A Monsanto Scientist on GMOs, Glyphosate Cancer Risk, and How Big Agriculture Really Works

Fred Perlak [00:00:00] Other chemical companies hated monsano because of what we did. We changed their world, and seed companies didn't like us either because we changed everything about it. This is the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:18] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Each week I sit down with an expert to figure out how did you have the discipline to discover something new, to build something or create something that now exists in the world that wouldn't have if you had not been there? And this week we have a special guest. It is my mentor from Monsanto. A lot of you are familiar that when I came into Monsanto, I knew almost nothing at all about agriculture. And since I was being hired for this really weird position called the Director of Millennial Engagement, that they were going to have to set up a training program that was a little bit unorthodox. And so the training program that they set up was that they would write a list of 50 people from throughout the company, that'd be geneticists and chemists and breeders, could be attorneys, communications people, salespeople. And I would go spend an hour with each one of those 50 people. And then when I got done, I would sit down with my boss and we would talk about what I did and didn't know. And then she'd write another list of 50 people for me to go talk with. Well, during the first list or two of those 50 people, I encountered a man named Dr. Fred Perla. He had just gotten back from living in Hawaii. He was running the Monsanto site out there, which, if you know anything at all about corn breeding or really plant breeding in general, Hawaii is the crown jewel of the company. Because you have three growing seasons, you have optimal growing conditions. So you can do some really exceptional research, and you can also bring seeds into production. You can grow up enough that you can then take them out and sell them and increase the quantity of seeds that are available.

Vance Crowe [00:01:53] And so he had just come back from running that site. Before that he had been the person that had been fundamental in discovering BT Cotton, which was one of the first genetically engineered cotton seeds that would make it so these insects couldn't bite into the leaves and tear up the entire cotton plant. So he had a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience running a giant science business. And we became friends. And during our friendship, we sat across the table from one another in his office. And I would ask him all sorts of questions about things like, how do pesticides work? How do we know that GMOs are safe? How do you know that you aren't just creating GMOs that will eventually develop resistance? And then you've given away this wonderful natural resource. And Fred answered those questions for me as I was learning and being asked to go out into the wider world and explain it. He has an exceptional ability to be able to take really complicated ideas and make them approachable, tell them in a story. So he is par excellence. But even more than that, Fred's an exceptional person, and he taught me a lot about life and how to enjoy it and how to value the things that matter. So I'm not going to do any more introduction here. I hope that if we do get a little bit lost in the weeds, if we start using names or jargon or talking about things that don't quite fit with what you know, that you hang with it, because the entire interview has these sections, these segments where we talk about things that even though I have spent literally hundreds of hours with Dr.

Vance Crowe [00:03:27] Perla, I'd never heard him say, and some thoughts that I had never considered before. So it is a fantastic interview. This is one of the longest running ones that we've done. But it gives you an insight into the conversations that I have with people that have become my mentors through their kindness and their time. They have taught me so much. And I hope that you can take away a lot from this conversation. So without further ado, I hope you buckle in and enjoy this interview with one of my favorite people in the world, Dr. Fred Perla. Fred Perla, welcome to the podcast.

Fred Perlak [00:04:05] Oh, thank you, Vance. It's, it's nice to see you and nice to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:04:08] Oh, I cannot tell you how excited I am to be sitting down and doing this because you actually would have been my very first podcast guest. In fact, most of the way that I designed this podcast was in memory of how you and I got to know each other and became quite close in the last, I think it was about a year that you were at Monsanto. That's

Fred Perlak [00:04:31] Correct.

Vance Crowe [00:04:32] And so I made a commitment to myself that I was gonna wait to invite you on until I had figured out how can I do this right? How can I have the right microphones? How can I have the right video? Because I feel like the conversations that you and I have had in that year that you were working at Monsanto, and then since we have stayed in touch, they're great conversations and there's nothing I would love to do more than to capture one and, and share it. 'cause I learned a lot from you about science, about how to think about business problems and, and really just about other things like wine. You and I have talked about that and, and your grandchildren and what that means to you. So you and I did the first Reddit a MA and asked me anything on behalf of a major Fortune 500 company. We had other people that helped us out, but it was you and I sitting down to make this happen. And we did yours in the science subreddit. And the science subreddit is exactly what it sounds like. People share an articles, it's pretty sophisticated conversation, but there's some people in there that just wanna be reading about science. They aren't necessarily scientists. So it's a broad spectrum. And when we did your Reddit a MA, it was the second highest rated science a MA in the history of Reddit all the way up until that point. And when we added up the amount of time that people spent on it relative to how many people visited, so you could take how many people visited and what was the average visit, and multiply that out, it turns out that more people paid attention to that podcast for longer than the Super Bowl ad that we ran that same year.

Fred Perlak [00:06:09] That's that's very flattering. It was, it was fun to do the Reddit.

Vance Crowe [00:06:14] So let's talk about that. What do you, what did you have to offer? Did you feel like when we were in that Reddit science, a MAI,

Fred Perlak [00:06:22] I think the, I think what made it so popular with people was the fact that I didn't feel I had to tow a particular company line. I tried to be as genuine and to reflect what it was like to work as a scientist in a big company, and to talk about what the conflicts were and things that we struggled with. Because you, you run into situations where you have only certain degrees of freedom to get things done, but you can work within that context if you're creative. And if you are persistent, you can get a lot of things done with it. And I think people like to hear that. No, I didn't have all the answers. Of course I didn't. But we thought about them and we took them into consideration. And I think the older I got in my career, the longer I got into my career, the more I realized I didn't have all the answers. And I think that's reflected when you start doing things like a Reddit or a podcast and start talking where people ask you questions instead of you telling them what you think.

Vance Crowe [00:07:39] Oh, that's, I, I, I guess I didn't even realize that about it. You know, my experience of you doing this Reddit a MA was not just that. You stumbled onto the platform six months before we did it. You and I had been sitting down and you had been teaching me science essentially. Like I started from, basically, I know that chlorophyll is in crops and I know that they need to grow and they need fertilizer. And I kind of understand pesticides, but I have no real fundamental understanding of how breeding works or how genetic engineering at all, or how even that there are various types of pesticides and then what they do. And so you and I found each other because while I was going through my list of 50 people that I, I talk about that, that was my training. You and I encountered one another. And then you started sharing all of this stuff with me, how, how this stuff worked in a format that I could understand. And it hit me one day on a, you know, I was thinking creatively and it hit me that Reddit actually would be a great place for you, that you could answer questions for other people the way that you were for me. 'cause my job was to go then out and talk about the science, And then I showed you that Reddit thread and you dove into it, and that's what made you ready. I, I felt like the six months that you did with the practice and things like that, what, what was the experience like of learning a platform you never even heard of before we walked in there?

Fred Perlak [00:09:08] Well, I, I, I thought it was pretty cool because people asked you questions and it was what they wanted to hear more than anything else. I think the thing I learned in my career, and I learned this from people like Kevin Holloway and others that I worked with, was that you really should listen carefully to what someone's asking you. What is it that they really want to hear about? Because too many people have stock answers that they fly into. And you see this all the time, scientific meetings or other, they go into a stock answer. It looks like it came off an index card. Well, you know, it's okay to say, Hey, you know, I have no idea how we're gonna deal with this problem, but this is the considerations we had for it. One of them was a, a question about temporary employees at Monsanto, scientific workforce. And you had a lot of young, young researchers coming out of college who had undergraduate degrees and just wanted a job. And then they saw that it was an exciting place to work, then they wanted to get on full time. Well, you can't just hire people full time, because then you wonder, okay, how do they distinguish themselves from other people who, who have those skills? How easily can you replace that person? If that person has a unique skill or is particularly hard driven or good or anxious to learn, then they stand out.

Fred Perlak [00:10:46] But if you do what's asked of you, well, everybody does, otherwise they're not working there. And we tried to balance that with their expectations. And so telling people, okay, I don't know what the answer is. I don't know how you deal with that, but you want people to have satisfying careers. It gets complicated in the workforce situation when you have people who wanna get in but don't have the skills right away. They don't like to hear sometimes that you've gotta go back to school. You've gotta take chances. You've gotta take risks with your career and with yourself. It's hard for people to cut loose.

Vance Crowe [00:11:30] Do you feel like you knew that at an early age about taking chances and doing things outside of the norm to stand out? I,

Fred Perlak [00:11:38] I think, yeah, I did. I mean, it goes all the way back down to, you know, playing baseball in little league. What makes you different from the other 16 kids on the team? Well, he, he runs extra hard or he works hard at his hitting or he hustles a lot. Well, that'll get you a little bit. It'll get you a chance. And then you have to make the most of those chances. And I don't think that I was so conscious of it, but I wanted to play. And if you want to play, you work at it, you practice. And if it's important to you, you do it. Too many people, I think, have a sense of entitlement or that they're owed something. Well, they're owed, yes, they are. But you have to really want to go somewhere to do something a little bit different. You have to take chances.

Vance Crowe [00:12:34] Were you, was it obvious to you when you were young that you would make it to the, to the highest echelons of science and industry in the very cutting age?

Fred Perlak [00:12:44] No, I never thought about that. I thought about doing what it was I liked to do. I liked science from ever since I was grade schooler. I, I always was fascinated by that sort of stuff. And I think what drove me to continue doing it was because I wanted to do what I liked to do. And that was my selfish reason for doing it. I wasn't worried about the money, I was worried about being happy, finding a job that I could be happy with eventually is what it worked into. You

Vance Crowe [00:13:22] Were cognizant that I want a job that's gonna make me happy instead of any of the other domains that somebody could have. I want to travel, I wanna be powerful, I wanna make money.

Fred Perlak [00:13:31] Yeah. I think, you know, my parents always stressed grades in school and working hard. My brother was a very good student, and so we had a, a atmosphere of accomplishment and, and doing things. My father was an accountant and, and he wanted me to be an accountant. I wanted no part of it. It's okay. But I like the idea of science. I like the idea of working on my own. And in college, I did a independent research program where I worked in the laboratory on my own project for a semester. I found that time in the laboratory just flew by. I didn't care. I mean, I could spend hours there and my, my buddies would come and we'd say, come on time to go. And then, okay, oh fine. But I didn't really mind the time just flew by.

Vance Crowe [00:14:31] Have you heard of this concept flow? Are you familiar with this? No, I'm not. It's where you get into a mental state where you are competent at the skills that you need to be attempting this thing, but that there is some aspect that you're having to stretch yourself for to be completely occupied because it is at the very edge of what you're capable of. And when you are working on those types of projects, for some people it's Excel spreadsheets. For other people, it may be drawing something. But I'm wondering if in your case, what you're describing, it's the experience of being really, really focused on something that you are curious about and interested. And then the time just passes. It's like you look up and, and you thought five minutes has passed and really it's an hour and a half.

Fred Perlak [00:15:13] Well, and that's kind of what it was like. I come home at, at night and my wife would say, gee, that was quite a storm we had today. I said, really? I didn't know. Really.

Vance Crowe [00:15:24] Yeah.

Fred Perlak [00:15:25] I mean, we had windows, but I didn't look out the window. I was, I was focused on what we were doing.

Vance Crowe [00:15:34] And what were you doing that had captured your attention?

Fred Perlak [00:15:37] Well, at, at most of that period of time, I always thought that when people start a job, there's three, three distinct phases to your job. The first two years, you're just trying to figure out what end is up. You don't know what the rules are, you don't know what the expectations are. You have an idea, but you're not quite sure. And then from years two to five, you're figuring out, okay, this is what I can do. These are the parameters I can push. These are the ones I can't, these are the people I need to work with. These are the people I like interacting with. And then from five to 10, you have to make your mind up because if you don't make a decision by your 10th year of your job, you're in that job for the rest of your career, maybe not with that company.

Vance Crowe [00:16:29] Yeah. But if you tried to go do something else, your value that, that you're creating wouldn't be as much as what you're making right now.

Fred Perlak [00:16:34] Right. Unless it's an ancillary field where there's things that you can use the knowledge you gained and apply it to something else. Like if you're a baseball player and you're really good, and after 10 years, you could be a really good coach or a scout or something like that. I mean, that's a good example. But I think in my case, when I was really focused on that, I loved my family and I, and I really enjoyed spending time with them. But time in the laboratory was never ever a burden. I used to tell people that the bacteria I worked with, they didn't, they didn't need development plans. They didn't need increases in salary, or they weren't angry with somebody who had slighted them and used their reagents. I i,

Vance Crowe [00:17:26] The bacteria is this, is this why like, really great scientists make terrible managers because they'd rather be in the flow state of, and that may be an overstatement.

Fred Perlak [00:17:35] Well, I think it's an overstatement. I think the, if you're a good scientist, and I won't say great, but a good scientist, you have an appreciation for how difficult it is, and you can understand what goes on. You can understand the limitations of what you can or can't do in a reasonable period of time. I think in many ways your experiences should affect your expectations and applying those experiences to other people and what they're doing well, how did they feel? How did you feel when someone did that to you? Well, remember what that was like and it wasn't so good. So remember what it was like when someone presented your results at a meeting and didn't acknowledge you. Well, okay, maybe you give that person the opportunity to present their results. Maybe not there, but someplace else, maybe you make an acknowledgement slide upfront in your presentation and say, this work wouldn't have been possible without the contributions to these people. I think understanding or remembering the good and the bad of what people did that you liked, and the things that they didn't do, they did, that you didn't like, is the key to being a good manager.

Vance Crowe [00:19:01] But that's a level of self-awareness that is very, very difficult. I mean, most of the time when people see something that they don't like, they just avoid it. You know, they go out of their way and they, and, and I know for me, I have to say, what if this am I contributing to, and what is, what is it? This other person is just not somebody I wanna work with. And so to be able to then take it to the next level and look back at those bad experiences and be able to say, what can I apply? That takes a deep level of self-awareness.

