Speaker 1: Push Kim. I hate to do this, but I just
Speaker 1: have to pick up right where we left off. In
Speaker 1: our last episode, we were talking about insider trading, how
Speaker 1: it's become the one crime the sports gambling industry really
Speaker 1: wants to police. But it's also the one thing that
Speaker 1: every other guy on an American college campus wants to do.
Speaker 1: As my producer LJ found out after just a few
Speaker 1: hours at the University of Kansas.
Speaker 2: I ask you for aniela intel on the player pot.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well he's driving there right now. He's on
Speaker 3: the bus, so I'm gonna text him Layer and I'd
Speaker 3: be like, what'sh I put money on.
Speaker 1: Wandering around the integrity landscape these last six months, we
Speaker 1: found that some huge number of Americans who are too
Speaker 1: young to drink now gamble on sports. Yet no one
Speaker 1: ever gets in trouble for taking their bets. What people
Speaker 1: do get trouble for is trading on inside sports information.
Speaker 1: The analogy, which seems obvious to some people is the
Speaker 1: SEC ban on trading stocks when you have inside information.
Speaker 1: But even that is not an obvious type of crime.
Speaker 4: You know, some kind of frauds clearly fall under thou
Speaker 4: shalt not steal some kinds of frauds clearly fall under
Speaker 4: thou shalt not bear false witness. But there really is
Speaker 4: no commandment that says thou shalt not trade securities while
Speaker 4: in possession of material non public information.
Speaker 1: That's Dan Davies, once an economist at the Bank of England,
Speaker 1: an analyst for a bunch of investment banks. He now
Speaker 1: writes about financial fraud lying for money. His first book
Speaker 1: was called.
Speaker 4: Most people would consider that's like just the epitome of
Speaker 4: doing good business. If you don't have more information, why
Speaker 4: are you making this transaction? And it wasn't a crime
Speaker 4: in most of the world for most of the history
Speaker 4: of stock markets. It became a crime in the USA
Speaker 4: in the nineteen thirty after the Wall Street crash.
Speaker 1: It's kind of odd, right that the financial markets are
Speaker 1: the only place where you're vilified if you trade on
Speaker 1: some piece of information not available to the general public.
Speaker 1: Amazon can buy your property without telling you that they've
Speaker 1: already acquired the rest of your city. But if Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos buys Amazon's stock because he knows Amazon has just
Speaker 1: secretly bought an entire city really cheaply, he might go
Speaker 1: to jail.
Speaker 4: It's a decision that society has made to create this
Speaker 4: crime on the basis of a tradeoff, and that tradeoff
Speaker 4: is obviously that if you have inside to dealing rules
Speaker 4: you make it look like a fair game, You're going
Speaker 4: to attract more people into that game, and that in
Speaker 4: turn is going to attract more of the savings of
Speaker 4: the middle class in to finance the industrial developments of
Speaker 4: the capitalist will.
Speaker 1: So maybe insider trading laws make sense in the stock market,
Speaker 1: though I got to say that their main effect is
Speaker 1: to trick a lot of people into thinking that the
Speaker 1: financial markets are more fairly police than they actually are.
Speaker 1: But that's my point, not Dan's. Here's why I called
Speaker 1: Dan up because his country is now trying to turn
Speaker 1: the informal rules against insider trading in sports gambling into
Speaker 1: actual laws, just like in the stock market.
Speaker 4: It is being done, in my view, on the basis
Speaker 4: of a very very shaky legal footing. The Gambling Commission
Speaker 4: have taken it upon themselves to say that placing a
Speaker 4: bet with material non public information is in principle cheating,
Speaker 4: and that they will investigate it with their own criminal powers.
Speaker 1: You're basically policing the market for who's benefit, Like who
Speaker 1: benefits from raising it to the level of a crime.
Speaker 4: I think that is completely the right question to ask,
Speaker 4: because we know the trade off that we made with
Speaker 4: securities markets, which is that we decided that we would
Speaker 4: police their internal rules for them using the criminal law
Speaker 4: because we want to attract everyone into the capital markets.
