The Terminator Gene (30 minute version)

to take all of the professions that exist in the world and you were to sort of rank them as to which ones you thought would be the most likely to cause an international incident of some kind I'm guessing that most people in the room would probably put moss scientists you know in the least likely category because when you think about that it's just not the kind of a thing where you're like you know what's gonna foment revolt there right probably just the word Moss alone was enough for you to kind of go like okay this is least likely and maybe you know if you're conservative you might have been like okay wait a second you might say Moss pirate or Moss beef and like you know that could be a little more incendiary but at the end of the day when I say Moss scientist you're like not gonna happen but it turns out historically speaking this actually has happened one time at least one time that we know of and it was a guy named Melvin Oliver he worked for the United States Department of Agriculture and he researched drought resistant Moss and he came home at the end of the day one day ate his dinner went to bed and had that thing happened that probably a lot of you have had happen like just when you're about to fall asleep you get like this idea that's like a possible solution to a problem you've been thinking of like in the back of your head and the problem that he been thinking of was you know scientists like me we do this research on stuff and we make genetically modified organisms right you make like new genomes for plants and we make like new plants but the problem with plants is that they are designed to reproduce so when I sell this new plant to somebody else they can just make as many as they want and they don't have to pay me any more for it right there's no way for me to protect my invention as I'm saying control it so that it only does what I wanted to do and so he was kind of thinking about this he's like I think I know how to fix that and you know when he kind of drifted off to sleep he was like it's gonna take a lot of work but I think we might be able to do this now obviously that's kind of like an ideology right that's a way of thinking about intellectual property and you know it's it's kind of familiar to our Institute right but in the same genre they're in the same our cultural John I just want to give you a totally polar opposite example so it's 1988 you have to cast your mind back there if you were even alive old people like me we were alive back then but cast your mind back to 1988 and in Wisconsin there's a farmer his name is Wayne Peters and he is a traditional family farmer okay and in the 1980s of course that was like the zenith in America that you know the the apex if you will of sort of the factory farms scientific based farming sort of like farming as a straight up business kind of a movement right that was what was dominant at the time and Wayne was just you know a farmer he lived on a farm he worked on his farm and he saw his way of life kind of disappearing around him because at the end of the day it was becoming harder and harder for him to sell his products at a price where he could make a living and still do things the way that he had always done them not using pesticides not using herbicides you know treating the animals well letting in the grays all these sorts of things and what bothered him most about what was happening in the outside industry where everyone was focused on just maximizing crop yields and you know do whatever you have to do to make sure your cow produces the absolute maximum possible amount of milk right what bothered him most about that was that he actually really loved farming and he knew that if people like him eventually went away entirely when he retired his children would not be able to enjoy that experience if they wanted to be farmers like he was and do that work which he found very rewarding there would be no way for them to do it because it wasn't going to be about that anymore and so what he did was he banded together with about seven other people and they formed something called the Coulee Region organic produce pool which you know they're not marketers they're farmers so wasn't the best thing but it acronyms to crop so you can give them credit for that and what they decided to do was Mamie if we band together we can start telling people like hey yeah you have to pay a little more there were dairy farmers right you have to pay a little bit more for this milk or this cheese but you know it's coming from we farm and it's gonna be something that's better but you want this you want to pay a little bit extra for this but it turns out that that's actually really hard to do because especially in industry like farming where things are very highly regulated but in any industry really when it's set up to do one particular thing and do it in a particular way you run into all sorts of things problems with how do you get financing problems how do you communicate with your customers I don't even find the customers were gonna want these things there's all these problems and so it was extremely difficult for them to even get started and they really could not figure it out and so it seemed like this experiment was really not going to work and Wayne Peters and everyone else's way life really was going to disappear now jump backwards a decade here and this is in Austin Texas 1978 there's a couple a guy by the name of John Mackey and and he and and a woman named Renee Lawson were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time and they were kind of you know I don't want to pigeonhole anyone but I'm just gonna say like in knowing their history I feel like they were they were kind of hippies I'm just gonna put it out there they were hippies like he lived in a vegetarian co-op for a while but he wasn't even vegetarian and so I'm just thinking like you know okay you know he just liked that way of life and so what they saw in Austin Texas and this is gonna sound weird when I say it but but he lived in Austin Texas and when he looked around there was nowhere to really buy foods that were sort of natural and were about you know not having lots of processing and not having lots of chemicals in them and so even though now we think of Austin is keep Austin weird like the supermarket's there were all about the standard stuff but you would see you know in 1978 it was just all processed foods and he and Rene they wanted to change that they wanted to be able to go somewhere to a