The Joe Rogan Experience - #1500 - Barbara Freese

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Barbara Freese is an author, environmental attorney and a former Minnesota assistant attorney general. Her latest book Industrial-Strength Denial is now available: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520296282/industrial-strength-denial

And we're rolling. How are you, Barbara? What's happening? I'm good, Joe. How are you? Pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. How did you get started on this, and how did you get interested in the subject? I got interested in this subject through climate change, climate denial specifically. I'm an environmental attorney, and back in the 1990s, I worked for the state of Minnesota. 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. We get most of our power from coal, or we did then. electricity. We get most of our power from coal, or we did then. And so we looked at coal emissions. We looked at the traditional pollutants that we had regulated for a long time. And my client was the Pollution Control Agency, so I was familiar with those. 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 to fight climate change. States had not taken a look at that. And what happened was we struck a nerve with the coal industry.

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 and it wasn't going to happen. Or if it did, it would be just a little and we'd like it. Panel on Climate Change, those scientists that the rest of the world, including the U.S. government and the treaty signed by George H.W. Bush, the ones that they were relying on, those scientists were basically biased. They were biased because they were in it for the money somehow. They wanted research grants or they had some political agenda. It was kind of vague. But it was clear they did not want us worrying about this issue at all.

They told you that it would be just a little and that you would like it? What do they mean by that? Well, a couple of things. 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. And 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. Yeah. So that was one of the arguments. 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. So yeah, there was a lot of crazy stuff that hasn't gone away. In fact, in many ways, it's gotten a lot worse. But there was certainly enough to leave me shocked. Was that the first time you were ever aware that corporations do send in people to try to diffuse arguments or pollute the waters?

I don't think I was quite that naive, but I'd certainly never seen anything like this. think I was quite that naive, but I'd certainly never seen anything like this. 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. And they were scientists. Yes, the ones I cross-examined were mainly the scientists. They also sent in some other witnesses as well. So they didn't actually work, you know, in a coal company. They were hired by the coal industry to come in and testify. And these scientists, presumably, they were paid to do this. Yes. So is that, I mean, how do you track that? Like 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? Did you ask them if they've been paid? We were able to put some things in the record regarding how much money they had gotten from different fossil fuel interests over the years. So we definitely did point to that, argue about that. We didn't realize some of the witnesses had a much deeper history than we understood in science denial. One of the witnesses was 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. So that would have been nice to bring up.

We had talked about just before the podcast, the film Merchants of Doubt, and that's how I kind of got into your work, that that film touches on that, how people who worked for the tobacco industry eventually went to work to deny the man-made climate change. Right. Well, in his case, he had actually been a physicist who was very involved in the Cold War weapons program. So he kind of came at it from that direction. 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 tobacco industry. But what happened was this handful of scientists profiled in that movie and in to climate change and really a lot of other scientific issues as well for industries facing regulation.

Someone should do a psychological profile of those people, particularly the tobacco people, because there's like such a direct correlation between tobacco and cancer. Like it's 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 the climate change isn't real, what deaths are caused? Is it directly attributable to that? Like, how do you, you know what I'm saying? But like cancer and cigarettes, it's like, here's a person, they smoke cigarettes, they have cancer. You said it didn't come from cigarettes.

What does that feel like to you? To be that person that actively tries to, well, they're essentially lying. They're lying for money. They're lying. 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. 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. 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. So it does get kind of complicated. As far as psychologically profiling the tobacco companies, I mean, or 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,

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. 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? Maybe you'd beat your wife. Maybe you'd drive cars fast. And that's part of how I think the tobacco industry approached this. And that's part of how I think the tobacco industry approached this. They would imagine this sort of counterfactual where a world without tobacco, without cigarettes,

and then they would imagine what that would be like. And of course, they'd always imagine it was much, much worse than smoking. Right. Yeah, I read that part. And also that the man in question wound up quitting cigarettes. Right. Yeah, he had to quit fairly quickly. He started wife-beating and speeding, and what up quitting cigarettes. Right, yeah. He had to quit fairly quickly. He was speeding and what did he do? Right, exactly.

Yeah, that was the question. And we never really did find that out. 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. Well, and it isn't just cancer. It's a heart disease, et cetera. 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. I think it was 100 million people.

More than maybe both wars, world wars put together. It's 7 million a year, I think, is the global death toll. In the US, it's 480,000 a year. Yeah. Directly attributable. Right. They trace it to directly attributable. Now, you know, these are extreme examples. Tobacco is the most famous and extreme example. And I talk about a lot of other examples. But I think it's actually, you know, a fairly common thing for people to go pretty far down the road of denial when they are working in an industry. And this is sort of the process I try to explore a little bit in the book. They're working in an industry.

They're confronted with some accusation that they have caused harm. They check their gut, and their gut says, no, we didn't intend to cause harm. We don't feel guilty. And so their mind starts to come up with reasons why it must be wrong. 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. So they immediately think, well, these people accusing me must have an ulterior motive. They must be, they want money, they want power, they want attention, they've got some sinister political objective. 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. It's to protect freedom 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.

That was actually an argument? Oh, yeah. The slave trade had a complete rescue narrative. I'm talking about the British slave trade here because that was the first really intense campaign of industrial denial I could find. The British dominated the slave trade in the 1700s. 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. They had witnesses. They had the torture devices.

They had all kinds of evidence. 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. So this was starting to really affect the industry. So the traders and the planters got together, they formed a slave lobby. They had a very organized campaign in response. There was a slave lobby. There was a very powerful slave lobby. 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. I mean, it was a widely accepted, fully legitimate industry. So the abolitionists really had their work cut out for them.

And they had all this evidence. The industry comes back and they knew they couldn't just say, oh, it's not so brutal. They actually came back with this complete counter-narrative, which was, we are rescuing these people. The Africans are eager to be purchased. They actually try to market themselves as how fit they are for work. They enjoy that crossing across the Atlantic. There is singing, dancing, games of chants. And when they get to the plantations, it is incredibly comfortable. They get comfy little houses. It's like a cradle to grave welfare state. They don't have to worry if they get sick. We take care of them. We feed them. 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. So that was part of it.

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. So this was a rescue narrative. 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. 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. I may have misspoken that a little bit, but it was a truly Orwellian quote. And so that way, you translate abolition into inhumanity, into brutality, and you portray the continued slave trade as a way to save these people. 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. But one of the quotes was that freeing the slaves would be cramming liberty down the throats of people incapable of digesting it. Wow. Yeah. 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. Right. And, you know, they did a lot of other things that we've seen modern industries doing. They, you know, I mentioned the reference to the poor peasants, and they also talked about, you know, how would you like it, Britain, if people came in and started telling the peasants

and the soldiers and the sailors that they had rights. So basically this kind of help us or you are next. Your whole class structure is going to collapse, that kind of an argument. And then they had an argument about basically failing to make a distinction between their industry and their interests and the whole country, or rather kind of know, kind of an early version of what's good for the country is good for GM and vice versa. They said, if you abolish this trade, it means universal bankruptcy for the kingdom. It means Britain is not powerful anymore. It means Britain becomes a province of France. It means in the sugar islands that the slaves will massacre the whites, exterminate the whites, or maybe make the whites slaves.