Speaker 4: And I think it's a very good question to ask,
Speaker 4: what is this great benefit that the gambling industry provides
Speaker 4: to society that we should do it, this huge favor
Speaker 4: of letting it put people in actual grown up prison
Speaker 4: in the worst cases, for the crime of knowing more
Speaker 4: about a horse race than the book maker does.
Speaker 1: And the answer to the question who benefits, it's the
Speaker 1: book maker. I assume the book.
Speaker 4: Makers are the concentrated interest. They're the people who pay
Speaker 4: quite a lot of the bills, and so a lot
Speaker 4: of these sports seem to be quite happy to bend
Speaker 4: over backwards to keep things nice and safe for the bookmakers,
Speaker 4: to allow them effectively the kind of privileged position that
Speaker 4: stock market specialists used to have in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 4: and nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Sports bookies hate insider trading for the same reason they
Speaker 1: hate smart sports gamblers. They're in the business of maximizing
Speaker 1: stupid sports bets and minimizing smart ones. They don't want
Speaker 1: to take bets from people who know more than they do.
Speaker 1: One way to avoid those bets is to criminalize the information.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Lewis and this is against the rulers. It's
Speaker 1: still hard to tell how exactly sports gambling will play
Speaker 1: out in the United States. It's still so new here.
Speaker 1: But outside the United States there are places that are
Speaker 1: way ahead of us. They give us a glimpse of
Speaker 1: our future, and it's not a pretty sight. The British
Speaker 1: have allowed online sports gambling since two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: Within a couple of years, sports betting in Britain had
Speaker 1: gone from a thing you had to work to do
Speaker 1: to a thing you had to work to avoid. As
Speaker 1: like this are everywhere football.
Speaker 4: Black cop competitions, the relegation bottles, the dykes under the lights.
Speaker 5: I absolutely love it.
Speaker 1: You can see the effects of this gambling culture everywhere.
Speaker 1: Just google gambler's anonymous meetings in London. The gambling industry
Speaker 1: in Britain has acquired so much political clout that the
Speaker 1: British government still thinks mostly in terms of policing the
Speaker 1: gambler rather than policing the industry. But it's the Australians
Speaker 1: who are way ahead of everyone, even the British. Australia
Speaker 1: legalized sports gambling with few restrictions back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one.
Speaker 6: Australians lose more per capita than any other country in
Speaker 6: the world on gambling.
Speaker 1: That's Charlie Lewis, journalists for the Australian news site Krichie.
Speaker 1: Charlie was amazed to learn that twenty seven million Australians
Speaker 1: were losing twenty four billion dollars a year gambling per capita.
Speaker 1: That would be the equivalent of Americans blowing more than
Speaker 1: two hundred billion dollars a year. In Australia. Problem gambling
Speaker 1: has become such a big issue that it was front
Speaker 1: and center in the last election, which the Labor Party
Speaker 1: won by promising to enact lots of restrictions on the
Speaker 1: sports gambling industry.
Speaker 6: There was a bipartisan process that unanimously concluded that there
Speaker 6: ought to be a blanket ban on online gambling advertising
Speaker 6: in Australia. The government had kind of sat on those
Speaker 6: recommendations for over a year until recently announcing that they
Speaker 6: were going to do a much more water down version
Speaker 6: of what that report was recommending.
Speaker 1: Pole still showed that seventy percent of Australians won a
Speaker 1: total ban on sports gambling ads. The major political parties
Speaker 1: say they agree, but there's been no ban. The sports
Speaker 1: gambling ads are still everywhere.
Speaker 2: Good I just chap fifty bucks on rice for don't
Speaker 2: give me lucky.
Speaker 5: Ni puller out one thing I love about you alses
Speaker 5: you're all different.
Speaker 2: And on the punt as mad as cuts.
Speaker 1: Mad Is cutsnakes. You gotta love it. Anyway, Charlie set
Speaker 1: out to understand why the ad ban was going nowhere.
Speaker 1: What he found was a situation even worse than in
Speaker 1: Great Britain. The sports gambling companies hadn't simply bought the
Speaker 1: political process that bought the bulk of the Australian media
Speaker 1: too with ad money.
