Purple Tomato GMO Gets FDA Approval: Plant Scientist Explains the Regulatory Breakthrough

Eric Ward [00:00:00] It's way better to work harder on identifying people that are naturally intrinsically motivated and want to work hard and learn. You know, big, big signal there in the human sort of personality dimension is you want to keep learning all the time. If you're like, that probably gonna be pretty good. I'm Brian Mos, a farmer living in Florence, South Dakota, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:29] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. You know, if you're a close friend of mine, you have a common complaint that when we are meeting new people, I'm gonna introduce you in a way that is excited and some might even call hyperbolic. Now, I don't agree with this. If I'm introducing somebody and I'm saying something about them, I believe it's true. And oftentimes the way that I describe it is just a little different than maybe the way they would describe themselves. But it often paints an image in other people's minds that I think helps them to understand why I'm so excited or why I've decided to be such close friends with this person. Now, no one has ever lodged that complaint more strongly with me than today's guest, Dr. Eric Ward. I view Eric as one of the most profound scientists in the entire world. I mean, how could I not? The way that I met him was that he invited me to come all the way down to North Carolina and gave me a chance to address several scientific audiences about GMOs and how to push back on propaganda. So anytime somebody gives me a big opportunity, I'm gonna feel good about them. But as I've gotten to know Eric over the years, I've come to realize that not only does he have a really amazing scientific mind, his true gift is being able to create the space for other people to be able to invent, to come up with things that no one has seen before, and to really build things that the entire world needs. And there's no better example of that than today's podcast because we start out this interview with Eric and I taste testing a Purple Tomato.

Vance Crowe [00:02:11] If you're a longtime listener of the podcast, you know that Eric and I talked about the Purple Tomato a couple of years ago, and we were talking about how it would be great you'd have this new product that was not designed as a GMO that made it easier for farmers to, to grow them. But instead, you'd have a product that actually improved the nutritional content of a fruit, and you made it so consumers saw a reason why they would wanna support GMOs. Well, it's gone from being just an idea or something that was scientifically possible to an actual reality. And in fact, our good friend Kate Crosby, sent us a small jar of these purple tomatoes that she's helped raise out in California. So Eric and I sit down and we get to taste test the fruits of Kate's labor, and then we get to have a great conversation that ranges not only from science and where things like climate change are headed, but also things that really matter to me. Should we continue to support the university's system? How did he raise his kids? And what can I do to improve the way I'm thinking about raising my own daughters? I loved this conversation and I think that it should illustrate for you just why I think Eric is such an amazing person, although I'm certain right now as he's hearing this, he's really frustrated with me for over-hyping it. But as I you'll see, I think it's all true. At the end of this interview, we decided to do something kind of interesting for the legacy interview project we've been working on.

Vance Crowe [00:03:47] You know, that we can't share real Legacy Interviews that people come to record their private stories. It's just too personal, and we don't want to take that and use it as marketing. So instead, we invited a few special and interesting people to come in and do a short legacy interview that they knew would be public. One of the people that accepted our invitation was a man named Ben Lawler, who's a Haber Dasher here in St. Louis. That's a seller of men's clothes. But Ben isn't just some guy that sells suits. He is one of the most well-respected suit sellers ever. In fact, he created for me the first tailored suit I'd ever owned, and I am forever grateful to that because he showed me just what is really possible. Well, Ben came into the studio and he told stories about his childhood and his youth that shocked me. And I thought it'd be really fun to put these on at the end of the interview. So you can hear how a guy went from being one of a bunch of boys in a small farm town to learning his way around business and trying to pass the obstacles that would get in their way. I'm not gonna ruin the surprise, but I can tell you he fights with a rooster named Boss Hog, and it is worth your time. So if you've been curious about what these Legacy Interviews are all about, then stay till the end of the interview and check out Ben Lawler. Thank you so much to him for sharing his fun stories. All right, without further ado, let's head to the interview with my man, one of the most prolific ag scientists in the entire world, Dr. Eric Ward.

Vance Crowe [00:05:21] Dr. Eric Ward. Welcome back. Thank you

Eric Ward [00:05:24] So much. I am, I'm very appreciative of the opportunity to be here and it's great to be here in person too.

Vance Crowe [00:05:29] Why does anybody want a purple tomato?

Eric Ward [00:05:32] Why does anybody want a purple tomato? Well, purple tomatoes are really cool because they've been engineered with a couple of gene that allow them to make the same amounts of purple pigments. The, the really good stuff for you that's in like a blueberry or eggplant skin or any of the purple vegetables or fruits that you normally would eat, like blackberries, these things have been around for a while technologically, but we just now are at the point where we can start to think about commercializing 'em. 'cause we've gotten through the first big regulatory hurdle.

Vance Crowe [00:06:09] So for anybody that doesn't know you were on the podcast before, we talked about Purple Tomatoes back when they were like a gleam in your eye, like this idea that it seemed like regulation was gonna come down enough that you could have a GMO for a commercially available product, that people would just go to the grocery store and be like,

Eric Ward [00:06:26] Right,

Vance Crowe [00:06:27] I know what I'm buying. I'm buying a GMO tomato because it's obvious the way that it looks and I want it. Yep. And now that's come true.

Eric Ward [00:06:34] Yeah. So I'll back up a step or two full credit to Kathy Martin, who's a scientist in Norwich, England at the John Inni Center. She's worked in this area for decades. It started with working on understanding the, the biochemical pathways that regulate pigment in flowers in snapdragons of all things. And she did a whole bunch of work on that and really got into the genetics of that and understood what all the different functions were. And it turned out from work that she did about 15 years ago, you could take two genetic control elements outta snapdragon, so-called transcription factor genes. She put 'em into tomato under the control of a promoter. That's a sequence that makes the genes express that's specific to the fruit. These couple of transcription factors turn on just in the fruit, and they activate this purple pigment pathway that's in the tomato anyway, but is normally latent. It's not expressed like the only time you'd see it typically would be like when you germinate a tomato seedling and you look at that kind of pale part under the two little green coens, you'll see some purple in that hypo coddle. So normally it'd be expressed there, but it would never be on in the fruit otherwise. So she basically hotwired the pathway by putting in these two snapdragon genes, which causes the all the pigment to be made in the, in the fruit, which is super cool.

Vance Crowe [00:08:01] I totally did not realize I, because my expectation was that it was like, Hey, we found this gene that makes these things have all these antioxidants. Let's put those in there. I, for as much as I've been around this, never understood No, it's just taking what it already has.

Eric Ward [00:08:14] Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [00:08:15] Allowing it to express it for longer.

Eric Ward [00:08:17] Correct. And in the right spot at the right time. Right. So the whole pathway's there to make these pigments, these anthocyanins, the purple pigments, it's just not active in the fruit normally. And you see a bit of it, there's a couple varieties on the market. Now, you might've seen some of these. They have sort of brownish skin, and there's even one that's more purplish. But when you cut 'em open, they're just red or greenish red in the middle. They don't actually ever make purple pigment in the flesh of the fruit. The difference here is it's expressed throughout the fruit. So they're dark purple all the way through, which is super cool.

Vance Crowe [00:08:52] And so I've been getting loads and loads of articles about the Purple Tomato just in the last week from you actually. What's the big thing that's going on right now?

Eric Ward [00:09:02] Well, we had a, a watershed moment a couple of weeks ago. So if, to the extent you want me to get into the wonky details Oh yeah. Of the

Vance Crowe [00:09:10] Regulatory process.

Eric Ward [00:09:11] I'll happily share that. So the USDA historically has regulated the, the release of genetically modified crops into the environment. Like are they gonna be a plant pest or not? That's really the USDA's role. And that goes all the way back to the mid 1990s with the very first GM crops like the flavor saver tomato from Calgene or the first transgenic corn plants that Monsanto and Novartis and other companies. So the USDA has always had this relatively narrow remit, right? They rule on is it a plant pest risk or not? There was a arcane detail of the way genetic engineering gets done that cause them to drag a lot of things into that regulatory regime that maybe shouldn't have been there. And the arcane detail is the way you put the genes into the plant uses a bacterium called agrobacterium tumor facies, agrobacterium naturally genetically engineers plants. That's its lifestyle. It actually sticks a piece of DNA into the plant all by itself, causes the plant to make a food source for it, the bacterium. And it causes the plant cells to proliferate, like make a, a so-called crown gall, basically a big nod of tissue. And then the bacteria thrives in that crown gall tumor and eats the stuff that it's engineered the plant to make. So that's pretty slick, like evolutionary trick. So years and years ago, Mary de Chilton here at Wash U in St.

Eric Ward [00:10:43] Louis and groups in, in the Netherlands and in Belgium. And then the guys at Monsanto too figured out that, hey, you could take that mechanism, strip out all that stuff you don't want, that the bacterium normally does, and put in your gene of interest and the ba the agrobacterium would take it in for you. And that was done in, in parallel by several of those groups back in the early eighties. Okay. So, so why is this germane to the USDA regulatory regime? AGROBACTERIUM is technically considered a plant pathogen because the crown galls are actually a disease of like grapevines. You see a lot of 'em in the field, right? So you

Vance Crowe [00:11:23] See 'em on oak trees too, right?

