 The industry has gotten away with all this shit for so long because nobody knows anything about it. And I think if people start to realize and say, hello, we know what's going on here and we don't want to stand for it the way it is anymore. Jocelyn Zuckerman is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Jocelyn is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, the former deputy editor of Gourmet, articles editor of On Earth and executive editor of Modern Farmer. She has written for Audubon, The American Prospect, New Yorker, National Geographic and many other publications. A graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya and as a former fellow with the Washington DC-based Alicia Patterson Foundation. Jocelyn has been the recipient of a James Beard Award for feature writing and fellowship from the Carter Center, the Peter Jennings Project, the New York Times Company Foundation and Columbia University Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. Her first book, Planet Palm, was published May 2021, just last month, a month and a couple of days ago. I've got it right here. This is the European edition, Planet Palm, beautiful orangutan with a palm seed root in his eyes and Jocelyn, I welcome you to the show. It's so good to see you. Thanks so much for having me, glad to be here. I'm so glad you can make it and I appreciate you kind of working with my schedule, we had to go back and forth a little bit to get a time that worked properly, but you've been busy, you've been kind of doing the book launch and tour on the tail end of hopefully emerging out of this pandemic and craziness, but in comparison to what I read in the book and what you've experienced on your Planet Palm, Palm oil journey, oh my God. I mean, seriously, I must say it pales in comparison. It's 10 times worse than any pandemic in my opinion of what's going on in the palm industry, what has going on in the long history and you really take us on a roller coaster ride through many countries, many places and cities and give us really the down and dirty of it. I wanna start out with, because you've been riding for quite some time and the research and the writings in this book about Planet Palm have taken you on a pretty big journey to see activism and things around our food systems all around the world. And then 2020 where we hit this pandemic and Black Lives Matters and Asian racism, crazy inauguration and many other crazy things in our world, but with all that research, all that riding all those things around kind of environment and food and what's going on in our world, did you have some better models for life to help you resiliently get through this time where you hit just as hard as everyone else and where there may be some learning lessons that you could share with us during this time, but most importantly, I just wanna know how did your family and you weather this crazy time and were you all okay and kind of catch us up to speed. Okay, so the last time I was on an airplane was February 2020 when I went to Wisconsin to visit that company that's making synthetic palm oil that I wrote about in the epilogue of that book. Haven't been on an airplane since then, got back here. I have been reading the news so I was pretty aware of it coming. Others in my family thought I was crazy. At one point I bought masks from the pharmacy in February and they're all just mulling their eyes saying you're so insane. It's gonna come here. Anyway, we did okay. I have two children. My older daughter was supposed to start college this past September, but they deferred all the freshman arrivals till January. So she was here, she did miss her graduation from and she's a dancer. So she missed her last dance recital. And then my younger daughter is 15. She's just finished her sophomore year. We're very fortunate we have a house in Brooklyn. So we have four floors. So my husband was working in the basement. The 15 year old was on one floor. I was in my office on the next floor and my older daughter was upstairs. So we sort of did our thing all day on Zoom and in the early days ordering in groceries, as I said, very fortunate to be able to do that and came together. Sorry for the dog barking. You might hear something. You're fine. And cooked every night and managed to stay healthy. And early on my husband and I were both convinced that we had COVID, but I don't know maybe that was hysteria, we seem not to have. So we did okay. We just kind of hunkered down. We didn't see anybody for months really. And fortunately, out the other end now. And do you think there was, I mean, you were obviously probably started working on the book well before the pandemic and you're kind of launching at the tail end of it and probably working on it as well during this time. This is your first book, am I correct? Correct. It's not your first writing. You're in more than multiple dozen publications and civil eats, gourmet, whole living on earth, on and on, code blue, everything, Bogue, Mary Claire, you're all over. So you've been writing for a while. Was that experience better, different? Was it during this crazy time? I didn't do much freelancing during the pandemic at all because I was finishing up writing the book. And I have to say it was some good discipline for me because I think most of us find it really hard to sit down and just concentrate on writing for hours at a time, but when you've got nothing else to do, no place else to go at a deadline staring you down. So I was really just in my office sort of revising and as I said, writing that epilogue and sort of finishing everything up. So I wasn't doing other reporting at the time. Great, great. Well, that's good. It turned out good. And I don't know if that extra little pause helped, but this book is amazing. It's like a roller coaster ride. I was telling you before we started, I kind of like it's a mix of the Moffian cartel and romancing the stone with, you know, Douglas, Michael Douglas and just a adventure and crazy things that you've experienced and also a big portion of it. It wasn't just research and history. It was also your travels and journeys where you went to a few places and kind of hair-raising experiences. Now, how did we get this? This is, we're talking about originally kind of a healing oil, a food product and what it sounds like we're dealing in plutonium or atomic weaponry or some kind of arms deal. Aren't we talking about food? How did it get there? I mean, maybe you can kind of give us the backstory. And also, how did you come to write about this? How did you get there? So I'll start with sort of the food. Yes, it's absolutely food. And I make the distinction in the book between sort of the palm oil that is produced artistically in West and Central Africa, which is where the plant is indigenous and the industrialized stuff that is now sort of in all of our junk foods and biofuels and makeup, which is processed and sort of has very little in common with the original bright orange oil palm oil that you get from Africa. So, and then we can sort of go back through how we got from one to the other. But how I came to do the book, you mentioned that I wrote for On Earth. And so it was in, I believe it was 2014. I had the idea that I wanted to write a story about land grabs. So this was, as I'm sure you remember in the aftermath of the food and fuel crisis of 2008 when there were those protests around the world fuel prices and food prices were really high led in part to the Arab Spring and other uprisings. And also another thing that came up after that was that agribusiness of land poor countries, sovereign wealth funds started looking around the planet for large swaths of fertile land where they could buy or rent either as an investment or to grow food maybe to send back to their populations. This tended to happen in places like there were deals written about in Ethiopia and Madagascar where sort of governance is maybe not great and people on the ground can be pushed, there's sort of far-flung and can be pushed off the land without that many people knowing about it. So anyway, that was the phenomenon that I wanted to write about. I could have reported it from any number of places, sadly settled on Liberia in part because of the relationship with the country to the States. As of yours, no, I'm sure it was founded by freed American slaves. I also had long admired Ellen Johnson-Cerleaf, the president of the country. I would be less admiring of her after my reporting but at the time I had only read positive things about her. Anyway, so I went down to Liberia to