store it's kind of like their dream where like everything in the store would be like a natural food product right everything there would be something that they wanted to eat so they didn't have to worry about like oh where am I gonna go get this thing or that thing I could just go shop at this store and it's all the foods that I want right so they scraped together $45,000 from their friends and family and you know they rented a storefront and they you know this Convention Center there's like two supermarkets kind of on either side of it the second closest one over there is a Safeway right and they use the name Safeway - pun on to make the name of this storefront it was called safer way right because they kind of thought that it was bad to eat the other way and so what they did is when they started you know doing this with only forty five thousand dollars the storefront was extremely small because that's all they could afford to rent and if your storefront is a community small there's nowhere to actually store all of your wholesale like packaging right and your goods so what ended up happening is they put it all in their house stuff would come in and they rented this house you know this is where they lived they would just stack it up in the living rooms there are boxes in the living room they'd overflow into you know the kitchen bathroom probably and this is you know not exactly conforming to your typical residential lease this is not typically something that they allow and in fact it's probably against some kind of Austin Texas residential zoning law I would imagine so it was only a matter of time before this game is going to be up and of course the landlord finds out about this and it's like you guys are so evicted and so just like that in the middle of trying to make this store work they find themselves homeless right so anyway I mean coincidentally at this point in time this is you know the late 70s I'm I'm really old at this point I was actually playing my very first videogame like the first time I ever played a video game it was like 79 or maybe 80 no one remember certainly not me but I remember the experience certainly like it was yesterday and the way that you had to play games back then at least the kind that we had was you had a terminal which is not even exist anymore right and it's this big CRT display like a television with the little you know big old punch keys on it and you would connect it to a mainframe over the phone line and you would run a program on the main side and it would like one letter at a time come back what was going to happen right and then you would type in what you wanted to do in like this game or whatever now none of this was something I could ever manage on my own because I was three right so there was like no way that I could figure this out but I saw my dad using this because he used it for work and I really really wanted to be a part of it you know I wanted to use this thing and I don't know why cuz my dad did other stuff breaking you know did woodworking and he loved playing baseball or whatever but for some reason there was like a magic to this device and that was the thing that I really wanted him to like show me how to do but you know a three-year-old can't do it so you know he was just like okay okay you know I'll run a game and the games that they had up there were like text adventures right in fact the particular one that that I'm thinking of my head is called colossal cave which some of you may even heard of it's a famous text adventure right and what he would do is he would run that on the mainframe and he would read out to me what came across on the screen and then he would ask me what I wanted to do and I'm sure he massaged my answers quite a bit because as any of you have ever played a text adventure know there parsers are awful even when you're an adult so a three-year-old is not going to make any headway but in one particular case in that game there is a dragon that you have to get by and you say kill dragon and it asks you what do you want to kill the dragon with your bare hands kind of facetiously but to a three-year-old that's not facetious it's just like oh that would be awesome to kill a dragon with your bare hands yes do that and my dad's like okay any types I didn't and it turns out that's the right thing to do in this game for some unknown reason and I felt so great about that because that's like the first time I ever did anything right in a video game and I pretty much made it for them ever since you know I learned a program when I was seven my dad taught me how to do it and the first thing I wrote was a game it was a thing where you could type in a number and it would print out what happened as a result of that number and I'm pretty sure that the review scores for this game would probably have been very low because it's the same every time you type number one you kept the same result so replay value not good but our one customer which was my mom she seemed to really like it so I don't know believe right but you know I'm just saying the fans they know that's that's that's my opinion anyway all right so anyway hmm Melvin Oliver goes to bait he's got this idea he's like you know what I think we can solve this problem of people of plants reproducing we can solve this problem we've got and so he starts doing research on the idea that he had and he works with a company because he's got the United States Department of Agriculture so typically what they'll do is they'll work with an external company when they try to sort of do research projects right so they work with an external company called the Delta and pine land company and they work on developing this technology and eventually it comes to fruition and they get a patent on it and they call it the T P P s our GPS technology protection system I think is what they call it and what this is is if you genetically modify a plant because we're probably have to germinate right like when you grow a plant it's got to make seeds at some point that process called germination and so it's that thing that they wanted to stop right they want to stop the germination and we could stop it in one plant easily we just genetically modify that plant to not be able to germinate but the problem is once you do that you can't reproduce the plant so what you're trying to do is you're trying to make this plant make lots of seeds for you that you can sell but when you give those seeds to someone else you don't want them to be able to make more seed right and so what this system