AS230: Dr. Kevin Folta

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 230, nice even number there, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Got a great interview for you today. Joining me right now is Dr. Kevin Folta. How you doing?

0:00:45 Kevin: Oh, really great, thanks for having me aboard.

0:00:47 Thomas: Hey, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. I reached out to Kevin and he pretty much instantaneously said, let's do it. And I love that kind of attitude. That's a really encouraging attitude, especially from a scientist, somebody who is willing to reach out and help educate people on these topics. So thank you so much for coming on.

0:01:07 Kevin: Oh, no, it's a Sunday afternoon, you know, I'm just sitting here in my office doing my work and it's nice to take a break and be able to talk about policy and topics with you, this is good.

0:01:18 Thomas: Excellent. So I'm going to ask you the tough questions. How much is Monsanto paying you to come on my podcast right now? That's what I want to know. The tough questions?

0:01:28 Kevin: Well, it depends on who you ask. If you ask my bank account or ask my retirement or me, they'll tell you zero. If If you ask any of the activists, they'll certainly tell you that I'm well-embedded. Eric Lipton of the New York Times will tell you that I am a crucial, embedded, strategic centerpiece of the Monsanto plan for world domination.

0:01:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:01:53 Thomas: So, I've just recently become familiar with your work, and I was just doing some research on you and stuff, And I saw this whole thing and I thought, you know, if you're going to be a shill for a giant corporation, you really ought to negotiate better, Kevin. I think you, you ought to be making a lot more money. I just, just, just saying, you know, well,

0:02:13 Kevin: And that's what's so funny about this whole thing is, you know, I have a 30-year career in science. I've been in public science. You can trace every one of my big, stupid footprints over 30 years in the literature and in meetings and conferences, and it's evident, I've worked for the public, and to think that I would throw that away to lie for a corporation is just insane, but, well,

0:02:39 Thomas: Not only that, it's just for allegedly just for like travel expenses. Like that's, you're gonna go lie just to cover, you know, a few bucks and travel or something. It's just ridiculous.

0:02:49 Kevin: That's what's so funny, is, like, I have oodles of frequent flyer miles I have never used, that if it really boiled down to it, I could use, but it's, I do a lot of travel for work, and I don't take vacations, so it's one of those things where they just keep piling up. If I really needed to do, it's just crazy.

0:03:02 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:03:11 Kevin: But that's the world we're in right now.

0:03:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, it must be really frustrating to deal with, especially since it seems like, I mean, you mentioned your 30-year career. I'm guessing your opinion on this has been pretty fixed throughout that time, right? I mean or was there a time when you might have thought differently on GMO foods or anything?

0:03:28 Kevin: Well, it always changes because you're a scientist and that's how it works. You know, you look at the evidence and you weigh it and you think about it. And growing up, you know, with this, back even before that 30 years, back when I was in, say, high school, We would learn about in the early 80s that they were moving genes into bacteria to make human insulin, that they were making cheese enzymes. This was really cool stuff. And when we started to learn in college about how they could protect plants with natural proteins that the plant would produce, this was revolutionary for me. And of course, whenever you see in the earlier days the papers that would come out, the very few, that would be critical or would say we have an evidence of danger, we took those really seriously because it was maybe, you know, oh, we got to think about this and learn about it. Plus, we didn't understand the process the way we do today.

0:03:32 Thomas: Sure. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

0:04:26 Kevin: So nowadays, it's pretty set in stone how we feel because the evidence is so overwhelming. It would take a really stellar, extraordinary amount of evidence to really turn things the other direction at this point about the technology as a whole.

0:04:44 Thomas: I see. You know, it occurs to me that maybe I got a little ahead of myself. Would you mind, for people who don't know, giving a little bit of your background and how you got mixed in with all this?

0:04:55 Kevin: Yeah, that's a good point. I'm right now currently a professor and chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. And we do fruits and vegetables and non-GMO fruits and vegetable. We have the nation's first organic and sustainable curriculum for undergraduates. We have everyone studying everything from cover crops to citrus disease to plants on the space station. That's the department that I'm the chairman of. My research is in how we use light as a non-chemical treatment to modulate flavors, product quality, the nutrient quality of foods, and we're doing a lot of interesting stuff there. We also study how we use genomics-based tools, so DNA, RNA tools, to understand how flavors are inherited, so this way we can use marker-assisted breeding, just traditional breeding with DNA markers, not GMO, nothing like that, to make better flavored fruits and vegetables. You

0:06:02 Thomas: So to just, well, I was going to say naturally, I don't know if that's the best word, but to not using GMO, but still breeding, trying to selectively breed for the, to enhance these flavors or, or what?