report the story on land grabs. And I got down there and what I saw as I described in the book, there were just miles and miles of rainforest that had been cleared and where they were about to plant the oil palm plant and then other places where there were young, early plantations of this oil palm plant. They were young, they were maybe three feet high, it looked like bushes down on the ground. And I just, as I said, we drove for, I was with a photographer with some local researchers and we just drove and drove and there was just like, they just cleared land, pushed people off of their, out of their villages, plowed through their grave sites and then these plantations that were planted, again, miles and miles. And I thought, what is this oil palm? How, like I had worked at Gourmet Magazine for 12 years and written for, as you said, these various other places about food and agriculture and nutrition and environmental issues. And I really, I knew nothing about palm oil and yet here was just masses of land growing this crop. So that sort of planted the seed. What is this, where is it ending up? Why do we need so much of it? How do I not know anything about it? And then here we are, but seven years later. So it's been, it has been a seven year journey then. Well, it was sort of, I came back from that. I didn't start the book immediately. I think in the next couple of years I was still doing other things, but I sort of was starting to think about it. And what I did was try to get early on sort of pitch stories to other magazines. For example, I pitched one to Audubon. I learned that helmets in Hornbills and other birds in Sumatra were endangered largely in part because of the palm oil industry going in there. So I sort of pitched stories that had to do with these different magazines. I pitched one to Vogue Magazine because so much palm oil ends up in makeup. And that way I got the magazines to sort of underwrite some of my early reporting trips because you can't get a book deal until you've sort of done a lot of the reporting and it's very expensive and I would go across the world and do that report. It's very expensive. So it was slow coming up. I wasn't sort of actively working on it until just the past three years. But there was also little articles and different magazines and things that kind of tickled and touched upon a few of those things. I did see some of those. I think they're, 2013 may have moderated and been something before that as well. I'm not sure. But yeah, it's amazing the amount of research and what comes out of this book. And it's kind of a longer journey that you take us on. So the original Foundings of Unilever, the company that came to be Unilever had big dealings in palm oil. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and about how you discovered that and when it really began and how that influences different countries and cities around palm oil? I remember how I discovered it up in my office and I had brought them down for some previous interviews. I got lots of old books, sort of the economy of Nigeria in the 18th century and trade with Europe. So I can't remember exactly when I found out about the William Lever connection. But anyway, so William Lever was one of I believe 10 children born in the city of Bolton, sort of an industrial town in England. His dad had a grocery store and he and his brother eventually took it over. And he was a very ambitious, he was very, very short man, just laser focused on sort of growing the business and making money. And so he started producing soap, which is made from palm oil. So that already palm oil and palm kernel oil. Maybe I should back up and just explain the plant a little bit. Yeah, that's fine, please do. He pointed out here that the oil palm fruit, these are sort of a little bit more elongated than off the middle of it, sort of the size of a plum or like maybe a date. And so it's got this orange flesh, that is where you get the palm oil, that orange stuff that I described. And that's 50% saturated fat. And then inside is a white kernel, which is from which you get a different oil, which is 80% saturated fat. So is that palm kernel oil that we're using are ready to make soaps and candles in Europe, particularly in England. And so he began manufacturing his own soap and margarine and then he decided that he didn't want us to deal with the middlemen who were bringing the ingredients from West Africa. So he went down to the Belgian Congo and managed to, this was in the aftermath of King Leopold, which your viewers probably know about him, murderous, said to have killed directly or indirectly 10 million Congolese through when he was extracting rubber and ivory to build his empire. Anyway, so William Lever went in there afterward and he got the government that came after King Leopold, gave him five concessions, big plots of land around the country where he was, some of them, there were already existent oil palm groves, but then he also was, his plan was to build these plantations so that he could have the raw materials directly to his factories in Europe. And he said, oh, I'm a Christian man and I believe in taking, I'm gonna build them houses and schools and give them great working conditions. Needless to say, not exactly how it turned out. Basically the slave labor. In many instances, the fact that I cited in the book, one, a local bureaucrats who did a report of Lever's operations at one point and in the end he said in some, the conditions are little better than they were under King Leopold. So there was some housing for, some nice housing but it was for a tiny percentage of the workforce. Others were, they forced them, they would take these men from their villages and then force them to move to these areas where the palm oil was being grown and harvest it and process it, taking them away from their families and in many instances conscripting children and women into the labor as well. So yeah, that's sort of how he built his empire. I mean, he didn't pay much for anything at all for labor, got these raw materials and just kept expanding, expanding around the world. So it's amazing how long ago around the world it started to begin and before the time it turned into industrialized things where other countries were coming in and kind of other corporations were coming in whether it was Indonesia or Borneo or wherever the different areas around the world where they would go in in Africa to do this, that the natives, the indigenous people were using it as well for other things and didn't really always see it as valuable or just kind of how an integral part as healing medicine and other options that were used, this was used for not only the kernel but also the orange palm oil. Absolutely, in Africa still it's a central part of the cuisine and the culture. They also tap the sap to make palm wine. They use the fronds for building and yeah, used in food and medicines for centuries. Southeast Asia, no, it wasn't grown there at all. So it was around the turn of the 20th century that European Scandinavian planters took it over there and started planting it. It was partly when synthetic rubber came on the market and they had been growing rubber there and the price of rubber tumbled. So they started experimenting with oil palm brought from Africa. So it was not part of the culture there at all. In fact, it still isn't, it's grown everywhere but this indigenous people don't use palm oil for in their diets or in their traditions. That's good, I would say that's good in some respect. We're gonna wait until we get closer to the end of the podcast to really kind of go into the really positive, a narrative of the whole entire thing of palm oil and what your research and discovery is. I've had other authors on the show that have kind of talked about Monsanto or Bayer or industrial agriculture and high use of chemicals and pesticides. I really think from reading this book it's you and the book are real close qualifiers and hopefully we'll receive the Rachel Carson Award. I think it falls in that same category of awareness because it's having a million to billion people health-wise and environmental-wise impact on what the palm oil industry and what it's become today and the damage and also civil unrest and also people's lives and just kind of a lot of slave labor and corruption and in the book you speak about even some villages being burnt because people weren't aligned and even at the UN level if the FAO said something negative about palm oil how Indonesia or others would come in and say, well, you need to retract that, that's