Rewriting the Code: Ancestral Genes, AI, and the Future of Health with Dr. Howard Urnovitz

In this provocative episode of Coffee in the Barn, Dr. Casey Bradley sits down with molecular biologist, immunologist, and biotech pioneer Dr. Howard Urnovitz, whose lifelong mission to understand—and challenge—how we think about disease started with personal tragedy and led to scientific transformation.

From launching the first FDA-approved urine test for HIV to founding FBB Biomed, Dr. Urnovitz walks us through the intersection of RNA sequencing, endogenous viruses, and artificial intelligence—tools he believes hold the key to curing everything from cancer to neurological disease.

💡 Along the way, we explore the darker side of modern life:
 – Why ultra-processed food and environmental toxins may be rewriting our DNA
– How junk DNA might not be junk at all
– And why our public health systems are still stuck in outdated models

🚀 Dr. Urnovitz also introduces his new book, Unnatural Selection, a powerful call to rethink how we define health, treat disease, and educate the next generation of scientists.

Whether you’re in the lab, in the barn, or on the frontlines of public policy, this episode will challenge everything you thought you knew about genetics, diagnostics, and the future of biotechnology.

You’ll hear about:

✔️ How RNA signals can predict disease before symptoms
 ✔️ Why “junk” DNA and endogenous viruses might hold the answers to chronic illness
 ✔️ The role of AI in decoding massive genomic datasets
 ✔️ How agriculture, animal health, and human health are connected at the genetic level
 ✔️ A call to re-educate the next generation of researchers—with curiosity, not conformity

📬 Connect with the Guest:
Dr. Howard Urnovitz – info@fbbbio.com | FBB Biomed

📘 Unnatural Selection by Dr. Howard Urnovitz – available now

📬 For regulatory support and technical guidance, email:
 technical@animistic.co

🌐 Visit animistic.co to learn more.

☕ Grab your coffee—and tune in to a conversation that challenges dogma, reimagines diagnostics, and rewrites the rules of health.

To learn more about Poultry Lingo 2025, email technical@animistic.co

Please email technical@animistic.co to learn more about our regulatory packages.

Visit animistic.co to learn more.

Transcript

0:00:00
(Casey Bradley)
Well, I'm so excited to have Howard on our podcast here. I've been hoping to get you on our podcast for since I met you through Niamary. Can we start off with a little bit of a background about yourself and your company and kind of what your purpose is?

0:00:23
(Howard U.)
Because I love your purpose. Thank you. Well, let's start with my purpose. My mom died when I was 18 years old of cancer, and my five other members of my family all died of cancer. And so my motivation is why. And so I was fortunate to attend the University of Michigan and meet William H. Murphy, who was influential for my whole life. Taught me the scientific method,

0:00:54
(Howard U.)
taught me that there are viruses that are passed down through our genes, mother and father. And that was the beginning. Went through postdoc, met Richard Lynch at Wash U, came up to Iowa, and then got bit by the biotechnology bug. The fact is that I did the first hybridomas in the Americas, given to me by Dr. George Kohler, who got the Nobel Prize for hybridomas.

0:01:25
(Howard U.)
And from there, just found that biotechnology gave me more freedom to operate than being a academic and writing grants to the NIH. So from that time, I've been looking for models on basically how do you cure cancer? And just led me to how do you cure everything? And just led me to how do you cure everything?

0:01:45
(Howard U.)
And so that was the fact that we've combined molecular biology with now the new frontier of artificial intelligence. And so my first company was Calypte Biomedical, in which we got the first and only FDA approval for a urine test for HIV antibodies,

0:02:05
(Howard U.)
saved a lot of lives, I hope. And then we took that public. My second company, Chronix Biomedical, we had a blood test for mad cow disease, which was not prions, but in fact, ancestral genes. But thank goodness that they figured out

0:02:23
(Howard U.)
how to get rid of mad cow, very happy about that. So we pivoted back to cancer and came up with a blood test for end-stage cancer. And finally when I saw the dawn of AI happening, I started my third company which is current FBB Biomed in which we wanted to say the best way for us to study cancer is to not study cancer. Because the genes that are in your blood and your body fluids, which ones are normal and

0:02:54
(Howard U.)
which ones are cancer. So that's why we did some customer discovery. Also went back to school and became an entrepreneur, thanks to the John Papa John Entrepreneurial Center, learned how to do it right, and then started with customer discovery. So when we talked to neurologists, they said, if you could figure out a way to give us an alternative to the spinal tap, we would buy it. And so that's what we did is we went in and said,

0:03:23
(Howard U.)
let's build a blood test. So the hard part there was to figure out what were the biomarkers. I went into RNA. My last company was DNA, but RNA is so much over expressed than DNA. It's a better signal to noise. Excuse me. And so that's what we did. And it turned out that because my whole life has been studying endogenous viruses, unfortunately, it clashed with the term junk DNA.