Eric Ward [00:11:24] Yeah. That, and those can be caused by insects and other things, but it's a similar idea. Yeah. So the USDA then interpreted that, well, look, you're taking a piece of a plant pathogen's, DNA, and it's ending up in the genetically engineered plant. Therefore, because it has a piece of plant pathogen, DNA, it gets pulled into our regulatory regime. We have to consider it as a plant pest risk. And after, you know, three decades of that technology and realizing that the only piece of agrobacterium that ends up in the genetically modified plant is like 20 base pairs. It's this little sequence that causes it to get guided in. It has nothing to do with the pathogenesis process other than it allows the DNA to go in. They finally have said, okay, just because it has a few base pairs of agrobacterium DNA, that doesn't automatically make it a plant pest risk. So that was one big watershed thing. Another was they no longer are gonna require that you do field trials in order to assess plant PE risk. That had become the defacto standard. All the big companies have tremendous resources and infrastructure and people around this. So they would do extensive field trialing of all these varieties, which they have to do anyway to make sure that they're, you know, gonna yield properly for corn and stuff like that. But that then turned into this hurdle for even a tiny little startup company. It's like, oh God, we gotta do all these field trials. USDA also said, unless the field trial is gonna shed light on whether it's a plant past risk, it's not going to be required.

Eric Ward [00:13:00] So in our case, tomatoes have no wild relatives in the us. They don't outcross very well. They pretty much self pollinate. And moreover, the mechanism. So the mode of action of the trait has nothing to do with it becoming a plant PE risk. That's what the USDA decided. So there's no reason for us to have to do field trials. Instead, we simply submitted to them all the detailed information about how it was made, where the gene is in the genome, what it does, and then some information about the population genetics of tomatoes and their wild relatives, of which there aren't any. And so that went through a new process that the USDA that they call a regulatory status review. And that was announced little over a year ago in the context of a new regulatory regime. They called a secure rule. So the news was we were the very first of these regulatory status review requests that emerged under this new regulatory regime.

Vance Crowe [00:14:03] Seems like a libertarian dream. Like it never actually happens that the government gives up a power that they have.

Eric Ward [00:14:09] Well, you know, I think it's, it's a testament to, this is a, an example of government actually working pretty effectively where there was an, a realization that we want, we have a technological lead in this area as a country period, number one. Number two, we wanna see more innovation. So specifically from little tiny companies like Norfolk Plant Sciences, which is the group that's commercialized in the Purple Tomato. Moreover, they wanna see the technology end up in more crops than just corn, soybeans, you know, canola like giant row crops, which are in the economic interest of very large companies that have commercialized them, but are not so relevant to like consumer interest, right? So I think there's a, there's a multiple factors that converged here. So there was a kind of big review catalyzed by the White House to look at the whole regulatory regime. I don't remember all the details, but out of that emerged the, this proposal for the secure rule a couple years ago. And then it got announced, and then we submitted a regulatory status review under that. And we were the first one spit out the other end of the pipe,

Vance Crowe [00:15:21] Which White House administration was,

Eric Ward [00:15:23] I don't it, you know, it, it might, I think it even started in the tail end of the Obama administration. And then it kind of went on during Trump. You know, this, the, these agencies aren't, they're, they're typical, they're not really run by political appointees, right? These are folks that are career administrators and the people we worked with at, at aphis, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection service, which is a group in USDA that has purview over transgenic crops. Those folks are all, you know, decade old employees and, you know, super smart scientists, really easy to communicate with, like very open to new stuff. And I think they're, it's, it's a bit of a dream scenario for them. When something comes along, it's like, oh, great, another one from Monsanto, you know, and all they do is read thousands of comments about how Monsanto sucks and Roundup kills people, you know, pick your poison. So when something comes along from a tiny little company that's actually made a really cool consumer facing product that's kind of like, wow, this is great. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:16:27] To me, the, like I used to always talk when I was going out and speaking about GMOs on behalf of Monsanto to activist groups is I would always bring up like the look the, the more regulation that you push for, you think you're hurting a

Eric Ward [00:16:39] Place like

Vance Crowe [00:16:39] Monsanto, but all you're doing is digging a giant moat because they don't care. Oh yeah. I had another year of trials on add 10 more years of trials on. 'cause all that does is make it so a little company like Norfolk can't do it. No. And then the only way that they're gonna see that be commercialized is if they put that thing up for sale. And there's only a handful of companies that can buy it. So to me, yeah,

Eric Ward [00:16:58] What

Vance Crowe [00:16:58] You're describing here is like, like truly like a, like a monumental movement.

Eric Ward [00:17:03] It's a big

Vance Crowe [00:17:04] Deal. It's

Eric Ward [00:17:05] A big deal. The other, there's one other, I'll just to for completeness. There's one other thing that changed under secure, which is once you've got the gene signed off on by USD, it's technically called it's deregulated, which means you don't need to get a permit or you don't have to notify anybody when you plant it. Now you can plant it like you would plant any other variety. If you were to then take that same gene, that same trait and put it back into the same species of plant again, just, and it just ends up in another spot in the genome, you're, you're pretty much exempted at that point. You've already been deregulated, unless there's something new about the way that gene went in. There used to be a lot of rules around the so-called event specific stuff, which is where the actual gene went in. And you'd have to go through the whole rigamarole all over again, even though it was the exact same gene. It just happens. You went into a different spot in the genome. So it's, it got rationalized, you know, kind of on multiple dimensions, which is, is great. And I think it's exciting for the people at USDA too, 'cause they wanna, you know, as much as we can have these weird stereotypes of the way career, you know, bureaucratic administrators are, these people actually wanna see innovation come to light. They don't always have the tools in their hands that do it.

Vance Crowe [00:18:25] So, so what then happens for Purple tomatoes? Are they, like, I remember when Kevin Fulta was doing something with Al Jazeera. I remember they had, he was showing him something with strawberries that he had a GMO strawberry. Interesting. And he said when he turned his back, one of the cameramen ate it. And he was like, I don't really know what to do here. 'cause it's totally illegal. Was it illegal? When, you know, right up until that these, these,

Eric Ward [00:18:50] Well yeah, you, you know, technically you, you're, well, yes. So when you, when you disseminate seeds and you're under, you're still under permit, then you can't allow those seeds to just go out willy nilly anywhere. So that, that has to all be done under permit. So any movement of those guys that we did before then we had to do under permit, which is the way we handle 'em. So that it's a, it's a frictional cost that gets removed. Now. We can basically send the seeds wherever we want. And if you eat one of those and you poop the seeds out, you don't have to worry about the seeds in your poop. And if you've ever been to a activated sludge bed at a wastewater treatment facility, which I would encourage you to do sometime there, you will see tomato plants sprouting all over them. 'cause the tomato seeds actually do a pretty good job transiting your gut. And they end up, even after going through activated sludging, you'll get volunteer tomatoes growing all over the place. So, so, so we weren't happy about, and in fact prohibited people from eating these up until we had the USDA permitted.

Vance Crowe [00:19:54] 'cause you legitimately, you could actually throw those out.

Eric Ward [00:19:57] They could hop on a plane and they'd grow in California. 'cause that's where you took your next, you know, number two. So it's, it's an issue, right? And it, under the, under the permitting rules, you've gotta revitalize the field after a trial. So you would, you'd steward the field at the end of the season, harvest the crop, all grown under regulation, kill everything, disc it all in, spray herbicide on it, monitor it subsequently to make sure there are no volunteers growing. And that's the kind of stuff you have to do. Which it's all doable. It's just expensive and it's extra work. So that's why it's so important to, to get this deregulated status for us. Now there, there's another dimension, which is FDA, which we haven't talked about at all, which is we're still waiting on. And FDA, this ist a a bit of arcana around genetically modified plants. The FDA process has always been voluntary. It, it started with calgene back in 1994. They decided they were gonna submit the FDA and FDA then came up with a framework that said, we will look at your submission of data about nutritional composition and allergenicity and the like. And we will acknowledge that we have no further questions. That's all you, that's what you get from it. So we submitted a thing called a biotechnology notification file or BNF back about two and a half years ago. Now I'm leaning away from the mic here and I'm sorry.

Vance Crowe [00:21:23] Yeah, keep going.

Eric Ward [00:21:25] So this, this BNF has been in the FDA for o over two years now. And what they do is they wanna see data that shows that the tomatoes are basically the same as any other tomato except for these changes that we made. So they're, they're super interested in like, what, what did you put in there? Could it be allergenic? In our case, these transcription factors, these gene regulators are there in such tiny quantities. 'cause all they have to do is turn on the genes that make the purple pigment. You don't need hardly any of them. And so they're almost undetectable. It turns out in the, in the tomato fruit, you gotta look really hard for 'em. It's not like there's some massive amount of some new protein that's been made there. So we're good on the allergenicity. And then you look at total nutritional composition of the fruit, like all the bulk properties like sugar content, all that kind of stuff. Amino acid levels identical to the other tomatoes. The only thing that's different that you can detect using normal analytical methods is they have a ton more of these anthocyanin pigments. Okay. So that's all good. So then the FDA will say, well, whoa, wait, what if you eat too many anthocyanins? So then you have to do comparisons of like normal dietary exposure to anthocyanins. And it turns out if you eat normal quantities of these, it's no different from eating normal quantities of blueberries or eggplant or blackberries or whatever. So we're not in some weird realm where all of a sudden you're gonna get, you know, a thousand times more of this compound than you would ever get in your diet anyway.