not fair. We're not gonna support the UN or support our agreements or continue those if you say anything negative about the palm oil. So just a lot of corruption, a lot of influence around our food system but out of all this research and this discovery, why? What is there a major reason why is it just your corruption? Is it something that the system started out wrong and it's just hasn't made the curve to get into something better? What is your takeaways? I think like in so many instances, we sort of, we're stumbling ahead in the name of progress and not understanding the long-term consequences of these things. So I talked about how the European planters started planting oil palm at the turn of the 20th century. So right after Indonesia and Dutch East Indies and Malaya got their independence became Malaysia and Indonesia, very large populations of very poor people. So those governments as part of a poverty alleviation schemes eventually supported by the World Bank would move people to areas that have been forced to clear the land, give them oil palm plantings and rubber plantings. So again, it was sort of, it was trying to help poor people make some money and have a lot in the hood and then it just expanded and expanded. And certainly in Indonesia, the folks in charge were cronies, largely cronies of Suharto, the former dictator and the industry is still very much concentrated in the hands of those folks or their offspring. So yes, a lot of corruption, but again, just sort of stumbling ahead. Initially it wasn't all corrupt and it was meant to sort of help the population when I think things continue to snowball. And part of the issue that we have really talked about why it's such a problem is that the oil palm, I mentioned that it's indigenous to Western Central Africa. So it grows best at 10 degrees to the north and south of the equator, which is the same latitude where Southeast, those Indonesia, Malaysia are. The problem is that it's that exact swath of the planet that is home to our tropical rainforests, which as we know are massively important for sequestering carbon and home to our most important biodiversity. And also much of it sits on top of peatlands, which are sort of organic matter that's accumulated over millennia and the companies burn that, let chop down the forest and then burn it. So it's just carbon flowing into the atmosphere for years and years. So again, back at the turn of the century, nobody was thinking about carbon emissions or biodiversity loss. They just wasn't on our radar. So I think then we're learning as we go and hopefully it's not too late. Yeah, hopefully. You mentioned earlier around 2008 with oil and with our food systems, how we kind of got started out and got stuck into something very bad where we turned food into a commodity. So at that time during the financial bubble in 2008, what was going on around the world with food and our financial problems, we started to invest into anything to do with the food systems. And it kind of turned the food systems into a commodity. And when you turn food into a commodity, it's those people who grow and produce that food are doing it as a commodity, not as someone incentivized by investors and not by people who are farmers and know how to produce products quickly. They just wanna produce it as cheap and as fast as possible. They don't care about human health suffering or environmental suffering or problems. And in return, when you cheapen food, you cheapen life. And so there since 2008, we've kind of been stuck into this real bad cycle with all types of food systems, but especially we've seen the rise of those commodities and palm oil and many other animal agriculture that are really having a big effect on human health and our environment. I wanna know is a lot of the palm that you researched, especially now, since 2008 forward to the present day of what's going on in the industries. Are you seeing that palm oil has become a commodity? Are you seeing that palm oil is just still industrial sector and not so much a commodity, but more an industrial sector product, which is not accounting for the human suffering or the total cost accounting or the true cost or the total environmental cost of the impacts of planting those. Are there any wisdoms or things that you've seen kind of emerging coming up? Right, so I'm sure your viewers know this term externalities, right? The hidden costs of things, in terms of rivers polluted, soil polluted, workers exposed to pesticides, and then the people who were eating. So we should talk about where all this palm oil is going. 75% of it ends up in food. What kind of food? We're not going home and cooking in palm oil, most of us. So it's ultra processed foods. You know, it's industrialized for baked goods, chocolate bars, ice creams, cookies, crackers, junk, basically, and then also used for frying, particularly in Southeast Asia and India, all the street vendors are using palm oil because it's so cheap. Well, why is it so cheap? Partly because the land is, in many cases, stolen. The labor is, in many cases, slave labor. And so, yeah, I think the palm oil industry says, oh, you can never get rid of it because if you use any other kind of oil, you're gonna need to clear this much land. Nobody wants to talk about, well, do we actually need this much oil in the diet? We never had it before. I mean, it's the trajectory of the growth of vegetable oil in our diets is off the chart. So it's not, you know, my argument in the book is, we need to sort of look at this in a holistic way, the same way we need to look at our meat consumption and, as I said, those externalities. What impact is that having on the soil, on indigenous populations, on biodiversity, on the climate? And adjust things moving forward on all those levels. I don't know if that answered your question. Yeah, I don't know. It definitely answered the question. I mean, in the book, but also before and other articles and overall palm oil industry has really been likened to the tobacco industry. And we also know, which is no big secret, there was a point in time where major tobacco companies were actually purchasing food production companies, high processed food production companies into their portfolio and just kind of not only the marketing but using that same scheme and methods that they'd used in the tobacco industry also and that food production industry. And so we're really not seeing, we're seeing more that the manipulation tricks and kind of hacking of the system to continue to get that commodity and the profits and that out of the products is cheap as fast as possible and with the highest margins as possible. And also growing their markets, right? Dumping, some populations maybe in Europe, maybe in the US where there's more publicity around the adverse health impacts of these different products. Well, maybe we can go to Africa and to these other places where people aren't aware or we don't have to put labeling with the saturated fat content. So yeah, dumping this stuff on people might not be in as good a position to understand what they're ingesting. I totally agree and that's a big trend. So I do a lot with food period, not just environment and sustainability but a lot with food as well. I have a book called Menu B coming out this year as well. So it's around global food reform and unhealthy things in our food and stuff as well. And so we speak about that a lot that food is, yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about menu B? So this is how we need to overhaul our menu moving forward in the context? Yeah, there's definitely no planet B for sure, but there is a menu B, a different way that we can produce and consume and do agriculture around food. That's not harmful to people, human health and also to our environment. And those two really go hand in hand. You know, the nation of plants where we really have taken care of our atmosphere and our planetary boundaries to keep us humans going for such a long time, not just with food but also great oxygen and great climate and environment. So for so many decades, we're exploiting, we're not paying the true costs, we're not giving it time to regenerate. And so that's kind of where I want to go with what you talk about in your book is there's too much of a good thing, I think there's probably very, especially for those indigenous cultures that have used palm oil one way or the other that there is a purpose and a use that it could be used for as long as it remains within the planetary boundaries in a regenerative cycle and it's not becoming an impact