Ep. #487: Kurtis Frank on the Benefits and Risks of Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs)

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So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Hello, welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I am Mike Matthews, and we’re here today to talk about GMO foods, because there has been a lot of grumbling about GMO foods over the last decade or so, and many of the claims that are being made are alarming enough to scare your puckers shut.

These foods are poisonous, some people say, and they increase your risk of all kinds of disease and dysfunction. At some point in the future, these people prophecy, we are going to look back on GMOs like we do fluoroscopes, lobotomies, and DDT. The other camp, though, says all that is hogwash. They say that genetically modified foods are perfectly safe and well studied and we should stop tilting at windmills and just embrace this wonderful product of modern food science.

Who is right? That is what this podcast is all about, and in it, Curtis Frank and I are break it all down, starting with what GMOs are and how they’re created, the difference between some GMO foods that are probably or almost certainly not a reason for concern, and others that may very well be, why genetically modified plant and animal foods are different, and more.

Oh, and in case you’re not familiar with Curtis, he is the co founder and former lead researcher and writer over at examine. com. So if you’ve ever poked around examine all of more or less all of the highly technical Highly detailed highly referenced information that you find at examine was researched and written by Curtis And he is also the director of research for my sports nutrition company Legion Athletics.

All right. Let’s get to the interview Curtis, Frank has returned. Sounded like you just did a line or something. 

Kurtis: Oh, no. I just coughed a little bit and tried to say hello after, but I forgot the H. 

Mike: This might be more of an interesting interview than I anticipated. 

Kurtis: Yeah, I’m a little bit, I don’t know, loose, happy.

That’s good. Not drunk, just to confirm. 

Mike: That’s even better. 

Kurtis: Yeah, I figured the first two may have sent everyone on a little adventure with their minds thinking maybe I was drinking a bit too much, but nope, not yet. 

Mike: Just high on life. Oh, totally. Life energies. All right. We’re talking about GMOs today, genetically modified, I guess we’re specifically we’re gonna be talking about genetically modified food.

This is something I’ve been asked about fairly often, and I’ve always punted. I’ve just said, I’m not because I understand that there is quite a bit of research that if you take it at face value, it indicate that GMOs are great and that we should just eat as many of them as possible.

And anyone who says otherwise is a conspiracy theorist. And then on the other hand, of course, you have people who have basically the polar opposite position of these foods are basically poison. My assumption has always been that it’s probably somewhere in between. And in the limited amount of reading that I’ve done on it, that seemed to be supporting.

Ported by at least some smart people who were specialists in the field, who were saying that, of course, there are positive aspects of this technology and there are potential downsides. Maybe we shouldn’t race to embrace it as quickly as we are, and maybe we should be a bit more careful. And there are some real open questions as to how these foods or some of the foods might be okay.

Other foods, maybe not so much, especially when you’re getting into animals as well. And. Especially with some people. And I intentionally have not really, I haven’t written about it and I haven’t spoken about it because I didn’t want to put the time needed into that it would require really to do it. And so that’s why I’m just using you, Curtis, to make me look good, to share the information that I didn’t want to go dig up and to be honest, you’re a better person.

I wanted to find somebody who understands biology in a way that. That’s above my pay grade. For me to try to get to your level of understanding of biology would take a lot of time. I’m excited to have you here to break this down for us. 

Kurtis: You’re basically using a cracked mirror to make yourself look good here.

Like it’s decent enough because you’re good and all that, but bit of a problem because I should clarify to the audience that I’m not an overall expert of GMOs. I just know genetics and all that and what it means to modify them and the implications thereof. But this podcast will probably not answer a lot of questions.

It’ll probably just give you a good base of understanding of what GMOs actually 

Mike: are. And then we can get into some of the, at least some of the open questions as to, are there Legitimate reasons for concern. Should we care at all? Or is all of it just alarmism being used to try to oftentimes sell us stuff, sell us organic food or sell us supplements that we’re supposed to take if we’re eating GMOs and stuff like that.

Kurtis: I guess I should start with just saying the basic definition of GMO is genetically modified organism. And the more I think about it, the vaguer it gets. It basically means that there is some sort of organism which had at least one gene modified. Now, with all the genes we have in our body, this could be completely worthless.

You could literally modify a gene in your body right now and not be able to detect it. A single gene is usually not that potent. But the idea behind GMOs is that they target a specific gene that they want to increase or decrease. Because they think it’ll make the product or species better. A good example, like this is a egotistical example, but it’s a good one.

And it’s when GMOs made tomatoes more red. The only reason they did this was because red tomatoes sold better, but they made the tomatoes more red and people bought them more. So they earned more money. It didn’t have any nutritional benefits, didn’t have any nutritional downsides, had no major effect at all.

They were just slightly more red because of a GMO. A completely neutral, Unreactive GMO. 

Mike: And just to add to that, genetic modification has also been going on for a long time, even before we had fancy technology just through interbreeding. And so maybe people could have figured out how to naturally make these tomatoes grow more red by, I don’t know anything about botany, honestly, or agriculture, but.