does is it puts into the plants genome like into its DNA the ability for it to self-destruct its own germination you know if it's only itself sterilized this is the way you might put it right it's kind of an ugly way to put it but that's what it is and they make this self sterilization capability masked by something else in the plant that it produces and they make that masking contingent on some external chemical so basically at any time they can just expose the seeds to that chemical and it will turn off the masking and the plant will become sterile it'll self-sterilizing right and so in this case it happened to be type of cycling so what you do is you take your seeds that you're gonna sell you bathe them in tetracycline you send them off and those seeds will never again germinate those they'll grow into plants but they'll never make more plants right and so it sounds kind of sinister when I'm saying it right and the word self sterilization does not sound good it's not like a positive word if you would use at a party or something like this and so at the end of the day you might wonder like why didn't I hear more about this or but Delta pine and land company or dustin pine life but i don't even know these don't sound familiar to me you think i would have heard of this right and the reason if you never heard of a delta and pine land company is actually because at this time they were in the process of getting acquired by monsanto which pretty much everyone has probably heard of at this point and they are not necessarily known for being the world's most friendly company okay so what we know from when peters little experiment here is that organic family farms cheese and milk it doesn't sell itself unfortunately right like you can't just do it the market doesn't just rejoice and welcomed with open arms and so these poor farmers back there who you know honestly like i am rooting for them right because anytime someone's big premise the big goal they want to achieve in life is passing their way of life on to their children i mean it's a romantic and noble notion right you want them to succeed but at the end of the day they have to be able to actually sell this stuff in order to support their family farms and so as luck would have it there's actually an organization called the national farmers organization it's a nonprofit organization kind of like the people who put together this conference and it turns out that some of the members of this co-op crop that wayne Peters have found we're also members of that organization and when that organization found out what they were trying to do they said you know what and this organization is pretty powerful actually goes back fairly far in American history so they've got some skills may get marketing a little bit better and they know how economics works a little bit better than some dairy farmers from Wisconsin who really aren't you know adept at this they're adept at farming and so what they say is you know what what you really need is you just need someone to basically become the conduit for what you're doing you produce the milk we'll provide some funding and we will connect you with people across the country who believe in the same sort of ideology because there's a movement going on right now it's like organic foods movement which at the time that wasn't even a defined thing right in the late 80s it was really a morphus and it had it kind of gotten into the mainstream but they're like there's this movement it's starting to gain traction I think this could really work and it turns out they were right once they just have that little bit of you know of a wind in their sails if you will and they had people who could do some of the things that they need to do like communicate to their customers what it was that they were selling finding people with a similar ideology who believe in family farms and getting them connected just that much allowed them to start succeeding and unlike before it looked like this was actually going to take off now that was a really it was a stroke of very good luck you might say right and this thing about the couple in Austin Texas John Mackey and Renae Lawson they kind of had the opposite of this I mean they were homeless already right they got kicked out of their house and at this point all they had was a storefront so you know what do you do and I don't know what you would do in this situation but like you know declare bankruptcy go try to get a job and buy an apartment or something like I don't know right but they believe so strongly in this idea of a national food market they were like you know what we've been working so hard to make this succeed and this is what we believe in and we're at the store all the time anyway let's just sleep in the store right and now that's the most totally ridiculous to me because I'm like if you just moved out of a situation where you got in trouble for using a residential space for commercial purposes you are now moving into a commercial space to use for residential purposes like this is ridiculous like you know don't you learn your lesson and you know I guess they didn't learn their lesson so they went ahead and did that and I mean they literally lived in this store right down to the fact that when they showered they showered in a Hobart industrial dishwasher and they used the little hot water hose disconnected to like that's how they showered and that is you know you can take that as a sign of how much they believed in this concept they're really do that or you can just say well Casey that's kind of like what hippies do like I'm not that impressed you know Sarah I hope I just kind of sounds luxurious actually I mean if you see how they camp and like I don't know I don't know about that I don't go camping it's not my thing but point being they really want to make this work and so they made that decision and it turned out to me a pretty good decision because the store keeps going they start making money on it it gets bigger and bigger the customer base grows in two years after that they are in a position to merge with one of the other natural grocery stores in the area to open a 10,000 square foot natural market which was really big at the time that's almost the size of a regular supermarket right this is crazy but unfortunately like I said these people have incredibly bad luck and so one night Rene is managing the store and the employees John is taking a break he's playing board games with some friends she calls up and she's like you know we're in the middle