America’s tobacco policy has turned self-destructive. Safer nicotine products are demonized and restricted while combustible cigarettes remain widely available. In this GFN interview, Michelle Minton of the Reason Foundation explains how fear, ideology, and institutional incentives replaced evidence in U.S. tobacco control—pushing consumers back toward smoking and undermining one of the greatest public-health opportunities of our time.
Featuring:
MICHELLE MINTON
Managing Director, Drug Policy Reason Foundation
reason.org
@michelleminton
Transcription:
00:10 - 00:52
[SPEAKER_00]
Hi, I'm Brent Stafford and welcome to another edition of RegWatch on GFN.TV. When it comes to nicotine and safer nicotine products, it's hard to overstate the distortion and dysfunction inside public health and regulatory agencies. Potentially life-saving tools like nicotine vapes and pouches are demonized and banned, while combustible tobacco is left untouched by agencies that insist harm reduction is too dangerous to allow. Is public health protecting big tobacco? Joining us today is someone with great insight on this question, Michelle Minton, Managing Director of Drug Policy at the Reason Foundation. Michelle, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on the show.
00:53 - 00:54
[SPEAKER_01]
Thanks for having me on again.
00:54 - 01:09
[SPEAKER_00]
Oh, always. So, Michelle, you've been writing about all the fun stuff, tobacco, nicotine, drug policy, alcohol and consumer freedom issues for some time. How would you characterize U.S. policy toward tobacco harm reduction?
01:10 - 01:29
[SPEAKER_01]
Suicidal in a lot of ways, really. I mean, if you actually care about public health or spending or just justice, you know, people's autonomy, the approach the United States has taken to the general tobacco issue for the last 60 years has been nonsensical in a lot of ways.
01:29 - 01:34
[SPEAKER_00]
Before we dive deeper, please tell our audience what brought you to write about these issues.
01:35 - 02:50
[SPEAKER_01]
That's actually because of my portfolio of like vice issues. It's a question I get a lot and I usually describe it as I've kind of like carved out a niche for myself in the research space that I call frontiers markets, both those transitioning into legality and those kind of transitioning into criminality because I consider black markets or illicit markets to be a frontier market for a certain segment of the business, the entrepreneurial population. Because once you ban something that was legal, you're functionally opening the market to people who are willing to operate illegally. And so those are the issues that I care about. For whatever reason, I find those types of markets interesting to study. And then the more personal answer is that I've had a savior complex, I guess, like most people remember kind of the wrongs of their childhood. And for me, I always kind of wished that there was someone to voice my concerns, someone to care about them. And as a research person, those are the issues that I kind of gravitate towards, the ones where there are consumers, just that's the area I focus on in economics, but there are people who are having issues, problems, concerns, or finding solutions for themselves, and they're not being heard, and they don't necessarily have a lot of voices to represent their interests. So I find that to be motivating, personally motivating for my entire career.
02:50 - 03:05
[SPEAKER_00]
So you would agree, of course, that public health in their zeal to ban safer nicotine products, that they're just showing a crusader attitude. But yet the only way to kind of fight it is to be a crusader from the other side like you're doing.
03:05 - 03:37
[SPEAKER_01]
yeah and you know that's what I try and I don't necessarily think about myself as a crusader but yeah that's definitely there, you know the savior complex and everything but yeah I think when you're entering that kind of a role defense justice, whatever it is. It is always no matter what side of any argument you're on if you hope to do good in the world, you really do have to always check yourself and. Listen to feedback if there are populations or voices that you've ignored when you've developed your ideas and the things that you're pursuing for the, you know, whatever the greater good is that you think you're trying to achieve.
03:38 - 03:47
[SPEAKER_00]
When you're having coffee with old friends from college or whatever, and they're asking you about why you're working on tobacco harm reduction, what's your answer?
03:48 - 05:38
[SPEAKER_01]
because it matters because people's lives matter and people's ability to make their own choices about their body and health matter. And we've talked about this before that I take great issue with the way that medical therapy health are defined generally in the Western world. And the boundaries around that are far too strict that I consider lots of different things to be therapeutic and helpful for people. And I think it's extremely important When it comes to these things like therapy, health, medicine, health, that the person who is receiving that stuff or doing those things is the one who determines whether it's therapeutic, healthy, medically beneficial, all of those types of things. And with tobacco harm reduction, frankly, the evidence right away was just so obvious, like just on concept alone, because it's been known forever. Since cigarettes have been studied, the harms of cigarettes anyway have been studied, that the primary 99 whatever percentage part of the risk that that poses is combustion. So by concept alone, anything that can supply the chemical that people like where we're not even sure how much damage or benefit or whatever that chemical has, but you take out the thing that's damaging. conceptually, this is a game changer. And so when I saw all of my friends quitting smoking, all my friends who I was shocked were smokers in the first place, when I saw them one by one by one by one, they cycled through a bunch of different types of vapes and everything, but almost all of them quit smoking completely. And most of them at this point have quit vaping as well. So it was just one of those issues where I was working in the policy space. I was seeing in the real world the potential benefits of this thing. And then I was watching technocrats, bureaucrats, academics even, and people who had really genuine desire to help people, potentially cutting off the whole world from a technology that could save billions of lives.