I’m sure that somebody who knows about those things could put forward a theory like, okay, if we want these things to come out more red, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take this plant here. And then we’re going to take this plant here and we’re going to work with them this way. And maybe over several generations, we’ll get redder tomatoes, but that would take more time than just being able to go in with technology that can edit a gene and be like, cool, we’re done.

Kurtis: Precisely. The main benefit of GMOs is that not only are they precise, they’re fast. So you could simply crossbreed plants, but that takes a long time, a lot of generations to go through. 

Mike: Sorry to interrupt, but how do you crossbreed plants exactly? I don’t even know if I’ve ever even grown a plant in my life.

Maybe in school, we like did a project. I’m not remembering, but 

Kurtis: you’re not asking a botanist right now. 

Mike: All right. While you continue, I’m going to Google and I’m going to find my answer and I’ll share it with everybody. 

Kurtis: I find your answer, but I’ll just continue. So it started with crossbreeding plants.

Then GMOs eventually started speeding things up with bacteria and viral genetic modification of their target plants. They were initially not the best, but they refined on it and made it faster. And now we’re in the CRISPR days. And if you don’t know, CRISPR is basically a technology that allows for very rapid and very precise genetic modification.

And CRISPR is actually awesome. I just need to say that it’s not like some weird conspiracy theory off the wall crazy shit. It’s actually just something we really want more of. Because it can amplify the rate of science so fast. But it also amplifies the rate of GMOs. And as long as safety procedures are followed, we’re good.

But the main issue is that if people don’t abide by the safety regulations, then perhaps some issues could come up in the future. But so far, no major ones have happened yet. Still could be a concern for the future. Not an issue at this moment in time. 

Mike: Yeah, I’ve read a bit about CRISPR. Seems interesting.

I read it. It was in the context of gene editing humans and kind of designer babies, which seems freaky, but. 

Kurtis: Yeah, that’s like the end goal of GMOs is running hits to humans because humans are organisms. And that’s when all the ethical issues hit because right now we can just play with the tomato as much as we want Pump up the lutein Pump up the vitamin a pump up the redness pump up the plumpness and all that No one bats an eye the moment we go to a human.

It’s we should just plump up the muscularity Whoop eugenics And then the huge wall is hit. 

Mike: That’s what China’s for. They don’t care. 

Kurtis: Yeah, exactly. But like GMOs at this point in time are good for vegetables and fruits and all that. 

Mike: Pretty sure eugenics are good for vegetables and fruits too.

Kurtis: Technically they’re the same thing. 

Mike: It’s funny how that word, not to go on a random tangent, but that word has a very negative connotation, of course. But if you take the recent history out of it and you just look at the dictionary definition, it’s a good thing. Yes, we want more of this. Please 

Kurtis: talk eugenics or 

Mike: eugenics.

Yes. You just get, please people with the best DNA, please get together and make babies for the collective future of our species. 

Kurtis: Do you even want me to continue with that line of thought? I’m 

Mike: just saying that if you were to say it that way, you’d be like, yeah, that’s cool. And you’d be like that’s eugenics.

Kurtis: No, cause there’s a one. Is that a guy talking in front of Congress and he had down syndrome right but he was like everything about him was completely normal aside from the fact that you can see a down syndrome like I forget his name like I really should have remembered it for the podcast but he mentioned how.

Us with Down syndromes are the canaries in the coal mine. If we go away, a lot more of you will go away in the next few years. Which is why I do really, I’m super cautious about any genetic modification of humans. Because I know that those people will be targeted first. And I know that whoever targets them, Will not stop.

Capitalism has no breaks. 

Mike: Oh yeah, no. To be specific, yeah, I’m not talking about eugenics. Again, I’m talking about just in a dictionary sense, right? Reproduction in a way that’s improving the genetic material over time instead of 

Kurtis: Oh, yeah, but you’re talking morality. And I’m talking capitalism and capitalism don’t care about morality, 

Mike: but we’ve been doing it.

All I’m saying is we’ve been doing a natural form of eugenics, at least here in the West for a long time. Even female hypergamy, right? Women, just the biological drive to mate with kind of the cream of the crop to get the best genetic material to mate with. That is a natural form of 

Kurtis: eugenics. Yeah, true.

I feel we may lose listeners unless you get back to the tomatoes.

Mike: Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they’re waiting. Where else is 

Kurtis: this going 

Mike: to go? By the way, to cross breed plants. So let’s see what you do is you take the male pollen from one parent plant, a flower, and then you put it onto the. female reproductive part of the other plant, and then you have to harvest the seeds and then you got to grow those.

So that actually makes sense. You violate plants and then you steal their children and you turn them into uber plants. 

Kurtis: Don’t make me think of farms as concentration camps. It gets worse. 

Mike: It’s 

Kurtis: I know it gets worse, but yeah, basically I just want to 

Mike: summarize farmers are Nazis. That’s all I’m saying.