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. So how well documented is this in terms of the influencers? Who started this? And how well documented is this in terms of like the influencers? Like who started this? And was there like 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? Well, I don't know about internal discussions within the industry. What we do have are lots and lots of books and pamphlets because this was all done in writing. We also have some hearings and we have

parliamentary debates. They were recorded, not verbatim, but people tried to write them down. And so we have some version of what was actually said in these debates and the various hearings, there were parliamentary hearings. So there's actually quite a lot of evidence of the arguments being made in their own words. So, and then this was primarily in Britain, right? Right. Well, that's what I'm talking about here, obviously. We had our own abolition movement here.

That's what I was going to ask you. Did those same arguments, did they actually get presented in the United States? Some of them did. In the United States, it was different because, of course, you had an entire society built around slavery. And I read one reference, one historian saying that about half of the defenses of slavery came from the clergy. It wasn't quite the same sort of clearly here's an industry and here's an audience that they're talking to. So that's one of the reasons I didn't focus quite at all really on the American debate. Half of it was from clergy?

That's what this historian said. I didn't dig into those. I did, by the way, though, find one source. And now I don't remember if he was a plantation owner or something else who described the – called slavery basically a way to make people as happy as can be and called it the ideal of communism, which was funny because you don't even think of communism – of that debate as existing. This would have been in the 1800s now. But he was saying that the North is exploiting these workers, not taking care of them.

But in the South, we take care of them. We make them happy as slaves. Jesus. Yeah. So is this a pattern that existed before that? Like is there any evidence that there was something? 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. So they start rationalizing their decisions and then twisting things around. But is this something that can be traced back before then? Is this a natural human trait, this kind of deception? Well, I can't specifically answer whether it can be traced before then because I didn't try to trace it. But I would not be at all surprised because I do think it's a natural human trait. 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. 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. So I do think it's part of human nature. I do think we've created this system that brings this out in people and really encourages it in so many ways. I mean, you mentioned the diffusion of responsibility, and that is huge because we do know, and I dip into the social psychology in here, not a ton of it because that science is still relatively new and kind of a little bit thin compared to the environmental science that I talk about, which is very, very deep. 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. So if you got a corporation, of course, you have division of labor. You also have division of management from ownership. 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. If you're the boss, you're focused maybe on your employees and certainly on your shareholders. So if you're lying about something or causing harm, it doesn't necessarily feel like a personal selfish act of deception. It probably feels like an act of loyalty and responsibility

to your shareholders. Your shareholders aren't going to care or know because, first of all, they're far away, usually. They don't really know what's going on. They have maybe just a temporary transactional interest in what's going on. They just bought the stock. They want to sell it quickly and make some money. So you don't really have anybody there who feels really responsible for this. There was a definition of the corporation from the early 20th century in something called the cynics' dictionary as an ingenious device for obtaining personal profit without personal responsibility. And, of course, that is exactly what we intend from corporations because we grant limited liability to the shareholders. 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. corporation. And then, of course, 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. But then there's a lot of other things to add to it. You've got competition. By definition, certainly if you're in competitive markets, we want there to be competition. So that means you are already in a kind of tribal mindset. 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 if you can pursue your own self-interest in the marketplace, we'll automatically convert that to public good. And that does work in a lot of cases and probably worked a lot better in the 1700s. 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. It is much harder to be confident that that's going to work. And then more recently, we've seen that idea that you don't have to worry about the social consequences of your commercial action just get intensified. 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. And if they're talking about protecting the environment or doing any of these

other things, that's socialism. And that's illegitimate. And that really did sway a lot of people, that movement really moved forward. 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. David Koch has passed away, so now Charles Koch. And the network of influence groups that he created, the think tanks, the free market groups, these different academic groups. So, you know, 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 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. But then starting in 1980, when Reagan is elected, you suddenly see those

concerns replaced with a concern over regulation and really a backlash that has come and gone, but basically intensified over the years. 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. And, of course, influenced by these very corporations to do that. Absolutely. 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. So that is very much based in the fossil fuel industry. But the Koch network is very ideological, passionately

ideological. And they just happen to coincide with being in the fossil fuel industry. 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. I do try to not treat them all the same in the book. 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. Actually, they fit more on the Koch side. 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.

Exactly. continue to make profits regardless of the impact on the environment or the people. And that's a weird thing about just the idea of a corporation itself. It's almost like a diabolical vehicle for allowing people to do things, 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. 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 bomb. You don't have to worry about that. But I like your new car and that's a beautiful house that you got. You bought with the profits of poisoning

lakes. It's weird. Well, that's exactly it. 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, 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. You'd have a justifying ideology

to make it all seem fine. You would have the responsibility so diffuse that nobody would really feel too badly about it. And you would give these folks incredible political power, including constitutional rights, so that they could dominate your democracy. So that they could – basically corporations can do whatever is legal. It used to not be that way. They could do whatever they were authorized to do by their charter, and then they'd have to stop. So they'd get the permission to build a canal, and then they'd be done and go away. Eventually, we made them immortal, and they could do whatever they wanted, as long as it's legal. And then we gave them a huge amount of power to determine what actually is legal by influencing our democracy. I was going to ask you about that. What is the birth

of a limited liability corporation? When did all that occur? Well, they go way democracy. I was going to ask you about that. What is the birth of a limited liability corporation? When did all that occur? Well, they go way back. I mean, during the slave trade, they didn't necessarily call them that, but they were essentially owned by shareholders. And so they would pool their capital. So it's very similar. I mean, actually, corporations are centuries old if you go back to, I think, some early universities and things.

But we didn't have kind of general purpose corporate laws in this country, I think, until mostly in the 1800s. So when we first formed this country, you would have to go to the legislature. There were only a couple of significant corporations around even at the time of the founders. And so that's why you really don't see corporations in the Constitution. They're not mentioned because they weren't very powerful. When they did get more powerful, you have some quotes from some of the founders saying, oh, this is a little scary. And then, of course, they became very powerful in the 1800s. You end up with the Gilded Age. And so then you have folks like Teddy Roosevelt, who are saying, wait a minute, you know, this is a creation of law. And so we get

to determine how much power it has. And he responded with the kind of trust busting movements, breaking down some of the really big old trusts. And that was, you know, probably the first big pushback where the government said, wait a minute, you corporations are too powerful. We're going to try to reduce that power. 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, OK, banks, you just wrecked the economy. We're going to regulate you. We're going to give workers more rights. We're going to create social security. We're going to do all kinds of things that diminish corporate power over the democracy. And then it happened again in the 60s and 70s.

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, very tippy top, and obviously people worried that we are unable to deal with climate change. And another factor would be the power of social media corporations to influence elections, to influence public discourse. They seem to have kind of snuck in in a way that was really unexpected and people didn't see it coming. Right. Well, I mean, that's actually the pattern. People never see it coming. I mean, all of these chapters pretty much begin with some kind of a discovery. And some industry races in there and takes

advantage of it. 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. 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, then problems are emerging. Obviously, with slavery, they were inherent, but problems will emerge. Other people outside the industry discover those problems and pay attention to them, draw attention, and then eventually you get to a law.

