The Jordan Harbinger Show - 440: David Michaels | Dark Money and the Science of Deception

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

David Michaels (@drdavidmichaels) is an epidemiologist who served as the Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA from 2009 to 2017, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety, and Health from 1998 through January 2001, and is the author of The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception. What We Discuss with David Michaels: Why bad science thrives and who most profits from its proliferation. How seemingly solid data can be used to mislead and distract us in the guise of fact. Why our flawed regulatory system can take decades to protect the public against dangers the industries benefitting from them know are risky. What David means when he says: "There are two sides to every story, but there are not necessarily two valid sides to every story -- especially if one of them has been purchased at a high price." What we can do to become more aware of these manipulations and resist their effects on our health, our children, and our trust in science itself. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/440 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this? Then you realize, maybe that someone is you. Well, with the help of GoFundMe, you can change someone's life. You could start a GoFund me to help a friend pay for school, fund that new community space, or help a local kid finally get to that national competition. I've seen this myself. Last year, a friend of mine launched a GoFund me to help with medical bills after an unexpected surgery. It was incredible how fast the support rolled in.

People want to help. They just need a way to do it. And GoFundMe makes it easy. So do you have a dream, a person, or a cause in your life that could use some support? Don't wait for someone else to bring change. You can be the one who makes a difference. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. Gofundme.com. Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. Johnson & Johnson, they made Johnson's baby powder as their iconic product. They announced they were going to stop selling baby powder made with talcum powder.

You know, this is a product that's sold for 100 years. It's the symbol of the company. And everybody knows the smell. I mean, we all grew up with it. We put it on our kids. Talc is a mineral. It's almost always present with asbestos when it's in the mountain and its mind. So it's very difficult to make talc.

without asbestos. And the FDA tried to take that on in the 70s, and Johnson Johnson and the industry pushed back very hard. So the industry hired some of the same experts who worked for tobacco. Now they're working for Johnson Johnson. And what they did was they said, look, we've got to convince the scientists on a national toxicology program that there's too much uncertainty. One of them says, here's our strategy, time to come up with more confusion. And it was successful. And so we had another 20 years where people had no idea that this baby powder they were using had asbestos in it, hiding the facts for manipulating the science. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories,

secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional mafia, each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. Today, Dr. David Michaels, he's former head of OSHA. You know, the folks responsible for all those signs in the break room at your workplace. Today, we're actually not talking about slip and fall signs, nor why you have to wear gloves when you're restocking the salad bar. We're talking about fake science or bad science. And now, when I say bad science,

I mean the type of misleading, biased, or just outright false conclusions that companies like big tobacco, automotive companies, e-sigs, alcohol, even the NFL used to insist that their products and services are perfectly safe so that we keep buying and using them even when they might hurt or kill us, or they pollute, or if they are terrible and they're targeted towards children, you get the idea. Today, why bad science exists in the first place? Who peddles it and whose idea was it to begin with? Also, we'll understand some of the methodologies people use to lie to us with data and keep

us distracted and uncertain. Last but not least, we'll hear what we can do to become more aware of bad science when it's thrown at us and what we need to do as a nation to limit the negative impact this is having on our health, on our children, and even on our trust in science itself. Super interesting episode here today, even if you're not a big science nerd like me, I think you're really going to dig it. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors and thinkers on the show every week. It's because of my network. I work my network every single week. I'm not slimy about it.

You shouldn't be either. I'm teaching you what I do for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Now here's Dr. David Michaels. You're the head of OSHA, and I think a lot of people have heard of that, though, the people that are responsible for us putting up signs that say, you know, you must wear eye protection or you could fall or this is slippery or, you know, this is what happens if you get something in your eye. But a lot of people don't really understand what that is beyond that. And I think if you're an employer, you complain about it. And if you're a worker, you just kind of deal with whatever it is figuring it's for your own safety.

How close am I? Yeah, no, that's right. Oshah, which actually is 50 years old this December. It's a revolutionary agency in some ways. It gave workers the right to a safe workplace and said to every employer in the country, you have to provide a workplace free of recognized hazards. So the obvious things you see are things like signs, but, you know, if you go on to a construction site, everybody's wearing a hard hat. Right. And there's almost no asbestos exposure now where, you know, 40, 50 years ago, there was just tons of asbestos around and caused tens of thousands of cases of cancer.

And so OSHA, you know, this sort of invisible agency, but it issues standards that employers try to meet. And it's had a huge effect. You know, when OSHA began, 37 workers, were killed every day on the job of the United States. Wow. Yeah, it's down to 14 a day where that's before COVID. And 14 a day is still too many, but with the workforce twice as large, OSHA's really had a big impact. It's kind of strange thinking that that didn't exist before,

where it was like, oh, if the person dies, we'll just hire another one. It's okay. That's exactly right. And if you were a worker and your boss said, you know, go up on that roof, no fall protection, and you put up that antenna, you had no rights around that. But now the law says you have to have fall protection. There are lots of things like that.

Lots of chemical exposures that have been decreased, much safer working conditions. Of course, the big challenge now is infectious disease, and OSHA's got to deal with that as well. You mentioned in the book that OSHA is for safety, but it's not like your work environment is safe because of this. It's safer, but it's still not safe. And I'm wondering, you know, as head of OSHA, what you meant by that? Because it's like, well, wasn't that your entire job? Like, what's going on here? It's still not safe?

Well, no, OSHA's job is to make sure employers provide a safe workplace. OSHA doesn't control workplaces. Of course, yeah. That's up to the employer. And we would tell employers that if you follow the OSHA rules, the workplace will be safer. But, you know, OSHA doesn't have a rule for every hazard. OSHA has some general principles, has some really specific rules about machine guarding or benzene. But there are lots of hazards out there that you can't predict.

And it's up to employers to figure out whether they're hazards. and how you're going to fix them. Example I always like to give because people remember it. The biggest press story about OSHA when I was running the agency for seven years was SeaWorld, where you had a killer whale kill a trainer. Of course, OSHA doesn't have any standards for killer whales, but we still issued a citation against SeaWorld because we said, look, it's obvious that it's not safe to put a trainer in the water with a whale that's already killed two other people. What I tell employers is, you should follow the OSHA rules. That will make your workplace safer. But just because OSHA doesn't have a rule that doesn't mean you shouldn't be taking every

action you can to protect workers. And that's true right now around COVID-19. We have no rules about exposure to airborne infections, but we know if you don't make sure people are more than six feet apart, if you don't give them PPE, they're going to get sick. I know we could go on about this, because it is kind of interesting that there's all these different regulations and holes in regulations, but we're here to talk about fake science, right? That's right. So let's talk about some fake science. This is something that I think a lot of people I've heard of before, but we don't necessarily

know how deep it goes. Have you ever seen Thank You for Smoking? Of course. I read the book. I loved the movie. I figured that was right in your wheelhouse. Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, thank you for smoking.