Kurtis: Totally. But I just want to summarize and get us all back on topic. GMOs are not inherently bad, nor are they inherently good. All they mean is that a single gene was modified. This could be good. This could be bad, but we need to be specific of which GMO we’re speaking of and any claim to all GMOs overall is false because it is far too vast a topic with way too many diverging examples to summarize with the single blanket statement.

And it’s just a single gene. You could modify multiple genes. But to classify as a GMO, you need to modify at least one gene. 

Mike: Okay. At least one. 

Kurtis: Yes. You could modify five if you want. It’s still a GMO, but like most people are very precise. Like they see a tomato that is like delicious, but it rots really fast.

And then they say, whatever gene makes it rot. knock it out. But if they find that three genes work in concert to make it rot, they knock them all out. And then boom, the tomato doesn’t rot anymore. 

Mike: And so if modifying a tomato to make it more red is an example of benign modification, what’s an example of something that maybe We don’t know that it is necessarily harmful, but it may not be such a great idea.

There may be a reason to not do it, or there may be some sort of health risk associated with eating a bunch of foods that have been edited in that way. Even if it’s just in some people, even if it’s how the foods interact with people’s individual genetics, 

Kurtis: that’s a pretty difficult question, but I would say that anything that influences the plant’s composition or nutrient growth sort of thing.

Like in the end, not even a plant, but this applies to animals as well. So let’s say an egg. You want to make an egg, but people say that they don’t want enough cholesterol. So you want to make a GMO egg that has low cholesterol in it. But cholesterol is the first byproduct in the synthesis of androgens and estrogens.

So if you were to modify the gene in, most likely, the chicken, because it lays the egg. You can’t inject every single egg as soon as it pops out of the butt. You’re going to negatively influence the chicken because of your, short sighted desires to reduce cholesterol at an egg kind of thing.

And that may actually be the main, at least in my opinion, the main downside of GMOs. 

Mike: How might that then negatively affect people who eat the egg or the chicken as well? 

Kurtis: Before I continue on that, it’s just, I feel that like at this moment in time, I don’t think GMOs are negative at this moment in time.

But I feel that if GMOs, especially due to CRISPR accelerating things, continue on their route, there may be negatives in the future, but they will impact farm animals before they affect us. Because, there are a lot of regulations preventing people from selling dangerous compounds to humans. But there’s less regulations when it comes to injecting your chickens with some weird ass virus.

The animals will hurt more before us. But beyond that, like, when it comes to humans, it’s the whole, you know how when it comes to the food pyramid, every decade or so, people just say, oh, this nutrient’s bad, or that nutrient’s bad, or this macronutrient just don’t have any of it, and it changes every 10 years.

GMOs could straight up take an entire crop, if there’s enough power behind it. and eliminate a huge portion of that macronutrient. What if all potatoes just had half the carbs? At all, like all American potatoes, just half the carbs, just because the government agency decided, carbs bad, thus genetically modify our entire agricultural industry.

That’s like a worst case scenario, it could theoretically happen if there’s just enough fat behind it. Like not to carbs, mind you, like carbs are proven enough that it would never happen to them. But when it comes to some sort of micronutrient, let’s say the zeaxanthin or lutein in eggs, if ablating cholesterol growth in eggs will result in less zeaxanthin and lutein, I could see some industries saying that is completely acceptable.

And then the main source of zeaxanthin in American diets just Goes away, it’s not to anyone’s fault or anything It’s just because some industry thought it was a good idea and there were a bunch of idiots 

Mike: Hey if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere And if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives.

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To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics. com, and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout, and you will save 20 percent on your entire order, if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order.

That’s essentially 10 percent cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics. com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. And what about, let’s see, there’s genetic modification with agricultural products.

I think it’s like drought resistance, pest resistance as well are common reasons. 

Kurtis: Those are generally the good reasons, to be honest, like just to make the crops a bit more resilient, but not influence them in any other way. The more crops that actually live. The better it is, as long as they don’t actually murder insects or harm humans, then it’s good.

Mike: And in the case of animals, how does that look? Because I’m also, I’m just curious as to if, again, are there legitimate criticisms or is a lot of it just complete alarmism? 

Kurtis: What do you mean when you say in regards to animals? 

Mike: Again, I haven’t looked too much into it, but aren’t there instances of where animals or DNA is spliced into, and these, this may actually be outside of the food supply action now that I think about it, but.

Kurtis: Not necessarily. 

Mike: Like I, if I remember correctly, there was salmon that was genetically modified that for people to, 

Kurtis: yeah, the awkward vantage salmon, it’s a GMO salmon. 

Mike: And what’s the story there? 

Kurtis: If you give me a few seconds to read their wiki page, from what I can tell a general growth GMO, they just made them grow faster, but awkward vantage salmon was the first example of a species that lived that lives and was GMO modified.

And still fed to humans. 