Now, that's kind of an artificial ending because you have to make sure that law gets enforced. 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. We stop this industry. We ban this product or at least we're going to try to tweak your behavior. But that process, first of all, it takes a long, long time and enormous damage can be done in the meantime. But that process doesn't work. 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.

Well, that's what I was getting to is because that kind of seems where we're at now with corporations like Facebook. Like they have an insane amount of power and that power is actually being used to dictate who becomes president. And that's what's really strange. Like there's never been a corporation that – 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, which is a new thing. Well, it's a new thing when they do it through information. Yes. It's not a new thing when they do it through money.

Right. That's not a new thing when they do it through money. Right. That's pretty well established. But, yeah, I mean, you know, somebody, probably not me because I don't know this industry well enough, but the pattern is so clear that it's clear where we're heading, right? I mean, the problems will get worse and worse. Other people will talk about them. The problems are very new, I think, because we are talking about problems related to information. And that, you know, and social media,

how does social media affect social animals? I mean, this gets really complicated. It's going to be hard to figure this out. But in addition to having their own denial about what harms they inadvertently unleash, they are vectors for the denial of other industries. 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 said, oh, we accept the climate science. We know this is happening. In fact, ExxonMobil even says it accepts the Paris Agreement, which says that we have to limit warming to well below two degrees

centigrade. And that sounds small. That's actually 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. Now, what that means is dramatically reducing our emissions first over the next 10 years. I mean, if you want to limit to 1.5 degrees, we're talking about cutting our emissions by 50%. That means pretty much cutting 50% of our fossil fuel use. That's a simplification. 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. 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. 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. So you've got Exxon saying, yeah, yeah, we understand Paris and all that. 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,

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. So it's kind of like the tobacco companies. The big tobacco companies are no longer denying the basic facts. They admit this product is addictive. And I've got a quote in the book from one executive saying, yeah, kills about half of our lifetime smoking customers, our most loyal customers. But despite having for decades said, if we really believed this was harmful, we wouldn't sell it, they're obviously continuing to sell it quite enthusiastically. And that's kind of where we are, I think, with the major oil companies. enthusiastically. And that's kind of where we are, I think, with the major oil companies. Coal is still in denial. Others are still denying it. But the major oil companies are saying,

yeah, that's a problem. But they are still planning on selling more and more of their product. And so that is sort of the kernel of denial that that industry has yet to grapple with. But isn't it right now, at least temporarily, inseparable in terms of our ability to move around, distribute goods? You kind of have to have oil. You have to have gasoline and petroleum products. You do at the moment. Right now. At the moment, yeah. But, you know, fortunately, we really do have the technologies to, in fact, slash our emissions. What we don't have is a

political will. 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. 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. That can be done. It is a massive undertaking. It is, 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, hopefully, address some of the inequalities that we already have in place.

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, help their communities diversify and whatnot. So, you know, 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. And it's hard for me to even say the word catastrophe because I know how people hear that. I know it sounds like a crazy exaggeration.

Do you really think it does at this point? Well, I think it does to enough people that it is. Is it because of propaganda? Yeah. Because it seems like if you – yeah, right? Yeah. I mean, there's been so much pushback. Because if you pay attention to the people that when they give you the worst projections, the things that we should avoid. 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. 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, if they just cut it all off. That would be a crisis. Yeah, we have a real issue. Right, we have a real issue. I mean, humanity has an issue, and we shouldn't be thinking of it as the oil company's issue or the climate issue. It's a humanity issue. How are we going to deal with this? And unfortunately, this isn't something capitalism is set up to deal with. That's about growth. It isn't about how do we take this massive industrial enterprise, wind it down, and replace this technology with something else.

Is the solution finding some method of profiting off of pulling carbon from the atmosphere? It seems like if it becomes very effective to do that, that could be an enormous way that these companies can kind of shift. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure that these companies will shift. Some of them could, because they do have drilling technology and whatnot. So they could end up being leaders in actually burying the carbon that they once extracted and put into the atmosphere. Oh, that would be so weird. That would be weird. One of the things that's so weird about this whole debate for decades now is that you've got folks talking about how incredibly terrific markets are and how they can handle all these problems.

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. 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. 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. 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. And here's another ironic part to this. The country who's like our main competitor and not incidentally a huge, huge polluter is China, ostensibly communist.

They believe more in market power than the right wing of the Republican Party. They have put a price on carbon. And they are using market forces to try to reduce pollution. Really? So China is more progressive in terms of trying to reduce pollution than America? Well, China is polluting a huge amount. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. 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. Another really divisive aspect of this is that it's become some sort of a left versus right ideological issue. 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. And when you press them on it, and 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 yeah 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 do you know what i'm saying it's like a thing 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.

What our issue right now is the economy. What we've got to do right now is support jobs and people. There's a lot of people that need to put food on the table. 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 that becomes left versus right it's very strange i don't understand why anyone like how can that not be a universal issue how could anyone not want the world to be better for our grandchildren how could anybody not want less pollution but it becomes this thing where we have all these different categories that are left and right. And once you're on one side, you automatically seem to oppose those things that are in the other party's ideas.

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. Really? More than abortion is crazy. More than abortion. Now, that was a snapshot in time, and I think maybe that's changing. Certainly, you see with younger Republicans a lot more concern about climate change. But you're absolutely right.

I mean, it remains very polarized, and I don't think you can understand it. You know, it's not in—I don't think it makes sense from an ideological standpoint. I think it makes sense from a tribal standpoint that we have divided and, 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. That's a source of hardship. And, you know, the reason it's such a big problem here is that this isn't just about making the world better for our grandkids. It's about avoiding catastrophe for our grandkids. And so that's why, you know, it is finally rising to the surface within the Democratic Party. I mean, it's been ignored or downplayed for too long. And certainly

in the national campaigns, it was never perceived to be important enough or winning enough an issue to get a lot of attention. Now we see largely driven by the youth movement in insistence that, yeah, it's time. It is absolutely time. It's 30 years past time that we get very aggressive about this. And so I don't know what happens now with COVID, with George Floyd. Obviously, there are other issues dominating the news right now. 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. Yeah, I don't think it's going to go away, I think, but other issues do come to the forefront.

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, in your group. And that's something that is exacerbated by social media and manipulated by social media. And it're aware of the Internet Research Agency from Russia that had an impact on the 2016 elections. did some pretty fascinating work on that where she 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. Like they manipulated it it like there was

no one child's play exactly it was like they were moving pieces on a chessboard and they they literally set up altercations and you would imagine that i mean i don't know what these fossil fuel companies or or any kind of company that's involved in any some anything that would be considered sketchy environmentally. 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. Because online discourse, it's so easy to throw monkey wrenches into the gears, to throw sand into the gas tank.

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. Yeah, I mean, if you're willing to lie and manipulate, then you have obviously a huge advantage. 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. And so we get polarized, basically. And that's even before social media. 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? And suddenly people are getting, you know, totally radicalized, you know, on climate change or on other issues. And so, yeah, I mean, it is a huge problem. How do we overcome the social divisions, the social distrust? How do we overcome the denial? 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.