0:06:13 Kevin: Got it. So what we can, are essentially, once we understand the the genes that are important to control flavors and aromas, once we know those genes, we can use the technique for forensics where you can amplify DNA from the end of a hair. We can use that same technique on a little snippet of a seedling's leaf to see if it contains a number of the genes that positively associate with good flavor. And this way we're able to select those seedlings that are good so we don't need to plant fields and fields. It's much better for the environment, it allows us to maximize our labor and fuel, and gets the breeders to a better quality fruit faster. So that's the big deal.

0:06:14 Thomas: Oh, okay. Hmm. Hmm, yeah. You know, you, I, I can't help but ask, you mentioned plants on the space station. That sounds really fascinating. Is there anything you can tell me about that that might be of interest?

0:07:06 Kevin: Oh, absolutely. So Dr. Rob Furl and Dr. Annalisa Paul are two space biologists in my department. If you look up UF Space Biology, I think that's what their website was, they have plants on on the ISS, and they're one of the main programs to actually study plants in low-gravity or microgravity environments. The idea is that there's all these genes that we don't understand what they do, and if you put plants in the funny environments, they sometimes do funny things. They do alternative mechanisms of survival. So we're able to really use space as a kind of testing ground to uncover how genes work that we previously didn't understand. Yeah.

0:07:52 Thomas: That's really cool. I, so this is, you know, I assume kind of a zero gravity situation or is there some centrifugal force going on? How do plants function in that environment? Seems a little bit of gravity.

0:08:02 Kevin: Yeah. Well, Well, that's what's so cool, it is microgravity. There's a little bit there. You know, the space station is held to the earth, still at gravity, so there's still a little, but, um, the main idea is that, um, plants, when you're walking around, you go through the forest, you see the green side up and the root side down, and you never see it the other their way around. Roots, when that seed germinates, start to head down and shoots go up. So when you put them in a microgravity or low gravity environment, now all of a sudden everything's changed. When that seedling germinrates, it doesn't know which way is up, but it's feeling for it and its sensors that monitor up from down are confused. And if we're going to grow plants in space to sustain humans someday, which we inevitably will have to do, you can't ship food.

0:08:09 Thomas: Okay. Yeah.

0:08:55 Thomas: Well, I've seen the movies. We're going to grow potatoes, right? I assume just a ton of potatoes.

0:08:58 Kevin: That's right. Oh, and and and if you were sitting next to me, you would have been getting elbowed the whole time. Like, ah, they just screwed that up, that isn't how you do it, but but

0:09:04 Thomas: Oh my gosh. I want to to ask you about that so bad. Okay, sorry, I'll let you finish your answer.

0:09:11 Kevin: That's the basic idea that you put plants into these um novel environments that give them unusual stresses that you can't produce on Earth, and in that extraterrestrial environment, or I should say, I guess it's hyperterrestrial, or whatever it would be, subterrestrial environment. You can start to understand more about gene networks and how they control the way plants behave.

0:09:12 Thomas: Sure.

0:09:33 Thomas: So, sorry I have to ask, what did they get wrong in The Martian? Now that we've stumbled upon this, I watched the movie, I enjoyed it, and now I'm curious.

0:09:43 Kevin: Well, I did enjoy it a lot, but I think most of my problems were of the physics of the way things were happening. I wasn't so freaked out by the garden, except for there wasn't enough light to to sustain those plants, um, and other issues, you know, there's a lot of things we could think about there. But but um, it's uh, the main thing were issues with uh when you think about pressures and uh how you're holding things shut with duct tape, uh, you know, it just seemed a little bit far-fetched.

0:09:50 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:10:13 Kevin: But that's why I

0:10:14 Thomas: That's the trouble is if everything was perfectly realistic in sci-fi movies, we'd just be sitting here on earth and there wouldn't be.

0:10:21 Kevin: Know.

0:10:21 Thomas: You got to have some conceits, I guess, huh?

