Cannabis Geneticist Kevin McKernan on COVID Models, Cross-Reactive Immunity, and Lockdown Skepticism

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe podcast, Kevin McKernan, welcome back to the podcast.

Kevin McKernan [00:00:10] Hey, Vance, thank you so much for having me back. I appreciate it. There's, I feel like it was yesterday, but it's probably been a month. Who knows?

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] Oh my gosh. And it seems like you're a person that I just met as a complete stranger and now I'm texting you being like, Hey man, you on, you ready to go? And you're like, no, I, I can't right now. I'm, I'm p Cing a SARS virus.

Kevin McKernan [00:00:31] Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] So like, now I've got a buddy out out on the East coast that's messing around with sars. What are you doing out there?

Kevin McKernan [00:00:37] So this may be completely superfluous and probably it's an insurance policy. We're, we're worried if they find SARS in the cannabis supply chain, we'll get shut down. And so we set out on, on a mission to figure out how to detect potential SARS contamination on, on cannabis. It's not a replicative host. It shouldn't have any sars, but we have, we've got dispensaries and we've got grows in town right now that are getting employees that are coming down with it. And naturally everyone's worried that, you know, cannabis is manually farmed and manually trimmed off, and there's a lot of human contact with it. And so if anyone's coughing or, or spreading SARS onto the cannabis, it's an inhaled product. So the next people downstream who might be getting this are people who could be potentially inhaling it. And that in itself, you think might be extreme, like a lightning strike. But there's a lot of bat guano getting used as fertilizers. That's where we're finding a lot of the coronaviruses. And then if you look at the patients, the patients have shared comorbidities. So a lot of the elderly population started using CBD as this became more legal. We've got a lot of COPD diabetes, hypertension, cancer in particular. There's a lot of cannabis use in cancer. So those are all the patient classes that are exposed to COVID. And so we're, we're just worried if it ever shows up, it'll, it'll be, it'll be a shutdown for us. So we just started building tests that could pick up SARS on, on cannabis.

Kevin McKernan [00:02:10] So now I'm finding myself like managing it every day and, and PCR it and purifying it. And naturally all, all of the, the whole mask debate gets thrown at you left and right as I, I saw that you're, you're involved in some of that recently as well. And there, there seems to be a community out there that's all or nothing on this. Like you either wear masks all the time while riding bikes and in cars and going to bed, or you don't wear 'em at all where,

Vance Crowe [00:02:34] And that there's no cost to wearing them. That it's just that people don't wanna, that My biggest issue with the way that debate is going is it's, it's saying, look at all these reasons why you should, and here's only one reason why you wouldn't. And it's 'cause you don't care about anybody else but yourself. Yeah. And it's like, wait a second, there are gonna be second order effects here. Things you can't predict when now everybody's not only allowed to wear a mask. Yeah,

Kevin McKernan [00:02:58] Yeah. But

Vance Crowe [00:02:58] Impelled to wear a mask like this is people didn't, you're right. We're in this place where people want all or nothing answers and it's getting scary out there.

Kevin McKernan [00:03:07] Yeah. And, and we're not even getting those from, I mean, we've seen the who flip flop. We've seen fauci flip flop on this thing. And it's not because I, I don't think they're being deceitful. I think it's that it depends on the context. If you're a physician that's managing patients that are immunocompromised, maybe you should wear one. And, and if you're out running or on a, I mean, I saw someone on a bike today fondling their mask while running a bike. I'm like, my, you know, right there, my rain man goes off like, wait a minute, you're riding a bike one handed fondling your mask is probably more dangerous than the risk that you're reverting by putting a mask on. So this has gone to just extremes of, of either virtue signaling or something that, and, and there's some data out there in hypoxia. These masks, if you wear them all day, they become wet sponges on your mouth. And, and there's higher respiratory infections with people that, that don't know etiquette on wearing them. And I'm not perfect at wearing them either. But if you're, a lot of these studies, they're finding, they're, they're finding the SARS on the outside of the mask now that that's not from breathing it in from the atmosphere that's from your hand touching something and putting it there. Right. So they, they become a collection filter for all types of microbes. And they, if, you know, and when you use these things in a, in a, in a star setting, you know, you, you touch it and you toss it, right? If you ever touch your mask, you throw it out and get a new one. And no one's doing that. You know, they're fondling them, moving 'em around, riding their bikes with them walking and, and none of that is, is is one, it's probably environmentally really destructive. I don't think there's good evidence that it's filtering these things out. Maybe some of the droplets and the coughs and what have you. But it's, yeah, it's gotten crazy that where no one can see any nuance here.

Kevin McKernan [00:04:40] So yeah, if I were handling live virus in a lab, you gotta do it in a BL three lab, I'd wear one. But if I'm going outside that day after being in the lab, I'm not wearing one. And

Vance Crowe [00:04:49] What about being in, in a, in a closed environment? You going to the grocery store again,

Kevin McKernan [00:04:54] I would probably, I mean they make you wear 'em in the grocery stores. I probably wouldn't feel like I need to. If I were in a New York subway, maybe I'd put one on, I mean, all the areas that have demonstrated there's bad airflow and high population density and perhaps high viral load. But wearing 'em everywhere just seems like we're gonna have, I can't imagine how many masks are floating in the Pacific after this.

Vance Crowe [00:05:15] Well I saw, you know, I had a really interesting guy, Brad fracking on who was running a pork plant and they had huge numbers of people coming back positive for coronavirus. And yet very few people showing any symptoms at all and only one hospitalization. And that was news that when that, that came out, I remember that was the same week as the two doctors that came out. It was the same time. Oh yeah. You and I talked, there was a whole bunch of stuff like, you're not even allowed to question any part of like how dangerous this is or how deadly or any of that. So where do you think we're at now?

Kevin McKernan [00:05:52] Well, you bring up good, good studies there. I mean those are really interesting, right? You see this go through communities like this. They're, you know, they're, they're in work environments where they're probably really close. I would imagine a lot of those rural areas, many of those people are probably socializing after work at the local bar. I mean, you tend to have these large factories that are in rural America. There's probably not a lot of places for them to go afterwards. So you tend to get a big community, you know, collection points at certain local restaurants and bars. That's probably where it's spreading. It's probably not spreading on the production lines, but you raise a good point that not a lot of them are getting sick. That was seen on the USS Roosevelt that was seen in the Diamond Princess. If you look at both of those cases, those are like Petri dishes that are islands, they're contained. And something like 82% of the people were clearly exposed 'cause they were held in the tightest quarters you could ever imagine. And they didn't come down with a sickness. So why, why are they not getting sick If you, if you jam that many people, I think it was five, close to 5,000 people in the US s Roosevelt. And they, the, the density at which they stack those people is like tighter than New York City.

Vance Crowe [00:06:53] Oh, I used to live on a ship it and, and they're living in soldier conditions where you, they don't have to try and convince young college kids to go work there. It is cramped. You are right on top of each other. Yeah. You're taking a shower in an area that your shoulders are so broad, they'll, they'll touch both walls. Like it is

Kevin McKernan [00:07:10] Super tight in there. Social, social distancing is impossible. So anyone in those ships is fully exposed and only 17% of them are, are coming down with,

Vance Crowe [00:07:19] Is that right? 'cause last we left the story of the ship, it was like waving goodbye the ship captain that absolutely broke all the protocols and these poor soldiers were basically left on the ship to die. And then we didn't hear anything about it. So what, what did end up happening there?

