Joe Rogan Experience #1540 - Frank von Hippel

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   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. 15:00 – 30:00

   It is really crazy…

   1. FHFrank von Hippel15:00

      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.

   2. 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-

   3. FHFrank von Hippel15:49

      (laughs)

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:49

      ... with pesticides.

   5. FHFrank von Hippel15:50

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:50

      That's a long time.

   7. FHFrank von Hippel15:52

      Yeah, and we fucked things up pretty fast-

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:54

      Yeah.

   9. 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.

   10. 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?

   11. 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.

   12. 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?

   13. 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-

   14. JRJoe Rogan17:08

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

   15. FHFrank von Hippel17:10

       Yeah. It's-

   16. JRJoe Rogan17:11

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

   17. 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.

   18. JRJoe Rogan17:38

       Mm-hmm.

   19. FHFrank von Hippel17:38

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

   20. JRJoe Rogan17:42

       Oh, wow.

   21. 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.

   22. 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-

   23. 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.

   24. JRJoe Rogan18:18

       Really?

   25. FHFrank von Hippel18:18

       But many people do or they home brew and-

   26. JRJoe Rogan18:20

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

   27. 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.

   28. JRJoe Rogan18:39

       So they pass these laws, they make them dry, but people sneak the stuff in anyway.

   29. FHFrank von Hippel18:44

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan18:44

       Yeah.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   On the outside. …

   1. FHFrank von Hippel30:00

      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?

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:11

      On the outside.

   3. FHFrank von Hippel30:11

      On the outside, right?

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:12

      Right.

   5. FHFrank von Hippel30:12

      That's where the sharks are gonna get you.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:14

      Ah.

   7. 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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan30:27

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

   9. 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.

   10. JRJoe Rogan30:35

       Mm-hmm.

   11. 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.

   12. JRJoe Rogan30:44

       Right.

   13. FHFrank von Hippel30:44

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan30:45

       And those, they're responding to something magnetic, right? Is that the idea?

   15. FHFrank von Hippel30:49

       They're using a variety of- a variety of things so that they do sense the Earth's magnetic field. That's part of it, but they also use landmarks. Some animals use polarization of the sun. Like if you- if you look at honeybees, uh, how do honeybees...... uh, communicate and navigate about, uh, where their food is. It's remarkable. It was di- it was discovered by a guy named von Frisch. He won the Nobel Prize for this along with, uh, Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. They were the only people to ever win the Nobel Prize in something to do with animal behavior. And what von Frisch found is that honeybees, when they go out, they've, they, they're, the workers are foraging, they're trying to find a good nectar source. So, they find some good flowers, they come back to the hive, and they then ha- communicate where that food is, uh, with something called the waggle dance. But it's, it's remarkable because this, it's kind of an abstract language. They, they transpose... Th- they do the dance on the vertical honeycomb and they, and they transpose the angle from where you have to fly relative to the sun to the vertical honeycomb. So, they, they position... They act like the posi- the sun is completely vertically above the honeycomb and let's say they had to fly 10 degrees to the right of the sun to get to the flower. Then they dance 10 degrees to the right of the vertical of the honeycomb-

   16. JRJoe Rogan32:07

       (laughs)

   17. FHFrank von Hippel32:07

       ... and they can dance for hours. But of course, the sun is moving, but they move their dance to coordinate with where the sun would be. They know where the sun would be internally in their, in their brain and they transpose their dance for that.

   18. JRJoe Rogan32:19

       (laughs)

   19. FHFrank von Hippel32:19

       But they don't just communicate w- they don't just communicate the angle to fly, they also communicate how far to fly. And it's really about how much energy you need to fly because if there's a headwind, it takes more energy and if there's a tailwind, it takes less energy. So, the intensity of the waggle dance tells the other bees how much energy you need, need to fly there.

   20. JRJoe Rogan32:37

       Huh.

   21. FHFrank von Hippel32:37

       And then when the workers leave the hive, they know the angle to go and they know the, the how much energy to expend to get there. But bees can also navigate by polarized light. So, if the sun is completely covered up with clouds, they still know where the sun is by the polarization of light. They still do the waggle dance based on that. And, uh, they can also la- uh, navigate by landmarks and the landmarks actually will take precedence. So, you can screw them up. You can have a landmark out there and then they do the waggle dance and then you move the landmark, and when they come out, they'll follow the landmark and go to the wrong place.

   22. JRJoe Rogan33:09

       Wow! So, they fucked with the bees to find out whether or not- (laughs)

   23. FHFrank von Hippel33:13

       (laughs)

   24. JRJoe Rogan33:13

       ... whether or not they could do that.