Mike: What are your thoughts on that? Just because we hear that GMO has, and GMO foods also, that when livestock and other animals have eaten a bunch of GMO corn or GMO feed of one kind or another. They’ve not fared nearly as well as with non GMO. And so I’m just curious as to why you think that’s like more of just a nutritional thing, or could there be unintended consequences of least certain types of modifications that are made to food that are impacting the animals in a way that we don’t understand yet.

And then if that’s the case. Would it be fair to assume that also could be happening to some degree in humans as well? 

Kurtis: I wouldn’t say that it would happen to humans in the same degree. But beyond that, I agree with you. Because when it comes to tomatoes being GMO modified, the tomato is already dead.

You plucked it off the branch, put it in a box, and it was shipped out. It’s dead. It’s not going to reproduce with any other tomatoes. At least from what I’ve seen, I haven’t seen tomatoes getting it on at the grocery aisle. But when it comes to something like the awkward vantage salmon, or just other GMO species that are currently living, as you mentioned, there are some discrepancies with feed efficiency ratios.

And it’s because when you modify one gene, you don’t modify necessarily one parameter. Humans don’t know every single thing about every single gene at this moment in time. So because of that, there may be unintended consequences. It’s okay when it’s applied to a tomato that is destined for death, which is, thrown into a grocery supermarket and you’re going to eat it.

But if it’s applied to something that could escape and start reproducing in the wild, it’s a bit complicated. This one genetic modification you put in the animal, if it made it stronger and more robust and made it more able to reproduce with other species, it could propagate. And if it propagates, what does that mean?

Mike: Not just propagate, but dominate. 

Kurtis: That would take one to two hundred years, and let’s be honest, it’s not going to happen these days. But at the same time you don’t want modified organisms escaping and just getting out into the wild. Because at the very least, if something goes wrong with a modified organism, and it proves to harm humans, you should be able to kill the entire crop immediately.

If it’s out in the wild and it starts reproducing with others, And there’s no way to curtail it at all. And for the rest of human history, now this entire species is compromised. That’s the main issue. 

Mike: Interesting. And as far as agricultural foods go, as they’re dead, they’re obviously inert. It’s less of a concern in that regard.

Kurtis: As long as they don’t, you’ve heard of invasive species before, right? When it comes to plants. 

Mike: Yeah, I’ve heard the term, but I probably couldn’t give it a good explanation. 

Kurtis: It’s basically plants that dominate other plants and spread out a lot. The only time GMOs, for plants would be an issue is if they became an invasive species.

But at the same time, GMO plants are under a lot of surveillance and they don’t have the chance to become an invasive species. It’s not like we have GMO plants in the wild, after all. So because of that, there is low risk when it comes to agricultural GMOs. For the most part, it’s the Living GMOs that we need to be concerned about.

Mike: And how does Monsanto fit into this? Cause I think a fair amount of the criticism of GMO comes from that company and many of their practices. And so it’s, what do they call it? They call it the horn effect, right? Where, because that company Has done a lot of things to piss a lot of people off and it has also been big into GMO.

The assumption is that, oh, GMO must be bad 

Kurtis: if I recall it correctly. Monsanto is the organization that did both the greatest good and the greatest evil of GMOs. The greatest good is golden rice and to put it simply for those who have not heard of golden rice, they made golden rice, like it’s just rice, but then they added beta carotene to it, which is the vitamin A precursor and some variants just add a little bit more of other nutrients.

And then they shipped a ton of it to Africa. And in Africa they had vitamin A deficiency rampant. To the point where 7 year old kids would be blind by glaucoma. Bad, but golden rice just prevented a lot of that and at this moment in time Golden rice has saved millions of lives. It is perhaps the greatest thing ever to happen with GMOs Take a basic food product Modified to have more nutrients in it and ship it out to areas that need those nutrients with no downsides whatsoever Golden Rice is bloody perfect.

Can’t stop praising it. Monsanto, however also had the idea, the genius idea, to make a kill seed where if a farmer bought seeds from Monsanto that after about three generations the seeds would just stop producing food. So you’d grow corn, you take the corn from the plant, Then you get the seeds from the plant, and you can plant the seeds again, get more corn from it without paying anything.

But Monsanto realized that this cuts into their profit margins, so they made it so you can only do this about two or three times before the seeds just stopped working. This is perhaps the most dangerous idea ever introduced to GMOs, because if that happens to crossbreed with other plants, All plants die.

That’s it. They just die. 

Mike: It’s a reasonable risk for billions of shekels, 

Kurtis: america is just all a desert now. Like everything, there’s no plants. 

Mike: Yeah. I have my compound on the edge of the world. So that’s not my problem. 

Kurtis: Invest in cactuses. They might live. 

Mike: And then of course, there’s also, there was a lot of controversy that created with farmers who were like, no.

Kurtis: Oh, the farmers were the ones most pissed off. Cause like farmers get the shit end of the stick all the time. And they didn’t want to have extra shit on the same stick. And they just want to get some seeds. It grows. 

Mike: I remember seeing headlines of, there were instances where, one where Monsanto was pressuring, they were trying to force farmers to start using their kill seeds, and then in some cases where there was, cross pollination occurring between non GMO and then these GMO crop fields.

