, soldiers who died immediately in that, tens of thousands of casualties. And that was the beginning of... That was the first use of a weapon of mass destruction, and it was the beginning of the, uh, modern use of chemical weapons in war.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:05:27

        Oh. And it's a horrific way to die too, right?

    16. FHFrank von Hippel1:05:30

        Horrible way to die. And so... And Haber, actually, he, um, after that victory at, at... I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, Yerp- Y-R-P-E-E-S, in Belgium, where that battle took place, after the victory there, he and his colleagues celebrated at their home. And, uh, his wife went outside with his service revolver and shot herself in the head, killed herself in front of their son, Hermann. So she was completely opposed to the use, the development and use of chemical weapons. That was part of it. But also, she was a prominent chemist herself. She gave it up to Mary Haber. And he was also having a dalliance with his future wife. So there were lots of things going on, but she killed herself. He left that very night to deploy gas weapons on the Eastern Front against the Russians.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:06:17

        And he left his 13-year-old son alone with his dead mom.

    18. FHFrank von Hippel1:06:20

        With his dead mom. Yeah.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:06:22

        (sighs)

    20. FHFrank von Hippel1:06:22

        And so then he fought using the same techniques on the Eastern Front, and then they developed mustard gas in his lab, uh, which was much more lethal than the chlorine-based, you know, the original chlorine gas. And after that, a whole series of other chemical weapons. So by the, by the end of the war, both sides, about a quarter of the artillery had chemical weapons in it, which is incredible, right? You're thinking about this battlefield that's just complete chaos, and a quarter of the weapons flying over those trenches was chemical.

13. 1:06:53 – 1:17:45

    War’s toxic legacy: unexploded ordnance, Aleutian Islands, and abandoned Cold War infrastructure

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:06:53

       (sighs) You know, speaking of, um, pollutants and war and, and chemicals, uh, there was this area that we were talking about once on the podcast that's the size of Paris in France that is uninhabitable because of munitions.

    2. FHFrank von Hippel1:07:12

       Mm-hmm.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:07:12

       I think it's from World War II. And, um-... there's so much unexploded munitions and so many bombs were dropped there, and so much chemicals got released into the environment and in the atmosphere and into the soil and everything, that it's uninhabitable. It's an enormous area.

    4. FHFrank von Hippel1:07:29

       Yeah, so the first time that I went out to work in the Aleutians, you know, the chain of islands that go off of Alaska, uh, I, I flew out there with, um, a couple of other biologists. Everyone else on the plane were munitions people. They were going out there to look for unexploded ordinance, because the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands during World War II. It was the only American soil taken over by a foreign power, and that's-

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:07:53

       Oh, wow.

    6. FHFrank von Hippel1:07:53

       ... and that's how the war in the Aleutians happened. The reason why there's a road from the lower 48 to Alaska is the US Army built the ALCAN, the Alaska Canadian Highway, to get the military up there to fight the Japanese.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:08:05

       Wow.

    8. FHFrank von Hippel1:08:05

       And so when I flew out there the first time, the military was giving the island back to the Aleut tribe from whom they had taken it, and they had to find the unexploded ordinance, all these bombs and things that were left there. So we were told, "Look, when you're doing your biology out there, please let us know if you find any ordinance." And we had GPSs with us 'cause we were doing the science. We found a lot of unexploded ordinance and just marked everything with GPS, gave it to the military so they could go out and clean up.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:08:34

       What's a lot?

    10. FHFrank von Hippel1:08:35

        Uh, you know, you come across bombs. You can come across even things like the Rommel stakes, those, those pikes they would set in the ground in the grass where you can't see them, so that when forces come in, they get impaled on these things. And, uh, and so the grass is tall there, and, and, and obviously we were worried about this, so you're, you're going through, parting the grass.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:08:56

        So they have these angled spikes?

    12. FHFrank von Hippel1:08:58

        Yeah.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:08:59

        Sh- to try to catch people walking through?

    14. FHFrank von Hippel1:09:01

        Or the soldiers charging up from the beach, they would get impaled on these spikes.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:09:04

        Oh.

    16. FHFrank von Hippel1:09:05

        But they-

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:09:05

        How many of them?

    18. FHFrank von Hippel1:09:06

        Oh, there were a lot of those spikes, but you'd also find, find bombs not just from World War II, but then afterwards in the Cold War. Um, this particular island, Adak, became the, uh, a very important Navy site, and, um, during World War II, Adak Island actually was the largest community in all of Alaska. There were 65,000 GIs stationed there. Can you imagine? In the, out in the middle of the Aleutian chain.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:09:30

        That's insane.

    20. FHFrank von Hippel1:09:30

        And that was a staging ground for the American armada that then attacked the Japanese fleet, uh, and fought to get the Japanese out of the Aleutians. So, um, given that there were 65,000 soldiers there in the, during the war, and after the war it was a very important Cold War military base. There's just incredible stuff there. We found these bunkers that, that, you know, you could go in. There wa- Military wasn't there anymore. You go in, these bunkers are flooded with water, and there's still beer sitting on the counter. There's still plates of food from decades ago that are just sitting there.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:10:03

        Whoa. Oh, Jamie pulled up some photos of these bunkers.

    22. FHFrank von Hippel1:10:08

        Yeah.

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:10:09

        Wow. That's wild. So, when you say you found a lot of unexploded ordn- What is that? Abandoned police barracks?

    24. FHFrank von Hippel1:10:17

        So, these are all military barracks.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:10:19

        Wow.

    26. FHFrank von Hippel1:10:19

        So, when the tribe went back to this island, you, uh, you have a 100, 120 people maybe go back, and they get to choose from housing that used to house 65,000 people.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:10:30

        Whoa.

    28. FHFrank von Hippel1:10:30

        It was the farthest west McDonald's in the world. I just saw you go by. There it is. It's not there anymore, but there was a McDonald's there that was the farthest west in the world because this island is just a couple of degrees from the internati-

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:10:41

        Oh.

    30. FHFrank von Hippel1:10:41

        ... you know, from the hemisphere line.

Episode duration: 2:36:48