Fred Perlak [00:19:32] I, I think the self-awareness is important, but I think in a scientific arena, it's more consistent or more accurate to what a person can contribute versus being part of a team that works on a marketing program. Well, okay, who had the idea to provide the rebate or this or that? Or was it the implementation of the rebate? Or was it the identification of who goes into the rebate or what area? Or it gets too complicated. Science is pretty cut and dry. Did you isolate that clone or not? Did you do this or not? Did you find this plant or not? So I think if you are really part of a good team, you, you lump everybody together and you say, okay, we did this together. And I think that was one of the things at Monsano that was so attractive as a company. The, in the early days, especially, and I'm talking eighties and early nineties, the attitude was you succeeded or failed as a team, and you really looked for people who could contribute, and you wanted to make sure everybody felt like they were part of that team. That was probably one of the keys to our success.

Vance Crowe [00:20:56] That's such a difficult balance to walk, because when you have a team and you wanna make sure everybody is acknowledged for their contributions, teams work out like Pareto distributions, right? There's 20% of the people are, are delivering 80% of the results. And if you treat that 20%, that's delivering 80% of the results. Like they're the other 80% of the people, you, you have real problems.

Fred Perlak [00:21:22] Well, there's a way around that. And, and at Monsano, there was a, in the scientific community, there was a very vigorous process of goals and objectives. So each individual would sit down and work hard on what was they expected to accomplish in the coming year. So there were expectations of that individual, well, this year we're gonna do this, this, and this as a team, we're gonna do this. We're gonna fail or not, and my contribution is gonna be this, this, and this. Okay. So at the end of the year, you can then sit down and say, okay, did you get what this needed to get done here? Yes or no? Well, I kind of did. Well, okay, and that's reflected in your overall comp compensation. But people had a very clear idea of what was expected of them and how they could contribute. And if what they were working on wasn't working out, okay, declare defeat and move on to something else and figure out another alternative.

Vance Crowe [00:22:25] You know, the, the core part of that is that the organization has to have a vision of where you're trying to get to. Because if you don't have that, then everybody can come together and say, this is what I'm producing for next year. But you don't really have that, that why, you know, what are we trying to get to and why are we trying to get there? Is what enables you to have the flexibility. And, and I I juxtapose what you're talking about against communications, where unless you have somebody standing up in front of you saying, this is what the world will look like when our marketing is done, or our branding or our industry makeover or whatever, all you're doing then is saying, let's go do things that are what we think are forward aiming, but might not be.

Fred Perlak [00:23:08] Yeah. It's, it's the difference between being serious and playing. There was a friend of mine who was a marketing guy.

Vance Crowe [00:23:15] That's a pretty brutal term.

Fred Perlak [00:23:16] I know. It is. You can go through the motions and you can fool people for years. I mean, thinking that you're getting something done. There was a friend of mine who was in marketing and, and he was, we were working on Bull Garden, insect Resistant Cotton. This guy named Dave, Dave Islander, wonderful guy, had a great rapport with farmers. And he said to me, he says, you know, he says, he says, when when you have really good technology, you can be just okay at marketing. He says, but if you have rotten technology, you

Vance Crowe [00:23:53] Better be then it's all marketing

Fred Perlak [00:23:55] Darn good. And I says, well, where are you? He says, I'm just okay with this. I'm marketing. I'm getting better. He says, but it's so nice to have good products that farmers want. And I think it's the difference in setting the vision of what it is you wanted to do when you start out. So for example, when David Fish off and myself were working on bogar cotton, insect resistant cotton, we said our goal was to sell bags of cotton seed that had a logo on it, like the NutraSweet swirl, and that it would be a Bogar logo, and farmers would seek out that seed because they want that product that has that logo on it. That meant that it was much better than what any other cotton was. That meant it added value. That meant that farmers would see the value and they would pick it preferentially. Now how much it was worth and how much to charge. Okay, fine, people can fill those blanks in. But if we can get a product that farmers want so badly that they will pick it out from others, then we've been a success.

Vance Crowe [00:25:11] Oh, wow. And, and to put that in context, you're talking about during the time when NutraSweet actually had a brilliant branding strategy. Exactly. Which was, if you put us in your product, you have to put us on your product. Right. And so that gave all of those companies an incentive to make sure that that brand of that NutraSweet was well known. Everybody understood it and chose it because it was better than drinking sugar or something like that. Well,

Fred Perlak [00:25:37] And I'll give you a, I'll give you an example where it didn't work so much for me. So when we were in the corporate engagement group, the, the, the goal for the team was,

Vance Crowe [00:25:52] Let me just make sure to clarify. Fred and I met each other after Fred's scientific career. When you were working in the lab, you're telling people, Hey, this is the direction we're gonna take. The, the technology you're doing studies, you're reading out data, when you and I met you had been moved into what they called consumer engagement or corporate engagement, which was an innovative wing of public relations, right? So you had people that were doing the website, people that were doing social media, people that were running ads, and then our kind of ragtag island of misfit toys,

Fred Perlak [00:26:25] Right? And, and my job was theoretically to be responsible for partnerships and work out instances with the Gates Foundation, the Buffet Foundation, the Danforth, to come up with programs that we could then somehow cobble together with the expertise at Monsano and have them work with us. The idea being is that we'd form some sort of partnership, whether it was with

Vance Crowe [00:26:54] Like Bill and Melinda Gates. They don't know how to grow corn, right? But they know that corn in Africa, drought resistance is important. So we bring the expertise, they bring the money and the connections with the nonprofits, and we make something real happen as opposed to like, you know, we're just,

Fred Perlak [00:27:08] And, and the problem ended up our corporate engagement group, their goal was to be the very best at communicating our story. And my comment to them was, look, if I give you good stories to communicate, you could be just okay at communicating those stories. That's

Vance Crowe [00:27:28] Right.

Fred Perlak [00:27:28] And get a big bang.

Vance Crowe [00:27:29] That's right.

Fred Perlak [00:27:30] But if you don't follow through on these projects, then you get a one off, you get a bang, and then you get, you don't get follow up. And there was a lack of commitment to do those follow ups. There were programs that were started before I got there, and I was like, we're gonna finish these. We're gonna ride them to the conclusion and we're gonna squeeze everything we can out of them. Well, there was no interest in doing it. Well, we've already gotten the publicity from that one. We're not interested. And that was very disappointing because that was not consistent with the monsano that I had worked at for all those previous years. It was very disappointing.

Vance Crowe [00:28:16] What do you think would've been possible had you been able to, to work out your, your partnerships that you're talking about?

Fred Perlak [00:28:22] Well, it, it, it all depends. I mean, it, and I tell people that companies don't carry commitments. Companies carry objectives or, or balance sheets and things like that. People within the company carry vision. They carry commitment. So for example, you look at somebody like Starbucks, well, they made the commitment as a company because Howard Schultz and Kevin Johnson said, we're gonna hire 30,000 veterans in Starbucks, or we're gonna provide education opportunities for our baristas. Okay, well that's a hardcore commitment and it requires follow through. Now, trying to get a company to do that, you can get people with all sorts of vision and it will set a direction. So for instance, the whole vision of genetically engineered crops was driven by Dick Mahoney, the former CEO of Monsano. His vision, and the way he started it was he said, bring me 20% return on equity. Well, that doesn't sound like all that visionary, but he said, I don't want to be second or third. I want to be at the top of the heap and I want to invest in new and novel technology that's gonna bring products that no one else would've thought of.

Fred Perlak [00:29:56] Is

Vance Crowe [00:29:57] Every CEO saying this to a science company?

Fred Perlak [00:30:00] They might be, but the difference was that Dick Mahoney invested in it. He built Chesterfield, he then took the law.

Vance Crowe [00:30:09] Well, so for people that don't know, Che, so Monsanto was in a, a part of St. Louis called Crieve Corps, and they built an entire another on a landmass that would be as large as a farm. They built real research facilities, two,

Fred Perlak [00:30:23] Multiple 200, 250 acres, and they spent $200 million. And in 1984, that was a lot of money, especially for something that wasn't already in the marketplace. I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:30:36] Didn't even know if you could do it.

Fred Perlak [00:30:38] Right. Genetically engineer, genetic engineering was so novel and so new. It was at the very beginning. And it was like one of those big hype things, you know, like

Vance Crowe [00:30:49] Artificial intelligence is

Fred Perlak [00:30:50] Now, artificial intelligence is now, or or

Vance Crowe [00:30:53] Driverless cars.

Fred Perlak [00:30:54] Driverless cars, or all the things the 5G network is gonna get us. And in reality, do those things actually happen? Well, eventually, but how much money and what sorts of things have to happen,

Vance Crowe [00:31:08] How long it takes to get it into the integrated into society is it thing? Right. A

Fred Perlak [00:31:12] Lot of blanks to fill in. That's right. From here to there. So, but what Dick Mahoney did was he built that facility geared toward genetic engineering and agriculture. And he invested in hiring all these patent attorneys that staffed our legal office because he said, if you're going to get something that is proprietary, we've gotta patent it. And you can't get me something that can be easily copied. You can't get me a me too product. I don't want it. He said, at the time, Monsano was the world's largest maker of nylon. He says, we're the number one producer of nylon in the world, and every pound we make, we lose money. This is not a good business.

Vance Crowe [00:31:57] No.

Fred Perlak [00:31:58] And so he had that vision that drove, drove us in that direction. Now, he also had the wherewithal and the ability to identify people to make that vision a reality, to fill in the blanks. He gave the overall vision of what he wanted. And then we got people like Ernie Jaworski and Howard Schneiderman, Rob Fraley and others to fill in those blanks.

Vance Crowe [00:32:25] So this brings up something I, I know you and I have talked about, which is the design paradox, which is the concept that Steve Jobs talked about. He said, how do you build the greatest iPod in the world? You know, the greatest music player? Well, you don't hire just computer engineers because if you do that, they're gonna give you what has already been there. Maybe something, maybe it makes it go a little faster, has a little more storage. Instead, what you have to do is you have to find people that truly love music, and then those people will build the, the music player that they want to hear music on. Right. The challenge is, if you are the leader making these choices on Ernie Jaworski or Rob Fraley or any of these, these characters, you have to know which one of you have to be able to distinguish who loves music and who doesn't.

Fred Perlak [00:33:11] Yeah, I, I think it's true. I mean, Rob Fraley is a good example. Rob Fraley grew up as a farm kid in Illinois, central Illinois. Went to the University of Illinois, had a distinguished career as a scientist, but he was our scientific leader. I've often heard people say that Rob was the, the best chief scientific officer during his career that anybody that they had ever seen.

Vance Crowe [00:33:42] No kidding.

Fred Perlak [00:33:43] This one Frank Atley, who came over and took Monsanto through a difficult period in time. And the, in mid eighties or actually early nineties, he had said that Rob Fraley was the best chief technical officer. And if you worked with Rob Fraley, you knew why. It's because if he played golf, he'd expect to shoot an 18. I

Vance Crowe [00:34:11] Mean,

Fred Perlak [00:34:12] No, no doubt about it. There was always a better way to do it. And he was very demanding and very, I wouldn't say inflexible, but he was, he had very high expectations for people. Now that didn't work with a lot of people, some people really bristled that, that well, he was never gonna be happy. And I'm like, well, yeah, I guess so. But that's okay. And looking at it being, trying to be very self-aware, could you have done it better? Yeah, I guess I could have. So, okay, get over the part that your feelings are hurt and get to the part of how do you make yourself better?

Vance Crowe [00:34:55] You need to have a bunch of stoics working for you. You need to have people that are willing to say, what did I do wrong? 'cause I am the only one that can control my situation and be so that, that is amazing that he, I I guess I had never really thought about Dr. Fraley in that way. I've spent, I don't know, a reasonable amount of time with him.

Fred Perlak [00:35:14] He, he's, he is very demand, he was very demanding. He's

Vance Crowe [00:35:17] Extremely demanding. Yeah's. That's

Fred Perlak [00:35:18] Right. And that's okay. But you know, the, the hard part is trying to come up to those expectations. And if you know you have someone that demanding, that's okay. But it forces you to say, well, what did I miss? What, before I go in and talk to Rob Fraley, what did I miss? What did I not do properly? So the idea was you'd learn from every time you did something and you'd write down the things you wanted to do.

Vance Crowe [00:35:45] So, oh, those journals.

Fred Perlak [00:35:47] Well, and you, you'd write them down together as a team and say, okay, last time we did this, you know, we could've planned that better. For instance, when we introduced bulgar, we said, okay, we're gonna put Bulgar two in there.

Vance Crowe [00:36:05] This is a form of BT Cotton.

Fred Perlak [00:36:07] Right. A second gene to provide resistance management. And

Vance Crowe [00:36:11] BT Cotton is, is the genetically engineered solution to making it so a certain type of insect can't eat the plant. And Right, it's, it's used in organic gar farming and conventional farming. Before you have GMOs, you would actually go take this bacteria, concentrate it down to a powder and go spray it out in your fields. Right.

Fred Perlak [00:36:30] I'm sorry, I I could have filled that in, but you

Vance Crowe [00:36:33] Did it. Well, you taught me that. So,

Fred Perlak [00:36:35] Yeah, so, but the, the, the key is that when we introduce Bogar one, our business guys were like, Hey, we're done. You don't, we don't need research anymore. No. Follow us. We, if you, if we don't get Bogart two, you're gonna develop resistance in five years. You

Vance Crowe [00:36:54] Knew it going in.

Fred Perlak [00:36:54] Yeah. I mean it, all the experts would tell us that in five years you'll get resistance.

Vance Crowe [00:36:59] Did you go tell the world that, is that something everybody knew?

Fred Perlak [00:37:01] Well, it, all, the entomologists that we talked to and the people who focus on insect resistance were telling us this.

Vance Crowe [00:37:09] Okay.

Fred Perlak [00:37:10] Now, that was a hard conversation to have with our management, is like, okay, they said we're gonna have to have a replacement in five to seven years. What do you, what do you mean a replacement? We have to have this add-on you. You have to have an add-on. We just commercialize this. Can't we just make some money for a while? No, we have to have this add-on because we

Vance Crowe [00:37:33] So take that money and start reinvesting it into RD

Fred Perlak [00:37:35] At least some of it, right? Because you want to have this prolonged and I'd I'd say, look, I didn't spend all this time to have a product go for five years and then be gone. Another example was two guys who worked on cotton, Randy Deaton and David Fish Hoff had talked to all these insect scientists. And the one thing they suggested we do was have a refuge within the field. So the idea being is, say you have a field of cotton, you wanna make sure 80% of the cotton or less is BT cottoned continuous. And then you have 20% that is not planted with BT cotton.