Eric Ward [00:23:00] So we're, we're in consultation with them. We expect, you know, knock on wood, we'll, we'll hear something positive from them in the next months, maybe even weeks. We've, we've had a regular ongoing discussion with them about what they're looking for. One of their concerns is, it turns out a byproduct of tomato processing is this stuff called poise, which is basically the skins and the seeds. So when you buy tomato paste and what do they do with that? Well, they put an animal feed, go figure, right? It's like, you know, vegetable matter that's got some protein and calories in it. So of course it gets turned into animal feed. So there's a concern that because these are now deregulated and you can grow 'em anyway, some, anywhere, somebody could turn the poms from the purple tomatoes into animal feed. So then it has to go to the Center for Veterinary Medicine and FDA where they will determine whether there's undue exposure to the animals that might eat this stuff. Now, in reality, these are not gonna be a commodity product, right? We're not making hunts tomato paste out of these. So it's probably a moot point. But for to be, to be careful and complete, they still will check for that too. So we've submitted arguments to them about the levels of anthocyanins that occur in animal food normally that show that we're not gonna cause someone do exposure as a result of these things being released. So

Vance Crowe [00:24:25] The things you're describing, like all the hurdles, all the government Yeah.

Eric Ward [00:24:28] Like this is like super boring.

Vance Crowe [00:24:30] No, I mean, it's not boring. It's, this

Eric Ward [00:24:32] Is like, I go,

Vance Crowe [00:24:34] Why would a human being dedicate their time to getting through the bureaucracy of the government?

Eric Ward [00:24:39] Well, being a human being who's spent a little bit of time doing that, I gotta say it's not my favorite. 'cause it's, it does seem like overly careful sometimes. But the reality is we live in a regulated world, right? And increasingly so it gets at something you said earlier about the activists not realizing they're feeding into the interest of big companies. It's like, well, this technology has never been tested. How do we know it's not risky? This is like the most regulated agricultural stuff there is. You can breed anything you want. You can wild cross anything. You can get to pollinate with anything else. You have no idea what you did. And

Vance Crowe [00:25:20] You can, not to mention the black magic of of oh, what it grafting. Yeah. Like the, the weird things that can come outta that,

Eric Ward [00:25:28] Whatever, you know, and that, that's completely unregulated, right? You're mixing like grab bags of jeans. So here we're taking, you know exactly what we put in here. You know exactly where it is. You know exactly what it does. And so this claim that it's somehow not highly regulated, it's just, you know, it holds no water on the face of it. The point being we're not going to proceed extra legally, let me put it that way. Now, the FDA process is voluntary, right? So we're not required by law to do anything with FDA, we're being good citizens by doing this biotechnology notification file and then awaiting their judgment that we've submitted sufficient evidence that these are no different from any other tomato. It doesn't mean we can't eat 'em right now, it just, we're doing it at our own risk. But, you know, realistically, you do all kinds of stuff at your own risk all the time anyway, including like eating too much ice cream, watching tv. That's extremely risky behavior that's not regulated by the government. So, you know, I, I feel completely comfortable guiding people by saying, you can grow these and you can eat 'em. We're not gonna give you any, you know, imprimatur that the FDA says it's okay to do that, but who cares? You do all kinds of things. The FDA says doesn't rule about already that, that said we're in, you know, like I say, we're in discussion with them. We respect what they do a lot. We've talked to those folks, we know 'em, they do a super good careful job and we're eagerly awaiting their judgment that we've supplied sufficient data to them.

Eric Ward [00:26:59] So

Vance Crowe [00:26:59] We have some right here. I got a package in the mail the other day and they, there they were the purple tomatoes. It's you, you believe safe to eat. You think if I eat this is not gonna cause me any, like, I

Eric Ward [00:27:12] Mean if, unless you, if they're you have a problem with tomatoes normally anyway, then I wouldn't eat 'em. But they're So these

Vance Crowe [00:27:18] Are like cherry tomatoes sized

Eric Ward [00:27:20] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:27:21] And then when we cut 'em open, they're like legit purple, like on the outside. In fact, when I opened up the package, I thought they were chestnut. I was like,

Eric Ward [00:27:27] Oh wow. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:27:28] That's how dark they're Well, and

Eric Ward [00:27:29] You can see there's even purple staining on the paper plate. Yeah. Which is pretty impressive.

Vance Crowe [00:27:32] And you look at 'em from there. Yeah.

Eric Ward [00:27:34] Like,

Vance Crowe [00:27:35] So I like, I, I actually was looking at it and then I was like, oh gosh, no, these are the tomatoes I was being sent, so I'm gonna try one.

Eric Ward [00:27:41] Sure.

Vance Crowe [00:27:42] You and you have eaten a purple tomato before. Yeah,

Eric Ward [00:27:45] Sure. I mean, you know, under controlled conditions before. But now, you know, since the, the So let me let,

Vance Crowe [00:27:53] That's super weird. That was super weird because I didn't realize that my looking at it would change. Like seeing that it was purple, I wasn't expecting it to taste like a tomato.

Eric Ward [00:28:03] Oh yeah, yeah. But

Vance Crowe [00:28:04] It does taste like a tomato, right? It doesn't taste

Eric Ward [00:28:06] Like a blackberry, right?

Vance Crowe [00:28:07] Yeah. But like, it was like, so, so you, it was like a little bit like, you know, when you go to get a glass of water and it ends up being milk and you're like, whoa. Like

Eric Ward [00:28:13] No, it is interesting, isn't it? And yeah, I think the, so part of the reason I'm involved in this is because I got involved in plant biotechnology way back in grad school, you know, when I was at WashU here in St. Louis in the early eighties. And I think all of us that back in that era were like, this is such cool technology, it's gonna have such a big impact on the world and on people's lives and on the climate and the planet. And then it turned into this regulatory cf right? Over time. And during that period of seeing it kind of degenerate into this lowest common denominator Franken food discussion. There's always this, well, look, nobody's ever come up with anything that a consumer actually wants or cares about, right? It's like, you don't, if you're gonna buy a corn chip, it doesn't matter to you if that corn was, was tolerant of glyphosate or it was resistant to corn borrower. It's like all, all you're seeing is risk as a consumer. It's like, it's good for the grower, it's good for the company selling the product. It's not, you don't see any direct benefit. Here's something where you see a direct benefit. So this is a bit of a holy grail, like consumer facing, genetically modified organism that people can actually get behind and that that's the hope, right. And we'll, we shall see.

Vance Crowe [00:29:33] Yeah. I mean I am naturally prone to, I, I guess I'm probably high in the openness scale. Yeah. So I like novelty, but if I go to the grocery store and all of a of a sudden they're selling yellow carrots, I really want yellow and purple carrots. Yeah. Like, 'cause I'm like, hey, what, you know, let's try that out. And I always thought that that would be the same way with, with GMOs, but there just wasn't who, who was gonna take the time to do that. Yeah. And frankly, like when you talk about the return on investment, right? Like selling something directly to consumers in the form of tomatoes, you have to sell a hell of a lot of tomatoes to make whatever genetically engineered change you've made valuable.

Eric Ward [00:30:11] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:11] Whereas if you can find a way to make a crop, you know, resistant to a certain kind of herbicide like corn. Sure. Sure. You're affecting like hundreds of thousands of acres. Yeah. You know,

Eric Ward [00:30:22] Tens of millions, tens of millions of

Vance Crowe [00:30:23] Acres. Yeah.

Eric Ward [00:30:24] Yeah. No, I think that's a super good point. And you know, Monsanto early on had projects going in tomato and potato and multiple crops where they were gonna have a positive impact. But at the end of the day, you end up having to do the calculation. It's an opportunity cost. You want to put your incremental dollar into more stuff that's gonna help you sell more corn seed. Or you want to put your incremental dollar into stuff that's gonna go into a crop that's, you know, much smaller. Particularly if you're just playing on the seed end of the value chain, right? You're, you're not actually extracting value at the retail point. You're just selling tomato seed. It's hard to make a living in doing that.

Vance Crowe [00:31:02] So you're not a marketing guy, but you're kind of the CEO of the, of the overall project.

Eric Ward [00:31:07] No, I gotta give a huge hat tip to a guy named Nate Poland based out in Davis, who's CEO of the commercial operation for the US who's been with us for about a year now. And he joined just about when the whole USDA landscape was shifting. And he's done a fantastic job. He's got a background in actually advertising originally, but then plant biotechnology of all things. And we, he, we got together at just the right time. He was looking for a new opportunity completely of his own volition. He quit a really good gig 'cause he just wanted to do something novel and he wanted to work in an area where there wasn't a super long discovery timeline. Like most plant biotech, it's like, here's a dream, we can realize the dream it's gonna take us eight years. This was like done. I mean, the technology risk is zero. This thing has been back crossed to, you know, dozens of times. You know, it's completely stable. It's a good trait. It's just a question of now getting it on a commercial path. So that's what Nate's been up to. And, you know, not to preempt, he'd be an interesting guy to talk to also, not that you wanna spend two whole podcasts on purple tomatoes, but the, the initial plan is try to work through regional growers that are connected to regional grocers, particularly in the center of the US where people have a more visceral understanding of agriculture. It's not a weird thing for them that something would be GM also working through farm stands. So direct sales where people get, you know, there's a, it shortens the value chain and the grower can take it directly to the consuming public.