And you can correct me here because it's been like a decade. But this was a publicist, I think, that worked for big tobacco and his job. job was to spin tobacco as safe or at least not dangerous. And so at one point, some activists kidnap him and throw him in the back of a van and they stick like a hundred nicotine patches on him. And he barely survives. And he goes, smoking saved my life. If I hadn't been a smoker, I wouldn't have built a tolerance up to all that nicotine. And those patches would have killed me. Thank God I smoked for so long. You know, truly it saved me in this instance. And we're supposed to sort of sit there and go, come on, man.

because his whole job is to just put a bald-faced lie and spin on this. And that's, okay, he's a publicist or a PR person. That's what those guys do, not always negatively, usually for good, but in his case, he was supporting the company that hired him. But this is a whole different level, right? Fake science is a whole different level. It's not saying the sky is green when the sky is blue and everyone else can see it and I'm just the a-hole that's sort of tasked with lying to everyone. this is, hey, I'm a scientist, and I'm going to throw uncertainty, fear, doubt into the data that is just garbage science in many ways because I'm getting paid and I want a new car. So I'm going to tell everyone that asbestos in baby powder or whatever is just not that big of a deal.

And I don't care if your kid dies or I do, but I'm going to lie to myself and say it never happens. Yeah, you know, that's a good summary of a lot of what I'm talking about. You know, thank you for smoking, of course, was fiction written by Chris Buckley. Didn't know that. Yeah, no, he's a satirist, and he really captured it and took it to the extreme. You know, there's another recent movie, Dark Waters, all about the chemicals they're used in Teflon and Gorex and Scotchgard, which all of us are exposed to. And I have a chapter in the book on that.

And it's sort of the same story. It's not as funny, of course, and it's not as extreme. But you have a chemical that causes, increases risk of cancer, immune function disorders, and the companies who manufacture this, in DuPont and then 3M, hire some scientists to essentially say, the science is terrible, even though a lot of the science that shows those relationships was done by scientists paid for by DuPont. But once the results came in, it's in the interest of companies that are fighting off regulation or fighting litigation to essentially manufacture uncertainty. I don't think those scientists necessarily believe that they're lying, but they've convinced themselves that, you know, these chemicals just aren't very dangerous. So everything they say says, well, all the other studies are wrong.

These chemicals are safe. And so then you end up having sort of, you know, dueling scientists. One group paid for by the manufacturer is this product. And the other paid for by governments, universities, et cetera. The model then paralyzes the system that we have to protect people. That's the problem. And it's done so often because it works so well. You know, the tobacco industry showed us, if you hire a scientist to say, look, the science just isn't clear that tobacco causes lung cancer, you can delay dealing with lung cancer around cigarettes for decades.

And that's exactly what happened. Exactly. How, look, y'all are scientists. How do you not understand the cognitive bias involved when I'm getting paid from big tobacco? How do I, I mean, come on. Like, this is a part of every science curriculum that we have to be aware of bias. And yet, if I'm getting 100% of my funding from a chemical conglomerate and I suddenly start finding that chemicals are unhealthy, like you say you don't know these scientists are lying to themselves. How can you not? Well, but that's the cognitive bias question. From the outside, you can see it. But, you know, Upton Sinclair, you know, who wrote the jungle, said very famously, it's hard to convince

a man of something when his salary depends on him not believing it. And so, The tobacco industry had people up into the end who just didn't see what's really obvious. And there are lots of examples like that. So that's why you need to make sure that the sciences you believe are not paid by the companies that make these products, that they're not mercenary. Unfortunately, we don't have a system that does that. You know, I'd like to see a system where if you make a product, you've got to put some money into a fund to hire scientists to examine whether or not it's dangerous without the manufacturer

deciding who should do the study, how they should do the study, and if they're ever going to be hired again by that same manufacturer, because that's the big thing. You know, I work in the university. You hire people to be your research assistants, to work in your laboratories, and then you have some obligation to them, and you think, well, where is their salary going to come from next year? You know, I've got tenure. I don't have to worry about that, but the people you hire say, well, I'd better not offend who's ever giving me money because next year I may not get it. And so that system leads to essentially biased science. Yeah, that's a huge problem, obviously, for the reasons that we discussed and that we'll be discussing here. But when we find out

that something might be bad for us, companies, corporations, they instinctively try to defend their product. They attack the science that says their product is not safe. They deny all wrongdoing. I was horrified by the chapter in your book about, I think it was Scotch Guard, where something like, I don't know, what is it, 95% of humanity has this in their body or something like that? I'm exaggerating maybe, am I? No, no, unfortunately you're not. And certainly in the United States, it's beyond 95%. And that's the chemicals that are in Scotchgard and Teflon and, you know, sometimes in

dental floss. I mean, these are widely used. Dental floss? I put that in my mouth every day. As do I. But, you know, you have this miraculous, on some level, set of chemicals, which have these fluorine bonds that separate oil and water. They're great for certain things for waterproofing and cooking, but it turns out they cause a lot of illness. And at the factories where they make this stuff,

it's very clear they cause a lot of illness. And now the big problem, and this is across the country, there are water systems in every single part of the country, in every single state. They're contaminated because these same chemicals are used in firefighting foam on Air Force bases, on airports. people don't want it in their water supply because we can see that if your water supplies contaminated with these chemicals, it increases your risk of a bunch of different diseases. The companies are fighting the science because they'll have to clean it up. They'll have to pay for the cleanup, and that's really a big cost. And so you've got this, you know, mammoth fight going on, but the fight ends up being around

the science, just like tobacco. Once you acknowledge that tobacco causes lung cancer, then you've got to deal with a problem. If you could fight the science, if you could say, no, the scientists are all wrong. and that chemical is safe or that chemical is only dangerous at huge amounts, then you don't have to clean it up and you don't have to compensate people who you've made sick. Yeah, I got to tell you, speaking of OSHA, my uncle works in, I'm from Detroit, so my uncle works in like one of these painting places where they spray car bodies. Right.

And as if that weren't bad enough, last year, somehow the fire suppression system got triggered as well, and everyone was inside. and they don't have respirators, even in the painting shop. Really? So they were breathing in the fire suppressant, and of course every day he breathes in paint and solvents in the paint. So I worry about him a lot, man.

I got to tell you, I mean, it's a taking time bomb, I think. I would too. I mean, these chemicals don't cause effects overnight, but if you're exposed day in, day out for 10, 20 years, the risk really can be quite high. The thing that really disturbs me the most is, right, we expect corporations to deny, and this is, look, maybe the overtone,

window or whatever you want to call it is my expectations are really low, right? We expect corporations to deny it. Probably I shouldn't, but my generation, we were sort of cynical enough to go, like, the company's going to deny that this is bad. But what's really gross about this is, is we do not expect this from scientists, right? I want scientists and we expect scientists to be honest with us. Like, that's why they freaking got into science in the first place to discover the truth. And now they're just like, eh, screw that. I'm going to lie to people for money. Like, PR people? Yes. of which I am one, to be fair. Yes, okay. We're going to advocate. We're going to say it. But scientists is nothing sacred. Come on, man. No, you've nailed exactly what this book is about,

because people believe scientists or they want to believe scientists. They know corporations will do whatever the corporations need to do. But the corporations know that if they could trot a scientist out, the tobacco industry called it Operation Whitecoat, if you can bring a scientist to say, this is what I think. If nothing else, you've confused people because you have equal and opposite scientists. That's the strategy for paralyzing any sort of protection program. But what's interesting, you mentioned attorneys. In some ways, what these scientists are doing are what attorneys are supposed to do. And we think it's ethical for attorneys to defend a defendant who might be accused of a heinous crime, but every lawyer I know says, you know,

everybody deserves a defense, right? Yeah, everybody deserves zealous advocacy, right? Even if we know that they are probably a terrible person, we've set up our justice system so that the government has to meet a certain burden if we're going to put somebody in prison for life, even if they're horrible, right? And so even though it's unsaid, that's how we've set up our regulatory system. So the government has to prove that the chemicals dangerous before they can do anything. That was the problem in OSHA. We have chemicals that I know are dangerous, but we don't have the bodies in the morgue yet.