Vance Crowe [00:38:20] So the non GMO,

Fred Perlak [00:38:22] Non GMO, you could still spray it, you could do whatever you wanted with it, but you couldn't have GMO, the reason being she wanted to have a refuge or a place where the insects would not be selected for the trait you have in your, in

Vance Crowe [00:38:37] Your field. 'cause if you spread the entire south with cotton that's been bt, then all of the insects that are susceptible to having that will eat it die. And they won't reproduce offspring that are also vulnerable to it. Right. So what what you want is to make it so some of the, the insects that would eat your cotton still live on. And it's a way to slow down e the evolutionary process of resistance.

Fred Perlak [00:39:01] Exactly. And the, the idea that people mistake what mutations really are, they think that mutations are caused by some problem. So for instance, if you take an antibiotic, people say, oh, you're forcing the bacteria to become resistant. You're, you're just finding the individuals in that population that are susceptible. That are resistant. So I, I used to tell people that the way to think about it is, suppose you wanted to start a basketball team and you wanted to have a seven foot center. So build a doorway that's six foot, 11 inches tall. Just ask people to walk through the doorway. Eventually you'll find people that won't fit through the doorway. They'll be over seven foot. And then now you can take those individuals, see if they can play basketball. Well, you building the doorway didn't cause them to be seven foot,

Vance Crowe [00:40:03] You just

Fred Perlak [00:40:04] Identified the way to find them. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:40:06] That's a good one. That's really good.

Fred Perlak [00:40:08] So the same thing happens when you have an infection. You take an antibiotic, you kill everything, but the ones that don't fit through the door, and those are the ones that grow. So the same sort of thing happens with these insects. You wanna not just have one door, you want to have a lot of doors. So you keep that 20%. So here's the conversation. We sit down as scientists and we say, you've gotta have 20% of the field, non BT business guys go, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. You are telling me I could sell 20% more seed and now you don't want me to do that?

Vance Crowe [00:40:52] Yeah, no way. Why are you doing this?

Fred Perlak [00:40:54] And in fact, you're going to enforce people.

Vance Crowe [00:40:57] You're gonna, you're gonna create, well, I don't know if it's a law, right? But it was definitely the, the mandated way that the company was gonna sell it.

Fred Perlak [00:41:04] If you didn't have 20%, and we found out we could take away your license to buy bogar seed,

Vance Crowe [00:41:10] You were serious about preventing resistance.

Fred Perlak [00:41:12] In fact, we did do that to a state legislator in Georgia.

Vance Crowe [00:41:18] And

Fred Perlak [00:41:18] That was a hard conversation. But our guys got on board with it. And our management, although at first was a little leery about, you sure this is gonna work? No, we're not sure, but it's the best idea we have. And to their credit, they, they took that, and part of it, part of Monsanto's mystique as a company early on, is that the management listened to the research side. They listened to Rob Fraley, they listened to Ernie Jaworski. And when they came to them and said, this is what we have to do, they did it. They didn't always like it, but they did it. And that's because

Vance Crowe [00:42:04] That's the culture of Dick Mahoney then. Right?

Fred Perlak [00:42:07] And Dick Mahoney, he thought the research community was fantastic. He was a chemical engineer himself,

Vance Crowe [00:42:14] Which is the perfect blending of science. Let's discover something new and engineering, let's apply it into the real world to solve a problem that we have.

Fred Perlak [00:42:23] Exactly. And, and the other thing about Mahoney is he looked to the future and he instilled that in the other people in the company. And so if you told them this would only last five years, oh, well maybe, maybe we better do that. So I know there's some resistance. I've heard some resistance happening in BT Cotton, but we introduced this in 2019 96, so at least it's gone 23, 24 years. And they're still, and they're still working some of the stuff through, but nothing lasts forever. The bottom, the bottom line of it, it was that it took the management of Monsano to listen to the scientific arguments that were coming through and react in the way that was appropriate.

Vance Crowe [00:43:15] So this, this brings up a scientific question that I don't, I I'll be interested to hear your answer. If you know that the GMO is going to run out this BT is eventually are, is this like exhausting a natural resource that we have? Is this like saying, Hey, there was this one gene that we could apply and the, the ths, this certain kind of insect can't eat the cotton, so we only get 15 years with it and Monsanto's the one that dug it up and put it in there? Or are there gonna be other solutions?

Fred Perlak [00:43:47] Well, there, there

Vance Crowe [00:43:47] Is it bottomless? Well,

Fred Perlak [00:43:49] There, there always are other solutions. There are always other things to do. The key in, for me, it was always, do you hide this or do you use it? So for 20 years, you've dramatically reduced insecticide use in the cotton industry. Now it's not completely eliminated, it never is. But it was a very good way to control insects. For 20 years. You had 20 years of an advantage and you had the time to work out other,

Vance Crowe [00:44:22] Other solutions. Solutions. You weren't under the gun to have one right now. Right.

Fred Perlak [00:44:26] The the key it ends for me, you're never done. You should always be looking for the next best thing. You're never satisfied for where you are or what you have because you can always do better. Just like Rob Fraley would suggest, what's the next idea? What's the next way you're going to do it?

Vance Crowe [00:44:49] I guess I really hadn't understood, I mean, I, I knew you were coming from the scientific world and you had been in the business aspect of, of Monsanto, but when you came to corporate engagement, that would've been like dropping into another continent or totally different culture because the, the way of doing business there, rightly or wrongly, right? They had a very, very tall order on their plate. By the time you got there was definitely not that directed. There was no, let's go solve this thing. This is how we do it. This is the structure, this is the scientific method. This is how our teams do things. I

Fred Perlak [00:45:25] I, there were several different factors involved. Number one, corporate and great engagement had a change in leadership. The vice president who was in charge of corporate engagement, Jerry Steiner had left in November before I got there.

Vance Crowe [00:45:43] Who would've been in charge when Monsanto had developed the name and brand that was Monsanto was evil. They're doing terrible things. They're suing farmers, they're putting toxic GMOs in there. So they were switching from a person that was at the helm during a pretty dark time. Whether he was responsible for it or not, I have no idea.

Fred Perlak [00:46:03] And there's a certain, there's certain predestination you knew you were going to get that it, it, it's hard to understand how that could have been looking back on it, how we could have tweaked it differently to make a different outcome. You

Vance Crowe [00:46:22] Think it was inevitable?

Fred Perlak [00:46:25] Probably. You, you can always have done better. And there were certain things that I wish we had done that we didn't.

Vance Crowe [00:46:34] Why was it inevitable? If DuPont would've would've come up with GMOs, their name would've been, would've been become as dark as ours?

Fred Perlak [00:46:42] Well, I think there's a price for everything. And I, we've talked about this before, the price monsano, we were changing the agricultural industry dramatically. So for example, a farmer used to buy 10, 20, $30 worth of insecticide to put on his cotton crop, maybe even more. All of a sudden he's not spending that money. So who gets hurt by that? Well, the other chemical,

Vance Crowe [00:47:14] Is it 10, 20, 30 an acre?

Fred Perlak [00:47:15] Oh yeah, easily. So

Vance Crowe [00:47:16] He, if he owns a 200 acre farm or a 2000 acre farm, you're talking about a lot of money.

Fred Perlak [00:47:22] Well, a farmer, a a cotton farmer who say a cotton farmer sprays once, it probably probably cost him $10 between the application costs and buying the chemical

Vance Crowe [00:47:34] And then the time to go out there and actually

Fred Perlak [00:47:35] Spray it. And the time. And, and not only that is if he has an infestation with a tough insect, he might have to apply 3, 4, 5 times, maybe even 10 times under the cases where traditional insecticides were really ineffective. So all of a sudden you've got a farmer who's no longer paying that much money to his local dealer or to the people who make the insecticide, who then have the factories that work, who buy the containers, who use the trucking firms. You're taking a whole lot of money out of the system.

Vance Crowe [00:48:15] I had never thought about that. All those people that go around filling up tanks, and then the people that fill up the larger tanks, all the truckers, all the people that go out and spray all the people that clean the sprayers, all the, that is way more people than I realized was getting disrupted.

Fred Perlak [00:48:30] Well, and it's probably one of the biggest reasons why Europe never got into GMOs is because a lot of the chemical companies or distribution areas are owned by governments are their quasi-governmental organization. So, gee, you're stiffing my chemical concern here in Germany or France and all these people are gonna lose their jobs or they're gonna get dropped back.

Vance Crowe [00:48:54] So that was, that was a hedge against technology for the long term to be like, we are going to, our citizenry will be happier, our businesses will be happier if we don't bring in GMOs.

Fred Perlak [00:49:05] I, I, I don't know what was going through the people's mind in Europe. I know change is difficult for some people there, and I know agriculture can be much more than just a business. It it becomes historical to

Vance Crowe [00:49:22] A's

Fred Perlak [00:49:22] Right to a certain degree. But, but also those governments were very cognizant of what it would mean when you brought that in. It's the same sort of thing that you see now with governments in Europe taxing Facebook or or yeah, Google. Google or any of those people. They don't like the idea that it's changing that way. They wanna protect their own industries and it's a way to tax or slow that down.

Vance Crowe [00:49:54] So do you think now that German companies have taken over Monsanto? So Bayer bought Monsanto and then you have BASF getting much larger in Switzerland and

Fred Perlak [00:50:06] You know, in the end, it, this is my personal opinion, but if you're Bayer, you don't care how many GMOs you sell because if you don't sell 'em the GMOs, they're gonna buy what you used to sell. So you have products for farmers, whether they're GMOs or not GMOs, you don't wanna use the GMO fine. I have insecticides that you can buy.

Vance Crowe [00:50:32] Will they then sell on both sides of the conventional and organic game?

Fred Perlak [00:50:36] Oh, of course they will.

Vance Crowe [00:50:38] So then they're, they're like, we're an all provider. So however you guys feel about the technology, we'll sell you whatever you want.

Fred Perlak [00:50:44] In the, in the mid nineties, other chemical companies hated monsano because of what we did. We changed their world and seed companies didn't like us either because we changed everything about it. In the past, for instance, before Roundup ready soybeans, roundup ready soybeans were introduced in 1996. In the past, soybeans were pretty much an old boy network. You made one, 2%, maybe you had some good seeds, you got a new variety, you came out with it every once in a while, no big deal. Monsano comes out with Roundup ready soybeans, by the way, we'll charge a technology fee of whatever it was, five, $10 an acre, whatever it is. But Monsano will split that technology fee with the company that sold the seed. Ha ha. All of a sudden, instead of getting a 2% return on equity as a seed company, I'm getting much more.

Vance Crowe [00:51:49] Wow.

Fred Perlak [00:51:50] So now I have to invest in new breeding programs, new seeds, new technologies,

Vance Crowe [00:51:57] And everybody wants to be partners with these guys. So they're gonna get to go pick off the top of the pile on who are the best seed salesman, right? Who are the ones out in the,

Fred Perlak [00:52:05] So all of a sudden, instead of a new variety, every five or 10 years, you've got a new variety every two or three years with different disease resistance, better nematode resistance, a better yield.

Vance Crowe [00:52:17] And to put this in context for anybody that doesn't know how plant breeding research goes on, what happens is you have these plants and you have a whole bunch of different types of seeds. You go out, and this is way slowed down or, or simplified, but you go out and plant a whole bunch of different seeds and say, this one is capable of resisting. If this certain type of fungus comes up this plant for whatever reason, randomly it can fit through the seven foot door. Right? Right. It can't fit

Fred Perlak [00:52:44] Through the, and, and, and so many of the seed companies will do their field tests in areas that they know have a particular problem. So if it's got a, if you know that southern Alabama right along the Gulf coast gets a high degree of a certain fungal disease, okay, do your tests there and see how that variety works versus this one versus now.

Vance Crowe [00:53:04] And you're testing. Yeah, so you have all fields and fields and fields of all different kinds of varieties that you have to mark very carefully. And at the time they were going out and doing phenotyping, right? Go out and look at the plant and see did it get the disease? Did it not? Right? And Monsanto, in addition to making GMOs added in, well we can actually go and take a whole punch of the leaf of that, put it in a little vial, ship it to a laboratory, break it up and see the DNA in it. And then we can start saying, if it didn't have resistance, which one of the genes out of all the thousands and thousands that are here, do we think made it so it didn't ha it had that resistance. And now you can take that one plant with the right gene makeup and start breeding it into others. So you haven't just taken it like, let's go out and grow the biggest soybean. You have hugely amplified your capacity.

Fred Perlak [00:53:55] And I think what you just summarized was the last 20 years of plant breeding research. So the impetus for all this was when Monsanto came out with GMOs like Roundup resistant soybeans, it changed the agricultural practices where Roundup ready soybeans were so much easier to deal with rather than wearing about other weed problems where they, how you're gonna, your field, are you gonna get your timing Just right now you use Roundup ready and it's pretty darn easy.

Vance Crowe [00:54:26] So it's pretty, that's the good thing to say. But what is Roundup ready? What, how does this work?

Fred Perlak [00:54:31] Roundup ready is where Monsano herbicide was glyphosate or is glyphosate? It, it's called Roundup. And it's a herbicide that blocks the synthesis of aromatic amino acids, specifically tryptophan. So when you spray it on plants, it blocks the synthesis of that key amino acids. So eventually the plant will die. It may take two weeks, it may take a month, but the plant's not gonna survive.

Vance Crowe [00:55:02] But it doesn't do it in the way of like burning the plant to death or no poisoning in some like toxic way. It's tricking the plant.

Fred Perlak [00:55:10] It, well, what it does is it, it starves the plant for glyphosate. So

Vance Crowe [00:55:14] Of, of chlor of chlorophyll. Right?