Eric Ward [00:32:46] We're also gonna,

Vance Crowe [00:32:47] I like the idea of farm stands. Yeah.

Eric Ward [00:32:49] If,

Vance Crowe [00:32:49] If only, like, 'cause I've seen the GMO corn, you know, sweet corn Sure. Sold there, right? Yeah. So you have some people that are like, Hey, I'm just growing sweet corn from my farm stand. And if you have a person standing right there explaining what's going on, all of a sudden the person isn't in the grocery store being like, yeah,

Eric Ward [00:33:07] Wait

Vance Crowe [00:33:07] A second, should this be cheaper? Right? 'cause it's a GMO, now all of a sudden you're able to explain like, hey, you're not gonna have worms in this because it's gotta, and you, and it

Eric Ward [00:33:14] Didn't get sprayed 15 times with insecticide between anthesis and harvesting, which is what they used to do. Right. So, so yeah, that's, that's a super good example. And it, it personalizes it, it also, you know, look, people, people are looking for differentiation. Like you said, you know, you see a yellow carrot or a purple carrot or purple broccoli, it's like, Hey, that's cool. I wanna buy that. And I think that's true across the board, including into retail, fresh produce, grocery, provided they can get over the kind of pucker factor about the fact that it's gm. You

Vance Crowe [00:33:50] Know, I, this is one of those things that I, like my, I always talk about the Peter Thiel paradox, right? Yeah. Like, what's one thing you believe that other people don't? You know, after I worked for Monsanto on behalf of GMOs, I came to the conclusion that almost no one had a problem with GMOs. Yeah,

Eric Ward [00:34:05] Interesting.

Vance Crowe [00:34:05] It was, it was almost entirely mimetic,

Eric Ward [00:34:08] You

Vance Crowe [00:34:08] Know? Yeah. They would hear from somebody else that somebody really didn't like them. And so then they were like, ah, if I have a choice between having them or not having them, I'm gonna lean towards not having 'em. But I don't really know, I don't really care. Because I had literally thousands of conversations about GMOs, and it was so rare that someone had even more than a modicum of resistance about GMOs that I just think like the activist did a very good job of making the pressure seem a lot higher than it was. But after just a little bit of pushback on the, on the anti GMO rhetoric, it's gone. It's not anywhere. No. You don't see Franken food.

Eric Ward [00:34:48] We, we feel the same way. And, you know, Nate points to the, the most recent Pew Charitable Trust study, which was, I don't know, three or four years ago, which is basically a 50 50 split. So, which is great. So half of the market doesn't care or actually wants it. That's a positive message. And I'm with you. I think a lot of it is just essis. It's like, well, if you're gonna, you know, why wouldn't you answer? No, I don't like 'em because you already have this weird, you know, sort of like, well, I see all these little pretty logos of the butterfly that says non GMO projects. There must be something to that. So it's, it's pretty easy to say you don't want 'em

Vance Crowe [00:35:25] No basis of Yeah. And I think it's the same thing as the, you know, when you walk up to somebody and you say, Hey, I'm gonna flip a quarter, you know the heads you get it, will you pay, you give me a dollar and if it's tail, then I'll give you a dollar. People are like, like, no, and you have to bring it like 10 times up. You know, I'll give you $10. You only have to give me $1 before people do it. And it's because we have risk aversion. Yeah. And that's makes sense, right? Sure. Like the humans that don't have high risk aversion were the ones that tried things and died. And so like, it's deeply embedded in you. Oh yeah. You just like, do whatever we were doing a moment before, even if I didn't know what we were doing a moment before change tells me something's wrong.

Eric Ward [00:36:01] Yeah. And you know, coupled with a healthy dollop of cynical marketing around fear, that's what all the NGOs, that's what they sell is fear. And so one of the, they latched onto this is something people could be afraid of. Now

Vance Crowe [00:36:17] I also think that those NGOs were actually just really well covered PR firms. Oh, sure. Yeah. And like, it was like, I think like sure people have this sense of like, no, there's a collection of people that were really passionate about something and they went out in this world. No, those guys were for hire and they would point at whatever technology you wanted. And the way that they did PR was they focused on that one aspect of it, whether it was sustainable or fairly traded or Yeah. And then they would just say, whatever you are doing that's different than my clients. That's the part of it that we're gonna point at. Yeah.

Eric Ward [00:36:48] I, you know, I, who knows, but I see no reason I, I have no data that would refute that. And at the end of the day, the result is what matters, not the motivation. And that's what they ended up doing. Right. And so I, the, the other thing I think that's happened is there's a lot more concern about climate change and sustainable production now for sure than there was 10 years ago. And if you say, I am gonna make it a defacto impossible for you to move genes from one category of organisms into a crop that isn't fertile with that other organism, you're, you're removing a huge, huge tool that we've got in altering crop physiology to make it possible to actually make those things more drought tolerant, more able to deal with extreme temperature, you name it, right? I mean it's, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:37:42] But we do that with nuclear, right? Like we've taken that off the table and, and

Eric Ward [00:37:46] Yeah, it's equally irrational probably even, you know, it Yeah. It's crazy, right? It's some level, but that's, it's understandable too. It's this like overinterpreting of incremental risk that isn't really an incremental risk, you know, it's kind of like, oh, well Chernobyl, Fukushima, that's all anybody thinks of with nuclear. And it's like, well, yeah, but I grew up, you know, I was born in 1960, I grew up, my dad used to travel for business all the time in the seventies. And I don't know if you remember the frequency of airline crashes back then. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:38:22] I wasn't alive back then.

Eric Ward [00:38:23] It was astounding really compared to what it is now. Yeah. I mean, it is a major news event when anywhere in the world, a jetliner crashes now, and the US jet liners were crashing at the rate of more than one a year back then in rather spectacular ways. And the result of that has been, we have an incredibly safe air transit system now, right? Like, all this stuff that could go wrong to a first order approximation has gone wrong and it's all been rung out of the system now. You know,

Vance Crowe [00:38:56] I had no idea about that. I mean, my sense about plane crashes or people being afraid of flying on a plane was just that they're like so irrational because planes never crash. But I didn't realize before the eighties they did crash.

Eric Ward [00:39:09] No. Then in the, you know, the post what immediately leading up to, and immediately after World War ii, the first real commercial, you know, propeller plane travel, that was just that the, the statistics are astonishing there. I mean, 'cause they'd take off, they wouldn't know what the weather was gonna be, where they were gonna land. And there was, you weren't coming back. You didn't have enough fuel, so you're just gonna wing it. Literally. There's a great book called Fate is the Hunter by Ernest k GaN. It's about, he's a, he was a commercial pilot back in those days, and it's all about his training and near misses. And the first six or seven pages of that book is fallen colleagues not from the war.

Vance Crowe [00:39:53] Whoa. Well, that probably explains why there used to be ashtrays on those things, because people were probably so Oh yeah. Addled with fear. They had to cocktails

Eric Ward [00:40:01] And a bunch of cigarette.

Vance Crowe [00:40:03] So you brought up climate change. And I am so deeply resistant to saying something as simple as I believe in climate change if only because I feel like as soon as I do now, we value smuggled all these other ideas in that I don't agree with and, and really like it, it's the diff it's the is ought dilemma, right? Yeah. Just 'cause you can say something is true. Yeah. Doesn't tell you what you ought to do about it. So let's start from there. Mm. Is climate change happening?

Eric Ward [00:40:34] Well, I'm, I'm, I would never claim to be an expert. Okay. For starters, that's probably good. Like if Naim Tale is hovering over you is like, good, you're not an expert, then you can actually figure out what's going on. You know, look, the, I think what's happened is it's become convenient to identify short term fluctuation, to equate that with longer term trends. Right? So I think back to Hurricane Katrina was 2006, and there were, every pundit was saying, this is the start of the new mega hurricanes, we're gonna have these every year. They're all gonna be CAD five didn't happen. Okay. So, so, but that, that's a, there's one sort of bin you can put that in. It's really super fricking hot here right now, and it's the middle of September. Okay. Who knows? Is that fluctuation? Yeah. I mean, over time statistically temperatures are shifting higher. I think it's reasonable now to say there's, there's a very high likelihood that anthropogenic CO2 generation is correlated with that and probably has a causal effect. I think that's hard to debate against right now, what I, what I don't like is then, okay, so what do we do about it? We now completely change the economy to try to mitigate the burning of fossil fuels in order to keep the temperatures lower. Nobody really knows how that's gonna work.

Eric Ward [00:42:07] Nobody has been able, that requires coordinated global action of a sort that we've never experienced. You know, the closest we've gotten to it is probably like World War ii and that was not a coordinated global action that was very much us and them.

Vance Crowe [00:42:26] So I don't, yeah, we can't do coordinated action on things that are irrefutably, you know? Yeah. Like a po net positive for everyone. Like I think that, you know, not everyone has electricity.

Eric Ward [00:42:36] Yeah. The CFC thing for the ozone hole is the best example that people point to where, but that was a case where there was a pretty well, well researched alternative that had incremental costs, but it was gonna work. They already had a solution. Effectively. This is like, okay, you wanna actually decarbonize and move away from liquid fossil fuel for like transportation and everything else. Like we don't actually have a solution for that. And do you know, you know this guy Vlo smell, do you read any of No.