It'll probably have a lot to do with maintaining long-term accountability and not just a flash reaction to what you hear. But it could very well take decades, and we will have a lot of damage done in the meantime. I wonder if there's going to be a time where there are laws against social media manipulation like that, because right now they're not. There will be. Yeah, it seems like there has to be, 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. It has to be.

They understand the effectiveness of it. It's been well documented. The idea that corporations are going to step back and go, well, that's not our business. That's not what we do. I mean that's an incredibly effective tool. 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, but it's not something that really gets discussed in terms of passing legislation to prevent that stuff.

Yeah. And hopefully it gets more and more discussed because it is very scary. I mean, it turns out we humans are easily manipulated and were easily manipulated even before social media. But now there is this incredibly sophisticated engine to drive us apart, to drive us in the direction that those best at manipulating us want us to go. Yes. And it's addictive, which is even crazier. It's a completely addictive mechanism. Yeah, it really is.

People are lost in their phones and lost in their computers, like when they're checking their social media stuff. And that's one of the more interesting things about these social media algorithms that it's been determined that when people are upset about things and when they're angry about things, they post more. So it's more valuable. So the algorithms favor people being upset. So they'll send you, if you find abortion a hot topic or environmental issues, they'll start sending you those. That's what's going to show up in your feed. You're going to get more of it because this is what you engage in.

And what's fascinating is it's not even really malicious in that it's just pragmatic. Because I have a friend who did an experiment. My friend Ari wanted to find out what would happen if he just looked up puppies. So he just looked up puppies on YouTube and looked up puppies everywhere and his feed was overwhelmed by puppies. So it's not like this some vicious plot to only feed you things that you hate. Just human nature, we tend to look at things that piss us off. Which is really kind of crazy. And now we have a very sophisticated machine to drive us in the direction

of getting more pissed off. And that sophisticated machine is clearly using the same sort of deceptive tactics to try to diminish their responsibility for what they're doing. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, one of the things that makes these tactics, I think, work so well is that they really are based in human nature. 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. becomes a foundation for a corporate strategy. 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.

And then that becomes an ideology. And that's certainly what we saw, the progression for climate change and I think – or climate denial. And that's a dangerous trend. Do you cover – you do cover social media and denial in this? I don't really get into it. I mean, I talk a little bit about, yeah, no, it's really not a factor. 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, right? Yeah. Have you read Matt Taibbi's work on that? I've read some of his work, yeah. Yeah, he's- The vampire squid clamped to the face of humanity. Yeah, that's an immortal line.

So his description of Goldman Sachs. Yeah, his work is fascinating and terrifying. It's just you. 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. And the idea that that is the backbone of our civilization in terms of our economic

civilization is really crazy. What a goofy system. Yeah. And of course, that industry has become, you know, so much bigger as a percentage of GDP and so much more powerful without any evident social benefits, as far as I can see. And, you know, I'm also not a person with a financial background. I came to this, you know, as an environmental lawyer and not as a particularly naive person. But I have to say I was really astonished at the depth of the exploitation. I mean, just the attitude. 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, you know, society. or we think we're trying to do the right thing for society.

It was just this full-on take the money and run and exploitation. I mean, they have this cute little code on Wall Street that was prominent before the crisis. I hope it's not so prominent now. 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. This investment product is going to fail. This is all going to hit the fan. This is all going to collapse. IBG-YBG. And the bonuses for selling these crazy, risky products were all front-loaded.

So you sell somebody a multi-year product and you get the bonus right up front. So you don't care what the long-term risk is. And the attitude toward their clients, I mean, there's an author in Britain who interviewed all kinds of people and promised them anonymity from the British financial industry, but it overlaps very much with the U.S. one. And the culture was, hey, rip your client's face off. You know, you eat lunch or you be lunch. And, I mean, a lot of really, really vicious stuff going on and risks that were so obvious that you can't believe that they were denying them. I mean, obviously, when there's a housing bubble, it will burst. And there was an

obvious housing bubble. 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. all of this really toxic debt that got magically transformed into AAA investments. And it wasn't, I think, that the industry was denying that it was going to burst. 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. So I don't know, do we call that rationalization? I mean, I put it all under the very broad category of denial. 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. I don't think they really did miss that fact. They really said it that way?

That's what Jamie Dimon said. Yeah, I may have a word or two off, but that's actually what he said. I suspect he regretted phrasing it that way because that's pretty astonishing. I wonder how many IBG, YBG tattoos there are out there. Yeah, that's a good question. There's probably a lot, right? A disturbing number. I think there's probably a lot.

You know, there's actually one anecdote in the book that I retold from a book that Mike Hudson wrote called The Monster. 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. And this one particularly bad company was out there. And Lehman Brothers sent a vice president to visit with this company because they wanted to know how they were doing. This was, I think, in the 90s. And he writes back and says that this is a sweatshop.

It is high-pressure sales for people in a weak state. And it is a check your ethics at the door kind of business. And Lehman Brothers writes back and says, we 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, selling them to investors. And then, of course, packaging them up, selling them to investors, and then, of course, eventually becoming the biggest bankruptcy in history. And getting bailed out.

Well, not Lehman Brothers, but the other ones did. That's what a crazy thing that they just sort of laid it out like that. Well, yeah, this is internal stuff that came out. But yeah, the fact that they were, you know, so happy to partner with an unethical business. 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. Because, you know, you started out with these very, very aggressive new companies. These weren't banks. These were lending companies. And they were new and they wanted to get huge very quick, and they were super aggressive. But they made so much money that the more traditional banks started following and doing what they had been doing. And so Wall Street gets involved, and basically they're saying,

you don't need documentation of income. And the banker would say, the lender would say, well, how do I know they're going to pay it back? And Wall Street would say, you don't need to worry about that. And in fact, they didn't because Wall Street would buy it. The point wasn't, will this ever be paid back? 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. And of course, they would package lots and lots of these together and then slice and dice them and stack them and 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. Well, that was one of the things that was so disturbing about Matt Taibbi's work is 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 got to start from scratch several times and go, okay, how are they doing this? And why is this legal? And how is this legal?

And when you're dealing with just numbers, too, that's what's disturbing to me. There's something about environmental impact that at least it seems somewhat tangible. Like it's a thing, right? It's carbon in the atmosphere. There's an impact. The temperature rises, the sea level rises. You know what I'm saying? There's physical things, whereas numbers are these weird things where if your whole business model is predicated on increasing the amount of

numbers that you earn, you can find ways, especially if other people are willing to go along with that, you can find ways to screw with those things. And that's the most disturbing thing about finances to me. Like the Bernie Madoff situation, for example. Like how many people had to know that there's something wrong with the amount of money they're earning? How many people had to know that? How many people had to, how many people, and how many people are like, listen, these are just numbers. We're just getting these numbers. We're

putting numbers in. We're getting numbers back. We're getting more numbers back than we get in. So we're good. Yeah. 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. It also means the industry can and it did go to Congress and say, you don't get this, which was true. And so, okay, we're selling these derivatives and, yeah, maybe they're super complicated and nobody knows what they are. But you regulators, hands off. We, you know, the market, we are self-disciplined. We, the industry, will not take crazy risks. And by the way, you should get rid of those depression era laws so we can do some other stuff. And then eventually, of course, you have the financial crisis. 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. It's going to be ignored because it just feels so abstract. I mean, you're so – okay, you sell a – you know, 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. 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. And then you add in the fact that they're able to manipulate politicians.