Speaker 6: The real unity is from the Australian mainstream media because
Speaker 6: they rely on that money much more than they ever
Speaker 6: used to. So they are of one voice opposing reform,
Speaker 6: which is kind of interesting because that's also who pays
Speaker 6: for journalism in this country.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that the Australian media completely ignored the problems
Speaker 1: that sports gambling caused, but Charlie found that a lot
Speaker 1: of the Australian media had settled on a narrative that
Speaker 1: was extremely convenient for the gambling industry. Yes, they report
Speaker 1: on the bankruptcies, the ruined lives, the suicides, but their
Speaker 1: reporting also implied that the industry bore is zero blame
Speaker 1: for any of it because some people simply didn't know
Speaker 1: how to gamble responsibly. Now we know that young males
Speaker 1: like to gamble, and we know that they're vulnerable to
Speaker 1: gambling problems. A society allows gambling companies to bombard young
Speaker 1: males with ads and free offers to gamble and VIP status,
Speaker 1: and then when vast numbers of young males get themselves
Speaker 1: in trouble, we all say, well, those young people really
Speaker 1: shouldn't have done that. To Charlie, Lewis, down under this
Speaker 1: frame felt off, so he dug deeper and found that
Speaker 1: this whole blamed The gambler. Frame indeed had an origin story,
Speaker 1: an American one, created by an American lawyer named Frank Farnkoff.
Speaker 1: Frank Farnkoff grew up in Reno, but made his career
Speaker 1: as a Washington lawyer and later became chairman of the RNC.
Speaker 1: Back in the early nineties, Charlie Wrights, the Las Vegas casinos,
Speaker 1: and the companies that made slot machines wanted to expand
Speaker 1: their operations. But at the very same time they were
Speaker 1: a US congressmen who were upset about the effects of
Speaker 1: gambling and who were writing legislation to ban all forms
Speaker 1: of gambling, which would not only have stopped the spread,
Speaker 1: but would have shut down Las Vegas too. It was
Speaker 1: Frank who convinced the casino operators to get ahead of
Speaker 1: the conversation. He told them they needed to come together
Speaker 1: around a strategy and the first step would be to
Speaker 1: admit that gambling addiction is real.
Speaker 7: And now that was not an easy sell.
Speaker 1: That's Frank himself now the co chair of the Commission
Speaker 1: on Presidential Debates. But back in the nineteen nineties, the
Speaker 1: Vegas casino owners hired him to be president and CEO
Speaker 1: of the New American Gaming Association.
Speaker 7: The guys who were running the gaming industry of the
Speaker 7: various companies didn't believe there was any problems with you know,
Speaker 7: we responsible gaming. And when the first meetings, when I went,
Speaker 7: I brought with me the picture of all the leaders
Speaker 7: of the tobacco industry standing before Congress, raising their right hand,
Speaker 7: saying that tobacco wasn't addictive.
Speaker 1: Yes or no? Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?
Speaker 1: I believe nicotine is not addictive.
Speaker 6: Yet I believe that nicotine is not predictive. I believe
Speaker 6: that nicotine is not addicted.
Speaker 7: And I said to them, you know, I want you
Speaker 7: to picture this in your mind. If we don't do
Speaker 7: something affirmatively which is in the public interest, the dealing
Speaker 7: with we we know is a problem. No one had
Speaker 7: any idea how deep the problem was.
Speaker 1: The gambling industry wouldn't do what the tobacco industry did
Speaker 1: and lie and tell people that its products never caused harm. Instead,
Speaker 1: it would shift the focus away from the industry and
Speaker 1: on to its customers. It would fund lots of research
Speaker 1: about gambling addiction without ever having to do anything that
Speaker 1: reduced the money they made from the attics.
Speaker 6: The gambling industry is only really doing what every big
Speaker 6: harmful industry does, which is fund research to try and
Speaker 6: get their message out there.
Speaker 1: That's the Australian journalist Charlie lewis again.
Speaker 6: Certainly not to back of companies. And I don't think
Speaker 6: even fossil fuel companies were ever as successful as the
Speaker 6: gambling industry has been in making that process kind of invisible,
Speaker 6: making it something that people don't really know is happening.
Speaker 1: We are all now just living in frank feign costs frame,
Speaker 1: a frame that keeps people's attention on the person and
Speaker 1: off the situation, on individual weakness, and off an environment
Speaker 1: designed a profit from that weakness. In Australia, the regulatory
Speaker 1: environment has fallen entirely under the control of the gambling industry.