Fred Perlak [00:55:16] Chlor not chlorophyll of, of aromatic amino acids. The best way to envision it is that the nutritional pathway within the plant is like a highway, alright, with lots of cars going down and the cars are the nutrients that flow up and down that highway. You take glyphosate and you put it in the plant and it blocks one of the highways so that everything piles up behind it. All these amino acids and no aromatic amino acids are making it through. So the plant can survive a little bit on their stockpile of aromatic amino acids, but eventually it dies because that block is there. It blocks the plant.

Vance Crowe [00:56:02] And why does the plant need aromatic amino acids?

Fred Perlak [00:56:05] Because we all need all am a all amino acids. The T essential amino acids, they're key components of proteins and regulatory pathways. We need all those. We don't make tryptophan ourselves. We get it from the plants or the animals that we eat.

Vance Crowe [00:56:22] So, and, and so when glyphosate hits this plant, it causes that backup. The plant looks like it's still alive, so it doesn't like burn away right there. But you wait another week or week and a half

Fred Perlak [00:56:34] Or two weeks and then it'll die,

Vance Crowe [00:56:35] Starts to brown dies. And it also has the impact of almost as soon as the glyphosate hits it, it doesn't produce seeds anymore. Right? It stops the reproduction cycle. Well,

Fred Perlak [00:56:45] Yes, to a certain degree. I mean it's just, when you're a plant and you're dying of starvation, the last thing you're thinking about is putting on seeds. You're trying to survive. Okay?

Vance Crowe [00:56:55] So

Fred Perlak [00:56:55] You putting seeds on is a very metabolically intensive process and requires lots of energy. So if you're starving, you don't have the energy to put a lot of seeds on. But the way you be make plants resistant to Roundup is you put a gene from bacteria in that allows a detour around the block that you've created with glyphosate and you make that detour to be as efficient as the original block was. In other words, you put in a whole new pathway with just that one gene to get around that block. There's one key enzyme that is blocked by glyphosate and you're putting in a new enzyme that doesn't have that sensitivity. And so now you make a pathway to go around and the plant doesn't even notice that you sprayed it with glyphosate because it can get around

Vance Crowe [00:57:54] Because you bred that trait into the plant

Fred Perlak [00:57:57] You first genetically engineered it in and then you continue to breed it because once you put it in it, it's, it's like its own gene.

Vance Crowe [00:58:05] And so to clarify, when you're saying you do a genetic engineer, it's that this trait does not actually exist right now in, if we're talking about soybeans, for example, right? It exists in a bacteria that you then isolate, right? And then you find there are many ways to transform to do A GMO. But let's just for the sake of this argument, just say you install that gene in a very specific spot in the plant. Really what you do is you randomly put it in and then you find the ones that didn't put the gene in exactly where we thought it should be. You kill all those off and you only take the one that has it. Right?

Fred Perlak [00:58:37] And

Vance Crowe [00:58:37] Now the plant has the trait of an alternate pathway. So if the farmer is going out into the field and they spray glyphosate on this plant, all the, on this field, all the plants that have that alternate pathway live, no problem. Right? The glyphosate didn't cause a backup and but all the weeds that don't have this, this trait in them, they all die really quickly. And with, with a very, with this very interesting mechanism. 'cause other pesticides don't work in this same way. Right?

Fred Perlak [00:59:06] Exactly. This is a different way to pr. It's a called a complementation pathway. 'cause you're not, it's not a detoxification, it's a complementation. So you're complimenting the existing DNA to provide an alternate way around.

Vance Crowe [00:59:25] Very interesting. Yeah.

Fred Perlak [00:59:27] And that was, Steve Rogers had worked a lot of that out.

Vance Crowe [00:59:31] And it was something that, that people thought, wouldn't it be great if we could make a plant resistant to a pesticide. Now let's go out and find a pesticide that we wanna use and let's go find the gene that'll do it. How did somebody envision this? Because you're talking about 10,000 years of agriculture.

Fred Perlak [00:59:50] Well, and and there were

Vance Crowe [00:59:51] Nobody thought of this before. There

Fred Perlak [00:59:53] Were a lot of other companies working on herbicide resistance. Really?

Vance Crowe [00:59:56] Yeah.

Fred Perlak [00:59:57] And some by natural selection somewhere they just mutagen eyes the plants and then hope to find a mutation.

Vance Crowe [01:00:05] They expose them to some sort of radiation, which then makes the seeds have all sorts of different traits. Right. You put 'em in the ground and you say, did we accidentally cause this thing to have some mutation in its DNA and if we did, now we can use this herbicide on this plant.

Fred Perlak [01:00:20] Right. And there are some herbicides that

Vance Crowe [01:00:22] It's gotta be like one in a million chance.

Fred Perlak [01:00:24] It, it depends on the herbicide. Some her herbicides are very, very specific and a slight change will make a big difference. Okay. And others not so much. So the only rule is there are no rules. You just have to take each one as they come. So, but there were a lot of companies working on herbicide tolerance or resistance. Now the whole idea behind a herbicide is that it's selective. When you use a herbicide, you want it to kill the weeds but not your crop. So for example, people use two four D on rice. Well rice is a monocot and it's fairly resistant to two four D. But broad leaves, whether it's morning glory or

Vance Crowe [01:01:12] Milkweed or

Fred Perlak [01:01:13] Dandelions or milkweeds, are very sensitive to two four D and therefore they'll get killed. And so for years, decades, people have used things like two four D and rice or wheat to kill those wheats. You, you do it in your lawn. When people put her fertilizer, what is it, a turf builder plus or whatever it is, it's got a little bit of two four D that'll kill the dandelions and everything else in your

Vance Crowe [01:01:46] Oh, it's a selective herbicide that you're using in your own lawn.

Fred Perlak [01:01:49] Yeah, of course it is. And the same thing people use turf builder plus halts. Well, that takes out the germination of seeds in the lawn, which is crab grass. And that's a crab grass preventer. It keeps the seeds that are crab grass from germinating. Your lawn is not dependent on seeds from year to year, but crab grass is, so that's how you control crab grass.

Vance Crowe [01:02:14] So these are the other types of herbicides that are out there. And they work on either being selective, you know, they, they are selective or they may not be. It could be you just go out there and blast a, but that nobody uses that on their crops because, well,

Fred Perlak [01:02:28] Some people will use,

Vance Crowe [01:02:29] Like

Fred Perlak [01:02:30] Glyphosate was used before gly, a roundup tolerant as what's called a burn down herbicide. Because

Vance Crowe [01:02:37] Glyphosate, when it hits basically any plant, it's gonna take it out,

Fred Perlak [01:02:41] Right? That's correct. And it'll, it's, it's got better activity against some, some plant species than others. But if you take glyphosate and you spray it and you have a fallow field, alright? And you might have some weeds before you plant. So you go out and you spray the field with a non-selective herbicide, like a glyphosate dicamba can be fairly non-selective as an example. And you do what's called a burn down. It burns down the weeds that are currently in the field so that then you till your field up and you're dealing with a clean field. So the idea is that, okay, you start off with no other weeds. You give your crop a little bit of a selective advantage. So people don't realize a big part of weed control is getting the plants established and the plants will create a canopy that will shade the weeds to a certain degree. Now, and I'm you talking about this very superficially, farmers who listen to your podcast, we'll know exactly how this happens and they work hard to maximize doing that. Getting up a good stand, getting a stand that will have a nice canopy, works great in soybeans, works great in in corn and a lot of other crops. The key is to always maximize the growth of your crop versus what you don't want.

Fred Perlak [01:04:16] What's your weeds? They steal water, they steal space, they steal nutrients, and they become a reoccurring problem in subsequent years.

Vance Crowe [01:04:25] And that's one of the things that people that didn't go out and walk beans as a kid or go out and de tassel, you maybe are driving along on the interstate and you see all this corn or all these beans and they look relatively clean. You don't see very many weeds in there. Yeah. You don't see it as a big deal. But if you actually go out into those fields and, and in particular you go out into a field before there's roundup ready and you, you used to have to send kids out there, teenagers like I was. Yep. And for hours and hours and hours and hours in the sun, you're getting a sunburn. You love it when you're a kid 'cause you're making money and you're just messing around with your buddies and yeah,

Fred Perlak [01:04:59] You

Vance Crowe [01:04:59] Got corn hooks and you rust in the, in the, in the fields. But it is hard, hot, difficult work. And in the US it's, it's teenagers work. But in most of the world, most of, there are huge percentages of people over 50% in some countries that they spend all day, every single day of their lives pulling weeds. I

Fred Perlak [01:05:20] I can believe it. And that's one of the hard parts for things like truly growing some crops organically. There's a tremendous dependence on farm labor to do that. There's almost no way around it

Vance Crowe [01:05:35] Because they're still using chemicals. But there are times when it's like, there is no chemical we can use in here, so let's go put some people there.

Fred Perlak [01:05:43] Exactly. I I had a farmer who once told me that, that he had a beef with me about Roundup ready Cotton. And I, and I said, well, what do you mean? And he goes, well, he says, used to be you could go in my county and see all the good farmers because their fields would be clean. And the farmers who weren't so good, their fields would be really kind of crappy looking. He says, now everybody's field looks great. He says, but he says Roundup ready cotton is like air conditioning. Once you've tried it, you never want to go back.

Vance Crowe [01:06:18] Yeah. Amen. You know, and that, that strikes me, one of the things that I didn't realize until I went to work at Monsanto, and then I spent a lot of time going out to visit Farms is Roundup when you had it, not only did, could you not tell where the seeds were or the weedy fields? It used to be part, a percentage of the value of your land was what it's its reputation for having a certain type of weed infestation. Yep. Because there are some weeds that they will mess up your combine. They'll, they'll break it. You know, there are some that'll make it so you will be out there constantly spraying, and it's because that patch of ground has been inundated with those seeds and the farmer just can't catch up with it. Well,

Fred Perlak [01:06:56] Well, if you're a farmer and you're trying to harvest your crop, whether it's soybeans or corn, and all of a sudden you come to a Wheaty patch, it clogs up your combine, you have to turn it off, you have to get off, you have to back it up. You have to pull the weeds out, and then you have to start back up again. And how many times do you wanna do that before you start cutting corners? Like not turning off the combine or, you know, just sticking a stick in there or something. And of course that's when you get injuries. Now Roundup Ready isn't

Vance Crowe [01:07:28] Oh, that's interesting.

Fred Perlak [01:07:29] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:07:30] You think that's, you, you would, you would attribute a drop in injuries to the fact that

Fred Perlak [01:07:34] Oh yeah. I mean, in the eighties and nineties, a lot of the farmers I talked to would be missing digits or, or yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:07:43] It was much more common when I was younger. That's definitely right. There would be people at my church that you would see that would only have, you know, nine fingers or something. Like you're

Fred Perlak [01:07:50] Right. A common common kind of happening. Now, Roundup ready isn't perfect, it takes some management. And now with subsequent years, some weeds have developed resistance to Roundup so that you have to use other herbicides or other, other management practices. But you, you had a good 15 to 20 years that it was pretty good. It's not always perfect, but it's still got a valuable herbicide to use.

Vance Crowe [01:08:21] So I, and this is, this is rhetorical in the sense that I already know the direction your answer is going in, but I don't know how you will answer it. And it is, what do you say to the people that are now concerned that glyphosate is causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma? And there were, I think 13,000 cases registered and $2 billion lawsuit just got a ju you know, put forward. I know it was retracted by the judge, but there are real cases, there are commercials, there are billboards, there are people that are saying, this is killing us. It's giving us cancer and it's your fault, Monsanto, and you owe us to the tune of billions of dollars.

Fred Perlak [01:09:00] Yeah. I, I've, I've tried to read a lot about this and the best review came from a guy who was studied cancer and causes of cancer. And his whole thing is that it's complicated. Cancer is complicated, who gets cancer is complicated because it's environment, it's lifestyle, it's genetics. All those things rolled in. He said that he looked at the data and all the stuff that came out, and his opinion was that if monsano, if glyphosate caused cancer, it would be a very low probability. In other words, he put it in between hot tea and bacon. And I'm like, what do you mean? Well, he said that in the article, he said that some people get esophageal cancer from drinking two hot liquids. And if you do it often enough, it'll irritate your esophagus and you can develop cancer. And bacon is a cured meat that it has nitrates. And if you eat enough bacon, you can get cancer. Now does that mean glyphosate has no role in it in any way? Well, it all depends who you are, what your genetics are and what your situation is. The best study I saw were, was among the farmers who used glyphosate on a regular basis and they didn't have an increase in, in, in actual cancer.

Vance Crowe [01:10:40] You did actually just say something that surprised me because almost everyone else that I talk to about this says, no, it doesn't cause cancer. And you are the first person I've heard that would be on the, from the Monsanto world that would say it's complicated. And I think then the next obvious question is if it can potentially, if you know it may be low, but it could potentially do it, then why are you using that chemical at all? Why don't we use chemicals that aren't causing cancer?

Fred Perlak [01:11:12] Well,

Vance Crowe [01:11:13] The,

Fred Perlak [01:11:13] The answer is, if hot tea can cause cancer, then everything has some basis in causing cancer. It's a matter of how much risk versus how much exposure you get. The dose makes the poison. So if you use enough glyphosate, would you get cancer? I, I don't know. I don't think they've identified a mechanism by which glyphosate would affect humans, but I'm on shaky ground here. I'm not a oncologist. I don't know what it's like for these people. Did they get cancer because maybe they smoked, maybe they did recreational drugs, maybe they lived under high power lines. Maybe. Who knows, maybe they add an extra piece of bacon every morning. Does that cause cancer? I don't know. But I do know that people are always looking for what someone termed to me to be other people's money. So if you're on a jury and you're in California, you say to yourself, you know, I'm not sure about this. A lot of conflicting evidence, but it's a chemical company and better yet, it's now a German chemical company. We don't really like them, so they've got lots of money. This poor guy's got a tough time. Well, let's give 'em the money. And I don't think it's any different from what Johnson and Johnson goes through with talcum powder or what Corning originally went through with breast implants or even with the opioid crisis.