And so it was causing problems for farmers who didn’t want to use these modified seeds. And I’m assuming that’s one of the reasons or. Probably the first point that you made is one of the main reasons why GMOs are not allowed in some countries. I’m right with that, right? Like some countries, they just don’t allow Monsanto GMO corn, for instance, to be grown.

And I believe there’s, these are Western, like highly industrialized developed countries too, right? 

Kurtis: I’m not sure about international policies, but While I’m normally a defender against GMOs as a general concept, if someone specifies Monsanto GMO corn, yeah, you can ban that. I’m totally okay with that.

Just ban it. 

Mike: Why? 

Kurtis: Because of the kill seeds. 

Mike: Oh, so it’s specifically for that crop. Okay. 

Kurtis: Like it’s just the general idea. Like when you don’t want to ban entire category, you want to ban the specific instances of the category, which are negative and the kill seed is a definitive negative on anything that is applied to.

If someone wants to ban kill seeds from happening in their country, go for it. If a worst case scenario happens, at least you guys got food. 

Mike: Yeah, I’m just looking at, on this point in particular, because I wanted to pull up which countries are definitely, according to an article written in The Nation, published in 2013, at that time there were 26 countries that banned GMOs, and, 

Kurtis: You screwed up when you’re a private company getting banned by multinationals.

Mike: Yeah, no, sure. Like 

Kurtis: multiple nations. Yeah, 

Mike: Yeah. Especially when you’re a multinational company who has enough money to do a lot of lobbying and you still can’t make it 

Kurtis: happen. You’re still banned by 26 nations. You’re pretty 

Mike: bad. Someone’s screwed up. You’re pretty bad at this game. It’s this BT toxin in particular that was used in GMO corn.

It’s a commonly used as a biological pesticide. So it’s to make, it’s to make crops more pest resistant. Let’s see, there is research that showed that it was detected in the blood of pregnant women and their babies. That’s not a good sign. And then there’s the point of genetic contamination, particularly with this GMO BT toxin, BT corn, as they call it.

Examples of cross pollination in indigenous varieties of corn in Mexico. There’s an example here is a study published in nature That was looking into this, then there’s, you also had mentioned this, that, so bringing something like this into an environment can have toxic or lethal impact on other living things.

So they have an example here. There was a study that showed this BT corn was destroying the larva of the Monarch butterfly. Obviously. 

Kurtis: My British blood is boiling within me. So just destroy a monarch? I will pillage 

Mike: him! Just a butterfly. 

Kurtis: I will colonize them! 

Mike: You guys don’t have guns anymore, so put your butter knife down.

Kurtis: Butter knife. It is not made for butter. It’s made for the queen. 

Mike: Yeah. So it’s just this point. It looks like the more controversial that has some research behind it points are the GMO foods that are either designed to produce their own pesticides or to be resistant to herbicides. So then the herbicides can be sprayed in massive quantities without harming the crops.

Kurtis: That’s smart. That was sarcastic. 

Mike: Again, smart, if your only metric is monies. 

Kurtis: It’s financially prudent, as you will say. 

Mike: And then insects develop resistance to the chemicals, which require more chemicals and different chemicals. And then there’s the kill seed point of just concentrating power in the hands of a few of these biotech corporations that are able to dictate who gets the special seeds and who doesn’t.

Kurtis: Yeah, I’ve played enough Day is X in my youth to know that’s just a bad idea. 

Mike: Biotech is evil. 

Kurtis: Have you not heard about the Day is X series? 

Mike: Of course, I just never played any of the games. I’ve listened to the soundtrack of one of the more recent ones many times. It’s a good soundtrack actually. 

Kurtis: Oh yeah, definitely.

But it’s all about how If capitalism has no restraints, they just go straight up evil kind of thing, controlling everything. It’s mostly a pharma and cybernetic stuff, they like control. So if they control the entire food supply in the entire world, they’re going to do it. 

Mike: I forget who said this.

How is this quote? The primary goal of Adam Jensen. Is he a character in the game? 

Kurtis: He’s a protagonist. He’s very good. I never asked. I never asked for this. 

Mike: How did I know that? I haven’t even played the game. I’m impressed that I knew that. Just a quote from I think it was an economist who said that the primary goal of any corporation is to engulf everything or something like that.

Kurtis: I hate how that’s accurate. 

Mike: Engulf everything. 

Kurtis: I think that’s literally why I’m a liberal. It’s yeah, capitalism, do your things until I hate you and then I’ll curtail you. 

Mike: But you’re liberal in the classical liberal sense. We should qualify that. Oh, 

Kurtis: yeah. Like I’m a liberal in classical sense, leading libertarian.

The only reason I’m not libertarian straight up is because they’re all like, let all corporations do whatever they want. They can have it in much powers, government agencies, whatever. It’s totally fine. And then I look at them and it’s no, this is not fine. This is definitely wrong. Yeah, 

Mike: I agree.

I’m over my libertarian days where are you cities think 

Kurtis: I’m so classical liberal that people confuse me. 