Kevin McKernan [00:07:34] Yeah, there, there's a good, there's a good video to to point your, your audience to, I think it's from someone at Rockefeller University who kind of, it's about a 12 minute video that walks through the numbers and the diamond princess and on and on that cruise ship. And the numbers line up pretty close between the Diamond princess and, and the USS Roosevelt of having over 80% of the people not getting sick despite being exposed. And then you look at the prisons, the, the prisons have, there's, I I, I'll I'll send you a link on, on, on the prison studies. There's a place that's tracking all the prisons and, and one of these studies, it was like 19 over 1900 cases and only 10 deaths. Right? So that's, that's down at 1%. And, and you know, prison environments, they're not getting a lot of vitamin D there. Right? This is a probably, you know, poor living conditions. They don't get outside much. Their immune systems are probably, you know, destroyed from being indoors and contained all day. And even there it's hard to get the numbers up to 1%. And, and

Vance Crowe [00:08:33] Oh really, I was expecting you to say, hey, the reason their numbers are over 1% is because they're vitamin D deficient. I thought you set up yourself in the, in the argument

Kevin McKernan [00:08:41] They could be, but the fact is they're just, they're contained and everyone's gotta be getting it. And only a very small number of them are dying. So what does that say? I, I would imagine yeah, the, the, the, I don't know the demographics of those, but I would, I i we do know there's, there is a high incident of African American imprisonment more so on drugs than, than equal number of people. If you're Caucasian getting caught for drugs for the same crime, there's something like a four to eightfold higher rate of getting incarcerated if you're African American, gee, for the same crime, despite the fact that drug use doesn't differ between the two. So there's clearly racism involved in prosecution and involved in who's gonna be incarcerated. And so there, there's interesting studies in Norway and in, I think it's Norway and Sweden, I could have, it's, it's a Nordic country. I've gotta get the right country on this, but the, there are Americans, and I shouldn't even say African Americans, there are people of dark skin that live in northern latitudes and they're the most vitamin d de deficient folks in the world because they're not getting the sun that they, that they're used to. And they're seeing higher rates of COVID fatality amongst them. So I imagine that same things going on in prisons,

Vance Crowe [00:09:49] Wow. That

Kevin McKernan [00:09:50] That community's vitamin might indeed deficient and they would be particularly prone to this. And yet we're not seeing nursing homelike fatalities there, we're seeing fairly suppressed exposure to this. So

Vance Crowe [00:10:02] What is it with vitamin D? I mean, all, all of a sudden that hit, I saw Matt Ridley talking about it. I've heard people, you know, trying to get out there and, and it's like, it, it, it feel, it felt at first, like we were talking one step above like essential oils or get your, you know, your vitamin C pack.

Kevin McKernan [00:10:18] It's easy, it's easy to throw to everyone. And the FDA likes to, you know, downplay anything that could be a, a nut, you know, nutraceutical. But no, people have been talking about vitamin D for a while. Nick Szabo has been, been, been pushing on this quite a bit. He's, he's really involved in the, or early on in the Bitcoin space. And he caught onto a lot of these papers really early. I started reading them and it, it helps boost your immune system. So if you can boost your immune system cheaply, hey that's, that's the thing to do. And a lot of people, there's a lot of correlation between vitamin D deficiency and, and, and COVID fatalities. So that's the easiest and cheapest thing Americans can do to, to pump up their, their immunity. And it's probably also why a lot of these viruses disappear in the summer is that people get out more, they get more sun, they get vitamin D levels up. But in the wintertime, everyone's vitamin D deficient in northern latitudes. And so there's a, a higher likelihood of these viruses causing grief. I think that's one reason why we're probably seeing it fade away right now.

Vance Crowe [00:11:12] And so, I mean, the obvious question is did people overreact? If, if what you're saying is it's vitamin D deficiency and it's not that that fatal, did the decisions we made, was this the wrong way to go?

Kevin McKernan [00:11:25] Yeah, I, I think we did. I mean, when you, when you look at the, at the Ferguson models, all of these things were going off of r not our r not as a reproductive number that assumes the population that the disease is entering has zero immunity to it. Right. But what's really happened is, is, and what a lot of epidemiologists will point to is you have to go after re which EE is the, has to do with what portion of the population is actually susceptible. So if there's any previous immunity to this in the population that puts the brakes on the, on the spread of the, the virus quite quickly. In fact, Michael Levitt's been been presenting a lot of this work too. He's a former, what year did he get the Nobel Prize? I think 2013 Noble Prize in chemistry. Really smart guy. He's been publishing all of these models, tracking the virus. And he's been demonstrating quite elegantly that it's not exponential. Everyone's assuming this thing's gonna go exponential, but it's not, it's never hit an exponential rate in any of the countries. So something's putting the brakes on this. I think what's putting the brakes on this is, is all the papers that we're seeing come out showing that the, the former coronaviruses have gone through the population are providing antibodies to sars cov to two. And that was never considered because they ran with this story that it's novel, novel

Vance Crowe [00:12:39] That, so when that word was being used, this is one of those situations where, you know, a philosophical background is really valuable because you start saying, Hey, if we're gonna have a term that we add into the environment, everybody should understand what that term actually means. Because everybody around me was using it because Oh, it's like COVID or Corona, you told me. That's what we call it. So that's what we call it. But they called it a novel Coronavirus. Yes.

Kevin McKernan [00:13:04] And

Vance Crowe [00:13:04] For the people that were like me, I don't know to push back on that, it, it could have been like the pink coronavirus. It wouldn't have mattered. Right,

Kevin McKernan [00:13:10] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:13:11] And, but it actually has meaning in the rest of the, it has an implication that we ended up taking on as far as how we reacted to the disease.

Kevin McKernan [00:13:19] Absolutely did. And we should never do that again. Just because something is new from an RNA standpoint does not mean that it's new to our immune system. And, and this is a bit of a, what goes on in the in publication bias. I I don't think there's any malfeasance here. I think what happens is someone discovers a new coronavirus and that becomes publication meet, Hey look, I found something new. I can get into a journal and say it's new, it's never been seen before. But if you come out saying, Hey, it's, it's kind of been seen before, that doesn't get published as, as readily. So the, the truth is that we've got ancestry on this thing. We know that it, it has relationships to Rat G 13, but those are 40 to 70 years ago. So it's a huge missing link that we spoke about in the last podcast of four to seven years. We don't know how long this has been in bats and how long it's been over in humans, but the assumption was that the first person they ever sequenced in Wuhan was a zoonotic event or close to it. And I just don't think there's really any evidence for that when you consider coronaviruses have been floating around mammals for ages and, and now the antibody studies are coming out showing that there's more. It's been here either longer than we think or spread further than we anticipated. And even those antibody studies, I think are underestimating the spread because when you design these antibody tests, you, you have to go through some work on an exclusivity and inclusivity study. Usually what you do is you get a bunch of SARS viruses and show that, look, my test picks up these SARS viruses, but it doesn't pick up mers and it doesn't pick up SARS one. So you spend all this time making antibodies that are really, really specific to track the current virus.

Kevin McKernan [00:14:52] That's a great thing for tracking the current virus. But do you wanna know about the immunity that might be out there? You actually want an antibody test that's gonna pick up, might the, is this person going to be immune to this or not? Well then you might need to survey all the old coronaviruses 'cause the patient may have seen those and built antibodies to the old cor coronaviruses that are applicable to this one. And that was never brought into the models, never brought into discussion and now paper after paper's coming out, showing that the antibodies to the old viruses are reactive against this current one. And I think those are, that, that is really the smoking gun on why this thing never went exponential. And I think that's probably what's behind Michael Levitt's work.

Vance Crowe [00:15:32] You're you're saying it never went exponential. I mean, I watch our world in data, you know, I'm, I'm watching those charts come out and they look like they are skyrocketing. It looks like, you know, if I turn on the news, they're running a dial that shows, you know, 90,000, a hundred thousand a million people. Yeah. And for me, I don't know if that's a lot of people or not. And I don't mean to be calloused. I mean, like, you know, you get up to numbers above 20,000 and it's difficult for the human brain to understand them other than in relative size.

Kevin McKernan [00:16:01] It is. And they're, they're often putting them on linear scales and, and that's deceiving to the eye. In, in, in sciences when you're dealing with exponentials, you put 'em on log scales so that you can tell if it's linear on a log scale. You, you can, you can gauge the exponent here, but what what Michael's work's been showing is that it's not been matching them. So there's some breaks on this thing. We don't know what the, he, he's not, you know, suggested what the brakes are. He's just been pointing out, look, everybody, it's not going exponential like it should. Why is it not spreading that fast? There must be other phantom forms of immunity or other people that have this virus that when the virus meets them, it's no longer a new event and it's not, it's not spreading as fast. Yeah. The one, the one paper I'll, I want to turn everybody to because this, this really made my day. 'cause I I, that that April 10th video I put out was like, I think there's gonna be some immunity to this, but I've got no data to prove it. I just have a hunch because like ancestry is, is real and evolution things tend to have ancestors and our immune systems probably has some, some history of this. This came out from the, the last author, the first author's name on this is Gani. If I didn't murder that, let me see if I can zoom in on this. 'cause I'm, I can't, my eyes have gotten a little bad in lockdown here. Yeah. Gani, G-R-I-F-O-N-I, and I'll try and link this to the end of this thing, but the, it's a paper and cell. It says, you know, the title of it is Targets of T Cell Responses to SARS Cov to two Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and Unexpected Individuals. So it's a really good paper. And the most important thing to take out of this is that they flat out say this is that it, you know, we, we detected SARS co to two reactive CD four positive T cells and 40 to 60% of unexposed individuals.