   25. FHFrank von Hippel33:14

       Yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan33:15

       Wow. That is so amazing. What, it's so fascinating to me how insects have this sort of collective intelligence. Um, my, my friend Lex Fridman was on the other day and we were talking about ants and about, uh, how, uh, amazing it is that ants collectively have some sort of intelligence and it allows them to make these, uh... I'm sure you've seen these gigantic leafcutter ant villages.

   27. FHFrank von Hippel33:38

       Yeah. I've s- I've studied them a little bit when I was in school. We, we did a course in tropical ecology in Costa Rica and you can have a single leafcutter ant colony with seven million individuals and they're acting as one, you know? And they, they can defoliate an entire rainforest tree in a couple of hours.

   28. JRJoe Rogan33:55

       But we don't know why, we don't know how. We have no idea how they're doing it, right? We don't know how they're thinking together collectively.

   29. FHFrank von Hippel34:02

       We don't. And in fact, leafcutter ants are farmers. So, you have one caste of ant that cuts the leaf pieces. There's another caste of ant that cuts it into tiny little pieces. And then, there's other ants that then process those pieces and seed them with a fungus. And then the fungus grows in this nest with seven million ants and it grows these little fruiting bodies and that's all they eat. They eat the fruiting bodies from the fungus. That's their diet. So, they're doing all that work of bringing leaves and flowers to tend this garden of fungus and the fungus can only live with the ant and the ant can only live with the fungus.

   30. JRJoe Rogan34:35

       They're farmers.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Yeah, it's particularly tragic…

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      crops or, you know, make, make it for, uh, cattle graze, or-

   2. 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.

   3. 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.

   4. 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.

   5. 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.

   6. FHFrank von Hippel46:24

      Mm-hmm.

   7. 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.

   8. 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-

   9. JRJoe Rogan46:34

      Right.

   10. 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.

   11. 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?

   12. FHFrank von Hippel47:45

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

   13. JRJoe Rogan47:47

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

   14. FHFrank von Hippel47:49

       Right. And, and-

   15. JRJoe Rogan47:50

       ... environments.

   16. 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-

   17. JRJoe Rogan47:58

       Mm.

   18. 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.

   19. JRJoe Rogan48:45

       Girdling?

   20. FHFrank von Hippel48:46

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

   21. JRJoe Rogan48:48

       Oh, around-

   22. 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.

   23. 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-

   24. FHFrank von Hippel49:54

       Yeah.

   25. 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.

   26. FHFrank von Hippel50:10

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

   27. JRJoe Rogan50:13

       Yeah.

   28. FHFrank von Hippel50:13

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

   29. JRJoe Rogan50:15

       Yeah.

   30. 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.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Yeah. It is, uh,…

   1. FHFrank von Hippel1:00:00

      uh, aquatic vegetation in the intertidal zone. Um, and then they save that throughout the year. But essentially, you're right. They're eating very little in the way of vegetation compared to what we normally eat, right? A salad or whatever. Almost their entire diet is coming from the ocean.

   2. 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.

   3. FHFrank von Hippel1:01:01

      That's right.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:01:02

      Which is pretty, pretty bonkers.

   5. 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.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:01:14

      (sighs) So explain why-

   7. FHFrank von Hippel1:01:17

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:01:17

      ... for, for people that-

   9. 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-

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:02:26

       Oof.

   11. 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-

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:03:54

       Wow.

   13. 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-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:04:08

       They self-tested?

   15. 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.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:05:27

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

   17. 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.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:06:17

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

   19. FHFrank von Hippel1:06:20

       With his dead mom. Yeah.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:06:22

       (sighs)

   21. 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.

   22. 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.

   23. FHFrank von Hippel1:07:12

       Mm-hmm.

   24. 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.

   25. 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-

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:07:53

       Oh, wow.

   27. 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.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:08:05

       Wow.

   29. 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.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:08:34

       What's a lot?
6. 1:15:00 – 1:15:49

   Ah, here we go.…

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:15:00

      yeah.

   2. FHFrank von Hippel1:15:01

      Ah, here we go.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:15:01

      We got it?

   4. FHFrank von Hippel1:15:02

      Lost City of Z.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:15:02

      That's it. I was gonna say World War Z.

   6. FHFrank von Hippel1:15:05

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:15:06

      I'm like, but, but I know that's not right, 'cause it was The Lost City of Z. That's it.

   8. FHFrank von Hippel1:15:09

      Yeah, yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:15:10

      That's the dude. So this is actually kind of an interesting movie about this guy who goes down there, and the idea is there was a city that existed and then by the time he'd returned, um... I think the theory is that European explorers had given these people diseases and smallpox and the like, and it had wiped out, like, enormous swaths of the population almost instantly. Within, you know, 10 years, there was nothing left, and then the jungle just overtook whatever civilization they had. And n- then when, you know, we're going back and looking at it through LIDAR, that's what we're seeing. We're seeing hundreds of years later that-

Episode duration: 2:36:48