And when we do have the sick people, then industry comes and says, no, no, no, the studies aren't clear, and it could take literally 20 years before OSHA can issue a standard to protect workers. And that's because you begin with the presumption of innocence. And that presumption is absolutely fair in criminal court, but it's absolutely wrong in public health. But the model is the same model. Yeah, that's quite disturbing because, of course, I don't want to put an innocent person away for life. Even if I'm a prosecutor, I really don't want to do that, right? A defense attorney, obviously, I want to get my client the best defense they can get. And if they're guilty, then I want to help see them through that. But if I'm a scientist, or even if I'm a company,

like a chemical that got invented that happens to be profitable should not have the same type of, there's not the same ethical standard of defense. If we stop using asbestos to fireproof things and we've got to find something that's slightly more expensive and it dings a stock price, but it saves 100,000 people's lives, that chemical is not entitled to the same type of defense as somebody who's accused of murder, especially when that chemical is beyond a reasonable doubt, guilty of murdering a lot of people already, right? But that the manufacturer of doubt, what these scientists do, and there's a whole industry, and that's what I write about, the product defense industry, and these are companies,

their business model is to create whatever report the client needs, and if the manufacturer needs a report saying, no, this stuff isn't dangerous, that's exactly the report they'll give them. And they have scientists with, you know, the fancy letters after their name, the same letters I have after my name. And so it looks like, well, scientists can't agree. Look, you see it in climate change. There's a small group of scientists. I mean, if it's a dozen, that's probably more than there really are, who are out there paid by the fossil fuel industry to say, know that all the other studies are wrong, or they're questionable, or they use the wrong data, or you're interpreting them wrong. But it looks like there is disagreement. And if you have the money, you can pay scientists,

because there are some scientists who will do this. They'll pay them to say anything, and they really will. That's the reason I wrote my book. I mean, I was on the inside, both in the Clinton administration, I ran health and safety for the nuclear weapons industry for the nuclear weapons complex for the government, and then running OSHA. I saw this up close, and I know that most people on the outside don't see this. They don't see how there's this sort of industry to create fake science. I think a lot of people have suspected that that existed, or we've heard about it in the news, but we thought, okay, well, I mean, how much. is that really happening? I mean, I'm sure it happens here and there. Chemicals are the only

example I can think of. And then I read the book, and the first example is the NFL and the concussion debacle. You said something really interesting. You said there are two sides to every story, but there are not necessarily two valid sides to every story, especially if one of them has been purchased at a high price. That's right. You know, we've come to believe that, you know, the press, for example, should make sure to cover both sides of every story. That's sort of one of the things that's been drilled into us since junior high school. But that's not really true. First of all, there's many sides to every story, but there's truth and there's not truth.

There's fact. There's certain things you can question, but the reality is we have to deal with those issues right now. The NFL spent 10 years pretending that these multiple hits to the heads of football players had no impact on their brain function. They invented a committee. They staffed it with their own people. They pretended to be doing studies. For years, they didn't publish anything, but then they published really ridiculous studies

that were totally wrong. And then when one physician looked at the brain of an Iron Mike Webster who had died young, he was an all-star player for Pittsburgh Steelers' Center, he had his head bashed many, many times. And he had this terrible disease, which this physician named this Benadamalo, who's played by Will Smith in the movie. There are lots of movies that actually come into this. He saw a brain that didn't look like other brains,

and he called it chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Well, when that came out, this whole group of experts who were hired by the NFL, their response was not, let's look at this more carefully. They demanded that Dr. Amalu retract his study. And they did that again and again attacking until the evidence became so overwhelming. The NFL said, oh, okay, it's real.

We're going to actually pay a billion dollars in the lawsuit to all these football players whose brains have been destroyed. And that's probably not enough, by the way. But it's that same process that it's been used by the sugar industry. It's used by the alcohol industry right now every day to convince you that alcohol consumption doesn't cause breast cancer, for example. There's no question that women who consume more alcohol are at higher risk of breast cancer. Now, it may be that people make that choice, and there are lots of reasons to think about

why you want to drink alcohol, but you can't pretend that it doesn't have long-term health. consequences, but that's what the alcohol industry does. And they hire the same exact product defense scientists who worked for tobacco or worked for the beryllium industry or worked for fossil fuels because that's their business. I mean, it's disgusting. And you hear about regulators going from private industry or going from government, then into private industry or then going back again. And it's like, just to make a buck, I just don't understand how somebody can go from, hey, look, this kills children, this kills children, and then they suddenly switch to the other side, and they go, you know, it doesn't really kill that many children. In fact, it probably didn't

kill any children. Those children probably died in some other way. And look at my bonus check. It is, look at this car in my summer house. It is awesome. Like I said, not that many dead kids, just a few, if any. That revolving door is so damaging. I mean, one of the examples I talk about in the book is around opioids, where the expert, the physician at the FDA, who essentially was rubber stamping the application from Purdue pharmaceuticals and these other companies to market these opioids that have ended up, you know, killing about 40,000 people a year in the United States. He did that for a while. The FDA believed what the Sackler family said, that this stuff is not very addictive.

He rubber-stamped that for a while, and then he went to work for their company, I'm sure, at, you know, five times the salary. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. David Michaels. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation.

It's called the Conspiratuality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies. An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that.

From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiruality podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. And now back to David Michaels on the Jordan Harbinger show. We talk about bias a lot. We talk about science a lot on this show. I understand that you get influenced by your check, but hurt less people selling fentanyl on the street

than you do telling people that asbestos isn't harmful or that these other chemicals don't hurt people. Like you would kill and harm less people literally being a drug dealer and selling poison to kids than you would literally. mass producing it and then telling people it's safe. Yeah, the great philosopher, Cindy Lapper, said, you know, money changes everything. You know, you get paid enough, you'll say, whatever it is. And

my point from before is, I think at some point you believe it. You have to tell yourself it's true. You have to. And there are enough ways to do that. Now, there are quite a few people, I think, who've come from the dark side over and said, look, I was doing this. You know, I was wrong. And certainly, you know, there are movies about that, the insider and the tobacco industry fellow who came over and said, look, this is terrible. And he spilled the beans and he made sure a large quantity of documents that were kept secret by the tobacco industry became public. And a lot of what we know about how this whole process works and how these scientists are hired and paid to manufacture doubt come from these tobacco documents. So we call it, in fact, the tobacco playbook,