Exactly. They fund their campaigns. That they're able to manipulate politicians. Exactly. They fund their campaigns. The really creepy one is when they give them money to speak, like enormous sums of money after they get out of office. That can be a little corrupting, huh? But it's just so gross and obvious. 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? What is that person saying? That's so fascinating. That's a very high rate of return for a quarter of half an hour of work. Well, when Bernie Sanders was upset at Hillary Clinton, he was like, release the transcripts. Let me hear what you said. There's not a chance in hell she's going to do that. I mean, what do they say during those things that warrants a quarter of a million dollars or more? It's a shady system. And there's no motivation to shift it, change it. 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. 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. And it isn't like the politicians who are raising money for the campaigns, they don't get to walk away with it. They're using that for their campaign. So I think there is motivation among the elected people not to have to keep doing this. 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. So that's a huge problem. There might be motivation, but there's no tangible alternative. There's nothing like where you can say, look, we've got a clear path.

You don't have to raise money anymore. Well, there are ways to whittle away at this. And it didn't used to be quite this bad. 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, without having to go to other people who have money to give them the money so that they can get access to the public. I mean, I think there are ways to do this. 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. What you're doing with this book is essentially you have a magnifying glass on some of the worst aspects of human behavior. Is it depressing? Kind of. It's kind of depressing. I've also had people tell me the book is infuriating, It's kind of depressing. I've also had people tell me the book is infuriating, which I really didn't intend that. 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. We were going to snap out of it because it was so obviously suicidal.

And then we were going to look around and go, how did that happen? And how do we make sure that never happens again? And I would be able to say, look, here are some factors that have contributed to this throughout history. And here's, you know, maybe this will lead to some reforms. And obviously it didn't work out that way. This book has come out when we have a climate denier running the country. Is it really a climate denier? He has called it a hoax several times.

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 read back. So he really said climate change is a hoax? 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. So in any event, you know, I wrote an infuriating book. I didn't mean to. I meant to write a kind of let's all step back and look at this sort of book. But it just turns out you cannot write about infuriating topics without writing a kind of infuriating book. I do try to keep some perspective here and, you know, 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 movements stepping up and confronting that denial and eventually, in most cases, overcoming it.

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, scientists and journalists. And that doesn't mean they're not also trying to pursue profit sometimes, or at least get paid for their work. But, you know, we do have systems in place that have successfully confronted this. And so it's not like we're starting from scratch. 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. What subjects have, where you see there's actually progress been made? 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. I mean, many, many states have put in place climate targets 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. 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. the industry first confronted this or when society first really started looking at this. And on the federal level, they've made major improvements in, they've required efficiency standards, which have been really helpful for like major appliances. We've had auto efficiency standards. Now, Obama put some strong ones in place. Trump has rolled those back again. So that's going to limit the progress exactly when it needs to be accelerated.

So that's maybe not one of the good pieces of news you were asking about. We have – well, I mean I think that's going to be largely the focus. 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. There's a handful that haven't ratified it, but everybody else is part of it. 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. So, you know, that's all very good news. The technology, we do have a deep bench of policy experience. We know a lot of good things that we can do that will work. And we have the rising concern, the youth movement, you know,

all around the world, really, who are really stepping up and say, enough, we have got to deal with this and we've got to deal with it now. And because you grownups have wasted 30 years, we've got to deal with it now. And because you grownups have wasted 30 years, we've got to deal with it particularly aggressively. Now, you cover how many different subjects in this book? I cover eight different campaigns of denial. And it seems like for you, in particular, climate change is the most disturbing or that's well, that's the one that threatens the future of human civilization. And the one that I got started on, yeah. But yeah, I cover seven other industries, including slavery, radium.

Radium. Radium. What's the industrial strength denial take on radium? Radium. Radium is a crazy, crazy story. Radium is this insanely radioactive element that was discovered, you know, around, just right around 1900 by the Curies in France. And it was a mystery. I mean, it was way more radioactive than uranium.

And people didn't even know what radioactivity really meant. But there was, you know, this sort of aura of wizardry around it. And when they discovered it, they didn't, well, the first thing they discovered, and they discovered this the hard way, was that it burned your flesh. It didn't burn it right away, 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. So they thought, okay, we have this flesh killing, cell killing element, what can we do with it? And they thought, well, let's try to kill cancer tumors, which was actually a very good idea. And they experimented with that. That was the medical use for radium. 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. And so it was a very efficient thing. What form was the radium in? They would put it, well, they somehow would refine it and distill it into tiny, tiny little amounts. And then they would put it in a needle would put it, well, they somehow would refine it and distill it into 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. It started out as ore and they had to refine it and refine it down, down, down, down, down. And so the governments at the time in Europe and also in the US thought, great, here's this weird, crazy, valuable stuff. Maybe we should control this ore so we make sure it gets used to actually cure cancer. And in Europe, that's pretty

much what they did. In the U.S., we tried to do that. But the industry, there was a brand new industry that was just forming. And they stepped forward. The first company was called Standard Chemical. They stepped forward and said, no, no, no, no, no. If the government starts taking over radium because it's radioactive, radium ore, well, everything's a little radioactive. Where will this stop? It was this classic sort of slippery slope argument, and somehow it succeeded. What happened was this mysterious and potent element became another commercial product to be exploited by this company, Standard Chemical. There were some others that later popped up.

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, he told Congress to cure cancer, he had a good motive. But he also wanted a big market, right? Cancer, you know, just one disease. And if you reuse the radium, that's not a market. So he was determined to expand that market. He actually opened what was called the first free radium clinic in the world in 1913 in Pittsburgh. And he invited patients in and hired doctors, and thousands of them were injected with radium, or they drank radium. So if you can somehow prove that consuming radium is healthy, then you have a market, right? And many of these people did have cancer, but it turns out that injecting them with radium would

actually kill them a lot faster than the cancer would have. And one of the clinic doctors was questioned before Congress, and he explained, well, the way he looked at it, he was just shoving them over a little more quickly. So he wasn't worried about the fact that he was killing the cancer patients. And they weren't just treating cancer patients. They were treating anybody. They were treating arthritis. They were treating joint pain. And so they were, you know, giving this very toxic substance to people with low-level chronic problems. 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.

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. Now, some of them said they did but didn't, but many of them really did. And you could buy your radium, get your radium in all kinds of different ways. If you wanted a radioactive drink, you could drink it. You could still get injected. You could take pills. You could, if you wanted to soak in radium, you could buy bath salts, ointments. There was radium toothpaste.