Speaker 1: But this is in a show about Australia. It's a
Speaker 1: show about America and how this latest predatory industry is
Speaker 1: likely to affect us. Happening in Australia seems bad, but
Speaker 1: if the pattern holds, what will happen in America will
Speaker 1: one day seem even worse. They are now a long
Speaker 1: list of products and substances either banned, they're strictly controlled
Speaker 1: in other countries that were allowed to wreak havoc in
Speaker 1: the United States, whereupon lawyers have rushed in and made
Speaker 1: a fortune by suing the relevant industry. And then everyone
Speaker 1: looks back and says, how did that happen? How did
Speaker 1: those tobacco companies get away with doing that, or how
Speaker 1: did opioids run wild for so long?
Speaker 5: The drug is released in nineteen ninety six, and initially
Speaker 5: there's this incredible reinforcement for them where they're getting these
Speaker 5: letters from people, these amazing letters who say, you know,
Speaker 5: I can pick up my grandkid for the first time
Speaker 5: in years, I can go back to work. You've given
Speaker 5: me my life back.
Speaker 1: That's Patrick raden Keief, author of Empire of Pain, the
Speaker 1: story of the Sackler family in Purdue Pharma, which back
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six came to market with a new
Speaker 1: painkiller called oxy contin.
Speaker 5: And the drug becomes a huge blockbuster. There's a big
Speaker 5: moment where it edges out Viagra as the number one
Speaker 5: drug of the day.
Speaker 1: So it's released in ninety six, when it is the
Speaker 1: first signs like if you were sitting there and you
Speaker 1: were concerned, when would you have first noted this some
Speaker 1: problems here?
Speaker 5: Really early, it's like almost within a year, really really early.
Speaker 5: When they released oxy conton they sent out into the
Speaker 5: field all across the country the biggest sales force that
Speaker 5: had ever been put to work marketing.
Speaker 1: A single drug.
Speaker 5: The interesting thing about doing that is those are your
Speaker 5: canaries in the coal mine. You have this early warning system,
Speaker 5: which is these people who are actually out there in
Speaker 5: the communities. And so when you start getting doctors who say, well,
Speaker 5: Jesus is interesting, I had a patient come back and
Speaker 5: say the pain is coming back within eight hours. They've
Speaker 5: started taking three pills every twenty four hours, not two pills.
Speaker 5: You know, you get pharmacists saying people are starting to
Speaker 5: break into my pharmacy and steal the OxyContin. The people
Speaker 5: who are hearing about that are produced sales reps.
Speaker 1: Now, obviously opioids aren't the same as sports gambling companies.
Speaker 1: Sports gambling companies make you poor instead of making you dead.
Speaker 1: Then again, if you're poor, you're more likely to die.
Speaker 1: What opio It's taught us, or should have taught us,
Speaker 1: was that when lots of money is being made, massive
Speaker 1: public health problems confesster out in the open for years.
Speaker 5: So it's not that people didn't notice in a public
Speaker 5: way that there were problems with OxyContin, that it was
Speaker 5: killing people, that people were addicted to it, and indeed
Speaker 5: that the company had done a lot of bad things.
Speaker 5: And there's this fascinating moment where there's a congressional hearing,
Speaker 5: and Arlen Specter, the late Republican senator from Sylvania in
Speaker 5: this hearing, has this moment in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 8: I say fines with some frequency and think that they
Speaker 8: are expensive licenses for criminal misconduct. I don't know whether
Speaker 8: that applies in this case, but a jail sentence is
Speaker 8: a deterred and a fine is not not a corporate
Speaker 8: fine in the context of the kind of profits which
Speaker 8: you're involved here.
Speaker 5: And he says, are we not, on some level just
Speaker 5: issuing them an expensive license to keep doing business? And
Speaker 5: it's this kind of incredibly poignant moment to look back.
Speaker 1: At the evil now seems so obvious. The Sackler family
Speaker 1: made billions peddling a drug they knew was addictive, But
Speaker 1: the fact that it now seems so obvious should make
Speaker 1: everyone a little uneasy, Like what is going on right
Speaker 1: now that one day in the distant future will seem
Speaker 1: so obviously evil.