Kevin McKernan [00:17:43] This is a hundred person study suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating common cold coronaviruses and SARS cov to two. So the common cold is basically is is counterfeiting the, the pocket ACEs and this whole vaccine story. You're not gonna need a vaccine. This thing's gonna go away before those things even get out the gate.

Vance Crowe [00:18:04] Whoa.

Kevin McKernan [00:18:05] Yeah. IIII wouldn't be dumping money into those stocks right now. 'cause I I honestly think by the time they get those things cleared, it's gonna be in the rear view mirror and we're gonna be talking about the next one that comes around. 'cause they come around every year. This one just happens to have been, you know, done something really nasty with a lot of the comorbids and we focus so much damn attention on it. And, you know, if we had a scoreboard like we have on coronavirus on the 2018 flu, we'd all be, you know, wearing masks and petrified to the next flu season.

Vance Crowe [00:18:36] Is that what we'll do? Do you think that's where we'll ha are we ha that that's one of my thoughts on the mask conversation and I like to be totally candid. You could be telling me something completely wrong and I would have no way to push back on it. Right. I I'm not reading them. So I just have to be like, okay, let's take Kevin's idea out to its logical maximum, which is, okay, so if this was people overreacting, will we continue the charade of people wearing masks and running a scoreboard such that the fear of a disease can drive us into behaviors like staying at home all the time? Or

Kevin McKernan [00:19:11] I'm afraid it's gonna go on longer than, than the data suggests it should. Mainly because it's really hard to admit that we just made 40 million people unemployed by a mistake. I think the people who have sunk their, you know, their heels in on that story are gonna be really reluctant to let go. And that's just human behavior. But the data is piling up that, I mean, look at the lockdowns. They've, Georgia's been on, you know, off lockdown since May 1st and everyone's like, you know, salivating over the dead bodies that would pile up. There aren't any, you know, it hasn't, it hasn't gone crazy in Georgia. It hasn't gone crazy in Florida. It hasn't gone crazy in Texas. I think Norway just came out claiming that lockdowns are ineffective, even Norway and Norway was kind of the antidote to Sweden and now they've just pulled the rug out of that argument. So, you know, th this is, it's gonna be I think, really hard for the political class to let up. I think the media as well knows they're probably culpable in this and so they're not gonna turn around and and do a 180 on this overnight. They're gonna probably, you know, slowly change their tune on this when it starts to become evident that, that these lockdowns were probably incredibly destructive and killed more people than they saved. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not hopeful that, that the story is gonna, people are gonna see the light and quickly recognize that we should change behavior. There

Vance Crowe [00:20:32] Is a sort of justice here in the sense that if the people that believe like you do, and I'm, I tend to feel like it, it was an overreaction and they decide, well I'm not gonna wear masks, then they get to live their lives. Right? They get to go out and breathe air freely. Yeah. And if they were wrong, they get really sick. And if they were right then you know, the other people are stuck just wearing masks unnecessarily putting a piece of cloth over their face.

Kevin McKernan [00:20:59] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:20:59] The challenge becomes people will say, yeah, but if Kevin, you go out and you say, Hey, this is right, this is what the data's telling us. I'm not gonna wear a mask, I'm not gonna participate and you're wrong. All these people could, could be exposed and you could be killing a lot of people. What do you think of that?

Kevin McKernan [00:21:16] Well, I think you can turn that argument right around on them and say the same bias probably existed in the model makers, right? When you're a model maker, if you're 10% wrong in one direction or the other, you would probably view that error bar equivalently. Like it's no big deal if you over call it by 10% or under call it by 10% when it's a, a model that's predicting this type of potential destruction. You would rather be wrong a hundred fold in one direction and tenfold in the other. Right? You would rather over cautiously pre you know, predict what this might be than under call it. So what has that led to? Are we gonna count the people that are unemployed Now? Are there's cancer patients backing up? As we mentioned before, there are heart disease patients that are, that are not getting access to healthcare right now. There are deaths that are happening because of this lockdown. They're just invisible blood. No one's gonna put them on the scoreboard, but we know they're happening, they are measurable. The physicians are talking about, I think they said the rate of suicide in like the last month was equivalent to what they saw last year. I mean, it, it's, it's the, the numbers are, are are there and we have all these countries that did varying degrees of lockdowns where we can now draw some of these parallels and see that okay, we didn't get a whole lot, most of the lockdowns by the way happens late, right? They, after this thing spread. And and this is something that I don't think it's spoken a lot about. When you start to see these things spike in the nursing homes. The nursing homes are the most sedentary population we have.

Kevin McKernan [00:22:46] So they get the viruses last. The people who are spreading this are probably the asymptomatic or partially symptomatics who confuse maybe their allergies for a cold and still go out. And those things get those spread very quickly. 'cause those people are still in the marketplace meeting people every day. They have an exponential contact map. Whereas the people in the nursing homes have a very limited contact map. So when you see the death spike in the nursing homes, it's usually a sign that the asymptomatic wave is behind you, not in front of you. And so we started the lockdowns really late when this thing was already everywhere and then proceeded to destroy the economy and, and, and, and wreck a lot of livelihoods. And now we're, we're slowly taking the breaks off of those things and there isn't any anything alarming going on. So I, I don't, I don't really subscribe to that. Like, you have to wear a mask to protect everybody else. It's like, well if you're really afraid of this and you're wearing your mask, what's the big deal? It's kinda like the vaccine story. If you're vaccinated, why do you care if I'm not, you should be protected, right? I mean I I'm, I'm a little skeptical that these masks are, are fully protecting people as they think they might be. But they'll put that aside. Assume that they are, if they are a hundred percent effective, you're an individual, wear it. Go for it. But that, that shouldn't imply that some other individual has to change their behavior to, to, to, to help butchers your fear and, and your health. That's never been the case.

Vance Crowe [00:24:09] You know what I, right now we're witnessing my greatest fear, probably the reason that I started doing the, the coronavirus podcasts and now I'm trying to get back into the, hey, let you know, doesn't matter whether Coronavirus is here or not, we just gotta keep moving forward.

Kevin McKernan [00:24:24] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:24:24] But mobs form, right? And they form because they're afraid. They are feel pinned in, they feel like they wanna have some sort of catharsis and then you have inciting incidences. However you think that that happened and you have the, the chemicals are all in the same spot for explosions to happen. Yeah. And that's what seems like is is happening. You've got this situation where if you're in the, in the politics seat and you wanna make sure that the eyes aren't focused on did we overreact to this? Now you're gonna start heading towards that, that mob to keep the, to, to change the narrative. Yeah.

Kevin McKernan [00:25:03] But I think we have to, 'cause if we don't push back on this quite forcefully, they're gonna do it again. They're gonna do it every cold season. This thing's gonna, it, it, it flu's gonna come around again. So is, so is, and the numbers the CDC just put out was like 0.26% fatality rate. That's not too different than the flu, right? Maybe two x. And the CDC is saying that that's not, that's not like some scientists off in the corner are doing models that everyone's questioning the peer review on. That's like, you know, the CDC coming out who everyone was accusing early on of being incompetent and not with the game. But even their numbers are, are coming down that low. So this is gonna come again, if we don't stop and tell people and demonstrate that this is not the way to manage a pandemic. You, you cannot have the, these lockdowns because there are all these unforeseen consequences that can be really destructive to the economy. And that does, it's not just money. Those are lives that are actually getting destroyed be due, due to livelihood issues. So I I think it's important that we continue to speak out about this because it will repeat itself. And there, there, there isn't science behind a lot of these numbers. I think there is propensity for the political class to grab models that fit their story and run with them. And that's clearly, I I think that, I think since we, I I can't remember what happened whether Ferguson's behavior was public back when we last spoke, but you know, this is

Vance Crowe [00:26:24] The gentleman No, no, no, no, no, no. We spoke a long time before that.

Kevin McKernan [00:26:28] Yeah. So he, he clearly didn't believe his own models.