Fred Perlak [01:12:54] I mean, I understand opioids can be a terrible thing and it can be a destructive aspect, but I've taken that medication from having knee surgeries and I understood that I didn't want to take too many of them. I wanted to make sure I got off 'em as quickly as possible. There were all sorts of warnings on the container that I got.

Vance Crowe [01:13:21] But it was a risk you were willing to take because pain is, is has a consequence. And

Fred Perlak [01:13:26] Well, I mean, that was the alternative and I understood that. But there's a price for everything. And I understand people are different. Some people are more susceptible to the pain, some people are more susceptible to the opioid. I get it. But that doesn't mean that they were completely unaware of what was going on.

Vance Crowe [01:13:48] You know, and I was struck while, while working for Monsanto and going out and addressing people's fears that glyphosate caused cancer, that I one day realized what a lot of the people that are spreading this information are doing and how they're doing it. Now, this is outside of when you were saying people want other people's money. There's a group of people that say, Hey, let's do these class action lawsuits and let's make money. Well, let's bring together investors and let's go get billboards and, and ads during daytime television. And if you invest into this project and they win, then you will get some percentage of the earnings. Right. And so this goes on, but there is an even different group that I was focused on that I had to learn a lot about, which is, who are the people that are out there saying that are spreading all the blogs, that are putting out all of the information about this stuff causes cancer. And one of the most striking things to me, and it actually, I felt myself having this emotion when you said, well, it's in between tea and and bacon. Because then my first thought is, well, I don't want any of that. Right? Like I'm, I don't want any risk. But it's that I notice that many of them do this game. And I, I give speeches and I talk about this where I say, take a glass of water when you go home and slide it over to your spouse. Right? Imagine this glass is full. And then look at the glass of water. Look up at your friend, look back down at the glass, smile and then look back up at them. Are they gonna drink that glass of water?

Fred Perlak [01:15:19] Hell

Vance Crowe [01:15:19] No, they're not gonna drink the water. And that is all you have to do to make it so people have a question. It's, it's etch a little question in their minds. And I'm, I guess I'm struck by the fact that that's probably why people don't describe glyphosates cancer causing probabilities as in between tea and bacon is because people want zero impurities in that water. Not realizing that even a glass of water you're drinking right now doesn't have zero.

Fred Perlak [01:15:48] I used to, I used to mess with my kids. They, when they were younger, they, there'd be a little bit of milk left in the refrigerator and they'd say, dad, is that milk any good? Wow. Who knows? You better try it. I'm not trying it. Oh, no, no, no. And and that's the whole basis for trash talking in sports is you try to instill a little bit of doubt. So the guy who is guarding somebody and he misses a shot and he goes,

Vance Crowe [01:16:16] You know,

Fred Perlak [01:16:16] You're not gonna make the next one. And if you make the next one, you're certainly not gonna make the one after that, but hope that you get followed because maybe you'll get to the line and you'll make one or two.

Vance Crowe [01:16:29] Wow. Yeah. That's brutal.

Fred Perlak [01:16:31] That's just trash talking.

Vance Crowe [01:16:32] Yeah.

Fred Perlak [01:16:33] And, and that's why they do it. And, and it's, it kind of, and it's kind of like trash talking. You can instill doubt on anybody about anything but this analysis that put it in between bacon and tea. Tea was an article that was in the Wall Street Journal, I think. And I thought it was very balanced because it's, it's so complicated for people who get cancer non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I don't know much about that disease. I just know that it's, it's a hard disease.

Vance Crowe [01:17:09] Yeah, that's true. You, you see the pictures of the people that are victims of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and you, you definitely must feel a level of empathy for them. No, no one would choose to have that diagnosis. That's right. Well,

Fred Perlak [01:17:23] And so, but you ask them question you, you know, I'd like to ask people questions. Well, you know, well, for instance, I, I often hear people who, this one is one that just drives me crazy. It's probiotics in the microbiome in your stomach. Well, is it important? Yeah, sure it is. What part is important?

Vance Crowe [01:17:49] Well, we don't know.

Fred Perlak [01:17:51] Well, should you eat yogurt? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, who says, you know, and, and so then the question is, well, glyphosate disrupts the microbiome bologna. Do you drink beer? Do you drink alcohol? You think alcohol kills bacteria? I'm pretty sure it does. Do you use mouthwash? Yeah. It kills 99% of the germs in your mouth. You think you swallow any, you use fluoride in your toothpaste. Oh yeah. Well, what do you think fluoride does to bacteria? I mean, don't, don't tell me that you understand this and then take this as gospel. There are risks all along the way. There are things you can do to improve your dietary concerns. You eat high fiber. Do you eat fruit and vegetables? Do you avoid processed foods? Highly processed foods? Well, I'm going to eat plant-based burgers. You wanna know who the highest processed food I can think of is that's one of those burgers. I mean, you know what they have to go through to generate those things. Unbelievable amount of processing.

Vance Crowe [01:19:02] Yeah. And it's an interesting feature because I don't have a problem with processing food. Right. That that's actually what freed millions and millions of women, for the most part from the slavery of saying, if I want my children to eat, I have to take the grains that I harvested, put them in a, in a bowl, maybe it's a stump or it's some, and take a large staff and raise it over your head and slam it down again and again and again. Because if you don't have factories, crack open the grains, then human beings have to do it. Yeah. And it is terrible work.

Fred Perlak [01:19:39] Well, in, in this particular case, the, the vegetarian burgers

Vance Crowe [01:19:44] Are

Fred Perlak [01:19:45] Generated to taste just like beef. So, okay, why wouldn't you just eat the beef? But that's okay, people wanna do that. And then I'm curious, what would it taste like? But

Vance Crowe [01:19:59] Well, do you, do you have the same sense that the broader republic has that agriculture is causing all sorts of environmental degradations and the world is getting lit? Literally yesterday, the, the last podcast I had, my interview guest was great. She was an artist. She spends her time imputing joy onto painting. So that that's what it reflects back in the world. But when we talked about environmentalism, I asked her, do you think the world is getting worse? And she said, yes. Do you, do you think that

Fred Perlak [01:20:27] No, I don't. I think things are getting better. I I'm an optimist by character, I think. But one of the things I did become exposed to was world hunger when I was in the corporate engagement group by working with the Gates Foundation, Buffett, Danforth, and the progress we've made in terms of feeding individuals in the world. In other words, the number of people that go hungry every night is going down, even though the populations are going up. Now, some people can say, well, the earth can't handle that population and we should have cutbacks. I mean, this is a common theme all the way from Jeremy Rifkin to the Infinity Wars. You know, we got a cutback, a third of the population, the Infinity Wars was really bizarre. That's exactly what you,

Vance Crowe [01:21:23] I don't even know what that is. Is that a museum kind of

Fred Perlak [01:21:26] Oh, that's like, well, the Infinity Wars was a Avengers movie.

Vance Crowe [01:21:32] Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fred Perlak [01:21:34] And, and in the, in the movie, the,

Vance Crowe [01:21:38] The

Fred Perlak [01:21:39] Villain wipes out a third of the population of Earth because he thinks it's gonna be better for the environment.

Vance Crowe [01:21:46] Oh, I didn't know that.

Fred Perlak [01:21:47] Oh, yeah, yeah. This is,

Vance Crowe [01:21:49] I'm not up on the pop culture. I it's I'm out, I'm out of it.

Fred Perlak [01:21:52] Yeah. I, that one just caught my eye boy. I was like, really? And this,

Vance Crowe [01:21:57] And so what was the core of that story? Was it actually, did he do wrong by wiping out a third of the population?

Fred Perlak [01:22:02] Well, of course the Avengers go back in time and reverse it, and those people show back up again. So I guess Yeah, but it was all convoluted and right or wrong was all convoluted. It's, it's what we talked about before is that there's a price for everything. You want fewer people. Well, who decides who those fewer people are. Okay, make a decision. Who, who is it? You wanna

Vance Crowe [01:22:31] Who? And then, and once you decide who, now you gotta tell me how, because we, we, we look at what China did to slow their population growth. And I don't think anybody thinks it's a, it. Well, maybe some people do, but I certainly don't feel like it's a good idea to have the government make a decision on who can and can't have children and how many children. And

Fred Perlak [01:22:52] Yeah, you're, you're on a slippery slope once you decide that you have, you have to enforce fewer people. Everything else after that is bad.

Vance Crowe [01:23:02] But don't you think that people would say, well, we just just want to create the circumstances under which there will be the fewest people. I mean, bill and Melinda Gates would say, you know, we know that if we educate women, then they won't have as many children if they get out of agrarian societies, they don't have to have as many children. So that in effect is

Fred Perlak [01:23:20] But still their choice. It's still their choice. At least they get the education to identify what their pros and cons are. I think that part is the key is to allow people to have their choice of what they want to do.

Vance Crowe [01:23:37] You know, that is truly, the agricultural labor is truly a big contributor to why people have so many children. Like when you are living in, in rural Africa. So I lived there for a little while in the Peace Corps. They're there when people have children. As soon as those children get to a certain age, they're now doing work that makes it so the family can survive. It's not like a nice to have, you're not running your kids to soccer practice. The, the experience of childhood is you maybe aren't working from sun up to sundown every single day, but most days you are out in the field pulling weeds or picking berries or, or climbing into trees and grabbing avocados or carrying water or tending sheep. You know, I knew goat herder herders, they're seven years old and every day all they do is go follow goats around to make sure they don't run off. Yep. And, and so the, the reason those people are having those children, they're making a conscious choice because it's, if we want the family to continue, we have to have this many children. Yep.

Fred Perlak [01:24:37] I, I, and I don't, I'm not smart enough to tell you what the answer to that is. I do know in a lot of societies, Japan, United States, Europe, the birth rate is actually negative that you're not replacing the population. I know certain countries in Europe are trying to figure out incentives for increasing the population because they're dying out or not dying out. They're just not replacing, they're not having as many younger people. I, I don't know what the birth rate is in the United States, but I bet you it's pretty close to zero growth.

Vance Crowe [01:25:18] Right. It's probably just at like 2% and you have to have over 2% to have, you know, an increase. 'cause it,

Fred Perlak [01:25:25] Yeah, I don't, I don't know enough about those.

Vance Crowe [01:25:27] It's, it's very specific. It's more specific than, than, than is would just be kind of commonly understood. But you're right, in all of the educated places, in all the places where modern technology has lowered the demand for the need for people to be out in the fields doing that work, then it's cheaper to move into the city. Food is more available. Those people living in the city can combine their resources and have education, and then they can build factories and they can industrialize. And that whole process starts with can you make agriculture less labor intensive?

Fred Perlak [01:26:01] Yeah. I think in all these cases it's, we've been grappling with these issues for decades, centuries as to how to deal with the disparity and equity between rich and poor, between people who live in a country where you have lots of natural resources such as water or fertile field versus a Sahara Sub-Saharan country has no water, no natural resources, poor soil. How, how do you deal with those disparities? I, I don't know. But I do think things are getting better. I do think despite ourselves that we're, we're getting to be better as an overall world.

Vance Crowe [01:26:48] So this is something I would've asked you about had you been at Monsanto when I was still working there, but I didn't, and I, I actually had a rather, a jarring experience that actually prompted me to write Hugh Grant, who's the CEO of Monsanto letter and get a meeting with him by accident. I just wrote it thinking he's just gonna ignore it. But he took it very seriously. But it was that I was invited to MIT and I went to the Night Science Fellows program, which it meant that there were 12 journalists that were given a year. They a whole fellowship. So they were paid to just go to MIT and they would audit science classes. Any class that they wanted, they could go and audit it and just sit in and try and learn and be exposed to cutting edge scientists and robotics and artificial intelligence and biology. And then the, the purpose of it was that they would learn how to be better science journalists if they had done this. So these were journalists from National Geographic and Bloomberg and from all over Outdoor magazine. And I was invited to come give an off the record talk. Now that doesn't mean I wasn't allowed to talk about the fact that I gave it, it was I was invited and they agreed that whatever I said, they wouldn't report in the paper. So you, you could go and, and so I went with another scientist and, and I'm trying to think of his name. He has long hair. He was out in Boston.

Fred Perlak [01:28:09] Wasn't Larry Gilbertson?

Vance Crowe [01:28:11] No. No. He doesn't have long hair. No,

Fred Perlak [01:28:12] He doesn't

Vance Crowe [01:28:13] Have, I'll, I'll think of it in a bit. But anyway, so I went there and we gave a talk, talked about this thing that I talk about the, well actually graph and the tribes and the networks. And I was saying, this is what you would do if you decided that changing perception of things like GMOs was the most important cultural question that you could get resolved. If, if, because if people are afraid of GMOs, then they won't use them. And if they don't use them, then that causes world hunger. I see that my work is actually has the potential to contribute in a big way. They love this talk. We have a great conversation, we get done and they invite me to dinner. So we are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I'm at MIT, we leave that place, we walk a few blocks away and we go to a restaurant that it is $80 a plate. It's like $250 bottles of wine. And these graduate students are able to pay for this. It's a, it's a part of bringing a speaker. It's like, Hey, we get to take you out to a really nice dinner. And we did. We had a great time. And we're sitting there eating probably one of the most expensive meals and the probably the most expensive real estate on the Eastern seaboard. And we're talking about esoteric ideas about science and agriculture and all these things. And the people that I'm sitting with say, I know that the scientists like Steven Pinker are saying the world is getting better, but I just, I don't think so. We have so much environmental chaos. We have so much corruption, we have so much.

Vance Crowe [01:29:44] And they just went on and on and on. And I'm sitting there thinking, you are literally at the top of the world. And if you think that the world is getting worse, that things are not, we shouldn't be looking forward to the future. In fact, that's just an abysmal apocalypse, then what the hell is anybody else supposed to do? That's a good point. I I grappled with it. I I still don't really know the answer. I came back and, and basically told Hugh Grant, you've gotta inspire people because if they, if, if your own workers don't have an idea that is as uplifting as as it could be, kind of what you're describing Dick Mahoney did. And, and if the, if you own workers don't feel that way, then how in the world are these reporters that are telling everyone how they should think, what they should feel about the future? How are you expecting to impact them?