0:10:22 Kevin: No, I I usually let it slide pretty well, and I I have to suspend been disbelief. And

0:10:26 Thomas: Right. Unless we're dealing with Armageddon. That movie's a lot worse. Okay, so that covers it for now for the topics that are fun and non-controversial, like space plants and the Martian. But now I got to ask you, let me just set it up briefly. I had an episode where I, well, I actually, okay, sorry, back backtracking. I stumbled across an article that talked about sort of science denial and how typically we associate it with Republicans and climate change denial. But one point this article was making was that, well, there's a lot of liberals on the other side who are in denial about things like GMOs. There's a number of things, but I would say GMOs are the biggest thing. Bernie Sanders is pro-GMO labeling, and he's very popular in younger liberal crowds. I'm a supporter myself, but that's something that I kind of disagree with him on. So I covered that in my episode, and I found what I thought was interesting was that there's a very significant

0:10:41 Kevin: Uh all Right, that's good. Well,

0:11:33 Thomas: Percentage, I'd say still a minority in my audience, I'm guessing based on the response I've have received, but a significant minority who are pro-GMO labeling, who were kind of upset by the, you know, the episode I did, at least in that they disagreed with it and stuff like that. So I had a little bit more of a conversation with a scientist and actually his sister, who was, it was kind of funny, it Was a little debate between siblings. One was a scientist, and one was, you Know, pro-labeling. And I just thought, your name came up, and a lot of people wanted to hear from you on this, and I'm so glad you're here to educate us. So, what do you think people who are pro-GMO labeling might be getting wrong or might be missing on this?

0:12:19 Kevin: I think I can maybe start by uh talking about the the politics. You know, when that you mentioned uh this being a left-wing phenomenon, which breaks my heart, because I'm a lefty, is lefty come for, at least for social issues, very much. And um, I always have been a fan of uh Senator Sanders, and um, really am disappointed by the the fact that he is putting belief ahead of evidence, especially when we are trying to – we talk about climate and how can people claim that this is all a big hoax and a fabrication that the planet's getting warmer, and then we turn around and say, well, this technology is horrible and dangerous and I need it labeled.

It's kind of speaking out of both sides of our science mouth, or I should say out of our activist mouths, and I think that for us to go forward, we really do need to trust the science and understand the science. And in this discussion, I think mostly if we talk about the pros and cons of labeling, I think people do land ultimately on the side that it really isn't something that deserves our attention. We have bigger fish to fry.

0:12:33 Thomas: Right.

0:13:31 Thomas: Yeah, that's certainly where I'd hope people would land personally, but I don't know. When you look at polls, it can be scary sometimes, depending on the poll you look At. It seems like a lot of people are in in favor of it. What about the argument of, this is what I hear every time, well, it doesn't hurt, we just want to know, you know, what's in our food. It's just information, it's no harm. What about that argument?

0:13:55 Kevin: Well, it doesn't tell you what's in your food. That's the problem, that genetic engineering is a process. It's not the final product, at least in the current suite of products that are available. So in other words, the best example I can think of is that if you make sucrose, so table sugar, and you grow it out of sugar cane, whether it's conventional, organic, or whatever, you take the crop and you process it, and at the end of that process, you have crystalline table sugar. If you take a GMO sugar beet and you grow it and you treat it with Roundup and you do what you do to maintain that field, you process that and at the end of the process you have crystalline table sugar, sucrose or sucrose. It's the end product is identical.

0:13:57 Thomas: Sure.

0:14:44 Kevin: And so when someone says, I want to know what's in my food, well, there it is. It's sucrose. It's not a special form of a sucrose that's magically different than the one that comes from the sugar cane. And chemically, they're indistinguishable. So if you want to know what's in your food, let's talk about what's in your food. It's sucrose. If you want to talk about the processes that were used to make them, that's entirely different front, and that just stands to confuse the consumer. Well,

0:15:14 Thomas: Right, right. What would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions you've come across in sort of being an advocate for GMO technology?

0:15:24 Kevin: I, you know, and I do like, just for what it's worth, I like to always kind of shy away from advocate as much as just because, because I don't really advocate for the technology. I talk about the strengths and weaknesses as represented in the scientific literature. I can tell you the good things about transgenic or GMO technology. I can tell you that things that are not good, and that's what's so cool about when you have your finger on the pulse of the risks and benefits, it's not, you're not out there, and that's why I tend to stay away from the labeling discussion, because that's where we start to say, here's what I believe, here's I think, rather than here's what I know.