0:03:53
(Howard U.)
And so we had to decode the junk DNAs for us to come out with these new diagnostics. And once we were the first to see the first results, it's like looking at the web telescope. And all of a sudden, all these stars are in front of us. And we just said, let's get AI to organize it.

0:04:14
(Howard U.)
And that's when we realized that the future is to now look at when dormant genes that are expressed during development and then should be shut off. When they're turned on again, that's the disease process. So what we plan to do with FBB Biomed is we own it all,

0:04:33
(Howard U.)
we've patented it. We have targets for therapeutics, which is exciting. And, but I realized that, you know, the efficiency is that large companies, they have full departments on regulatory sales and marketing. Why should I reinvent that?

0:04:51
(Howard U.)
So I wanna follow the current model in biotechnology, which is file the patents, show it works. We'll actually have some sales, so you can see how the sales work in forecasting, and then just sell the company and put it in the hands of somebody that can get this worldwide distribution so that there is no cancer or neurologic diseases

0:05:14
(Howard U.)
or animal production problems. So I worked in Mad Cow for that exact reasons. So by harnessing the energy of now being the ones that finally mapped the end of the human genome and we're going to get all the genomes because only 80% has been mapped up till now, the rest of it we claim is in fact variable regions. That all of the different human populations we have are because as we walked out of Africa about

0:05:45
(Howard U.)
100, 150,000 years ago, we interacted with animals, we got herpes viruses in us that actually was beneficial and got us to adapt to the new environments, you know, less sunlight, less fat here, more blue eyes there. All of these things are adaptation Traits which still makes us human beings and so that's it if we can sell the company out and I can continue my work on Educating the world because I hate being the only guy who understands us

0:06:19
(Howard U.)
That's why I'm focused on the next generation of scientists. And I think that's going to be a more effective way to get this out onto the marketplace and into academia. 

0:06:32
(Casey Bradley)
Well Howard, that's pretty impressive. And I think your education in the market, obviously through LinkedIn, you're doing a lot of that outreach, but you just wrote a book called Unnatural Selection. Can you kind of walk us through this whole concept of rewriting our DNA because you know when we think of extreme I guess evolution and you can get into the sci-fi, I have a ten year old son so sci-fi and you know two heads and turning green and we think of that but when you talk about rewriting our DNA

0:07:12
(Casey Bradley)
and the new evolution it's actually not a healthy path that we're on today. Can you kind of walk us through the setting the stage of the book and why rewriting our DNA today is not probably that cool that we're going to have multiple eyes and can see more or be smarter, but it's actually a health crisis?

0:07:35
(Howard U.)
It's a health crisis.

0:07:36
(Howard U.)
So thank you. So I wrote the book. The title, Unnatural Selection, of course, is a reference to Darwin's natural selection. And what makes it unnatural is the fact that we don't have that link that everybody needs. I mean, I respect the agricultural community that says, show us the evidence that pesticides

0:07:59
(Howard U.)
really are causing problems on our DNA. And it's a fair challenge. And so what I wanted to do was start with a reference. What do we know? And the fact of the matter is that with unnatural selection, I basically document things that we never really thought about. The fact that, you know, we're just coming off this COVID pandemic. But the fact is, the other terrible pandemic was the Spanish flu of 1918. How many people know how many kilotons of phosphorus gas, mustard gas,

0:08:39
(Howard U.)
chlorine gas was used in the battlefields of World War I. And what that did was it basically made the world susceptible to anything that came through. And that was basically an influenza virus that basically took over. So example after example, I personally have been sprayed with DDT so that we didn't get mosquitoes on us. It was free from the government. But in fact, the DDT was the reason why we had a polio epidemic.

