Anyways, that question is one of my hero'sies for a lot of reasons because I think better than anybody I've spent most of my career in the environmental space trying to save nature and then the other half particularly more recently dealing with toxic and impacts on human health and I think you better than anybody in the world in history has kind of united those two things into a single a single vision for how to who think about

and how to understand the world and you know you've just done such a good job of explaining that unity to so many people like me and you know helping us understand that it's all the same thing.

Let me just tell you I'm not about you for years but I really started paying close attention to you when I was trying the Monsanto cases.

So on glyphosate and you've done in a lot of the really important thinking on glyphosate really for the first time I was talking with experts who were explaining to me about the the Shikame pathway and the importance of the way that glyphosate injures people is really by entering the microbiome and by rewarding the bacteria that cause inflammation.

And making a much more hostile environment in your gut and in your body or the commensal back to the ones that are supposed to be the police force who get rid of the inflammatory invaders in our systems and inflammation.

You know I think that's one of the things you've really taught us that inflammation is kind of everything.

That's an incredible introduction coming from somebody with your impact on the world that you've had and the breadth of activists and and scientists you've been in touch with over the last 40 years.

I was a very humbling introduction, but I think it's a really outproposed place to start at the Shikame pathway.

It's a esoteric enzyme pathway that is not known to us as consumers or frankly as physicians.

I certainly was not taught the Shikame pathway and the reason is this is not in the human body.

And so the Shikame pathway only resides in single cellular organisms or plants.

And so the bacteria and fungi within our soils or the plants that we would consume contain the Shikame pathway and its critical role in nature and human biology is around producing a number of different compounds.

I would break into two general categories, one being the alkaloids, which are the medicine within our food, including many of the anti-inflammatories that you're kind of referring to there.

And so the anti-inflammatory anti seizure, anti-diabetic anti heart disease, anti cancer, all these compounds in the alkaloids that have been long exploited by myself and others within the drug industry.

And when I do chemotherapy development, we were always looking at the alkaloids for wisdom on which molecules we should manipulate next to be a chemotherapy or not because nature has already figured out these medicinal pathways.

And then the other half, if you go past the alkaloids are the essential amino acids.

And so the the ringed carbon molecules that are necessary for the essential amino acids to be produced are necessarily coming through the Shikame pathway and bacteria and fungi in our gut or the soil or plants that we would consume.

And the essential amino acids are turned such because we can't produce something since we don't have the Shikame pathway.

And these include critical compounds like phenylalanine, triptophan, tyrosine. These rings amino acids are the building blocks then for large enzymes and proteins and neurotransmitters and ultimate hormones.

And so you can't have normal estrogen testosterone or an organ ever an happen after and signaling within the human body without these constituent building blocks of the essential amino acids that are coming from the microbes in your gut or the microbes in the soil or the plants that you would consume.

And so the building blocks for human life, the building blocks in fact for any multi-cellular life is put together by this incredible microbiome and the plant life that would be nurtured by it.

And so when we talk about adding a chemical to the food system in the 1970s that would block the Shikame pathway, it was sped through the EPA USDA all the regulatory environments saying it was going to be safer than water was their tagline for many years as you well know.

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