The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1500 - Barbara Freese

00:00:01.000 And we're rolling.

00:00:02.000 How are you, Barbara?

00:00:02.000 What's happening?

00:00:03.000 I'm good, Joe.

00:00:04.000 How are you?

00:00:04.000 Pleasure to meet you.

00:00:05.000 Pleasure to meet you.

00:00:06.000 How did you get started on this and how did you get interested in the subject?

00:00:11.000 I got interested in this subject through climate change, climate denial specifically.

00:00:16.000 I'm an environmental attorney and back in the 1990s I worked for the state of Minnesota and we found ourselves very briefly sort of on the front lines of the scientific debate over climate change and the way that happened was The state had passed a law saying that utilities regulators should try to estimate the cost to the environment of generating electricity.

00:00:40.000 We get most of our power from coal, or we did then.

00:00:45.000 And so we looked at coal emissions.

00:00:47.000 We looked at the traditional pollutants that we had regulated for a long time.

00:00:51.000 And my client was the Pollution Control Agency, so I was familiar with those.

00:00:56.000 What we also looked at, though, and I wasn't familiar with, was CO2 and its effect on climate change, because while that was a big issue globally, there was already a global treaty signed.

00:01:11.000 To fight climate change.

00:01:12.000 States had not taken a look at that.

00:01:14.000 And what happened was we struck a nerve with the coal industry.

00:01:19.000 And they sent to Minnesota a bunch of witnesses, a bunch of scientists, to testify that we did not have to worry about climate change.

00:01:29.000 And it wasn't going to happen.

00:01:30.000 Or if it did, it would be just Just a little, and we'd like it.

00:01:34.000 And that all of those scientists, the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, those scientists that the rest of the world, including the U.S. government in the treaty signed by George H.W. Bush, The ones that they were relying on,

00:01:51.000 those scientists were basically biased.

00:01:54.000 They were biased because they were in it for the money somehow.

00:01:58.000 They wanted research grants or they had some political agenda.

00:02:02.000 It was kind of vague.

00:02:04.000 But it was clear they did not want us worrying about this issue at all.

00:02:09.000 Trevor Burrus They told you that it would be just a little and that you would like it?

00:02:12.000 What do they mean by that?

00:02:14.000 Well, a couple of things.

00:02:15.000 One of the arguments, and you will still hear this sometimes, is that CO2 is a plant fertilizer, which is true, and therefore more CO2 makes the world a happier place for plants and therefore better for everybody else.

00:02:32.000 To the point where one of the coal interests who were parties had put out a video saying that the earth was deficient in CO2. And by digging up the coal and burning it, we were correcting that.

00:02:47.000 Yeah.

00:02:47.000 So that was one of the arguments.

00:02:49.000 The other was, you know, it'll be mild, it'll be warm, the winters won't be as cold, and hey, this is Minnesota, so, you know, you guys are going to appreciate those warmer winters.

00:02:59.000 So, yeah, there was a lot of crazy stuff that hasn't gone away.

00:03:04.000 In fact, in many ways it's gotten a lot worse.

00:03:07.000 But they were certainly enough to leave me shocked.

00:03:10.000 Was that the first time you were ever aware that corporations do send in people to try to defuse arguments or pollute the waters?

00:03:19.000 I don't think I was quite that naive, but I'd certainly never seen anything like this.

00:03:23.000 I mean, these were people under oath, you know, and they were saying things that were pretty extreme, and many of which would just get a lot more extreme.

00:03:34.000 And they were scientists.

00:03:35.000 Yes, the ones I cross-examined were mainly the scientists.

00:03:38.000 They also sent in some other witnesses as well.

00:03:41.000 So they didn't actually work in a coal company.

00:03:44.000 They were hired by the coal industry to come in and testify.

00:03:47.000 And these scientists, presumably, they were paid to do this.

00:03:52.000 Yes.

00:03:52.000 How do you track that?

00:03:56.000 If you have scientists and they come in and they say things that you know are not accurate or deceptive, how do you find out what their motivation is?

00:04:05.000 Did you ask them if they've been paid?

00:04:08.000 We're able to put some things in the record regarding how much money they had gotten from different fossil fuel interests over the years.

00:04:15.000 So we definitely did point to that, argue about that.

00:04:19.000 We didn't realize some of the witnesses had a much deeper history than we understood in science denial.

00:04:25.000 One of the witnesses was a A pretty prominent scientist named Frederick Seitz, who has since died, but what we didn't know, what I didn't know when I cross-examined him, I mean, this was a shoestring operation, was that he had spent a lot of time actually consulting for the tobacco industry.

00:04:44.000 So that would have been nice to bring up.

00:04:46.000 We had talked about, just before the podcast, the film Merchants of Doubt, and that's how it kind of got into your work.

00:04:52.000 That film touches on that, how people who worked for the tobacco industry eventually went to work to deny the man-made climate change.

00:05:01.000 Right.

00:05:02.000 Well, in his case, he had actually been a physicist who was very involved in the Cold War weapons program.

00:05:08.000 So he kind of came at it from that direction.

00:05:11.000 And it wasn't until really he had retired from his main scientific and academic work that he was brought in to work for the The tobacco industry.

00:05:20.000 But what happened was this handful of scientists profiled in that movie and in the book by the same name.

00:05:28.000 They would also then work with these nonprofit groups, these free market groups that were strongly opposed to regulation of industries.

00:05:36.000 And those same groups then would address lots of different issues from tobacco to ozone and now to climate change and really a lot of other Scientific issues as well for industries facing regulation.

00:05:50.000 Someone should do a psychological profile of those people, particularly the tobacco people, because there's such a direct correlation between tobacco and cancer.

00:05:58.000 The climate change thing, it's almost like, boy, it's so hard to track because it's so far in advance, and if you say that climate change isn't real, what deaths are caused?

00:06:07.000 Is it directly attributable to that?

00:06:09.000 How do you...

00:06:10.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:06:11.000 But, like, cancer and cigarettes.

00:06:12.000 It's like, here's a person.

00:06:14.000 They smoke cigarettes.

00:06:15.000 They have cancer.

00:06:16.000 You said it didn't come from cigarettes.

00:06:19.000 What does that feel like to you?

00:06:20.000 To be that person that actively tries to...

00:06:25.000 Well, they're essentially lying.

00:06:27.000 They're lying for money.

00:06:28.000 Let me just back up one second and then talk about that, just because I want to make it clear that while the link between smoking and cancer may seem entirely obvious, there's enough of a delay that opens up the opportunity for denial.

00:06:43.000 The link between putting greenhouse gases in the air and dramatic climate change, that's actually as well-established as the links between smoking and cancer.

00:06:53.000 It's just that it is a more complicated process, and there's potentially more of a delay, and it depends in large part on what humans do along the way.

00:07:01.000 So it does get kind of complicated.

00:07:03.000 As far as psychologically profiling the tobacco companies, I mean, the tobacco executives, I won't presume to suggest this book does that, but I do write a lot about what these folks were saying, not just to the public, but to,

00:07:19.000 you know, internally, we've got some internal documents and certain things that may have been public utterances, but were clearly just sort of part of their internal rationalization.

00:07:28.000 And, for example, I start the book with a quote from the head of Philip Morris, who says, Who knows what you would do if you didn't smoke?

00:07:36.000 Maybe you'd beat your wife. 1.00

00:07:37.000 Maybe you drive cars fast.

00:07:39.000 And, you know, that's part of how I think the tobacco industry approached this.

00:07:44.000 They would imagine this sort of counterfactual where, you know, a world without tobacco, without cigarettes.

00:07:51.000 And then they would imagine what that would be like.

00:07:54.000 And, of course, they'd always imagine it was much, much worse than smoking.

00:07:58.000 Right.

00:07:58.000 Yeah, I read that part, and also that the man in question wound up quitting cigarettes.

00:08:04.000 Right, yeah, he had to quit fairly quickly.

00:08:06.000 He started wife beating and speeding, and what did he do?

00:08:09.000 Right, exactly.

00:08:10.000 Yeah, that was the question, and we never really did find that out.

00:08:13.000 It's such a strange way to live your life, to be deceptive in a way that you know is going to – I mean, there's – I don't know how many people have gotten cancer from cigarettes, but it's probably millions.

00:08:26.000 Well, and it isn't just cancer.

00:08:27.000 It's a heart disease, et cetera.

00:08:29.000 So millions – I mean, I've seen an estimate that in the 20th century, smoking killed – I want to make sure I get this right.

00:08:37.000 I think it was 100 million people.

00:08:39.000 Oh, my God.

00:08:39.000 More than maybe both wars, world wars put together.

00:08:45.000 It's 7 million a year, I think, is the global death toll.

00:08:49.000 In the U.S., it's 480,000 a year.

00:08:54.000 Directly attributable.

00:08:55.000 Right.

00:08:55.000 They trace it to directly attributable.

00:08:59.000 Now, you know, these are extreme examples.

00:09:02.000 Tobacco is the most famous and extreme example.

00:09:05.000 And I talk about a lot of other examples.

00:09:06.000 But I think it's actually...

00:09:09.000 You know, a fairly common thing for people to go pretty far down the road of denial when they are working in an industry.

00:09:16.000 And this is sort of the process I try to explore a little bit in the book.

00:09:20.000 They're working in an industry.

00:09:21.000 They're confronted with some accusation that they have caused harm.

00:09:25.000 They check their gut and their gut says, no, we didn't intend to cause harm.

00:09:30.000 We don't feel guilty.

00:09:31.000 And so their mind starts to come up with reasons why it must be wrong.

00:09:35.000 And their tribal instincts, which are never more than just a millimeter below the surface for pretty much any of us, but certainly in this case, get triggered.

00:09:45.000 So they immediately think, well, these people accusing me must have an ulterior motive.

00:09:51.000 They want money, they want power, they want attention, they've got some...

00:09:56.000 Sinister political objective.

00:09:59.000 And then the other part of that tribal dynamic is they start thinking about themselves and their truly lofty mission, which isn't just to sell a product, but something else.

00:10:09.000 It's to protect freedom.

00:10:11.000 Or if you're a slave trader, it's to rescue the Africans from terrible lives in Africa and bring them to the comfortable plantations. 0.99

00:10:18.000 That was actually an argument?

00:10:20.000 Oh, yeah.

00:10:22.000 The slave trade had a complete rescue narrative.

00:10:26.000 I'm talking about the British slave trade here because that was the first really intense campaign of industrial denial I could find.

00:10:35.000 The British dominated the slave trade in the 1700s.

00:10:40.000 And they faced a very powerful abolition movement at the end of that century, which was really going to the public and saying, look at how brutal this is.

00:10:51.000 They had witnesses.

00:10:52.000 They had the torture devices.

00:10:53.000 They had all kinds of evidence.

00:10:55.000 And the British were really responding because they, even though they dominated the slave trade, you know, they had this notion of themselves as civilized and promoting freedom and being very humane.

00:11:07.000 So this was starting to really affect the industry.

00:11:09.000 So the traders and the planters got together, they formed a slave lobby.

00:11:13.000 They had a very organized campaign in response.

00:11:16.000 It was a slave lobby. 0.80

00:11:17.000 There was a very powerful slave lobby.

00:11:20.000 I mean, the thing about the slave trade was you had people invested in it from the royal family down to the local bakers to many members of parliament.

00:11:31.000 I mean, it was a widely accepted, fully legitimate industry.

00:11:34.000 So the abolitionists really had their work cut out for them.

00:11:39.000 And they had all this evidence, the industry comes back, and they knew they couldn't just say, oh, it's not so brutal.

00:11:45.000 They actually came back with this complete counter-narrative, which was, we are rescuing these people.

00:11:53.000 The Africans are eager to be purchased. 1.00

00:11:56.000 They actually try to market themselves as how fit they are for work.

00:12:00.000 They enjoy that crossing across the Atlantic.

00:12:04.000 They're singing, dancing, games of chance.

00:12:07.000 And when they get to the plantations, it is incredibly comfortable.

00:12:11.000 They get comfy little houses.

00:12:12.000 It's like a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

00:12:15.000 They don't have to worry.

00:12:17.000 If they get sick, we take care of them, we feed them.

00:12:20.000 And they're doing way better than those poor peasants back there in Britain or those poor miners or those people working in the new factories. 0.98

00:12:29.000 So that was part of it.

00:12:31.000 And the next part of it was that they said that if they had left them in Africa, if you didn't continue this trade, all of these prisoners of war would be massacred, or they would be eaten by cannibals, or they would die of famine.

00:12:46.000 So this was a rescue narrative.

00:12:49.000 And here's the really clever part of this, because if you believe that you are rescuing them, and if you persuade other people, I'm not suggesting the industry believe this, But if you can persuade people that you are rescuing them, the flip side of it is that abolition would doom them.

00:13:05.000 You would be shutting the gates of mercy on mankind because, as one trader put it, the house of bondage is really the house of freedom to them.

00:13:17.000 I may have misspoken that a little bit, but it was a truly Orwellian quote.

00:13:21.000 And so that way you translate abolition into...

00:13:28.000 Inhumanity, into brutality, and you portray the continued slave trade as a way to save these people.