Fred Perlak [01:30:39] I think the, the, in, in some ways people forget where they are and what they're doing in their lives. So for example, my uncle was quite a character and he lived to 94 years old. And I'd go visit him and he'd complain to me,

Vance Crowe [01:31:00] Oh,

Fred Perlak [01:31:01] These doctors are are giving me all these pills. They're doing this, they're doing that. Gimme the good old days. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait a minute, uncle John, how old are you? I'm 93 or 94. And how old were your parents when they died? Well, they were in their sixties. And your older brother, how old was he when he died? Well, he was in his early seventies. I said, you made it to 93. So this can't be that bad. I mean, come on. And the same sort of thing goes on all the time is where are we now versus where we could have been or where, where some other things happen. We do better by reminding ourselves how far we've come versus

Vance Crowe [01:31:49] What's not right today,

Fred Perlak [01:31:50] What's not right today, look at the efficiency of automobiles versus the 1950s. Look at computers and telephones and communication and connectivity. Even that guy who was the comedian Louis CK the guy

Vance Crowe [01:32:06] Who's

Fred Perlak [01:32:06] Got into all the trouble, he had a routine where he'd say, I'm in a plane and this guy, and we're flying and this guy is complaining that the internet is spotty and we're at 37,000 feet strapped into a seat in a metal tube flying at the speed of sound. He said, what's the matter with you? And my dad is 91 years old. He was born in 1928. Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927, a big deal. Right? And today you can get on a plane and go the speed of sound across country and it's standard, it's trivial. So you look at where we are and where we've come from and we're doing really well. Now they're talking about space travel and SpaceX and

Vance Crowe [01:33:01] Yeah, going to Mars,

Fred Perlak [01:33:03] Mars

Vance Crowe [01:33:03] Harvesting asteroids is my, is my favorite thing to think about in the future, right? That there are blobs of rare earth metals that are flying around in the solar system and that we could send a satellite up that would go and lasso it or, or have a bunch of drones collect it somehow collected somehow and bring that back. And it would be more valuable than all of the gold and all of the world today because it would help us do so much. And that's, that's impossible.

Fred Perlak [01:33:31] That's impossible. But look, who, who would've predicted that cell phones could do what they do today? I mean, when I started at Monsano, we first started out with the early apples, the, the earliest versions that they had. And this was a big, big deal. The the ones where the floppy disc went in the front.

Vance Crowe [01:33:55] Yeah, like the Apple two Gs or whatever.

Fred Perlak [01:33:57] Yeah. Yeah. And then they came out with the multicolored ones.

Vance Crowe [01:34:00] Oh yeah. And,

Fred Perlak [01:34:01] But we look back on it and my, my Apple phone right now has 10 times the computing power that that thing had. And you can do, you can stay in touch, you can do FaceTime, I mean FaceTime. You can FaceTime anybody else with an Apple phone or another phone and, and talk to them over the waves. I mean, that's unbelievable. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:34:25] And with, with how much faster science can move forward now, like we were talking about going out and planting those fields and then going and doing a whole punch. Now you don't even need the whole punch. You can get a little bit of dust by cutting a little side of the seed. You can, man, you can do millions of seeds with robots, get that dust process the genetic information architect. Well,

Fred Perlak [01:34:49] And and not only that, but, but it's sharing information and how you share information. As a scientist, I've always believed that knowledge is like standing in a pool of water. If you're a scientist, you're standing in this pool and you wanna get the water level up. So you do your best to put some water into the pool. If all the other scientists put water into the pool, the levels rise faster and faster. So now you can share information so much easily. So much easier than before.

Vance Crowe [01:35:23] Yeah. And, and it doesn't cost, it cost you barely

Fred Perlak [01:35:26] Anything cost you barely anything. And you have so many other people with such good techniques and such good protocols and stuff to add to that pool of water. So you're getting better and better and better. Look at the, the advances in cancer research and what they've done for things like cystic fibrosis or, or certain leukemias. And even the people who are, there was one case I read about a person with sickle cell anemia and the reversal of it. These are tough diseases and tough instances where a single change in using CRISPR and ways of changing that DNA just with one base pair. Incredible. So I'm very positive, very optimistic.

Vance Crowe [01:36:18] So if you're optimistic, and your field has always been agriculture, you know, the growing of food or fiber, what do you think is on the horizon that people should be looking forward to as we get better at agriculture?

Fred Perlak [01:36:32] I, I think in increasing the amount of productivity, short corn is something that's just come up lately. I don't know if you're familiar with short corn.

Vance Crowe [01:36:42] I am. But, but how would you describe it?

Fred Perlak [01:36:44] It's just genetically engineering the plant to grow shorter and thicker as opposed to taller.

Vance Crowe [01:36:52] Is it genetic engineering or is it breeding?

Fred Perlak [01:36:54] You can do it both ways, but probably the best ones will be genetically engineered, maybe through the use of crispr. And you can do that by switching the amount of plant hormones within the plant. There's no reason for corn to be 10 foot tall

Vance Crowe [01:37:11] Because all that energy is going into making the stock instead of saying, Hey, I could produce more seeds. And like you had talked about with the glyphosate, when you're starving, you don't produce that many seeds. Exactly. But when you've got leftover metabolic energy, you potentially could put that into more seeds. Well,

Fred Perlak [01:37:25] And then just think about a 10 foot stock of corn and you have a heavy ear at the end, all of a sudden it's top heavy and a and a heavy wind blows it over. You get lodging and you can't harvest lodged corn.

Vance Crowe [01:37:36] Yeah. I mean, that's a sad thing. You've watched this corn, all the materials go into it, fertilizer, pesticides and a big storm knocks 'em all over like, like pushing over a forest where all the trees are just laying on the ground and you can't go through and harvest them.

Fred Perlak [01:37:51] And, and I get it, I I think with climate change people would say, oh, it's not really happening. Well, the weather is changing. Is it caused by CO2 emissions? Some people say yes, some people say no. I I would tend to think, yeah, it probably is. Are we gonna be able to reverse it anytime soon? Well, not in my lifetime, it's gonna take decades and centuries. But there's a cost for everything. Some people don't want to pay the costs. So for example, electric cars, oh, you have an electric car, you need a battery. Well, those batteries are pretty environmentally caustic. I mean, they have heavy acid, they have heavy metals and getting rid of it is a problem.

Vance Crowe [01:38:40] Yeah. I think that that's the, the equation that you don't get to have if you only understand one side of an issue. And that, that, that I think is one of the biggest problems that we have going right now in society is that it is almost in vogue to know one side of the issue and fight it to the death.

Fred Perlak [01:39:00] Well, fracking everybody, oh, we're against fracking. Well, okay, you get more oil, but you also get a lot more natural gas. You get a natural gas, which is more burns, much cleaner than coal as a consequence of fracking in natural gas. A lot of the power plants have switched from coal to natural gas. So coal companies are, are, are not,

Vance Crowe [01:39:25] Oh, and I am watching the money roll into the anti-fracking groups because you're starting to see stuff on social media. You're starting to see articles written. Those things most of the time are not written for free. There's somebody saying, we should not do fracking because we should do this other thing, which happens to be the thing that I own. Yeah,

Fred Perlak [01:39:44] It of course. And whether it's the nuclear energy business or it's solar energy or it's wind energy or it's coal.

Vance Crowe [01:39:56] So you, you said fracking, you brought up this topic. Rob Long, you, you know Rob. Well, and he pointed out an article to me that was, it made my heart leap with joy about, about these natural gas wells out in South Dakota. Right. You can actually go and look on a satellite image at night and it looks like it's Chicago. Yeah. Because they're just lit up from burning some of the natural gas off of the top because they're going for that oil. And it's like, if we try and capture this or move it through a pipeline or try and compress it, it's just too expensive and it's not enough energy for us to, to be able to use. Right. And so, so for a while there, they were just burning these things. But there's a group of investors right now putting together a system where you can capture that natural gas that is coming off of those wells and burn it in a generator right away. And those generators, power Bitcoin miners, it's genius. We

Fred Perlak [01:40:59] Can talk about Bitcoin another time. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:41:01] I'm not a good, oh, I, we don't have to talk about it, but I just, it's a great idea because it is saying you can capture energy that was going to be wasted. It was just gonna get burned up and now you're turning it into digital currency. Whether that's a good idea or not, who knows. And now people can buy that Bitcoin because those miners are producing it and then they can go out to the market and sell it. So they found a way to be able to capture value on what was at one point in time total waste. Yeah.

Fred Perlak [01:41:30] I, I think that's always the, the key is there's

Vance Crowe [01:41:34] Always trade-offs. Oh man, this good. The guy could not have come any closer with that lawnmower than he did right there. That's okay, we'll we'll just wait once there he goes.

Fred Perlak [01:41:42] But I think there's a price for everything and you just have to balance what price you wanna pay. Do you wanna lose mountains in West Virginia or do you want tremors in Oklahoma? Make your pick. Do you want,

Vance Crowe [01:41:58] Do you want, well, and then the alternative choice, if you don't choose one of those is what energy use, what energy consumption are you going to choose to not use? Or are you willing to force everyone else to not use that thing? Right. And the thing that you're asking them to give up, is it actually going to make an appreciable difference on the demand of energy? So for example, you can focus everybody's attention relentlessly on plastic straws. Maybe that is a poor use of oil. Maybe it's getting all this pollution, but you only get one chance at the people's attention to change something. And straws is the thing you're changing. Now,

Fred Perlak [01:42:33] Plastic straws would not be what I chose. The, the, you, you look at companies that do waste management, you know, recycling and so forth. And they say, well, you know, it's no longer feasible because China won't take it because it's not clean enough. We'll make it clean enough. Figure out how to do that. You can take plastic bottles and you can make shoes out of them. You can make park benches, you can do all sorts of things and they'll last forever. So.

Vance Crowe [01:43:12] So what do you think of ethanol?

Fred Perlak [01:43:14] You know, I like drinking ethanol. That's a good thing. But ethanol has its prices. Well, I mean ethanol add,

Vance Crowe [01:43:24] And I'm specifically for listeners that don't know there, there are production plants all over the world. But in the United States it's big that you can turn corn and you wanna grow a certain type into a certain alcohol and, and that alcohol can be blended into fuel and be used to power cars. Right.

Fred Perlak [01:43:44] And I think ethanol, when it's mixed with gasoline, the engines burn cleaner and they get higher octane. So you don't have to use a lead additive to increase the octane. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:43:56] I guess I didn't realize that.

Fred Perlak [01:43:57] So that's, that's one of the big pros. The,

Vance Crowe [01:44:01] We'll just wait one minute. I think he's got like two passes, maybe three. I can't believe it's like the worst luck. It's

Fred Perlak [01:44:07] Okay. So, but the, the other part is if you have ethanol production as part of a integrated corn processing chain, then it's fairly easy to understand how that would work. Yes. So, so for example, taking corn and squeezing the oil out, first you get corn oil, then you ferment away the carbohydrates to make ethanol. And then what you're left with is this high protein corn or what's it called? Dried distillers grain. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:44:44] That's right. Which

Fred Perlak [01:44:45] You can then use for feed for chickens and a high protein feed for other animals. So now you've taken corn from just being used for ethanol to being used for oil, for use for ethanol and used for feed. So it's fairly integrated and ethanol becomes a byproduct, not the end.

Vance Crowe [01:45:06] You know, that strikes me as almost being like the way that the Native American culture gets a lot of respect for saying, we used all of the bison, we used every piece of it. And when the settlers came out here, they were just going after one thing. Well now with corn, we are using all of it

Fred Perlak [01:45:23] Theoretically. Now whether they do that all the time or not, I don't know. I I I would think that that's a very good use of how you would do it. And I could support that easily. Agriculture is is a hard business. It's hard to get people to work in agriculture. There are parts of the United States where you go to North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas,

Vance Crowe [01:45:53] Oklahoma,

Fred Perlak [01:45:53] Oklahoma. People scratch out a living in those desolate areas and there's not many people out there.

Vance Crowe [01:46:02] Yeah. I have a buddy Jared McDaniel, who runs a podcast called Ag Uncensored. His studio for running this podcast is in a giant, basically it looks like a townhouse in the, in the center of his town that he bought for just a few thousand dollars. The whole, it's a huge, it's an entire building, but it's 'cause there's nobody there. Yeah. So it doesn't cost you anything to have the coolest house or the coolest recording studio. I mean, and it's cool. But you can see that the reason that happens is because the demand for that property is virtually zero. Yeah.

Fred Perlak [01:46:35] It, it's, it's a hard, it's a hard life. And to choose it, you really have to love agriculture. And that's what always impressed me about the farmers I worked with, is that they had a love for the land. They felt it was their calling to be a farmer, not their occupation.

Vance Crowe [01:46:56] Do you feel like that was your way with science? Do you feel like you had a calling in that same

Fred Perlak [01:47:00] Way? It worked out that way? Yeah. I, I have to admit that, that it was just something I liked to do and I kept doing it and found I could be very good at it.

Vance Crowe [01:47:13] I think that for me to, to resonate with your point, it's that not only do you have to find it, your calling, you have to find a spouse that also feels it's their calling. And then you have to be a part of whatever amount of culture is there to be integrated into this, into this community. Because there's not very many people there. Right. And if you can't make right with the community, if you don't know how to get along, you're completely isolated. Yep. And so it really is choosing a culture that I think increasingly feels isolated from the people living in the city. 'cause they're a smaller and smaller number.

Fred Perlak [01:47:50] Well, and I know my wife was very understanding as me as a scientist, there were times I'd go six months where every day I would've been in the lab at least for a short period of time.

Vance Crowe [01:48:05] Every day.

Fred Perlak [01:48:06] Every day. So you have Monday through Friday, I'd go in on Saturday, traditionally spend, oh, maybe four or five hours on a Saturday morning. And then Sunday I'd go in and start some cultures or do this or do that just to keep things going. And she was very understanding and I put in long hours, a lot of the scientists at Mons Sinai would put in long hours. One of our seed company partners, when he was looking for which company to partner up with, he told me he selected Monsano. And I said, well, why? And he says, I came to visit Chesterfield where you guys were working and it was six o'clock and most of the cars were still in the parking lot. He goes, I wanna work with you guys.