Speaker 5: You're actually working in a very familiar kind of a
Speaker 5: Marria moral vernacular, right, which is guns don't kill people.
Speaker 5: People kill people, right, Like we have a deeply ingrained
Speaker 5: libertarian sense that you can create something that will wreak
Speaker 5: havoc and put it out in the world and get
Speaker 5: very rich doing it. And as long as there's some
Speaker 5: person downstream of you making some bad decision, you're kind
Speaker 5: of off the hook.
Speaker 1: Morally and legally. We lead the world in many things,
Speaker 1: and one of those things is in our tendency to
Speaker 1: see the person, rather than his situation, as the ultimate
Speaker 1: cause of some problem, even when the situation has been
Speaker 1: designed to lead the person to his ruin, maybe especially
Speaker 1: when an industry has designed the situation. So long as
Speaker 1: that industry remains faceless.
Speaker 5: Telling the story of how the wrong happened and how
Speaker 5: it should be righted is a lot harder if there's
Speaker 5: no characters in the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's an accident with driverless cars, exactly, exactly,
Speaker 1: stay faceless, Blame the customer, buy media, and politicians. All
Speaker 1: of that needs to be part of the sports gambling
Speaker 1: industry's strategy if they want to stay out of trouble.
Speaker 1: After that, there's only one more thing they need to do,
Speaker 1: create doubt. Lots of smart people recently have been noticing
Speaker 1: the same addictive forces at work in American life. We've
Speaker 1: interviewed some of them. For example, the anthropologist Natasha Shall,
Speaker 1: who wrote a book called Addiction by Design, and whose
Speaker 1: interview can be heard later this season. Another great writer
Speaker 1: on this topic is the historian David Courtwright, author of
Speaker 1: the Age of Addiction, How Bad Habits Became Big Business.
Speaker 1: There are now shelves of books on how strong market
Speaker 1: forces and weak regulations leave Americans wildly exposed to predatory industries.
Speaker 1: But the grandmama of all these studies is Merchants of
Speaker 1: Doubt by Eric Conway and Naomia Rescues. It's about the
Speaker 1: way that predatory industries use bad science to obscure the
Speaker 1: good science. It's trying to reveal harms to the wider society.
Speaker 2: So I started just pulling on that thread and discovered
Speaker 2: this whole universe of scientific work that nobody had really
Speaker 2: written about.
Speaker 1: That's Naomia Reski's Harvard professor in the history of science.
Speaker 1: Way back in two thousand and one, she was looking
Speaker 1: into the question of how much difference it made who
Speaker 1: paid for science, and she was looking specifically at oceanography,
Speaker 1: a field that launched in a big way after World
Speaker 1: War Two with money from the US Navy. These early
Speaker 1: oceanographers discovered, among other things, that oceans were warming, that
Speaker 1: the climate was changing.
Speaker 2: So I wrote what became my most famous paper, the
Speaker 2: Paper on the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, saying, hey, guys,
Speaker 2: there really is a consensus on this issue, and there
Speaker 2: has been for a while now. And I started getting
Speaker 2: hate mail and threatening phone calls.
Speaker 1: Naomi soon found herself under systematic attack from a machine
Speaker 1: she didn't know existed, a machine built to deny climate
Speaker 1: change and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, a
Speaker 1: very American machine that happens to employ scientists. She decided
Speaker 1: to study the machine and others like it. I want
Speaker 1: to know the playbook, so I'm asking her to play
Speaker 1: a game with me. It's called Devil's Advocate. Naomi hasn't
Speaker 1: paid much attention to sports gambling, but it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: because she understands the big picture, sort of like a
Speaker 1: talented consultant to Hell Incorporated. I would turn you into
Speaker 1: an advisor to the forces of darkness. How do you
Speaker 1: tell them what they do to combat what's coming?
Speaker 4: Great?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I charge a lot of money
Speaker 2: for this. I just want to be clear up, friends,
Speaker 2: this is not a pro bono operation. But what we
Speaker 2: need to do is situate you as an honest business
Speaker 2: you're good guys. Just giving people an opportunity to do
Speaker 2: something that they enjoy. This is a form of entertainment.