Vance Crowe [00:26:31] So tell the story, tell tell who he, he was for anybody that wasn't really

Kevin McKernan [00:26:35] Watching when that happened in Imperial College of London, he has a history of, of doom and gloom models. I think they use some of his models for bovine encephalitis and they ended up slaughtering millions of pigs. They also used his models for one other incident like this and it, it was thought to be overblown. So they went back to the same guy who, who, who cries chicken little, the loudest in incomes this 2 million person prediction that that that were gonna die in the United States. Now his code wasn't public very recently. His code became public and it's a complete shamble. It's not reproducible in that if you put the same number in twice, you get different numbers. And it was discovered that he, he actually got COVID and it was supposed to quarantine himself and he didn't, he was found having an affair with somebody else's wife. Right? Alright, so here here's the one where everyone else is getting locked down around the world because of this guy. And then he runs off and violates quarantine. He's like, well I, you know, I, I thought I was past it and I had enough evidence to think that I was no longer contagious. I'm like, well, could you give everyone else that same freedom that we can decide for ourselves what we think?

Vance Crowe [00:27:43] Wow.

Kevin McKernan [00:27:44] All right. So the world is just on fire over what this person did. And those models didn't go through peer review, but of course they got sucked up by a class of people that saw they could use this to institute new forms of power. And so that, that, that's something we have to be really attentive to that the political class magnifies power under pandemic circumstances. And we have to be really cautious about giving them, you know, giving into that.

Vance Crowe [00:28:10] When we started talking about this as though it were a war, I became really uncomfortable because, you know, when, when you look at what wartime powers are designed to do, it's to say, you know, everything else stops except for the security of the overall nation. The individual citizens, even in that situation, not so protected from their own government. And so when we started saying this, it was like, wait a second, this is something we wanna discuss. Like yes, you have to have speed, but liberty is a real thing and you guys are thinking it's something we can take for granted. We can take it away and we can give it back. We can take it away. We can give it back. That's not how liberty works. Because if people can grab your liberty, if they don't have to give it back, they won't.

Kevin McKernan [00:28:51] Well that's what happened, right? What the flatten the curve turned into waits for a vaccine, right? It the goalposts move pretty quickly. So it's already happened here and everyone said, oh, don't worry about it. That's not gonna happen. They'll we'll give you your liberty right back. It's supposed to be a couple week. I think FCIs original plan was something like a couple weeks to flatten the curve and, and now it's a couple months and now you see California talking about, well phases one through phase four. And, and, and then the CDC has language for how to open up a school that looks like you, like, you know, the checklist for, for, for, you know, taking off a plane. And, and this is insane. All the teachers I know are like, there's no way we're gonna be able to educate kids when you, when you treat 'em like that. I mean, they're gonna be completely obsessed with all the mask wearing and the protections in there. It's, it's just gonna scare the daylights out, I think all these children. So I, I fully agree with you there, there, there's a really good podcast I point people to that Bob Murphy did on this, that that really changed my opinion on this because he went through the economics of a lot of war and demonstrates that in most cases the country, if they're equally, somewhat, equally matched in terms of population and perhaps power the country that wins the war is the one that's the freest. 'cause in the end, a war is basically turning one's entire economy over into one purpose. And if you don't have an economy, you can't win that war. And so the United States was very effective early on a lot of wars because it had the freest economy controlled compared to the very controlled ones.

Vance Crowe [00:30:18] Wow.

Kevin McKernan [00:30:18] And so it's a very interesting dialogue about how the top down command and control often backfires in war. And he goes through some cases and with u-boats and, and in England and how eventually it was a citizenry that figured out, Hey, we need to get food back and forth. We're gonna start forming convoys to get these things across the ocean because it's gonna be easier for us to, to protect them that way. That was something that the, the generals were against, but the, the, the, the free markets started to do it and were successful and then they mimicked it in, into the, into the military. So there are all of these attributes about free markets that function far more effectively than, than this top down command and control. And it's, it's even evident in the times of war. Yet we've all been trained that, hey, when it's war time, it's time to kill the economy and have one guy in charge. Well, you do that to an extreme, you're gonna lose the war. And I think we're losing the war on COVID right now because of it.

Vance Crowe [00:31:14] Well, and then we're losing the war on, on many other fronts, right? You have people that are unemployed, you have people that have been stuck, they've been told explicitly, you are not essential. And, and now you're a powder keg, right? Like people need purpose. And if you've taken away their purpose and you've said your only purpose is just don't die and we'll take care of everything else, just don't die, be in your house. Nothing good comes out of human civilization that doesn't have purpose, that isn't driving forward.

Kevin McKernan [00:31:41] Yeah. Yep. I mean we're seeing this now in Minneapolis, right? It's just a powder keg. A lot of people have been unemployed for a while and violence is breaking out.

Vance Crowe [00:31:49] So Kevin, I mean, most people I think if they were involved in cannabis and they would be like, well if they find out it's, you know, not good for our, our patients, that's not, you know, that'll, that'll suck. We'll deal with that when we get it. But you're sitting here turning resources over to studying this and to keeping it out. Where's the passion here? Why aren't you instead breeding, you know, better, better strains of really great pot?

Kevin McKernan [00:32:16] It's, it's, it's a bit of an insurance policy. I mean, when you, when you see an event like this happen, we're very lucky we didn't get closed down. A lot of other businesses in a life sciences are, are, are, are hemorrhaging right now because they depended a lot on the academic community for revenues. And those academic labs are all partially shut down. We happen to be in a space that didn't get shut down, but it could get shut down at a moment's notice if there's just one note of, of it potentially being a vector for COVID. So I'm in this odd position because I don't think this virus is gonna be long for long for very, very long. Yet I'm out building assays to potentially detect it because I'm actually petrified that they'll come and shut the market down if they find one, one shot of

Vance Crowe [00:32:58] No way they're shutting the cannabis market down no way.

Kevin McKernan [00:33:00] Well they they won't be shutting down the black market. They failed doing that for 80 years. But you know, they, they, they may in fact get to the safer side of it. Right now the, there are some benefits to the, the, the markets we have in cannabis, they're kind of interesting. They're, they're fairly, they're not as regulated as obviously FDA approved drugs. That's a very good thing. But there, there's a little bit more testing that goes on and it's fairly decentralized in that every state has a slightly different way to do this that frustrates a lot of people. 'cause they're like, oh, it's different laws in California than in Massachusetts. But I view that as kind of a laboratory of democracy, that California comes up with some good ideas and regulations that we don't do here in mass. And so we're watching 50 different experiments go on. It's harder for us 'cause we have to make kits that that address the different regulations in every damn state. However, we're learning from that too. That, that sometimes we learn something based on the Massachusetts regs that we would've never learned if we had a one size fits all regulation. So we're tolerant of it and understand it and do it. So

Vance Crowe [00:33:59] Federalism is a beautiful thing, isn't it? Like

Kevin McKernan [00:34:02] It's a very beautiful thing when

Vance Crowe [00:34:03] We let it run, then we get all of these opportunities to try different things that we couldn't in one other place. And if regulation in one place gets too big, then people leave. I will guarantee you Joe Rogan is gonna leave California and move probably to Texas is what it sounds like to me. Right?

Kevin McKernan [00:34:18] I hope so. Is that, is that really going on?

Vance Crowe [00:34:20] I, I think so. Man

Kevin McKernan [00:34:21] Contract with, that's a big change in the media, right? Is is his, he got a hundred billion dollar deal or something from Spotify. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:34:27] And he probably said five or six times. Well, how's the comedy scene in Austin? How's the comedy scene in Austin? Hey, I really like Idaho. You know, he is talking about some other places, but I I, they, I love Missouri. I, you know, yeah, I, the the St. Louis the city and the county, as soon as they could grab power where I live, they did. We're just now coming off Lyft like the lockdown. But our governor was way, hands off, was like, Hey, we're gonna test, we're gonna take things slow. We're not gonna get rushed into this. I love Missouri.

Kevin McKernan [00:34:56] Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's really good to hear. Well, I hope he does move. I mean Elon was threatening that as well and it sounds like they caved to him, but you know, Joe, Joe could do his podcast from anywhere and I hope he takes advantage of that because it's a very, it's a big statement and I like that he's, he might have a little bit more freedom. I understand. He's, he's worried about getting censored. He, he, he, what I like about him and your shows as well is you bring on all types of opinions and that's, that puts you at risk of getting de platformed. And, and this may be something that he's doing to, to basically hedge against de platforming. I mean, he's outta Alex Jones on there, who's the target of all types of de platforming, right? So I'm, I'm certain if he wants to keep the caliber of his show up and get all the most, most esoteric views on there, he's gotta find a shelter from people who can cut 'em off in a heartbeat.