Whoa. Yeah. Oh, and one of the more interesting ones, there were radioactive rectal suppositories. And these were marketed basically for male sexual dysfunction. That's not what they called it. What did they call it? They said this was for, as I recall, weak, discouraged men who wanted to perform the duties of a real man. So, yeah, and that was, you know, 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. So they're less likely to go to their doctor, they'll buy it out of the back of a magazine. And then if it doesn't work, they're not going to complain about it, they're not going to sue you. So and but these were not just marketed for that they were marketed for colds, they were marketed for obesity, for constipation, for insanity, that was a big one trying to cure insanity. So yeah, it becomes a health fad. How long did this go on for? 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. And ultimately his facial bones started to dissolve. His teeth fell out. He had

like holes between his sinuses and his mouth. 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. A lot of young women were hired to paint radium onto watch dials, not just watch dials. They put them on all kinds of products. Oh, my God. Look at these images. Oh. You can see it up here.

It's called radium jaw. Jaw necrosis. Oh, my God. Wow. This went on. Look at that one guy with his lower jaws just gone on the second row. Yeah. Oh.

So this, oh, my God. Yikes. Yeah. lower jaws just gone on the second row yeah oh so this oh my god yes yeah radium this went on for 20 years um well yes i mean the the industry got going in the mid uh 19 teens um this 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. The worker exposure, the young women usually who were disfigured and died from this, that part of the industry of radioactive paint lasted a bit longer into the 30s. When they began, they taught these women and 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. And because there was this health fad around radium, they told them that this would put a glow in their cheeks. And you've seen these pictures that they really had some change in their cheeks, but it wasn't a glow.

They told them it was good for them. And 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. 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 cripples and other people who weren't super strong because this was easy work. And when they got sick, everybody blamed them and they were being punished for their generosity of hiring these folks in the first place. And by the way, these women had radioactive breath at this point. I mean, so it's not like there was any doubt that they had radium lodged in their bones. What is radioactive breath?

It means they're exhaling radon. So this was measurable? Yeah. Oh, Christ. Even by the standards of the time. Oh, my God. Now, one thing about the radium industry is, you know, denials like that blaming the victim are appalling. 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.

And certainly the inventor of the paint died because of radium exposure. His teeth had fallen out. According to Time magazine, his fingers had been removed. Nobody else covered that particularly gruesome detail. But then he died of anemia. These are all radium-induced ailments. Joseph Flannery, the guy who launched Standard Chemical, well, he had this great idea that he had all this radioactive waste, right?

So he hired a botanist to find out if it could be a fertilizer. And then they published a report that you should, yeah, spread radioactive waste on your food crops because it's great. He actually had him spread waste on his own garden. And then six years later, Flannery died. 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. You mean death certificate? Is that what you meant? Oh, I'm sorry.

Yes. You said birth certificate. Did I? Right. His death certificate. Thank you. So, yeah, he had anemia. So, yeah, he had anemia.

And if he believed his own clinic, his own sales pitch, he probably drank more uranium to treat his anemia. So he did die. So in these two characters, at least we have people believing what they said enough to actually kill themselves as well as other people. So it seems, again, that there's this human characteristic this 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. Yeah, well, and you know, one of the reasons I talk about Joe Flannery is that he's a, 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, the founders of industry. And we know from psychological studies that, you know, well, let me back up.

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. One of the things that activates the approach system is power. And if you have an approach, an active approach system, you are focused on your goal. You're focused on reward. Meanwhile, the powerless are focused. The inhibition part of the mind is more triggered by powerlessness, and you're more focused on risk. So if you're focused on reward, you're not focused so much on risk. You're not focused so much on consequence for other people. And so, of course, that gets you hailed as a visionary. And Joseph Flannery was hailed as a visionary. And he did,

you know, he was bold. He was inventive. He worked hard. He built a business. 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? Or should we just go for it and see how it works? 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. But if they are not balanced out by other people whose job it is to say, what about the risks? What about the consequences? What could go wrong here? You have a recipe for disaster.

And also ignorance at the time. 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. The general public didn't know at all. And in fact, radioactivity, you know, there was this incredible aura around it. I mean, it was energy. It was stimulation. That's one of the reasons it got used for sexual dysfunction and other sorts of treatments. Yeah, we don't know. And that's the problem. I mean, with the case of a lot, yeah, me too. With the case of a whole lot of these folks, the consumers of these products, we really

don't know much about what happened. We know more about the radium girls who were the ones who used this paint. God, it's so disturbing. Yeah, it's very disturbing. 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? It may

well be social media. We've unlocked some really powerful, potent force and it's addictive and people love it and it's so exciting and it's it, and it's so exciting, and it's racing forward, and it's so new that nobody fully understands the risks yet. But I think that might be what, when people look back, they will think, how did these people let this happen? How did they let it rip them to pieces like that? 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? Well, and also what's it doing to our children? I mean, I grew up without it. You grew up without it. What is happening to 11-year-olds right now that have Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts and Instagram accounts? And they're going back and forth with people all day long and being mean to each other. I know personally people that get involved in like these online beefs with people and they're sick. They get sick. They get ill. Like they can't leave their house. They can't get out of bed. They're severely disturbed for days on end. They have sick. They get ill. Like they can't leave their house. They can't get out of bed.

They're severely disturbed for days on end. They have to get on medication. It's really common. And, you know, look, I don't read that stuff. And I'm a 52 year old man with a fairly healthy brain and an understanding of my own shortcomings. I stay the hell away from it. But I know a lot of people who are addicted. And you'll see them some days and they're sweating. Their face is pale. And you're like, what's going on, man? Oh, I'm involved in this Twitter thing. 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, Christ. Yeah, yeah. There's a definite ugliness to it. The children. And if you think about the anonymous comments, you know, one of the things that – this surprised me. You know how when you've got a European company, it might have S-A at the end of its name instead of ink?

That's common. That stands, like in French, for Societe Anonyme. It stands for anonymous society. Anonymity was such a central feature of the corporation that they actually appended it to the names of corporations. 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. And anonymity, we know from all kinds of research and from, you know, the internet brings out a kind of, you know, not just, yeah, yes. And just a kind of casual brutality and certainly not social responsibility. So, yeah, I mean, I think that it's going to be a huge issue. And I think people certainly smarter than Right. in mind. And our brains, you know, being 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. And social media, of course, expands that dramatically. And it's just, I think you're right, really hard for people to deal with. Well, we're seeing it so clearly right now now because it's being exacerbated by social distancing. The fact that we're not around each other and there's less communication person to person, particularly with strangers or particularly with people that you have issues with. People aren't getting together and communicating face to face. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. That's probably true.

And then children. How many children are doing like my kids are all doing zoom school, which is horrible. I mean, it's it's so ineffective. They're barely paying attention. They find strategies to to mute the teacher and to shut their camera off and pretend they're out their laptop broke. And it's kind of hilarious. But these kids are engaging even more in social media and less in hanging out with each other. It's really like a perfect recipe for a distorted and confused society. Yeah, it's scary. It is. And, again, it's a new thing.

So the regulations that are in place, they're just – there's really nothing to prevent people from using it to manipulate things. Right. It's not illegal. And it will take a long time before we get those in place. Yeah. And also it might be too late before we recognize the repercussions. I mean Facebook is talking about making their own money. They're talking about making their own Bitcoin-type cryptocurrency.