00:13:35.000 Oh, one quote was great, that if you were to free these slaves, and by the way, at this point, they weren't actually talking about freeing the existing slaves, just stopping the flow of new slaves.

00:13:44.000 But one of the quotes was that freeing the slaves would be cramming liberty down the throats of people incapable of digesting it.

00:13:53.000 Wow.

00:13:54.000 Yeah.

00:13:55.000 So this was the first example that you found of industry that was working to try to distort the perceptions of reality so that they can continue what they're doing.

00:14:06.000 Right.

00:14:07.000 And, you know, they did a lot of other things that we've seen modern industries doing.

00:14:12.000 They, you know, I mentioned the reference to the Oh,

00:14:30.000 wow.

00:14:34.000 And then they had an argument about basically failing to make a distinction between their industry and their interests and the whole country.

00:14:43.000 Or rather, you know, kind of an early version of what's good for the country is good for GM and vice versa.

00:14:49.000 They said if you abolish this trade, it means universal bankruptcy for the kingdom.

00:14:54.000 It means Britain is not powerful anymore.

00:14:56.000 It means Britain becomes... 0.89

00:14:58.000 A province of France. 1.00

00:15:00.000 It means in the sugar islands that the slaves will massacre the whites, exterminate the whites, or maybe make the whites slaves. 0.99

00:15:09.000 So they basically just created this incredible slippery slope that any kind of reform or certainly abolition of this industry would be disastrous for the entire kingdom.

00:15:19.000 So, how well documented is this in terms of the influencers?

00:15:22.000 Who started this?

00:15:25.000 Was there open discussions about how to spin this in a way that it's going to get people to think that slavery is a good thing?

00:15:33.000 Well, I don't know about internal discussions within the industry.

00:15:36.000 What we do have There are lots and lots of books and pamphlets because this was all done in writing.

00:15:42.000 We also have some hearings and we have parliamentary debates.

00:15:47.000 They were recorded not verbatim, but people tried to write them down.

00:15:50.000 And so we have some version of what was actually said in these debates in the various hearings.

00:15:54.000 There were parliamentary hearings.

00:15:56.000 So there's actually quite a lot of evidence of the arguments being made in their own words.

00:16:02.000 So, and then this was primarily in Britain, right?

00:16:07.000 Right.

00:16:07.000 Well, that's what I'm talking about here, obviously.

00:16:10.000 We had our own abolition movement here.

00:16:12.000 Right.

00:16:12.000 That's what I was going to ask you.

00:16:14.000 Did those same arguments, did they actually get presented in the United States?

00:16:18.000 Some of them did.

00:16:20.000 In the United States, it was different because, of course, you had an entire society built around slavery.

00:16:26.000 And I read one reference, one historian saying that about half of the defenses of slavery came from the clergy.

00:16:36.000 It wasn't quite the same sort of clearly here's an industry and here's an audience that they're talking to.

00:16:42.000 So that's one of the reasons I didn't focus quite at all really on the American debate.

00:16:47.000 Half of it was from clergy?

00:16:48.000 That's what this historian said.

00:16:51.000 I didn't dig into those.

00:16:53.000 I did by the way though find one And now I don't remember if he was a plantation owner or something else who described the – called slavery, you know, basically a way to make people as happy as can be and called it the ideal of communism,

00:17:09.000 which was funny because you don't even think of communism, of that debate as existing.

00:17:14.000 This would have been in the 1800s now.

00:17:17.000 But he was saying that the North is exploiting these workers, not taking care of them.

00:17:22.000 But in the South, we take care of them.

00:17:24.000 We make them happy as slaves.

00:17:26.000 Jesus.

00:17:27.000 Yeah.

00:17:30.000 So, is this a pattern that existed before that?

00:17:34.000 Like, is there any evidence that there was something?

00:17:37.000 I mean, it seems like whenever people start to make money doing something, whenever a corporation, particularly a corporation, right, because there's this diffusion of responsibility in a large group of folks, and they have this, you know, this obligation to earn money for all the people that are involved in the corporation,

00:17:53.000 so they start rationalizing their decisions and then twisting things around.

00:17:57.000 But is this...

00:18:00.000 Is this something that can be traced back before then?

00:18:02.000 Is this a natural human trait, this kind of deception?

00:18:06.000 Well, I can't specifically answer whether it can be traced before then because I didn't try to trace it.

00:18:11.000 But I would not be at all surprised because I do think it's a natural human trait.

00:18:17.000 I mean, one of the issues that I started to struggle with on this book was deciding to what extent are people lying and when are they actually deceiving themselves.

00:18:27.000 And I realized early on there was just no way to write this book if I was going to try to parse that out and I also decided it doesn't matter that much because I think these are really very much intertwined and they're both equally destructive and they're both I think equally responsive to these kind of external circumstances that we create in corporations when we form corporations and we put them into a marketplace.

00:18:52.000 So I do think it's part of human nature.

00:18:54.000 I do think we've created this system that brings this out in people and really encourages it in so many ways.

00:19:12.000 That science is still relatively new and kind of, you know, a little bit thin compared to the environmental science that I talk about, which is very, very deep.

00:19:22.000 But we do know that when you diffuse responsibility, it makes it very easy for people not to feel responsible for the harm that's done.

00:19:31.000 So if you've got a corporation, of course you have division of labor.

00:19:34.000 You also have division of management from ownership.

00:19:37.000 So if you're a lower worker and you're told to lie about something or cause some harm, Well, you're minding your own business and you let your boss take responsibility.

00:19:47.000 If you're the boss, you're focused maybe on your employees and certainly on your shareholders.

00:19:55.000 So if you're lying about something or causing harm, it doesn't necessarily feel like a personal selfish act of deception.

00:20:01.000 It probably feels like an act of loyalty and responsibility to your shareholders.

00:20:07.000 Your shareholders aren't going to care or know because, first of all, they're far away, usually.

00:20:13.000 They don't really know what's going on.

00:20:15.000 They have maybe just a temporary transactional interest in what's going on.

00:20:20.000 They just bought the stock.

00:20:21.000 They want to sell it quickly and make some money.

00:20:22.000 So you don't really have anybody there who feels really responsible for this.

00:20:28.000 There was a definition of the corporation from the early 20th century in something called the Cynics Dictionary.

00:20:35.000 As an ingenious device for obtaining personal profit without personal responsibility.

00:20:42.000 And, of course, that is exactly what we intend from corporations because we grant limited liability to the shareholders.

00:20:50.000 And that's why it's that protection from risk that people are willing to pool their capital and that's sort of very key to the very idea of a corporation.

00:21:00.000 And then, of course, the The focus on profits means that you're constantly focused on money and in the most short-term way, not even long-term profits, which would be a narrow enough focus.

00:21:15.000 But then there's a lot of other things to add to it.

00:21:18.000 You've got competition.

00:21:20.000 By definition, certainly if you're in competitive markets, we want there to be competition.

00:21:24.000 So that means you are already in a kind of tribal mindset.

00:21:29.000 And you've got the ideology of the marketplace, which, you know, we can go back to Adam Smith, The Invisible Hand, and basically the notion that you can pursue your own self-interest and the marketplace will automatically convert that to public good.

00:21:44.000 And that does work in a lot of cases and probably worked a lot better in the 1700s.

00:21:49.000 But when you've got these enormous organizations that have incredible market power and these very new risky technologies often, it is much harder to be confident that that's going to work.

00:22:04.000 And then more recently we've seen that idea that you don't have to worry about the social consequences of your commercial action.

00:22:12.000 Just get intensified.

00:22:14.000 We had Milton Friedman in 1970 writing this very persuasive article saying that the only real objective, the only legitimate objective of a corporation is to maximize shareholder profit.

00:22:27.000 And if they're talking about protecting the environment or doing any of these other things, That's socialism.

00:22:32.000 And that's illegitimate.

00:22:34.000 And that really did sway a lot of people.

00:22:37.000 That movement really moved forward.

00:22:39.000 And then it got more extreme in the 90s and in the 21st century, where you've got this strain of intense faith in market forces that was manifested by Alan Greenspan at the Fed by the Koch brothers.

00:22:57.000 David Koch has passed away, so now Charles Koch.

00:23:01.000 And the network of influence groups that he created, the think tanks, the free market groups, these different academic groups.

00:23:09.000 So one of the things that I try to trace a little bit in the book is talking about the rise of The consumer movement and the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s and people saying, wait a minute, we need corporations to be aware of these problems and we need government to regulate corporations to make sure that our cars are safe and our ozone layer is not destroyed.

00:23:33.000 But then starting in 1980 when Reagan is elected, you suddenly see those problems.

00:23:37.000 Those concerns replaced with a concern over regulation and really a backlash that has come and gone, but basically intensified over the years.

00:23:47.000 And now, of course, we have a situation where not only do we have a government unwilling to regulate, but we have one that is rolling back critical regulations that were put in place by previous administrations.

00:24:01.000 And, of course, influenced by these very corporations to do that.

00:24:05.000 Absolutely.

00:24:06.000 And, I mean, it gets kind of complicated here because if you think, for example, about Charles Koch and Koch Industries, it's based in oil refining.

00:24:14.000 So that is very much based in the fossil fuel industry.

00:24:17.000 But the Koch network is very ideological, passionately ideological.

00:24:24.000 And they just happen to coincide with being in the fossil fuel industry.

00:24:29.000 But you have a lot of other groups that have received money from oil companies, from the coal industry, so it gets kind of integrated.

00:24:37.000 I do try to not treat them all the same in the book.

00:24:40.000 I try to kind of differentiate, and you really do have a difference between the kind of Koch perspective, the coal industry perspective, the oil industry perspective, and then all of these little free market groups.

00:24:51.000 Actually, they fit more on the Koch side.

00:24:53.000 But they all seem to have one thing in common, that they're rationalizing and justifying their actions because they want to continue to make profits regardless of the impact on the environment or the people.

00:25:04.000 Exactly.

00:25:05.000 And that's a weird thing about just the idea of a corporation itself.

00:25:10.000 It's almost like a diabolical vehicle for allowing people to do things.

00:25:15.000 You know, to be able to do something and say, hey, we're going to do this as a collective, and therefore no individuals are responsible for the results of the collective, particularly if you're not the one who gets to decide what gets done.

00:25:28.000 You're just taking orders, and you're just doing your job, and your job is segmented, and it's all compartmentalized, so you're not dumping anything in the river, Bob.

00:25:37.000 You don't have to worry about that.

00:25:38.000 But I like your new car, and that's a beautiful house that you bought with the profits of poisoning lakes.

00:25:43.000 Well, that's exactly it.

00:25:45.000 In fact, I suggest in the book that if you were a supervillain and you wanted to create a society that would ultimately destroy itself by imposing huge risks on each other and on the planet...

00:25:58.000 You would probably create something that looks a lot like our current corporate dominated global economy in the sense of these organizations that amplify your self-interest, that diminish your sense of responsibility, that amplify all of your biases.

00:26:16.000 You'd have a justifying ideology to make it all seem fine.

00:26:19.000 You would have the responsibility so diffuse that nobody would really feel too badly about it.

00:26:26.000 And you give these folks incredible political power, including constitutional rights.

00:26:32.000 So that they could dominate your democracy, so that they could—basically, corporations can do whatever is legal.

00:26:40.000 It used to not be that way.

00:26:41.000 They could do whatever they were authorized to do by their charter, and then they'd have to stop.

00:26:45.000 So they'd get the permission to build a canal, and then they'd be done and go away.

00:26:51.000 Eventually, we made them immortal, and they could do whatever they wanted as long as it's legal.

00:26:56.000 And then we gave them a huge amount of power to determine what actually is legal by influencing our democracy.

00:27:02.000 I was going to ask you about that.

00:27:03.000 Like, what is the birth of a limited liability corporation?

00:27:05.000 Like, when did all that occur?

00:27:08.000 Well, they go way back.

00:27:09.000 I mean, during the slave trade, they were, they didn't necessarily call them that, but they were essentially owned by shareholders.

00:27:16.000 And so they would, you know, pool their capital.

00:27:19.000 So it's very similar.

00:27:20.000 We've had, I mean, actually, corporations are centuries old, if you go back to, I think, some early universities and things.

00:27:27.000 But we didn't have kind of general purpose corporate laws in this country, I think, until mostly in the 1800s.

00:27:34.000 So when we first formed this country, you would have to go to the legislature.

00:27:39.000 There were only a couple of significant corporations around, even at the time of the founders.

00:27:46.000 And so that's why you really don't see corporations in the Constitution.

00:27:49.000 They're not mentioned because they weren't very powerful.

00:27:51.000 When they did get more powerful, you have some quotes from some of the founders saying, ooh, this is a little scary.

00:27:58.000 And then, of course, they became very powerful in the 1800s.

00:28:01.000 You end up with the Gilded Age.

00:28:02.000 And so then you have folks like Teddy Roosevelt who are saying, wait a minute, this is a creation of law, and so we get to determine how much power it has.

00:28:13.000 And he responded with the kind of trust-busting movements, breaking down some of the really big old trusts.