Vance Crowe [00:35:41] Yeah. And the, and the idea, the what people wanna talk about is the edge of chaos, right? They want to talk about right at the edge between what they know and then they understand and something new. Most of the time that's gonna be edgy conversations. And if we're letting the large scale te like tech companies decide which of those edge of chaos ideas are too far and we don't want people surfing there and they block them out, man thi this gets ugly in a hurry. Like,

Kevin McKernan [00:36:08] You know, and I, I'm somewhat shocked by this too because you, you have Trump out there doing this executive order against Twitter and some people cheering it on, some people not. And I'm, I'm like, did you ever see that movie on Cambridge Analytica?

Vance Crowe [00:36:22] I didn't, no. Uhuh

Kevin McKernan [00:36:23] So I'm forgetting its name. It might be Data Breach I think is, but anyway, it, it's, it's a really interesting story about a woman who's a whistleblower. I think she's now in the blockchain space, but they went through how they're, they can utilize Facebook as a mechanism for, for social unrest and a mechanism for apartheid in political systems. And they first tested this out in like, smaller countries in Africa and the Caribbean and showed great success that they could pretty much guarantee somebody a political spot if they use their data platform. And the Trump administration was their largest customer in the last election, right? So he clearly is tuned in and one of the largest customers of manipulating social media data to his favor. And now he's out attacking Twitter as if he doesn't like that feature when he uses it. So I'm, I'm really perplexed by this because I, I don't like the idea of a fascist control of, Hey, I'm just gonna executive order Ford Motor Company into my domain space and have them make ventilators or I'm gonna take over what Twitter can do so I can politically control it. I mean that scares the hell outta me. I don't like what Twitter and Facebook initially doing on, on, on de platforming people and, and what's going on with the First Amendment. But they are a private company and everybody using those platforms agrees to the fact that hey, we, it's our servers man, we don't like what you put on here. We're gonna cut you off. And there has to be, you know, some, some level of that given, you know, some content is probably abusive to, you know, you start getting into child pornography and all these ethical issues of there are victims involved in moving this information around when, when it goes there. I understand they have to step in and, and get rid of this stuff, but the, the the, you know, maybe someone will build a blockchain based system that folks will migrate to that's completely uneditable and you know, social media platform that no one can edit.

Kevin McKernan [00:38:05] That'll be really interesting experiment to see.

Vance Crowe [00:38:07] Wow.

Kevin McKernan [00:38:08] But a few have been built, they just haven't taken off. It's really hard to get people off of Twitter and Facebook 'cause there's so many people there and the network effect is extraordinarily powerful. But

Vance Crowe [00:38:16] Yeah, it's only valuable because your people are there. Right, exactly. And unless you could port that network from one place to another, you know, I can't replicate the news information and digestion sit like system that I have on Twitter. If I ported it, somebody, it was somewhere else, it would be extremely difficult. Yeah. Somebody, somebody would have to architect it and find it. And I, I don't know. I I don't think it can be done.

Kevin McKernan [00:38:39] Yeah, it wouldn't have the mass, it'd be really hard for all those people to exit. And so you wouldn't have, you wouldn't have the numbers there. But yeah, it's certainly overwhelming when you hear of, you know, the government's now gonna get involved and I'm, I'm not, I I don't think this is new. Like if you look at what Snowden put out, they're meddling with this already. The government's already involved in filtering some of this stuff they're already involved in in scanning this stuff through the NSA. So it's not like they're not in there. That's a little bit of a farge to say that, oh, we're finally gonna step in and control Twitter. It's like now you've been kind of doing it on the, on the backdrop without a lot of people knowing it and now you're just gonna make publicly make a statement that you're really doing it.

Vance Crowe [00:39:18] What did you think of of Twitter putting a fact check below the president of the United States

Kevin McKernan [00:39:26] Long overdue considering he's been threatening war with with North Korea. Sorry. Yeah, North Korea, right? I mean, doesn't that go against their community standards?

Vance Crowe [00:39:34] Interesting.

Kevin McKernan [00:39:35] You know, no violence. Oh, but the president can talk about the nuclear football in North Korea. That seems a little violent to me. So I'm not a fan of that. I know it's his largest platform and there's, there are aspects of what he does that I sometimes agree with, but I'm not a big fan of, of them, of any of the jingoism that comes outta that, that doesn't seem to be productive at all. Nor, you know, some of the banter that goes on there seems to be just childish, but whatever, it's his, it's his choice to do it. If that's the way he wants to play politics, that's his choice. But, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I try to stay out of that game. I'm not much of a voter. So I, I've kind of given up on the whole system that I, I really don't think it can be changed through a vote. I think it's more changed with individual action in the economy. I think you have far more influence with where you spend your dollars than where you spend that imaginary vote every four years. So I I, I try to put as little effort into that as possible. 'cause I know it's just distraction bandwidth. I don't have, I don't have the ram for.

Vance Crowe [00:40:33] And what are you spending your dollars on these days that you were not spending your dollars on before the Coronavirus pandemic?

Kevin McKernan [00:40:39] Well, that's a good question. I think it, we all went through a little bit of a fear early on. So I, you know, I, early on I did all the like get myself some O2, get some oxygen generators, get some quinine, get all the things I might need when this was cooking. And then I realized, okay, I've been, had I went and bought all this shit and I probably don't need it, but better safe than sorry. But no, I, I've been trying to channel my efforts into entrepreneurial efforts. I want to, I'm putting effort into building tests for COVID on cannabis and we're doing work on, right now, we've been cloning a lot of enzymes out of the cannabis genome into other organisms so that we can express some of the enzymes in the plant that fight off pathogens. I mean the, the real issue in, in cannabis is yield, like any farmer knows, you don't want to have aspergillus or penicillium or BetUS or powdery mildew wreaking havoc. Fusarium is another one. These things all wreak havoc on and can destroy 40% of your grow. And that those yield numbers really matter. So we have been, we found some powdery mild resistance genes in cannabis in a few of the cannabis plants. They're missing in other cannabis plants. So we clone those enzymes and we're expressing them and we're demonstrating that they, they knocked down other fungal growth by a thousand fold in vitro. So we can maybe build, we can build sprays that aren't chemically based. Like you, you've got a Monsanto history, right? So you now know and you, you've you guys paved the road here that the chemical sprays can be a real problem they end up showing Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:42:02] But the biologicals aren't, aren't regulated

Kevin McKernan [00:42:04] Way. Biologicals are more ephemeral. Yeah. You gotta apply them more. But they decay in the sun and over time and they're not a small molecule that's gonna enrich. And the cannabis space does a lot of extraction. So if you use a small molecule as a, as a fungicide like Michael Labinol or eagle twenties, probably well known in the, in the agricultural space, a a perfectly fine, you know, fungicide. Except when you heat that thing it turns into hydrogen cyanide. Right? So you don't want that fungicide making its way into an extraction 'cause it enriches in the extraction more than the cannabinoids do. And they end up in vape pens and people are smoking hydrogen cyanide. So you gotta change what you do in the cannabis field for fungicides. And we want to go the direction of, of biologics because the biologics are natives. The plants already, they're already, they've already had thousands of years of human exposure and they're more ephemeral, they decay in the environment so you can use them to knock down the pathogens and by the time you harvest, they're probably gone. And so we want to, we wanna go down to the enzyme road here and, and grab enzymes out of the cannabis plant that everybody's comfortable with and just turbocharge their expression and reapply them to the plants when the plants didn't need them. So we've been going down that road 'cause it looks less regulated.

Vance Crowe [00:43:14] It's an interesting road to go down. It is less regulated. And there, so I have friends in this space and, and many of them have told me there's gonna be a couple of wonder things that come out of this because it's really just a biological agent producing a chemical. So you're still doing chemistry at its core.

Kevin McKernan [00:43:30] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:43:31] But that a huge amount of what's gonna get sold into the system probably already has been sold in the system is snake oil. So how are you present preventing yourself from, from the, into one of those, the sweet sweet alcohol of your own brew? Yeah,

Kevin McKernan [00:43:44] Yeah. These, so these enzymes are kite AEs and thine like proteins. These things decay beta glucan, the thine proteins decay beta glucan, which is in the cell wall of fungi. And the kite AEs hit chitin. And so when you hit 'em with both of those, the fungal walls dissolve. And it's actually the most highly expressed gene in cannabis is the kinase, at least the plants that we've been sequencing. So the gene is already turned on full chart.

Vance Crowe [00:44:10] 'cause it was confronted with this in the wild in the past, huh? Yeah.