Mike: And that’s a sign of the times. That’s a sign of clown world. But 

Kurtis: yeah, like there are so many fields, you’re like, Oh, you’re going to serve. There’s no. I shouldn’t be insulted by 

Mike: that. I don’t even know what I consider myself.

Like I try to explain it. I’m like, yeah, I guess I have a heavy dose of maybe you’d call it traditionalism. And I think there’s a lot of value in tradition and not just trying to overthrow everything because there’s a lot of, it took a lot of work to get to where we are and to get a stable society that is relatively.

Unviolent, if you look at it in the context of history, and we have a lot of prosperity here. And we have a lot going for us. And maybe we shouldn’t assume that we understand the system that got us here as well as you might want to think we do. And therefore maybe we should be a little bit more, should be a little less enthusiastic about just ripping random parts of it out and Frankensteining other random body parts in, and just hoping that everything comes out nicely.

Kurtis: Have you ever take the eight values test? 

Mike: No. 

Kurtis: Okay. I’ll send it to you after the podcast and then maybe we can link it and the description, but it’s basically just a general idea of where you stand on the political spectrum. I ended up with centrist, slightly leaning towards libertarian, which is exactly where I thought I’d be.

I 

Mike: have it pulled up. I’m going to take it after this 

Kurtis: eight values. github. io. Yep. That’s exactly the same site. It’s just interesting because. I never knew how much of a fence sitter I was until that moment. 

Mike: I don’t want to divert this conversation too much, but the running internet joke, right? Is libertarians are driven partially like 50 percent of them hates roads and 50 percent of them just likes child porn in that you have people that one of the reasons why, and there’s actually, it’s a joke, But it’s obviously just sensationalism to make you laugh.

But the point is that sure, there’s the whole, all governments are bad and in all taxation is theft, which I don’t even necessarily agree with and all force is bad, which is stupid, but then there’s also this idea that everyone should just be able to do whatever they want so long as it makes them happy.

And I’m always suspicious. I had just written about this recently in a book. book review I did, I’m always suspicious of people who are reluctant to take a strong moral stand against what people should and shouldn’t be doing and maybe shouldn’t even be allowed to do and are very quote unquote libertarian or quote unquote liberal or quote unquote classically liberal and, just live and let live, who are you to judge who, if they want to sit around and smoke crack all day and live on Netflix and in video games and.

Hentai porn, like who cares? And whenever I hear that, I just think that are you so tolerant because have so much compassion, empathy, or are you really just trying to make a play at self preservation here? Are you really yourself a degenerate? And you know that in a society with any real standards, you would be ostracized real quick.

And so that’s why you are so live and let live. You know what I mean? 

Kurtis: Oh, yeah, totally. And I’m pretty sure they’re all self preservative. 

Mike: I think probably in a lot of cases it is, or it’s just kind of naivete. And I remember again, in my early twenties, I was very much the libertarian kind of, so long as people aren’t hurting others, who cares?

Drugs, for example should they be illegal? Should we really care as long as people aren’t hurting others? But that’s the problem when you really start looking at. A lot of different behaviors and life choices that people make, they do impose costs on others. Maybe they’re not outright just going out and directly harming others, but they are certainly imposing costs.

And should other people have to pay the costs? Should other people have to carry some of the burden for other people’s stupid decisions? Maybe a little bit. That’s part of being a part in a society. But when you have people who are actually just being a net negative on the whole, why should society accommodate that?

Kurtis: We should GMO them. 

Mike: Apparently they just need to eat a bunch of BT corn. 

Kurtis: No, just find the aggression gene and just like sniff it out. Give them like a red gene. You’ll find like a bunch of people look like tomatoes and it’s that person’s not aggressive. 

Mike: Oh, what a great segue. Bravo. Bravo. That’s too good.

And don’t worry. China’s already working on that. I promise you they’re going to figure out when your social score drops below A certain number and stays there for long enough. They’re just going to forcibly sterilize you and then figure out some way to give you like, a genetic kind of scarlet letter that anyone can see.

Kurtis: Do you get political with other people on the podcast or is it just me? I’m not the blessed one. 

Mike: You’re one of the blessed ones. You’re one of the initiated. Praise be to Baphomet. 

Kurtis: I’ll throw you a bone. Okay. When it comes to having 3 million of your own people in concentration camps and also harvesting your own people’s organs and also keeping all this news away from the media and stealing IPs from other nations, maybe you’re doing some creepy scientific shit behind everyone’s back.

Just hypothetical. I don’t know. It’s not like a communist regime ever does anything immoral. 

Mike: You sound like a conspiracy theorist. 

Kurtis: Oh yeah, totally. I’m the anti Lebron James. I have no sneaker deals. You can’t take them from me. 

Mike: Yeah, exactly. You’re officially banned in China now, by the way. Just in case you were wondering, their AI will find this and your band.

Kurtis: That likens me to South Park and I’m grateful for it. And I should also mention to all people who are listening, watch this season of South Park because it goes in hard on China and it’s just hilarious. 