not that the tobacco industry was the first industry to use this approach, but because of these documents and the lawsuits that end up revealing literature. literally millions of pages of memos and documents that all are public now. They're on University of California, San Francisco's website. You could look at them. You could see exactly how it works and how these physicians, these epidemiologists, toxicologists, were chosen thinking, well, they're people who we're going to give them some money for research, and we're going to tell them what research we want them to do and bring them into our circle. And then we can use them when we have court cases when smokers who develop lung cancer sue us, they will be people who will testify on our

side. And they did this for years. What's interesting is, you know, the tobacco industry stories is interesting because, you know, for many years, they ran this public relations campaign saying, we're trying to get more research. We're doing more research, but we really care about your health. And we'll tell you everything we know. And they could do that for a long time because people weren't looking very hard at, but also they said, look, whatever the research finds, you as a smoker need to figure out whether you want to continue to smoke or not. It's your choice. And so that avoided really any sort of regulation because they kept saying, well, people are choosing what to do. And we have a free country. Freedom is a really important value. But when the studies started

coming out showing that not just smokers, but non-smoking spouses of smokers were getting lung cancer, that really threatened the industry. And that's when they had to hire even more science. scientists and develop a lot of tactics now they're used much more widely where, you know, if the government does a study, what they will do is they will demand the raw data and they will change the results around. And that's not hard to do. If you give me the raw data from a study that shows a relationship between an exposure and cancer, for example, I can take that raw data, I could put different assumptions into it, I could play with it, and turn a positive study negative. You know, that's one of tactics that they do. And then all of a sudden you have two studies. One says this causes cancer,

and the other says it doesn't. And so what do you do? It's impressive when you step back, but it's deadly when you realize what's really going on here. Yeah. Look, make no mistake. This has nothing to do with advancing science, has everything to do with what convincing a jury to spare a corporation using flawed studies and analysis that are sometimes laundered through academia or credentials of people like yours where, look, he's an expert. And he's, He said that it's not always this way, so ignore the other 500 people that weren't paid by the company that say that it is and have more data. I've seen that a lot of these flawed studies are published in scientific journals, and I've

done another show that's about this, where there are vanity journals where I can just drop $1,000 into some bank account. I mean, I can pay online with my credit card, and I can publish a study that says people who eat dry erase markers live 10 years longer, and they're like, whatever, here you go, published in the journal of the dumb fake science weekly, and that journal sounds to the layman just like nature or some other reputable journal. I mean, if I'm on a jury, then what? You have to attack the journal and say, well, anybody can publish in there. I'm not paying attention. I'm a public school teacher. I don't really know and care about this. You know, I'm just looking at this for the

first time. I'm confused now. So maybe the company shouldn't pay $100 million and all those people lose their jobs. That's exactly right. And in fact, you know, most articles in leading journals, read the New England Journal of Medicine or Science. I've published in, you know, JAMA recently. The articles are at most, you know, four or five pages, a long article is 10 pages. Because no one wants to read that much. In the science world, you want to see what's there. And sometimes online, there'll be some additional stuff. But these articles are short and to the point, and they have the important information. In these vanity journals, some of these experts will publish 100-page papers. And, of course, you have to pay by the page in those journals, the scientist or the

sponsor pays. But a hundred-page paper, which no one is. in the scientific community would ever read, looks really impressive to a jury. And it'll have tons of tables, and you'll show that to a jury. I said, look at this study. And that shows the opposite of what the truth is. Right. So it won't fool regulators, but the real audience is a judge, a jury, and the journals, I think you noted in your book that are some of these fake journals, they're owned by the industries that they protect. So I suppose there's a journal called real climate science or something like that, and it's owned by fossil fuels industry. But it's interesting, even though regulators aren't fooled by them, and I would see that. The problem with the regulatory system is you have to

respond to every comment that comes in and every study that doesn't find exactly what you think is the truth. And so when I was at OSHA, we issued a standard on silica exposure. Those things that say do not eat that come with all kinds of different. That's silicone. But silica, it's like if you have a brick and you grind it up, the very fine dust is silica. And it causes lung cancer. It causes disease called silicosis. There's actually a new outbreak of silicosis in people who are cutting and installing countertops in your kitchen. There's something called artificial stone that looks just like marble. I mean, it's a pretty aesthetically impressive product, but it's pure silica. And, you know, to cut it and grind it, you get this very fine dust. And just last year,

there were a bunch of deaths in people who were crippled for life who work in these shops. Anyway, it took OSHA 20 years to issue with a standard. One of the reasons is the industry, was opposed to it, and they paid for studies that didn't find any effect. And OSHA and all the agencies know that you have to go through every study and every comment and reply to it and show why it's wrong, because if you don't do that, there'll be a court case afterwards, but the judge will look at and say, well, you didn't respond to this comment. Now, I know, as an epidemiologist, that comment was nonsense. But you still have to respond to it and show why it's wrong.

And so you have this whole literature. You have to debunk. It works. It slows things down. And so companies get years of additional production and marketing without any government interference. Real science, correct me where I'm wrong. I am not a scientist. But it starts with a hypothesis.

I remember that from sixth grade. You collect data and then you see what conclusion that data supports. Right. Is that kind of? That's a general model. Right. And you lay your methods out in advance. Right.

And you say, this is how I'm going to do my study. and this is, I'm going to report whatever result I find. And product defense science, in air quote science, right? Product defense specialists, they start with the answer, and then they what, seek to find the data that's then going to support the conclusion, and then that's the way they roll. They don't tell you that, but that's absolutely right.

And I know that because you can look at some of these scientists or some of these companies who, you know, and they publish dozens of studies a year for different industries. They always have the same conclusion. It just can't be that every single one of these chemicals is safe. In triumph of doubt, you said that every exposure to a carcinogen increases cancer risk by some small amount. That's actually really terrifying because I guess I never really thought about it, but there is no healthy amount of any human carcinogen. I always just

figured, oh, okay, well, you need a lot, or it's cumulative, or you need a lot at once. I didn't realize that like every little shred just mathematically increases your risk. But you have to know, And I'm not someone who's worried about these things very much. My family knows that one of my basic lines I use when we do certain things is, oh, the risk is low. There's risk, but the risk is low. You know, I'm not stopped from, you know, having a gin and tonic or a beer, you know, at the end of the day, even though that slightly increases my risk of a couple of different cancers,

actually. Men have no great increase in breast cancer as a result of alcohol, but esophageal cancer, there are other cancers. But that's okay. I mean, what we need to do is reduce our risks as much. much as we can. And there are a lot of risks that are needless. And certainly risks that are industrial products in workplaces, we should be controlling those exposures. People shouldn't be exposed at all. If there are things in our food, we should try to pull them out and make sure our food

doesn't have sort of pesticide residue if that's going to increase our risk of cancer. You know, we can have something that increases the risk of cancer in one and every 10,000 people. That risk to you as an individual is pretty low. You're saying, well, the risk, I've got one in 10,000 chance of being made sick, but I'd probably take that risk for almost anything. On the other hand, one in 10,000 people in the country is a whole lot of people who are sick. Yeah. And so from the public health point of view, we need to eliminate those risks as much as we can without making people's lives, you know, unhappy or miserable or, you know, bereft of some of the things that make them happy. Yeah, I think it's hard for us, of course, to do that math in the moment. And so

we rely on scientists. That's what's so disturbing about the book, right? Because there's this truth decay where there's alternative science and alternative facts and attacks on science and, hey, this person's motivated reasoning, you know, even when you call out motivated reasoning and somebody getting paid, then that side can say, well, you're motivated because you, I don't know, insert, even something that's not going to motivate your reasoning, the other side can say, well, your reasoning is equally motivated. There's just this what aboutism. And then people go, well, I don't really know what to believe. So I'm just going to do whatever I want, which is keep drinking or use the cheap chemical or play football, whatever it is.