Kevin McKernan [00:44:13] Yeah. Okay. And, and interesting enough, it doesn't express it in the roots, like the roots system has zero expression of this. And I think that's 'cause the roots need to talk to microrisal fungi. And so they don't want to be omitting something that melts fungi.

Vance Crowe [00:44:26] What is the history of, of cannabis? Do you know how it became domesticated?

Kevin McKernan [00:44:30] That is a very good question. There's a lot of history and folklore there, but I think the, I think it's the tombs in China. Ethan Russo's probably the best person to talk to. And then I can connect you with him if you ever want to get into the ethno botany. John McPartland's another good name on this. And they were, they found psychoactive THC and tombs in China that I think were like 5,000 years old. Right. So that they were able to, they were able to PCR the, the cannabis that they found in these tombs to know that the THC gene was there, therefore wasn't just fiber type. And so, and it was a grave, so a ceremony, they can see that they probably packed some of the stuff into the grave as a summary. So we know, we know that far back, the, the pollen records suggest it diverged like 20 million years ago maybe from hops. And so it's got an old pollen record, but we don't have, we can't get DNA that's settled. So I think the oldest DNA sequences out there are probably for the Dennis Os that might be like a hundred thousand years old. I could be behind on some of that lit that paleo genomics work. But it's, we, we don't have good ability to sequence DNA that's, that's, you know, a million years old at the moment. So we, we can, we can PCR stuff that's thousands of years old, not a problem. And you know, a hundred thousand years old, there are the ways to do it, but when you go deep deeper into this, it's a bit harder to get DNA out of it. But anyway, it did, it wasn't here. There's no evidence it was in North America. The evidence is that it came out of, of the Hindu Kush area and then spread around the globe in equatorial sense. In fact, it was used to create the fiber for the sales.

Kevin McKernan [00:46:04] So canvas sales, the can and canvas is for cannabis.

Vance Crowe [00:46:08] No way. Yeah,

Kevin McKernan [00:46:09] Yeah. So

Vance Crowe [00:46:10] James,

Kevin McKernan [00:46:10] James Cook actually introduced cannabis to Australia because he carried cannabis seeds with him everywhere he went, in case his sales got wrecked, he'd plant these things and they grow within eight, eight to 10 weeks, recreate his fiber. He could remake his sales and, and move on. So all the cannabis that's in Australia is presumed to have come from James Cook. And then how when it got to Americas is, is an unknown. I I don't know that if I don't have good visibility on that, but it, it's not believed to have been here until ships brought it here. So it was the naval, it was the whale of oil, of, of the naval industry and, and the human diaspora was really powered by cannabis. So it's gone with us all over the globe and intermixed for a long period of time.

Vance Crowe [00:46:49] So people have been smoking it for that long or, or predominantly using it for the fibers?

Kevin McKernan [00:46:54] It's a good question. I, I don't know when that aspect was discovered. You know, it was certainly in, in the, you know, being used for, for seed and fiber for a long period of time. But I don't know when someone decided to smoke it. That's, we have evidence of that tomb 5,000 years ago. So I would assume that was prior to a, a lot of these ships moving all over the place. So people on those ships probably knew about its psychoactive effects as well,

Vance Crowe [00:47:19] Kevin, you find me, you find me the expert on this, and we will have the greatest conversation because what, what an interesting plant and for it to, the thing that strikes me is there's very few things in this world that wanna draw attention to themselves as much as that plant does because it smells so strongly.

Kevin McKernan [00:47:40] Yeah. When

Vance Crowe [00:47:40] It's ready to, to be harvested that it's, it's, it's unimaginable. If you're, so I used to live in Mendocino, you could be walking around in the woods and smell something and PE people would be like, well, that's several miles away.

Kevin McKernan [00:47:51] Yeah. Yeah. And don't, don't walk over there by the way, you might get a shot.

Vance Crowe [00:47:54] Yeah, that's right.

Kevin McKernan [00:47:57] Yeah. Those are the terpenes that the plant makes. And those are important essential oils as well. A lot of the terpenes, beta Carlene is one that's quite common in cannabis and is known to be a cannabinoid two agonist. So even things that aren't cannabinoids in the plant have some activity on the endocannabinoid system

Vance Crowe [00:48:13] And what are terpenes? Yeah. For people that haven't been into a smoke shop to see like the, this is the terpene profile.

Kevin McKernan [00:48:20] Yeah. The terpenes are smaller molecular weight molecules. They're, they're, the plant makes a lot of these six and eight carbon chain molecules. It kind of glues those things together into a variety of, of different compounds that are, that are volatile. Volatile meaning they, they, they vape off into the air and you can smell them from long distances away, but they're believed to be signaling molecules that are used to either fight off, you know, pesticide, you know, other insects or, or also maybe even attract things that might move its seed around. So a really good paper to go and read is from David Sinclair on this. David Sinclair you may know, is one of someone who's been working on the fountain youth for a long time. He's published a lot on Revital, and he's been on Joe Rogan's podcast a few times. He does really good work outta Harvard. He published a really good paper on Xenohormesis, which is this concept that plants make chemical messengers to attract the things that might move their seed around. Okay. So terpenes are, are in that category that they're building these compounds to not only be an insecticide, but they're also meant to attract humans to perhaps, or other mammals to perhaps engage with this plant and move it around. But as a result of this, they tend to have really interesting signaling to the organisms that eat them. They're known to, to, to play around in the pathway. And the human body node is the mTOR pathway. mTOR is involved in your metabolism. So his theory is that when the plants start to sense environmental stress, they change their terpene profile.

Kevin McKernan [00:49:51] So the things that are consuming them get a signal that prepare for caloric restriction. I'm going away and it's adapted to do this in theory so that the thing that's spreading its seed gets a signal from the environment to prepare for change so that its partner in transmission of its genetics is actually receiving some chemical messengers to make it, you know, to, to make it better prepared. The paper will blow your mind.

Vance Crowe [00:50:16] This, this sounds remarkably similar. I have good friends that are in the pepper breeding and I actually heard one of the, one of the world's great pepper breeders said that when they started breeding jalapenos, they put it in the best conditions they could possibly get. Right. Perfectly watered, lots of sun protecting it. And they found out that the scovilles of these on these jalapenos were going down, down, down.

Kevin McKernan [00:50:41] Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:50:42] 'cause the way that the, the chemical that the seeds produce capsaicin, which, you know, is that really spicy chemical, it is increased when the plant is stressed.

Kevin McKernan [00:50:53] Yes, this is true. So

Vance Crowe [00:50:55] Yeah, you have to go out and like break branches. You have to hold, withhold water. And that's the plight of the, of the pepper breeder, the pepper, because you've gotta balance that out. And I believe they think it's epigenetics. So if you are stressed parents, then you give children that end up being more Yeah,

Kevin McKernan [00:51:13] Yeah, yeah. It's quite possible. We, you know, we're just starting to get into epigenetics and cannabis. We just published some of the first methylation maps in cannabis. And plant methylation is more complicated than mammalian methylation. They, they mammals tend to methylate only

Vance Crowe [00:51:27] What is methylation?

Kevin McKernan [00:51:28] So in, in DNA, ATCs and GS can transmit through sexual reproduction into the offspring. The, the, the, the cells that, that contain those in the plant can have some memory. They, they can write messages on the DNA based on the environment, but that message doesn't always get transmitted. Alright. So when they do this in the form of methylation, they'll come onto the cytosines and they'll put a, a methyl group on it. And that methyl group, when the polymerase copies the DNA into the next generation, it doesn't copy the methyl group. So the methylation patterns are not replicable necessarily into the meth, into the next generation. Some of them can be, but it's, it's a much more subtle effect than the copying you get on the ATCs and Gs. So you have to think of the, when the environment wants to paint its picture onto DNA, it's doing it with methylation, right. The, the environment printed onto DNA based on methylation patterns. And the plants have more ways to methylate DNA than humans do. We tend to only methylate seas that are next to Gs. Plants can do almost any sea in the genome. They can methylate. And so the methylation patterns are far more complicated. And we, we don't fully understand 'em in cannabis yet, but we're starting to do this for that reason. Because you're absolutely right in cannabis, if you want to get the terpene profile up and the cannabinoid profile up, you need to stress that plant. And its secondary metabolism kicks in and starts making all types of different molecules when it's stressed. This is why they try not to seed them. So if you really want to get cannabinoid content up, you keep pollen away from the female plants and the female plants start to stress out because they're getting late in their life cycle and they're worried they're not gonna make a seed.