Vance Crowe [01:48:57] I think that that is, I mean, the thing that you described in the beginning and the thing that you're describing there about people having their cars there, people want to work on things that matter.

Fred Perlak [01:49:09] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:49:10] And they want to find that edge of chaos. Right. Where they, where, where they're in that flow state between what they know and what they can discover. And when you do find it, there is nothing more satisfying in, in the world than being able to ride on that wave.

Fred Perlak [01:49:28] Well, and and there's a, there's a part of that and to make sure that you're constantly in it. There were one, the courses, one of the development courses I took at Monsanto and I didn't have a choice. I had to take this course was a very interesting exercise they did with our group. We paired off with another individual and you had to ask each other questions, but the questions were very specific. So the person who was asking the question could only ask regarding Monsano, what do you want? What do you really want? And why do you want that? And so the other person would talk, and those were the only questions they could ask. So they say, well, regarding Monsano, what do you want? Well, I I want a corner office. I want more money. I want more responsibility. Well, what do you really want? Oh, I really wanna do this, this, and this. Well, why do you want that? And more often than not, it was, I wanna work on something that makes a difference, that improves people lives. That, that I can sit back at the end of my career and say, yep, I did that and that was worth it. That was really worth my time. And as long as Monsano can get you, what do you want? What do you really want? Why do you want that? If you can answer those questions, then that's how you knew you wanted to stay at Monsano.

Vance Crowe [01:51:00] Did you ever have a time when, when the answer was, what do you want? What do you really want? And it was in conflict with what you were getting.

Fred Perlak [01:51:08] Yeah. And toward the end of my career, I was, I was more than ready to leave.

Vance Crowe [01:51:12] Oh shit. Okay.

Fred Perlak [01:51:14] Yeah. I was ready to leave because number one, they had already made up their mind. They were gonna either buy another company or

Vance Crowe [01:51:24] This was right before the announcement of, well, not right before, but a but a year or so

Fred Perlak [01:51:28] Before that. But oh, and we knew, we knew that this was going on. They had talked to Syngenta and Hugh Grant was very upfront about it. He says, if we don't buy another company, then we're gonna have to find some sort of arrangement or relationship, which means somebody's gonna buy us to, to survive. And so, okay, I get it. And once that became the mantra of what they wanted to do, the focus left wanting to get things done to wanting to get to survive.

Vance Crowe [01:52:02] Yeah, that's right. And people became laser focused on that, on survival. So the thing that you were describing earlier about wanting to have these partnerships and connections, that was not the emphasis. Nope. It was, we're doing something different now. We've decided we're either gonna take over somebody else's ship or we're gonna have our ship taken over

Fred Perlak [01:52:21] And there's not gonna be not any room for that. 'cause they don't carry those individuals can't, won't honor the commitments we make now. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:52:30] And, and so to the, to the fairness of the corporation, the decision that they made not to do those partnerships may not have been the thing that you as an individual agreed with. But you don't you understand why they did

Fred Perlak [01:52:42] It. Oh, of course I do. I understand why I didn't like it. And they were in, in the past, we always had a sense of vision or mission and focus where we were going. Now all that was put on hold

Vance Crowe [01:52:57] Right.

Fred Perlak [01:52:58] For a long period of time. And

Vance Crowe [01:53:00] That was a struggle for a lot of people because they, and, and some people, because they wanted to see their career move forward and they wanted to have some kind of sense, should I be buying a house now? Should I be investing in, you know, my kids' education? You know, how, how, how should I be spending my time and money? And they wanna have certainty. But there were other people that said, I wanna be doing something that matters. And right now you guys are doing a really, you're doing right by me. You're, you're keeping me employed, but I don't have much to do right now.

Fred Perlak [01:53:29] That's exactly it. And I think there, there, there are certain areas where you become independent of the noise. If you were working in the laboratory and you had a scientific project that you knew was really worthwhile, then you could really focus in on it and make progress independent of the outside noise. But if you are in corporate engagement, which depended on the acquiescence or the, the direction you were getting from corporate.

Vance Crowe [01:54:04] Yeah. What do you guys wanna do? What's gonna be, Hey, this is a job well done.

Fred Perlak [01:54:07] Yeah. And we're not sure, so just, just don't write goals anymore. What, what do you mean don't write goals? And

Vance Crowe [01:54:13] So, so I have you and I had a, a very interesting experience in that I got invited to a talk to a food manufacturer's group. And it was one of the very first times that I had been invited to go out and give a speech. And I think one of the reasons that they let me go, because it was, this was really edgy, very, very few people on behalf of Monsanto got, this is before we knew we were being bought. This is when, right. Your in corporate engagement. And

Fred Perlak [01:54:40] This is the trip to Chicago.

Vance Crowe [01:54:41] This is the trip to Chicago. So I was invited to give this speech and the night before you and I get dinner, you're helping me hone in. I'm talking with you about the things that I want to talk about. I'm actually telling the story of the guy that came in and sold the snake oil. And you said, well, he's the man on the box because I was describing for you what he did. And you were the one that was like, gave me that, that moniker man on the box. Which became very powerful. But I remember the night before we were doing the talk, I was like, okay, so we're both in agreement. You're gonna be in the front row and if I'm doing good, you'll gimme a thumbs up. If I'm running long on time, you'll, you know, you'll, and you're like, yeah, we, we've got it. We got it. We're all set. We're good. So I walk into this talk, it's, I'm speaking in front of, you know, corporate America people that are running legitimately large companies. And actually the guy that is in the front row, not very far from you, a guy named John Ruach was who was going to give a keynote the next day. That was in complete opposition to what I was doing. I was saying, GMOs are good. You know, there is a reason that you should not be putting non GMO verified on your products. And he was going to stand up the next day and say, let me show you how you can make a lot of money. You should be involved in the non GMO verified project. So my story of the Man on the box, the reason I told it was because I was trying to warn the crowd that the guy that was gonna stand up after me was the man on the box.

Fred Perlak [01:56:04] That was pretty clear. He did a good job.

Vance Crowe [01:56:06] Well, do you remember what you said to me right before I went on stage? Right before I got on stage? The guy is literally reading my bio. It's the first time I've ever stood up, I think on behalf of Monsanto. Certainly the only time I'd ever been recorded. There's spotlight, there's everything, there's, I don't know, 300 people in the room. And I go, I'm just about to be introduced to go on stage and you lean over to me and you said, Hey, about that stuff, about telling you whether you're doing good or your time, you're on your own up there, good luck. And then I'm like, oh God, I'm on my own. And, but I, there was nothing to be done about it. There was no time to plead with you.

Fred Perlak [01:56:41] The, the reason I did that was because I didn't want you constantly looking down to see if you were doing on doing the right thing. If you wanna be genuine, if you wanna connect with your audience, you have to be who you are. In Hawaii, the, the term aloha is a, a fusion of two words. Aloe is how you appear to everyone else. In ha means the spirit of who you are. So when you say aloha, you are essentially saying, okay, the way I am appearing to you is exactly who I am.

Vance Crowe [01:57:28] Whoa.

Fred Perlak [01:57:28] I'm holding nothing back. So when I say aloha to you, what you see is what you get. No filters, no analysis, no no conditioning. That is deep. I am leaving myself out so you can see who I am. You have to have that when you go before an audience, just like testifying in a trial. People can tell when you're telling a story or the company line or you're stretching the facts. People know people aren't stupid. They pay attention. I've often said in, in all the trials I was involved with over patent cases, I could tell when someone was stretching or when they were lying or when they weren't sure. Under all that pressure, it, it, it's obvious,

Vance Crowe [01:58:18] Right?

Fred Perlak [01:58:18] And any attorney, any trial attorney will say, I can tell right away if this guy's gonna be a good witness or not, or if he's gonna stretch the truth. So you wanna have that aloha. You wanna talk as if you are showing people who you are. And as a scientist, I always thought that it was so important to publish papers and to talk about your research, whether they were patents or papers, because you are putting the essence of who you are on paper for people to see and judge. And when you publish a paper, when you publish a patent, they get to rip apart every little bit of it.

Vance Crowe [01:58:58] And there may come a day when you have to stand on in, in an actual courtroom and defend what you put there.

Fred Perlak [01:59:03] Well, even if you don't, it is part of you. It is who you are. And that is your ha your spirit of yourself who comes forward. Now, that sounds a little deep, but the reality is when you talk to people, you try to be as sincere as you possibly can. And that shows through how you appear, shows through.

Vance Crowe [01:59:23] That is 100% my experience when I would go out and speak on behalf of Monsanto, because it became very quickly, very clear to me. I didn't actually care what happened to the company. And, and, and actually that's a function of you. You, you do. There was a time when you and I had been doing mentoring. It was getting close to when you were about ready to be done. You were about ready to retire and, and leave. And we went out on a park bench.

Fred Perlak [01:59:53] Oh yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:59:53] And you, there was a fountain there. We used to go sit out there all the time. 'cause I would tell you about things I was worked up on and things that I, you know, was trying to do. And sometimes when I would get a little riled up, we'd go outside and take a walk. And I remember sitting on the park bench with you and you, you know, listening to me talk, but then very patiently and calmly saying, Vance, I think that you're falling in love with this place. And I think that that's a mistake. And you said it's not your job to defend this place. You were the rare person that could come in that didn't like us, but would give us a chance to explain. And your job is not to decide whether or not what we're doing is good or bad, or right or wrong. Yours is to look and see what we're doing and then go answer other people's questions.

Fred Perlak [02:00:42] Right. 'cause if you have a good story, the story will tell itself. Oh man.

Vance Crowe [02:00:47] That's exactly right.

Fred Perlak [02:00:49] So if you, if you really have a good story and you know it's a good story, just tell it. Just tell the story. And I think that's true for everybody. So there are, and, and companies like a bear, even like a Monsanto, they carry balance sheets and it's how they view themselves in this. And that in the end, it is what you do that makes a difference and how your commitments fit into that background. And sometimes the company doesn't honor your commitments or decides to go off in a different direction. So somebody was saying, oh, do you think you think Bayer would fund this initiative? They just gave $50,000 or some amount of money to the Magic House. And I'm like, look, bear does it because they want people to see their name associated with St. Louis, do they care about Magic House? I have no idea. Maybe

Vance Crowe [02:01:54] There's somebody in there that it's really important to them. And they said, Hey, if we're gonna be giving money, this is the best place. But it would really come down to an individual having a vision for that. Exactly. That pushes it through

Fred Perlak [02:02:04] That Exactly that, that that commitment, that vision. I see Bear's name on the, the, on the the

Vance Crowe [02:02:12] Blues game. The blues game, yeah. I saw

Fred Perlak [02:02:14] And I see them. I see them in the, in the ballpark. Well, you know, is it because they like baseball or honking? No, they don't care. They just want to be out. And people to know they're in St. Louis and that they're a big employer here. There were commitments Monsanto had while I was there to certain things that went above and beyond. And Deborah Patterson, who used to head up the Monsanto fund, was really good about identifying what those were. The United Way was one that going back to even before Dick Mahoney, that Monsano was highly committed to allowing the campaigns to go through and to have such a big emphasis on what was going on because it was good for the community. Did Monsano get a lot of PR because they were a major contributor to the United Way? Yeah, but by the same token, they got our employees involved who then become volunteers, who then got involved in organizations. And it was pretty good for everybody.

Vance Crowe [02:03:23] Yeah. And that was a distinction that I discovered when I moved to St. Louis, because this was, I, I was living here for several years before I ever went to even visit Monsanto. I didn't even, I mean, I knew they were here, but it was on a campus somewhere, not where I would drive by. And it was astounding to me because you would hear the name Monsanto and it would be in a positive light. Whereas literally everywhere else I had ever been was, if you said the word Monsanto, it's 'cause somebody was telling you about what they saw in a documentary or read in a book. So you get here and people be like, oh yeah, my uncle worked for Monsanto, or Oh yeah, it's a great company.

Fred Perlak [02:03:57] People really

Vance Crowe [02:03:58] Like it. And it was a cultural shift here.

Fred Perlak [02:04:00] Yeah. And, and you see some of the places like Lly, Louisiana or Mustard

Vance Crowe [02:04:05] Or they make the glyphosate or where they do breeding for corn,

Fred Perlak [02:04:08] Right? Those are the chemical plants that have been part of Monsanto for decades, at least 30, 40 years. But people have worked there, they've retired, they retire with a good pension, they retire in good health. And people look at that and go, well, this doesn't line up with someone who says that they poison people with glyphosate, people who worked at the glyphosate plant, they're pretty darn healthy. And by the way, they're in their Winnebago going across the country or so.

Vance Crowe [02:04:41] So that is a good story. Why is that not the story that was heard then?

Fred Perlak [02:04:45] Well, I think it's because people aren't interested in a good story like that. If you lived in Luling, you'd be really into that story. If you didn't live there, what do you care?

Vance Crowe [02:04:58] Yeah, that's true. I don't, I don't, I don't have any particular love for random named town. Yeah.

Fred Perlak [02:05:02] You know, I mean,

Vance Crowe [02:05:03] How are those people treated by their corporation?

Fred Perlak [02:05:05] Oh, Luling, Louisiana is treated well by Monsano. Oh yeah, that's fine. But what about, and you know,

Vance Crowe [02:05:19] But

Fred Perlak [02:05:20] Like I I said before, nothing is simple. Everything is kind of complex and all mixed together.

Vance Crowe [02:05:27] So we maybe should make sure that the world that is listening to this conversation realize that you and I did not always just sit around and talk about Monsanto and man on the box and pesticides. You introduced me to, you know, I was aware that there were different wines in the world and I knew I, you know, I, I had knew like pinot noir these things, but I had never really had anybody sit down and say, I'm gonna pour three glasses of wine from three different bottles and let's taste them and describe them. That was a really big experience for me. I'm in my early thirties when we met and this, this was a good thing. How did you come to a love or an appreciation of, of wine in the way that you did

Fred Perlak [02:06:14] Growing up? My dad would have wine at Sunday, dinner and he would always let us as kids, even when we were younger, take a little sip. Just a little sip. But, and in the same thing was with his beer. You know, he could have a sip once in a while, just, oh, can dad, dad, can I try your beer? Yeah, sure. Just a little sip. Yeah. And I think once you start reading about wine and getting into it, you realize it's such a social thing. I always had this saying that you should never open a bottle of wine angry. And I told this to a friend of mine and they said, well, I'd like to put that on a T-shirt. And I said, well, on the backside of the t-shirt you should say that's what gin is for.