00:28:20.000 And that was, you know, probably the first big pushback where the government said, wait a minute, you corporations are too powerful.

00:28:28.000 We're going to try to reduce that power.

00:28:32.000 And then I think the next big phase of that would have been in the Depression, where you have the New Deal coming in and saying, okay, banks...

00:28:41.000 You just wreck the economy.

00:28:42.000 We're going to regulate you.

00:28:43.000 We're going to give workers more rights.

00:28:45.000 We're going to create Social Security.

00:28:47.000 We're going to do all kinds of things that diminish corporate power over the democracy.

00:28:52.000 And then it happened again in the 60s and 70s.

00:28:55.000 And what I think is that it might be about to happen again, given that there is now so much concern about corporate power You know, Citizens United, influence over our democracy, people worried about concentration of wealth at the very,

00:29:13.000 very tippy-top, and obviously people worried that we are unable to deal with climate change.

00:29:19.000 And another factor would be the power of social media corporations to influence elections, to influence public discourse.

00:29:28.000 They seem to have kind of snuck in in a way that was really unexpected and people didn't see it coming.

00:29:34.000 Right.

00:29:34.000 Well, I mean, that's actually the pattern.

00:29:36.000 People never see it coming.

00:29:38.000 All of these chapters pretty much begin with some kind of a discovery and some industry races in there and takes advantage of it.

00:29:46.000 I mean, even slavery, the discovery would have been the new world and this enormous commercial opportunity if you can just get the workers in there to grow the tobacco and the cotton and the sugar.

00:29:56.000 But so you'd have the discovery, you have an industry springing up to take advantage of it and making a lot of money and changing social norms along the way.

00:30:05.000 Then problems are emerging.

00:30:08.000 Obviously with slavery they were inherent, but problems will emerge.

00:30:11.000 Other people outside the industry discover those problems and pay attention to them, draw attention, and then eventually you get to a law.

00:30:19.000 Now, that's kind of an artificial ending because you have to make sure that law gets enforced.

00:30:24.000 But in almost all of these chapters, you get to some form of government action where they say, no, you can't do that anymore.

00:30:32.000 We stop this industry.

00:30:33.000 We ban this product, or at least we're going to try to tweak your behavior. 0.95

00:30:38.000 But That process, first of all, it takes a long, long time and enormous damage can be done in the meantime.

00:30:45.000 But that process doesn't work.

00:30:48.000 You don't even get your somewhat happy ending if the industry has become so powerful that it determines whether it gets regulated or not and it blocks those regulations.

00:31:00.000 Well, that's what I was getting to is because that kind of seems where we're at now with corporations like Facebook.

00:31:06.000 Yeah.

00:31:07.000 They have an insane amount of power, and that power is actually being used to dictate who becomes president.

00:31:15.000 And that's what's really strange.

00:31:16.000 There's never been a corporation that...

00:31:18.000 I mean, other corporations did their best to influence the market and influence regulations in a way that they can continue to profit, but this is a different thing, where they're literally influencing directly who becomes the person who runs the country.

00:31:37.000 Which is a new thing.

00:31:38.000 Well, it's a new thing when they do it through information.

00:31:43.000 It's not a new thing when they do it through money.

00:31:55.000 This industry well enough, but the pattern is so clear that it's clear where we're heading, right?

00:32:02.000 I mean, the problems will get worse and worse.

00:32:03.000 Other people will talk about them.

00:32:05.000 The problems are very new, I think, because we are talking about problems related to information.

00:32:11.000 And that, you know, and social media, how does social media affect social animals?

00:32:17.000 I mean, this gets really complicated.

00:32:18.000 It's going to be hard to figure this out.

00:32:21.000 But in addition to having their own denial about what harms they inadvertently unleash, they are vectors for the denial of other industries, right?

00:32:33.000 And so that's one of the reasons climate denial, for example, is still going to be out there and deeply rooted for a long time, even though the oil industry, which played a huge role in building it up, has basically set up We accept the climate science.

00:32:49.000 We know this is happening.

00:32:50.000 In fact, you know, ExxonMobil even says it accepts the Paris Agreement, which says that we have to limit warming to well below 2 degrees centigrade.

00:33:00.000 And that sounds small.

00:33:01.000 That's actually...

00:33:01.000 A pretty dangerous amount of warming, but that's the target of this Paris Agreement, although it also says we're going to try to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

00:33:10.000 Now, what that means is dramatically reducing our emissions first over the next 10 years.

00:33:16.000 I mean, if you want to limit to 1.5 degrees, we're talking about cutting our emissions by 50%.

00:33:22.000 That means pretty much We're cutting 50% of our fossil fuel use.

00:33:29.000 That's a simplification.

00:33:31.000 But then you have to go for that more aggressive target to zero, net zero emissions by 2050. So we're talking essentially about this huge industry having to either completely transform itself Or go away within 30 years.

00:33:47.000 And then, by the way, after that, you have to go into negative emissions, which means building a new industry that sucks carbon out of the air and buries it.

00:33:56.000 We haven't even really begun to talk about that, but that's assumed what we're going to have to do because we have now delayed for 30 years, thanks in large part to fossil fuel denial.

00:34:07.000 So you've got Exxon saying, yeah, yeah, we understand Paris and all that.

00:34:11.000 But if you look at their own projections about what they think is going to happen, they put out these formal projections of how much oil will be consumed in the whole world and what our emissions are going to be.

00:34:22.000 They still project emissions going up and then sort of leveling off until like 2040, by which time, in fact, they need to be very, very low.

00:34:31.000 So it's kind of like the tobacco companies.

00:34:33.000 The big tobacco companies are no longer denying the basic facts.

00:34:37.000 They admit this product is addictive, and I've got a quote in the book from one executive saying, yeah, it kills about half of our lifetime smoking customers, our most loyal customers.

00:34:49.000 So, but, you know, but despite having for decades said, if we really believed this was harmful, we wouldn't sell it.

00:34:57.000 They're obviously continuing to sell it quite enthusiastically.

00:35:00.000 And that's kind of where we are, I think, with the major oil companies.

00:35:04.000 Coal is still in denial.

00:35:06.000 Others are still denying it.

00:35:07.000 But The major oil companies are saying, yeah, that's a problem.

00:35:12.000 But they are still planning on selling more and more of their product.

00:35:16.000 And so that is sort of the kernel of denial that that industry has yet to grapple with.

00:35:22.000 But isn't it right now, at least temporarily, inseparable in terms of our ability to move around, distribute goods?

00:35:30.000 You kind of have to have oil.

00:35:33.000 You have to have gasoline and petroleum products.

00:35:36.000 You do at the moment.

00:35:38.000 But, you know, fortunately, we really do have the technologies to, in fact, slash our emissions.

00:35:46.000 What we don't have is the political will.

00:35:47.000 But you could, I mean, it is not impossible to say in 10 years, we are going to have closed, certainly all of our gas plants and our natural gas plants will either have carbon capture or they will be closed.

00:35:58.000 It's not impossible to say all of our cars Certainly all of our new cars are going to be electric and we can build an infrastructure.

00:36:05.000 That can be done.

00:36:06.000 It is a massive undertaking.

00:36:08.000 I mean, when people talk about the Green New Deal, sometimes that rhetoric includes World War II, and I think that's actually appropriate because we are talking about a massive change that is going to transform our economy and at the same time, 0.89

00:36:25.000 hopefully, Address some of the inequalities that we already have in place.

00:36:29.000 I mean, that's going to make it trickier, but most of the deals are, for example, very aware that we're going to be hurting coal miners, we're going to be hurting oil rig workers, and trying to put in place some ways that we can keep them from suffering, help them find other jobs,

00:36:46.000 help their communities diversify and whatnot.

00:36:50.000 If we are going to avoid what will be a multi-century catastrophe in terms of climate change, this is what we have to do.

00:36:59.000 And it's hard for me to even say the word catastrophe because I know how people hear that.

00:37:04.000 I know it sounds like a crazy exaggeration.

00:37:08.000 Do you really think it does at this point?

00:37:10.000 Well, I think it does to enough people that it is...

00:37:14.000 But why?

00:37:14.000 Is it because of propaganda?

00:37:17.000 Yeah.

00:37:17.000 Because it seems like if you...

00:37:18.000 Yeah, right?

00:37:19.000 Yeah, I mean, there's been so much pushback.

00:37:20.000 Because if you pay attention to the people that when they give you the worst projections, the things that we should avoid...

00:37:25.000 I mean, what I was getting at when I was talking about these oil executives still selling oil is that right now they have to.

00:37:32.000 I mean, I understand that there needs to be a shift, and I'm absolutely in favor of that, but if there was no oil right now, they just cut it all off.

00:37:42.000 That would be a crisis.

00:37:42.000 Yeah, we have a real issue.

00:37:44.000 Right, we have a real issue.

00:37:45.000 I mean, humanity has an issue, and we shouldn't be thinking of it as the oil company's issue or the climate issue.

00:37:50.000 You know, it's a humanity issue.

00:37:52.000 How are we going to deal with this?

00:37:53.000 And unfortunately, This isn't something capitalism is set up to deal with.

00:37:59.000 That's about growth.

00:38:01.000 It isn't about how do we take this massive industrial enterprise, wind it down, and replace this technology with something else.

00:38:08.000 Is the solution finding some method of profiting off of pulling carbon from the atmosphere?

00:38:14.000 It seems like if it becomes very effective to do that, that could be an enormous way that these companies can kind of shift.

00:38:24.000 Well, I'm not sure that these companies will shift.

00:38:26.000 Some of them could because they do have drilling technology and whatnot.

00:38:29.000 So they could end up being leaders in actually burying the carbon that they once extracted and put into the atmosphere.

00:38:36.000 Oh, that would be so weird.

00:38:37.000 That would be weird.

00:38:38.000 One of the things that's so weird about this whole debate for decades now...

00:38:43.000 Is that you've got folks talking about how incredibly terrific markets are and how they can handle all these problems.

00:38:54.000 And, you know, starting in the 90s or so, folks were saying, great, okay, let's put a price on carbon because otherwise the markets are totally blind.

00:39:02.000 If you can pollute for completely for free, the market has no incentive to reduce polluting or to draw carbon out of the air and bury it.

00:39:10.000 But the people who seem to have the most faith in the power of markets are the ones most opposed to putting a price on carbon.

00:39:17.000 So the advances we might have made, and some states actually do have a price on carbon, but the advances we might have made more nationally and globally have been blocked by people who love markets.

00:39:29.000 And here's another ironic part to this.

00:39:32.000 The country who's like our main competitor and not incidentally a huge, huge polluter is China, ostensibly communist.

00:39:40.000 They believe more in market power than the right wing of the Republican Party.

00:39:46.000 They have put a price on carbon and they are using market forces to try to reduce pollution.

00:39:53.000 Brilliant.

00:39:54.000 So China is more progressive in terms of trying to reduce pollution than America is?

00:39:59.000 Well, China is polluting a huge amount.

00:40:01.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

00:40:03.000 But on this particular issue of how can the markets help us reduce pollution, they're using market forces to try to reduce their pollution, and we're still not.

00:40:12.000 Another really divisive aspect of this is that it's become some sort of a left versus right ideological issue.

00:40:19.000 Like there's a lot of people on the right that I've had conversations with people that really don't have any idea what they're talking about, where they instantly deny that climate change is a real issue.

00:40:28.000 And when you press them on it, That's one of the benefits of having sort of long-form conversations is that if you're doing this on CNN and it's one of those talking head things where you only have seven minutes and there's three people shouting over each other, it's very hard to get to the heart of why do you believe this?

00:40:45.000 But when you're talking over long podcasts, hours long, you get to these people and they'll adamantly deny that it's an issue, but they don't know why.

00:41:00.000 Do you know what I'm saying?

00:41:00.000 It's like a thing.

00:41:01.000 If you're a right-wing pundit or a right-wing person and you're saying right-wing things, you're going to say, climate change is not our issue.

00:41:07.000 What our issue right now is the economy.

00:41:09.000 What we've got to do right now is support jobs and people.

00:41:11.000 There's a lot of people that need to put food on the table.

00:41:13.000 There's a lot of people that need to – and then they get this sort of ranting, raving, pro-economic standpoint, and it becomes a denial of environmental problems.

00:41:24.000 That becomes left versus right.

00:41:26.000 It's very strange.

00:41:27.000 I don't understand why anyone, like how can that not be a universal issue?

00:41:32.000 How could anyone not want the world to be better for our grandchildren?

00:41:37.000 How could anybody not want less pollution?

00:41:39.000 But it becomes this thing where we have all these different categories that are left and right.

00:41:45.000 And once you're on one side, you automatically seem to oppose those things that are in the other party's ideas.

00:41:54.000 Well, in fact, there's one survey I cite in here that showed that climate change was the most polarized issue in the American political landscape, even more than abortion.

00:42:07.000 Really?

00:42:08.000 More than abortion?

00:42:09.000 It's crazy.

00:42:09.000 More than abortion.

00:42:10.000 Now, that was a snapshot in time, and I think maybe that's changing.