Kevin McKernan [00:53:05] And so they start making more cannabinoids and more terpenes and the flowers get bigger. And so one way of, of stressing these plants out is pushing 'em into later their growth and, and keep pollen completely away from them. And then they end up getting really large flowers. Whoa. So

Vance Crowe [00:53:19] You, you're

Kevin McKernan [00:53:20] Absolutely right. Same thing's going on in peppers. And it's a very similar pathway. I think capsaicin is probably in, in, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a terpene pathway in there that's making capsaicin. So the terpenes, they're, they're very small, volatile molecules. The building blocks that make terpenes are also utilized to make larger molecules like cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are like 21 count, 21 carbon molecules. And the terpenes are usually like half that or less. So there, there, there is some competition there that when you get changes in terpene profiles, the, those will change to the environment much more quickly than the cannabinoid content. Well, because the cannabinoids are like 10 enzymatic steps downstream. And so when you get a change in the environment, the terpenes will change first and the cannabinoids will get their, their change will be much more delayed like a few weeks later. So there's a bit of a, a queuing theory issue there and, and getting the cannabinoids to move around a lot with the, with the environment. But the terpenes you can change instantly. And you, there are even papers out there that if you, there's a dance with these things with the microbes that if you actually antibiotic treat the flowers, this wasn't done in cannabis, it was done on rabbit opsis. But if you antibiotic treat the flowers and wipe out the microbiome terpene profile completely changes.

Vance Crowe [00:54:30] Wow. So there are that much in a dance between Yes.

Kevin McKernan [00:54:33] Between

Vance Crowe [00:54:33] What's going on all the way down at the roots and the microbiome. Wow.

Kevin McKernan [00:54:38] Yeah. There are unique terpenes that are made in the roots too, that we don't see in the flowers. This is Keith Allen published some of this work. He was working with a reference that we made on Jamaican lion and profiled all, all the terpenes, syntheses jeans, beautiful paper. And he noticed that there's a few of these terpenes that are exclusively expressed in the roots and we don't know what the hell they are.

Vance Crowe [00:54:58] So you have a very precise and nuanced way of looking at how the environment impacts these chemicals and these microbes. And you're thinking about this on a very deep level. But what if we zoomed the camera lens way, way, way back, and instead of looking at what is it doing to the individual human mind, what it, what happens when a culture now gets a hold of this chemical in mass or these chemicals in mass in a way that they never have before? What are the societal implications of this, of this being something we can grow on a scale we've never done before? Okay.

Kevin McKernan [00:55:30] So I think the first thing we, it goes back to that mask thing, right? You cannot, there, there's a tendency to do a one size fits all on the human population as well that can, like, THC does the same thing to everybody. It's not true, right? There's, there's like 9% of the population that gets anxiety from THC and they believe it's associated with an AKT one variant, but it's still early data. Likewise. So I think it's just important to know when there's some generalization going on when people say, oh, THC gets everybody high and gets them stoned and they sit on their couch and eat Doritos. That's just

Vance Crowe [00:56:07] It. It has like a stimulation effect on me. It, it's almost like taking Adderall or something. Yeah. I, I never took Adderall, but I, the way that I hear other people describe it, for me, it is like extreme focus.

Kevin McKernan [00:56:18] I, I know people who do that as well. They're like, they want to get stuff done. They have THC and they go to town and clean the house and they, they end up like, you know, writing papers. This is, it has a different effect. Some people couch locks them and they, you know, they perhaps they become net Netflix junkies. But, so that's, that's the first thing is, is to step back and realize human biology is also a different glove hand and glove type of environment. Here we did, we published a paper on this for a while. We were sequencing lots of patients with epilepsy to try and sort out which genes were involved in CBD helping epileptic patients. And what we quickly found there is that there are variants in the PO in human population. The cannabinoid one receptor in a gene known as dla, which is involved in making your own endocannabinoids, your body makes cannabinoids, but they're, they don't look the same as the plant ones. The plant one is, is mimicking them, just like opiates are mimicking endorphins, cannabinoids are mimicking a anandamide in two eight G. Those are the compounds that your body makes, that the plant tries to stealthily mimic. Well, there's enzymes in your body that make those things and break those things down. And there are variants in the human population that altered the ability for those enzymes to properly function. So we published a paper demonstrating, there were, there were people in the population that have those mutations and they tend to have a higher likelihood of getting migraines, getting headaches, seizures, host of these, these things. So I just wanna be really clear that this is, it's not a one size fits all. There's some generalization, you'll hear people say that CBD does X and THC does y and there's some generalizations there that are true, but they're always, they're always edge cases. So when you're back to your question, when, when people are engaged in taking these cannabinoids, it's very rare that they're taking a pure isolated compound.

Kevin McKernan [00:57:57] You know, they're usually taking a plant extract, which has hundreds of compounds in them at varying concentrations or one that have been extracted. So they're slightly enriched for more THC or CB, D. But there's this long tail of other terpenes, cannabinoids, flavonoids that we don't really understand yet and what they do. But they, they're, they're very much delivering a different experience every time. And I think that's, that's probably one reason why I think this is a very attractive market to recreational users is that much like wine, it's a very different flavor. Every plant that you, that you visit and every, you know, concoction that you come up with, it's very rare that you come across a plant that's expressing exactly the same cannabinoid ratios and terpene ratios that you had before. And so you may have a very different experience, you know, plant to plant.

Vance Crowe [00:58:45] It's like a boat ride is gonna be different every time, right? Yeah. It may look a lot the same, but it's gonna, it's gonna wave around in the waves. It's going to handle differently. It's gonna pick up the wind a little differently. All of 'em are just a little bit different.

Kevin McKernan [00:58:57] Yeah. And you know, this, this tends to scare people the FDA because they're like, whoa, whoa, you're just doing random number generators on people's minds, man. Get through that, you know? But, but the, you know, the, the history here, and I think it probably has to do with our evolution that we've been, you know, we, this is, they believe this is the first plant we ever domesticated. I mean, that's how far back it goes. So if that's the case, our genetics probably, you know, we, we are not seeing deaths from this probably.

Vance Crowe [00:59:24] Wait, did you say you think this is the first plant we ever domesticated?

Kevin McKernan [00:59:27] Yeah. If, if you talk to folks like Ethan Russo and, and McPartland, that's what you see in the literature is this may be the first domesticated plant.

Vance Crowe [00:59:34] I mean, you could imagine people being highly, highly motivated when they found out that there is this wild plant that can make you feel this way or have these ideas. I, I mean like

Kevin McKernan [00:59:44] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then that, that's something that's pretty sticky. I mean, it's funny, we, we published our, our preprint on these 42 genomes that we sequenced. And the, the one area that a few people commented on is that we, we put in there that these cannabinoids and terpenes might be responsible for tracking pollinators. And they all like threw bees at us. Like, no, it's not true. Bees only go to cannabis plants at, at late in the year, and they don't really move it from male to female plants. They just eat the pollen and take it. It's a good food source. They're not at all pollinator. And this stuff is wind pollinated. And I had to remind them that you're forgetting about humans, right? The biggest pollinator in cannabis are humans. And they're not telling me that

Vance Crowe [01:00:25] We're

Kevin McKernan [01:00:26] Not attracted to this plant. All right? It's the most, it is the most widely consumed illicit drug. It is definitely found a way to make us pollinate. And if the bees aren't doing it, we are. And, and I think that's, that's very true. We have carried this all over the globe for a reason, whether it be the food fiber or the psychoactive effects. So it it's

Vance Crowe [01:00:46] A symbiotic relationship in some way. Right. In in exactly.

Kevin McKernan [01:00:49] And

Vance Crowe [01:00:50] That the plant would've adapted to what we, what, what the humans wanted. And the ones that, that gave humans what they wanted randomly got selected for Yeah. Many, many times over.

Kevin McKernan [01:00:59] Like imagine if the poppy plant made fiber, you know, would we have an opiate overdose problem right now if we were traveling all over the world with opiates? Or would've we created a population of people that just never died from opiates? You know, I don't know. It's, it's just a thought experiment.

Vance Crowe [01:01:15] Oh, that is a wild thought experiment that you had to select out for the humans that were gonna have cannabis. Terrible reactions, but that's already been done. But now with poppies, we never did that because through

Kevin McKernan [01:01:27] Really

Vance Crowe [01:01:28] Only

Kevin McKernan [01:01:28] For one

Vance Crowe [01:01:28] Thing, thing

Kevin McKernan [01:01:29] Capability, other, other than other than one drug that was probably discovered fairly late in its in, in its relationship with humans.