0:09:13
(Howard U.)
We've always had the polio virus. FDR had polio. But it was at a level that was more of measles type, not an epidemic or a pandemic. So what increased it was DDT. It's a neurotropic agent used to kill mosquitoes and flies, but it basically turned on a set of genes

0:09:36
(Howard U.)
that we'll talk about that made us susceptible to these types of viruses. So once DDT was banned, polio went away. And so all of these things are documented examples of that people don't even know about. So I wrote the book to basically say,

0:09:56
(Howard U.)
let's all start from the same point, reference point about what's going on, and then morph into what our discovery is not new, that endogenous viruses have been around for the study for 40, 50 years. Bill Murphy and I wrote the landmark review in 1996, summarizing what we knew from antibody studies, not even molecular biology.

0:10:24
(Howard U.)
And from that point, we've been searching for a way to measure them. So that's what the book does. It summarizes what we know, and it tells us where we're going. It points out the first publication we've done in this area.

0:10:38
(Howard U.)
It points out that a lot of these studies that claim Epstein-Barr virus infection causes MS and the like is just wrong. It's that that Epstein-Barr virus is in a huge percentage of our population because it helped us evolve as we were migrating out of Africa. So when you see all these studies, they're antibodies to Epstein-Barr virus, not the

0:11:04
(Howard U.)
virus. Well, if you activate your endogenous Epstein-Barr virus, the ones that mom and dad gave you, you will get an antibody response. So I'm trying to reset our mindset about the fact that virology is one virus that causes the disease. You can't get more wrong. And the fact is that viruses were discovered after the great Robert Koch saved the world with his postulates on how to identify which bacteria or fungus or parasite was associated with each disease. Brilliant stuff, but it's not his fault

0:11:45
(Howard U.)
that we said, okay, well it's got to work for viruses. It doesn't. And so in the book I described why I started the golden age of virology, where we don't look at this concept that we have to go after the virus alone, but we must also treat our genomic health. If you do that one-two combination, you have a healthy planet. So that's why I wrote the book.

0:12:13
(Howard U.)
And I wrote it in three days because the whole book was written with my good friend, Chat GPT. And as I say at the very last paragraph, why it's the only thing on this planet that understands what I'm talking about.

0:12:30
(Howard U.)
So it helped me translate all these complex ideas for the both the general public, but also for neurologists and oncologists and doctors who just wanna know, give us a reason why we're seeing so much of this now, and also now spilling over, and thank you for inviting me, into the world of animal

0:12:52
(Howard U.)
production, agriculture, everything else. Because if you've got DNA, then you need to figure out how do you keep that DNA stable, whether it's an animal or it's a human. So thank you, Chat GPT. I'm very proud to have been your collaborator.

0:13:11
(Casey Bradley)
One of my great collaborators as well. It takes what we have here and translates it to the normal human in my mind.

0:13:20
(Howard U.)
Well said.

0:13:21
(Casey Bradley)
It's my great editor on things, but you opened up a lot of rabbit holes. And I'm going to take us, like I said, I promised you I'd probably go off script. But this kind of goes into this. When we look at public health policies today, what do we need to do to be proactive about this?

0:13:39
(Casey Bradley)
Because reading your book said, well, crap, Casey, you need to be proactive on the food that you produce for the world. I mean, I care about the world, right? I'm here to help support the world, provide food security, you know, and inspire other people.

0:14:01
(Casey Bradley)
But I was really kind of concerned because when we get into toxins and animal nutrition, we talk about micro toxins. And obviously I was introduced to a client working on a human product for microplastics and trying to do this. What shifts do we need to make? Because we're getting a lot of backlash or Robert Kennedy is like on both sides of is this really right? And I'm like go Robert, this is what we

0:14:29
(Casey Bradley)
needed a long time ago on some things. But really where do you think these policies need to go? Because obviously us as humans we're not voluntarily going to give up the stuff that we have comfort to.

0:14:46
(Howard U.)
Yeah, the public health policies are they need time to develop. And when I, you know, I have a mixed relationship with the secretary, because I completely agree with the ultra processed foods that kids are eating. And as you saw from my LinkedIn, I was able to create my new box cereal Darwinios, now accelerating extinction one bite at a time. These are terrible things. Ultra processed foods is not how we evolved into the humans we are today.