on human health or on environmental issues because we're pushing all other traditional plants or other types of agriculture out or forestry out of the way to the plant palm. And so I really, you know, I kind of wanted to address that how you're seeing with all the bad and the horrific in the book that you discuss in many different countries how they're really protecting this industry. Are there those who are saying, no, we need to pay for the total environmental impact of palm oil, we need to make sure that we're paying the water, the resources and letting the earth regenerate we're paying the total, the true cost, the counting is a big thing that's just come out, the TCA, the true cost accounting of food and the actual EBITDA, the environmental EBITDA of food. So that's never accounted for in the process of food. You see a lot of the palm oil products cheaper than the labor, the harvest, the transport, the processing, the water resources, the land resources that are used in it. And that's never accounted. That natural capital is never accounted for. You see a slow shift in that or is that really one of the other main reasons why you've written the book is so that we can say, hey, we're over doing that. We need to reel this back in and let's start focusing more on fixing this problem. Very much the reason I wrote it is so that people who are the consumers of these products understand what goes into producing it. When you talk to about the indigenous people, I would say, yes, there's absolutely movements on the ground in so many places. They've seen what the industry comes in and does and are fighting against it. It's less a question of sort of externalities and the true cost because they've always sort of lived in harmony with nature and it's basically, we don't want our forests knocked down for this monoculture. And again, in Africa where the plant is indigenous, it grows in sort of agroecology systems. It's not, I mean, there are plantations there now that companies have established, but traditionally and still in many cases, it's intercropped with other things. So it's a perfectly sustainable system. But yes, definitely there are organizations, I mean, there are groups on the ground who've been protesting in all everywhere, Sierra Leone, Liberia, in Liberia, in fact, one of the companies that I wrote about in the introduction to my book, they eventually that the company pulled out because there was so much opposition on the ground. They had seen what this other company had done in terms of, as I said, polluting their rivers, knocking down their grave sites and they fought and fought and fought and finally the company pulled out. So some of that is happening in some places, sadly in other places, the industry is just sort of flowing ahead in Papua, on the Indonesian side of the island that is also Papua New Guinea, there's the industry is still going in big, knocking down primary rainforest, drop of a rainforest to establish more palm oil. But there are organizations I talk about in the book, the Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace, Muddy Earth, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been reporting on the labor issues. So there are definitely sort of global groups that are working with more local groups on the ground to help them get the word out and fight back. It's hard because these are massive corporations with very deep pockets. To me, you really seem like a global citizen. I mean, you're talking many different countries and I know you've been to Africa and you've traveled around, you did a little bit with Greenpeace. Do you consider yourself to be a global citizen? How would you feel about a world without nations, borders and divisions of humanity, one from another? Would that make a difference in this whole palm oil business or moving forward with some better systems? That's an interesting question. I don't think I've thought through enough to sort of the policy implications, but my instinct is yes. Have you read the book, Exit West? I have. Yeah, so that's sort of when you talk about these borders and in that book, there's a lot of migration, a lot of it due to conflict and environmental problems too, I think. And yeah, you start to think about, these are artificial constructs, right? And we're all led to believe like, oh, you can't cross this southern border, you can't come from Mexico to come from here. Well, luck in the draw, I happen to be born in a rich country. So I think absolutely, we need to rethink all of these things moving forward given the environmental crisis and that no nation is gonna solve this on their own. You knock down the tropical rainforest there, we're not insulated from that here in Brooklyn. It's all of a piece. So I think yes, and you also mentioned basic income before, I think all of our sort of concepts of capitalism, borders, countries, we need to sort of throw everything up in the air and figure out how we move ahead. Another book I read recently that I had mentioned a lot, I'm sure you've read is The Ministry for the Future. That one I haven't read, but it's on my list, I haven't read it yet. It's very much to the climate change focus, but it also looks at our capitalism and just how our organizing principles and how we need to rethink everything given the state of the planet right now. So yeah. And the reason I kind of bring it up because it's a unique tie and it's kind of a dual edged sword in many respects. So we very much want the palm oils and the banana, Chiquita bananas. And I mean Chiquita is one of the big players in the palm and Guerrero and other big corporations are as well. As well as a lot of government and organizational corruption out there and that, but we're in the time of pandemic and even before we get this nationalistic view and we don't want immigrants and we don't want migrations, we don't want these things. But as far as the goods go, as far as the food goes, as the air quality and those things, we absolutely want it. And during this time, 15, 18 months of pandemic and issues that we face, a lot of rise of nationalism, the global citizens were food, the pandemic, COVID, obviously air, food, water, species didn't hold back by borders, but there was some really unique things. So, and I'm gonna give you an example and this kind of ties to some of the other things that you speak in the book. Before the pandemic, they had the Brexit vote and then there was the finalization, but because of the pandemic, that Brexit vote, now the borders were closed because of the pandemic and the United Kingdom saw between 400,000 and 600,000 immigrant migrant workers every year coming in to produce food, harvest food from farms, produce food, serve food, gastronomy and grocery stores in the United Kingdom every single year. A big part of that vote was because of this nationalism because they didn't want people taking their jobs. Also, maybe you could throw in racism in there. They didn't want people doing their jobs. Well, now Brexit was voted on, the pandemic comes, the borders locked down, shut down, no more immigrant workers are there. They've solved the problem, but all those people who made the vote didn't jump into the jobs to harvest the food or to process that food or into the gastronomy or the grocery stores. And so there was an extreme amount of food waste that occurred during that time. Plus, on top of that, the United Kingdom takes five times the land mass of the United Kingdom in other countries, Indonesia, Russia, Africa, all over the world to process that food, to get their resources, their raw goods from other places. So that's okay, but by damn, we don't want anybody coming to our country and living in that because, but the food's okay. And so it's just this really, it's an oxymoron, it's, I don't know what the right term is, but it's absolutely this insanity that we can make those hard distinctions, but yet it's okay to exploit other populations of the world for palm oil, for other resources and goods. And then when they need aid or when there's some issue, we're not jumping in properly to solve that. And I see when I'm reading your book this whole time, I'm seeing that that's a glaring thing for me there that really is something that we never talk about, we don't address a lot. And I just wanted to get your feelings and kind of how you touched upon it in the book and how maybe it bubbles up in your views, because I mean, as you talk about all these colonialism and as your travels and kind of the big history of palm and then how it develops into present day, it's very a global