00:42:14.000 Certainly, you see with younger Republicans a lot more concern about climate change.

00:42:19.000 You're absolutely right.

00:42:20.000 I mean, it remains very polarized, and I don't think you can understand it.

00:42:25.000 I don't think it makes sense from an ideological standpoint.

00:42:28.000 I think it makes sense from a tribal standpoint that we have divided, and it feels good to believe the same things as the people you are affiliated with, and it's tense to not believe the same things.

00:42:40.000 That's a source of...

00:42:57.000 I mean, it's been ignored or downplayed.

00:43:17.000 I don't know what happens now with COVID, with George Floyd.

00:43:27.000 Obviously, there are other issues dominating the news right now.

00:43:30.000 But I really hope we hang on to this issue as a critical one for the election and don't stop there because this is going to continue to require lots of pressure to make sure that we make the changes we need.

00:43:43.000 Yeah, I don't think it's going to go away, I think, but other issues do come to the forefront.

00:43:47.000 But what you said I think is really interesting is that it gives you comfort to agree with the other people that are in your party and your group.

00:43:53.000 And that's something that is exacerbated by social media and manipulated by social media.

00:43:58.000 And it's one of the weirder things about it is that A corporation could legally create hundreds, if not thousands, of fake pages and then use those.

00:44:11.000 I'm sure you're aware of the Internet Research Agency from Russia that had an impact on the 2016 elections.

00:44:18.000 And Renee DiResta did some pretty fascinating work on that, where she We did a deep dive into how these accounts, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or what have you, have been manipulated and how they use them, where in one point they had a pro-Texas group meet up at the exact same time as a pro-Muslim group on the exact same block.

00:44:44.000 Like they manipulated it.

00:44:46.000 It's like child's play.

00:44:48.000 Exactly.

00:44:48.000 It was like they were moving pieces on a chessboard and they literally set up altercations.

00:44:53.000 And you would imagine that, I mean, I don't know what these fossil fuel companies or any kind of company that's involved in anything that would be considered sketchy environmentally.

00:45:06.000 I don't know how many manipulating sites they run or manipulative social media accounts they run, but I would imagine that's got to be part of the game plan.

00:45:16.000 Because online discourse, it's so easy to throw monkey wrenches into the gears, to throw sand into the gas tank.

00:45:25.000 It's so easy to sort of monkey with the numbers and change the ideas that are being discussed and change the narratives that it's just a way that you can sort of shift the public's interests and opinions on things.

00:45:42.000 Yeah.

00:45:42.000 I mean, if you're willing to lie and manipulate, then you have obviously a huge advantage.

00:45:47.000 But there's also just the basic human tendency that when we talk to people we already agree with, we tend to then become stronger in our opinions.

00:45:55.000 And so we get polarized, basically.

00:45:59.000 And that's even before social media.

00:46:01.000 So then you sort of weaponize that polarization, that tendency, and you've got an algorithm that says, well, if you like that video, how about this video?

00:46:09.000 And suddenly people are getting...

00:46:11.000 You know, totally radicalized, you know, on climate change or on other issues.

00:46:16.000 And so, yeah, I mean, it is a huge problem.

00:46:19.000 How do we overcome the social divisions, the social distrust?

00:46:24.000 How do we overcome the denial?

00:46:26.000 And, you know, I think if the patterns in the book come to the fore, we will, society will find ways to build trust again.

00:46:35.000 It'll probably have a lot to do with maintaining long-term accountability and not just a flash reaction to what you hear.

00:46:41.000 But it could very well take decades and we will have a lot of damage done in the meantime.

00:46:47.000 I wonder if there's going to be a time where there are laws against social media manipulation like that.

00:46:54.000 Because right now they're not.

00:46:56.000 There will be.

00:46:57.000 Yeah, it seems like there has to be.

00:46:59.000 Because if you, I can't imagine, I'm not naive enough to imagine that what's happening with the internet research agencies in Russia is not happening here.

00:47:06.000 It has to be.

00:47:07.000 They understand the effectiveness of it.

00:47:09.000 It's been well documented.

00:47:11.000 The idea that corporations are going to step back and go, well, that's not our business.

00:47:14.000 That's not what we do.

00:47:16.000 I mean, that's an incredibly effective tool.

00:47:18.000 And if you were going to use it to manipulate opinions on whether it's climate change or anything, pharmaceutical drug overdoses, whatever it is that you want to manipulate people with, I would imagine that that's a gigantic issue,

00:47:33.000 but it's not something that really gets discussed in terms of passing legislation to prevent that stuff.

00:47:41.000 Yeah, and hopefully it gets more and more discussed because it is very scary.

00:47:47.000 I mean, it turns out we humans are easily manipulated and were easily manipulated even before social media.

00:47:53.000 But now there is this incredibly sophisticated engine to drive us apart, to drive us...

00:48:00.000 In the direction that those best at manipulating us want us to go.

00:48:04.000 Yes.

00:48:04.000 And it's addictive, which is even crazier.

00:48:07.000 It's a completely addictive mechanism.

00:48:10.000 Yeah, it really is.

00:48:11.000 People are lost in their phones and lost in their computers, like when they're checking their social media stuff.

00:48:17.000 And that's one of the more interesting things about these social media algorithms.

00:48:22.000 That it's been determined that when people are upset about things and when they're angry about things, they post more.

00:48:29.000 So it's more valuable.

00:48:31.000 So the algorithms favor people being upset.

00:48:34.000 So they'll send you, if you find abortion a hot topic or environmental issues, they'll start sending you those.

00:48:41.000 That's what's going to show up on your feet.

00:48:43.000 You're going to get more of it because this is what you engage in.

00:48:45.000 And what's fascinating is it's not even really...

00:48:51.000 Malicious in that it's just pragmatic.

00:48:53.000 Because I have a friend who did an experiment.

00:48:56.000 My friend Ari wanted to find out what would happen if he just looked up puppies. 0.97

00:49:02.000 So he just looked up puppies on YouTube and looked up puppies everywhere and his feed was overwhelmed by puppies.

00:49:08.000 So it's not like this some vicious plot to only feed you things that you hate.

00:49:14.000 Just human nature, we tend to look at things that piss us off.

00:49:19.000 Which is really kind of crazy.

00:49:21.000 And now we have a very sophisticated machine to drive us in the direction of getting more pissed off.

00:49:27.000 And that sophisticated machine is clearly using the same sort of deceptive tactics to try to diminish their responsibility for what they're doing.

00:49:38.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:49:39.000 And, you know, one of the things that makes these tactics I think work so well is that they really are based...

00:49:45.000 In human nature.

00:49:46.000 I mean, I think that if you are an executive, you know, your instinct is that you are doing fine and your instinct is that the other side is wrong and that psychological reflex then, you know, becomes a foundation for a corporate strategy.

00:50:02.000 And then that corporate strategy becomes the basis of kind of its own new industry of public relations folks and advertising people and lawyers and think tanks who will promote that.

00:50:12.000 And then that becomes an ideology.

00:50:15.000 And that's certainly what we saw, the progression for climate change and I think – or climate denial.

00:50:21.000 And that's a dangerous trend.

00:50:24.000 You do cover social media and denial in this?

00:50:28.000 No, I don't really get into it.

00:50:30.000 I mean, I talk a little bit about, yeah, no, it's really not a factor.

00:50:34.000 I mean, the most recent industry that I talk about, the two most recent industries are the fossil fuels denying climate change and also Wall Street denying the products and activities and hazards that led up to the financial crisis of 2008. That's a can of worms in and of itself,

00:50:53.000 right?

00:50:54.000 Have you read Matt Taibbi's work on that?

00:50:56.000 I've read some of his work, yeah.

00:50:58.000 The vampire squid clamped to the face of humanity.

00:51:02.000 Yeah, that's an immortal line, so his description of Goldman Sachs.

00:51:07.000 Yeah, his work is fascinating and terrifying.

00:51:10.000 And he's not a guy with a financial background, so he had to do a deep dive into all that stuff for years to sort of get a grip on how they do things and what they're doing.

00:51:20.000 The idea that that is the backbone of our civilization in terms of our economic civilization is really crazy. 0.87

00:51:27.000 What a goofy system. 0.96

00:51:28.000 Yeah. 0.63

00:51:29.000 And of course, that industry has become so much bigger as a percentage of GDP and so much more powerful without any evident social benefits as far as I can see.

00:51:38.000 And I'm also not a person with a financial background.

00:51:41.000 I came to this as an environmental lawyer.

00:51:45.000 And not as a particularly naive person, but I have to say I was really astonished at the depth of the exploitation.

00:51:53.000 I mean, just the attitude.

00:51:55.000 It wasn't even like we think we're trying to do the right thing for our clients or we think we're trying to do the right thing for clients.

00:52:03.000 You know, society, it was just this full-on take the money and run and exploitation.

00:52:10.000 I mean, they have this cute little code on Wall Street that was prominent before the crisis.

00:52:16.000 I hope it's not so prominent now.

00:52:20.000 It's IBGYBG, which stands for I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone, which was the answer when somebody said, wait a minute, we're pumping all this risk into the system.

00:52:32.000 This investment product is going to fail.

00:52:34.000 This is all going to hit the fan.

00:52:36.000 This is all going to collapse.

00:52:38.000 IBGYBG. Oh, Jesus.

00:52:43.000 Crazy, risky products were all front-loaded.

00:52:46.000 So you sell somebody a multi-year product and you get the bonus right up front.

00:52:50.000 So you don't care what the long-term risk is and the attitude toward their clients.

00:52:56.000 I mean, there's an author in Britain who interviewed all kinds of people and promised them anonymity from the British government.

00:53:09.000 Thank you.

00:53:14.000 Thank you.

00:53:25.000 We're so obvious that you can't believe that they were denying them.

00:53:29.000 I mean, obviously when there's a housing bubble, it will burst and there was an obvious housing bubble.

00:53:35.000 It was denied for a long, long time and that ultimately became the basis of all of this really toxic debt that got magically transformed into AAA investments.

00:53:45.000 And it wasn't, I think, that the industry was denying that it was going to burst.

00:53:49.000 They just felt they were going to get in and out before it burst, that they could pass the risk off to the next party before it happened.

00:53:56.000 So I don't know.

00:53:57.000 Do we call that rationalization?

00:54:00.000 I mean, I put it all under the very broad category of denial.

00:54:04.000 But actually, the head of J.P. Morgan later would testify to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Somehow, you know, we just missed the fact that housing prices don't go up forever.

00:54:17.000 I don't think they really did miss that fact.

00:54:19.000 They really said it that way?

00:54:20.000 That's what Jamie Dimon said.

00:54:23.000 Yeah, I may have a word or two off, but that's actually what he said.

00:54:27.000 I suspect he regretted phrasing it that way because that's pretty astonishing.

00:54:31.000 I wonder how many IBG-YBG tattoos there are out there.

00:54:34.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:35.000 That's a good question.

00:54:36.000 There's probably a lot, right?

00:54:37.000 A disturbing number.

00:54:38.000 I think there's probably a lot.

00:54:39.000 You know, there's actually one anecdote in the book that I retold from a book that Mike Hudson wrote called The Monster.

00:54:46.000 And he's talking about, first of all, we had this new breed of mortgage lenders, the folks who actually went out to sell the subprime mortgages to the low-income people who were often defrauded and certainly not the most sophisticated financial consumers.

00:55:03.000 And this one particularly bad company was out there.

00:55:07.000 And Lehman Brothers sent a vice president to visit with this company because they wanted to know how they were doing.

00:55:14.000 This was, I think, in the 90s.

00:55:15.000 And he writes back and says that this is a sweatshop.

00:55:20.000 It is high pressure sales for people in a weak state.

00:55:24.000 And it is a check your ethics at the door kind of business.

00:55:28.000 And Lehman Brothers writes back and says, we in Enthusiastically welcome the opportunity to partner in your future growth and ended up then, in fact, partnering with them and financing these mortgages and then buying them back, packaging them up,

00:55:43.000 selling them to investors, and then, of course, eventually becoming the biggest bankruptcy in history.

00:55:49.000 And getting bailed out.

00:55:51.000 Well, not Lehman Brothers, but the other ones did.

00:55:54.000 What a crazy thing that they just sort of laid it out like that.

00:55:58.000 Well, yeah, this is internal stuff that came out.

00:56:01.000 But yeah, the fact that they were, you know, so happy to partner with an unethical business.

00:56:10.000 And in fact, there's also a lot of evidence that Wall Street was just continuing to get the mortgage lenders to reduce their standards even lower.

00:56:19.000 Because, you know, you started out with these very, very aggressive investments.

00:56:22.000 New companies.

00:56:23.000 These weren't banks.

00:56:24.000 These were lending companies and they were new and they wanted to get huge very quick and they were super aggressive.

00:56:29.000 But they made so much money that the more traditional banks started following and doing what they had been doing.

00:56:36.000 And so Wall Street gets involved and basically they're saying, you don't need documentation of income.

00:56:43.000 And the banker would say, the lender would say, well, how do I know they're going to pay it back?

00:56:48.000 And Wall Street would say, You don't need to worry about that.