0:15:22
(Howard U.)
And so I applaud that effort. But then making the claim that vaccines cause autism is just wrong. It's not the scientific method. If you want to say we'd like to test the role of vaccines in autism, I'm on board. But you're not going to find the vaccines causing it. This all happens in utero. The mother is exposed to these things, whether they're microplastics or mercury in a fish or where you live and how much pesticides. Mom translates that into the growing fetus. And so you're going to get, you know, things

0:16:01
(Howard U.)
like autism is a disorder. It's not a disease. And so you'll get a disorder out of that. And so I would say all of this is the same thing until public health policies embrace the idea that we have suppressed the idea of the role of ancestral genes in our development for 38 years. Yesterday, I asked my friend, John Wayne, the Duke, to chime in on the death of, can I say bullshit on your podcast?

0:16:37
(Speaker 7)
Yeah.

0:16:38
(Howard U.)
Of Tony Fauci's bullshit, that an AIDS vaccine is gonna save the world. That got defunded yesterday. And so the Duke chimed in and said his famous line, life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid. I've been fighting Fauci for 38 years.

0:17:00
(Howard U.)
When we published in Lancet, the finally first clue how to cure AIDS, instead of being asked to develop that further, I was suppressed and I was called a crackpot. And for 40 years, even today, I'll never get a government grant. So let's go back to public policy. Even though you got these imbeciles, and let's also go to the fact that Francis Collins, an evangelical, would label junk genes as meaningless stuff that God just didn't get around to

0:17:34
(Howard U.)
sweep away. You know I do the Edward Munch thing right now but I think it'd throw off the camera. And so this kind of insanity of having people with no scientific method, training at all, going in and formulating public policy is why we got the COVID pandemic, is why we haven't solved the AIDS epidemic or chronic fatigue or any of these things, because we suppress the science. So that said, it's gonna take the private sector.

0:18:08
(Howard U.)
That's where I've gotten the most freedom to operate is I set an objective and I tell my investors what we're gonna do and we meet the objective and I get the freedom to do that. So that's why the private sector is really gonna help out. Public policy needs data.

0:18:26
(Howard U.)
I'm happy that I looked at our data from our research use only test and was able to see, aha, it's the genome. And so for a guy like me with these kinds of tools, imagine if my colleagues had the same tools. So with this, we need an abundance of information.

0:18:50
(Howard U.)
You can't just do science by press release, like Theranos and all these other companies. You've got to have the raw science and you've got to have somebody else repeat it. So the only way to change public policy is with hard scientific data. The problem is getting the funding to create that. But that's over. We're excited the fact that the funding world in biotechnology loves our objectives, loves the fact that we own this all, and that we'll be able to control this

0:19:25
(Howard U.)
so that we can provide people now the data they need. And where's the public health going? I believe it's going this way, is I don't think you should put anything into our environment, whether it's feed to animals or where they live or anything in our world, until you test it first. And you know how easy that is? You take blood samples from pigs and cows,

0:19:56
(Howard U.)
excuse me, it's my environment, pigs and cows and all the production stuff there is, just take a blood sample out, put their white blood cells into dilutions of new food, mycotoxins, microplastics, anything, and then 48 hours later, harvest it and see if in fact you angered the ancients, which means turned on your ancestral genes. That is not something you should release

0:20:27
(Howard U.)
into the environment. So the best way I see public health policy changing for all health is to in fact do the data and have a system in place that you would know. Professor Bruce Ames pioneered this in the 70s by looking at foods added to bacteria that would have high mutation rates. He got the whole ball rolling, but the fact is that the mutations we need to look at are the ones we never knew we had to look at.

0:21:00
(Casey Bradley)
I think that's a great part. And obviously your technology and your changes, I think we're to a point I could have never imagined where we are with biotechnology, technology in general as a child, right? I was that generation introduced to computers and internet and all of that glory. And I still tell my students or younger mentees that, you know, my first literature review we had to file tape lines on the library floor and go up and down two or three levels, right, to write a paper and now you can use chat

0:21:38
(Casey Bradley)
GPT and other sources so easily, how do you think, or how does your company utilize artificial intelligence to analyze these sequences? And where do you see the use of artificial intelligence in the future in medicine? I see it almost replacing maybe the potential of human error?

0:22:06
(Howard U.)
Great question. And the fact is the thing I learned in entrepreneurial school is make sure your product doesn't replace anything because there's too much resistance. So first, what we're gonna do is we're gonna help veterinarians and physicians use AI to help them make better decisions.

0:22:26
(Howard U.)
And so that's where I start with. But you actually hit on it. I just re-released my video of, do you know what it's like to live in Göttingen, Germany? A town no one's ever heard of, but you've heard of every invention that came out of there.