story that you're telling. It's this very one planet, we're all on the spaceship Earth. And so I just kind of, I don't know what your thoughts, I'd like to hear more of your thoughts and feelings and how you tie that in and what your bigger view is. So in terms of labor issues, sorry, I'm not quite... Everything, I mean, everything, I mean, don't, I wish we could just say it's only labor, but we're really the systemic view of life. So we're more than just laborers, we're also eaters and consumers and we're also have this cultural diversity. And so it's much more than just boxing us in and saying, oh no, Mark's just a podcast guy, that's all he does, he doesn't eat, he doesn't do anything else. But no, I have opinions on a lot of things, but I also realize a lot of the food that I eat comes from other places than just Humberg, Germany. Matter of fact, I probably started to death if I just ate food just from Humberg, Germany. So I need to know how do my consumer behaviors or how do those big companies I buy from influence the suffering or the environmental crisis in other parts of the world? One last aspect that kind of fits to that as you're thinking about that answer as well is that especially with palm, especially with animal agriculture, I would say in Australia and in Brazil for the most part, and excuse my French, other countries are basically saying, hey, do you mind if we let our cattle shit in your land and produce methane and ruin your soils and that, and then you ship them as cheap as possible to us so that we can eat them in our burgers and our steaks, but you deal with environmental problems and sell it to us at less than fair trade, fair cost, environmental cost, all those natural capital things. And a lot of people don't get that bigger picture, and especially those indigenous or those people on the ground, they don't realize the cheap labor of the poor living conditions, the poor working conditions being burnt because you talked about this in the book as well when your pole touches a wire and you're burnt to death or whatever happens in the process of that cheap palm oil so it can be sold as a commodity or as cheap as possible on the other side of the world, they don't give a damn about those environmental and health impacts that are occurring in those different places. And that's a big huge thing in our food system, it really needs to be addressed and thought about or discussed and I think you tickle upon it in quite some ways with your story and what's going on to bring that to light, but I'd like to even go deeper if you don't mind and if you maybe have opinions or thoughts or what you've discovered in your journeys on that. The first thing I would say is that what distinguishes palm oil to me is that unlike you mentioned, you want your bananas, you want your coffee, your chocolate, you don't wake up in the morning thinking I want my palm oil. I would argue that, again, this isn't, I don't think it's consumers that have demanded this oil, it's the corporations, it's the Pepsi-Pose and the Unilevers who are producing this junk and I will call it junk that we are buying because it's there and it's cheap. Again, we talked about why it's cheap, all of these, the impacts that it's having on the other side of the world. So I think in your book, menu B, we need to rethink, what are we eating? We've got a finite amount of land, how are we going to use this land in a way that can sustain us all moving forward? I would argue absolutely it's not a bunch of ultra-processed food largely composed of this filler cheap palm oil. So that's the first thing. The other thing is, what's that going to say? Just in terms of worker issues, recently the US Customs and Border Patrol stopped importing from two big Malaysian palm oil companies because of evidence of slave labor and child labor on plantation. So if we raise our voices and say we care about these things then I think there can be some changes made. But as I say in the book and you said, I go to these far-fung places so much of what happens on the ground in this industry is like way off the beaten path. So which is partly why the industry gets away with all these things. We're here in Brooklyn and in Hamburg eating our food. We have no idea what's gone into it and who's paid the price at the other end. And that's sad. I mean, in Germany there's a lot of environmentalists and activists and they try to make that aware. So sometimes you'll see these pop-up markets in the streets to take surveys and they'll try to sell people a kilogram of bananas, five, six bananas for 16 cents. And it's an experiment to see who will take it. And if there's any thought about it, if it's just about the price and they don't care where it came from, how it was transported, who was paid for it and things like that. And I mean, there's a lot of philosophy and thought that goes into that sometimes because people are hungry at the moment. They don't think about all those. It's about convenience. And so they don't think about all those other things and that maybe yeah, it was a mother or her child or someone who didn't had to work a month long for that 16 cents of bananas that now was shipped or what all the externalities are of environmental impacts that go along with that, shipping, transport, emissions in the process of that. And so I like little experiments of that that kind of make food at the forefront and make us aware of what goes on behind it. And that's why I love your book because it really through many multiple stories goes through, it's not only adventurous, but you're like, well, this is like, I don't even wanna say horror story, but I didn't know this was going on. This is really- You said it was like boring gray. It just gets uglier and uglier as you read. Well, it's still a good read. Don't please my listeners, don't get me wrong. It's a fabulous read. And I don't wanna have you give the whole book away. I want people to go out and buy it and read it. It's not only on the edge, interesting to read and very positive at the end. So it's not all doom and gloom for those of you are my listeners who are thinking, okay, boy, this is just a sad story and that, but we need to be aware and be more aware of us. I say this quite a bit. Our basic resources food, it's how we regulate our body temperature and a measurement of a caloric intake is a measurement of energy. And I don't want you to count calories, but I want you to know that's how you regulate your body temperature, keep your energy and keep going. And it would be like buying a cell phone or a car not knowing how you're gonna charge the battery or fill the tank with gas. The same thing as we've turned over our responsibility to food and where it comes from to 10, 20 big companies in the world. And God knows what's going into it and what kind of environmental destruction or health issues. We're seeing tons of obesity and chronic diseases coming out of food and food issues around the world. And we need to take a little bit of closer look at how we feed our body and fuel our body in a different way. And so I think this is a very enlightening book of something that maybe has fallen under the radar in many respects for those just average day snackers like the chips and crackers and all the goody things. At closer to the end of the book, you talk about Nutella and I'm in Germany, that's a German product. And in Europe, people go crazy. I couldn't eat the shit. Sorry, I just don't care. There's this great food company here in our food awareness company, kind of a company that lets consumers know what's behind and they did this great thing. They took a Nutella glass and they kind of cut it in half so you can see the inside and they break down the amount of actual hazelnut butter and oils and fat and sugar in there. I saw that once because as a kid, I thought, wow, I love Nutella and my grandma gave it to me all the time. And then I looked at that, I was like, oh my goodness, I can never eat that again in my life and it's about this world. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a big layer of palm oil in that process. Yeah, it's a pretty big one. And yeah, I don't care how good it is. What is the awareness level of palm oil? I mean, I know it's much higher in Europe. Like for example, in Germany, are there products in the grocery store that have labels that say no palm oil on them? Or have you not noticed that? I'm not sure I've noticed where they say no palm oil but I'm always one who's flipping it over, looking at the ingredients to see if there is palm oil because I don't wanna buy it as well as other like canola and many other different types of oils and ingredients. I just, I don't wanna have them in my stuff but I don't know how to pronounce them or what there is and there's actually another great book it's not just devoured from Sophie Egan. That is, this is a great book. The devoured from Sophie Egan or how to be a conscious eater from Sophie Egan. She actually goes in and some of the products or the ingredients, she says, you know, this sounds bad but it's actually good for you. And then this other one that sounds good is actually bad and she goes through and gives you some hints and tips of where to look but I'm one that looks, but really that's almost sad. Why do we have to look? We shouldn't have to look, it should be another system and the agriculture industry, the food beverage industry the seafood industry or the world's oldest industries ever. They're the world's oldest economy they call it an agrarian society. Even if we're talking seafood, it's an agrarian society it's the world's oldest, longest running economy our world has ever seen, it's the most successful even in the time of this pandemic, all food systems investments have gone up, new investments towards new startups and new food from cellular agriculture to precision fermentation has gone up because it's a vital resource. It's Maslow's basic hierarchy of needs it's our physiological need, food, breathing and water and really it's also the longest running. I find it, right? I'm making more lessons, at least on this one. And it absolutely is but the thing is it's also the one that employs the most women and girls, the least amount of pay. It's a 20 trillion US dollar industry market industry worldwide globally, which a lot of people don't know for a long time they thought, okay seven trillion that was just Europe and 2021 it's 20 trillion US dollar industry, agriculture, seafood, food and beverage industry. And it's just the longest running successful economy that we could ever rely upon and it makes sense. The problem is it's still stuck in an industrial revolution they're not using smart efficient ways to produce it's the least digitized industry and good healthy products. And they're also not taking into account this total cost analysis or accounting this environmental impact on our planet to produce food and we've left this regenerative zone of producing food and kind of are starting to encroach five of our nine planetary boundaries in the wrong way. And so this is really not about me or menu B or about my thoughts or feelings about us about how this book has stimulated thoughts in me and hopefully in my listeners to go out, purchase the book, read it, understand more about palm oil and how to change your buying habits how to influence those organizations to move away or not use palm oil. Besides Nutella at the end, your last little section you give us some very good things about what's coming down the pipeline or alternative palm done right. Is there such a thing as palm oil done right can we have hope that that it's a product that can be on our palates in the future? I think there is such a thing. I guess I didn't talk in the book but I've talked about it in some other interviews. I visited some farmers in Ecuador who were producing palm oil for a company called Natural Habitats. And these are not plantations they were sort of, as I said, agroecology systems they were on their own farms small, maybe five, 10 acres intercropped with passion fruit and other things all grown organically. One guy had his own compost tea that he was making to pour on his oil palm plants. So it's certainly possible but this was like a very small organization they're producing a small amount of palm oil. The problem is monoculture plantation but that's what the corporations want because that's where they get there where they can make all the money by having one massive thing that they can farm out without having to use that much labor. So the problem is the sort of industrialized stuff. If you're producing it artisanally I think absolutely it can be done right. But again, we don't need as much palm oil in our diet, in our world. We need to sort of rethink what that those tropical lands can be better used for. And I also talk in the book about synthetic palm oil that a couple different groups are working on. I visited these guys in Wisconsin who are producing it from a genetically modified yeast. There's also a company based in New York City called C16 Biosciences that I think last year got 20 million from Breakthrough Energy Ventures that the group formed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and some others. So I know a lot of people are sort of looking at how we can produce at least enough. The palm oil that we need for, we didn't talk about this much, but about 7% of global production is used for personal care products. So sort of nibbias, lipsticks and things. And to me, that's sort of okay. I mean, I think it's better used in that sort of thing than in junk food. So I can see that we should have some palm oil in the world. I just don't think we need as much as we're producing now and certainly don't need to chop down more tropical rainforest to keep producing more. And do you feel okay about the synthetics or do you feel about okay about the kind of the lab based, maybe the potential of a lab based type of a palm oil coming up a replacement or what, I mean, do you have any feelings or thoughts about that? If that's bad, if this is kind of something taking us down a wrong path? I'm not worried about that actually. But I said genetically modified, it's not that they've introduced a gene from a different organism. It's just that they've sort of, they've fooled around with the genes, cuts them out, but it's the same yeast that they're using. So I'm not worried about some Frankenstein organism. I think it's all done in a safe situation. I know there are issues in terms of like, all the farmers who are now involved in the, and laborers involved in the palm oil industry. And in my book, I argue that again, as you were talking about, this has got to be a global effort. So yeah, Indonesia, the Indonesian and Malaysian governments get really mad when you start sort of dumping on the palm oil industry because they say who are you rich countries to dump on are and you're oppressing all our farmers. So I understand those economies are very, they're very invested in this industry. And sort of the same way, we need to help coal miners in Appalachia and fossil fuel workers. We need to rethink these things and subsidize them to keep their tropical rainforest standing and to shift to other industry, better crops that are gonna be more nutritious and agroecology systems that are gonna preserve the land. But so I think again, none of these is like a silver bullet. I think all of them, you need to look at sort of the ramifications in terms of labor issues and environmental issues. But I think synthetic palm oil sounds like a great idea to me, assuming that it's all done in a safe context. And I think it is. Out of all your experiences, would you say your green peace experience was the craziest most hair-raising or was it the other one you, I don't think it was the green peace one where you went into another country and kind of- Undercover? Yeah, kind of undercover and find out about that, but you're like, oh, okay, can you tell us which one was kind of the most hair-raising for you and just what your thoughts and your experiences were there and- So the green peace one, I actually wasn't there just to tell your listeners that I told the story of how the green peace activists pulled up next to a tanker off the coast of Spain and threw a ladder up the side of it and they found out there were six of them. They wanted to occupy this tanker and the captain came out and said, I'm gonna beat you up, I'm gonna throw you overboard. They were put in the Suez cabin, they call this little cabin, they didn't know where they were going, what was gonna happen. Basically, I just interviewed a bunch of green peace people who were there and then sort of recreated that. But it was an amazing story. They finally ended up in a little town in Spain and they called in the cops and they let them go, but they were terrified. They didn't know what was gonna happen. But in Sumatra, I did go undercover with these guys, it's a group called Eyes on the Forest and they're amazing. They pose as sort of businessmen or bird watchers or sort of environmental worker, extension workers with palm oil companies and they go. So we