00:56:51.000 In fact, they didn't because Wall Street would buy it.

00:56:55.000 The point wasn't, will this ever be paid back?

00:56:57.000 The point was, is the interest rate on the surface of the mortgage high enough that we can package it into what looks like a lucrative investment?

00:57:06.000 Of course, they would package lots and lots of these together and then slice and dice them and stack them.

00:57:12.000 Keep rearranging them and essentially then threatened and corrupted and manipulated the ratings agencies so that they would give them AAA ratings so that your pension fund could buy it.

00:57:26.000 That was one of the things that was so disturbing about Matt Taibbi's work.

00:57:29.000 It's so sophisticated that it takes so long to understand how they're doing it and what they're doing that the average person that doesn't have a background in finance, as you get into it, or economics, if you get into it, it's like you have to start from scratch several times and go,

00:57:45.000 okay, how are they doing this?

00:57:47.000 Why is this legal and how is this legal?

00:57:50.000 When you're dealing with just numbers, too, that's what's disturbing to me.

00:57:54.000 There's something about environmental impact that at least it seems somewhat tangible.

00:57:59.000 Like it's a thing, right?

00:58:00.000 It's carbon in the atmosphere.

00:58:02.000 There's an impact.

00:58:04.000 The temperature rises.

00:58:05.000 The sea level rises.

00:58:07.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:58:08.000 Like there's physical things.

00:58:09.000 Whereas numbers are these weird things where if your whole business model is predicated on increasing the amount of numbers that you earn...

00:58:19.000 You can find ways, especially if other people are willing to go along with that, you can find ways to screw with those things.

00:58:26.000 And that's the most disturbing thing about finances to me.

00:58:30.000 Like the Bernie Madoff situation, for example.

00:58:34.000 Like how many people...

00:58:36.000 Had to know that there's something wrong with the amount of money they're earning.

00:58:41.000 How many people had to know that?

00:58:43.000 And how many people are like, listen, these are just numbers.

00:58:47.000 We're just getting these numbers.

00:58:48.000 We're putting numbers in.

00:58:49.000 We're getting numbers back.

00:58:50.000 We're getting more numbers back than we get in.

00:58:52.000 So we're good.

00:58:53.000 Yeah.

00:58:53.000 Well, you know, and I think any industry like finance that is incredibly complicated and abstract in that way that doesn't feel quite right but who really knows is one that is absolutely ripe for denial because the complexity means nobody really knows the risk.

00:59:10.000 It also means the industry can and it did go to Congress and say, you don't get this, which was true.

00:59:17.000 And so, okay, we're selling these derivatives and yeah, maybe they're super complicated and nobody knows what they are.

00:59:22.000 But you regulators, hands off, we, you know, the market, we are self-disciplined.

00:59:28.000 We, the industry, will not take crazy risks.

00:59:31.000 And by the way, you should get rid of those depression-era laws so we can do some other stuff.

00:59:35.000 And then eventually, of course, you have the financial crisis.

00:59:37.000 But the abstract nature of all these numbers also means That whatever little bell might go off in somebody's head saying, this is going to hurt somebody, it's going to be muted.

00:59:48.000 It's going to be ignored because it just feels so abstract.

00:59:52.000 I mean, you're okay.

00:59:53.000 You sell this security to a pension fund and maybe way down the line it'll fail and maybe some people won't get to retire, but you don't know who they are and maybe that won't happen.

01:00:06.000 I mean, the more abstract it is and, of course, the more globalized our economy becomes, The more distant the impacts, the harder to imagine they are and the easier to ignore and deny.

01:00:17.000 And then you add in the fact that they're able to manipulate politicians. 0.98

01:00:22.000 Exactly.

01:00:23.000 They fund their campaigns.

01:00:25.000 The really creepy one is when they give them money to speak, like enormous sums of money after they get out of office.

01:00:32.000 That can be a little corrupting, huh?

01:00:35.000 But it's just so gross and obvious.

01:00:37.000 When you're giving a former president or a former secretary of state a quarter of a million dollars to talk for an hour, like, why?

01:00:46.000 What is that person saying?

01:00:48.000 That's so fascinating.

01:00:50.000 That's a very high rate of return for a quarter or half an hour of work.

01:00:54.000 Well, when Bernie Sanders was upset at Hillary Clinton, he was like, release the transcripts.

01:00:58.000 Let me hear what you said.

01:00:59.000 There's not a chance in hell she's going to do that. 0.95

01:01:02.000 I mean, what do they say during those things that warrants a quarter of a million dollars or more?

01:01:07.000 It's a shady system, and there's no motivation to shift it, change it.

01:01:15.000 Well, there's no motivation for those who are benefiting from it, certainly those who have the most money and are able to manipulate it.

01:01:22.000 I do think there's, I mean, if you were a politician and you were constantly raising money, I mean, I think many of them hate that and would love a system that didn't require them to be constantly doing that.

01:01:36.000 And it isn't like the politicians who are raising money for the campaigns, they don't get to walk away with it.

01:01:41.000 They're using that for their campaign. 0.94

01:01:43.000 So I think there is motivation among the elected people not to have to keep doing this.

01:01:49.000 But in the meantime, those who are benefiting from this and who can manipulate the system are going to resist any efforts to try to change it.

01:01:57.000 So that's a huge problem.

01:01:59.000 There might be motivation, but there's no tangible alternative.

01:02:02.000 There's nothing like...

01:02:03.000 Where you can say, look, we've got a clear path.

01:02:06.000 You don't have to raise money anymore.

01:02:07.000 Well, there are ways to whittle away at this, and it didn't used to be quite this bad.

01:02:12.000 And certainly you can provide some additional public funding or require networks to give politicians time on the air, things that allow them to speak to the public, which is, of course, what this money is supposed to give them a chance to do.

01:02:28.000 Without having to go to other people who have money to give them the money so that they can get access to the public.

01:02:34.000 I mean, I think there are ways to do this.

01:02:36.000 I wouldn't pretend to be an expert at all in campaign finance reform, but I think it is a field, and I think that the reforms of the past have been blocked or undone, and we can try to put some of those back in place.

01:02:49.000 What you're doing with this book is essentially you have a magnifying glass on some of the worst aspects of human behavior.

01:02:56.000 Is it depressing?

01:02:59.000 Kind of.

01:03:01.000 It's kind of depressing.

01:03:02.000 I've also had people tell me the book is infuriating, which, you know, I really didn't intend that.

01:03:09.000 I kind of thought, well, let me tell you, when I first imagined this book, I imagined that we were going to go through climate denial.

01:03:16.000 We were going to snap out of it because it was so obviously suicidal.

01:03:20.000 And then we were going to look around and go, how did that happen?

01:03:23.000 And how do we make sure that never happens again?

01:03:26.000 And I would be able to say, look, here are some factors that have contributed to this throughout history.

01:03:31.000 And here's, you know, maybe this will lead to some reforms.

01:03:34.000 And obviously it didn't work out that way.

01:03:35.000 This book has come out when we have a climate denier running the country.

01:03:40.000 Is it really a climate denial?

01:03:42.000 He has called it a hoax several times.

01:03:45.000 Now, I think maybe he's been talked out of using that term lately, but he's still pushing back the regulations and trying to re-back.

01:03:54.000 So he really said climate change is a hoax?

01:03:55.000 I said that several times and I know at least in one tweet maybe more a Chinese hoax that China was trying to perpetrate on us.

01:04:05.000 So in any event, you know, I wrote an infuriating book.

01:04:10.000 I didn't mean to.

01:04:11.000 I meant to write a kind of let's all step back and look at this sort of book.

01:04:14.000 But it just turns out you cannot write about infuriating topics without writing a kind of infuriating book.

01:04:20.000 I do try to keep some perspective here and look at the good parts of this history, which is to say, in each case, you have members of the public, you have scientists, you have journalists, you have movement stepping up and confronting that denial,

01:04:37.000 and eventually, in most cases, overcoming it.

01:04:42.000 And, you know, we do have other segments of our society that are designed to try to not just pursue profit but to seek truth of scientists and journalists.

01:04:52.000 And that doesn't mean they're not also trying to pursue profit sometimes or at least get paid for their work.

01:04:58.000 But, you know, we do have systems in place that have successfully confronted this.

01:05:04.000 So it's not like we're starting from scratch.

01:05:06.000 We are just in a very big hole right now and particularly about climate change and particularly with so much corporate power over Congress and frankly the states as well.

01:05:18.000 What subjects where you see there's actually progress been made?

01:05:25.000 Well, you know, people have been fighting climate change on the state level, and we have done some things also federally for a long time over the years.

01:05:33.000 I mean, many, many states have put in place climate targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

01:05:39.000 Many have put in place renewable energy standards, which have been enormously successful in building up The wind industry, the solar industry, and those technologies as they deploy and improve have gotten so much cheaper.

01:05:52.000 I mean, it's really much, much easier now to imagine getting rid of fossil fuels than it was, you know, 40 years ago when The industry first confronted this or when society first really started looking at this.

01:06:06.000 And on the federal level, they've made major improvements.

01:06:10.000 They've required efficiency standards, which have been really helpful for major appliances.

01:06:15.000 We've had auto efficiency standards.

01:06:17.000 Now, Obama put some strong ones in place.

01:06:19.000 Trump has rolled those back again.

01:06:21.000 So that's going to limit the progress exactly when it needs to be accelerated.

01:06:26.000 So that's maybe not one of the good pieces of news you were asking about.

01:06:31.000 We have – well, I mean, I think that's going to be largely the focus.

01:06:35.000 And even though we have – Trump has said we're not going to be part of the Paris Agreement anymore, which, by the way, every other country in the world is a part of.

01:06:43.000 There's a handful that haven't ratified it, but everybody else is part of it.

01:06:48.000 Even though he said that, you have many states and many cities stepping forward and saying, well, we are still part of it and we are going to be working to reduce our emissions.

01:06:57.000 So, you know, that's all very good news.

01:07:00.000 The technology, we do have a deep bench of policy experience.

01:07:03.000 We know a lot of good things that we can do that will work.

01:07:07.000 And we have the rising concern, the youth movement, You know, all around the world, really, who are really stepping up and saying, enough, we have got to deal with this and we've got to deal with it now.

01:07:21.000 And because you grown-ups have wasted 30 years, we've got to deal with it particularly aggressively.

01:07:27.000 Now, you cover how many different subjects in this book?

01:07:31.000 I cover eight different campaigns of denial.

01:07:33.000 And it seems like, for you in particular, climate change is the most disturbing?

01:07:38.000 Well, that's the one that threatens the future of human civilization and the one that I got started on, yeah.

01:07:45.000 But yeah, I cover seven other industries, including slavery, radium.

01:07:51.000 Radium.

01:07:52.000 What's the industrial strength denial take on radium?

01:07:56.000 Radium.

01:07:56.000 Radium is a crazy, crazy story.

01:07:59.000 Radium is this insanely radioactive element that was discovered just right around 1900 by the Curies in France.

01:08:10.000 And it was a mystery.

01:08:11.000 I mean, it was way more radioactive than uranium, and people didn't even know what radioactivity really meant, but there was this sort of aura of wizardry around it.

01:08:20.000 And when they discovered it, they didn't...

01:08:24.000 Well, the first thing they discovered, and they discovered this the hard way, was that it burned your flesh.

01:08:29.000 It didn't burn it right away.

01:08:30.000 But you'd carry some around and then in a few days you would have a burn there because it was sending off all of this energy.

01:08:37.000 So they thought, okay, we have this flesh-killing, cell-killing element.

01:08:42.000 What can we do with it?

01:08:43.000 And they thought, well, let's try to kill cancer tumors, which was actually a very good idea.

01:08:48.000 And they experimented with that.

01:08:50.000 That was the medical use for radium.

01:08:52.000 We're going to put this radium next to a tumor and then we'll take it away and it'll shrink and we can use the same radium for the next tumor.

01:08:58.000 And so it was a very efficient thing.

01:08:59.000 What form was the radium in?

01:09:00.000 They would put it, well, they somehow would refine it and distill it into, you know, tiny, tiny little amounts and then they would put it in a needle or put it in a vial or something and just position it near a tumor.

01:09:11.000 It started out as ore and they had to refine it and refine it down, down, down, down, down.

01:09:17.000 And so the governments at the time in Europe and also in the U.S. thought, great, here's this weird, crazy, valuable stuff.

01:09:25.000 Maybe we should control this ore so we make sure it gets used to actually cure cancer.

01:09:30.000 And in Europe, that's pretty much what they did.

01:09:33.000 In the U.S., we tried to do that.

01:09:34.000 But the industry, there was a brand new industry that was just forming.

01:09:39.000 And they stepped forward.

01:09:41.000 The first company was called Standard Chemical.

01:09:43.000 They stepped forward and said, no, no, no, no, no.

01:09:46.000 If the government starts taking over radium because it's radioactive, radium ore, Well, everything's a little radioactive.

01:09:53.000 Where will this stop?

01:09:54.000 It was this classic sort of slippery slope argument, and somehow it succeeded.

01:09:59.000 And so what happened was this mysterious and potent element became another commercial product to be exploited by this company, Standard Chemical.

