Merchants of Doubt How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

I want to recommend a book called Merchants of Doubt right now. I'm reading and it's about how the tobacco industry, climate change, denial, all this stuff is largely the result of PR.

They're a conservative think tank. You might remember them in the nineties when they worked alongside Philip Morris to deny the risks of secondhand smoke.

They're a conservative think tank. You might remember them in the nineties when they worked alongside Philip Morris to deny the risks of secondhand smoke. Yeah. That's all chronicle in that book. I've talked about merchants of doubt.

And I want to recommend a book called Merchants of Doubt right now. I'm reading and it's about how the tobacco industry, climate change, denial, all this stuff is largely the result of PR.

one of the many analogies used by Amway distributor leaders to illustrate this was a reference to the McDonald's franchising scheme. Would you rather own one McDonald's or be Ray Kroc and have the right to franchise or duplicate your efforts?

Isn't it far better to have 10 percent of 100 businesses than 100 percent of one? By helping many people succeed in owning their own franchise, so to speak, you could literally work yourself out of a job and live comfortably on the residual income generated by the businesses you started.

This residual income is what you're going to get from your business. This residual income stream could even be passed on to your children as part of your estate. There was no way to lose money.

no one makes more money off your business than you.

one of the many analogies used by Amway distributor leaders to illustrate this was a reference to the McDonald's franchising scheme. Would you rather own one McDonald's or be Ray Kroc and have the right to franchise or duplicate your efforts?

Isn't it far better to have 10 percent of 100 businesses than 100 percent of one? By helping many people succeed in owning their own franchise, so to speak, you could literally work yourself out of a job and live comfortably on the residual income generated by the businesses you started.

This residual income is what you're going to get from your business. This residual income stream could even be passed on to your children as part of your estate. There was no way to lose money.

no one makes more money off your business than you.

one of the many analogies used by Amway distributor leaders to illustrate this was a reference to the McDonald's franchising scheme. Would you rather own one McDonald's or be Ray Kroc and have the right to franchise or duplicate your efforts?

Isn't it far better to have 10 percent of 100 businesses than 100 percent of one? By helping many people succeed in owning their own franchise, so to speak, you could literally work yourself out of a job and live comfortably on the residual income generated by the businesses you started.

This residual income is what you're going to get from your business. This residual income stream could even be passed on to your children as part of your estate. There was no way to lose money.

no one makes more money off your business than you.

When you brought this crusty old weather-beaten book with you, Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast, written in 1992.

But one can find all of the content and you were boasting off camera that nothing changed because your foresight was impeccable.

because it's no longer in print.

The only thing in this book that I predicted that seems to be unusual is there's a line in the book where I say again, I was writing this in 1991 and I said perhaps Earth scientists of the future will determine that we're in a geological age of our own making, a post-Holocene geological age of our own making. And maybe they'll call it the anthracene.

But he endorsed this old book back when he was still Senator Al Gore in 1990.

And the short answer is that these folks weren't interested in the scientific evidence. What they were interested in was a kind of political argument about preventing government interference in the marketplace, preventing the EPA and other organizations like the EPA from taking action to control the hazards and the damage of fossil fuels.

So the idea is that it's us against them it's democracy against totalitarianism it's capitalism against communism and any threat to democracy any threat to freedom any threat to the free market system is so profound that it has to be resisted and even if that means misrepresenting the science, ignoring the science these people were prepared to do that.

I wrote a book in 1992 About global warming That was part of an exhibit At this museum 1992

When you brought this crusty old weather-beaten book with you, Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast, written in 1992.

But one can find all of the content and you were boasting off camera that nothing changed because your foresight was impeccable.

In this book, I mean you're a journalist, right? So you are compiling basically the fruits of the research that's going on among scientists around you.

The only thing in this book that I predicted that seems to be unusual is there's a line in the book where I say again, I was writing this in 1991 and I said perhaps Earth scientists of the future will determine that we're in a geological age of our own making, a post-Holocene geological age of our own making.

But he endorsed this old book back when he was still Senator Al Gore in 1990.

And the short answer is that these folks weren't interested in the scientific evidence. What they were interested in was a kind of political argument about preventing government interference in the marketplace, preventing the EPA and other organizations like the EPA from taking action to control the hazards and the damage of fossil fuels.

So part of the mystery was trying to make sense of that.

Another classic about this early opium trade is Merchants of Badness by Bertel Lindner, one of the true experts on Burmese history today although he was really rude to me once so that's the last you're going to hear about him on this particular show.

I don't really have a great answer for those two, but I do very much recommend this audiobook edition of Seneca, the Tim Ferris put together a few years ago called The Doubts of Seneca.

It is available actually as a PDF, totally for free if you go to Tim.blog slash Seneca

I suggest that you do so. I think it's a wonderful public service that Tim has done here. In the fact that it gives the PDF of it away for free is also wonderful.