0:22:43
(Howard U.)
And one of the inventions in 1737 was Professor Heine, who with two employees by the name the Brothers Grimm, who were professors at the university, did something that changed the world forever and created what is known as the Age of Enlightenment. And that was you have a hypothesis, but then you have to look at learning everything that's known about it so that you add to that knowledge, not to simply repeat, which is fine, but you really need to advance it. And so what they did was one simple thing,

0:23:19
(Howard U.)
and I filmed it inside this hallowed, sacred library, where they created something that when you went in with a catalog card, the name, the author, where it came from, and then one little thing, the subject. And so now, instead of putting books by alphabetical order of authors, you now put them in stacks and rows of subjects. So I just came up with a theory in mathematics. Do I know if anybody else did that? Well, I

0:23:53
(Howard U.)
go to the library and I sit in the aisle of mathematics and I go down there and read everything about it. That was the world's first browser. That is how this all got started. So when you're adding the list of all the great things that we've come up with, don't forget Google Scholar, is that you have an idea, put it in there, find out who else has had that idea. So now you're doing scientific method at a level you can never do

0:24:21
(Howard U.)
before. I often say what would happen if Albert Einstein had a Google Scholar? I mean, what else would he come up with? And everybody. And so what we do is we use it all. And so the future for artificial intelligence is, it's not quite there yet. So you know, you write the book and it has its problems. It repeats itself over and over and this, that, and the other. But by strengthening it, it's actually learned what I think of. In fact, I tell people that when I die, I'm going to give you my username and password so you can keep asking

0:24:59
(Howard U.)
me questions because it's going to be the same answer. They'll just figure it out. So the thing right now is it should be a partnership. I agree with all the people that think there is the evil form of it. We know that. But the fact is there's also the productive form of it. So in the future, I'm not sure we're going to replace clinicians and veterinarians because we're always going to have new things coming up.

0:25:25
(Howard U.)
And it's hard for AI to know those new things, it may eventually, but for right now in this phase of growth, we have this opportunity to reverse all of these chronic diseases we're seeing now, things that affect our food, avian flu wiped out, showed how vulnerable our food supply is. You know, without food, we don't exist. And so that's why this is also very important. So what AI does for us is takes the human genome,

0:26:04
(Howard U.)
we're starting with the human genome, we're starting with his human genome. And we've been able to now break 11 different neurologic diseases, from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, things like schizophrenia and depression, in break it down into the patterns of ancestral genes. We're always looking for SNPs,

0:26:27
(Howard U.)
these single nucleotide polymorphisms to explain everything. That works perfect in single cell anemia, works terrible in chronic diseases. And the reason why is, it's not gonna be just one mutation,

0:26:42
(Howard U.)
is if you start creating inhibitors that are the natural part of our operating system, as I call it, that could happen anywhere on a 2000, 5000 base pair, non-coding RNA. So it won't always be the same spot. So it's always hard to get that same PCR when in fact it could be anywhere on the gene. So that's why we use next generation sequencing. But then you're staring at, you know, 12 to 25 million reads and saying, how do I organize this? And that's what we do is we write the

0:27:19
(Howard U.)
programs that say, here's our control group. here's our disease group, what do you find different? And then the amazing thing is, things like in Parkinson's, or all of these Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, PCP, multiple systems atrophy, all of these things have consistent patterns

0:27:43
(Howard U.)
of ancestral genes that define the disease. Now, what we need to do is take artificial intelligence and say, all right, you gave us the gene names. Now, tell us functionality. Is there any actionable biomarkers? And that's where the fun begins.

0:28:01
(Howard U.)
Because if you know empirically all these functional docs have done an amazing job of strengthening your mitochondria or doing this, that, and the other. They just figured it out over the last 15 years. What if I can tell you that this group has a mitochondrial problem and should use your protocols to strengthen it. But this group over here has synapse problems and you need to use that. So while they all seem to have the same symptoms, you may only have 20 to 30% have lesions in areas that are going to

0:28:39
(Howard U.)
be different. That's why we never found a way to have a magic bullet to be able to cure all these diseases. We needed to find, and this is my AACC video that I filmed inside of Paul Ehrlich's laboratory five years ago when we predicted we were going to do this. And my friends and colleagues at the American Association of Clinical Chemistry, now ADLM, said, we don't care if you got the data, just tell us where it's going.

