Round ‘Em Up! The 308th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

On this, our 308th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss glyphosate, Roundup, Monsanto, and how science and the law are done. A benchmark scientific review paper from 2000, which established the safety of glyphosate for humans, has been retracted by the publisher, on the basis that a) the paper did not actually review the available evidence, b) the stated authors did not actually write (much of) the paper, and c) employees of Monsanto, which makes Roundup, cryptically contributed substantively to the paper. This paper never should have been published, and its retraction should prompt the EPA to revamp guidelines for the use of glyphosate. Also: peer review and scientific culture are widely gamed. And: punitive damages to injured plaintiffs, awarded by juries against corporations, are being reduced by appellate courts due to a misapplication of the 14th Amendment.

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Mentioned in this episode:

NYT on glyphosate article retraction: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/climate/glyphosate-roundup-retracted-study.html

Williams, Kroes, and Munro 2000. Safety evaluation and risk assessment of the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, for humans. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 31(2), pp.117-165:https://www.cbs17.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2019/06/Safety-Evaluation-and-Risk-Assessment-of-the-Herbicide-Roundup-and-its-Active-Ingredient-Glyphosate-for-Humans.pdf

Retraction: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230025002387

Journal Aims and Scope: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/regulatory-toxicology-and-pharmacology/about/aims-and-scope

Johnson v Monsanto (2018): https://www.wisnerbaum.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-roundup-lawsuit/johnson-trial-2018/

Chapters

• 0:00 Does "sally forth" originate from sally forager?"
• 16:05 Roundup Study RETRACTED
• 1:07:36 Monsanto on Trial & the 14th Amendment
• 1:39:07 Glyphosate is Banned on the Island

Transcript

1:00:00

(Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream. It's the 308th. I am Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Heying. I'm gonna say with a certain degree of assuredness, 308 is not prime. But it is the first of the new year. So happy new year to everyone who's watching. Yes, happy new year. Indeed, I hope it is an excellent one. I have concerns, but you know, that's sort of my nature, I guess. Yes, it is. Yes, yes, it is. All right, so we're gonna talk about animal communication. We're gonna talk about the safety of the public relative to things like pesticides and things that have emerged on this front. And we'll see where it goes from there. And maybe some other things as well. So yeah, welcome everyone. Here we are in the new year. We will actually not be back next Wednesday, but we'll be back a short time after that. It's a strange January for us. Hopefully not too strange for everyone else, but... Well, hopefully it's good strange. Yeah, indeed. So we've got a watch party going on at locals. As always, please consider joining us there. And we have the rent to pay right at the top of the hour with three carefully chosen sponsors that if you hear us reading ads, you know that we have carefully vetted the products or the services being offered. In this case, it's three sets of products, all of which are awesome. So without further ado, let us go go forth and pay our rent. We will sally forth whatever that means. Yeah, our first sponsor this week is... You know what sally for? I don't know why Sally has ended. You do it. Our first sponsor is a foraging Sally in, for instance, a tropical bird. I think it's the same. It's the same word. So a foraging Sally. Okay, let's just back up. We're not doing ads at the moment. This is not paid content. The flycatchers are not paid. I'm going to tell the story myself to allow you to, I don't know, save face or something. Okay. But I think it was our first field season as biologists. We had already spent some time in the neotropics traveling together and exploring and actually doing some, and in Madagascar, ending up helping on research projects. But our first summer after our first year of grad school, we were in Costa Rica with a few of the grad students and our professor, John VanderMeer, who had created a field course for us in the style of the Organization for Tropical Studies. Which simply wasn't offering one that year. And although we had both spent some time in tropical forest before, we didn't, there are literally tens of thousands of names to learn in any given forest and no one knows all of them. And we specifically didn't know the birds particularly well. And so I was standing with Dr. VanderMeer at some point and we were watching a bird who had gone forth from a branch and appeared to have been a hawking insectivore, had caught something in the air, an insect in the air, and then gone back. And he said, "That is a foraging Sally." I sort of dutifully wrote down in my"Right in the Rain" notebook, I said,"Okay, that type of bird is called a foraging Sally." And I don't know if I vocalized what I was doing, but he looked at me like I was just an idiot. He said, "No, not the bird. The behavior is a foraging Sally in which you, the bird, sallys forth, forages and goes back. Therefore, when we sally forth, is it not the very same Sally?" I believe it is. And it's not done so much anymore. But back in the day, if you were to do it on a horse, it would be a Mustang Sally. I was trying to help you save face. I think we're back. Okay. Back to the ads. Yes. Which we have not yet become. Nope. We are going to Sally Forth with the ads. Our first sponsor this week is brand new to us as a sponsor. It's Xlear. That's X-L-E-A-R, but pronounced Clear. Xlear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health, and it's a product that we've been using for a while now, made by a company with which we are well familiar. That's again, Xlear, X-L-E-A-R. Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life, more so often than traditional medical advances have. For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, seems obvious to us now, but it wasn't then, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have usually negative effects on human health, clean up the air and water, and people get healthier. Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose. It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person, but it's rare that we get sick through our hands. Rather, we get sick through our mouth and nose. Thus, it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose. Enter Xlear. Xlear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol. That's xylitol with an X, hence Xlear with an X. Xylitol is a five-carbon sugar alcohol. Our bodies naturally contain five-carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose. That's the R and the D in RNA and DNA, respectively. Those are the backbone sugars of those informational molecules that make up all life that we know it on Earth, while most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugars like glucose and fructose. Xylitol is known, xylitol again, a five-carbon sugar alcohol. Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues. In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including for instance strep, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. So again, xylitol in our airways reduces the adhesion of many bacteria and viruses, perhaps all of them, we of course don't know that, but many, including strep, SARS-CoV-2, RSV, and makes it more difficult for them to adhere and make us sick. Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast and easy and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to Bret's conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Xlear on the Inside Rail in November of 2024, or Bret's conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, an osteopath and the inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses last May, May of 2025. We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Xlear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Xlear, once again, X-L-E-A-R. Get Clear online or at your pharmacy, grocery store, or natural products retailer. It's really widely available at this point. You should be able to find it just about anywhere. And start taking six seconds each day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health. Yes. And I will just say that the folks at Clear have been extremely supportive of the medical freedom movement. They're good people in addition to making an excellent product and they have faced the most ridiculous opposition in including in the middle of the panic over SARS-CoV-2, though they demonstrated that it prevented adhesion and therefore caused you to be much less likely to come down with SARS-CoV-2. We're forbidden from saying that publicly by the federal government. They have now won their legal challenge. And of course, you just heard Heather say this, which they are now allowed to say, but the evidence was there. So even at a time when we were turning civilization upside down to prevent the spread of this disease, here you had a product that did prevent the spread of the disease and they were forbidden from saying it. An amazing story. It really is. So again, Clear nasal spray with Xylitol. It's a nasal spray just like if any of you've had, I was going to say inhalers. That's not how inhalers work, is it? It's a nasal spray just twice a day, morning and night. Super simple, super fast. And it seriously reduces the likelihood of when you're exposed, you're going to have those viruses or bacteria actually make you sick. Yes. And they have a version for preventing you from getting sick and a version. If you find yourself becoming sick, a rescue version, I hope they will at some point come out with a version for dyslexics who do not properly understand how you spell this term. If they just spelled it with C, I'd know where to look for it. You know? Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Okay. Our second sponsor this week is ARMRA colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. Here at Dark Arts, we talk frequently about the fact that we live in an age of hyper novelty. Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet and even we can't keep up with the rate of change that we are enacting on ourselves. We are bathed in electromagnetic fields, artificial light, seed oils, microplastics, endocrine disruptors in our air, water, food, and textiles. And there are myriad other modern stressors like overcrowding and having too little control over choices in life. Here's something you can control. Strengthen your immune health with a bioactive whole food that is ARMRA colostrum. All of this hyper novelty can disrupt the signals that your body relies on negatively impacting gut, immune, and overall health. ARMRA colostrum works at the cellular level to bolster your health from within. Colostrum is nature's first whole food, helping to strengthen gut and immune health and fuel performance. ARMRA colostrum is great added to smoothies. I love it with banana and mint and cacao and raw milk. Wilk, I was going to say, but I don't eat raw Wilks. Oh, that does not sound good. No, definitely not put them in smoothies. No. Yep. Not going to show up. I'm going to tell you. It's a great alternative to raw Wilk. Yes. Smoothie. Yeah. But so is just about anything. Yes. True. So that's a low bar. ARMRA colostrum, however, meets a much higher bar. Bovine colostrum can support a healthy metabolism and strengthen gut integrity. And ARMRA colostrum is a bioactive whole food with over 400 functional nutrients, including, but not limited to, immunoglobulins, antioxidants, minerals, and prebiotics. ARMRA colostrum starts with sustainably sourced colostrum for grass-fed cows from their co-op of dairy farms in the United States, and they source only the surplus colostrum after calves are fully fed. Unlike most colostrums on the market, which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, ARMRA colostrum uses an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing calcium and fat to guarantee the highest potency and bioavailability. The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be, wait for it, glyphosate free. And why should that matter? Hang in there, and we'll get to that point once we're done with the ads. People who have used ARMRA's colostrum have reported clearer skin, faster and thicker hair growth, and better mental concentration. In addition, people using ARMRA's colostrum have noticed a decrease in muscle soreness after exercise, better sleep, and fewer sugar cravings. ARMRA colostrum is the real deal. We've got a special offer for the DarkHorse audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to ARMRA.com slash DarkHorse or enter DarkHorse to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's a-r-m-r-a dot com slash DarkHorse. Our final sponsor this week is Caraway. They make high quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware that is excellent for but not limited to making wonderful two egg omelets. Maybe you may- You may be the only person in the world who makes two two eggs. I know. That's why I think of it as a major innovation. Maybe you've made a New Year's resolution to eat better or cook more or decrease your exposure to toxins. You can do all three at once by cooking with Caraway. We're in the cold season now at- Wow, this is showing our northern hemisphere bias. We are on the cold- So is the population distribution of the planet. Excellent point. All right. If you're not in the cold season now, that's kind of on you. It is a time for warming soups and stews, braised and slow cooked cuts of meat and roasted root vegetables. Maybe you're full up on cookies after the holidays, but a nice piece of cake generally hits the spot too. With Caraway, all of this deliciousness from roasting to baking, from a quick omelet, two eggs or otherwise, cooked on the stovetop to a long simmered soup is easy to accomplish. Caraway's cookware and bakeware is functional, beautiful, and non-toxic. It is also easy to clean. What more could you want? Modern life is full of hazards, not least the nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware. We threw out all of our Teflon cookware decades ago because Teflon is toxic. Yet over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from nonstick cookware in their blood. When you cook with Teflon, it only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins. Enter Caraway. Caraway kitchenware is crafted with sustainable non-toxic materials like PSC certified birch wood, premium stainless steel, enameled cast iron, and naturally slick ceramic to help you create safer, healthier home. Create a safer, healthier home. That's what you should do. Caraway makes several lines of non-toxic cookware and bakeware. Our favorites are their stainless steel line and their enameled cast iron. All of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals and their enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors including forest blue. Actually forest blue does not exist. I checked. These pop... What you call forest blue looks to the rest of us like car heart orange. Yeah, it looks nice though. We'll agree to that much. It's beautiful. Yeah, these pots are strong and highly scratch resistant the last generations and Caraway also offers butcher blocks to cut on, glass lids for non-toxic cooking with a view and a bar set which is crafted from rust resistant 304 stainless steel. We're cooking with Caraway and now Zach, our elder son, is two in his first college apartment. He says it's amazing which we know to be true and we know that he will be cooking with it for years to come. Caraway's cookware set... mmm... English again. Gotta remember to stick with English. Caraway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It can save you up to $190 versus buying the items individually. Plus if you visit carawayhome.com slash dh10 you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners so visit carawayhome.com slash dh10 or use the code dh10 at checkout. Caraway non-toxic kitchenware made modern. In case anyone was concerned that you are limited to two egg omelets with Caraway cookware because there is one skillet we have of theirs that is Bret has discovered perfect for two egg omelets. Our younger son Toby whom we sent back to college yesterday... Yeah... was regularly making 10 egg scrambles. I don't know um I don't know if people make 10 egg omelets but he was making 10 egg scrambles because apparently we are told it is bulking season. When he comes home I'm going to teach him... He was just home you know for like three weeks. I know but given some time to reflect you know hours I think when he comes home I should try to a) figure out whether a 10 egg omelet is possible and b) I think he actually prefers the scramble. What does that matter if it's possible it seems like it is a it is a bar worth setting. Not if it's not preferred. I don't see what preferred has to do with it frankly but... Anyway use Caraway to make two egg omelets or 10 egg scrambles and anything in between. There you go. Yeah there you go. Uh shall we start with the glyphosate news? Yeah let's do that. Yeah let's do that. Um okay so actually I did not have queued up here but uh the New York Times um we're gonna we're gonna show the papers um but uh of all places the New York Times is covering and published let's see when is this this is uh January 2nd of this year. A study is retracted renewing concerns about the weed killer Roundup. Problems with a 25 year old landmark paper on the safety of Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate have led to calls for the EPA to reassess the widely used chemical. So as it turns out they're the the main paper that has been used to point out uh and you know direct all naysayers and skeptics to the obvious safety of glyphosate is this one from 2020 and uh if I can have my screen back for a moment so I can show the uh hold on. The obvious safety concerns or lack of safety of glyphosate. Anyway just skip to work. Um okay so here is the the paper in question published in 2000 in regulatory toxicology and pharmacology. At this point I did not have it before. I kind of thought I had but I didn't so it you can't get it I'm sure you can if you if you work hard and use um way back machine or something but at this point all standardly available copies of the paper have retracted across every single page which is kind of remarkable um that the you know these people are serious. The paper was called was titled from 2020 from 2000 safety evaluation and risk assessment the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate for humans. Let's just share the uh abstract with the understanding again uh that this work is no longer being vouched for by the journal it's published in nor has any other professional society or journal stepped in and said well actually we're gonna go ahead and um you know unretrite that paper now that that's exactly how it works but um. I have to say retraction is a pretty extreme step lots of papers that don't stand up to scrutiny never get retracted exactly just the literature builds on it and yep that that's a natural process. Retracted is pretty serious. It's very serious and so we're just going to share this um the abstract from this paper from 25 years ago and then then share the retraction notice itself um because there are several reasons for the retraction in this case uh all of which are interesting and none of which strike me as uh that they should be particularly new or surprising at least the DarkHorse audience because this this story sort of has something for everyone with regard to uh what is wrong with science today. Yes in fact um the pesticide story is like right next door to the pharma story and they are connected through Bobby Kennedy. Right. So okay so uh again abstract of this now retracted paper from uh 26 years ago on that purported to uh conclude that glyphosate was safe. Effective I don't know safe for human health. Reviews on the safety of glyphosate and Roundup herbicide that have been conducted by several regulatory agencies and scientific institutions worldwide have concluded that there is no indication of any human health concern. Nevertheless questions regarding their safety are periodically raised. This review was undertaken to produce a current and comprehensive safety evaluation and risk assessment for humans. It includes assessments of glyphosate, its major breakdown product, AMPA, its Roundup formulations and the I don't even know and the something surfactant used in Roundup formulations worldwide. The studies evaluated in this review included the performed this is going to be tough to read um included those performed for regulatory purposes something something something I'm going to just skip a bunch of this because it's actually very hard to read with attraction um listed uh written through it. Multiple lifetime feeding studies have failed to demonstrate any tumorogenic potential for glyphosate. Accordingly it was concluded that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic. Glyphosate, AMPA and PoEA were not tereogenic or developmentally toxic. There were no effects on fertility or reproductive parameters in something generation reproduction studies on and on and on again really hard to read exactly what is being said here. Skipping to the end of the abstract acute risks were assessed by comparison of oral LD50 values to estimated maximum acute human exposure. It was concluded that under present and expected conditions of use Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans. I will the only thing else I'm going to share from the paper itself again retracted published in 2000 along the sort of the gold standard for um what people point to and they want to assure you that glyphosate is safe. The herbicidal properties of glyphosate were discovered by Monsanto company scientists in 1970. It is a non-selective herbicide that inhibits plant growth through interference with the production of essential aromatic amino acids by inhibition of the enzyme enolpyruval shicamate phosphate synthase which is responsible for the biosynthesis of chorismate and intermediate and phenylalanine tyrosine and tryptophan biosynthesis. This pathway for biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids is not shared by members of the animal kingdom making blockage of this pathway an effective inhibitor of amino acid biosynthesis exclusive to plants. So right there at the very beginning of the introduction we have one of the primary claims that is made often about glyphosate and about other herbicides said this only works on plants we assure you or in some cases with some herbicides this only works on monocots right this only can work on grasses or the opposite on dicots and not monocots. So there's often these claims like given the particular way that the molecular mechanism of action is and given that we know we're very very sure that this doesn't exist in pick your clade in this case animals therefore it's totally safe in animals and it's true that we believe that it is true that this pathway for biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids is not shared by us for one thing we know for instance that tryptophan is what we call an essential amino acid essential amino acid being a list of amino acids that we cannot synthesize ourselves and therefore they are essential in our diet. So that much is true but like the most obvious problem that that pops out to me from this and I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this paper having just been made aware of it you know a couple days ago is that we're not just made of us we contain multitudes we have many many in fact you know we have we have so many species of an abundance of individuals of bacteria mostly you know the good bacteria that you will always hear about in our guts and throughout our bodies and I don't I have not found any evidence that we are confident that