And and so that's kind of a little caveat here, that I am speaking a little bit more from just what I understand, my from my interpretations from talking to farmers and policymakers. The biggest misconceptions are that that these technologies, which really are just changing the way a plant can grow, that the technologies somehow make the product that comes from them substandard. So the oil that comes from a GMO soybean would somehow be magically different than the oil that comes a non-GMO soybean, a conventional soybean. Or that canola oil would be different than canola. And really it's the same thing chemically. The places where you may see a slight difference is if you look at cornstarch from a corn plant that is non-GMO, conventional,

0:15:30 Thomas: Okay. Okay, sure. Right. Right.

0:16:55 Kevin: Or corn that is GMO, you may be able to detect the DNA or even the protein that is allowing the plant to grow through the herbicide. You added a gene that creates a new protein that allows that plant to function in the presence of the herbicide. Those you can detect. So those are slightly different. But otherwise, in terms of the quality of the product, they're indiscernible.

0:17:22 Thomas: So when you say there might be a different gene in that, would that show up in the ingredients somewhere? Because earlier you talked about that GMO not really telling you what's in your food. You know, it's sucrose is sucrose. So what about in the case of that corn you talked about where you have changed or something? Yeah, whoever's doing it has changed the genome there. There. Would that show up somewhere on the label? Not, yeah, yeah. Go ahead.

0:17:48 Kevin: No, it doesn't. But that is something that is in there. But it's one of 45,000, 50,000 genes in corn that, well, there's an awful lot of genes that we have no idea what they do, as I mentioned earlier about the ones in spaceflight. And we have no trouble crossing two corn species together, and who knows what we're mixing. And nobody worries about that. But the gene that is added, there's one of two genes that are typically added. One of them is this thing for Roundup resistance, which is a version of a gene that's already there. So it's an enzyme involved in amino acid synthesis that all we do is add one. That, so this protein encoded, this enzyme encoded by that gene is sensitive to glyphosate. It interrupts its activity. That's why the plant dies. Glyphosat being the herbicide in Roundup. What we do is add, not what I do, but what we big science we do, is add a gene from a bacterium that is not sensitive to glyophosate that then allows the plant to grow in the presence of the the herbicide.

0:18:00 Thomas: Be a big label, huh?

0:18:16 Thomas: Right.

0:19:01 Kevin: So in that corn, you would have the DNA for that enzyme, but it's really the same DNA as the native plant enzyme. It's not that much of a difference. That's one of them. The other one would be the Bt protein, which is a protein that is insecticidal against larvae from certain kinds of insects. So those are the only, and perfectly harmless towards humans.

0:19:28 Thomas: Yeah. I guess. So at this point, maybe it does become a little bit conspiracy theory-esque or maybe just, uh, maybe just ignorant, but I do hear the horror stories or the whatever of Roundup and how that, you know, that whole situation, how it's, uh. They're making plants that are resistant to it and then they're spraying it all over and then we're eating it or something. I don't really know what the theory is, but it does seem you've probably heard a lot of fuss over Roundup, right? It's brought up as like this boogeyman, you know, constantly.

0:20:01 Kevin: Oh, it's really emerged as the boogeyman in the last couple of years because 20 years have gone by and no one's had any problem in terms of a health problem with the plants themselves. And the Roundup obviously is an herbicide. It does have a very limited toxicity, but if you can't go after the plants, go after the chemicals that are used in conjunction with the trait. And they've gone after Roundup, which is a very, very low toxicity chemical, but the the claims are just crazy about how this causes all these problems. Most of it is fueled by some very low quality review papers that are in a predatory journal done by an MIT computer scientist.

0:20:47 Kevin: She doesn't have a laboratory, her research is done on Google, and she assembles these papers and submits them based upon her credibility as an MIT associated scientist to this lousy journal. And people believe them, they say, "Oh, her research," there's no research in there, she is simply kind of cherry-picking the journals to support her conclusion that this is dangerous stuff. And over and over it's been shown for years that this is a very specific and a very specific herbicide that works against a a particular enzyme, and that only plants have, and some bacteria, but humans do not have this gene.