01:10:10.000 There were some others that later popped up.

01:10:11.000 Standard Chemical was founded by this guy named Joe Flannery, and he had a background as His family were morticians, and then he went into industry, and then he was kind of a snake oil salesman, and he kind of failed, but he wanted with radium.

01:10:28.000 He told Congress to cure cancer.

01:10:30.000 He had a good motive.

01:10:32.000 But he also wanted a big market, right?

01:10:34.000 Cancer, you know, just one disease, and if you reuse the radium, that's not a market.

01:10:38.000 So he was determined to expand that market.

01:10:41.000 He actually opened what was called the First Free Radium Clinic, In the world in 1913, Pittsburgh.

01:10:49.000 And he invited patients in and hired doctors, and thousands of them were injected with radium, or they drank radium.

01:10:59.000 So if you can somehow prove that consuming radium is healthy, then you have a market, right?

01:11:04.000 And many of these people did have cancer, but it turns out that injecting them with radium would actually kill them.

01:11:13.000 We're good to go.

01:11:26.000 And they weren't just treating cancer patients.

01:11:28.000 They were treating anybody.

01:11:29.000 They were treating arthritis.

01:11:31.000 They were treating joint pain.

01:11:33.000 And so they were giving this very toxic substance to people with low-level chronic problems.

01:11:41.000 And then he actually formed his own medical journal, and he would have his doctors write up the results of this and put it in there and send it out to all the doctors.

01:11:52.000 So, yeah, I mean, it was really pretty crazy, but he did succeed in launching this health fad where suddenly there were lots of products that contained radium.

01:12:04.000 Now, some of them said they did but didn't, but many of them really did.

01:12:19.000 Wow.

01:12:20.000 Yeah.

01:12:32.000 Oh, and one of the more interesting ones, there were radioactive rectal suppositories.

01:12:40.000 And these were marketed basically for male sexual dysfunction.

01:12:45.000 That's not what they called it. 0.55

01:12:46.000 What did they call it?

01:12:47.000 They said this was for, as I recall, weak, discouraged men who wanted to perform the duties of a real man.

01:12:56.000 So, yeah, and that was, you know, I I think what happens is if you're going to sell a quack product, you try to identify problems that people are kind of embarrassed about.

01:13:05.000 So they're less likely to go to their doctor.

01:13:06.000 They'll buy it out of the back of a magazine.

01:13:08.000 And then if it doesn't work, they're not going to complain about it.

01:13:11.000 They're not going to sue you.

01:13:13.000 But these were not just marketed for that.

01:13:14.000 They were marketed for colds.

01:13:16.000 They were marketed for obesity, for constipation, for insanity.

01:13:19.000 That was a big one, trying to cure insanity.

01:13:22.000 So yeah, it becomes a health fad.

01:13:25.000 How long did this go on for?

01:13:26.000 Well, it pretty much fizzled out in the 30s, largely because one particularly prominent and wealthy individual could afford to poison himself very thoroughly by drinking these radium drinks every day.

01:13:44.000 His facial bones started to dissolve.

01:13:46.000 His teeth fell out.

01:13:48.000 He had like holes between his sinuses and his mouth.

01:13:51.000 This is actually what happened as well to a group of workers who were painting radium paint onto watch dials, which is actually a more well-known part of this history.

01:14:02.000 A lot of young women were hired to paint radium onto watch dials. 0.99

01:14:06.000 Not just watch dials.

01:14:07.000 They put them onto all kinds of products.

01:14:09.000 Oh, my God.

01:14:09.000 Look at these images.

01:14:10.000 Oh, yeah.

01:14:12.000 You can see it up here.

01:14:13.000 It's called radium jaw.

01:14:15.000 Jaw necrosis.

01:14:17.000 Wow!

01:14:18.000 Look at that one guy with his lower jaw is just gone on the second row.

01:14:23.000 Yeah.

01:14:24.000 So this...

01:14:26.000 Oh my god!

01:14:29.000 Yeah, radium.

01:14:30.000 This went on for 20 years?

01:14:34.000 Well, yes.

01:14:35.000 I mean, the industry got going in the mid-19-teens.

01:14:39.000 This one man I was just talking about died in the early 30s, got lots of press, and that helped the health fad part of it go away.

01:14:47.000 The worker exposure, the young women usually who were People disfigured and died from this. 1.00

01:14:54.000 That part of the industry of radioactive paint lasted a bit longer into the 30s.

01:15:01.000 When they began, they taught these women, young women, they might have been 15 when they got hired, they taught them to make a nice sharp point on their paintbrush with their lips and tongue.

01:15:13.000 And because there was this health fat around radium, they told them that this would put a glow in their cheeks.

01:15:19.000 And you've seen these pictures that they really had some change in their cheeks, but it wasn't a glow.

01:15:24.000 And they told them it was good for them.

01:15:28.000 And...

01:15:29.000 So a lot of them, not all of them, I mean, so, you know, not everybody died, which made it easier for the industry to actually blame them.

01:15:37.000 And later, the industry would say that these people with these horrendous disfiguring diseases, that they were suffering from a pre-existing condition, that this was somehow not the fault of radium, that they had hired people.

01:15:51.000 Cripples and other people who weren't super strong because this was easy work. 1.00

01:15:56.000 And when they got sick, everybody blamed them and they were being punished for their generosity of hiring these folks in the first place.

01:16:04.000 And by the way, these women had radioactive breath at this point. 1.00

01:16:09.000 I mean, so it's not like there was any doubt that they had radium lodged in their bones.

01:16:14.000 What is radioactive breath?

01:16:15.000 It means they're exhaling radon.

01:16:17.000 So this was measurable?

01:16:19.000 Yeah.

01:16:20.000 Oh, Christ.

01:16:20.000 Even by the standards of the time.

01:16:22.000 Oh, my God.

01:16:23.000 Now, one thing about the radium industry is, you know, denials like that, blaming the victim, are appalling.

01:16:28.000 But one of the things we did see is that the leaders of that industry, including the guy who invented that radioactive paint and including Joseph Flannery, died.

01:16:38.000 And certainly the inventor of the paint died because of radium exposure.

01:16:45.000 His teeth had fallen out.

01:16:48.000 According to Time Magazine, his fingers had been removed.

01:16:51.000 Nobody else covered that particularly gruesome detail, but then he died of anemia.

01:16:55.000 These are all radium-induced ailments.

01:16:57.000 Joseph Flannery, the guy who launched Standard Chemical, well, he had this great idea that he had all this radioactive waste, right?

01:17:03.000 So he hired a botanist to find out if it could be a fertilizer.

01:17:07.000 And then they published a report that you should, yeah, spread radioactive waste on your food crops because it's great.

01:17:15.000 He actually had him spread waste on his own garden.

01:17:18.000 And then six years later, Flannery died.

01:17:21.000 And the industry didn't mention this, but his birth certificate, which I managed to dig up, mentioned that he had a contributing factor in his death of anemia, which is something that radium exposure causes.

01:17:33.000 You mean death certificate?

01:17:34.000 Is that what you meant?

01:17:35.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

01:17:35.000 Yes.

01:17:36.000 You said birth certificate.

01:17:37.000 Right.

01:17:38.000 His death certificate.

01:17:39.000 Thank you.

01:17:40.000 So yeah, he had anemia.

01:17:43.000 And if he believed, So it seems,

01:18:01.000 again, that there's this human characteristic that...

01:18:04.000 This tendency, you start making money, you start justifying, you want to keep that money coming in, so you start justifying your actions, manipulating the facts, and just continuing to push out whatever it is that you're doing that's allowing you to earn this profit.

01:18:19.000 Yeah.

01:18:19.000 Well, and, you know, one of the reasons I talk about Joe Flannery is that he's, I think, a really good example of a certain kind of person that we celebrate because they invent things and they make things happen and they build businesses,

01:18:35.000 the founders of industry.

01:18:38.000 And we know from psychological studies that, you know, well, let me back up.

01:18:45.000 There's a model when you think about how the mind works that governs a lot of this research that we've got a going system and a stopping system, an approach system and an inhibition system.

01:18:57.000 One of the things that activates the approach system is power.

01:19:02.000 And if you have an approach, an active approach system, you are focused on your goal.

01:19:07.000 You're focused on reward.

01:19:09.000 Meanwhile, the powerless are focused.

01:19:11.000 The inhibition part of the mind is more triggered by powerlessness and you're more focused on risk.

01:19:17.000 So if you're focused on reward, you're not focused so much on risk.

01:19:21.000 You're not focused so much on consequence for other people.

01:19:24.000 And so, of course, that gets you hailed as a visionary, and Joseph Lannery was hailed as a visionary, and he did.

01:19:32.000 You know, he was bold, he was inventive, he worked hard, he built a business.

01:19:36.000 He just didn't ask, you know, should we actually feed this cell-killing radioactive substance that fuses into people's bones permanently to people without any evidence of safety?

01:19:49.000 Or should we just go for it and see how it works?

01:19:52.000 And so, you know, that I think is troubling in the sense that you've got industry leaders who fit a certain psychological profile who rise to the tops of their industries precisely because they are reward-focused.

01:20:07.000 But if they are not balanced out by other people whose job it is to say, what about the risks?

01:20:13.000 What about the consequences?

01:20:14.000 What could go wrong here?

01:20:16.000 You have a recipe for disaster.

01:20:20.000 And also ignorance at the time.

01:20:23.000 No one really understood that kind of stuff in terms of what the general public probably didn't really know what radiation could do to you.

01:20:31.000 Oh, right.

01:20:31.000 The general public didn't know at all.

01:20:33.000 And in fact, radioactivity, you know, there was this incredible aura around it.

01:20:38.000 I mean, it was energy.

01:20:39.000 It was stimulation.

01:20:40.000 That's one of the reasons it got used for sexual dysfunction. 0.97

01:20:44.000 What happened to those guys?

01:20:46.000 Yeah, we don't know.

01:20:46.000 And that's the problem.

01:20:48.000 With the case of a whole lot of these folks, the consumers of these products, we really don't know much about what happened.

01:20:55.000 We know more about the radium girls who were the ones who used this paint.

01:21:00.000 God, it's so disturbing.

01:21:02.000 Yeah, it's very disturbing.

01:21:03.000 Whenever I hear stories about that from the early 1900s, I always wonder, is something like that happening right now that they're going to look back on the year 2300 and go, what were they thinking back in 2020?

01:21:17.000 It may well be social media.

01:21:20.000 We've unlocked some really powerful, potent force, and it's addictive, and people love it, and it's so exciting, and it's racing forward, and it's so new that nobody fully understands the risks yet.

01:21:32.000 But I think that might be what, when people look back, they will think, how did these people let...

01:21:38.000 How did this happen?

01:21:39.000 How did they let it rip them to pieces like that?

01:21:42.000 How did they let it destroy all of their trust in each other and their government and their experts and their academia so that nobody really could tell, or at least a big chunk of your population could not tell what was true and what was just somebody pandering to their tribal biases?

01:21:58.000 Well, and also, what's it doing to our children?

01:22:01.000 I mean, I grew up without it.

01:22:02.000 You grew up without it.

01:22:03.000 What is happening to 11-year-olds right now that have Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts?

01:22:09.000 Instagram accounts and they're going back and forth with people all day long and being mean to each other.

01:22:14.000 I know personally people that get involved in like these online beefs with people and they're sick.

01:22:20.000 They get sick.

01:22:21.000 They get ill.

01:22:22.000 Like they can't leave their house.

01:22:24.000 They can't get out of bed.

01:22:25.000 They're severely disturbed for days on end.

01:22:28.000 They have to get on medication.

01:22:29.000 It's really common.

01:22:31.000 And, you know, look, I don't read that stuff.

01:22:35.000 And I'm a 52 year old man with a fairly healthy brain and an understanding of my own shortcomings.

01:22:42.000 I stay the hell away from it.

01:22:44.000 But I know a lot of people who are addicted.

01:22:47.000 And they, you know, you'll see them some days and they're sweating, their faces pale, and you're like, what's going on, man? 0.97

01:22:54.000 Oh, I'm involved in this Twitter thing, you know, somebody got mad at me about this, then I went back and forth about that, and next thing you know, my boss found out about it, and it's, oh, crap. 0.88

01:23:04.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.90

01:23:05.000 There's a definite ugliness to it.

01:23:07.000 And if you think about the anonymous comments, you know, one of the things that – this surprised me.

01:23:15.000 You know how when you've got a European company, it might have SA at the end of its name instead of ink?

01:23:21.000 That's common.

01:23:22.000 That stands, like in French, for Société Anonime.

01:23:26.000 It stands for Anonymous Society.

01:23:28.000 Okay.

01:23:29.000 Anonymity was such a central feature of the corporation that they actually appended it to the names of corporations.

01:23:36.000 You don't know who's owning these things, and so that's another reason that the people who do own it don't feel responsible.

01:23:44.000 And anonymity, we know from all kinds of research and from the Internet, brings out a kind of...

01:23:53.000 Yes, and just a kind of casual brutality, and certainly not social responsibility.