those bacteria don't have their pathways impaired by glyphosate and in fact I find some evidence that in fact they do. So the human body itself may actually be able to do what it needs to do even in the presence of this ridiculous herbicide but given that we aren't alone like none of us is simply an individual that is only made up of mammal we're also made up of all these bacteria and if it's impairing the ability of our good bacteria to do what they do then it's impairing our ability to do what we do. So we sometimes talk about the textbook version of something a textbook a literal textbook generally presents a simplified version of biological function and the problem is often that the thing that you need to be concerned about isn't described in the textbook. If you look at what the textbook says about the way vaccines work it seems extremely elegant if you understand that there's a manufacturing process that vaccines don't work the way the Jenner vaccine did and that therefore other things have been introduced to compensate for the defects of modern vaccines you understand that the story that the textbook tells isn't right and this strikes me as exactly like this. I can imagine as if I was a bit more naive than I am and I imagine I'm probably naive about a bunch still but there was a bit more naive than I am I can imagine myself confidently saying well this is an elegant pesticide because what it does is it disrupts a pathway that's unique to plants we aren't plants and therefore you should expect this pesticide to be effective when trying to control things in one kingdom without disrupting things in another. Now the track record of glyphosate is so appalling with respect to disrupting animals and environments that I know the textbook explanation is dead on arrival but the point is you can see how this paper is structured to lead you to a what would be a comforting assessment if it were isolated from all of the things that aren't being said here. Yes and in 1970 when glyphosate was discovered invented or when its herbicidal qualities were discovered I think it had already been invented before then we did not have the kind of knowledge that we have now about the you know the fact that all mammals contain multitudes that we in fact are conglomerations of individuals that are that include many many species of an abundance of individuals of bacteria but that doesn't make those people back then any less culpable because the idea that at any moment we know everything we know everything we need to know we know everything that there is to know can never be true so we always we always have to assume that there are ways that things can act in complex systems that we have not yet considered therefore claims that are meant to mollify to calm to sedate to to make you feel like this is just fine don't worry about it are very often covers for a hubris that is utterly unworked. Yes and and we've discussed many times the distinction between highly complicated systems and complex systems and so the overarching problem here is that any time you're taking let's say a pesticide introducing it to a food crop you are assuming that you understand all of the things that might be disrupted when the chances that you do are effectively sorry effectively zero so you know the what one would need to do is if you're going to introduce such a thing you would need massive work on the tail end tracking the harms and most important of all that work has to be done by people who don't have a conflict of interest so they can compare the well-being of populations that are exposed to this to populations that aren't and say well was there a health effect rather than you know corporate goons who are going to arrive at a preordained conclusion because it's how they pay their mortgage. Yes so speaking of conflict of interest let's get to why this paper was attracted first off let's just take a look at authorship published in 2000 with three authors which is a relatively small list of authors for a molecular paper although it's a preview paper so such papers often have fewer authors listed at New York Medical College University of I don't know if that's going to be Utrecht maybe because it's retracted yeah Utrecht and then Kentuck's Health Sciences International in Canada so we've got representatives three scientists out of the United States out of the Netherlands and Canada authoring this paper and back in 2000 and then we have fast forward to the retraction notice published just now in again regulatory toxicology and pharmacology for for the paper that I was just showing you with that same authorship. So why let's just read some of their reasons for why this article has been retracted at the request of handling co-editor and chief professor Martin Vandenberg Denberg excuse me concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors I the handling co-editor and chief of regulatory toxicology and pharmacology reached out to the sole surviving author Gary M Williams and sought explanation of the various concerns which have been listed in detail below we did not receive any response from professor Williams so two of the three authors are dead and one of them is not responding to requests for explanation of a paper which presumably helped make his reputation because it is the paper that for 25 years has been pointed to as evidence that glyphosate is safe hence this article is formally retracted from the journal this decision has been made after careful consideration etc etc subtraction is based on several critical issues that are considered to undermine the academic integrity of this article and its conclusions one carcinogenicity and genotoxicity assessments the article's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto which have failed to demonstrate tumorigenic potential the handling co-editor and chief also became aware that by the time of writing of this article in the journal the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies that were already done at the time of writing the review in 1999 pause for a second that 2000 paper that has now been retracted was explicitly a review article it did not seek it did not undertake any new experiments it did not seek therefore to generate any new data it was explicitly a review of existing data so that the public could the public and the scientific community could know what it was that was actually known when taken in a collective form a review paper thus has as perhaps its primary necessary goal that it actually successfully completely reviews all of the existing literature very first reason for the retraction here is that what they reviewed was unpublished Monsanto which is the maker of glyphosate studies and none of the actually published reviews that had already been published at the time of submission to the journal which not right there means that this was not a review paper at all yeah it was an anti-review i will say um good on the handling editor for retracting it but this is a failure of the journal this is not something that came to light later this was a failure of the journal to recognize that this review article failed to review the literature in question well i mean in this yeah this gets back to one of the problems of peer review of course um that back when you know back when we were professors i was um you know somewhat often asked to peer review articles and i did so i took it as a as part of my responsibility to sort of the academy even though it is explicitly unremunerated and it takes a lot of work and uh and there you know there there's sort of two approaches that editors can take when sending papers out for peer review they can send papers out to people who are doing work exactly in the domain where the research is being done and thus they are very likely to know if anything has been missed for instance oh there are review papers out that that you haven't reviewed here however you end up with this circle jerk of of scientists potentially who okay there's a community of call it 440 maybe even 400 scientists depending on what the field is uh who are all working in the same in the same area and if it becomes clear that one of them yes peer review is supposed to be anonymous but almost always people can tell if it becomes clear that one or a handful of scientists are actually being rigorous in their peer review and pointing out flaws and causing people's papers not to be accepted by the journals then there is going to be retribution and so um the the problem with sending peer review with sending papers out to peers within the same sub-discipline is that you have a game theoretic problem in which unless you can be assured that you are actually completely anonymous and if the community is very small how could you possibly be honest review is taken as uh basically actionable for retribution or you can send papers out to people sort of more broadly in the field and then they're less likely to know that oh actually there are reviews out there so again it's unremunerated work there's a problem if you send it to people who are most likely to know if the if the review has been done well and then there are problems um if you send it out to people who are less likely to feel beholden to the authors of the paper but less likely you know what those people are likely to be able to do is assess the actual rigor of the work in a review paper that's going to be you know less interesting it's not going to be about experimental design and hypothesis generation and all of this it's going to be just about like are the statistics done correctly which is an important part of peer review but uh it it minimizes the role of the peer reviewers but even so we're talking about a paper they've had a quarter century of feedback on this paper and to the extent an editor should have known that this was missing important literature shouldn't have taken much to figure that out if they had made the mistake of publishing it and then discovered that because angry letters arriving at the journal they should have quickly retracted it and so i again would point out something's wrong it should be no surprise something is wrong in the state of toxicology um and it's going to involve economic feedback loops almost certainly um i would also point out one of the things that is inadvertently demonstrated if mon santo running studies couldn't find carcinogenicity and all sorts of people who were not at mon santo found carcinogenicity what does that tell you about mon santo studies right they're not science that's what it tells you right that's right okay so um you know there's a few more details about that first reason for retraction uh but uh but that's a big one right okay they just they don't appear to have actually reviewed the literature in in a paper whose sole job was to review the literature should have been dead on arrival over that yeah exactly two second uh reason for retraction of this 25 year old paper lack of authorial independence litigation the united states revealed correspondence from mon santo suggesting that the authors of the article were not solely responsible for writing its content it appears from that correspondence that employees of mon santo may have contributed to the writing of the article without proper acknowledgement as co-authors this lack of transparency raises serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the office of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented now i did not go and uh try to figure out when the litigation in the u.s that revealed this was presumably wasn't right then it might be quite recently i don't know but this points to direct conflict of infant direct conflict of interest with regard to what in every single scientific paper out there is explicitly expected to be stated that you you have to you have to state any conflicts with regard to finances or other work that you are doing or have done and if there are other people who have contributed to the work they need to be explicitly either you know made authors um or acknowledged and uh there is if i remember correctly um at some point when i'm not on my screen here i will look i think in the acknowledgments of the original paper there's a vague unspecified unnamed mention of help from mon santo employees you know by help they mean they went ahead and gave us our conclusions and wrote most of it for us well i guess so okay uh third um reason for the retraction of this 25 year old paper misrepresentation of contributions this is very similar to the last one the apparent contributions of mon santo employees as co-writers to this article were not explicitly mentioned as such in the acknowledgments section this omission suggests that the authors may have misrepresented their unique roles and the collaborative nature of the work presented the failure to disclose the involvement of mon santo personnel and the writing process compromises the academic independence of the presented findings and illusions drawn in the article regarding carcinogenicity four questions of financial compensation further correspondence with mon santo disclosed during litigation indicates that the authors may have received financial compensation from mon santo for their work on this article which was not disclosed as such in this publication this raises significant ethical concerns and calls into question the apparent academic objectivity of the authors in this publication which concerns and questions have not been answered goes so hold on i just want to point out there's a whole there's a whole range of games that can be played and there are a whole range of countermeasures that have been deployed to try to prevent them yes yes do you have a conflict of interest you have to declare it um what did all of the authors do on this paper you have to say the how was the work funded how how was the work funded imagine all of the games you can play if you can have an author of the paper who is not named somebody can write the paper other people can claim they wrote the paper so let's say i have a product and i want a paper that says the product has awesome impacts on my health right well i can write this fraudulent paper and then i can have other people i can say i don't even want to be an author you be an author it goes on your cv you get the credit they publish the thing yeah then i say wow my product look there's even scientific work that says it has awesome effects on your health but of course it wasn't that so and given the penny any economy of academia where low authored papers add to your cv and add to your credibility as a scientist even if they're crap papers and even if you didn't write them at all people people who are ethically compromised which is to say most people are likely to take someone up on that offer hey i've got this paper it's already written already like already vetted by well me um you want to slap your name on it so you can get it published sure that's a deal that a lot of people accept and you know there's a whole range of ways that you can contribute to a paper that wouldn't seem to an outsider like they were real contributions but are so you we have seen this proliferation because work has become more complicated we've seen the number of authors on technical papers go way up but that's not entirely about the complexity it's also about um it cost me if i've got a paper with 10 authors it cost me very little to give you the gift of being an author on this paper for a contribution that doesn't really warrant it and what will i get from you maybe you'll smile on my paper my next paper in review so anyway these net these incestuous networks yeah develop and the countermeasures are manifestly inadequate they're inadequate they're too slow um they're trying to keep up with a game that's evolving much more rapidly than the countermeasures are um i have begun to see not on these you know molecular biology papers that are authored by like many dozens of people but on papers that have many authors something between let me say just like five and twelve or something increasingly now i will see a description of what each author's contribution was yeah um you know historically um the last author on a multi-authored paper was basically the p.i the principal investigator of the lab um he was the one he usually was the one interested in the work in the first place uh drove the experimental design at a broad level you know wrote and received the the federal grants um but often um unfortunately modern science modern scientists even lived in the most honest and remarkable of them get trapped into more and more bureaucratic roles the more advanced they get like field scientists don't get to go out in the field anymore lab scientists don't get to spend time at the bench anymore what they've become is people seeking money from the federal government and so it's their postdocs and their graduate students who are doing the work and so you'll see you know on say a sixth authored paper uh you know the first two authors maybe you know ran the first part of the experiment and and did most of the writing and the third author did the stats and the fourth author you know did a bunch of the grant work because it was the undergraduate in the lab and then like the final author was the actual p.i um you know who without whom none of it would have happened but didn't actually do any of the work involved yeah it's actually so may not be able to actually vouch for it it's a it's a genuinely difficult question somebody may have done foundational work they provide the environment in which the work gets done they didn't contribute to the experiment is that a contribution or isn't it right um you know yeah this is not an easy problem it's not an easy problem to solve you could also you know let's say you have a case where you wanted to measure the length of micro satellites and you needed a primer uh to uh to get the sequence measured somebody may supply the primer had nothing to do with your research question but they made the primer yeah without which the research couldn't be done couldn't be done right so is that is that worthy of an of a line in the acknowledgments or is that worthy of authorship well if you've or if you've got a four person authored paper it's probably not worthy of authorship if it's if you've already got 20 authors on the thing slap it in there and like let them add that line to their cv and this is why you have people you know early and mid careers with you know hundreds of papers um you know i i once asked a colleague uh about some some work in a paper that they were an author on and literally and i've reported the story before but this is a particular story but i have many others like it and i know it's not unique this person said to me i don't know what that means i said what do you mean you don't know what that means you're an author on the paper said well i didn't write that part i said i don't i don't care you're an author on the paper so why didn't it's not the part i was responsible for it you know he he felt no no shame no embarrassment at all about actually saying not only am i like dude did i not write that i don't know what it means maybe i don't even agree with it sure it's in a paper that my name is on but i wrote this little piece over here which was also crap by the way but you know like there's just no culpability so what is a paper you know we're we're at a we're at a level where it it raises questions about what is a scientific paper and if it doesn't hold together as a as a coherent mass where at the very least every single author can tell you what the hypothesis was and what work was done and how it was analyzed and what the results were and what that means in the context of what else is known in science then i'm sorry it shouldn't qualify yes it actually reminds me of the thing you sometimes say that nobody at the cocktail party would uh be proud of being illiterate but people frequently proclaim pride over being enumerate in this case you get this weird kind of pride inside of research science where people are basically evidencing that yeah i know how the game runs and i'm good at it and you know yeah i didn't write that part of the paper and they don't realize that they're telling on themselves you're actually saying that you gave up on science a long time ago and you're just playing some stupid game well that's exactly it hey look at me i'm so good at the game of science like and clearly you don't care about actual science yeah like that you know you you can get one congratulations you're good at the game but you're not good at the actual thing yeah and the game actually destroys the actual thing that's that's what gets people like you and me upset by this sort of behavior is it's not like that game continues and it's some separate thing it's it you know drenches the literature in things that masquerade as if they're informative when in fact you in fact you don't even know what they are right right okay so um let's keep going through there's uh eight points of the reason that the uh co whatever founding uh i don't remember the editor handling the co-handling editor of currently of regulatory toxicology of pharmacology uh is retracting has retracted uh the foundational 2000 paper uh which supposedly established the safety of glyphosate in in humans number five ambiguity and research findings this article has been widely regarded as a hallmark paper in the discourse surrounding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate and roundup however the lack of clarity regarding which parts of the article were authored by monsanto employees creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn specifically the article asserts the absence of carcinogenicity associated with glyphosate or its technical formulation roundup it is unclear how much of the conclusions of the authors were influenced by external contributions of monsanto without proper acknowledgments again related to the previous several but a distinct point it also strikes me though as very weak tea at the point you know that monsanto has written part of this paper and it's not acknowledged as having authorship the paper's a fraud well but that's what they that's what he's that's what they've done here right but he's saying one of eight points right but this is five i know but he's he's saying we don't know which parts monsanto wrote the real answer is monsanto wrote parts of this paper period the end it's a fraud um and i i i disagree i think i think being careful being as accurate and less important but as precise as possible when you can be especially when you're retracting you know there's going to be major pushback to this retraction i'm sure there's going to be explanations for why okay fine you retracted that paper but it was a good paper after all right and so being very very careful about what is and is not known uh is is valuable well i don't want us to get lost in the weeds here but what part of the paper would be acceptable for monsanto to have written that's not that he's not saying that some part of it is he's well he's saying it's not clear which parts and i'm just saying this editor i think you're misunderstanding did not spot that this review failed to review the literature and this is 26 years later this is not the editor who was involved in accepting this paper in 2000 this is not i took handling editor to be the person responsible for this paper maybe if that's not the case i doubt it if that's not the case then then i take back my i didn't look into that i i i would be shocked if there was still the same handling editor well i i agree it's impressive if no i i don't think so no um but that's uh it hadn't even occurred to me that it could be so i didn't look it up um six uh sixth point in uh the reason for retraction of this paper from 2020 weight of evidence approach the authors employed a weight of evidence approach in their assessment of glyphosate's carcinogenicity and genotoxicity while this methodology is sound in principle the potential biases introduced by undisclosed contributions from monsanto employees in the exclusion of other existing long-term carcinogenicity studies may have skewed the interpretation of the data the author's critical analysis of both unpublished and published studies must therefore be viewed with caution here to object again to the cautious language may have skewed viewed with caution this is you know this this is how scientific papers are written yeah but this is the problem um no no no no that is not the problem no writing with with clarity and conservatism and caution is not the problem the problem is no no exactly the problem is fraud and the point is that the caution belonged in the other direction the caution should know the caution belonged in 2000 right exactly and that's having failed to exercise you're holding the current retraction accountable for yes and yes because for the same reason that a grudging acknowledgement this this i think this this journal fell down on its obligation to the to the public and people died because of it so my feeling is this needs to be accurate and the way it needs to be accurate is to say monsanto authored parts of this paper the authors failed to acknowledge literature that was relevant that monsanto didn't author this paper was a fraud and and that's how it should be stated and the problem is so you think that having more words makes this week you think no but you want a three sentence retraction no well first of all i would accept a three sentence retraction but then there's no detail that's fine then we know it's not okay you can list all of these things but i don't like hedging in there and the question is you know being careful is not hedging it's it's saying it we don't know which parts of this paper monsanto authored if monsanto was not an author on the paper the fact that it authored any part of it is in and of itself yes invalidating of the entire thing he doesn't say that that's not true he's just saying it's possible that the authors on the paper did write some of it we don't know but clearly monsanto was involved in writing some of it and that's unacceptable well look we have a completely broken academic environment in my opinion part of it has to do with the places that things hide whether it's long authorship lists or caution that has been reversed and the fact is the public is entitled to understand how bad a failure this was and this was a catastrophic failure mind you a catastrophic failure like this can happen when human life and limb is not at stake but in this particular case yes human life and limb people die from this pesticide and this journal has responsibility because it completely failed to do the job a journal is supposed to do making sure that the papers it publishes are accurate and if they're not retracting them quickly so the fact that this took a quarter of a century is i think we're learning why it took a quarter of a century in the cautious language of the retraction i i don't think that's that's fair um at all however um the the only uh the only way that i think that that is a fair uh critique here is if uh this editor martin vanderberg was the handling editor back then and has been sort of sitting on growing evidence all along and a very quick uh ai look uh says nope uh he he was not uh so i would be surprised at that duration at the same journal yeah but i don't know what the word handling is doing there if he wasn't the one who handled this he's handling it now that's i mean that that's that's a term that shows up in in journal editors that's that's not that's not new to me um you know it can mean different things in different contexts but um i'm not i'm not that that does not inherently come with a timestamp from before no but i mean look again we're in the weeds but if you think about the reason that i took handling to be important here is that the handling editor suggests one interpretation of it is that it was the editor who handled this paper why is this editor in charge of this retraction rather than the editorial board because he was the handling editor maybe that's not maybe it's not true but it isn't it well it is an interpretation to that word the word is okay but i so i i just allowed that there was one condition by which i would allow for what i think is a is a very ungenerous and frankly not helpful reaction that you're having and on you know my first look suggests very strongly that that condition does not hold that this editor was not the editor uh who accepted and shepherded this paper back in 2000 and your your position hasn't moved no my my i i allowed that there was one condition that would move my my position and it it's it's not true and um i just think i think this is this is massively important this is going to get major pushback uh i'll bet that we do not see so so you know one thing that is also true that is related in the new york times article is that in 2026 uh the epa is uh i don't know if it's certification or whatever of glyphosate as safe for use on food crafts for humans is coming up for review so this comes at a critical moment like the epa needs to take this not just into consideration i just be like oh actually we know nothing that says that this garbage is safe for humans and we need to you need to radically change our recommendations for its use i would say get it off the market entirely but you know the timing is important it's powerful it is a full retraction you can see i can't even read the paper um you know i couldn't even read all of the abstract because they've stamped retracted across the front of it uh you know i don't i i think asking for more asking for it to have happened earlier you know this is like you're like why now like no no this is not this is not look i have one interest and one interest only in this which is what happens now should be designed to make sure this kind of failure never happens again yes and to the extent that the journal minimizes its responsibility that is a problem what needs to happen is this needs to be so embarrassing to the journal the level of egregiousness of the failure here is so large this needs to be so embarrassing to the journal that no other journal would contemplate making an error like this that other journals will think oh crap you know what we need again i think i think you're misunderstanding what it looks like on the inside of peer review that uh you know the best journals the ones that are actually trying to um publish good science to to other scientists are overworked overburdened they're asking unpaid academics to do a bunch of the work and you know most of the time they don't get responses at all and then they get and so you know don't do this again don't do don't do what again like how like apparently a bunch of what has been revealed that is the basis for this retraction came out through litigation that that happened well after this was published right now but you know the one thing that i have read in this retraction um that could have been known at the time was presumably known by some people and was not caught by the editors and the peer reviewers of the journal in 2000 is that there were published studies that showed carcinogenicity and toxicity of glyphosate that were not included in the review that seems you know that it seems obvious that that needed to be in a review uh but how do you guarantee that that is like without redoing the work without every time a paper is going to be published someone at the journal itself redoes the work to make sure that everything is as it is claimed like it's it is no it is a maybe intractable problem to guarantee that all the work is going to be x okay but let's take that okay the work would have to be much greater than the available labor in order to get a proper study that would say this thing is safe enough to put it on food crops and my point is fine if you can't do the work or if you can't review the work to make sure that this product is safe to be on food products it shouldn't be and the fact that the journal isn't about safe on food products like this is a this is a basic oh yes it is it is playing a role in the process that arguably makes us safe and because it is not doing that role well we are not safe so my point is whatever the problems are in the academy whatever the level of overworkness of the people involved they don't have a right to do shoddy work when life and limb is on the on the line frankly they don't have a right to do shoddy work when only the future of science is on the line even if we were talking about cosmology you if you don't have the labor to make sure the thing is done right most of the time then you shouldn't have a journal and so i am in sense what so you know the problem then becomes worse there are already you know by by many measures too many people with appropriate degrees trying to publish too many papers because the one metric because the thing that's easy to count is how many papers do you know yep and there aren't enough journals even now to to to publish all the papers that people want to publish the fact i mean we've talked about uh you know more chronic issues with regard to paper mills and uh you know fake people being put on papers and being and you know i know this problem is about to get way worse right the papers are going to be generated entirely not by humans uh and you know the work itself may be fabricated right but i think your question go uh first of all i have said in many different places i'm i don't think you disagree with me that the system is so broken it can't be fixed here we're getting to peer into a place where that brokenness resulted in humans getting cancers that they were assured would not be downstream of this product and do i think that you know the population of the academy can be saved by uh by reforming the system i don't i'm not particularly concerned about them because they haven't stood up against this fraud en masse as they should have so no i don't i don't think you can rescue these journals i don't think you can rescue the faculty i don't think you can rescue this process every time we peer into it we see that this is its product a bunch of people solving their own little game theoretic problems about how they're going to get through their career results in other people dying of cancer who were told that the product that they were using was safe and it's not acceptable so well you're really going to like point seven okay yeah uh so seven of eight of the of the reasons that the paper uh from 2020 has been retracted is historical context and influence the paper has significant impact on regulatory decision making regarding glyphosate and roundup for decades given its status as a cornerstone in the assessment of glyphosate safety it is imperative that the integrity of this review article and its conclusions are not compromised the concerns specified here necessitate this attraction to preserve the scientific integrity of the journal go off no i mean i think we've said it all yes i don't like this hedging voice and whoever you are who wrote this you owed the public better you should have just said it straight we screwed up we published a paper you shouldn't have published we didn't retract it in a timely fashion and even if that timely fashion was as soon as discovery in court revealed that the paper wasn't what it pretended to be it should have been retracted then and the fact that you're hedging and at this point you know you want a pat on the back for retracting it no there should people died i'm sorry they died and that's on you okay so i don't see hedging in this attraction i disagree with you about that but let's just read the the final point eight conclusion in light of the aforementioned issues the handling co-editor in chief lost confidence in the results and conclusions of this article and believes that the retraction of this article is necessary to maintain the integrity of the journal the scientific concerns regarding the lack of carcinogenicity only derived from monsanto studies concerns regarding ghost authorships and potential conflicts of interest none of which have been responded to are sufficient to warrant this action any of those points would have been sufficient to more of this action lack of lack of using non-monsanto data or ghost authorship like either of those yes certainly reason not to publish in the first place of the ghost authorship had they had no way to know that at the time but any of these points would have been sufficient to retract we appreciate the understanding of the scientific community regarding this matter and remain committed to upholding the highest standards of integrity in published research in regulatory toxicology and pharmacology yep oh i'm glad he appreciates my understanding i'm part of the scientific community oh wait oh you're gonna you're gonna like the disclaimer oh no yeah it comes with a disclaimer as handling co-editor in chief i emphasize that this attraction does not imply a stance on the ongoing debate regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate around up but originates from directly following the cope guidelines which he has to say that that has to be his position that has to be the journal's position because they haven't published counter evidence it certainly doesn't need to be stated um it's obvious this paper should never have existed okay we all can figure out what that means right most of us those of us who need to figure out what that means can figure out what that means the added hedge is uh is preposterous but anyway i'm sure it was written from under his desk i that's not fair no it's fair that's totally not fair people died here is a it wasn't him no but he is so you you've got you've got a paper co-authored by three people co-authored by court publicly co-authored by three people apparently ghost authored by like the entire staff of mont santo yep okay only one of those dudes is still living only one of the publicly authored dudes is still living he's not responding to requests for like what the hell did you do obviously the ghost authors are invisible to us there's no tracking them down although maybe in litigation maybe you know maybe those court documents reveal some stuff those are the people who oh i agree at whom you should be directing your ire right no no it's there's plenty to go around the fact is you had people submit a fraudulent paper and those people have done something utterly unforgivable in light of what the topic is right these people have blood on their hands the journal failed to do the job of the journal i don't want the journal hedging about the failure to do the job of the journal it's all too common and it has had a horrifying impact on the way civilization functions on the health of the public i just want people to take responsibility for their part entirely i have some sympathy for an editor who wasn't there at the point that this paper was published who now has to clean up the mess but what i want them to do is say here's where we screwed up i want them to do it without hedging and i think that that's a reasonable thing to do it's it's what it's what you would do interpersonally if you had screwed up in some way and you were explaining to somebody else i made an error you wouldn't hedge and the hedging doesn't belong here anymore but interpersonally like i i am not responsible for the sins of my ancestors okay so if i am now the editor at a journal a job that i took i don't know when right but let's say 12 and a half years ago okay half again 50 of the time since the paper was published it is my job to oversee the journal and when i find evidence that there has been fraud in the journal from well before my time uh to work hard to get that fixed but it is not my personal responsibility to apologize for actions that were not mine i didn't i didn't know i was not involved in accepting and accepting the paper sending it out for peer review that turned out to be wildly insufficient um for knowing things that no one knew at the time outside of mon santa which turned out to be released in court records years later so i don't know why this is signed by an individual editor if the journal made an error the people who are running it aren't the people who were there it could have been done as the editorial staff i mean he's he's written it in which like he's saying that he's now seeing these things right so i i get the form but the question is if this is you know a quarter century in the past mistakes were made by a different staff they are now trying to correct it resurrect the the status of the journal in the public's mind that's all well and good i would do that by not hedging i don't you know the fact that he's not responsible for those errors is of little consequence it's you know yeah if he had not hedged then i would i guess i would like i mean i don't think i think we're gonna drive off the rest of our audience but i i want to know where you saw the hedge i didn't let's take the one sentence i remember at this moment okay the idea that we don't know which parts of the paper mon santa wrote the fact that mon santa wrote parts of the paper and was not acknowledged as an author makes this fraudulent in light of the consequences of being wrong about toxicology it makes it dangerous the lack of clarity regarding which parts of the article were authored by mon santo employees creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn right that's certainty but yeah uncertainty about the integrity no they can they they conducted a fraud and it's one thing to be defrauded it's another thing to hedge in the aftermath of it this should just simply have been retracted there there's obviously ample reason i disagree i think um simply retracted without any of this without our ability to see any of what went into it that would be ridiculous they can enumerate each of those things which they've done without the hedging there's not this isn't hedging creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions drawn creates uncertainty the conclusions drawn were fraudulent there it's not creates uncertainty this was a fraudulent paper can we the next part assuming you don't have further you want to go here i think well but i think the whole thing um connects let us talk about what has happened in these trials in a general sense what trials the trials where mon santo has been sued court trials legal trials the same ones that reveal i thought you're talking about randomized no no no court trials so numerous people have sued mon santo which has now been purchased by bear um bear in this case actually is a bit in the position of your editor who apparently was not at the journal at the time this fraud was perpetrated on but has inherited responsibility yes legal responsibility although they have they have plenty of sins in their past wow do they wow do they but nonetheless bear made a mistake it purchased mon santo including all of their liabilities and wait also he's not my editor go on all right sorry start start over the the the court trials okay what happens is and the first one of the trials that was one was actually one he was not the only lawyer but bobby kennedy was one of the lawyers on the initial trial in which a verdict against mon santo for cancer caused by glyphosate was won by a guy named dwayne johnson i do we know do we know i do but i've forgotten uh it was um ballpark like first decade of this like right after this got published or uh yeah could you look it up um what do i look up though i don't know dwayne johnson verdict against mon santo um but i want to make a point to you about what's going on here so the general pattern is this individuals sue mon santo for injury done by glyphosate oftentimes these are people who work with a lot of it in an agricultural context or their landscape this is 2018 2018 so they sue oh wait so dwayne johnson isn't the lawyer he was he was the plaintiff yes the plaintiff yeah oh i remember this yes non hodgkin lymphoma he got a ton of money from them well that's what i want to get okay he got a ton of money i think something like 280 million dollars 39.2 million this is again just first past chat gpt 39.2 million in compensatory damages and 250 million in punitive day except guess what the punitive portion was later reduced by the trial judge on appeal the final award was significantly lowered 20 million to late no reductions to around 78.5 and later to about 20.5 after appellate decisions okay so the jury looked at this guy's yeah terminal cancer and awarded him 280 million dollars it was reduced later by two successive judgments to 20 million dollars he is still alive and he was given two years to live um when he was first diagnosed he's significantly outlasted his prognosis but nonetheless this pattern where a huge award is given by the jury in the aftermath of one of these cases and then it is later reduced has been the consistent pattern with judgments against monsanto now i want to talk a little bit about why that is is so i want to hear that but what do we know about whether or not that tends to be a pattern with very large punitive damage awards by trials trial by jury trials that are later reassessed in appellate court that is exactly the pattern for all across all yeah not just monsanto right so a jury of your peers hears about what some awful corporation did to you awards you a huge amount of money because you're in a state that has punitive damages not all of them do as you will remember we were limited in our ability to sue um the state uh when the evergreen meltdown happened and happened to us because washington does not have punitive damages punitive damages are designed to um punish the offending entity so that it will stop with the egregious behavior now i'm going to argue that we do them incorrectly and that there's a fix that needs to happen in order for the system to work but i'll get to that in a minute the reason that these judgments get reduced is because of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment okay didn't see that coming yep you want to put the uh 14th amendment up so the 14th amendment for those who have uh forgotten which was part of reconstruction and it was designed to protect slaves former slaves all persons born or naturalized in the united states and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the united states and of the state they reside no state shall make or enforce any law such uh any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the united states nor shall any state deprive any person of life liberty or property without due process of law or deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws so we don't really see monsanto in there do you no and i don't remember what you said about what part of the 14th amendment is being used to justify the minimization of jury judgments it's the equal protection clause at the end okay now the reason that this yeah because it's preposterous okay what's going on here is that corporations you'll remember are um persons corporate personhood a widely misunderstood property the reason that corporations are persons and they do need to be persons is to bind them you need to have a the ability of a corporation to sign a contract and then to be able to enforce that contract against them so that personhood was designed to make them persons for purposes such as contracting and suing it was not designed to give them the protection that is granted to all citizens so what's going on here is that the courts have a kind of pseudo sophistication in which they look at the ratio between compensatory damages and punitive damages and they consider things above nine to one to be excessive now this is insane that still doesn't get you to a reduction of more than an order of magnitude of total damage is awarded um i can't get you there myself the ratio the ratio problem doesn't get you anywhere close to that reduction well the general property is reduction based on a skewed ratio of uh compensatory damages which are scaled to the harm that was done to you um and the punitive damages now let's talk about why so uh hold on there are three things that um are taken to be uh reasons to reduce these verdicts one is the degree of reprehensible of the defendant's contact two is compensation uh uh to civil criminal penalties for similar misconduct so they compare to other uh penalties and the ratio between compunative and pensatory compensatory damages here's the problem there is a general flaw in our legal structure which is that penalties are scaled to the offense not to the capacity of the individual or the corporation to endure the penalty so bill gates does not suffer the same fear of getting a speeding ticket that i do yeah because there's no speeding ticket you could give him that would make you know the amount of time that he has to sit there with his window rolled down is way more expensive to him than any ticket he could be given so there are no effective speeding tickets for bill gates right in fact the best thing you can do is draw out the process while you've got his window down that'll hurt him um right so a he doesn't drive himself the juries are responding to the evil done to these people dwayne johnson got non-hodgkin's lymphoma from uh glyphosate having not been told that that was a possibility and in fact being assured that it wasn't right the jury was incensed by this and gave him a big punitive award and then the court said well that big punitive award is out of scale the problem is what you want punitive damages to do is to alter the future behavior of the offending entity you want monsanto to not just simply budget for lawsuits you want them to stop selling glyphosate because they know it gives people cancer right the award has to be large enough to do that so the jury's ire is actually right and the courts are wrong to be reducing these things because what they do is they turn it into a cost of doing business but um i'm curious about the larger trend that you say is true which is that across the board you have large jury judgments being reduced in appellate courts yep that is uh the big guys own the system and my claim is that we need a wholesale rethink of this process punitive damages are vitally important to the system doing what it's supposed to do when you it should not be a cost of doing business when you cause somebody cancer it should cause you to rethink whether or not you can afford to have your product on the market at all in order for that to be true these things need to be scaled to the degree of evil and the size of the entity being punished right and what i mean i i remember us discovering uh after our lives had blown up on us and evergreen had turned on us uh that washington didn't have punitive damages perhaps being told by our lawyers who were you know very good at what they did but they're like there's just not much we can do yeah um i don't think that either of us looked into at the time and maybe you know like why do the states vary so much in with regard to um the ability to enact punitive damages and it i would have guessed uh that historically states that were tending to vote blue would be more likely to have punitive damages and so was surprised to find that washington state had none yeah i don't know what the history is it's bound bound to be interesting but when its corporations were dealing with the 14th amendment should not apply this is not the founders gave corporations personhood to bind them not to enable them with the rights of a citizen did the founders do that yeah they did because there was some because they had there was some interpretation more recently that got a lot of attention oh it was the citizens united in the 90s or something corporations right to free speech is like equivalent to that of an individual so it's preposterous in order to make the system work a you need to have punitive damages b they need not to be scaled to the amount of harm i mean you know the harm to monsanto needs to be large enough that they don't do harm to dwayne johnson in the way that they did um so you need massive punitive damages now it may be that some of those punitive damages should not go to the person who was harmed right to the extent that the court awards i think part of the reason that we um hiccup on this is that it's not obvious if you punish monsanto at a level that makes it think twice about what it's doing it's not obvious that that's relevant to what the person who was injured the person who was injured deserves some of those damages but in order you know if you're it it's possible that those funds should go elsewhere in other words the general harm that was done to the public maybe it should go into a fund for other people who've been harmed something like that i'm not arguing all of it some of the punitive damages i don't i think that's i think you're asking for trouble really i mean you're effectively talking about socializing the the damages no what i'm talking about is the purpose of punitive damage is is to punish and and it's punitive versus what would be compensatory compensatory um compensated for harm yeah but yeah i just that the uh the strong allergic reaction to uh socializing of um of funds that have been earned through trial um in this case an actual trial um i feel like i i don't i don't think any good will come of it well that's possible but my feeling is um if the court's purpose is to punish it is not obvious that the best way to punish it is to transfer that wealth to the individual who was egregiously harmed in other words if you've got if dwayne johnson is representative of a thousand people who never sued because they couldn't or uh because the their case was less clear whatever it was then it's not obvious that the huge windfall and mind you he didn't get a huge windfall he got 20 million for his life being radically shortened um but the huge windfall that has been scaled to the size of the thing that you need to punish it's not obvious that that is relevant to the individual who's been harmed to a certain extent he he deserves to be more than made well i believe but the purpose to punish has to be maintained and it may be that the public is actually less enthusiastic about punitive damages because they see it as uh a windfall but i don't i don't see any evidence the public is not enthusiastic about punitive damages because you know you you you report that jury trials keep on producing these big judgments well and then it's the appellate courts that reduce them right you know i do wonder how it is the state like washington has no punitive damages at all um but i don't i don't see any evidence that what you're saying is true and i think the idea of um yeah we're gonna let the guy who's obviously harmed go to court and take all of the risk and then we're gonna claw back some of that for you know unspecified others like that just sounds like socialism and it's stupidest um no i think actually the pattern is the one i'm describing and it makes sense because if you're in the jury box and the uh prosecuting attorneys are presenting you with the evidence that not only did monson mon santo distribute a dangerous product that it knew it was dangerous that there was a discussion about whether or not the public needed a better warning and they decided against it you know if you have that evidence in front of you it incenses you that's very different than the public at home reading whatever they're reading that hears that somebody you know got i forget what the judgment was for the hot coffee that got spilled in the drive-through window but you're like hey wait a minute but then you look at the case and you're like oh actually you know once you see the discussion where somebody knew that somebody was going to get scalded and decided that's fine you know how how bad could it possibly be um you understand why these why these punitive damages are there in the first place but the public in general doesn't they hear these giant numbers and uh there's well i mean so i don't i don't know the legal system at all it's an entirely social construct it's entirely human construct and so not being able to derive anything from first principles i don't i only know what i know and it's not much um and you are proposing you are you are noting a problem uh which you say is widespread not limited to things like the mon santo judgments in which uh juries of one's peers come down with large amounts of punitive damages and later on those get reduced substantially by appellate courts that is a problem um that you know probably also the media follow-up on the reductions is much less than the than the original yep than the original and so people don't even recognize that actually mon santo wasn't really slapped um you know hardly it was like a mosquito at their at their foreheads as opposed to a major problem um so something i have no idea what um is you know something is a miss there and how might you solve it i don't know i think you are proposing that there is another problem i don't yet see that there is that problem maybe there is that the public uh gets a little squirrely about the idea of large punitive damages delivered to individuals um there's a problem that you see i don't know that there's a problem and you proposed something of a solution that is kind of vague and i feel very concerned about the solution being proposed okay i have proposed a solution it's not vague you're concerned what's the one nuance of the solution the solution is we have to fix the belief that the 14th amendment protects corporations um from egregious no but the hold on um so we need to have punitive damages scaled to the size of the entity that has engaged in this bad behavior and they have to not be protected by the 14th amendment in this way that's illogical right it was not designed to protect corporations in this way so we need large punitive damages uh and we need corporations not to be immunized by the 14th amendment because it's illogical and so the justification by the appellate courts comes back to the 14th amendment yeah after these times yeah the equal protection clause so that's just uh well i think the answer is it's obvious what this does when you have these massive judgments reduced uh on appeal what it does is it has bear the owner of mon santo uh which has suffered substantial loss in its valuation uh after buying mon santo because these judgments are mounting and it's looking for relief from the federal government wants to be freed from responsibility it's still selling the stuff right so here's my point you don't want that liability stop creating new victims it's obvious and what do we know about the judgments that were ultimately handed down they weren't big enough you're still selling the stuff yeah right so and they're probably still developing i don't know but my guess is that they're also still developing the round up ready crops um which are you know the crops that are particularly resistant um which then use tons of the stuff which puts the very people the idea of a roundup ready means bring it on yeah it means that you can afford to drench the crop in the stuff they're also developing this insane use where they use it to desiccate crops right before harvest which means that people ingest a lot more of it so the point is the bad behavior continues unabated these judgments need to be bigger not smaller right reducing them has left this behavior in place and so this does for me connect back to you know the journal in my opinion i know it's not yours but in my opinion covering its ass here my feeling is this stuff's got to hurt way more if it's going to stop that's my point it's got to hurt way more the natural level at which it needs to hurt has to be more if we're going to get people to stand up and block bad papers or retract them quickly once they find out that they've been had which is what we need in the public that's what that's what we're owed well given that this this particular bonsanta lawsuit that you've been talking about was from 2018 yes that's some years ago but it's not it's it's a small fraction of the time that has passed since this paper was published and you know i don't i don't i don't know when the rest of the reasons that the paper is being retracted were came to be understood my guess is and this is not how journals should work but that it was you know no one's job once it had been accepted and published to go back and continue to you know relitigate as it were um the paper and so only at the point that these big lawsuits started happening did uh anyone at the journal start to think now wait a minute i don't think that's true for the following reason do we agree that i don't remember was it eight enumerated reasons yeah but although one of them was concluding so okay um i think each of them was sufficient on its own does that seem right to you yeah although honestly only one of them i i think i can go back but um only one of them was about the the one that seems the most substantive and obvious to explain to anyone who whether or not they have any background in academia is this is a review paper review papers review what's known bingo dude well how how is this helpful this is what i'm saying is that if they never went back to it let me just finish the thought yeah go ahead if if the i think that the only one of the eight points um that is likely to have been knowable outside of the context of the court cases is that a review paper is expected is required to review all that is known and in fact it did not review all that was known and in fact only reviewed that which was uh cryptically or not so cryptically out of montanto in the first place it was never a review paper in the first place that should have been caught in peer review that should have been caught by the editors in the first place etc etc but journals are not in the business of once they've decided to accept and publish a paper continuing to go back and be like now did we make the right decision like that's not what that's not what journals do well so i don't i just i don't look i am not pleased that this paper has sat for 25 years um allowing allowing actual grifters and fraudsters to poison an entire planet with this garbage yep but i don't think that you can hold a journal to a standard of constantly reassessing everything that it has already published no that is an unreasonable standard no uh this this was exactly my point i'm sorry i said bingo but this is why i said it they will have known almost immediately that they screwed up and that this review paper was no such thing no they will not have you don't think they got a slew of correspondence people saying hey wait a minute you missed these 16 papers this is a review article and it doesn't cover these 16 papers hey i don't think there were 16 i think there were a a couple okay and no i don't actually and you know if they did then that's a different situation and we will never know well so we don't know we don't know but i would say the contentiousness of the safety of glyphosate has been such and they in fact mention in their concerns continue to have been raised i would would bet that that was immediately called to their attention and that that is their responsibility as a journal the journal screwed up in this case we published a review that wasn't one that missed important evidence that everybody knew was in the literature so uh even though 2018 is the first judgment successful against monsanto it's not obvious that that's where the discovery would have happened because it wasn't the first trial against monsanto but even if that were the case we only find out but is discovery inherently um a matter of public record i don't think so no and you have to you have to know to make a FOIA request or whatever the appropriate request is in the first place like there's just a lot of there's a lot of contingencies well i agree and i and we don't know that history you and i don't know it presumably somebody does yeah um but the journal published a paper about toxicology of a product that was being used widely in the world that review article was not a review article i think they will have known that quickly um but that's but that's your opinion we don't so it's my guess fine but you can't like that's that that's not a basis on which to to formulate the argument that they were being irresponsible um it's contingent if i am right that they will have known quickly that they published a review that was not a review they should have retracted it earlier yes i agree there's lots of stuff published that they can't go back and reinvestigate and the place to discover that is in future articles that say you know this experiment was done poorly here's what it missed but a review article is different a review article that doesn't review uh and you know becomes the cited article is a hazard in its own right yeah and you know among other things i did not look at uh so it's an elsevere journal which is the you know major academic publisher but i did not look into anything about their history you know who who has been known to support them elsevere is is giant and predatory in its own its own different way but regulatory toxicology and pharmacology already sounds like it's you know it's not a basic science journal it's an applied science journal um and and we don't know like we can we can guess but i'm i'm not prepared to um claim that the journal has been uh grossly uh in gross negligence of what it should have been doing based on some um suppositions about what they knew when fair enough um i would say that what we have learned about medical journals and the degree to which what is in them is thoroughly compromised by pharma um it's hard to see why this would be any different you know there's tremendous amount of money to be made in uh toxicology for obvious reasons people are putting stuff into the world and um you know there's lots of reasons to want your competitor's product to look more dangerous than it is to make your product look safer so i wouldn't expect it's any purer than that on their site um and you can show my screen here um one interesting thing i find and you know we've begun to talk about this a little bit privately i don't think we've said anything publicly but it's it's amazing what becomes known and becomes a focus of human concern and so you know aims and scope is is the page i'm at for the you know the elsevere journal regulatory toxicology and pharmacology which published this article establishing the safety of glyphosate in 2000 is now attracted this year um they describe what they are and it's sort of you know as you would expect you know it's it's it's an applied journal science here's the types of peer-reviewed articles published original research articles also um news regulatory toxicology and pharmacology the last thing on the aims and scope page is rtp tobacco policy regulatory toxicology and pharmacology as the journal serving developments for improvement of human health and environment will not consider manuscripts that have been supported by tobacco companies now cool i guess but you know nicotine is the enemy like i don't know that it's good for you i don't know that it's helping people i you know it might it but there's a lot that's where they're gonna draw that's where they're drawing the line because somehow we all accepted i think after you know court cases really before you and i were conscious um or you know maybe you were conscious of them but you know everyone came to accept that smoking is bad for you yeah smoking cigarettes is bad for you um i don't even know to what degree that research is absolutely well vetted uh at this point but the idea that tobacco is the one tobacco company is the one named type of company that cannot be involved uh in any way in papers that are submitted here like if you if you say that you received funding from nih and the dod and you know the bill milena gates foundation whatever it's called now and um you know philip morris then you're out but if it was merc and monsanto and you know well then well then it's okay it's actually fun and the bill milena gates foundation and you know the welcome fund or the welcome trust whatever it's called i have now forgotten uh you remember the film uh thank you for smoking um in which it was the film in which i at least became aware that there was a bobby kennedy junior i did not know that beforehand that he is uh the he is portrayed in the film as the sort of protagonist um because of his work in this uh in this area tobacco is the one corporate entity that just lost this battle yeah right and it's like okay fine yeah these things suck they're bad for you we all we admit it um but uh you're hooked right but the point is that's the one that they're gonna forbid is bizarre given the number of things that are actually harmful and the and you know that's the one where it doesn't really matter because as you point out we all accept it right right it doesn't matter what the toxicology says we all right or wrong accept the harms of this of this one particular product it's the harms that we don't yet accept which are the ones that it's really important that this journal get right and uh they're uh mom about it yeah and you know and they and part of what they say here is that this is the journal serving developments for improvement of human health and environment which you know means this attraction never should have been necessary yeah right because the paper never should have been published in the first place because it was neither a review paper nor written by the people um that were claimed as authors and it had um direct and intensive uh contributions from the very company that makes the product that was supposedly being assessed totally yeah now we could stop there or we could uh we had a couple other things that we were thinking about doing we could save them both um actually maybe maybe we we uh save them um yeah yeah the the other one we had planned for today we'll keep just as well and uh i'd be up to explore it next time all right i think that's all right that's the fiery episode of the DarkHorse podcast yeah um let's see let's see if i can find out what what else uh we're gonna oh so just a teaser for next time uh one of the next the stories we're going to be talking about uh it involves leopards martial eagles and pythons that's it that's all you get you know you have to guess you don't have to guess you already know no i already know yeah it would be easy for me to guess it's unfair yeah and you're not a cheater nope nope never have been not interested okay um um i don't even know what i'm supposed to do now because we sort of stopped all of a sudden which okay um we'll be back uh not next wednesday but a week from saturday uh and then the following wednesday with uh with a couple more episodes of dark horse um but there will be an inside rail episode publishing on the 11th i believe and another one this month as well and um gosh i just feel like i'm forgetting to say all the things but uh you know a happy new year to everyone and i hope you know we're already a weekend for one 52nd of the way through 2020 say wow already already already um i'm still writing 2013 on my checks okay let me ask you a question yeah no actually i was gonna when was the last time you were to check i think you actually have written yeah i've written a check you know i write probably but probably for a year at this point yeah now the island that we live on actually requires checks more often of of us uh because for better and for worse we are still living 50 years behind technologically for better and worse for better and for worse yes uh mostly for better yeah yeah yeah um although there's clay facade on the islands it's actually it's forbidden on the island yes still is some but yeah so this is this is not this is not the time but i think we've mentioned before it is apparently forbidden in the san juan islands glyphosate and there are state agencies encouraging and in fact uh employing it in order to kill some plants and encourage other plants so that an endangered leopodopteran can thrive and it's just so short-sighted and arguments with such people gets nowhere maybe now it'll get somewhere maybe now we can stop the application of glyphosate within african national historical park my god hell yeah yeah this is this has been a long time coming and so as much as you and i disagree about the particular you know where to focus our our dismay and anger we are in absolute agreement that the retraction was necessary and we hope that the epa pays close heed and uh changes its directives when it has to do so this year good yeah uh so you have something else nope all right um until you see us next time be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside be well everyone