0:29:09
(Howard U.)
And so inside Paul Ehrlich's lab, we coined the term magic bullet, because he found a way to cure syphilis with a dye, a small chemical, is now what we need to do is provide the Paul Ehrlich's of the world with magic targets. And those targets need to do is provide the Paul Ehrlich's of the world with magic targets and

0:29:25
(Howard U.)
those targets need to be analyzed and given data from artificial intelligence programs. That's the excitement we couldn't do any of this until we had a

0:29:37
(Casey Bradley)
tool to organize it for us. So with this tool, the possibility to reverse your, it's not so far off. It's

0:29:50
(Howard U.)
not so far off. And we're looking for right now as an entrepreneur, it's focus, focus, focus. So we started out with neurologic disease. It's a fantastic thing for us because the diagnostics in neurologic disease are either terrible or they don't exist. And the fact is that this now helps us understand, without any complicating other things like cancers, exactly what we need to do. We know things like my colleague Terry Wallace or Dr. David Hasse in Tennessee. They're figuring out how to do these things empirically. And when I met Terry five years ago, and you

0:30:34
(Howard U.)
can see my podcast with her where we describe basically what's in the book, is she had MS 15 years ago. She was in a wheelchair heading to her demise. But because she's so brilliant, she actually got up and is now saving lives left and right. So when I said to her five years ago, look it, you helped me control my diabetes type two

0:31:03
(Howard U.)
by changing my diet and exercise patterns, I'm completely healthy. And so, but there's, I don't understand the science behind it. So would you work with me so we can then understand the molecular biology of functional medicine? And that's where I believe if I can make her protocol and all the functional medicines docs protocols more efficient, we're moving towards, let's say, controlling disease. And then when you add stem cells, which is exciting, stem cells, I think, needs our technology

0:31:40
(Howard U.)
because in the Midwest, we know don't't plant corn in sand, because it ain't going to do nothing. You got to have the soil ready to take the seed. And so when we can come, people that need stem cell theory, calm down their ancestral genes to a point where now you come in with stem cells, your own stem cells, you can then start regenerating the lesions that you created. And now we've got a new problem. What are we going to do with all these 150 year olds around?

0:32:18
(Howard U.)
Well, you know, the tax office is going to love it. So while I may have extended your life and quality of life, you're going to be paying taxes for another 50 to 75 years. So that's the bad side of longevity, but the good side is what we're working on. So I firmly believe from the evidence of my colleagues, we can do this.

0:32:40
(Casey Bradley)
Amazing. Well, there's a whole bunch of questions I have, but obviously we need to re-educate our scientists, our medical professions, even us as people. Where do you see, how do we re-educate them? Because it's so fast.

0:32:56
(Howard U.)
Find the entry point. And so you know what? I love my colleagues, but I just think they're not thinking outside the box. And you know what? There's a reason why is even if you think too far outside the box, you're not going to get funded. So what I want to do is start with the next generation. So when I was honored to have my alma mater at the University of Michigan Microbiology and Immunology Department accept my legacy grant to create the William H. Murphy Professorship that says we're going to study interactive infections. We're gonna study how the genome is there.

0:33:45
(Howard U.)
And so I provided the funding for that to happen. And then two other professorships. And I also, if I may put in the stipulation that for those candidates that will apply for this professorship, if you spent more than six weeks

0:34:04
(Howard U.)
at any of the health and human services, FDA, CDC, or NIH, you are unqualified to have this. Why? Because your brain is rotted. And so I want young minds who want to hear, tell me all the data I should be looking at, how I should look at it, give me the tools to look at it, and I'll make my own decision. I don't want you to agree with me,

0:34:31
(Howard U.)
I just want you to take the same journey I did and find out if you have the same. So I wanna start at the level of college. I want high schoolers to learn how to eat properly, and so they understand all this. Because quite frankly, while I don't agree with the great Max Planck's plan, when asked, why didn't you get into quantum mechanics earlier? And his response was, a lot of people

0:35:02
(Howard U.)
had to die first before I wanted to waste the time. I don't want anybody to die. I just want them to be able to expand their possibility of what's out there and teach the next generation. So while we think what we're gonna do is gonna happen, if our big box company that buys us and uses this to put in the hands of clinicians,

0:35:27
(Howard U.)
it will just have that pull effect. So I'm not going to push people into reading it. I'm going to pull them into it because the results are spectacular. So that's where I would start is we've got to educate the next generation whose brains have

0:35:43
(Howard U.)
not been stupefied by the dogma, because the dogma will destroy the discovery.