of a rainstorm right now and like the creek near the place is kind of the water levels rising and I'm worried right next call okay the creek is overflowing next fall okay the water is at the door of the store what do we do and they're like I don't know what we do you plug the door try to make it not go through anyway it turns out they were caught in one of the worst storms with well the worst floods that Austin Texas has ever had it was a Memorial Day flood and by the time the employees evacuated with Rene the water was up to their waists it destroyed all the inventory in the store and it ruined most of their equipment and you know grocery stores don't operate especially a small natural grossly grocery store with you know no other locations they don't have a lot of cushion there right so this is like devastating it's unclear how you come back from this so alright I promised you an international incident the beginning of the talk and I don't want to fail to deliver that so I mean the Delta pine land company is acquired by Monsanto and if nobody was really going to care very much about this technology protection system that the Delta and pine land company was doing as soon as you attach the name Monsanto to it and people find out what it's actually supposed to do that becomes newsworthy and so slowly all of these organizations who are already not particular fans of Santo but who are farmers advocates who are advocates performers around the world they are like this sounds awful if Monsanto can start to control seed in this way and sell it to other seed companies who will control control seed in this way they will basically become a monopoly unlike what people come Clint in some countries some countries get a lot of their seed this way and they could completely they could just go in and force farmers to do whatever they wanted because there's no way to even break the law and replant seed because there'd be no seed to plant right and so it becomes sort of a natural fit it's like an international it's it's an international incident there's a lot of furor what ends up happening is the UN has a Subcommittee on biodiversity they have a sub conference on this they come out against it the head of the Rockefeller organization gives a speech to Monsanto's own board telling them you must not commercialize this and strangely enough Monsanto actually listens it's so overwhelming that Monsanto actually listens so mm-hmm if you think about this it's kind of crazy actually because the food industry I mean that doesn't really operate like our industry in that sense right you know when things happen like this there aren't all of these authors you know the footage there's all these authors who are writing books about what food means and and how food should be you know what our food supply should look like there's all these organizations that think about that and advocate on behalf of people all this sort of stuff so in this case the new technology protection system which got rebranded the Terminator gene by the people who do PR for these organizations who wanted to stop it from happening right they were able to basically shut this down before it ever even got out in the wild and that's kind of incredible to me anyway how much they were able to do here and it's very important for emerging markets and that sort of stuff but what I thought about when I considered how this whole thing went down was that actually in America there was a more defense-in-depth for this meaning even if they hadn't been able to convince Monsanto not to do this at our current state of how agriculture works we could actually have avoided any serious problems because there's a big organic foods movement there's depicting all this stuff because of the people that I've been talking about in this lecture right those Wisconsin farmers what happened is Monsanto who features prominently in this lecture multiple times he introduced the thing called recombinant bovine growth hormone in the 1990s and consumers hated this concept it had terribly bad press nobody wanted it and so people started asking for milk that didn't have it and guess who was there to give them that crop the coop and others like it across the country who were still doing family farming who would never have done that to their animals they were in a position to capitalize on that and they grew extremely quickly and in fact you have heard of them this is their trade name Organic Valley they're in basically every supermarket now you can get this anywhere and so the little Coulee Region organic produce pool and in fact I think crop is still their acronym for their legal name but this is their trade brand now right is one of the most desired brands in the country and it demands sometimes twice the price of a competing product that does not feature organic family farming right and of course you know where did I get this this guy right here well we we put them aside for a second just say so it turns out actually I mean you know if you if you take a look at the Safeway or something like this if that thing not flood its probably not very likely than anyone care yeah that's the corporate it's a you know honestly some corporation that runs the supermarket they'll take care of it insurance whatever but it turns out if you're a natural food store and you're one of the very first natural food store and all of the people who are customers at your store believe in what you're doing and care about what you are doing when you have a flood that wipes out everything in your store and destroys all your equipment everyone wants to help you and so John Mackey Renae Lawson when the store got flooded their customers down to help them rebuild it the people who sold them their products allowed them not to pay for a few months so they could get back on their feet and it turned out it's step by step after having rebuilt that store they opened another one and another one and they continued to grow and grow and grow and it became the chain where I bought this milk the actual first closest store to this convention center right on the other side of the highway which is Whole Foods another premium brand one that is so desired that people even have a nickname for it whole paycheck because they believe it's so expensive but they stopped there in droves so nobody's under any illusions about what they are getting when they go to Whole Foods but because it ideologically matches with what they want out of the world and what they believe their food should be they will pay extra and they