I mean if that takes place, I mean, they're already manipulating things in some really weird ways. 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? I mean, no one even considered, no one considered cryptocurrency 20 years ago. No one considered the impact of social media 10 years ago.

What are we going to be looking at 30 years from now? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, you know, our failure of imagination goes both ways. We don't tend to imagine the problems that are going to result from the technologies and the new industries. We also hardly ever imagine how we will solve those problems. We hardly ever, if you look at any kind of speculative fiction or movies or comic books, I mean, you don't see progress. You don't see people getting together, figuring out a problem, hammering out a solution, putting it in place. I mean, because of course it's boring and it's not cinematic. It's all deeply dystopian. Terminator. It's kind of interesting if you compare that to much older science fiction that has a much more positive perspective often. Not always, but at least there was often something that was positive.

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. Well, those fools were hopeful. They were hopeful. And we want to encourage hope. We just want it to be realistic and focused and driven hope. Most certainly. The ozone layer is an interesting subject that you cover because that doesn't get discussed anymore.

But I've been to Australia. And you go outside and you burst into flames. Everywhere you go in Australia, there's these billboards for skin cancer it's really it was at least it was the last time i was there which was over 10 years ago but it's really strange wow there's these uh billboards everywhere that show tumors and show you know people that have skin cancer and talk to you about the damages and the dangers of sun wow yeah i had not realized we have a giant hole. Like Australia.

Yeah. They're close enough to the ozone hole or partially under parts of it, I suppose. They got our hairspray. They exactly got our hairspray. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing how that story does seem to have been forgotten, both the threat and the fact of the success. I mean, we caused this huge problem.

We discovered this huge problem, which we needn't. I mean, that was kind of serendipitous. And yes, the industry denied it. And this kind of came in two chapters. First, it was the aerosol industry saying, this is an attack on free enterprise. Probably the KGB is behind it. I mean, what else? Is that really what they said? There was one aerosol company president, yeah, who suspected it was the KGB. But many industry leaders were talking about this being as an anti-capitalist crusade, and partly because

this was the early 70s. So they had already faced all of these demanding environmentalists saying, take the lead out of the gasoline and do all kinds of other things. And so they were starting to feel like attacked on all sides. And eventually, you know, so there was some denial there, mostly political. Eventually that got handled. Well, I shouldn't say eventually. 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.

We don't need this in spray cans. What was it that was in the spray cans? Chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, which were invented, ironically, by the same guy who invented leaded gasoline at GM. Oh, boy. He invented both of these chemicals. What's that creep's name? His name is Thomas Midgley. Yeah. And he left quite a mark on the world. But here's the thing. I mean, I blame him for putting lead in gasoline. That was terrible. But inventing CFCs was actually done because

it was replacing the poisonous gases that were then in refrigerators. And they would sometimes leak and kill people. So people were just transitioning now from iceboxes to fridges. And so they needed a non-toxic gas to put in there. So he came up with this, and it was non-toxic. And so at the time, nobody really even knew much about the ozone layer. And they certainly didn't know CFCs were going to wreck it. So it was a much, much less obvious risk. And then it wasn't until the 70s, then scientists who were just sort of curious, put this all together and realized, oh, we are wrecking the ozone layer. And by 76, I think it was 76, the Ford administration said, okay, we're getting it out of the cans, you got a couple years. And this industry, the aerosol industry,

who had been screaming and yelling about anti-capitalists, said, okay. I mean, it was not that big a deal. It was easy for them to do. 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. And they were putting up a plan for that.

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, which was the top CFC maker, they had been working on substitutes. But once the pressure of regulation went away, they just dropped it. 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, ah, we're not going to have to worry about it. science telling them that there was a risk here, but they decided, ah, we're not going to have to worry about it. 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. 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. Oh, wow. So it was actually the British who discovered this. They did it the old-fashioned way, going down to Antarctica and measuring things. So anyway, they announced it, then NASA looked back and said, whoops, you're right, huge ozone hole. Then everything kind of accelerated. And by 87, we had the Montreal Protocol. And even though Reagan had run on this

anti-regulatory platform, he signed the Montreal Protocol, the Senate ratified it, I don't think there were any dissenting votes. So, you know, that was a big success story. And by the way, by the time things really were winding down, even DuPont said, okay, yeah, there's enough science here. We're going to stop making our product. And so it's sort of the one example I can point to where science and evidence overcame denial. But it's an example where the product wasn't their core product. It was a little sliver of revenue that wasn't that lucrative. They could replace it with something that they could sell. And they were going to clearly get regulated anyway.

So clearly the benefits of continued denial had sort of disappeared. And so you can't count on evidence leading to the end of corporate denial. evidence, you know, leading to the end of corporate denial, more typically you have a situation like tobacco and fossil fuels, where even if it does lead to denial, it doesn't, they don't stop selling the product, right? So, 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. What efforts were done, if any, to regenerate ozone? Just to cut the emissions. I mean, I'm not aware of anything. I don't know that. Yeah,

it's funny. I've not heard anybody talk about that. But we've always known that the CFCs take decades to get up to the atmosphere. So stopping emissions meant that the old stuff was still going up there and it was going to take decades to fix it. We do seem to have signs of healing now of the ozone layer. So it does seem like we have solved, well, solved this. We have stopped the harm and it's going to get better through natural circumstances. 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. But what happened immediately after that was this political backlash. 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, 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. And you had then, I think it was Tom DeLay, saying he doesn't listen to the ozone trends panel, all of those hundreds of scientists who have hammered out the data on these issues. He listens to Fred Singer. And that was sort of the beginning. Well, not the, because you could take it back to the 80s. But

that was the next step in the rise of the science deniers who sort of had this all purpose agenda that looked at lots of different industries. And the funny thing was here, you know, you had the industry saying, no, we're fine with this accelerating the phase out. We're going to go ahead and do it. So, you know, the way I think about it is that industry for a long time fueled doubt. And to some extent, they also then funded groups with an ideological agenda who continue to push that doubt. 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. But the groups that they have funded now sort of outflank them on the issue. And for example,

Exxon used to fund, ExxonMobil used to fund this little crazy little group called the Heartland Institute. And they stopped doing that quite a long time ago. This institute kept just getting more and more extreme on this issue. And recently, they had a dispute between ExxonMobil and the Heartland Institute. And Heartland's leader called ExxonMobil part of the anti-energy global warming movement. That's hilarious. Yeah. So, you know, things are weird right now. That's super weird.

That is super weird. Exxon, part of an anti-energy global warming movement. 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. The problem is, we don't necessarily know who's funding these groups anymore. For a long time, Exxon funded a lot of climate denier groups. They got a lot of public pushback and pressure. They stopped funding the most extreme ones, not all of them. Then the Koch brothers started funding, their foundation started funding a lot of these groups. They got a lot of attention.

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 a politically sensitive issue, nobody knows you've done it. 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. That's some 4D chess if Exxon was doing that. If they're sitting there going, look, I know what we can do. Let's get someone to call us a bunch of hippies. Yeah, I suspect that it wasn't that.