Vance Crowe [00:43:04] His stuff?

Eric Ward [00:43:05] So he, he's like Bill Gates' favorite author I think. So he's written a whole series of books about the energy economy and how what actually runs the world. His latest one is called How the World Works. And this guy basically says all of these gestures that are being made are just that. And you know, it's effectively ends up being virtue signaling. Now it's great, it's an incremental, I, you know, I got a, my lovely wife Gertie bought me a RAV4 prime for my birthday back in December. It's a plugin hybrid so I can run it on electric

Vance Crowe [00:43:37] For

Eric Ward [00:43:37] All my commuting to and from work. And I feel kind of good about that. And it's about half the price of gas. You know, I plug the thing in overnight, it costs me a buck 50 to put 45 miles worth of electric power into it, but I'm, it's not, it's not moving the needle, you know, and it just isn't gonna work. If you look at the number of coal burning power plants in China, if you look at the amount of fossil fuel you have to burn to make stuff like concrete or steal, like there's not good alternatives to that. So it's, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:44:07] And like, and to push people to not be able to use the options that are the incremental options to generate electricity, to me, like borders on evil, right? Like if you define evil as the, the addition of suffering where it doesn't need to exist, you're talking about people, like when I lived in Kenya 15 years ago, in order to be able to have light bulbs on in your house, if your solar panels, if you didn't have enough money to, to front for solar panels, which is pretty rare, you had to take a car battery to the center of the little village where there was somebody running a generator to plug that car battery in and bring it back. And those kids are trying to read to their math, do all this stuff with light bulbs that are par powered by car batteries to tell them that they're not allowed to have a coal burning power plant because we want to manage the, the environment. Yeah,

Eric Ward [00:44:58] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:44:59] But yet not swooping in and finding some other alternative to the energy. Like, I don't know, like who are you to, to, to interfere with that level of progress.

Eric Ward [00:45:08] Yeah. And similar analogy to that would be, oh, well we're not gonna let Africa have a green revolution like you saw in India because you gotta make all this Haber Bosch nitrogen to have fertilizer to have good enough yield for the crops. So it's like, okay, great, well let 'em starve is effectively what you're saying when you do that. Right. Which is, yeah, I'm with you. I think it's a, it's a real moral issue where it's like the ultimate sorta, it's, it's almost, it's like a version of nimbyism almost. It's like, as long as I can feel good about my shit and I got my Prius and I don't use plastic water bottles, that's all great. And meanwhile there's, you know, 800 million people that don't know where their next meal's coming from and they're not gonna get to benefit from technological progress. I, I guess I'm enough of a long-term optimist about technology that I don't, it doesn't feel to me and admittedly is this feeling, I don't have any, you know, it's predicting the future. So there's no real basis for doing it. We're gonna get out of whatever issue we've created by putting so much CO2 in the atmosphere. There's no question we will, it's, it could take a hell of a long time. A bunch of bad things might happen, but those are gonna be bad things that are trade-offs against good things. And you know, they're trying to save every, I mean the pains me to say this 'cause I'm a like nature lover and you know, first of all bird watcher and all that, but yes, a bunch of species are probably gonna go extinct, but, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:46:43] So you think the, the danger of climate change is so present as to be like already things are dying as a result or?

Eric Ward [00:46:52] Yeah, I think there's decent evidence of that. Let me put it that way. I, I've really come around to it over the last couple years. I, I'm, I'm in your camp pretty firmly. I don't like subscribing to the belief because I feel it, it bins me in a tribe that I'm not a part of. And this whole like trust the science thing that, that people say like, this is the most arcane, difficult to model problem that anybody's dealing with. Like literally the models are incredibly complicated to the level where I could never understand them. They're only as good as the inputs that go into 'em. And I know that how hard it is to model stuff, you know, from very limited exposure I've had to, like in biology, it even pretty simple systems take years and years of work and typically have to be backed up by experimental manipulation to say like, okay, I've got a model now so I can genetically take this gene out and see what happens. Does the model support that or not? You can't do that with the climate.

Vance Crowe [00:47:53] Well, and like, geez, the perfect example is people maybe if you're in farming, you definitely know about dicamba, but if you're outside of it, you maybe heard like, hey, there was this chemical that farmers were spraying on their crops and it would like volatilize and lift off and go hit some other farmer. And if that one had didn't make his crops dicamba tolerant, then they just, right. They're just blam blasted. Right. Well, one of the reasons that their models were so bad was that they were using the United States has a huge amount of wind data and like, what is the wind speed? And you needed to do, you needed to put dicamba down when the wind speed was between like five miles an hour to seven and a half or 10, right? Yeah. It wasn't zero. They didn't want it dead calm. And what they found out was after all this stuff had volatilized and moved on was it turns out the difference of wind speed at the ground level versus where all the, the wind speed was being monitored so that it wouldn't be interfered with by having trees and buildings in front of it is really different. And so when you put it into a live environment, you're like, Hey, it's supposed to be five mile an hour winds right now, okay for me to go put this on. It turns out it wasn't that. And so like to your point about the inputs, like there's so much stuff where it's easy to be like, we know that this data is right because look how much of it we have. And it was just a matter of whether or not that that thing monitoring the wind speed was five feet further off the ground than it should have been.

Eric Ward [00:49:25] Yeah. And we, the, the granularity of the data in the case of this climate stuff is like extremely coarse grained, right? Like I think yeah, it's probably, you know, maybe we have enough computing power now if you like, took measurements every 10 square meters all over the whole planet, you could figure some stuff out, but it's not, not even close to that. Right. And again, I'm like outta my depth, I just know it's a super complicated problem. It's very hard to model and you know, I, I don't think that there's any real disagreement now that there has been some impact of anthropogenic CO2 on the climate that's like hard to believe that it wouldn't be true. The question is where's that taken us? And what are we gonna do about it? And I'm, I'm not a fan of putting the brakes on the global economy to try to fix that right now. I think it, like you say, it's a moral issue among other things. And you know, the best thing we can do for the long-term future of humanity is grow the economy.

Vance Crowe [00:50:21] So speaking of growing the economy, that happens when people start new businesses that are, that are innovative and different and your company does something really different, right? Normally people that are going out and spraying their crops to protect them from fungus and, and insects are going out there and spraying synthetic things or some naturally derived but put into mass production. What are you guys doing that's different?

Eric Ward [00:50:47] So yeah, this is, I'll, I'll shift gears here. So that was Norfolk Plant Sciences, purple Tomatoes passion project. I I, my day job is with a company called AgBiome where we discover microbes that have useful properties, so natural occurring microbes. And the market that we've gone into most intensely has been crop protection where there's a real need for new solutions to control diseases, insects, weeds, nematodes. The big chemical companies that have historically done that really well have not discovered any real new modes of action. So genuinely new ways of controlling those pests in over two decades,

Vance Crowe [00:51:28] Which is exactly why we're talking about dicamba, which was invented in the seventies and the only innovation was now we've made some of the plants tolerant to dicamba, not that we've changed how dicamba works. That's

Eric Ward [00:51:39] Exactly right. Yeah. The innovation has all been, the innovation has been reformulating existing active ingredients making new combinations of them engineering plants so they become tolerant to them, et cetera. So no actual new molecules coming. So what do you do about that? Well, it turns out that microbial world is this enormous source of biological activity. So microbes have been around since the dawn of the earth being habitable by life. And they were among the first life forms were primitive microbes. So they've been around for three and a half billion years round numbers and have been kind of fighting it out with each other in whatever environment that whole time. And really useful byproduct of that fighting each other as they, they've come up with cool molecules that have evolved that allow them to interact with one another and do important things to one another. And some of those, it turns out, have really potent properties to that, that are relevant to, to agriculture. So we've got two products on the market now. They're both naturally occurring bacteria. One's called howler, the other one's called Thea. They're two completely different taxa of bacteria, but they each in their own way make a combination of pretty potent fungicide compounds and they, they basically act as like pathogens of the fungus that's trying to grow on the crop. So there, there's a huge additional amount of microbial diversity out there.

Eric Ward [00:53:15] We barely scratched the surface of it. We've got about a hundred thousand proprietary strains in our collection where we know all the genetic information about every one of of 'em. We're continuing to add to that all the time. And there there's way, way more stuff out there to get. And what we're trying to get into now with some success now is working in other industries than crop protection where a microbial process could substitute for a chemical process, a more traditional one that's based on some, you know, petroleum derivative or the like. And that's a super cool new area that's starting to get some traction from the incumbent players in those industries where they've got, you know, decades old processes that work great and fully depreciated plants that run just fine, but they're, they see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel that, hey, there may be a better way to do this. It's more biologically based, it's gonna be more sustainable, it's gonna have lower carbon footprint,

Vance Crowe [00:54:14] Et cetera, et cetera. What, what does it look like if that actually works? How does that go? Well, there's

Eric Ward [00:54:19] A whole bunch of different ways it can, but, you know, simple example would be like you use a, a bacterium to extract some mineral from stuff that you mine, rather than putting it through some chemical process. It's very energy intensive and creates a lot of waste

Vance Crowe [00:54:34] That, so if there was sulfur or something in natural gas and you found out, hey, we could actually, instead of running it through all this chemical and these reactions, we could put a microbe on it and that eats the sulfur.