But that's the job of the government to help you figure that out. And certain choices should be made much more difficult. Like, you know, people often say to me, how do I figure out what's safe and what's not? You know, you look at the back of a shampoo bottle that will list 15 chemicals each with six syllables each. I can't tell you which ones are dangerous. And certainly people who are non-scientists shouldn't even have to think about that. The government can play a really useful role. It could say certain chemicals are two dangerous to be in products at all. And others, maybe they're really important to have, but we should have warning labels on them so people can decide. That was really one of the big issues around baby

powder. You know, you probably heard that Johnson Johnson, that made Johnson's baby powder is their iconic product. And they make some body powders as well. They announced they were going to stop selling baby powder made with talcum powder in the United States and Canada. You know, this is a product that's sold for 100 years. It's a symbol of the company. And everybody knows the smell. I mean, we all grew up with it. We'd put it on our kids. What happened there is, you know, talc is a mineral. It's almost always present with asbestos when it's in the mountain and its mind. So it's very difficult to make talc without asbestos. And even in 1970s, mineralogists were saying to Johnson Johnson and others, look, there's asbestos in your product. And the FDA tried to take that on in the 70s and

Johnson, Johnson, and the industry pushed back very hard. And the FDA gave up because, you know, These big companies are very powerful. And one of the things I read about in my book is in 2000, at the end of the George W. Bush administration, the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, excuse me, the National Tuxicology Program, which is a sort of multi-agency branched to us government, looked at talcum powder and said, look, it's often with asbestos, and it needs to be called cancer-causing. And if they say that, then this is not a regulatory agency. It doesn't say you can't sell it.

But by notifying the public that it causes cancer, that could change people's use patterns. So the industry hired some of the same experts who worked for tobacco, literally, and they had done their reports for tobacco. Now they're working for Johnson Johnson and the Trade Association representing consumer products. What they did was they said, look, we've got to convince the scientists on a national toxicology program. There's too much uncertainty. and the memos that came out of a court case that are really remarkable. One of them says, here's our strategy, time to come up with more confusion. And it was successful.

And so we had another 20 years where people had no idea that this product had asbestos in it. Now, since then, there have been quite a few studies showing that there's a link between ovarian cancer and baby powder use, body powder use. The science is not definitive. I've looked at lots of studies. some say there is a relationship, some say they're not. But in any case, people weren't given the information they needed to know. They should have been told that this baby powder they were using had asbestos in it, and they could have used cornstarks or bought a product that was different.

And as a result of that, though, Johnson Johnson has had huge lawsuits. In fact, one lawsuit, the jurors awarded $4 billion in punitive damage against Johnson Johnson for hiding the facts, for manipulating the science. It's unfortunate. the company is paying the price, these people paid the price, these women who developed this disease, they might not have used baby powder, and maybe they wouldn't have cancer as a result. So it's a very big deal, and it's unfortunate that this is going on and so frequent. And what's interesting, of course, is it comes up in movies all the time. You know, you started with a movie.

I don't know if people saw Dark Waters, but that was a movie about the same issue, about the Teflan chemicals, about how companies hid the science, and eventually have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars, or we'll have to pay on hundreds of millions of dollars. of dollars because they've made people sick. They made people sick and they hid the evidence. That to me is the next level of sort of despicable behavior. Like if you're a massive company, you made billions of dollars off something, I wouldn't say it's totally forgivable that you didn't fund a bunch of science to see if it was safe. Like, yes, it should have been done, but will the company willingly sort of shoot themselves on the foot? Not necessarily. But once the

science is in and then you're going, all right, bury this. Now you're just a freaking criminal bastard, in my opinion. And what's interesting is they don't use their own scientists. You know, all these companies, DuPont, Johnson, Johnson. They have great scientists with real integrity who work for them. But when they run into a problem like this, there is a small group of these companies out there, these product defense firms, one's called gradient, chem risk, you know, exponent. That's their business. You know, it's like when you're accused of murder, you know, you better find, you know, the best criminal defense attorney. When it looks like one of their chemicals, one of their products could be making people sick, they know exactly who to do.

go to. And all the members show that. They say, these are the companies, they're going to be friendly to us that'll give us what we want. Right. So it's not like they hire a company and the company goes, all right, well, don't tell them, we're going, we're going to find in their favor because we want a curry favor. This is the executives going, who's going to give us the result we want, whether it's bullshit or not? That's exactly right. They know when they're going to court, they don't want independent view. They want someone who will defend them, just like they hire a lawyer. And so that's why we need a system. And what I talk about in the book is say, okay, we've got to have independent science to make these evaluations. And then we have to trust those scientists. And, you know,

there are a couple of models like this. There's a organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, set up by the Environmental Protection Agency and the motor vehicle industry. You know, originally the auto companies, it's banned now, has truck companies, has some oil companies. And they each put in half the money, the government and the corporations, and they hire scientists to do research. It's actually pretty good. It's not perfect, but they do good research. And it's really independent. And they know, those scientists know that they're getting the next grant is not dependent on giving this institution. It's called the Health Effects Institute, the results that they want. So we need to have that for chemicals. We need to have that for food. There is this incredible

industry of fake studies in food. There's a really brilliant nutrition scientist at NYU, Marion Nessel. And she's written a lot of books on this. She actually has... Not to be confused with Nestle. Nestle, no. Spelled the same, pronounced differently. That's got to be so. She probably has to explain that every day of her life. I'm sure. Anyway, she has an email that goes out every day with different things about the food industry and writing. But every week, there's a different study done by, you know, the pomegranate juice industry saying, you know, pomegranate juice cures sterility and put hair on your head. And, you know, whatever else they can claim. It's just amazing nonsense. And you just see this stuff. But it's all done for the press to promote pistachios or cranberries or to help in court somewhere.

I have a chapter on that, but her work is really remarkable. She sees these, and it's a huge industry. And a lot of that actually is academic because they're not so much going to court to defend a product because no one's suing the pistachio makers. But in this case, they want to convince you that whatever the food is, it's healthy. You're going to live longer. And therefore, you should buy whatever that food is. even though the studies are terrible.

Yeah, by the $6 glass bottle of pomegranate juice because it has antioxidants in it, which cure cancer may be sort of kind of positive. Well, that company was taken to court by the feds, and they had to retract all of their claims because they were unfounded. Isn't the person who owns that? Isn't she the wife of the almond guy who's taking all the California water as well? Yeah, I'm not on top of it as on top of that sure as I should be, but I believe it is.

I believe there's a family. Yeah. They own a lot of land in the vans. Yes, they're producing pomegranates and pomegranates, yes. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. David Michaels. We'll be right back. I wanted to thank you for listening and for supporting the show. Our advertisers, yeah, some of these ads might be annoying.

