How Will We Look at Electronics Manufacturing 100 Years From Now? w/Alan Levinovitz | Joe Rogan

You know what, okay, so one of the things I do, you know how you have like the junk, the junkie folder? Yes. So to remind myself of how blind I might be and how I could, like how I need to change my mind, right? I talk about this with my students, but I keep it with myself. I actually have a, this is touchy, I have a Confederate monument in my wallet right here. So I keep, I don't know if you know, so the Confederate $2 bill. Oh, wow. That's a real Confederate $2 bill. That's a Confederate $2 bill. And that guy on it right there, that's Judah Benjamin. He's the only Jew who ever made it onto American currency, if you want to call it. And it's Confederate money. It's Confederate money. Can I see that? Yeah, go for it. What year is this from? Let's see, what does it say on there? I don't remember the exact year on the bill. This is weird, man. It's paper. Yes, paper. But then it's like really flimsy paper. I would think you would want to keep this under glass or something. No, it's not. I mean, they're not like super valuable. It's not? No. But historically, I mean, it's so touchy, right? Even saying anything about Confederate, like, of course it's not valuable, you fucking idiot. But they won't do that. I'll tell you why. Because here's why I keep that in my wallet. People won't do that. I mean, maybe they'll take that sound bite and it'll get ultra processed and people will be like, he was arguing for Confederate monuments, but that's stupid because I keep that in my wallet because that guy celebrated Passover. Which is a Jewish holiday all about how slavery was bad. Meanwhile, it looks like he's got a little Hitler must have. He had slaves. Whoa. So, here's this guy who's a Jew in America in the 1800s, who's one of his most important holidays is a celebration of the Jews' liberation from slavery who had most likely slaves in his house serving him the Passover dishes and certainly washing them. And what that means to me, at least, is like, there's going to be something in my life that I'm as blind to as that guy was to the evils of slavery. And if you can have your most important holiday, be a holiday where you're celebrating the liberation of your people from slavery and still end up on a fucking Confederate bill, like, God knows what we're blind to right now. Right? Like, what is it that we're not seeing right now? When people can justify, it's very strange. Right. And it means that no matter what, there's probably some kind of thing that 100 years from now is going to seem like, how could Alan, how could this idiot have not seen that? Right? It was right in front of his eyes. Yeah. What do you think that would think it would be? Have you ever tried to think about it? Yeah, I have tried to think about it. What do you think it would be? There's a couple of things I think it could be. One of them is the fact that we've essentially exported slave labor. So people are going to be like, all these people who were talking about how slavery is bad, right? And chattel slavery is a very, very different thing from other kinds of slavery. But there are ways in which people are trapped in horrific situations who are manufacturing the goods that I have. Now it gets complicated, right? People are like, well, you know, that's better that than no job at all. I'm not sure exactly how it all plays out, but I can imagine a future in which people look back at me and you and the things we are consuming and saying, how were they blind to the conditions in which those items were produced? Sure. Well, one of the best examples is someone tweeting about slavery on an iPhone that's made by someone who works at Foxconn, who has these giant nets around the building to keep people from jumping off because they live such horrific lives that they leap to their death so often they have to protect the building with nets. And this is the exact point at which if you wanted to ultra process this conversation, you take that soundbite and you'd say, look at these two assholes comparing working in a Foxconn factory to chattel slavery. Which is precisely not. Explain chattel slavery. Chattel slavery. So sometimes, so for example, when people are trying to justify the Bible and the fact that like, so why didn't Jesus, here's this guy who came down and he shocked everyone, right? Why didn't he also say like, you know, also slaves need to be released ASAP. Slavery is bad. He didn't say that. So one of the things people will point out is that there are different forms of slavery. So chattel slavery specifically where people are turned into property and bought and sold and have no opportunity to earn their freedom is a sort of specific kind of slavery that was the kind of slavery we had in the United States. It's uniquely horrifically bad. And so that kind of slavery is not the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory. But we know when I think about, you know, I'm thinking about this right here. I'm like, you know, what's going to happen when that parallel gets made? You know, I think it's actually an instructive parallel, right? Like I'd like us to think about what, you know, how were the goods that we're using and consuming and where they're made. I also don't want people to think that for a moment that chattel slavery is the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory. No, it most certainly isn't. But it is. But it's bad. It's bad. Working in a Foxconn factory is bad. Or you don't want your children to be there. Joel Saladin will tell you. Another thing is eating factory farmed animals. Yes. I mean, it's messed up. I don't know. Like I do it, you know, I go out. I eat meat that I know comes from a place, you know, where the animals are not treated where they're in hell. It's animal hell, you know, and we have these animal hells. When do you do that? I mean, just yesterday when I went out and ate like baby back ribs down the street, I guarantee those baby back ribs didn't come from Joel Saladin's Polyphase farm. I think that, you know, that's something I think about. But I do it anyway. I can imagine a time when we look back on our current eating habits and we're like, why wasn't everyone arguing for ethically sourced meat? How was it that people didn't want to force everyone collectively to pay more for meat that was raised in a way like the kind of way that Saladin pioneers? Right. In this, I'm really on board with Saladin. I think he's right to say, look, there are contexts in which animals are happier and less happy and they're happier on my farm and they're fucking miserable. But I thought it was very interesting in your book when you talk about Michael Pollan pressing him on whether or not you could feed New York City that way. And he's like, do you really need New York City? Yeah. Well, so Saladin's got it right. So this is well, and Saladin thinks, I mean, he thinks about this, right? Like you saw in the book in explicitly divine terms, right? God has designed the