Eric Ward [00:54:46] Yeah. And we're working with, we've got a, a, a published deal with WL Gore where they make all kinds of interesting membranes, you know, the Gore-Tex guys and they're, they're very interested in, in basically revolutionizing how fermentation gets done. So like adhering a bacterium to a solid substrate so that you could flow stuff over it and the bacteria would be exuding stuff that would cause some chemical transformation and what you're flowing over it, right? You can imagine this having all kinds of

Vance Crowe [00:55:20] Applications. No. Tell me what those would be. Well,

Eric Ward [00:55:23] So for instance, if a chemical reaction you would typically catalyze with some sort of like organ metallic catalyst like you, and you would react it in some vessel. Okay, well how about if you have a bacterium that has an enzyme that's gonna catalyze that reaction instead, and now you've got a, a reactor that you can flow the substrate through and the product you want comes out the other end. And that, that, that has like literally limitless applications. Now the trick is finding the microbe that does the stuff you wanted to do. And that's what we're really focused super hard on now is identifying what environment we need to go into to find such a microbe. What would the genetic signatures of that microbe be in the case that it did do that stuff we wanted? And then developing a actual laboratory screen to look for that property so that we can find the ones

Vance Crowe [00:56:15] That are really doing it. How do you decide which of the things you could do? Because I mean, you're really talking about really imaginative things, right? Yeah. So you like if the sky is the limit on, on, you know, what you can imagine, how do you choose which ones to the challenge? So we, you know,

Eric Ward [00:56:31] Part of it is doing as broad up like landscape surveys you can, and then pretty quickly trying to identify things that are technically tractable in some reasonable timeframe. Like not, we gotta put 20 people on it for 10 years to figure it out. Like if we went hard at this for a couple months, we would get a signal that would say, Hey, it looks like this could work. And then, you know, in an industry where there's a pain point that we think a biological process could help with and the industry has at least one player that's willing to plunk down some money to see that happen. 'cause you know, you, you, I'm sure you can think of all kinds of examples of industries that absolutely would be ripe for having some sort of technological disruption to happen, but they're not gonna, they're not

Vance Crowe [00:57:22] Gonna promote it. Yeah, that's right. That's like the, if you could create an algae that produces petroleum. Yeah. Right. You can't imagine Exxon being real excited about that.

Eric Ward [00:57:31] You know, that's a really interesting case. 'cause if you remember back to the mid two thousands, there were a bunch of plant biotech companies that were focused on bioenergy of various sorts, including making it from algae, you know, that made oil bodies and stuff. All that stuff tanked basically when fracking started to come in big and all of a sudden fossil fuels are dirt cheap and the US is a net exporter and it just was a market problem. So that's getting rebooted a little bit now with the energy prices spiking up over the last few months, I realize they're correcting, but people can see, hey, you know, this isn't all happy, happy if a major supplier, like, you know, Russia gets into some issue where it's gonna be harder to get their, get our hands on their energy in some part of the world, maybe we do need to start to work on that stuff. So I think there's, there's a niche group of investors that are more interested in kind of long-term sustainability than they are in immediate financial return. And that's gonna help fuel some of that stuff too, which I, you know, it's, it's a good idea to have those technologies around that's different from, we should have some massive government program that penalizes the existing ways and, and subsidizes new ways. You know, that's a whole other discussion. But having access to the technologies I think is great. And so it's encouraging that there's stuff out there already and we'll see more of that. And so we're, that we're trying to fuel that fire too in areas that maybe people have looked at yet where I

Vance Crowe [00:59:05] Think a micro can have a, an impact. I would think that the, having people work on a project looking for signal over a couple of months, that's probably a lot better than the, you know, 10 year just keep going blindly. What's the balance? Like? How much do you keep people like up late at night working on their experiments versus like, Hey, have work life balance and be relaxed and

Eric Ward [00:59:30] Yeah. I can't claim to have any special knowledge in that area. Pe people that work hard on this stuff do it out of intrinsic motivation. So if they believe in it and they think it's cool, they'll work hard on it. We've, we've never been like a, you know, the beatings will continue until morale improves kind of company and, you know, with good and bad, right? That I think they're short term. You can get a lot of productivity out of people like that, but it's not sustainable and it's not fun and I, I, I'm bad at it too. So never really gone at it like that. It's, it's way better to work harder on identifying people that are naturally intrinsically motivated and wanna work hard and learn. You know, big, big signal there in the human sort of personality dimension is you want to keep learning all the time. If you're like, that probably gonna be

Vance Crowe [01:00:19] Pretty good. Has it been hard for you to keep learning as you've like gotten older?

Eric Ward [01:00:25] Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it, I think it, it takes more intentional effort, let put it that way. 'cause you can for sure get into a pattern where it's like a lot of like the big life questions. You think you have sort of a framework that works pretty well and it can be tempting to be like, that framework works for me. It gets to what you said earlier, like this risk aversion thing. It's a flavor of that. Like, I've got a paradigm that works for me, so I'm just gonna, you know, we're gonna start to put iron all around that, right? So I actually have done a couple things to try to intentionally break myself out of that. 'cause I don't like feeling that way. And I, I can't say I've got like the problem solved, but one thing I, I've kind of learned this from you actually is like, everybody you meet knows something, knows more about something than you do. And so it's fun trying to figure out what that something is.

Vance Crowe [01:01:23] Yeah. And I used to think that was like this like ethereal thing, right? Like, oh, maybe if you dig down deep enough, it's like right there on the surface. Like you, you can find it real fast, whether it's your Uber driver, your security person, like it's right there and like it's probably miles deep, right? There's a whole vein that you can go into. Yeah.

Eric Ward [01:01:41] So that's, I try to do that, you know, but yeah, there's other people that are way better at it. You're like the master at that stuff.

Vance Crowe [01:01:48] There's

Eric Ward [01:01:49] No seriously people that I know well but that, so that's helped. And then I joined a group, there's this thing called eo, it's the Entrepreneur's Organization, but it just goes by EO now. And my dear friend and close colleague Scott Ness got me into this a few years ago. 'cause he had joined it previously. And that has a, it's a, the core of that is I think called forum, which is a group of like six to nine people that you meet with once a month. And you do, you share the, it's a 5% share. It's the stuff that you don't talk to anybody else about. Although I gotta say in our group, our folks are so open, it's hard for us to find the 5%. 'cause pretty much all of us talk to everybody about everything. But I'm the oldest person in that group and I, I intentionally joined that organization to interact with people that were, you know, two or three decades younger than me. Different point in their careers because I learned all kinds of stuff from, it's not so I can sit there and be the wise elder and tell 'em what to do. In fact, the whole organization shies away from direct advice giving. They practice this method that's got it's experience sharing. So all you do is like try to align an experience that has a similar emotional tenor to what that person might be going through. And you tell them about that and then they draw their own conclusions from it and you draw your own conclusions from theirs. And that's been super cool. 'cause you know, it's like people I've never met otherwise, they're in completely different business areas. They're all like, you know, you'd think it's Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill, but if they're in Raleigh, I'm never gonna meet 'em, man, that's like 35 minute drive away.

Eric Ward [01:03:26] Right? So it's, it's been really fun. Or, or like the, you know, the folks in, you know, the, the network that you've got, it's been great for me to meet a bunch of those guys too. They're, they're super interesting. A bunch of 'em are way younger than me. They do all kinds of cool stuff that I just probably would never have run into 'em otherwise. So

Vance Crowe [01:03:46] Yeah. One of the things that was weird for me, you turn 40 and I remember I was actually just going back and reading a biography I wrote last year. Every year I like write up this biography. I have group of friends, you're in that group of friends. We share it. And I, I realized last year was the first time i, I ever wrote down that I felt like I was getting older. And you know, people have that experience of I look in the mirror and I see an older person, but I don't feel older. Right? Like I'm just, and and I think that's very true for me. And one of the things that I notice when I look at my journal is how much more resistance I have to Yeah. Trying things that are outside of my capacity that I'm good at. And it, it's not because I'm like afraid I'll fail. It's just that like, ah, these other things. I know if I hit that button then the pellet drops out and I get the thing I want. Whereas I could go over here and hit that button a bunch of times and no pellet comes out.

Eric Ward [01:04:46] Yeah. That's a, I think that's pretty deep point. And it gets at all this like, okay, self-improvement journey, right? Like I'm, I'm all about like trying to be a better person and trying to learn more and interface with the world more productively and understand the world better not, but there's this fine line between do you, how much do you want to like stick to your strengths, which you know pretty well and how much you wanna work on the stuff that you basically either have admitted to yourself, you're never gonna really wanna get that much better at, or, you know, there if, to the extent that it's like a five factor thing you're probably good at, so it's

Vance Crowe [01:05:25] Gonna work well and parenting puts you in this weird situation because you really only get to be a parent of that 2-year-old for that moment when she's two. Now you might get another one coming through and you get to do a better job, but you're still moving forward. And my brother actually, Dan posed this thing, this question to me the other day, and it was like very shaking for me. It was, he said, you know, one in, have you ever thought about how your parenting style is designed absent of I'm gonna try and do what my parents do or I'm gonna try not to do what my parents did, right? Like, so if you take those two options off the table for how you're becoming a parent now, how are you defining what you are as a parent? And I was like, oh shit, actually, I really was defining so much about what I wanted to be as a parent as those two things. But that really is limiting. Yeah.

