Josh Clark

It's very hardy.

It can be susceptible to disease, though, depending what kind of disease, but also grows everywhere and serves as a pollinator.

And it's

It doesn't deforest things.

So the big problem, though, and I know everyone's like, oh, my God, is this the miracle we've all been hoping for with rubber?

It just doesn't yield as much as the Russians said it did.

And so it's not economically viable as long as the real rubber tree is around.

Mm-hmm.

They released some paper that overstated how much rubber can be gotten from the dandelion because they wanted to sound like big shots.

Yeah.

So the reason why we didn't just keep going with dandelion rubber research in trying to figure out how to increase yields is because in the meantime, people figured out we could make synthetic rubber from petroleum.

It was almost as good as natural rubber, and it certainly was a good enough substitute, and we could just make batch after batch after batch.

rather than have to try to yield it from dandelions.

So that fell to the wayside.

And then by the time World War II ended, we had access to natural rubber supplies from the Southeast Asia, I should say.

And so all that kind of put dandelion rubber on the back shelf.

But in the, what, 50s?

80, almost 100 years, geez, since World War II.

I remember when that was like just like that was firmly like 40 to 50 years in the past.

And it just keeps getting further and further away.