0:21:33 Thomas: So I really don't know much about this and sorry if you have to, you now, handhold me through this a little bit. So Roundup is really just not dangerous to humans, is what you're saying. I mean, what if I drink it? It's probably not going to be good, right?

0:21:48 Kevin: Well, it's kind of funny that you would say that. You can actually go online and look on PubMed, which is where the repository of journal articles, and you can find peer-reviewed literature of people who've tried to commit suicide by drinking Roundup, and They wake up the next morning with a headache, and, uh, they drink to concentrate and they have very specific spectrum of symptoms and we do know the toxicities. If you look at the MSDS, which is the material standard material safety data sheet for glyphosate, you see that you have to consume five grams. Well, at least if we look at animal studies, we, you know, we don't do these on humans.

0:22:03 Thomas: Oh, man.

0:22:30 Thomas: Right.

0:22:30 Kevin: But if you look at animal studies, you're looking at taking a gram to five grams of this compound. So a nickel is five grams per kilogram of your body weight in order for it to be toxic. And if you look at what you spray on the field, you're spraying 80 milligrams per square meter. So just a dusting over a square meter and basically a pop can per acre, a soda can per acre. And so how you would get that large amount, you would have to eat thousands and thousands of kilograms of soybeans to reach that kind of physiological threshold.

0:23:13 Thomas: Well, and that's, I mean, that's assuming that you haven't washed it off, right, does it come off if you just rinse the soybeans?

0:23:20 Kevin: So that's right. Not so much. I mean, there are residues You can detect, but the detection is everyone who's done it, including anti-GMO groups, they've detected somewhere everywhere, but typically below three parts per million, but always very, very low. And you're looking you know if it's detectable at all other groups have done looked in water or air and you find ridiculously low numbers like 20 nanograms per cubic meter which is a 26 billionths of a gram and so the numbers are staggeringly small and yet people will use the fact that you can find it as evidence of danger where that's not really there. The dose does make the poison. And

0:23:23 Thomas: Oh okay.

0:24:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So, I think, you know, I started this by saying, why not just give people the information? You said, you know. It doesn't really provide you any information on what's inside. Side. Are there other reasons that you have heard that might be good arguments for labeling? Is there anything that gives you pause or is it pretty much all, a good idea in your mind?

0:24:33 Kevin: I should say that I'm not against the categorically against the idea of labeling. I think that if labeling was done right and it was done universally, like where every state had the same rules and we all had the the same exemptions, and, you know, every, because this is, well, we can talk about that in a second, but if we had a universal U.S. or worldwide label that had honest information, like this is what this gene does, and this is the gene that's in there, here's the website that has the information about it, this is why it's more sustainable, or here are the the risks, here are the benefits. That would be so cool. And I think that would give consumers real information.

0:25:18 Kevin: The problem is we live in a world that is really kind of against that. If you look at any of the activist websites, the people who are telling you this is dangerous, that it'll kill you, they've come out directly and they've said that getting a label is the first step in getting a ban. Because once we can label it, we can tell people that it's poison reason, and then tell them to avoid it and boycott it or whatever.

Now you've got Food Babe syndrome because she can organize a boycott around anything and mobilize a 5 million people Food Babe army to go malign a perfectly safe product and technology. The problem with that is that a lot of farmers find this very beneficial and it keeps their costs low and it helps them produce food and keeps our costs down. Down. The last thing I want to see is cost raised on farmers and cost raised on the poor. They're the ones who are going to pay this. It's not going to be the company, like Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, or whatever. They're the ones that make the seeds. They won't absorb that cost. It'll be passed along to the farmer, we'll pass it along to the consumer.

0:26:30 Thomas: You mentioned this, that there's some specific genes you referenced when it came to, I think it was at Korn or I might be mixing it up. For someone who is, you know, doesn't know what you know on this, for maybe someone listening who doesn't quite have the picture. Is GMO technology a free-for-all, or is it something where there's one or two specific things that people are doing? You know, like, I really have no idea. I'm not sure if this is, you know, the process, the GMO process, has been approved and therefore people can do whatever they want with these genes and put put whatever they want anywhere? Or is it specific genes have to be tested extensively before they're allowed? How does that work? Can you give me a, build me a... you know, give me a picture

0:26:38 Kevin: Sure. Yeah, and

0:27:20 Thomas: Of that?