01:24:00.000 So, yeah, I mean, I think that it's going to be a huge issue.

01:24:06.000 And I think...

01:24:07.000 People, certainly smarter than me, who understand this industry better, are going to have to pick it apart and try to think about how we really do directly address these problems.

01:24:17.000 We obviously didn't evolve with social media in mind.

01:24:21.000 No.

01:24:24.000 Highly social creatures, huge portions of our brains are about looking around at our place within our tribe, looking at other tribes, and just dealing with all of the status issues and the comparison issues.

01:24:37.000 And social media, of course, expands that dramatically.

01:24:40.000 And it's just, I think, you're right, really hard for people to deal with.

01:24:44.000 Well, we're seeing it so clearly right now because it's being exacerbated by social distancing.

01:24:49.000 The fact that we're not around each other and there's less communication person to person, particularly with strangers or particularly people you have issues with.

01:24:58.000 People aren't getting together and communicating face to face.

01:25:01.000 I hadn't thought of that.

01:25:01.000 That's probably true.

01:25:02.000 And then children.

01:25:03.000 How many children are doing, like my kids are all doing, Zoom school?

01:25:08.000 Oh, yeah.

01:25:08.000 Which is horrible.

01:25:09.000 I mean, it's so ineffective.

01:25:11.000 They're barely paying attention.

01:25:13.000 They find strategies to mute the teacher and to shut their camera off and pretend their laptop broke.

01:25:20.000 And it's kind of hilarious.

01:25:21.000 But these kids are engaging even more in social media and less in hanging out with each other.

01:25:29.000 It's really like a perfect recipe for a distorted...

01:25:34.000 Yeah, it's scary.

01:25:36.000 It is.

01:25:36.000 And again, it's a new thing.

01:25:39.000 So the regulations that are in place, there's really nothing to prevent people from using it to manipulate things.

01:25:48.000 It's not illegal.

01:25:49.000 And it will take a long time before we get those in place.

01:25:52.000 And also, it might be too late.

01:25:54.000 Before we recognize the repercussions, I mean, Facebook is talking about making their own money.

01:25:58.000 They're talking about making their own Bitcoin-type cryptocurrency.

01:26:03.000 I mean, if that takes place, I mean, they're already manipulating things in some really weird ways.

01:26:07.000 If they start having their own money on top of that, and then they can manipulate their own individual economy, like, what does that look like?

01:26:17.000 No one even considered cryptocurrency 20 years ago.

01:26:20.000 No one considered the impact of social media 10 years ago.

01:26:23.000 What are we going to be looking at 30 years from now?

01:26:26.000 Yeah, that's a really good question.

01:26:27.000 I mean, you know, our failure of imagination goes both ways.

01:26:31.000 We don't tend to imagine the problems that are going to result from the technologies and the new industries.

01:26:36.000 We also hardly ever imagine how we will solve those problems.

01:26:41.000 We hardly ever...

01:26:42.000 If you look at any kind of speculative fiction or movies or...

01:26:47.000 I mean, you don't see progress.

01:26:50.000 You don't see people getting together, figuring out a problem, hammering out a solution, putting it in place.

01:26:55.000 I mean, because of course it's boring and it's not cinematic.

01:27:00.000 It's all Mad Max.

01:27:00.000 It's all deeply dystopia.

01:27:03.000 It's kind of interesting if you compare that to much older science fiction that has a much more positive perspective.

01:27:09.000 Often, not always, but at least there was often something that was positive.

01:27:14.000 Although, I have to say a lot of that is stuff that was actually put together by corporations who were showing you the home of the future and all of their marvelous appliances. 0.97

01:27:22.000 Well, those fools were hopeful. 0.98

01:27:23.000 They were hopeful. 0.99

01:27:25.000 And we want to encourage hope.

01:27:27.000 We just want it to be realistic and focused and driven hope.

01:27:30.000 Most certainly.

01:27:31.000 The ozone layer is an interesting subject that you cover because that doesn't get discussed anymore.

01:27:36.000 But I've been to Australia, and you go outside and you burst into flames.

01:27:41.000 Everywhere you go in Australia, there's these billboards for skin cancer.

01:27:46.000 At least it was the last time I was there, which was over 10 years ago, but it's really strange.

01:27:52.000 There's these billboards everywhere that show tumors.

01:27:57.000 And show, you know, people that have skin cancer and talk to you about the damages and the dangers of sun.

01:28:03.000 Wow.

01:28:04.000 I had not realized that.

01:28:04.000 Well, they have a giant hole.

01:28:06.000 Like Australia. 0.59

01:28:07.000 Yeah, they're close enough to the ozone hole or partially under parts of it, I suppose.

01:28:12.000 They got our hairspray.

01:28:14.000 They exactly got our hairspray.

01:28:16.000 Yeah, I mean, it is amazing how that story does seem to have been forgotten, both the threat and the fact of the success.

01:28:26.000 I mean, we caused this huge problem.

01:28:30.000 We discovered this huge problem, which we needn't.

01:28:34.000 I mean, that was kind of serendipitous.

01:28:37.000 And yes, the industry denied it.

01:28:39.000 And this kind of came in two chapters.

01:28:41.000 First, it was the aerosol industry saying, this is an attack on free enterprise.

01:28:46.000 Probably the KGB is behind it.

01:28:47.000 I mean, what else?

01:28:48.000 Is that really what they said?

01:28:49.000 There was one aerosol company president, yeah, who suspected it was a KGB. But many industry leaders were talking about this being as an anti-capitalist crusade.

01:28:59.000 And partly because this was the early 70s, so they had already faced...

01:29:03.000 All of these, you know, demanding environmentalists saying, take the lead out of the gasoline and do all kinds of other things.

01:29:09.000 And so they were starting to feel like attacked on all sides.

01:29:13.000 And eventually, you know, so there was some denial there, mostly political.

01:29:18.000 Eventually that got handled.

01:29:20.000 Well, I shouldn't say eventually.

01:29:21.000 It got handled relatively quickly because actually it was like only 1976 when they said, okay, we're getting this stuff out of the hairspray, out of the deodorant.

01:29:29.000 We don't need this in spray cans.

01:29:31.000 What was it that was in this process?

01:29:33.000 Chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, which were invented, ironically, by the same guy who invented leaded gasoline at GM. Oh, boy.

01:29:42.000 He invented both of these chemicals.

01:29:44.000 What's that creep's name?

01:29:45.000 His name was Thomas Midgley.

01:29:48.000 Yeah, and he left quite a mark on the world.

01:29:51.000 But here's the thing.

01:29:52.000 I mean, I blame him for putting lead in gasoline.

01:29:54.000 That was terrible.

01:29:56.000 But inventing CFCs was actually done because it was replacing the poisonous gases that were then in refrigerators.

01:30:04.000 And they would sometimes leak and kill people.

01:30:06.000 So people were just transitioning now from iceboxes to fridges, and so they needed a non-toxic gas to put in there.

01:30:14.000 So he came up with this, and it was non-toxic.

01:30:16.000 And so, you know, at the time...

01:30:18.000 Nobody really even knew much about the ozone layer, and they certainly didn't know CFCs were going to wreck it.

01:30:23.000 So it was a much, much less obvious risk.

01:30:26.000 And then it wasn't until the 70s that scientists who were just sort of curious put this all together and realized, uh-oh, we are wrecking the ozone layer.

01:30:35.000 And by 76, I think it was 76, the Ford administration said, okay, we're getting it out of the cans.

01:30:42.000 You got a couple years.

01:30:43.000 And this industry, the aerosol industry, who had been screaming and yelling about anti-capitalists said, okay.

01:30:50.000 I mean, it was not that big a deal.

01:30:52.000 It was easy for them to do.

01:30:53.000 And then I guess we were in the Carter administration, and they were going to start looking at the harder problem of how do you replace CFCs in refrigerators and air conditioners.

01:31:02.000 And they were putting up a plan for that.

01:31:05.000 But then Reagan got elected and the concerns of the 60s and 70s about how do we protect the environment were replaced by concerns about how do we avoid environmental regulations because they felt it was hurting business and so they basically dropped the ball on this completely and the corporations like DuPont,

01:31:27.000 which was the top CFC maker, They had been working on substitutes, but once the pressure of regulation went away, they just dropped it.

01:31:36.000 They didn't keep looking for substitutes, even though they had the same science telling them that there was a risk here, but they decided we're not going to have to worry about it.

01:31:45.000 Then eventually the ozone hole is discovered and scientists are shocked because the models had predicted, you know, a gradual reduction in ozone and suddenly you've got this deep reduction in ozone and it covers like, you know, this huge space over Antarctica.

01:32:00.000 One of the reasons NASA had not discovered this with their satellites was that they were expecting so much less that they had apparently programmed the computers to read huge readings like this as instrument error.

01:32:15.000 Oh, wow.

01:32:16.000 So it was actually the British who discovered this.

01:32:19.000 They did it the old-fashioned way, going down to Antarctica and like measuring things.

01:32:24.000 So anyway, they announced it.

01:32:25.000 Then NASA looked back and said, whoops, you're right.

01:32:27.000 Huge ozone hole.

01:32:28.000 Then everything kind of accelerated.

01:32:30.000 And by 87, we had the Montreal Protocol.

01:32:33.000 And even though Reagan had run on this anti-regulatory platform...

01:32:37.000 He signed the Montreal Protocol.

01:32:39.000 The Senate ratified it.

01:32:41.000 I don't think there were any dissenting votes.

01:32:43.000 So, you know, that was a big success story.

01:32:46.000 And by the way, by the time things really were winding down, even DuPont said, okay, yeah, there's enough science here.

01:32:52.000 We're going to stop making our product.

01:32:53.000 And so it's sort of the one example I can point to where science and evidence overcame denial.

01:33:00.000 But...

01:33:01.000 It's an example where the product wasn't their core product.

01:33:04.000 It was a little sliver of revenue that wasn't that lucrative.

01:33:07.000 They could replace it with something that they could sell.

01:33:10.000 And they were going to clearly get regulated anyway.

01:33:12.000 So clearly the benefits of continued denial had sort of disappeared.

01:33:18.000 So you can't count on evidence leading to the end of corporate denial.

01:33:23.000 More typically you have a situation like tobacco and fossil fuels where even if it does lead to denial, they don't stop selling the product.

01:33:36.000 And again, obviously oil companies can't just stop selling their product, but they can be part of a process for us all to figure out how we're going to replace it as quickly as possible.

01:33:45.000 What efforts were done, if any, to regenerate ozone?

01:33:49.000 Just to cut the emissions.

01:33:51.000 I mean, I'm not aware of anything.

01:33:52.000 I don't know that...

01:33:53.000 Yeah, it's funny.

01:33:54.000 I've not heard anybody talk about that.

01:33:56.000 But we've always known that the CFCs take decades to get up to the atmosphere.

01:34:00.000 So stopping emissions meant that the old stuff was still going up there and it was going to take decades to fix it.

01:34:07.000 We do seem to have signs of healing now of the ozone layer.

01:34:10.000 So it does seem like we have solved...

01:34:13.000 Well, to solve this, we have stopped the harm and it's going to get better through natural circumstances.

01:34:18.000 But, you know, I was talking about how people don't let us celebrate that as humanity at its best, you know, because we really did something very hard in the sense of figuring out the science, getting the nations of the world together, and getting rid of a product that had been really useful and valuable to us.

01:34:36.000 But what happened immediately after that was this political backlash.

01:34:41.000 Even when you had the chemical industry saying, yep, we're destroying the ozone layer, we're going to stop doing that, you had these right-wing groups, Fred Singer actually was one of the witnesses who was also in Merchants of Doubt, who goes and he gets to testify before Congress,

01:34:59.000 he's a scientist, and he's saying that the mainstream science on which you have just based all of these decisions, you're being bamboozled, and they have an anti-capitalist agenda.

01:35:11.000 And you had then, I think it was Tom DeLay, saying he doesn't listen to the Ozone Trends panel, all of those, you know, hundreds of scientists who've hammered out the data on these issues.

01:35:22.000 He listens to Fred Singer.

01:35:24.000 And that was sort of the beginning, well, not the beginning because you could take it back to the 80s, but that was the next step in the rise of these science deniers who sort of had this all-purpose agenda that looked at lots of different things.

01:35:36.000 And the funny thing was here, you know, you had the industry saying, no, we're fine with this accelerating the phase out.

01:35:47.000 We're going to go ahead and do it.

01:35:48.000 So, you know, the way I think about it is that industry for a long time fueled doubt.

01:35:54.000 And to some extent, they also then funded groups with an ideological agenda who continue to push that doubt.

01:36:01.000 And then some of those industries stopped denying the science, maybe because they were going to get sued or maybe because it was just time.

01:36:09.000 But the groups that they have funded now sort of outflank them on the issue.

01:36:14.000 And for example, Exxon used to fund, ExxonMobil used to fund this little crazy little group called the Heartland Institute.

01:36:23.000 And they stopped doing that quite a long time ago.

01:36:27.000 This institute kept just getting more and more extreme on this issue.