Eric Ward [01:06:19] The only, I, I'm just thinking back to, so my,

Vance Crowe [01:06:24] My twin sons are third tomorrow. Wow. Yeah. Congratulations. And, and my, my dating daughter who's back actually in Durham right now

Eric Ward [01:06:33] For just for another day, she's 25 in a half. So, you know, I've been, I'm way through all that stuff, but I'm trying to think back to what I can relate to what you just said. That I think the only thing Gertie and I did that was different from that was there were a few books that we read that were pretty seminal. And the one that really stands out to me is this one called How to Talk. So Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk and it's by, I don't remember the names of the authors. It's two female psychologists who were acolytes of a guy named Hy Gano, G-I-N-O-T-T, who used to, I think he write, wrote a newspaper column when I was growing up even, you know, about like parenting. And there there were some really simple techniques in there. Like if you're pissed off that your kid won't put his towel on the towel bar in the bathroom after showering, this is like when they're 11 years old or whatever. You can be the, you know, the person who's hectoring your kid all the time and just turn yourself into an asshole. Or you can make a sign that says put towel on towel bar after showering and stick it to the wall. And you know, you know this, you have more of a like public relations, marketing back the power of the written word. Right? It's like, it's very hard to disobey a rule

Vance Crowe [01:07:56] And you never have to say it again. Wow.

Eric Ward [01:07:59] Or like when they, you know, it's a lot of it is just like simple empathetic listening skills, right? Getting them, drawing them out in a way that they will say stuff to you instead of just like, you know, peppering 'em with a bunch of shit they don't want to answer. You know, like, well how was your day today? Oh fine, well here's what my day was like. And then boom, boom, boom, go through three or four really specific things and usually somebody will respond similarly when you do that, right? You sort of put yourself out there a little bit instead of just, you know, how come you'll

Vance Crowe [01:08:37] Never talk to me? You know? Yeah. And then you're in a fight and you're not in like the movement forward and you know, the

Eric Ward [01:08:43] Little tiny kid stuff. I don't know, maybe we just had like a weird attitude toward, I think it was a lot like how you look at yours. Like whatever they're doing, they're not doing it at with limited exceptions. They're not doing it to like mess with you.

Vance Crowe [01:08:56] Yeah. And when they do, it's kind of fun, right? When they do figure out how to mess with you, you're like, Ooh, that was clever. I

Eric Ward [01:09:02] Tell a story because a former colleague of mine, also mentor of Scott Ness is who I mentioned before. Fred Mines, he was a professor at University of Illinois and then he went to the Friedrich Meher Institute in Basel, which was owned by my former employer. So I got to know Fred quite well from business travel over there. And then Gerie and I went and lived in Basel for a year and a half. And Fred and his wife Marita had us over for dinner shortly after we moved to Basel. And our sons, the, the about to turn 30 were like two years and one month old at that point. You know what that's like, right? So we go to their house for dinner and they last at the table for like, you know, 4.2 minutes and then they're off running around the house and the light switches in Switzerland are completely different from the ones in the us you know, they're like a push button instead of a flippy thing, the standard one. And so of course they're like fascinated by this. And so they're like turning the lights on or off like million times, right? And I'm getting ready to blow like after, no, you can't do that. And Fred's just sitting there with this beatific smile and he looks at me, he goes, this is such a wonderful age. And it just like immediately, you know, just melted everything right? Like appreciate what's going on. And it, that was super powerful moment for me.

Vance Crowe [01:10:27] Yeah. Because that, it's like

Eric Ward [01:10:29] One of those, like this is, you're not gonna, this isn't gonna be like that forever, right?

Vance Crowe [01:10:33] Yeah. It's an, it's an awareness of, of the moment that I think, like, so the other day Violet needed to, to get some eye drops and so like after she did it the first time she realized this actually hurts. I don't, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And the experience of watching a little girl overcome her fear, 'cause I'm not gonna hold her down and like pry open her eyes. So like I committed to like, if it takes us a half hour to do this, then I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a half hour to do this. Right? But like, it is a profound experience to watch a child be brave. Right? So she's like, literally her arms are shaking and then what we've worked on is like, put one hand here and then put another hand here and then take a big breath and then close your eyes and then dad will go as fast as he can and to watch her. 'cause I can't do anything for her other than talk her down that path. To watch a human being master themselves is like, if only I could do what you're doing right now on the things that are as hard for me as this is for her. I mean, you, you could do anything. It was like a really profound experience. That's

Eric Ward [01:11:50] Cool because yeah, the alternative is, you know, Hey Anna, you hold her arms down,

Vance Crowe [01:11:56] Right? Not cool. Yeah. Right.

Eric Ward [01:11:58] It gets the job done, but the kid doesn't learn anything from it other than, you know, you're, you're probably not a hundred percent to be trusted.

Vance Crowe [01:12:05] Yeah. And I mean like I, violet and I have such a good relationship because her personality is so similar to mine. Like I can already just see some, but the number two that we have Autumn is you can already tell she's much quieter. She just kinda watching things, you know? And her personality may change as she gets older, but it's just, it'll be interesting to see me interacting with a child that's not like me. Well

Eric Ward [01:12:33] I I, it's funny you mentioned that 'cause we, we tell a story about our sons going to the ophthalmologist 'cause they had pretty bad eyesight early on and getting the drops for the dilation and like literally being held down by a nurse and the other, it's a torture. It's a torture. So not everybody experiences it the same way. Violet.

Vance Crowe [01:12:54] Yeah, that's right.

Eric Ward [01:12:55] Admittedly that was an external agent, so it's all good. They just got afraid of big nurses instead

Vance Crowe [01:13:00] Of us. Violet definitely had a bad experience with the doctor early on and that makes her, like, you can tell what happens when a child doesn't trust somebody anymore. And it's like, that's another weird thing to see where you're like, yep. You know, normally this gregarious little child is like,

Eric Ward [01:13:15] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:13:15] I don't like you. I'm gonna go hide from you. Weird.

Eric Ward [01:13:18] Yeah, no, very cool. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:13:20] Interesting. So changing away from parents, but parenting, but you have two sons that have just, they've got advanced degrees, you're hiring young people that have advanced degrees right now. I think there's a huge amount of talk about how the university system is broken. It's producing all these ideal ideologues and you know, is the university system broken in your opinion?

Eric Ward [01:13:50] Well, it's multiple components to that answer. I think there's pretty good arguments now that the scientific funding system could use a shaking often. You saw this thing the White House came out with a couple of weeks ago, which I think is a step in the right direction, that there's a definitely a rich get richer phenomenon in science funding and coupled with a incentive to basically do not the riskiest stuff. Right. Do, you know, keep stay in the, the the hole you're digging already. That's working pretty well. There's that, that effect exists for sure. And there's people that have been really strong beneficiaries that, but if you look at the things that are like the really big breakthroughs, all that stuff comes from some weird fringe thing that wasn't planned out. So I, I would be delighted if there was more randomness in that. You know, like Tyler Cowen would call it higher variance stuff. Like, you know, and I think some of the agencies have gone to this like go to a, a first level cut. Like, okay, all these grants are good enough, we can only fund one 20th of 'em. So let's just start pulling numbers out of a hat and fund those instead of try to hone it down, down, down, down. And then it turns into, you know, you're gonna give money to the people that you're 99% sure are gonna get a really good publication out of it, which are the ones that are already doing pretty well and it's probably gonna be incremental in that super impact.

Vance Crowe [01:15:20] Yeah. The, I did you read the Safety Nous book, the either the Bitcoin standard or the Fiat standard. So he, in the Fiat standard talks a lot about this, about how one of the consequences of the government being so deeply involved in funding of the university system is now all of a sudden you have like accepted ways of thinking. You know, it's, it's unlikely that the government is going to fund some kind of, they're not gonna fund economists Yeah. That are gonna be like, you know what, this Keynesian system is not working and we should blow it up. The Fed doesn't work. Right. So you end up producing more of the people that already believe the thing that is accepted. Sure. And then, and then because you have the government money, which is almost limitless, then you can really supercharge the problems in the university system rather quickly.

Eric Ward [01:16:13] Yeah. I I think it, I have no, no dispute with that line of reasoning. The other one, I think that's pretty interesting, if you followed any of Brian Kaplan's stuff, he's made the argument that the real value of higher education is a signaling thing. Like if you look at the stats of earning power of people that have three and a half years of college versus people that have four years and a degree, the people that have four years in a degree are statistically paid more than the people of three and a half years. It's not 'cause they learned anymore, it's because they got the steal of approval. So the whole thing is about signaling and you know, that's, I think it'll be really cool to see what the world is like, like when your kids are college age. 'cause you can see how fast stuff is changing already.

Vance Crowe [01:17:03] Well, it's already happening now. You know, my business partner Ben dropped outta college and has done really well. You know, he's now working on papers with Michael Levin and talks with, you know, great other scientists that wanna work with him. So he found a path. Yeah. But even our, our producer here, right? Like, he was like, Hey, college isn't gonna work for me. I don't want to take on all that, all that debt. So he didn't, and he started, you know, doing production. And now when I meet somebody that doesn't have a college degree, it doesn't feel like, oh, you're kind of a, you, you didn't, you you weren't able to hack it. Right?

Eric Ward [01:17:35] A hundred percent. And the stats of the completion of four year degree programs is be

Vance Crowe [01:17:40] Yeah, it's less than 50% after six years. Yeah.