world, but I'll tell you, this is a story I tell at the end of the book. I was eating Saladin's delicious pork. I mean, it was an incredible place, Polyphase Farms, and I was eating his pork and like the people there are awesome. He's awesome. And he announces to everyone, he says, look, we're going to be doing a bit of a change. We have a new thing that we're going to be doing. We are going to be producing chickens for a growing segment of our market that doesn't want soy fed to their chickens. So Saladin's chickens get a lot of their calories, not from his farm. They get a significant portion of their calories from non-GMO soy that's grown at another place outside of Polyphase. So it's not a self-contained system, he says, but there's some people that don't want soy fed to their chickens. They feel like they react to soy, they don't want it. So they're going to start feeding their chickens. There's a certain percentage of Saladin's chickens. He's going to start feeding fish meal, ground fish meal. So afterward, I went up to him and I was like, you know, Joel, that doesn't seem very natural. Like do chickens eat? They swim? Yeah, right? Like how are they getting all this fish? And you know what? He looked at me and he said, I'm a hypocrite, you know, I'm a hypocrite like anyone else, but at least I admit it. And what I wanted to say to him was there's nothing wrong with feeding your chickens fish meal. If some people want chickens that are fed fish meal and you're treating your chickens in a way you think is ethical, there's not some kind of purity test that you need to apply to your farm, even though it's on a road called Pure Meadows Lane, right? But it's like, you don't need a purity test for your farm. You're a good guy who cares. I mean, I really think he's a guy who really cares about his animals, you know, and it just kind of made me sad that he thought of that as some sort of hypocrisy. Well, the only hypocrisy that you could see in it is factory farmed fish is awful. I mean, it's really bad. I mean, it's bad for the environment. It's bad for the fish. There's not a lot of sustainable factory farmed fish operations. It wouldn't make you wince if you actually saw how they process all that fish meal. Factory farmed fish. Another thing, I didn't know any of this stuff until I started this research. So I'll tell you a story, crazy story. I was in the Netherlands researching the food chapter of this book, which is about vanilla, which I could talk to you about vanilla, which sounds very boring, right? Which is why I picked it. It's vanilla. I'm researching vanilla and people want natural vanilla. And I don't know if you know it. Do you know where vanilla comes from? Vanilla beans? Yeah. Do you know where those come from? No. That was the end of the line for me, right? So we've got vanilla beans in the house. So they are actually on an orchid. This beautiful white orchid vine is where vanilla beans grow. That makes sense. Vanilla ice cream has that orchid on the... Yeah. All of a sudden I was like, oh wait, that's what my yogurt looks like that. Every single one of those is artificially inseminated. So there's a person who goes, and you can watch YouTube videos of it. It's crazy. Have they always been like that? No. So vanilla used to be only in Mesoamerica. That was the only place where it grew naturally, right? So everyone thinks of Madagascar, right? Madagascar vanilla. Only place vanilla was growing was in Mesoamerica. It was these Mayan silviculturists, which is like forest gardeners who grew this. And it was pollinated by its only known natural pollinator, which was this thing called a meloponabii. I don't know if I pronounced that right, but whatever. So that's the only place it was. And when people came from Europe, they were like, this is incredible. Vanilla, amazing. And they wanted to grow it, but they couldn't because they didn't know how to pollinate it. And then a 12-year-old slave named Edmund Albius discovered how to artificially pollinate vanilla flowers. And just like that, you now have the ability to grow vanilla orchids in non-natural habitats, right? So it's still expensive because you can only grow them in Madagascar, Tahiti. I don't know if you know this, but vanilla beans are incredibly expensive. Natural vanilla is just really expensive ingredient. And that's because there's not a lot of places it can be grown. So they're looking for ways to make natural vanilla cheaper. And the Netherlands is where all of the best growing technology or a lot of the best growing technology is. So I went to a university there where they have a greenhouse where they're growing vanilla orchids, pineapples, bell peppers, like coconuts. I mean, you name it, everything they figured out how to grow all of these natural plants, right? But I'm sitting in here and I'm like, you got vanilla orchids growing out of these buckets in this highly technological environment. You know, it's all temperature controlled, right? And for what? So that you can have cheap vanilla beans that can be labeled legally natural. And that whole story comes back to the salmon and the fish that you were talking about before, because in that same place, there was a machine like at a Charlie and the chocolate factory with like pink sludge whooshing through it. This was, you know, a couple of places down from the vanilla orchid house. I was like, what's that? The guy who's showing me around says that's algae that we're growing here because people want their salmon, their farmed salmon to be pink. And it's not pink because it doesn't eat the diet that it gets in nature. So it's naturally gray, but people people won't pay for that. So he's farming algae, which is natural. So he's that's the stuff, the pink stuff. And then they feed that to the farmed salmon just so it can be naturally pink. So when you go into your whole foods or whatever and you see that your salmon is all natural and it's pink and I'm just looking, I'm looking at this whole thing. I'm like, what is wrong with us human beings that we've gotten to this point where we like, we want stuff natural so bad that we're developing new technologies to figure out how to like, have our cake and eat it too. They die salmon. It's really an orange, but they die. They do. They get the orange, just orange, pinkish color. But there's also a way. So as taxa-thin, I think is the chemical that and that you can have it artificially. But then people don't want artificial color. Can't they just feed them the bugs that they eat that make them... Way too expensive. Really? Yeah. For when you want it on that scale. So they feed him this algae and I was like, I get what we're doing. I get what we want, right? We want stuff that's better for the planet. We want natural. And so then, yeah, so what do we do? But it's so complicated, right? Like you were saying, like what do we do with factory farmed fish? You're like, what are you saying about Joel Salatin? How do you get Joel Salatin's meat to people that can't afford it? Right. How do you?