Mike: I got the show band there. 

Kurtis: Yeah. Like they actually had an episode that was called band in China, but it was a music band, right?

But it was a double entendre, and they went so hard on China. But basically South Park is literally banned in China now. It is straight up banned in China because they went in so hard that the Chinese communist president got his panties in a twist and said when I don’t like this and now South Park’s not allowed in China.

Mike: Badge one. That’s 

Kurtis: how you know it’s quality. 

Mike: And it’s actually a smart PR move. Just think of how much free media that got them. Getting banned is just great marketing. 

Kurtis: And the episode was literally called Banned in China. And that’s what they got them banned. They knew what they were getting into.

Respect. They played it awesomely. 

Mike: Respect. All right circling back around to genetically modifying people and animals and foods and things. Wait, 

Kurtis: people? 

Mike: That was your idea, man. You’re a eugenicist at heart, aren’t you? 

Kurtis: Only if everyone looks like me. 

Mike: Mate, you can make that happen. Like some Genghis Khan action.

Kurtis: Genghis Frank. 

Mike: Hey, it has actually has a ring to it. Cause the Franks were pretty, pretty savage in their time. 

Kurtis: No, I like, I can’t abandon my first name. I should actually mention this to the people listening cause it’s just going to be hilarious. Because my name is Curtis Frank, right? And it turns out that I had to send an email to somebody.

I won’t mention who. And they were getting a bit on my nerves, and I was in a position of power over them. So I had to casually mention to them how I was disconcerted with their disposition, as we may say. So I basically said that the Kurt in my name stands for honest, the Frank in my name stands for honest.

And honestly, do X by Monday. Otherwise we’re abandoning you. 

Mike: And did it work? 

Kurtis: I got a response in 10 minutes after not getting a response for two months. 

Mike: See, but according to libertarians, you just violated the non aggression principle, you fascist. 

Kurtis: I’m so aggressive. And that is honest for both. My name is Mina.

Mike: Curt doesn’t mean honest though. It just means like brief. It actually means rude, right? It has a rude connotation. So that was your rude honesty, actually. Perfect. Perfect. 

Kurtis: Frank means like honest in and of itself, but Kurt is very much similar to an aggressive bluntness, where it means honest, but aggressively and don’t say anything.

I’m going to shut you up right now. Type of honest, 

Mike: I think you enjoyed that email. Maybe a little bit too much, particularly that point. You’re like, Oh, this is too perfect. This has to work. This is like a hack 

Kurtis: my entire life. I’ve waited for that email. I am Mr. Honest, honest man. 

Mike: No rude, honest man.

Kurtis: Honestly, rude, honest man, and I shall be honest yet a bit rude. 

Mike: Some inception action there. 

Kurtis: Is it even possible to segue this back into GMOs anymore or no? 

Mike: Yeah, now we’re just going to say that, those are the main points that I had on GMO. And I think that hopefully this episode’s been at least partially informative to people listening.

I’ll throw in some random commentary in the end. Turn it back over to you, Curtis, but if based on my limited reading, there does seem to be some valid concerns with some of these foods, like some of the stuff that I mentioned with BT corn, this, that’s what I had heard about previously was that it was pest resistant and herbicide resistant foods.

Like those actually may be a problem. We may not want people eating a bunch of those foods. And then there were the other issues of. Contamination and consolidation of seeds and just power over who can grow what, how these foods also might impact just the ecosystems that they’re grown in the plant, the other animals that eat them and what other things might get in the soil that might cause issues, but that from what I’ve heard.

Read and what I was looking into before we got on the podcast seems to be again limited to there are certain specific examples of that does not apply to any and all genetic modification that is done to foods. 

Kurtis: And yeah, that’s pretty much the main reason why I Really was excited for this podcast because I wanted to defend the notion of GMOs because as long as the notion of GMOs is active then we can have wonderful foods like golden rice but we need to have a lot large amount of criticism and just because something is GMO does not mean it’s good.

It could be very bad but we need to specify each specific GMO targeted specifically. 

Mike: And hopefully, ethically, where certain people definitely were thinking like, Hey, if we take this food here and we jack up this bacteria, that is a natural pesticide, then maybe that’s not going to be good. If people are eating a bunch of it now, whatever, turn it loose, see what happens.

Kurtis: It all depends. Resveratrol and caffeine are both natural pesticides. So increasing their amounts could be cool, but you could increase one of the pesticides that is not beneficial to human biology. Again, it’s all the reason I want to mention golden rice so much is because when I mention golden rice, that is a very specific GMO.

And it’s one that everyone can look into and say, this did good. This GMO did good. And that’s what I want GMOs to be, where we look at every specific GMO and say whether it’s good, bad, moderate, or indeterminate. One of those things. I just don’t like the idea of judging all GMOs under the banner of GMOs.