0:27:20 Kevin: That is an excellent question. I just did the thing already today, what scientists do, that makes us absolutely horrible, is that we don't start at the beginning and communicate correctly with an audience. And you have to understand, this is like, you know, the guy who works in the widget factory for 40 years, he knows everything about widgets, and so when someone else asks him, he doesn't even define what it is.

0:27:44 Thomas: Yeah, you got to remember how ignorant we all are, Kevin. Come on.

0:27:48 Kevin: So well, I wouldn't say that. I think it's not that people are ignorant, it's just that I've spent the last chunk of time really focusing in one area, and it's part of my daily conversation, seven days a week. But here's the idea, is that if you think about genes as essentially beads on a string, or let's even say words in a book, Let's go with that analogy. Genes are words in the book that together tell a story. And it's possible to be able to, with genetic engineering technology, take a word from one book and essentially cut and paste it into a different book. And with that, you can change the meaning. You can put a knot in front of a very critical part of that, a punchline of that story, to directly change its meaning. You can add verbs that might make something more exciting, or maybe add adjectives to make something bigger than it normally would be. It's a very simple way for us to essentially change the meaning of a word or two in the book of life based upon the addition or subtraction of modifying words.

0:27:53 Thomas: Right, right. Hmm.

0:28:55 Kevin: Words. In genes, we can take genes out, we can add genes in. We can change their level of their expression. The basic idea is that you're not changing much. In that big book with 40,000 words, you're only changing one or two words. And that can have profound consequences on one or two processes, and that's the main idea, so it's a very, very surgical and precise process.

The alternative is traditional breeding, where you take those two books and mix them together in ways you didn't understand, and now it makes no sense. So the way that this is all done, and we can talk about, you know, the process maybe another time, but the the idea about the testing and the verification, if you have an idea, like, I, I want to stop this virus, like they did in papaya and some other crops, we can take a little piece of the virus genome, a little piece of DNA from the virus. And the idea was that if you put this into the papaya plant and turn it on at a very high level, this virus that's already there, but take a little piece of it and turn it off at a high level, that maybe you'll trigger an immune response in that plant. And that's exactly what happened.

0:30:16 Kevin: How do you, how does this go through a process? Well, you get this idea that you're going to try it, you vet it very well. These days, you can build computational models, you can do many things to test it computationally. And then if it looks like it's going to work and looks like you wouldn't have any unusual ramifications, or if it does, then you go to the next step and actually validate that test in plants. You make the plants and you test them. And right now the process is really rigorous. For a company to begin making a GM crop, it takes anywhere between 5 and 13 years and anywhere between $5 million and $130 million.

0:30:57 Thomas: Wow.

0:30:57 Kevin: So it's a very expensive process, and that keeps guys like me out. We don't do it, even though we have a strawberry plant in our department, in my lab, that can really cut any kind of fungicide use or other inputs. It would be great for organic growers. They'd be able to grow strawberries without a whole lot of work. And that would be huge for the organic market. But because it's GMO, it's automatically excluded.

0:31:25 Thomas: Hmm, interesting.

0:31:44 Thomas: All right. More on that in part two. Much more Kevin Folta. This was the shorter part because I have some good comments I want to go through, and then the longer part will be on Monday's episode. But if you are a fine, fine patron over at patreon.com/atheist for as little as a dollar a show, then you can access part two with Kevin Fulta. Really cool part two right away. It's already up for my fine, fine patrons as a way of thanking them for being so awesome. Everyone else, no problem. I understand some people can't afford to contribute. They don't want to. No big deal. It is on Monday for you. And hopefully if you are someone who wants to contribute but maybe can't financially, hopefully you have given an iTunes review, something like that. Follow me on Twitter at SpeakAtheism.

0:32:31 Thomas: Those are cool free ways to help the show. I don't care to spend too much time on this, but I do put out a bi-weekly show. My absolute best to make sure they're all of a top quality for you guys. And if you want to give back, simply go to patreon.com/atheist or, you know, give a review or do any of the number of things that I just said. Review or follow on Twitter. That would be great. Thank you so much. It makes the work well worth doing to have listeners like you guys or just throw up a comment on on atheisticallyspeaking.com on one of the episodes. The comments are cool. Speaking of, I've got a few good comments I want to go over. The infamous Mike Samsa is back and has a confusing comment that I really think I disagree with, which is pretty much always what happens with Mike Sams, I think. You raise an interesting question. This is about the no-platforming thing I talked about an episode or two ago.