01:36:31.000 And recently they had a dispute between ExxonMobil and the Heartland Institute and the Heartland's leader called ExxonMobil part of the anti-energy global warming movement.

01:36:41.000 That's hilarious.

01:36:42.000 Yeah.

01:36:42.000 So, you know, things are weird right now.

01:36:47.000 That's super weird.

01:36:48.000 That is super weird.

01:36:49.000 ExxonMobil.

01:36:50.000 Part of an anti-energy, global warming movement?

01:36:53.000 Now, it's possible that this was all kind of staged to make Exxon look good, but I think they have just created a monster, and that monster is going to keep going around out there, and it keeps getting a lot of money.

01:37:05.000 The problem is we don't necessarily know who's funding these groups anymore.

01:37:09.000 For a long time, Exxon funded a lot of climate denier groups.

01:37:12.000 They got a lot of public pushback and pressure.

01:37:15.000 They stopped funding the most extreme ones, not all of them.

01:37:19.000 Then the Koch brothers started funding, their foundation started funding a lot of these groups.

01:37:24.000 They got a lot of attention.

01:37:26.000 Then we saw a lot of the funding of these groups going underground into these dark money organizations like Donors Trust that promise anonymity so that if you want to fund AAP. It's a politically sensitive issue.

01:37:38.000 Nobody knows you've done it.

01:37:40.000 So these, you know, the more extreme groups get a lot of money from these dark money organizations and therefore there's even deeper anonymity and no accountability.

01:37:52.000 That's some 4D chess if Exxon was doing that.

01:37:55.000 If they're sitting there going, look, I know what we can do.

01:37:58.000 Let's get someone to call us a bunch of hippies. 1.00

01:38:01.000 Yeah, I suspect that it wasn't that. 0.93

01:38:04.000 I think they really have just created a monster here.

01:38:06.000 Really would be brilliant if it was true.

01:38:09.000 I think that some of this is true.

01:38:11.000 I mean, here's the thing.

01:38:12.000 If you're Exxon and you don't actually want to do anything, you spin off the denial into other groups that will actually stop things.

01:38:20.000 I mean, this little group, Heartland, I mean, this extreme edge of these advocacy groups, they're deeply involved in the Trump administration.

01:38:28.000 I mean, it's not like they're just out there howling in the wilderness.

01:38:32.000 They have had enormous influence.

01:38:34.000 So if you can back off like Exxon, especially ExxonMobil, especially if you're being sued and you've got angry shareholders and you've got the SEC, you have a lot of reason and you have angry European countries that are taking this more seriously and you're multinational.

01:38:50.000 You have a lot of reason to kind of keep your mouth shut and maybe say the right things.

01:38:54.000 But you can indeed still benefit from the denial you have spun off into the world that is in fact, say, rolling back the fuel efficiency standards.

01:39:04.000 I don't know what ExxonMobil has said about that, but clearly the more inefficient our cars, the more oil gets burned.

01:39:11.000 Are there tactics and is there like a school of thought that goes along with these sort of strategies?

01:39:17.000 Like is this taught in universities?

01:39:19.000 Is there places where they learn this stuff?

01:39:21.000 Because you would think that it's very valuable and it's often very sophisticated.

01:39:26.000 How to actually manipulate and deny.

01:39:28.000 Is this something that gets taught once they get into this corporation?

01:39:31.000 Is this an internal thing?

01:39:33.000 Or is it just a natural factor in the way human beings react to profitability and denial of responsibility?

01:39:42.000 I think it certainly starts there with it being a natural reaction.

01:39:45.000 But I think then what happens is industries learn from the previous industry.

01:39:50.000 Tobacco taught everybody how to do this, certainly everybody in the modern era.

01:39:55.000 And then, of course, you do have this industry of groups that serve multiple industries.

01:40:01.000 So you can be a group that sets up front groups.

01:40:05.000 And I quote one here, the man named Rick Berman, who has a company that sets up front groups for industries that are facing regulation.

01:40:13.000 And he promises them complete anonymity.

01:40:16.000 And the irony here is that he was talking to a group of oil and gas executives and saying, hey, we can give you complete anonymity.

01:40:22.000 And some were saying things like, well, you know, you're telling us we should really be attacking people's character and reducing their credibility, and I'm not so sure I like that.

01:40:29.000 And he says, hey, you can either – how do you phrase it?

01:40:34.000 Lose pretty or win ugly. 0.98

01:40:36.000 Oh boy.

01:41:23.000 What he said was...

01:41:26.000 Doubt paralyzes people.

01:41:28.000 They think, I don't know who's right.

01:41:30.000 They think, I'll just wait.

01:41:32.000 And then basically you have sort of a tie in their minds, but you win every tie because you have preserved the status quo.

01:41:40.000 So that kind of a strategy, that's, you know, it's pretty sophisticated in the sense that it was an insight that really helps lots of industries with science denial.

01:41:52.000 But it was also a pretty obvious lesson from watching the tobacco industry, but really nobody's put it to use the way the fossil fuel industry has done around climate change.

01:42:02.000 So there is, in a sense, a playbook.

01:42:05.000 There's a playbook and there's an industry that will help you run those plays and also keep you hidden while you're running those plays so you don't have to be visible to your shareholders, to your consumers, to politicians.

01:42:19.000 If this was an operating system, we would abandon it and bring in a new one, right?

01:42:23.000 Like if this was Windows 95 or something.

01:42:27.000 We might be better able to predict how it will crash us.

01:42:31.000 Yes.

01:42:31.000 Yeah, but it seems like the operating system of whether it's economics or politics never really gets updated.

01:42:39.000 It just sort of gets patched.

01:42:41.000 Yeah, unfortunately, this is an operating system that takes on a life of its own and has its own desire to perpetuate itself.

01:42:48.000 Maybe this is where, you know, the future of all operating systems.

01:42:52.000 I mean, you know, if you think about sort of, again, back to the comic books, back to the novels, back to Frankenstein, our creations tend to want to live, and they tend to want to turn on us, and corporations are our creation.

01:43:07.000 Yes.

01:43:08.000 Yeah.

01:43:09.000 How did you choose which ones to cover?

01:43:12.000 And were there any subjects that you left out that you didn't...

01:43:16.000 Yeah, well, yeah, I was pretty...

01:43:19.000 Conscious about it eventually.

01:43:21.000 I mean, I stumbled around a long time and looked at a lot of industries.

01:43:24.000 But I wanted, first of all, in industries where there was a lot of evidence.

01:43:28.000 So it was clear that this isn't just reasonable doubt.

01:43:32.000 This isn't just people trying to figure it out.

01:43:34.000 There was something going on here that I could call denial.

01:43:37.000 Thank you.

01:43:49.000 Thank you.

01:44:00.000 So those were the first two factors.

01:44:01.000 And because I was looking at this as a social phenomenon, I didn't want cases where a company was just keeping a secret and it got discovered.

01:44:10.000 I wanted cases where there was a sustained campaign of denial over time.

01:44:15.000 Which of course gave me lots of source material to look at.

01:44:19.000 But also because that changes the way people think about things, not just the primary question of like, do cigarettes cause cancer?

01:44:29.000 But larger questions of, can I trust my government?

01:44:32.000 Can I trust science?

01:44:34.000 Who should decide these things?

01:44:35.000 How certain do I have to be?

01:44:36.000 So it was that kind of Social influence that I was really interested in and social norms and social change.

01:44:43.000 So I looked at those.

01:44:45.000 Now, as far as industries, I didn't write about lead paint because I already had leaded gas.

01:44:54.000 But lead paint has its own long history and history.

01:44:58.000 You know, it's just so tragic.

01:44:59.000 You look at these old ads and they're talking about, you know, paint your baby's nursery with this lead paint.

01:45:05.000 And the thing is, like, lead isn't a contaminant of lead paint.

01:45:09.000 Lead is like the main ingredient.

01:45:11.000 I mean, they were basically spreading a known poison over all of our living surfaces, knowing that it would eventually crumble, knowing that it accumulates slowly and poisons people.

01:45:23.000 And here's something I read.

01:45:24.000 I'm not 100% sure this is true, but it's heartbreaking.

01:45:28.000 That lead is sweet.

01:45:29.000 So you hear about children eating lead chips and you think, why would they eat lead chips?

01:45:33.000 I guess because it's kind of sweet.

01:45:37.000 What was the benefit of putting lead in things?

01:45:39.000 Oh, it made good paint.

01:45:41.000 I mean, it was strong and now, of course, we think of it as these old, old buildings and so we think of it as crumbling, but it did a pretty good job as a paint, if you didn't count the human impact.

01:45:55.000 Did you get any pushback or did you ever get contacted by any of these different industries that you're covering?

01:46:02.000 And were you concerned at all about that while you were writing these things?

01:46:05.000 Because you're kind of exposing.

01:46:07.000 I'm kind of exposing.

01:46:08.000 But I actually, you know, it's funny.

01:46:09.000 I thought about, should I be trying to interview people?

01:46:12.000 For all of these.

01:46:13.000 And I really didn't.

01:46:14.000 I mean, I tried.

01:46:15.000 I called Ethyl Corporation, which still exists, the company that made leaded paint.

01:46:19.000 I mean, not leaded paint, leaded gas.

01:46:21.000 They ended up moving on to other products.

01:46:24.000 Well, they sold it overseas for a long time, but then they also made a lot of other things.

01:46:28.000 So they still exist, even though their product was banned.

01:46:30.000 Their only product at the time that they were started was banned in this country.

01:46:34.000 And I called them up and said, so I'm writing this book about corporate denial.

01:46:38.000 And just wondering, you know, if you'd like to talk to me about lidded gas and just hear silence on the other side of the phone and then they would transfer me to somebody else and I would try it again and get silence and, you know, then it would get disconnected and it became pretty clear to me at the beginning that...

01:46:55.000 It wasn't going to be all that helpful for me to ask people, so tell me about what you're in denial of.

01:47:02.000 Because I didn't think that was going to work very well.

01:47:06.000 And also because my focus was the public debate and how did it affect society.

01:47:10.000 That's what I ended up focusing on the most.

01:47:12.000 So, you know, I wasn't worried about the industries as I was writing this.

01:47:17.000 I'm a little worried now, but I mean, really, I'm just quoting them.

01:47:20.000 So at this point, I don't feel like I'm at a particular risk.

01:47:24.000 Well, just, I mean, not even risk, but has there been a reaction by these corporations?

01:47:33.000 Yeah, because their whole thing is about denial, right?

01:47:35.000 So I would imagine you put out a book about industrial strength denial, you would get some denial about The book about denial.

01:47:44.000 That may be.

01:47:45.000 But, you know, I've picked such big industries and these campaigns are so old that there's nothing particularly newsworthy about saying that, you know, tobacco companies used to deny that smoking caused cancer or that the fossil fuel industry raised all kinds of doubts and denied climate change.

01:47:59.000 Was there any controversy about the subject matter and the topics?

01:48:04.000 Like, were there any ones that you considered not adding?

01:48:07.000 Oh, sure.

01:48:08.000 I mean, I was very nervous about slavery because it is just such an emotionally searing topic.

01:48:15.000 And because I didn't You know, these are all examples of denial.

01:48:22.000 They're all very destructive.

01:48:23.000 But I don't want to draw a direct moral equivalency between selling human beings where the harm is so immediate and obvious and selling these other products.

01:48:33.000 I mean, it is a different sort of situation.

01:48:36.000 So that was an issue for me.

01:48:37.000 But the denials were so fascinating and appalling and revealing that I ended up deciding to include it.

01:48:45.000 I was nervous about doing the financial chapter just because that took me out of my comfort zone and forced me to learn about collateralized debt obligations and things like that.

01:48:56.000 But again, that turned out to be such a fascinating topic that I'm very glad I ended up researching it and writing about it.

01:49:03.000 Well, listen, I'm glad you wrote this book.

01:49:06.000 And like I said, this is a subject that's always been bizarrely fascinating and compelling to me since Merchants of Doubt.

01:49:15.000 And I just think it is such a weird aspect of human beings.

01:49:21.000 The power of a corporation, the deniability, what they're able to do and how they're able to continue doing it.

01:49:28.000 It's very strange.

01:49:29.000 So I'm very happy that you wrote this book.

01:49:31.000 Thank you, Joe.

01:49:31.000 And it was great to talk to you.

01:49:32.000 It was great talking to you.

01:49:35.000 Do you have social media or anything that you would like to tell people about?

01:49:38.000 Oh, yeah, to prove what a lot I am, I have a website, barbarafreeze.com?

01:49:44.000 You don't know?

01:49:46.000 Yeah, I know.

01:49:48.000 My kids are going to tease me.

01:49:50.000 That's good.

01:49:51.000 Stay out of other stuff.

01:49:52.000 But you don't need to go to my website.

01:49:54.000 You can just Google the title, and if you're interested in the book, you'll find it anywhere.

01:49:59.000 Thank you, Barbara.

01:49:59.000 I appreciate you.

01:50:00.000 Thank you.

01:50:00.000 Bye, everybody.

01:50:06.000 That was great!

01:50:06.000 Thanks!

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 01, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1500 - Barbara Freese

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript