The Psychology and Denial of a Tobacco Executive w/Barbara Freese | Joe Rogan

Someone should do a psychological profile of those people, particularly the tobacco people. Because there's such a direct correlation between tobacco and cancer. The climate change thing, it's almost like, boy, it's so hard to track because it's so far in advance. And if you say that climate change isn't real, what deaths are caused? Is it directly attributable to that? You know what I'm saying? But cancer and cigarettes, it's like, here's a person, they smoke cigarettes, they have cancer. You said it didn't come from cigarettes. What does that feel like to you? To be that person that actively tries to... Well, they're essentially lying. They're lying for money. Let me just back up one second and then talk about that. Just because I want to make it clear that while the link between smoking and cancer may seem entirely obvious, there's enough of a delay that opens up the opportunity for denial. The link between putting greenhouse gases in the air and dramatic climate change, that's actually as well established as the links between smoking and cancer. It's just that it is a more complicated process. And there's potentially more of a delay. And it depends in large part on what humans do along the way. So it does get kind of complicated. As far as psychologically profiling the tobacco companies, I mean, or the tobacco executives, I won't presume to suggest this book does that, but I do write a lot about what these folks were saying, not just to the public, but to, you know, internally, we've got some internal documents and certain things that may have been public utterances, but were clearly just sort of part of their internal rationalization. For example, I start the book with a quote from the head of Philip Morris who says, who knows what you would do if you didn't smoke? Maybe you'd beat your wife. Maybe you'd drive cars fast. And, you know, that's part of how I think the tobacco industry approached this. They would imagine this sort of counterfactual where, you know, a world without tobacco, without cigarettes, and then they would imagine what that would be like. And of course, they'd always imagine it was much, much worse than smoking. Right. Yeah, I read that part. And also the man in question wound up quitting cigarettes. So, right. Yeah, he had to quit fairly quickly. And what did he do? Right, exactly. Yeah, that was the question. And we never really did find that out. It's such a strange way to live your life, to be deceptive in a way that you know is going to, I mean, there's, I don't know how many people have gotten cancer from cigarettes, but it's probably millions. Well, and it isn't just cancer. It's a heart disease, etc. So, millions. I mean, I've seen an estimate that in the 20th century, smoking killed, I want to make sure I get this right. I think it was 100 million people. More than maybe both wars, world wars put together. It's 7 million a year, I think, is the global death toll in the US. It's 480,000 a year, yeah. Directly attributable. Right, they trace it to directly attributable. Now, you know, these are extreme examples. Tobacco is the most famous and extreme example. And I talk about a lot of other examples, but I think it's actually, you know, a fairly common thing for people to go pretty far down the road of denial when they are working in an industry. And this is sort of the process I tried to explore a little bit in the book. They're working in an industry. They're confronted with some accusation that they have caused harm. They check their gut, and their gut says, no, we didn't intend to cause harm. We don't feel guilty. And so their mind starts to come up with reasons why it must be wrong. And their tribal instincts, which are never more than just a millimeter below the surface for pretty much any of us, but certainly in this case, get triggered. So they immediately think, well, these people accusing me must have an ulterior motive. They must be, they want money. They want power. They want attention. They've got some sinister political objective. And then the other part of that tribal dynamic is they start thinking about themselves and their truly lofty mission, which isn't just to sell a product, but something else.