0:33:33 Thomas: You raise and interesting question about the No-platforming issue, and I think you've highlighted at a very real point of hypocrisy among a lot of people who think no-platforming is a bad thing, usually when it happens to someone they like. For me, there wasn't an issue when the vaxxed thing came up because no-platforming is the standard part of free speech, so I'm happy to defend Tribeca's choice just as I was happy to defend NECSS's choice. Well, what do you mean by that because they Do you mean the choice, I assume you mean, the choice to not show Vaxxed, the documentary, but they also, I mean, they had the initial choice to invite Vaxxxed to be a part of the thing to begin with. So I don't really know. I mean the no platforming is more on the part of all the people protesting, I think.

0:34:30 Thomas: Is that a good result? Not should, you know, this film festival cave when there's massive public outcry or whatever. As for potential differences between the two, I'm not sure I'm convinced that many, if any, exist. Now, this is interesting. It could be true that it's different because Dawkins was discussing a social issue, whereas Wakefield's is a scientific issue. But to me, that difference, if anything, means that it is more important to know platform Dawkins, since social issues are massively important, whereas scientific issues don't necessarily have a real-world impact. This is where I think you've lost your mind. But of course, that's just because I'm coming from a different point of view, I guess. And then you said, and I hope this is a typo. I hope I'm going to, like Sam said, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

0:35:20 Thomas: Because he said, "scientific issues don't necessarily have a real-world impact," the vaccination case here not being an exception to that. I hope you meant being an exemption to that, because it's pretty important. So, I'm going to assume you did because that would, I mean, that would be pretty outrageous if you thought the vaccination case isn't an exception to your rule of scientific issues not having a real-world impact. "Yeah, but anyway, their opinions, but their opinions about real things and facts about the world, if they're not based on evidence and are, in fact, contradicted by evidence, then it's no better than making claims about scientific issues without evidence." Not totally sure what that means. I'm not really sure where this stance against no-platforming came from.

0:36:07 Thomas: Just a couple of years ago, it was the standard accepted position in the atheist community to support no-platforming, spearheaded by Dawkins himself, who was almost known for his staunch no-plateforming stance. Now, this is interesting. I actually think you have a good point here. Even today, going on Mike Samsa, even today he holds the same views in that he refuses to debate creationists to avoid lending credence to their views.

He even has the same position for other skeptics and atheists he disagrees with, like making sure Rebecca Watson isn't allowed to speak at conferences he's at. My view is that there's nothing inherently wrong with no-platforming. If someone is a terrible person and you don't want to lend credence to their views, even if they're going to be talking about something completely unrelated, then absolutely don't invite them. Them. There can be good reasons for no-platforming and bad reasons for it in specific instances, and we could debate those, but trying to draw a hard line against it doesn't make sense to me. If Sam Harris is right when he argues that some views are so dangerous that they could justify nuclear first strikes, which is a bad quote by the way, I'm pretty sure we can accept some views that are dangerous enough that we shouldn't be willingly giving them more airtime.

The Sam Harris quote you're looking for is that some views are so dangerous that we could justify killing people for them, not a nuclear first strike. That's a different, separate point he made. And he made that point because the leader of, at the time, was it Al-Qaeda or, anyway, the leader of one of those groups hadn't actually killed anybody, but he was saying we'd be justified in killing him because his ideas and his beliefs are leading to killing people.

0:37:44 Thomas: I mean, he believes that that America should be brought down, etc., etc. So that was what that's about. But anyway, that's a sidebar. So this interesting issue, I think this, Mike, this really summarizes the difference between the differences that we tend to have. Because for you to say that it's more important to no platform someone on a social issue, which to me, social issues I see as, sure, they can be important depending on what it is. They can also be very unimportant. So, there's a wide range there, whereas when it's someone who is fraudulently peddling false science, I see that as way more important. That seems to be, especially when it relates to vaccinations, of course, but I mean, even if it doesn't, that's fraudulent behavior where we could definitively prove, hey, your view is wrong.