0:35:51
(Casey Bradley)
I love the fact that there's another person out there like myself. And that's why I don't fit in a traditional box. That's why I'm an entrepreneur as well. But obviously I play more on the nutrition side of what goes in, you know, the animals or plants that go into humans and then also pets. What do we need to do from an agriculture perspective to make foods healthy again? Obviously we talked about pesticides and

0:36:25
(Casey Bradley)
I think you in your book you mentioned artificial fertilizers and different things like that. Where do we need to go and let's put this hat on and I hate this hat but the pushback I get from big companies, our food system, in my opinion, is way too big. We have way too big of monopolies out there from the ultra-processed cereal companies to the Tysons of the world that I live with in Springdale.

0:36:58
(Casey Bradley)
There's good things and bad things, right? And I think we've gotten too big. And I tend to work more with the regenerative niche producers, who are really looking at putting back into the land, back into the animals and, you know, trying to make a profitable living, but you talk about investors, right? They're going to want to see a certain

0:37:20
(Casey Bradley)
ROI. And I think even in the food system, we've gone to these, and, you know, stock options and everything that controls our food, and they want to see profit. How do we blend the changes that we can make all the way from the soil level up into the food on our grocery shelves? What can our role be? How do we change that? I mean, where do we start besides educating the next generation?

0:37:48
(Casey Bradley)
Because I still think there's another generation that needs to come to get this done.

0:37:52
(Howard U.)
You bet.

0:37:53
(Howard U.)
And that's why I said we need to educate not at the high school level, but all the way down to when your baby comes out. And so we need to educate moms and dads. And then we need to have school programs dads. And then we need to have school programs that tell you why we're doing things this. So the easiest way to describe this

0:38:11
(Howard U.)
is you got to change the market. And you got to make the market demand healthier foods. You know, Little Big Farm was a movie that came out about sustainable farming. Took these guys about seven, eight years to get to a point where they could sell the healthiest eggs on the market. They could sell cheeses that came from the healthiest cows and pigs and goats that there are. You need to let the market know that there are consequences on eating ultra processed foods. So I wrote that section in the book.

0:38:48
(Howard U.)
And so we have to be able to make it so that the market sees we can't sell crap anymore. Is that we're going to have to find a way to perhaps find better ways to farm. I agree we're way too big and we're getting bigger and therefore we need these chemicals to sustain it. But the reason why we've gotten away with it is because we didn't know all this evolution was going on in our farm system. We didn't know. And that's why-

0:39:22
(Casey Bradley)
We didn't know better. We thought we were doing better for the world.

0:39:25
(Howard U.)
We did. And that's why we picked Mad Cow. In fact, I was brought to Germany for the sole reason to come up with a blood test for Mad Cow disease, however I could do it. Well, we were fighting, you know, not all Nobel Pri prizes are winners. And the one that was gone to prions, I actually lost five more hair follicles here, was the idea that proteins fold other proteins is complete nonsense, because they never got rid of the RNA that was misfolding the proteins. And so what happened is we were able to build and confirm it with the German and Canadian governments on models like chronic wasting

0:40:13
(Howard U.)
disease, which we published in nucleic acid research, a fine piece of work with my colleagues, that in fact, you can monitor mad cow disease nine months in advance before you even see the symptoms of mad cow. Because the prion test, which sucked up all the venture capital money there was,

0:40:37
(Howard U.)
a fast test, it worked when the cow died because that's when there was enough folded protein in the blood. That's not a very helpful. So what I'm saying is we know how to do this and when we see our animals and we do it effectively, you know, you can pull this, you can, I understand the need to get this cost-effective and we will. But the

0:41:02
(Howard U.)
fact is that we need to monitor our food production. And if it's too big, we'll know that. And if we find out what is the largest denominator of animals that could be sustainable within a given space, and the foods we feed it in the environment it's in, and then we just simply monitor the ancestral genes and ask the question, when we change something, does it change the evolution of the animal?