Eric Ward [01:17:43] And it's, and you know, and those people are taking on debt and that is, it's again, it's almost a moral issue, right? Like what, what are we doing as a society that says that in order for you to be regarded as a serious person and have any sort of career that matters, you must get a four year college degree. It's like kind of messed up on some basic level, but there's a lot of political pressure toward that. Right? That's kind of a, it's been a a I think both parties have pushed the, you know, everyone should go to college thing. Not just opportunity, but you know, we're gonna make it really easy for you to do that. And that creates all sorts of weird incentives.

Vance Crowe [01:18:22] Oh yeah. And once you made it so that the, you couldn't declare bankruptcy on your student loan debt, you have inevitably created a bubble. There's no way around it that is the market. You know, that's just the way that it is subsidizing it. You know, one of the things that I think we didn't see, regardless of whatever you think about the $10,000 to people with student loans, one of the things I've really thought a lot about is if you have to recapitalize a company, not because, hey, we've got all our money working in great places, but because the money ran out, you know, like then you may recapitalize the company to keep it going, but then you do a key thing, you get rid of management and you get new management, right? Like that's the way that it works. Yeah.

Eric Ward [01:19:04] It's like chapter 11 would typically bring in, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:19:07] Yeah. We're, we're, we're chopping off the top. Like clearly whoever did this screwed something up. Right. That to me should have been the requirement of people getting money off of their student loans. So if you were going to schools X, Y, Z, your president and the layers below that are all taken out and you've gotta hire new people that are gonna come in and they will be summarily asked if we get back to the same debt level that we're at. Because if you don't, then we should definitely get rid of, you can't declare bankruptcy on your student loans. It should be really easy. So that way people start then having, really taking a look at it. But then if you end up having to pay your students off, you should have to cut off the top of the management of the school because that way they have skin in the game.

Eric Ward [01:19:55] Yeah. I, I'm a big fan of skin in the game, not just for that, but you know, banks and all the other stuff too. I, a lot of people have written pretty eloquently about that. It's, it's always trouble when you completely decouple any of the risk from, from the people that are making the decisions. Right. Not a good plan.

Vance Crowe [01:20:14] And so if your kids were 20, you know, and 18 years old again, and they were thinking about science degrees, you'd say keep doing the same thing you're doing if you're, you know, it depends on

Eric Ward [01:20:25] The kid, right? If they're, if they're, if they can succeed in that system then and they like it and they're getting positive feedback from it. And so it, I think, you know, I don't, I won't go too deep on like my personal history with our family, but I think, and you're, you're seeing this with yours now too. You basically learn how to learn on your own. Like anything you're gonna really get good at, you're gonna pick up in the home environment. School is about taking time off the parents' hands and socialization and you know, yes, there's book knowledge and yes, you will meet one or two or if you're really lucky, four or five people that impact your life in a significant way. As you know, as teachers, I was lucky. I had some teachers I really vibed with and learned a lot from. But most of the stuff I learned from them, I would argue I learned like outside the formal lecture environment, you know, it was more like how they behaved and the way they treated people and the way they prepared for what they did and that kind of stuff. So, point being, if you're, if you can, if you go into that environment and you like it and you're good at, then there's nothing wrong with that. But it doesn't mean that's what everybody has to do. And if you're not, you're a failure. That's what's really screwed up. It's like, it's such a narrow pipe to put people in that and some people just aren't gonna be suited to it. And they, they, they're, they're great at all kinds of other stuff. You know, it should be, I mean it's a, it's a truism now, but you know, Zuckerberg Gates, the guy that just sold this company for 20 billion to Adobe, he was a teal dropout.

Eric Ward [01:22:04] You know, all these guys are like, school's not for me.

Vance Crowe [01:22:08] Yeah. And there has to be something to the innovation that comes from a person that wouldn't put up with the bullshit that you have to, to say get a PhD. Right? If you're like, no, this my life just isn't worth giving up three years, maybe you're also the type of person that can see through the current paradigms to find a new one.

Eric Ward [01:22:24] A hundred percent. You know, you know, I think in the hard sciences, it's still a really good training system for, again, for people that access the value of it. That's a great way to really get steeped super deep in something and it forces you to like become the world expert in that really narrow thing, right. That moment in time, you know more about that stuff than anybody else and you're really good at it and you develop a ability to like go really deep in an area that other people just aren't gonna have. But there's plenty of other people that they sort of surf through it and depending on the school, they can get out with the credential and they didn't really do the work very well. You know, I mean every, every place is different, right. So it's hard to generalize.

Vance Crowe [01:23:11] So we're gonna wrap up, but before I do, what is, when was the last time you laughed really hard?

Eric Ward [01:23:20] Wow. There was something I was reading or watching recently and it's gonna escape me. 'cause I'd probably had about two or three drinks and I can't come up with it, but I do. Wow. Well actually I shouldn't say that. I, not to put 'em on the spot, I won't talk about what we were discussing, but Jim Carrington, who runs the Danforth Center, who I've known for a long time, I spoke with him on the phone this morning 'cause we were prepping for this meeting that's coming up tomorrow. I wanted to find out, you know, what, what do we wanna focus on? Is there anything to luck out for? And he invariably, every time I talk to that guy, I make him laugh and he makes me laugh. It's just like that's built in. He's got a super dry sense of humor. And I I I, I'm not gonna relate any specifics, but we laughed pretty hard this morning.

Vance Crowe [01:24:16] Well I, I, I think that that's been one of those questions that I found recently that really opens people up. I ask him at the end of the Legacy Interviews, right, you've just done this really heavy thing. Then you ask people like, when did you laugh really hard? And, and I think this is like, I'm gonna ask it more on the podcast 'cause I hope other people ask. Like, it's a great way to open people up. That's

Eric Ward [01:24:35] A good one. I, and I'm gonna think about that now too. The next time I laugh really hard, I will remember what it was and like write it down. 'cause you know, there definitely stuff hits me and I, I, one of the things I like working with, about working with a bunch of other people is it's, it's, I I get positive feedback from making people laugh. It's not necessarily the best quality and like a leader. It has its limited utility. And I, I probably overstep more often than I should. 'cause I, I have a, I've sworn a pact with myself not to be sarcastic in front of large groups of people because even though I know like 30% of the people are side splitting, there's about another half or like, wait, was he serious? And then there's like 10% that are like, he was serious. Oh my God, what's gonna happen really hard not to do it. It's difficult 'cause it's learned behavior and it, you know, some people say sarcasm is bad, like under all circumstances, but I

Vance Crowe [01:25:33] It's the ignorant man's wit. Right. Or it can be right. It

Eric Ward [01:25:36] Also can be like a, it's a way if you have a bond with somebody that you feel is pretty tight, it's a way to, to share stuff Right. In a way that, you know, is not meant in any sort of mean-spirited way, but it, but that's, it's gotta be used in a narrow way.

Vance Crowe [01:25:52] Yeah. I I think it's good to be aware of when you're laughing. You know, like, because it's like Barry Flinch Bow, who's this famous professor at K State University. He and I gave talks at a couple of the same places and he used to always tell me if people are laughing, their minds are open. Yeah. And that really made me much more aware when I'm watching a speaker, how often they get people to laugh because you get people to laugh and then you can slot in some ideas and then you can keep going. And I also think it's like a, a sense of being present. Right. If you're aware, I'm laughing, I'm feeling joy. It's like, you know, it's, it's the, the reason to be alive really. Absolutely. Well said. Well, Eric Ward, thank you so much for coming by sharing the Purple Tomatoes from our friend Kate and, and making this happen. It was a pleasure. Thanks so much for asking me.

Eric Ward [01:27:04] So early on, my first job was the chickens, right? So starting out in third grade, I'll never forget going out to the, the chicken coop, right? So there was probably 50 to 60 hens at any given time. But one rooster, so the rooster in particular that I can remember, his name was Boss Hog. Right? And he was mean, right? Whenever I would get into the coop, that was his territory, right? So he was very protective of these hens. So as a young boy, you know, probably seven or eight at the time, I would come in there and I needed something to carry all these eggs. 'cause if you could imagine, I would get 40 to 50 eggs at a given time. So I would get a lid, you know, from one of these big trash cans, flip it over. And whenever I would go in, that's how I would fend off Boss Hog, you know, push 'em to the side. And then I would get in the chicken coop, bring that lever over and I could hear Boss Hoog, you know, just pecking on the door because it's like, what's this guy doing in my, he's on my turf, right? So the challenging part was coming out, right? So I had this lid with 40 to 50 eggs and then I had to fend boss hog off with my feet, right? So I would one foot up just kind of holding him back. But my responsibilities early on were the, were the chickens. That was my first sales job, right? So I'll never forget going down to the end of this long gravel lane and I would sell farm fresh eggs for a dollar 25.

Vance Crowe [01:28:35] Was it a hard sell?

Eric Ward [01:28:36] It wasn't bad. You know, most people knew the family. So my father was a dentist practiced for 32 years. So we knew most people in the community and it was right on the way into town. So a lot of people would stop by and, you know, it wasn't just eggs, you know, we would have cucumbers, tomatoes, peaches, strawberries. So kind of a mini mobile market at the time, but a cash business. So as a seven, 8-year-old kid, I would, you know, I would earn a few bucks on the side.