Speaker 2: It's fun, it's enjoyable. People love professional sports, and people
Speaker 2: enjoy gambling on professional sports. Now, we recognize that for
Speaker 2: some people it can be a problem, but that's relatively minor.
Speaker 2: What you will do is promote the notion of responsible gambling,
Speaker 2: that this is an adult activity, adults can decide for themselves,
Speaker 2: and for the vast majority of people it's perfectly safe.
Speaker 1: Now vast majority might be too strong. I mean, the
Speaker 1: respected medical journal The Lancet just published a bunch of
Speaker 1: scary scientific findings. For example, one in six adolescents who
Speaker 1: gamble on sports develop a problem. That sort of science
Speaker 1: could screw up your business if you're running a sports
Speaker 1: gambling app. That's why you need Naomi.
Speaker 2: You're going to cast doubt on that science. You're going
Speaker 2: to say it's unsettled, we don't know, the methodology is suspect.
Speaker 2: You're going to come up with a whole set of
Speaker 2: strategies and I'm going to help you with that. You
Speaker 2: will find credible researchers at credible universities, including my own Harvard,
Speaker 2: places like Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, and you will
Speaker 2: find scientists who are willing to do research that cast
Speaker 2: out on the mainstream view that this is harmful. Once
Speaker 2: you have that research in place, then you will be
Speaker 2: able to say in public that there's no scientific consensus
Speaker 2: on the harms of this activity, and therefore that there's
Speaker 2: no reason for the government to regulate it or control
Speaker 2: it in any way.
Speaker 1: And you think this will be effective, not think.
Speaker 2: I know it will be effective because we've done it before.
Speaker 2: I can show you many books, many articles, many examples.
Speaker 2: I can show you examples of court cases that we
Speaker 2: have won because we cast out on the science.
Speaker 1: And what other industries should I look to as models
Speaker 1: from my own, Like if I want to see who's
Speaker 1: done this, well, who's like state of the art?
Speaker 2: Well, the textbook case is tobacco. We've known that tobacco
Speaker 2: was harmful since the nineteen thirties. We've known since the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties the tobacco caused cancer, emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease.
Speaker 2: But tobacco is still legal everywhere in the world. Millions
Speaker 2: of people still smoke, and even in the United States,
Speaker 2: where significant controls were placed on tobacco. From the nineteen
Speaker 2: nineties onwards, we delayed. We effectively delayed tobacco regulation for
Speaker 2: the better part of half a century.
Speaker 1: And So if I don't take your advice, if I like,
Speaker 1: just let the science pile up. The gambling addiction is
Speaker 1: growing because of legalized force betting. What's going to happen
Speaker 1: to me? If I try to just stay out of this, well.
Speaker 2: Your business will be destroyed because the scientific evidence will
Speaker 2: make it clear that this is massively damaging. There will
Speaker 2: be public outcry. There will be parents, mothers, the spouses
Speaker 2: of people who have been bankrupted by your industry. There
Speaker 2: will be teenagers who committed suicide after being incrupted or
Speaker 2: having their lives destroyed by gambling addiction. You will be
Speaker 2: hauled into court, you will face thousands of lawsuits. You'll
Speaker 2: face both personal injury lawsuits, class action lawsuits, and possibly
Speaker 2: state and federal prosecution. And your industry will be destroyed.
Speaker 2: So this is a matter of life and death for
Speaker 2: your industry.
Speaker 1: Sorry, don't have any choice. That's the big point here,
Speaker 1: the inevitability of what the sports gambling industry must do
Speaker 1: if it wants to survive in its current most profitable form.
Speaker 1: The first thing it must do is figure out the
Speaker 1: best scientists to buy Our Devil's advocate isn't worried about that.
Speaker 2: We can identify three different types of scientists who you
Speaker 2: might be able to find help you.
Speaker 1: Type number one is the shill the hacks who show
Speaker 1: up every time some predatory new industry needs help, but
Speaker 1: they aren't all that useful because of their past association
Speaker 1: with Big Tobacco or Purdue Farmer or whoever.
Speaker 2: That is, if we can find someone who's a bit
Speaker 2: of a true believer, and we do that in two ways.