Vance Crowe [02:07:03] When

Fred Perlak [02:07:03] You're angry, you should drink gin. That's an angry drink

Vance Crowe [02:07:06] Because you're saying that the wine should be in celebration or it should be in, in

Fred Perlak [02:07:11] It's social. It's a, it's something you share with another individual. And I think that's what food is like. And cooking is like, and, and when you cook and when you have wine and when you have a meal with a person, you are sharing what it is. You just put on the table what you think is the most important thing. So there's nothing more satisfying for me now that I'm retired and not working in the laboratory, trying a new recipe and finding people really like it and then having a nice bottle of wine to go with it. And the wine is all about the context that you have with it. And you set up the context to be celebratory or at least, at least something where you enjoy that person's company. We have so many times when we don't have another individual to share things with, should celebrate the times when you do have something to share with them.

Vance Crowe [02:08:07] Yeah. And that context setting is right. I mean, you think about the amount of wine that you gave me in those three little test things. It was so little, but the fact that we were having an experience that we were going through this together was, was something that meant a lot to me. And I, I am reminded of a word that that is used in wine circles when you go to do a wine tasting at, at a vineyard, the term terroir, right? Where you're tasting the land. And that is something that is so profound to hold up a glass of wine and to look out and say, this land and the sunlight that hits it and the water that's here and, and the, and the work that went into that, that tastes like this, that that terroir that when you have that concept, your ability to taste the wine in a different way actually increases because it really is all about the context.

Fred Perlak [02:09:02] And, and I can't tell you that I'm good enough to be able to pick out a wine from this region versus this region. In, in the absence of any comparison, there are people who can taste a glass of wine and will remember that tastes That's right. And how it tastes for a very long time.

Vance Crowe [02:09:21] And can name whether it's acidic or fruity or full bodied or dry.

Fred Perlak [02:09:25] Well, I can remember dinners that I've had with people and what bottle of wine I ordered and whether we had a good time or not. But to tell you whether I could describe that wine in any great detail, what I remember is the experience of drinking that wine with those people. We had a nice bottle of wine when we had that dinner in Chicago. Do you remember what we had?

Vance Crowe [02:09:50] Oh, I would no chance it was red. That would've been the only thing I could have known, but I'm probably

Fred Perlak [02:09:54] Disappointed. I don't remember the wine per se, but you had the squid,

Vance Crowe [02:09:57] A squid pasta. Yeah, that's right. I do remember that. And,

Fred Perlak [02:10:00] And I picked that because I said, you should get this because you'd never had squid pasta before.

Vance Crowe [02:10:06] That's right.

Fred Perlak [02:10:07] And, and I never told you this, but I had them make a separate check for the wine because I bought a better bottle of wine and I didn't want it to appear than our

Vance Crowe [02:10:17] Per diem to

Fred Perlak [02:10:18] Show up on the expense report. Oh. And so I paid for the wine and

Vance Crowe [02:10:23] You're the man. You've always been the man.

Fred Perlak [02:10:25] And, and when I talked to, you know, when I used to go on in the research organization, sometimes Rob Fraley would ask me to talk to somebody who was having a difficult time, or

Vance Crowe [02:10:41] These

Fred Perlak [02:10:41] Two

Vance Crowe [02:10:42] People

Fred Perlak [02:10:42] Were not getting along. And

Vance Crowe [02:10:44] So the lead scientists that we were talking about before would sometimes say, Hey Fred, we gotta get this worked out. You gotta get people,

Fred Perlak [02:10:49] Oh, well we gotta get these people talking to each other to be civil because they're at odds with each other. And I'd say, okay, I'll take so-and-so out to dinner. I said, you're not gonna bark at me about the wine price. I, he says, if you get this salt, you can have whatever you want.

Vance Crowe [02:11:06] Really? Yeah. Wow. And

Fred Perlak [02:11:08] So in, in one instance, I would go out to dinner with this one individual every couple of months and, and 'cause he would be up from out of town and I'd take him out to eat. We'd get a nice bottle of wine. I'd say, okay, you know, how's, how's that going? And he'd tell me all the problems, issues, concerns, and we talk about 'em and then walk it through. And by the end of the bottle of wine, everything was okay. But there were some people who were like that.

Vance Crowe [02:11:39] I think. So Rob Long again, he and I have been talking about this concept that is becoming more and more and important to me called intersubjectivity. So it's really trying to have an, a shared understanding of what is going on in this chaotic world with another person really

Fred Perlak [02:11:57] Is

Vance Crowe [02:11:57] The, is the meaning of life. Right. It's right. Otherwise you're, you know, we don't realize it, but we are only able to see this visible light because we evolved to see it. We could have evolved some different thing and we'd just be in darkness and not be able to see anything. But we can perceive through all of this chaos in this world, you and I can sit here together. We can have a meal together, we can have wine. And both of us can share this experience. And the fact that we shared it is what makes life exciting and worthwhile. And

Fred Perlak [02:12:29] Well not and

Vance Crowe [02:12:29] Not alone.

Fred Perlak [02:12:30] Not every conversation has to be worthy of a philosophy course at a university. I mean, sometimes it's better not to talk about detailed stuff. And I know people who always like to talk about politics and you want to, you wanna polarize a conversation with people at dinner, just talk about current state of politics in the United States, especially now. Right. And but on the other hand, there are things you can talk about that give you joy or Hey, you know, I read this book and it was really good, or I saw this movie, what did you think? Or what have you been doing? How's your job going? Or you know, like you say, when you say to someone, tell me about it, all you have to do is say, oh, I moved into a new apartment. Oh, tell me about it.

Vance Crowe [02:13:26] Exactly.

Fred Perlak [02:13:27] And all of a sudden it's a wonderful conversation and I, you really have an appreciation for what that person is like.

Vance Crowe [02:13:38] I think that that's another reason why it's an added in reason why reading books is so important, right? Like I think that this thing that we were talking about with terroir and inner subjectivity and sharing meals, when you read a book that another person has read or even better another person has recommended, then you go and read that and you absorb those ideas. You're in your own context. You were either in your own bedroom when you're reading it or you read it at night or on a plane, but yet you shared all of those ideas. And it could be a created world, it could be this fantasy land, it could be some historical event. The idea of experiencing a shared book between people I think is a lost thing. Oftentimes when you give up reading or you don't make time for it, you miss out on having this deep inter subjectivity where you and I both have the same experiences despite being in different places.

Fred Perlak [02:14:31] I found that since I retire, I enjoy reading a great deal and I like to read nonfiction. I read a lot of fiction, some fiction, but I tend to like to read historical biographies and I'll read three or four different ones about the same person or people around them and try to piece together a viewpoint of what that individual was like. It's always kind of interesting to do that. What

Vance Crowe [02:15:00] Would you say is the last book that you read that changed what you did in the regular world that changed some behavior that you had in some way? Oh

Fred Perlak [02:15:09] Man, that's a tough question. I don't know if it completely changed. It was a book my, my wife had recommended called a, a man called Bove. BOVE is,

Vance Crowe [02:15:31] We'll put it in the show notes.

Fred Perlak [02:15:33] I, and, and I think if I remember it correctly, it was about this man in Sweden who had lost his wife and it starts out with him trying to commit suicide and he's unsuccessful, but then he ends up interacting with a immigrant family next door and getting into their life and all his trials and tribulations. And it does a lot of flashbacks. And what it really enforced with me is that no matter who you are, you can have a big impact on other people and how they view things, even when you think you are not really having a big impact. So his interaction with the youngest child of this, it was some family, an immigrant family from the Middle East, and he got very friendly with the youngest child and worked with her on reading and a few other things, computers and all that sort of stuff. She got him involved. It was a, a very nice light kind of book, but it just showed that anybody can get involved in the most minor ways. I don't know if it changed my life. I don't think it did.

Vance Crowe [02:16:57] I think that that is actually a great place for us to close out because I think when you and I encountered one another, you were just being who you are. You, you were interested in answering questions, you took me to task on, on everything that I did. You never let me slide when I didn't understand the details and pretend like I did. You pushed me to be more of who I could be and I'm grateful for that. But I think it's just who you are as a person. So I am so glad that you were willing to stop by.

Fred Perlak [02:17:29] Well, Vance, it was always a pleasure to work with you and I still like seeing you. It's great to talk with you.

Vance Crowe [02:17:35] I mean, I think that we could go on and on, so we should just plan on having you back. I I have more questions for you and a lot more we could talk about.

Fred Perlak [02:17:42] I don't know if you, well, if you, if you think it's that interesting, I I'm a pretty boring guy actually, but that's okay.

Vance Crowe [02:17:48] But this was a blast and if I, I know you and I set up your Twitter account, the photo is actually of you at doing the Reddit ama. If people wanted to interact with you, is Twitter an okay place for them to

Fred Perlak [02:18:02] Find you? Yeah, that's fine. I don't tweet all that much. I i I just don't have all that much to say. I mean, Twitter ends up in some instances being judgmental in, in some, in some manner, shape or form. But that's okay.

Vance Crowe [02:18:25] Well, I think that there, if there are questions that people have

Fred Perlak [02:18:28] Oh sure.

Vance Crowe [02:18:28] You will give them non-judgmental answers there. Yeah, of course. And that's at Fred Perla, right?

Fred Perlak [02:18:33] Yeah. I still, I I still remember somebody was I, I I've also into beer, like I am into wine and someone was suggesting that they genetically engineer yeast so that they produce some of the aromatics found in beer and that should solve all the problems. So we won't need hops. And, and the one that they came upon was basil or something else. And I'm like, you have no idea. Do you, you have no idea what the beer culture is like and what craft beer is like and what people value and don't value.

Vance Crowe [02:19:09] They're not looking to get rid of hops, they're

Fred Perlak [02:19:11] Not looking, they're looking to diversify hops. Right. And there are hundreds of kinds of hops and how you use the hops, whether it's dry hopped or wet hopped or post this or pre this, it makes all the difference in the world. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [02:19:26] That's right.

Fred Perlak [02:19:27] And people love that diversity and for you to say, oh, we'll engineer the yeast so all beer will taste the same. What, what are you kidding me? Go buy Bud

Vance Crowe [02:19:37] Light. Well, I think that that's one of the coolest things about online is that you can find the exact right group of people that wants to talk about the cool thing that you are super into. And if people are looking to find you that I think you are somebody they should be into. And also to check out, I'll leave a note, a link to your Reddit a MA because I think that that was a great starting off point. Good. So thank you so much Dr. Perla for stopping

Fred Perlak [02:20:05] By. Always a pleasure, Vance.

Vance Crowe [02:20:05] Always a pleasure. Thank you. Well that's gonna do it for this week's interview with Dr. Fred Perla. Thank you so much Dr. Perla for stopping by the studio. If you want to learn more, as Dr. Perla said, he goes by at Fred Perla, P-E-R-L-A-K on Twitter. And he's not always super responsive, but every once in a while you see him get on there and fire off some tweets that could only be done with somebody that the expertise and the wisdom that he has. I wanna thank you so much for sticking all the way through this interview. It means so much to me that you're here In the last two weeks, I have had a huge upswing and the number of people that are reaching out, they're sending me direct messages on Twitter or sending me notes on Facebook. This means a lot to me. I really can't tell you how much it means to me when somebody said, I heard you talking about journaling and now I'm making a commitment that I wanna start writing a journal as well. Or I heard this artist talking about how she generates creativity and, and I think I wanna start trying to create routines in that way. I'm getting these conversations and I love them and I hope they keep coming and I hope you keep giving me suggestions on ways to get better, ways to improve the audio quality. This is all exactly what I'm here for is that I can put these things out and then smart, interesting, creative, curious people can send me a note and we can get connected. If you don't have something to say to me and you're not on social media, then I do have a request for you. Beyond all the typical things that help a podcast, you know, hitting the five stars and, and thumbs up on YouTube even more than that, I'd love for you to think about who is a person that would really appreciate a new and different sort of podcast.

Vance Crowe [02:21:51] One where we can have these long form conversations where, where you can really get to know another person and send it to them. But if you're gonna send it to them, the way that you can make it as valuable as possible to you is to say why you thought they might be a good person to send this podcast to. What was it that happened? Was it that they're creative and you thought maybe they would wanna be hear another artist? Was it that you know that they're always curious and really suspicious about science? And so you wanted them to hear this because they would be able to discern whether or not, not these scientists ideas were right or wrong, or maybe it's just somebody that you know has an eclectic sense of what's interesting in the world. Whatever it is. When you write them that note, tell them why you thought of them and ship them the podcast. I would love to know if, if you were one of those people that ever had somebody reach out to you and send you a podcast and really it's going to just continue to increase this community that we're building. I'm seeing people get to talk to one another on Twitter. I'm seeing lots of messages get shared on Facebook and it means so much to me that this is happening. That means that you can have conversations that can have an impact on the world. So I encourage you, if you really like these podcasts, to pick somebody that you think of, think fondly of, and send them the podcast and tell them why. Don't forget that on Friday we will have another bonus episode. This week is gonna be a special one. I have talked about the, well actually graph several times before, but recently I was giving a talk to the Cooperative Communicators Association and they happened to videotape that part of the presentation.

Vance Crowe [02:23:26] So I have decided that I'll record an intro and put that video up. So if you've ever heard me talk about the well actually graph, sometimes I talk, I make reference to it, but I've also talked about it on the bonus episode where I talked about the value of learning to draw your ideas that I got from going to the Santa Fe Institute. So it's one that's been long awaited and I'm glad to be sharing it. So stay tuned and check us out on Friday for that as the Crow Flies Friday episode. Thanks so much and we'll see you on Friday.