Vance Crowe [01:01:34] Man, I always thought it was total garbage a couple of years ago when people would talk about hemp and hemp plants and paper and, and string. And I think people oftentimes overemphasize things when it benefits them and kind of Sure. But it, it really is. I mean, for you to tell me that sales were made from, from cannabis like that is so mind blowing because that would mean that you could, you basically have a little factory that you just hold in your pocket and it's biologically, you know, it's, you just put the sun on and some water and bang, you've got a, you've got a fiber factory built for it.

Kevin McKernan [01:02:07] Yeah. And, and the, the genetics have diverged enough where the, the hemp plants are different genetics than the ones that might grow CBD or THC. But that's natural. That's just people selecting over the years that they want really tall, lanky plants that make the fiber. There's different plants they want that make the seeds that are really big. And, and then the cannabis plants, they, they, they make for making very large flowers, have completely different genetics and morphology. They're really distant. Actually, if you look at the distance between hemp and cannabis, like drug type cannabis, I think we're finding like 15 or 16 million SNPs. So it's, it's like 10 times the polymorphism rate that you would see between any two humans that you would see between a hemp plant and, and a and a drug type cannabis plant.

Vance Crowe [01:02:48] So separated quite a while ago.

Kevin McKernan [01:02:50] They're they are, they're very different with

Vance Crowe [01:02:52] The Ians Would it be before we were broken off from humans then?

Kevin McKernan [01:02:56] Oh, I, I haven't done, that's a good question. On a molecular clock basis, I haven't done that. I, we just know that they're much more, they're much more polymorphic at the moment. But I'll, I'll, I'll have, I gotta ask the people about that. That's an interesting question,

Vance Crowe [01:03:07] Kevin. You're a, an amazing, you know, plant storyteller. You've got all these ideas. Why Boston? Why, why are you running your company outta there East

Kevin McKernan [01:03:17] Coast? So, that's a good question. We, when we started this in 2011, I had to get a BV set up in the Netherlands because we were absolutely petrified that lawyer, the, you know, we would get shut down. We were, you know, in 2011, cannabis wasn't the, the, the movement wasn't to the state where, where it was legal in a couple states, it was still pretty much illegal everywhere other than maybe medical use in California. So our lawyers advised, look, set up a BV over in Holland, it's gonna cost you like 30 k, 30 k or something to do this. But you'll be in a jurisdiction where it's free for you to purify DNA and you can ship that DNA into the states, but you can't be shipping samples from Holland into the states and, and you want to have a really clean bill of record that the first cannabis plan she sequenced you, you, you, you crossed all the i's and dotted the T's. So we went through all that and now it's not needed. You don't need to do that. But that's just a frustrating aspect of, of regulation. Now we can do this here in Massachusetts. We're a recreationally legal state. We didn't get shut down during this COVID then, thank God. But Boston is a biotech hub of the world. I mean, this is the, if you wanna deploy genomics on cannabis, this is the place to do it. And you know, may only other place,

Vance Crowe [01:04:29] I'm gonna make the pitch, I'm gonna make the pitch that that St. Louis is the place that should be. I want St. Louis to be the Hong Kong because we are the, the huge hub of plant biologists per capita. We have more plant biologists than anybody else. We don't have traffic. We've got really, really inexpensive lab space and we've got a dining scene that's killer. Which, that's what you need is people to be able to come together, have meals, interact, come up with new ideas. I want, I want you guys to come to St.

Kevin McKernan [01:04:56] Louis, you've got, yeah, you've got the Washoe Genome Center there too. That's

Vance Crowe [01:04:59] Right. That

Kevin McKernan [01:04:59] Is one of the best genome centers in the world right there in St. Louis. And

Vance Crowe [01:05:02] We've been cranking out genomic data engineers out of Monsanto for, you know, about a decade now. And so we have some hardcore Yeah, data scientists and architects.

Kevin McKernan [01:05:13] I know a lot of people there that, that came outta WashU did a stint in Monsanto. Really talented bioinformatics folks that are now on their own and in sort of the plant breeding arena. So it is, you're right, that is, that is a very good hub. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:05:24] Well, and the guy that hooked us up, Rob Long Plantables is the, the data genius that, that knows all about how to set up architecture systems to track genomes. And

Kevin McKernan [01:05:34] I owe him some thanks for doing that. I mean, that's what I love about Rob is he may, he doesn't have to agree with everything you say to still be able to recommend other people, should, should, should have a look at what you do. And that's, that's rare today, right now we have a lot of people that are just on one side of this fight versus another. And if you find yourself in the middle of that fight, not picking sides, you're, you're somewhat isolated.

Vance Crowe [01:05:54] Yeah, that's exactly right. That's been the craziest thing about all of this experience because I was interacting and talking with different people and I naturally like to be around disagreeable people. I like to be around somebody that's like, Hey, the idea you had Vance that wasn't very good. And let me tell you why. Yeah.

Kevin McKernan [01:06:09] But this

Vance Crowe [01:06:09] Sense of, we're gonna disagree with you by yelling at you or by like just telling you that there's no possible way that anything you're saying is correct and the fact that you believe it means blood is on your hands. I don't have any time for this. I don't want, I don't want anything to do with the people that are like that.

Kevin McKernan [01:06:25] Yeah. COVID has come out of this, right. All types of slander and slurs. And I've seen it used on either side of the fence too. You know, one, one one side call and the other committee gets the other one. You know, it's, it's, it's unfortunate. I I think that, you know, the social media systems are doing what they're designed to do, which is to split people into fractions here and, and have us fight while, you know, all hell breaks loose elsewhere.

Vance Crowe [01:06:46] So Kevin, in closing, what do you think you're gonna be paying attention to over the next two weeks?

Kevin McKernan [01:06:54] Oh, what's today? Oh, I think I'm gonna be paying attention to getting outside. To be honest. The weather's turning around. I'm not afraid of this thing. I think it's time to get outside, get healthy, get people convinced that hey, it's safe to go back outside. It's safe to reengage, lead by example here. I, I think keyboard worrying everybody into, into opening up lockdown isn't gonna work. I think we should just lead with our actions and start supporting small businesses, start supporting some farmers. I'm gonna start planning my garden. I mean that's key. 'cause if this continues on, I think everyone, this is a great time for people to learn how to garden.

Vance Crowe [01:07:30] This is,

Kevin McKernan [01:07:31] This is it. Summer's here and, and you know, we don't have enough of that. And I know all the farmers that you're in touch with probably resonate with this. That there's too many people in this world that, that cannot feed themselves in, in a crisis. And we, and our food chains are a little bit too, are not decentralized enough. But if everyone can grow, hey, try it with cannabis, it's the easiest thing to grow. In most states, you can grow six to 12 plants on your own. And if you want to teach someone how to grow, that's probably the best place to start because you really can't screw it up.

Vance Crowe [01:07:59] Yeah. You'll always have volunteers that'll come over and weed with you. If so, no problem if you have a guaranteed crop share.

Kevin McKernan [01:08:07] Yeah. It's, it's hard to get recruits for tomatoes, but you tell people you're gonna, you need some help with your cannabis plants and you'll have a, you'll have an army of people who wanna chip in.

Vance Crowe [01:08:15] Kevin, it is so good to talk with you. I'm, I'm so glad we had a chance to catch up and this seemed like the right time. Thank you for sharing all your research and your background. I really appreciate it, man.

Kevin McKernan [01:08:26] And indeed. And I wanna, I, I'll send you a, or I'll post some of these, these links 'cause I wanna make sure people don't think I'm just talking out my ass here. There are all these papers that have come out talking about the antibody response and COVID and I really think everyone should read those 'cause they're not getting airtime.

Vance Crowe [01:08:40] And so I'll put 'em in my show notes. But how can people find you on Twitter? 'cause that's how I have stayed in touch with you, is I watch your feed. It's very good. It's, it's, it's all signal, almost no noise.

Kevin McKernan [01:08:51] That's on. I think I'm Kevin Kernan on Twitter. Okay. So yeah, look me up there. I I, I've got some, some other content on Facebook as well that allows more characters. I rarely, a little bit on LinkedIn as well, but it's, I think all of them are Kevin underscore Kernan. So you can find me on any of those three platforms and our, our websites, medicinal genomics.com.

Vance Crowe [01:09:10] Thank you so much, Kevin.

Kevin McKernan [01:09:12] All right. Appreciate it. Thank you.