I try and keep them funny, but look, these are the people that keep the lights on around here. You can check out all the deals we've got for you at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. That's everything all in one place. Please do consider supporting those who support us in our ability to create these types of of shows for you. Also, don't forget, we've got worksheets for every episode. Today's is no exception. Those are linked in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, for the conclusion of our episode with Dr. David Michaels. So the way that this happens, what, they misrepresent the data as one method that they come up, they sort of throw uncertainty in there, right? They say the data

is incomplete, which you made a really interesting point in the book, which is any data, literally anywhere in the world for anything, is always incomplete. Like, there's no such thing as a complete set of data, so you can always claim, hey, the data's incomplete on whether or not water hydrates you. You know, I mean, you can really just throw that in as a part of the laundry list, right? And the big problem of studying sort of health impacts, the negative health effects of different exposures is you can't do the randomized trial. Right now, you know, we're really interested in the COVID-19 vaccine. Make a trial of 30,000 people and they randomize them and one group gets the vaccine and the other doesn't, they get something else. They think they've gotten a vaccine.

They actually get a shot. You can't do that with a toxic chemical. You can't say we're going to take 30,000 people and give half of them something that we want to know if it's toxic and have something that looks like it but isn't toxic and then follow them for 10 years or 20 years, see who gets sick. So instead, you've got to do studies on animals or you do studies on people with really, you know, not perfect understanding of what their exposure was 10 or 20 years before. So there's a lot of always uncertainty and there are always differences. But if you want to protect the public, the basic principle is that you have to institute your protections on the best available evidence we have at the time. If it looks like something could be dangerous, you don't want to say,

well, let's wait 15 years to figure out if this really kills a lot of people. And then lie about it for 15 more years. Right. But even if you step aside and you say, we're going to wait until all these studies are done, you know, that's wrong. You've got to say, look, there's some indications here, unless we really need to, if we need this chemical for some reason or we need this food for some reason or this pesticide, if we can't get rid of it, let's figure out how to reduce exposure to warn people. But if it's looking like it's going to get people sick, let's not fight over the science. There's enough indication to pull it now. Of course, that's what's so hard to do. And industry has so much power, especially right now in the Trump administration.

Another sort of tragic example occurred in the last few weeks. There's a pesticide chloropyrifos. And clopyrophos is a, it's used on a lot of different crops. It's also used or was used at one time to kill household insects like cockroaches. But there were studies done in New York City where it was used in the household, clearly showing it impacted neurological development in kids. So they stopped using it in homes, but still used on crops. And so farm worker children are exposed. They live right there.

And people who there's residue on crops, and none of us should be exposed to this. But the EPA just said, well, there's too much uncertainty. And at the behest of Dow Chemical, who has been begging to keep selling this crop, the EPA said, we're not going to ban this. Even though EPA scientists have said very clearly, this chemical is too dangerous to use. And in fact, what the EPA is saying is there's too much uncertainty. In fact, they're using this new technique that tobacco came up with. They're saying to the researchers at Columbia University who did this study of household exposure,

they said, we need to see your raw data. We need to give that to Dow. Since you're not giving us your raw data, we can't believe your study. And so therefore, we're not going to, we're not going to consider it. They just gave the stamp of approval to selling this chemical and using it on crops that just shouldn't be used. You would think the default sort of outcome would be, if it's possibly unsafe, let's halt it until we can prove that it is safe, not, hey, you have to prove, like, at a murder trial that this is completely unsafe.

and then we're going to say you have to stop using it, but then we have to let you phase it out because of your profit margins and your shareholders. I mean, it's just, like, I'm all for free market economy, and there's a lot that I can't stomach when it comes to this kind of thing, because as a parent of a 14-month-old kid,

the idea that some A-hole is going to get an extra 20 bucks a share, and my kid could die from exposure to this chemical is so infuriating. It makes me want to, you know, it drives me absolutely insane. That's absolutely right. especially when we think about kids, because the ability to have a toxic effect on a kid is so much very because they're changing so fast, their cells are reproducing so fast, they can absorb

chemicals that has a bigger impact on their brains and on their development. And so we often look at kids, we say, well, if something's dangerous for adults at a certain level, we have to assume it's going to be dangerous for babies and young children at a much higher level. We need to protect everybody, and that really means protecting the youngest. Absolutely. Look, he takes those little oranges we buy and he puts him in his mouth and we go, oh, hold on, we've got to wash that. I would be murderously angry if I found out that there was a chemical on every single one of those things that is damaging his brain. Obviously, we wash things like that because you don't know what's on there. But like if someone's deliberately spraying that on every orange that I'm peeling and giving to him and I'm feeding it to him, it just makes me want to fly off the handle.

Jordan, you've made a really important point. You can't know what's on that orange and you shouldn't have to know. you should be able to live your life assuming that that orange is safe and isn't going to hurt you or your kid. That's why you need a strong environmental protection system in the government. It can't rely on you making decisions because you don't want to spend your time thinking about that. And it's too complicated for most individuals. And that's what's really run down in the United States. As bad as it is now, and I think it's really problematic, I don't blame President Trump alone. In fact, I think on one level he's done us a favor.

I think in recent years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been decimated. A lot of the best people have left. The rules that protect people are being rolled back. The same is true for OSHA and other agencies. But it wasn't very good five years ago. The agencies were set up with this presumption of innocence, with all sorts of difficulties in moving forward. I think now when we have to think about how we're going to rebuild our system of protecting

people, we have to look and see what mistakes did we make in the past. You know, one I think everybody's aware of is, you know, the 737 max jet. Is that the one that had a defect in it that was crashing or something like that? That's right. It crashed twice. Two different planes went down, killed 350 people. And it came out after that. The FAA had essentially outsourced safety oversight to Boeing.

And, of course, the folks at Boeing were under great pressure. I don't think any of them said, I'm going to cut this corner and people are going to die. but you have to have independent oversight for safety. As a result of what happened, Boeing had to ground hundreds of jets. It's cost the company a fortune. They lost a tremendous number of jobs. All the suppliers got hurt. The whole air traffic system was in shambles, because that was before COVID, which has raised another set of problems. But independent, strong safety oversight would have saved 350 lives and protected the corporation and all those jobs as well. And so it's very short-sighted to just say, let's get the government out of this and let the corporations take care

of these risks themselves. They need a strong government authority because their instinct, of course, and the competitive pressure says, well, let's cut corners, let's use things that may be a little dangerous. Of course, they don't really think it's very dangerous, but of course they're not going to think that. And so when I think about the Trump administration and the next administration that comes in, we have this opportunity now to take these principles and rebuild a system that will be much more effective and protect babies, we'll protect workers, it will protect all of us. What about people who say, okay, fine, worker standards, but these OSHA guys, they get carried away. They're going to make this so damn expensive. Look, if they had it their way, everybody

would be in a bubble and we'd never get any work done, and everybody would have $100,000 and PPE on it all the time and all this stuff. You know, that's, of course, the line the anti-Ocia people use. In fact, Senator Kennedy from Louisiana just said, yeah, I don't want OSHA to make me wear a mask in the shower. You know, just people just don't understand OSHA. When OSHA issues a standard, the proposes a standard, industry always says, look, it's going to cost too much. The evidence is once OSHA issues a standard, it saves lives and always costs far less than even OSHA predicts it will because industry is very creative and they figure out exactly how to meet the standard. And then you forget it has a standard. You know, when you go into every, any hospital room or doctor's office,