0:38:37 Thomas: It's been contradicted by science, and also, in this case, it's someone who was pretty fraudulent in how they were advocating their view that's been discredited by science. So I have the exact opposite point of view as you. I don't think social beliefs necessarily or social issues are 100% clean cut. I mean, a lot of them are, sure, but not all of them. And so to say, like, it's important that we know platform whoever has a social view that we don't like, I mean...

Okay, in my mind, I'm talking about advocating it. We'll be Once again, let's separate, yes, both Tribeca and any CSS, they all have the right to do whatever they want. I understand that. I'm never disputing the right. I just want to make that clear because, Mike, I'm talking about if you were someone, and I know you weren't, but if the listener, this was someone who was complaining about no-platforming and then proceeded to seek to no-platform the Tribeca guy. My only point was they had better think about that. They had better to think and make sure, I think, that an alarm should go off like, hey, wait a minute, yesterday I was against no platforming, today I'm pro no platform. You should at least, you know, you should at least critically think through it. That's the only point I want to make in this whole thing.

And when I critically thought through it, I thought, well, one guy is a fraud and is peddling false science is demonstrable, so it's very uncontroversial, really. There's just misconceptions about it. It. And another example is someone who has a certain social belief, but is speaking maybe on something else or whatever.

0:40:12 Thomas: Like I, I don't really personally, I wouldn't really advocate for no platforming, but I'm just saying, be consistent. That's all I'm saying. If you're consistently, no, don't de-platform anyone. Don't no platform anyone. Make sure you have a good reason for that. Or if you're a fan like Mike, Mike Samsa, if you're a fan of no-platforming in general, I really don't mind. I mean, that's totally fine. But then, of course, just be ready when it's a view that you like and, you know, people are widely against it and no platform it all the time. I mean, just to be ready to say, yeah, that's fine, because I'm, in general, again, I'm not talking about legality. I'm talking about, in general, an attitude of advocacy for this. That's all I'm talking about. And you make a good point about Dawkins. He does. That's a good point.

0:40:58 Thomas: I mean he does essentially no platform and always did Creationists by saying they shouldn't be invited to debates, you shouldn't... Yeah, you have a good point there, Mike, so I think that's a worthy thing to bring up. Gerald had a different take on it. He thought, I'll just read part of this. The film festival showing the anti-vax movie is different for one important reason, the potential for harm. The misinformed idea that vaccines cause autism actually kills kids. People who are dogmatically committed to this idea will not change their mind on the issue. Yeah, so I didn't read all that comment, but Gerald was essentially saying the criterion should be harm. I don't know if I necessarily agree with that, because that's actually subjective. Well, okay, in the vaccines case, it's not.

0:41:45 Thomas: So I agree that in that case, it's easy to build a subjective case or an objective case for that. But someone like Mike Samsa could say, well, the harm of someone who doesn't recognize trans rights or the harm, like you can make all kinds of cases for harm. So I didn't really think that was quite a worthy criterion criterion for deciding whether or not to know platform, because don't you foresee everyone making the case for harm? Oh, if Dawkins has a view about, I don't know, women, it's going to harm whatever. If this person has a viewpoint about this, it is going to cause all kinds of harm socially. So, I mean, that's why I wasn't too terribly in love with that idea, but I appreciate the comment. And then I wanted to just quickly read one by Sezet.

0:42:33 Thomas: Tom, your befuddlement on on the pointlessness of the guy who gave an opinion then told you to fuck off because you didn't agree is mirrored 100% by every woman who is street harassed or experiences unwanted sexual attention. I couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. So many guys feel free to yell all sorts of come-ons, then when they don't get the response they want, they yell an insult. "Hey baby, nice ass." "Well, you're ugly anyway." These people are looking for an affirmation, and the fuck-off response is just self-protection. Some people with weak egos or over-inflated self-importance react to rejection or a challenge with anything from insults to violence. I agree with that. I mean, that's a little bit of armchair philosophizing, or rather psychology, not philosophizing. That's armchair psychology going on, but it's convincing to me. That is totally true.

0:43:19 Thomas: I can't believe people do that. It's horrible. I hate it. And thanks for the comment. So that's it for this show. Thank you so much for listening. Like I said, a nice big chunk of of Kevin Folta interview on Monday that you can get right away if you just go to patreon.com/atheist and pledge today as little as a dollar a show. All right, that's it. I will see you next time.