0:41:34
(Howard U.)
You may never see that, but you might see it in your food, which is then transmitted to whoever consumes that food. So that's why we really needed a breakthrough into understanding how disease works. And that breakthrough needed data. And so that's why the tools, when they came available,

0:41:58
(Howard U.)
us old guys have been around long enough to know. We were, everything on this podcast I said 40 years ago, but I didn't have a way to measure it. I was using PCR and we were using rock curves and we were getting up to 90%. Now we're getting 100% separation because we found what is the cause. So we need to embrace the new technology. The other thing is by doing that we need to embrace the new technology. The other thing is by doing that,

0:42:26
(Howard U.)
we need to then change market trends. There is a trend for healthier markets. But then again, you pick up something that's superfood and it's all ultra processed chemicals. We're not addressing what you really need. Fresh food, the problem that inner city people

0:42:47
(Howard U.)
don't have access to fresh nutrients, that's a government problem that I can't solve. But the fact is you have to solve it. Because you know what, if you're gonna just say, well, the poor people will die anyway, those poor people are incubators for viruses that will get.

0:43:03
(Howard U.)
So you know what, if you don't love your common man, at least treat him with respect so that we can all be healthy together. And so that's why it's going to take, we need to educate public health people, environmentalists, climate change people, couldn't be more right. We're adding to that equation as climate change, as more bugs are losing their habitat

0:43:29
(Howard U.)
and now interacting with animals. The fact is that we have to pay attention to that. Animals are incubators that can have gene rearrangements. Influenza, we know where that comes from. It's pigs and geese in China, in one of the most polluted areas in the world.

0:43:48
(Howard U.)
And all you're doing is creating lots and lots of new tools that viruses can use so they can spread around the world and interact with sick people. So that's the bottom line is change the market trends. And if you change the market trends,

0:44:07
(Howard U.)
you'll see that entrepreneurs will come up with more profitable solutions as the big ones start to phase out their ultra processed foods. It's the only way I can see changing things is by changing how you make money.

0:44:25
(Casey Bradley)
I agree. And we're running out of time. We can talk and talk and talk, but we wanna make sure we value our listeners time. Before we go though, I'm gonna ask like, what's one call to action?

0:44:37
(Casey Bradley)
You talked a lot about re-educating yourself. And I think a good call to action is how would you recommend re-educating yourself if you're a scientist or a professional today to lead that next generation?

0:44:50
(Howard U.)
Yeah.

0:44:51
(Howard U.)
You know, at $2.99 a book, I'm not going to make that much profit. And as I've been saying, my book is less than the cost of one egg. Is let's start with a reference point. You know, you don't wanna buy my book, go to the literature and do the research yourself. Let's all start with the second part of the scientific method.

0:45:15
(Howard U.)
My call to action is get back to what works. The scientific method has been destroyed is we're failing to understand all the data that's out there. And so my call to action is read. Read what other people say. You don't have to agree with it,

0:45:36
(Howard U.)
but you have to ask the question, why did they come up with this different idea? And then challenge your own ideas. You have to do that. Now the problem is, where are you going to write a grant for that? That's a problem. The other call to action is, how do we make funding in America and across the world more equitable? Is how do we stop doing the bidding for health and human services or USDA and say to the fact,

0:46:08
(Howard U.)
you know what, you need to make 30% of lottery. And the fact is that people need to have access to funding. And so the call to action to me is read the literature.

0:46:19
(Casey Bradley)
Amazing. Thank you, Howard. And hopefully we'll get you back again. And I will keep reading your stuff. It was a easy read, quick weekend read. You actually gave it to me for free so I got lucky, but I was going to pay for it anyways.

0:46:37
(Howard U.)
All your readers can write me at info at FBB bio and I'll send you a free copy. But Casey, didn't you love the illustrations? I mean,

0:46:48
(Casey Bradley)
they were really good. I love the illustrations. I love the AI in the way you're thinking of things with John Wayne, then the serial, I think that's kind of what we need to do is be like, put some wow factor out there and then, you know, they may not spark interest with just the one post. But I think if they see it,

0:47:13
(Casey Bradley)
they might.

0:47:14
(Howard U.)
Well, you know how you get more oxygen in your brain so you can start thinking better? Laughter.

0:47:20
(Casey Bradley)
Yes.

0:47:20
(Howard U.)
So if I can get you laughing when I put out that the EPA is going to lift all the restrictions so that now America is the most toxic place in the world, I put together four chimps sitting on a couch laughing at Fox News, that evolution's a hoax, and I had a picture of Darwin over it.

0:47:44
(Howard U.)
I want you to laugh laugh because when you laugh, get more oxygen in and you start thinking. So that's my approach.

0:47:51
(Casey Bradley)
Well, I love it and keep going. Well, I love it and keep going. So thank you so much.