you go and it has a little box on the wall where you have to put sharps in, you know, because, you know, needles. And that's because you have an OSHA standard that says, you know, to protect those workers to make sure they're not hit by a needle. At one time they were worried about HIV, that worried about hepatized. You know, you have to do that. And it's commonplace now. No one even remembers it's because of OSHA, you put that up. And that's true for most OSHA standards that you just accept them and you live with them. And it turns out they're not such a big deal and it makes everybody better off. Right. I'm imagining y'all proposing that standard and somebody going, I can't just throw syringes in the garbage can anymore and then when it bounces against the intern's

leg, it pokes him. How are we going to be able to afford this plastic box that goes on the door? That's going to cost billions of dollars. They say it's too expensive. Of course, when OSHA first proposed that blood-borne pathogen standards called, dentists said, you're going to make me wear gloves? How am I going to do dentistry if I have to wear gloves? Of course, when was last time anybody has been to a dentist who wasn't wearing gloves? That would be discussed. This is so gross. I guarantee you no dentist wants to not use gloves either at this point.

Exactly. At this point. But at the time, they all felt like, you know, we've always done it this way. Why make us change? Or Winosha said, if you have tools on construction sites, they're grinding up cinder blocks, they're putting a lot of dust in the air. You have to have something on the tool that either wets the dust down or vacuums it up, which costs a few hundred dollars.

And, you know, the home building industry said, this is going to kill home building. No one's going to be able to afford a house. Of course, OSHA put that out in 2016. It's now required. The tools are flying off the shelves, and it works fine. And no one's complaining. Basically, it's like a hose that sprays water on the blade, right? I've seen them when they're doing the street or something like that.

Exactly. Yeah, it just it wetts it down. Or if you don't want to have water there, you vacuum it out. It's not such a big deal. And it's all doable. But the instinct is always to say, don't make us spend any money protecting someone because we don't want to do that. Yeah, because that person's expendable.

It says they're at the bottom of the food chain, right? That's right. That's because we don't pay the cost when that person gets sick. That's another, a different discussion, but yes. There's a lot in the book that I really enjoyed, and people can go and buy it. We'll link it in the show notes. You've got diesel engines. You've got the Volkswagen saga in there, some stuff about the NFL and the concussions.

What example, baby powder was in there? What else am I forgetting? Well, you know, that monkey story in diesel is a great story. Oh, yeah. That was kind of gross. You want to draw us through that real quick? that was like shockingly disgusting, actually. Well, one of the stories I tell is about Volkswagen, when they were facing this problem,

when they were trying to market diesel engines, they said diesel engines were going to be the best thing. And of course, everyone knows about the diesel engine scandal. You know, beyond the defeat device that they had in the software, they had another problem with, which these diesel engines put out particulates. And the World Health Organization classified diesel engine exhaust as causing lung cancer. And so the industry said, and this was actually one of the PR people, said, you know, we need to have a study that opposes this, that sort of makes it look like it's safe. Come up with a study. So at first, they said, well, maybe we'll do a study where we'll take some volunteers, we'll put them in a chamber, we'll put them on

bicycles, and we'll pump some of this engine exhaust in. We'll clean it out a little bit, but we'll pump it in and show that it's safe. And then they realized that probably the optics were not good for a German company to put people in chambers and pump a gas into them. Oh, yeah. So instead, they said, well, we'll use monkeys. And so they hired this research group in New Mexico called Lovelace. They did the study where they were going to pump gas into the chambers and show that the monkeys were not affected. And they actually had to have the monkeys watch TV cartoons to keep them calm. They did the study so badly that they found the opposite result, that they showed that the monkeys who breathed the air coming from a new Volkswagen Jetta, or a beetle I can't remember,

actually had more of an impact on their lungs than breathing the exhaust from like a 15-year-old Ford F-150 because they did the study wrong and they just, you know, they hired these people who just didn't follow basic science rules, I guess. But when they didn't get the result they wanted, they wouldn't pay the folks in New Mexico. They said, we need you to change the results to give us a study that we can use to show our product is safe. And that went back and forth and the folks in New Mexico were going to change their results. But then the whole scandal, the other scandal, the defeat devices hit the fan, and so the folks in Germany said, okay, we're done. And so the folks in New Mexico actually never got their final payment.

But just it shows the length that both Volkswagen would go and the scientists in New Mexico would go to create the image that diesel exhaust was safe. A lot of cars, when I lived in Europe, they had a lot of diesel cars, right? They had those turbo diesel, Mercedes, sedans, and you don't see them here. And I don't really know why. I guess diesel's a lot cheaper in Europe and gasoline's price here. I'm not really Sure. Gasoline is very expensive in Europe. It's highly taxed. And diesel is taxed much less. It's subsidized. And so there's a lot more incentive to use diesel in Europe. It ends up being cheaper an operator car with diesel. And all of these companies move to these new, more efficient diesel engines,

but it turns out many of them use these defeat devices to make it look like they were polluting much less. And they're all paying the price for that now. Wow. So the air in Europe, is it dirtier than the air in the United States? No, no. I mean, what they've done in Europe in a lot of the big cities is they've actually limited access to cars, especially to diesel engines downtowns. Many of them have very limited hours that you're allowed to drive in downtown. And that keeps the air cleaner. Wow, yikes. Well, here's what I want to clean up before we go here, because I think a lot of people go, oh, so science is just fake then. I can't trust it at all. I want to clean this up because most scientists do search for truth. We have to beware of science that's sponsored by corporations,

but I want to talk about why this doesn't mean, oh, well, science is fake, because that does more harm than not doing this episode at all. No, you are exactly right. And most scientists have great integrity and are doing this because they want to understand the world. It's fascinating to them, and they want to make it better. And that's certainly true of people who go into the public health sciences like toxicology or epidemiology. And they work really hard, often for, you know, not as much money as they'd make if they were in business or as attorneys. but they love the idea of inquiry. They don't want to get involved in some of these debates. They think that's ugly and that's dirty. They really just want to be creating new knowledge.

They're often dragged in because then you have these unfortunate, really mercenary scientists who end up opposing their work and contradicting the work of all these scientists who are quite independent and honest. When they're forced to do that, it sort of opens their eyes and says, boy, in the real world, some of this stuff gets really difficult. But most science is well done. It's not perfect, but it's done by people with,

real integrity who want to make the world a better place. Dr. David Michaels, thank you so much. I think, look, it's scary to think that some of the science we read is fake. And as a lot of paranoid people say, follow the money. But that's even hard to do, right? Because then we go, well, it's the big corporation. No, it's the government wants us to have to buy more safety stuff. So there's even that argument on both sides. That's what the subtitle of my book, Dark Money and the Science of Deception. That's absolutely right. Dr. David Michaels, thank you so much. The book will be linked in the show notes. I really appreciate your time. This is really interesting.

I enjoyed this tremendously. Stay safe, Jordan. As usual, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, I wanted to give you a preview of one of my favorite stories from an earlier episode of the show. Steve Elkins. My friend Steve Elkins found a lost city in the jungle that most people never even knew existed. I'm not even kidding. It sounds insane.