Speaker 2: A person could be a true scientific believer, and that
Speaker 2: happens when for some reason someone doesn't accept the science,
Speaker 2: and it might be a legitimate reason. We can find
Speaker 2: those people and they may be willing to accept funding
Speaker 2: from us for their research because this is the research
Speaker 2: they want to do independently, so we can make common
Speaker 2: calls with those people.
Speaker 1: Yes, we can get the science we pay for. We
Speaker 1: can buy the science we need, but in the end
Speaker 1: we might not need to pay that much because this
Speaker 1: is America, baby Land of the Free, which means, among
Speaker 1: other things, being free from science.
Speaker 2: The other people we can make common calls with our
Speaker 2: ideological fellow travelers, people who believe in the free market
Speaker 2: system on principle, who don't believe in government regulation. I
Speaker 2: can assure you there are lots of them, people who
Speaker 2: are opposed to govern regulation on principle, and they will
Speaker 2: support us, and they will do this work because they
Speaker 2: don't want to see your industry regulated. And those are
Speaker 2: the best. Those are the ones we want most of
Speaker 2: all because they are they're true believers, but they're not
Speaker 2: industry shills. And that makes them perfect to present when
Speaker 2: we go to the New York Times or the Washington
Speaker 2: Post with our side of the story.
Speaker 1: If muddying the waters is actually going to cause so
Speaker 1: much damage, to actual damage in the society, how do
Speaker 1: these people who are going to help us sort of
Speaker 1: defend themselves from I mean, why are their institutions even
Speaker 1: put up with them? I would have thought they would
Speaker 1: be discredited just by joining forces with us.
Speaker 2: Well, universities are very weak, and the remarkable thing about
Speaker 2: universities is how easy it is to buy them.
Speaker 1: Is it sufficient just to muddy the waters in scientific research?
Speaker 1: That's all we need to do?
Speaker 2: Yes, that's the beauty of what we do. You don't
Speaker 2: need to prove that what you do is safe or good,
Speaker 2: or right or moral. All you have to do is
Speaker 2: prove that we don't know. Because if people think the
Speaker 2: science is unsettled, then they will think it's premature for
Speaker 2: the government to get involved.
Speaker 1: So the lesson to draw from that is, don't waiver,
Speaker 1: don't show any weakness. As long as I don't flinch,
Speaker 1: I'm more likely to be the tobacco industry than I
Speaker 1: am the ozone whole industry. Correct, Right, So sports, if
Speaker 1: I'm my sports gambling company, just has to be just
Speaker 1: consistent in the messaging that we don't know.
Speaker 2: Correct, do not flinch, Do not.
Speaker 1: Flinch, and I don't think they'll flinch. Too many interests
Speaker 1: are aligned. The sports leagues all see gambling as their future.
Speaker 1: The tax revenue for states isn't big yet, but it's
Speaker 1: new revenue, and new revenue is hard to find. I
Speaker 1: think this is what's coming. Lots more people getting into trouble,
Speaker 1: lots more ruin and anger and pity. Because your society
Speaker 1: will not defend you against this particular threat, not for
Speaker 1: a very long time. You'll need to defend yourself, or
Speaker 1: more likely, the young men in your life, and we're
Speaker 1: going to tell you how in our next episode.
Speaker 3: So I'm not family dinner in Paris at the Olympics,
Speaker 3: and I made a bet i'n't an event. I didn't
Speaker 3: tell my dad about it, and the dopamine is filling
Speaker 3: my brain right now, I can smell the money.
Speaker 1: Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis and produced by Lydia gene Kott, Catherine Gerardeau, and
Speaker 1: Ariela Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is
Speaker 1: Jake Krski. Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and
Speaker 1: John Evans of stell Wagon Cinfinett. Our fact checker is
Speaker 1: Lauren Vespoli. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, And if
Speaker 1: you'd like to listen to ad free and learn about
Speaker 1: other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin dot Fm, slash Plus or
Speaker 1: on our Apple show page.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm a little scared now. This could be taken
Speaker 2: out of context and people will think I've gone over
Speaker 2: the dark side.
Speaker 1: Oh no, that was just the best.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'll share another secret. You know, people always say, like,
Speaker 2: if you could be reincarnated as anything in the world,
Speaker 2: I would like to come back as a stand up
Speaker 2: comic because I don't think anybody gives people more pleasure.