talked a little bit earlier about how the industry is very corrupt. So lots of times there's sort of absentee businessmen who are collecting all the money and running things but it's the farmers on the ground who are attending the trees and might not realize that they're doing it on illegal land. Anyway, so these guys sort of go undercover into these very remote areas and talk to people and figure out sort of what's going on. The other thing is the industry, a lot of the companies say our palm oil is sustainable because we've traced it to the mill. So the fruit is collected on the plantations. It goes to the mill for processing into oils and then the oils go to the refinery for further processing. And you need to basically process the fruits within 24 hours or they go rancid. So the idea of they say it's traced to the mill, they assume that if it's being processed at this mill it must have come from a certain radius because you would need to travel within 24 hours. Well, the folks behind it find a lot of ways around it so they might get oil palm fruit that's been grown on a national park where they cut down the trees and then they just race through the night. Sometimes they change their license plates and change their drivers to show up at the mill, pass the guy at the mill a little money, no questions asked or where this palm oil is coming from. So yeah, it was me and I think it was six guys. It was four investigators and then two drivers. We had two vehicles and it was very interesting. They didn't speak any English. I don't speak Bahasa Indonesia. We were together for five or six days. So I did, there was one translator but his English wasn't very good either. So it was, there was a lot of comedy involved just sort of communicating with each other but it was amazing to see their work. They're very meticulous about not just sort of, we would sort of go race behind these trucks that had oil palm fruit that we knew was from an illegal place. And then they also, they were hunched over their computers every morning and they have drones and they had GPS systems. So they were tracking everything and they had sort of import information about where the soil from this mill, what refiner it was going to and then what port it ended up in and then they could trace it to, oh yeah, that ends up in the products of palm olive or PepsiCo or Unilever. So they figure out, who's doing what in an illegal way? And then they report to these companies and they say, are you aware that the palm oil that you're sourcing from this refinery came from this illegal place and what are you gonna do about it? So they really, they document everything and are able to get these companies to then acknowledge, okay, we don't know where all of our palm oil is coming from and maybe or maybe not try to do something about it. It was fun, there were such pros that I wasn't, I wasn't really scared with them. I was scared, I'd give the scene at the very beginning of the chapter before we sort of went out on the road with them when I had just arrived. They said, we need to get clearance from the, who's like the provincial governor. So we went into the office and I had binoculars around my neck and like a bird watching book, I said I was there to see the orangutans and the birds and my heart was pounding when this guy, he was just sitting behind his desk smoking a cigarette and he was like, what are you here? What are you doing? Anyway, we got out, I got begging us like the certificate that it was okay for me to be in the district and then we went off. Crazy. Yeah, I mean, but even when they get to the refineries the refinery is not that sustainable or not that great of a place. I mean, isn't there a lot of toxins and chemicals and kind of emissions going off at these refineries? I've seen, not just, I don't think I saw any from yours but I've seen a bunch of other palm oil refinery processing mills and that, there are horrible working conditions and kind of smelly, awful places. It was smelly. The one I visited, the working condition seemed okay was it was owned by Wilmar, which is the biggest palm oil trader in the world. Also, I couldn't get in there without clearance from Wilmar, so certainly they took me to a place that looked nice, but the mills I think are also, those are very smelly. That's where they do in the initial processing and then they put sort of all the sort of sludge that results in these pools outside. This one was pretty well run, they hadn't managed well but in other places like in Guatemala where I reported there was a big rainstorm and these pools overflowed and there was that fishpill for miles and miles, just millions of dead fish floating from all the toxins that have been in that stuff. So some run much better than others, obviously. Yeah, I've seen that before and that sludge is really rough stuff. So, wow, that's interesting. And again, I wanna encourage everybody to go out there and get the book but I wanna ask you what your biggest takeaways or hope is for those who read the book that you would like to give them one or two takeaways that was really your hope to achieve by coming out with the book. So to understand that palm oil is in so many of our foods and other products and to understand what goes into it in terms of environmental issues, human rights issues, labor issues and to call out the companies, tell them that you care, that you know that this is there and you know what's involved and you want them to reform or that you're not gonna buy their products. And again, most of these companies have palm oil policies you can read about the sort of consumer facing companies like Unilever or PepsiCo. If you go on their websites, they have a palm oil policy. You can read it, you can call them on it that a lot of them have sort of grievance mechanisms too if there have been abuses that have been documented by some of these NGOs, they're sort of tracking them. I think they sometimes they don't change them for years, they assume nobody's really keeping track but so I would say, yeah, get, call out the companies, tell them, you wanna see their policies, you wanna know what's involved in the sourcing of this ingredient. And then the other thing I would say is to go to the websites of some of these organizations that are really focused on these issues and not just focused on the issues from like New York and San Francisco but they're working really closely with the folks on the ground in these communities who are being impacted. So the Rainforest Action Network, Mighty Earth, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, you go on those websites and look at sort of click on palm oil and then you can get involved in some of those campaigns, social media campaigns to raise awareness. And again, I think the industry has gotten away with all this shit for so long because nobody knows anything about it. And I think if people start to realize and say, hello, we know what's going on here and we don't wanna stand for it the way it is anymore. I'm glad that we have wonderful people like you out there raising the awareness and putting that out there and getting, you know, going through the hard work and research and also being on the ground to figure out all this so that you can bring us this wonderful book. And I have, I wanna kind of move into some other questions now. So I think we pretty much covered the book as much as we're gonna cover it and tease that I hope enough for those to go out and look at the show note descriptions and the links on where they can get the book themselves. I have some other questions for you that are kind of more moving into food and activism and what you've been doing, other things you've been doing over the years. But the biggest one is the burning question. It's the WTF is the burning question. And it's not the swear word that probably this past 15, 18 months, a lot of us have been saying because of the pandemic. It's really what is your vision and your thoughts of the future moving forward for whether it's, I really wanna know for you and your family and kind of moving forward what your thoughts and your plan on the future is. And the reason I ask that question is, if you don't have a roadmap, if you don't know what the future is, you're kind of like just a drift and you're going wherever your government, your country kind of take you. And so I wanna know what are your thoughts and feelings are we gonna go, are we gonna continue to have to do things like a planet palm type of books to raise awareness about every product out there on the market or do you think