will support it and so I think about this and I am in total awe of the food industry and those I mean because they were little guys right and you look and there's clothes and examples of this like I said I couldn't even fit this lecture into 30 minutes so I couldn't go into a lot of them but I'm just in awe of how much they care about what they're doing and how they organize to make sure it will happen and I see all kinds of parallels between their industry and our industry right because at the end of the day we definitely do have a split in the game industry we even have names for it triple-a and Indy right we have giant farming that is metrics oriented that is about maximizing profits and making games as a business and then we have independent developers who really love games and just want that authorial control and want to do it the way it's always been done I want to make a game that I want to play and I believe that customers will want that from me right and what's so fantastic about the game industry right now is that without even having ever had to really fight for this yet both of these things coexist peacefully Triple A developers don't care about what indie developers do they don't think that we'd be stealing their it's any developers don't care what Triple A developers do it's something for everyone right and no matter what it is that you believe in this market supports you and I think that is absolutely incredible right what I don't think is so incredible is the fact that this is extremely extremely tenuous because at the end of the day in order to ship a game to anyone they must have hardware on which to play it and over the past decade what we have seen with game hardware is that as becoming increasingly closed even in the personal computing space and what that means is that a very very small number of companies Microsoft Apple Sony Nintendo very very few completely control whether you will be able to connect with your customers how you will be able to connect with their customers whether they can get your product at all and in my mind that looks a lot like what Mon Tinto wants to do right they want to control what's going on in their platforms it's not necessarily that they're going to be nefarious it's that they want that control and when they have that control what they're going to do with it and what they have done with it you can look at what they have done traditionally when they've had these controls is they will do what benefits them most for their business that's not so concerning when you're a triple-a developer because when you're a triple-a developer you have some negotiating power and people need you on their platform right if I make a call of duty Microsoft has to deal with me it's not going to be very easy for them to sell another Xbox if they don't have that product but my game handmade hero is I went to Microsoft and said you know what we need you to do this stuff or we're not putting handmade here on your platform they would turn to me and say what is handmade here oh right and that would be the end of that discussion if the discussion even happened at all and so I think we need to start doing real work to keep what we have gotten by accident that is extremely valuable because the equivalent of the Terminator gene is actually all many people in this room probably have an iOS device nobody can make anything on iOS device unless they go through Apple you have to pay $99 to Apple to even program something for your own iOS device this laptop that I'm running the presentation on comes with something called a TPM a trusted platform module one letter away from the acronym of the technology protection system isn't that amusing and what that chip is designed to do is to make it so that not just anyone can write code for this machine only people with defining keys can make stuff for this machine and Microsoft hasn't decided to turn this on everywhere yet but maybe someday they will and so I think now because I know from reading the history what the lean time is on building defenses for these sorts of things I think now is the time for us to figure out how to start and I think we can take a lot of lessons from the food industry because there's two big things that we as game developers can do there's things that authors need to do there's things that organizations need to do but we are game developers what can we do the first one is to start establishing the concept of an organic brand and I don't know exactly what the name needs to be for that but the concept that we communicate to the consumer that there are Indies they are valuable they believe in a way of life they're making games because they love them and people know this it's out there but it doesn't have a stamp it's a big difference when you talk about an ideology and when you've got a stamp organic it means something and people know they can shop for it and feel good that they are supporting a particular way of life right and the other thing is we desperately desperately need a Whole Foods we need somebody to start making hardware or committing to making their hardware the place that will always be open and that will not try to curate the content it will not try to stop developers from developing on their own machines or selling over their website or distributing it to their fans that will allow that open ecosystem to continue and that is definitely the hardest one and like I said if we want that to happen we have to start pushing for it now so I just like to end by saying the person of course in the story who identified that most whiff was Wayne Peters because when I think about his situation I get kind of teary-eyed when I think about the concept that all someone wants to do is they've loved farming their whole life and they just want to pass it on to their kids and you know honestly I've loved game development my whole life and I feel exactly the same way and it would absolutely break my heart to know that when I am gone the next generation of programmers of game developers will not be able to choose the kind of life that I did simply because we let the Monsanto's of our industry take that away from them thank you very much

Channel: Molly Rocket

Views: 19,111

Rating: 4.930676 out of 5

Keywords: Handmade Hero

Id: biuRt_qdcIg

Length: 31min 51sec (1911 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Chii]

I've never made the analogy of terminator genes (as in for seeds), and trusted computing/closed platforms. It's super interesting - well worth the 30 minutes.