I think they really have just created a monster here. Really would be brilliant if it was true. Well, I think that some of this is true that you – I mean here's the thing. 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. I mean this little group Heartland, I mean this extreme edge of these advocacy groups, they're deeply involved in the Trump administration. I mean, it's not like they're just out there howling in the wilderness. They have had enormous influence. 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.

You have a lot of reason to kind of keep your mouth shut and maybe say the right things. 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. I don't know what ExxonMobil has said about that, but clearly the more inefficient our cars, the more oil gets burned. Are there tactics and is there like a school of thought that goes along with these sort of strategies? Like is this taught in universities? Is there places where they learn this stuff?

Because you would think that it's very valuable and it's often very sophisticated. I mean, how to actually manipulate and deny. Is this something that gets taught once they get into this corporation? Is this an internal thing, or is it just a natural factor in the way human beings react to profitability and denial of responsibility? I think it certainly starts there with it being a natural reaction. But I think then what happens is industries learn from the previous industry. Tobacco taught everybody how to do this, certainly everybody in the modern era.

And then, of course, you do have this industry of groups that serve multiple industries. So you can be a group that sets up front groups. And I quote one here, a man named Rick Berman, who has a company that sets up front groups for industries that are facing regulation. And he promises them complete anonymity. 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. 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.

And he says, hey, you can either, how do you phrase it, lose pretty or win ugly. And said, I will give you complete anonymity. People have no idea who's paying me. And then somebody in the audience anonymously leaked the whole tape to the New York Times. And so you can see all of the text. And he was talking about the various strategies. And one of the things that he explicitly said, although it was pretty obvious already from the tobacco history, was that you do not need to convince people you are right when it comes to science denial. All you need to do is raise doubt.

Because in order to do something, we need to reach a certain level of certainty. We need momentum. And it is actually really easy to diminish that by raising doubt. That's certainly something the fossil fuel industry has done with respect to climate. And what he said was, doubt paralyzes people. They think, I don't know who's right. They think, I'll just wait. And then basically, you have sort of a tie in their minds, but you win every tie because you have preserved the status quo. 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. 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. So there is, in a sense, a playbook. 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. If this was an operating system, we would abandon it and bring in a new one, right? Like if this was Windows 95 or something.

We might be better able to predict how it will crash us. Yes. Yeah. But it seems like the operating system of whether it's economics or politics never really gets updated. It just sort of gets patched. Yeah. Unfortunately, this is an operating system that takes on a life of its own and has its own desire to perpetuate itself. Maybe this is where the future of all operating systems. I mean, 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 want to turn on us. And corporations are our creation. Yes. Yeah. How did you choose which ones to cover? And were there any subjects that you left out that you didn't? Yeah. Well, yeah, I was pretty conscious about it eventually.

I mean, I stumbled around a long time and looked at a lot of industries. but I wanted, first of all, in industries where there was a lot of evidence. So it was clear that this isn't just reasonable doubt. This isn't just people trying to figure it out. There was something going on here that I could call denial. I also ended up with industries that had an enormous impact because there were just so many of them. And in fact, all of the chapters deal with hurting millions of people or threatening catastrophic global harm like ozone depletion or climate change, with in fact, the exception of radium, which I think we can probably say only hurt thousands of people. So those were the first two factors. 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. I wanted cases where there was a sustained campaign of denial over time, which, of course, gave me lots of source material to look at.

Also because that changes the way people think about things, not just the primary question of like, do cigarettes cause cancer? But larger questions of, can I trust my government? Can I trust science? Who should decide these things? How certain do I have to be? So it was that kind of social influence that I was really interested in and social norms and social change. So I looked at those. Now, as far as industries, I didn't look at, I didn't write about lead paint because I already had leaded gas.

But lead paint has its own long history. And, you know, it's just so tragic. You look at these old ads and they're talking about, you know, paint your baby's nursery with this lead paint. And the thing is, like, lead isn't a contaminant of lead paint. Lead is like the main ingredient. 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. And here's something I read. I'm not 100% sure this is true, but it's heartbreaking.

That lead is sweet. So you hear about children eating lead chips, and you think, why would they eat lead chips? I guess because it's kind of sweet. Oh, God. What was the benefit of putting lead in things? Oh, it made good paint. 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. Did you get any pushback or did you ever get contacted by any of these different industries that you're covering? And were you concerned at all about that while you were writing these things? Because you're kind of exposing. I'm kind of exposing. But I actually, you know, it's funny, I thought about should I be trying to interview people for all of these? And I really didn't. I mean, I tried. I called Ethol Corporation, which still exists, the company that made leaded paint. I mean, not leaded paint, leaded gas. They ended up moving on to other

products. Well, they sold it overseas for a long time, but then they also made a lot of other things. So they still exist even though their product was banned. Their only product at the time that they were started was banned in this country. And I called them up and said, oh, I'm writing this book about corporate denial and just wondering if you'd like to talk to me about leaded gas and just your silence on the other side of the phone. And then they would transfer me to somebody else and I leaded 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 then it would get disconnected.

And it became pretty clear to me at the beginning that it wasn't going to be all that helpful for me to ask people, so tell me about what you're in denial of because I didn't think that was going to work very well. And also because my focus was the public debate and how did it affect society? That's what I ended up focusing on the most. So, you know, I wasn't worried about the industries as I was writing this. I'm a little worried now. But I mean, really, I'm just quoting them. So at this point, I don't feel like I'm at particular risk. Well, just, I mean, not even risk, but that, has there been a reaction by these? From any of these industries? Yeah, because their whole thing is about denial, right? So I would imagine you put out a book about industrial strength denial, you would get some denial about the book about denial. That they're denying. That may be.

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, the tobacco companies used to deny that smoking caused cancer or that the fossil fuel industry raised all kinds of doubts and denied climate change. Was there any controversy about the subject matter and the topics? Like, were there any ones that you considered not adding? Oh, sure. I mean, I was very nervous about slavery because it is just such an emotionally searing topic. And because I didn't, you know, these are all examples of denial. They're all very destructive, 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. I mean, it is a different sort of situation.

So that was an issue for me, but the denials were so fascinating and appalling and revealing that I ended up deciding to include it. 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. 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. Well, listen, I'm glad you wrote this book. And like I said, this is a subject that's always been bizarrely fascinating and compelling to me since Merchants of Doubt. And I just think it is such a weird aspect of human beings, just the power of a corporation, the deniability, what they're able to do and how they're able to continue doing it.

It's very strange. So I'm very happy that you wrote this book. Oh, thank you, Joe. And it was great to talk to you. It was great talking to you. Do you have social media or anything that you would like to tell people about? Oh, yeah. To prove what a lot I am, I have a website, barbarafreeze.com.

You don't know? Yeah, I know. My kids barbarafreeze.com. You don't know? Yeah, I know. My kids are going to tease me. That's good. Good. Stay out of that other stuff. But you don't need to go to my website. You can just Google the title, and if you're interested in the book, you'll find it anywhere.

All right. Thank you, Barbara. I appreciate you. Thank you. Bye, everybody. That was great.