This has to be one of the most incredible stories I've ever recorded on the show. I know you're going to love this one. The legend of Ciadet Blanca, or White City in English, goes back probably 500 years to the best of my knowledge. People have believed that there is this civilization out there. And the local indigenous people have their own legends. It has about five different names of which I can't pronounce about this culture, this civilization that lived out in the jungle at one time. One of the other monikers for the city in current times is Lost City the Monkey God. Maybe there's some truth to this legend.

I kind of felt there was something to it. The Mesquedia jungle where it's located in the eastern third of Honduras is one of the toughest jungles in the world, and by accidents of geography and history, it's remained pretty much unexplored until recently. I have a map made by the British in the 1850s, and on that map, it says Portal del Inferno over that part of the jungle,

and it was called the gates of hell because the terrain was so tough. A lot of people have gone looking for it. Some went in and some never came back. A director friend of mine introduced me to a guy named Captain Steve Morgan. And he was a lifelong adventurer, explorer, treasure hunter, raconteur. Nice guy. Really pretty smart. And I said, let's go. In the 1994, we headed out to Honduras for an unknown adventure looking for the lost city. For more with Steve Elkins, including the details on how they did. discovered the city and made one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century, check out episode 299 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Fake science and bad science. We knew this kind of thing was happening, right? I mean, you knew about that, right? But I didn't know how deep this went. I didn't know how common this was. And I had no idea that the NFL is actually the most dangerous job around besides logging and commercial fishing. Think about how dangerous logging must be.

And think about commercial fishing. You've seen those deadliest catch shows. The freaking show is called Deadliest Catch. The NFL is the most dangerous job behind that. CTE or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This is the brain condition associated with repeated blows to the head. Now, you don't have to be a doctor to know that that's bad for you. It leads to suicide.

It leads to violence. It leads to memory issues. There are numerous stories. Aaron Hernandez, three murders and then a suicide. I mean, he was probably not a great guy beforehand, but he had super severe CTE and they found it in his autopsy. This is just something that's being covered up by the NFL. And the NFL can't claim this isn't real,

especially after colleges put new anti-concution regulations into play. So they simply had studies made that claimed professional players were more resistant to CTE and therefore didn't need those regulations. It's just, it's a shame. It really is. Yes, they're getting paid a lot, but come on. This is quite remarkable. This is a remarkable statement that obviously nobody could possibly believe,

even inside the NFL. The book also goes after some of these regulators that join private companies and then go back to the regulatory agencies after their pension vests. It's just kind of icky and makes you realize just we cannot trust companies to regulate themselves and we can't usually trust the government to actually be effective in regulating them. And I think whenever we see regulations rolled back, we always see that those are not good for the consumer. They're great for business. They're not good for us. And it is sad to me to hear engine companies and mining companies fighting new standards and safety measures that would cost something like $150,000 a year, which is, that's less than they probably spend on branded frickin' pens and pizza Fridays

and crap like that. There's an example on the book where $1,200 a year would be all it would cost for an entire company to keep construction workers safe from inhaling silica, which causes this like agonizing, painful death. It's just such a shame. $1,200 bucks a year for the whole company, not per worker, the whole company, all they needed was like a water sprayer attachment for the machines that cut the blocks. That's all they wanted to not pay for. The water sprayer. Come on. It just, it makes me angry. These bad studies, they also use things like distractions. So some of these conclusions could be a distraction. Here's one that really caught my eye. As a woman, you're at higher risk for breast cancer as well. And this comes from the alcohol companies. Their implication is,

the inference here is, hey, don't worry about alcohol because you have a higher risk for, breast cancer just because you're female. First of all, you should worry about both of those things, male or female. Just because something is riskier than something else doesn't mean you don't worry about the thing that's less risky. Give me a break. And yes, of course you're at higher risk for breast cancer as a female. Everyone knows that. That doesn't mean you don't have to worry about getting cancer from drinking alcohol. It's just, it's infuriating. The things people do for money just pisses me off. Another common tactic is the ruse, so they'll float a more moderate conclusion. They'll say something like, well, it doesn't cause cancer.

It may cause silicosis or cirrhosis of the liver, or it may increase the risk of cirrhosis of the liver or silicosis or cancer. Increase the risk. Yes, if it goes from 1% for somebody who's not exposed to this, I'm making these numbers up, and then goes up to 70% for people who are. Yes, it increases the risk. It increases the, just like my risk of winning the lottery is increased when I buy a ticket and decreased when I do not, right? my chances go up or down depending on those things. They'll say it increases or decreases the risk because they don't want to say, hey, this causes this. They want to take that language out because it sounds less risky. So they float a more moderate conclusion based on whatever they want. Dr. David Michaels had a

really good quote in the book. He said, statistics, they're real people with the tears wiped away. In other words, all of these safety standards, they affect people. And if they don't work or they're weakened by industry bullshit and lobbying, people get very sick and die. And these are people who are people family members, and children. Just remember that. And that's what makes this so appalling for me. And we didn't even get into the climate breakdown denial. There is big, dark money in politics, because it is harder to get tons of money from loads of citizens. Look, if I've got a cold call, five million people and each one of them donates five or ten bucks, that's a lot of work. But if I go to corporations and super PACs and I get hundreds of millions of dollars from three or five

different industries or one industry, then it's a lot easier for me. It's a lot more reliable. It's scalable. I can even get more money from that. So politicians, they just vote accordingly. It's so much easier to get money from those places. Therefore, industry voices are so much louder than actual humans and citizens because of this. And look, if you're a conservative, you might have some issue with this. But I think all of us realize that we need to make sure that things are safe for us, not just save for businesses to make loads of money. I am not against big business making money. I am against big businesses wanting to save $1,200 a year and not giving a crap if their workers get silicosis because they didn't want to buy a freaking water spray. That stuff just grinds my

gears. Of course, his book goes over lots of potential solutions, and likewise, we need politicians that aren't on the freaking take in who are willing to implement these. Getting big money out of politics, whatever, I'm going on a rant now. You don't even want to get me started. Big thank you to Dr. David Michaels. The book is called The Triumph of Doubt. We will obviously link to that in the show notes as we always do. Worksheets for this episode to remember what you took away just in case you were driving or something when you heard it. You don't have to take your notes. They're in the worksheets. Those are linked in the show notes. Transcripts are also in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems, using tiny habits. Maybe you get a promotion. Maybe you find a job if you're laid off right now or you're in between something. Go learn how to do this. This is a game

changer. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's free. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Come on, people. You know you need it. And no, you don't naturally do this. Stop lying to yourself. You don't naturally do these things, okay? They teach this to intelligence agencies and law enforcement and special operations. None of those people naturally do it. Why do you think you do? So no more self-delusion. Go get it, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This show is created in association with Podcast One, and my amazing team includes Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird,

Millie O'Campo, Josh Ballard, and Gabe Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. You know somebody who is interested in how science can be manipulated, so maybe they're into science, maybe they're just into politics. Share this episode with him.

I love this one. This one kind of came out of left field. I thought it was mildly interesting before I started researching it, and I just really got into it. Hopefully you know somebody who will be the same way. And I hope you find something great in every episode of this show, so please share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time.

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