Some, like Golden Rice, are very good. Some, like the Flavorsaver Tomato, the Awkward Vantage Salmon we mentioned earlier, and then just the whole increasing the redness of tomatoes, they’re just inert, for the most part. And then there are, I’m sure there are some that are negative, but I couldn’t really find them right now, because they’ve been taken off the market.

Can’t find any negative GMOs on the market that we know about. They could be there, but maybe the science hasn’t been done yet. 

Mike: The BT corn example that I gave is one that we know about. Maybe it’s not conclusively, okay, this is a huge problem, but there’s at least reason for concern, it seems 

Kurtis: yeah, it seems like it, but I wasn’t able to come to conclusions myself. So 

Mike: Yeah. And of course not again, I’m not me. That’s why I also wanted to pick your brain on the topic because I wasn’t able to find anything that even for myself where I’m personally not concerned about eating GMO foods. And now a lot of the foods I eat tend to be organic.

Just. Because my wife likes to buy organic food, and I do actually think some organic food tastes better than conventional. And I do that some of it has more nutrition than conventional, but I’m not concerned so much about the genetic modification side of that. If they don’t have what I might normally get in an organic, I get conventional and I’m not worried about it.

Kurtis: Yeah, same on my end. It’s just, ultimately, if the organic is the regular or similar enough prices, I’ll go for whatever is cheaper. Sometimes like I’d say like maybe 60 percent of the time, the organic looks better than the regular, it’s like technically a difference, but not too much of a difference.

So I just buy whatever looks good, to be honest. And then I just keep my eyes out on if. There’s anything I need to completely avoid, which so far I have not seen because usually they’re taking off the market as soon as they are seen to have a huge major health risk to the public. 

Mike: In this case, though, obviously it’s a bit more complex because the amount of money that’s behind it and 

Kurtis: exactly 

Mike: science is great, but you can find corruption anywhere and there are plenty of examples.

Kurtis: I’m Canadian. You don’t need to get into that. We know, 

Mike: I don’t even know what that means, but I guess your government is like every other government is what you’re saying. Justin Trudeau after all. 

Kurtis: Oh, our blackface president bought off the media. He 

Mike: doesn’t even know how many times that he wore blackface.

Kurtis: Oh no. He knows exactly how many times he just said that. So he got out of 

Mike: it. He always has a mask on one mask or another. 

Kurtis: Yeah. And he literally if we’re going in Canada, we literally had a media bailout. You know how in America they bail out the banks. And how most people didn’t know what this meant, but thought if the banks went away, that would be bad in Canada.

We had a bailout of the media of which a hundred percent of Canadians thought wait We don’t care if the media goes away. They can just go away if we if all we want 

Mike: especially state funded media Please go. 

Kurtis: Yeah, pretty much but Their bailout went through anyways, and now every single, media organization in Canada that is left leaning is funded by Trudeau himself.

Mike: People aren’t going to brainwash themselves, Curtis. 

Kurtis: Yeah we have state funded media in Canada now. Totally unbiased, mind you. 

Mike: They say so. People don’t lie. We know that 

Kurtis: no liars at all. It’s I’ve never been in blackface. Whoops. 

Mike: That reminds me of just to take us in a very different direction.

And then we can just stop altogether. That reminds me of a discussion I was having with someone about FFMI and steroid use that there’s research out there where people like D1 college athlete either say they haven’t used steroids or just never mentioned that they haven’t used steroids and that was then assumed to be used.

Conclusive. Either they said they didn’t use steroids or they never mentioned it. And so they must not have used steroids. I’m like, no, or they’re lying. Or they just didn’t want to tell you. Why would a D1 football player lie about his steroid use? I don’t know fuck man, I don’t know what kind of world You live in a different world, my friend.

And part of me wishes I lived there too. 

Kurtis: Why would somebody lie to earn six digits a year? I don’t understand. 

Mike: And have a shot at seven or even eight. Why would a bodybuilder lie and say that he’s natural to compete in a natural federation? Thanks for watching! 

Kurtis: Yeah, like the entire friggin difference between natural bodybuilding and regular bodybuilding.

It ain’t regular, we all know that. 

Mike: No, it just means more drugs, that’s all. Natural means a lot of drugs, and 

Kurtis: Natural means as many drugs as you can get away with. 

Mike: You can get away with a lot. And it’s actually, it’s not even that, it’s also your physique. You can only get so big before it’s Alright, you need to go to the regular bodybuilding crowd.

It’s too many drugs for us here, come on. We’re supposed to at least look semi normal. 

Kurtis: And then when he’s got a regular bodybuilding, just look like an inevited turtle at that point. 

Mike: Well, a true natural bodybuilder, you can spot a true natural because they just don’t look very good. They get on stage and you’re like, that guy looks small and flat.

And 

Kurtis: it’s like somebody sewed 50 balloons together. 

Mike: Let’s stop now. Thanks, Curtis. It’s been great as always, and we’ll be back. We’ll be back with some other discussion that hopefully is equally stimulating as this one has been. 

Kurtis: And slightly more controversial. 

Mike: Oh, we could do that. That’d be easy. Hey, Mike here.

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