there's some bigger shifts on getting us to better futures out there than we currently have seen? I'll start on sort of the personal level. I would say I was listening to the radio show yesterday there was a guy who just wrote a book about environmental issues, climate change, I guess. And he was talking about how our sort of, our comfort level has changed. Like people just have the air conditioning on all the time in the car, in their house. He was in Brooklyn and he said, I haven't had it on. He said, I turned it on once last year because it was like a hundred degrees or something. But so I think all of us sort of on the personal level just need to realize that we need to change. We can't just be living like the resources are endless. And that would also entail not eating meat all the time. I don't think you have to absolutely go vegan but I think you need to really cut down on your meat and dairy animal products. It's just, the data is there. We just, it's taking up too many resources. So I would say on a personal level on the sort of policy level, I do think there's a shift. I mean, you would know better than I being involved in the UN issues and the World Economic Forum but I do think governments, Western governments are realizing sort of the importance of tropical rainforest and starting to put policies in place that acknowledge that and that rewards the governments of the companies that are home to these precious ecosystems. So during Biden's climate summit, he announced, you probably heard the announcement of this organization or this initiative called LEAF, lowering emissions. Anyway, it's basically a carbon tree. It's like a red plus but much improved and it's the governments of the US, Norway, EU, UK I think, and also a bunch of big companies, Airbnb, Amazon, a bunch of others. So I think also this sort of private public thing people are skeptical when you get corporations involved but I do think we need all hands on deck initiatives like that and I know there are also legislation moving through the government here and in the UK in terms of commodities linked to deforestation and sort of really clamping down much more on being able to trace where these commodities including palm oil are coming from and if they're linked to illegal deforestation or human rights abuses, labor abuses. But I do think books like this, social media campaigns it's in our power right to say we care about these things otherwise corporations and governments are not likely to pay attention if they don't have to. Yeah, they're absolutely vital. I mean, like I mentioned before, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Maria Rodale Organic Manifesto and many, many others are out there that are raising awareness about what's going on that most people really just don't have that connection to food but also how the food industries and systems work, how they've been set up and how many people's lives they affect and the health and the environment. So I'm glad that you're addressing that and I hope to see many other works come from you and down the road, not just in magazines, articles but maybe some other great things. There are a couple of other questions in line with WTF that I wanna ask and that is similar but a little bit different. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you? Probably, I feel like it might, I'm very privileged here in Brooklyn and that my family uses more resources than we should. I talk about in the book that I was a Peace Corps volunteer in a little village in Western Kenya and there was no electricity, no running water and I mentioned that I was so happy there. Part of it was, I said, the absence of extraneous anything like I didn't generate garbage, I just ate fresh food and it was so simple, it was so, I loved it. I feel like there's so much shit in our lives, I don't need all this shit. I don't know how I get back there but it's somewhere between here and there. I just like a simpler life I think. Yeah, I can tell that as well. I've moved over the years quite a few times. I live in Germany now but I'm from the States and through each of those moves I can always declutter, de-junk, get rid of some stuff and it's just such a freeing feeling. I don't need all this stuff, right? Yeah. What did that happen? I don't need it, I don't need all this stuff. It's just freeing and it's just a lot simpler life but yeah, I mean, I like you, I think I probably have this book addiction. I have so many books and this is a tapestry but if you look everywhere else in my office it's wall-to-wall books and I just, it's an addiction but I love the physical type of books. That's what I like to spend. Yeah. What? What was that? That's one addiction I would defend. Yeah, yeah. And that's a hard one when you know it because, boy. I know it's a tough one, yeah, it's a piece, but yeah. But I actually, I love it. I actually printed two books both done on rock paper, which is calcium carbonate. So it's like a seashells, calcium carbonate. Still also not the best environmentally but better than cutting down trees. You can read them in the bathtub, I guess. That's a benefit or you can write on them. I don't know, but yeah. I'm not sure if I'm convinced on that transition yet but maybe soon. I do do a lot of digital books as well. The last three questions I have for you really for my listeners and they're more for them to kind of get a little insight on how they can improve what they could apply into their lives. If there was one message or even two that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, what would it be, your message? I think to eat thoughtfully, to think about what you're eating, where it came from, its impact on your body and on the environment and on the folks that produced it. I think that Michael Pollan adage, eat food and when he says food, he said basically anything that your grandparents knew about. If it's some multi-syllabic thing, that's not food, that's some corporate invention. Anyway, eat food, not too much, mostly plants. I think he nails it there. Yeah, he does, I really love that. What should young freelance writers or writers or researchers who are even young innovators in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make a real impact? I think it's thinking holistically. I think we can't sort of attack any problem in isolation. We can't think about the food system or health or animal welfare isolated from all these other things because it's all so connected, increasingly so. And in terms of geography as well, sort of you can't fix something in New Jersey and not worry about what's happening in Indonesia. It needs to be a holistic. What have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start? That the magazine industry was gonna collapse? That's, I was a long-time magazine editor and it was really fun work. And there's just so many for you or all the magazines that I worked for no longer exist. And that's really sad to me. I mean, I understand things have gone digital but I think it's also the Facebooks and the Googles where the advertising money is going. And anyway, that's sort of sarcastic. But more seriously, I guess, pursue the work that you love that you feel is, if you don't believe in it, it's not gonna be fun. You gotta feel like you're doing something that matters. I'm not even sure if it's bad that that is sarcastic and because there's also some truth in it because I'm not sure the digital versions has really replaced that sustenance or that true journalistic styles or even some of the publications you've written for editing. It's not just magazines. I mean, it's local news, local newspapers, being bought off by hedge funds and then just being gutted. So there's so many journalists now who are out of work and that's the local journalism is really important to know what's going on on the ground. So yeah, we need to address that moving forward. I truly agree. Jocelyn, thank you so much for letting us inside of your ideas. It's been a sheer pleasure and I'm glad you let me just speak to you or relax like you're right next to me and I wish you all the best and I'm done with my questions but if you have anything else that you would like to add on the book that we didn't get a cover, now is your chance. Otherwise, I really thank you for your time and I hope we can have another podcast follow up maybe next year when you come out with some other good surprises. Thank you so much, Mark. I'd love talking to you and thank you for all your amazing work. I appreciate it and you have a wonderful day. Take care. Watch you too. Bye.