05:39 - 06:08
[SPEAKER_00]
The UK, as we both know, has always been kind of the bastion for tobacco harm reduction and really a leader. But, you know, interestingly enough, just in the last two months, you know, the research has come out. Most smokers in England now think that vaping is more harmful than cigarettes. And the US went that way by about 2020. And so there was another half a decade here before it really, you know, went this way in England. But I mean, wow, this is pretty sad, isn't it?
06:09 - 07:45
[SPEAKER_01]
Sad and predictable. I mean, it's when you have, this is what happened with the, you know, the youth vaping epidemic, a lot of other things. When you have a lot of people talking about an issue, which happens when there's a lot of money behind an issue, right? If there's anybody on one side of a topic that is spending a lot of money to have their opinion heard, they're just generating tons and tons of conversation. And when the conversation is overwhelmingly negative or about the dangers of the risk, which even, you know, as someone who believes I'm an ethical person, or at least tries to be an ethical person, when I write about these topics, I don't just say, like, this is the greatest thing in the world, there's no harms, blah, blah, blah, right? You have to be kind of honest and say, well, there are some risks, there are some unknowns here, but not everybody does that, especially when you are a crusader. You often say, I'm gonna just put my ethics aside a little bit, and for the greater good, I'm going to make this thing sound even more extreme than it is in order to get my message across. So you kind of get like an arms race of extreme language and people hear this and most people, right? We're all busy. Our attention spans are constantly getting shorter and shorter. People read headlines and the more you hear those things without kind of like diving in and having the skills and the knowledge, the ability to research this stuff is difficult, but you hear this and it just kind of becomes part of your subconscious. We saw that in America. We've seen that in other countries where the kind of like The public health industrial complex starts to move in on any given topic as news stories get generated, conversation begins, and then the public starts to slowly distrust whatever the topic is that they're hearing about.
07:46 - 08:07
[SPEAKER_00]
Yeah, we call it the tobacco control industrial complex. It's the same thing. I mean, billions of dollars, hundreds of millions for sure, if not billions globally, go in to support all the research and academia and everything else. And their job is to control tobacco. And if tobacco is under control, they will have to grow their pie.
08:08 - 09:00
[SPEAKER_01]
So they had to march of dimes it. They had to find a new cause to continue operating from to keep selling their product, which is their public health services too. With the march of dimes, if you're not aware, started out concerned about tuberculosis. And then when tuberculosis was functionally eradicated, rather than shutting their doors and giving the money back to all of their donors and kind of firing all of their employees. They just look to see what was the next emerging kind of like health concern that they could participate in, which is now what we know them for in terms of childhood diseases and afflictions. We see that all the time in public health where you have a Stanton Glantz, for example, who's going to exit the conversation about e-cigarettes and nicotine. And he'll never exit the tobacco conversation, I'm sure. But who's kind of turned his focus, as some other people in the tobacco space and the public health tobacco space have, towards the harmful, supposedly harmful effects of cannabis.
09:00 - 09:03
[SPEAKER_00]
Three quarters of doctors believe nicotine causes cancer.
09:04 - 09:56
[SPEAKER_01]
And that's a little bit understandable, both when public health people started to talk about tobacco and nicotine, it was a very good way to talk about the dangers and it was very effective in communicating that there were actual harms to smoking, to like scare people into maybe considering changing their behavior. But then it also, with the advent of things like nicotine pouches and e-cigarettes and other ways to acquire nicotine besides smoking, the fear that had already been generated in the pub in the pub in the public about nicotine being addictive was very easy to kind of move their entire focus away from just cigarettes so that they could continue their operations their crusade against tobacco but with nicotine it was a very smart way to kind of um develop and like push yourself into an entirely different marketplace by saying it's the same thing functionally even though they're not in reality
09:56 - 10:07
[SPEAKER_00]
Yeah, an incredible amount of work had already been done in the fight against combustible tobacco by demonizing nicotine. So why not just continue on that? Because they've made a huge investment in it.
10:07 - 10:48
[SPEAKER_01]
That is that crusader, this idea that for the greater good, the ends justify the means over millions of people, right? So people who I believe were genuinely trying to do good work and scaring the public over cigarettes, which the public was not adequately fearful about, they decided to kind of flatten the message and say, okay, maybe this isn't technically scientifically objective to just say nicotine is addictive or this kind of thing, but that messaging is more impactful. So they kind of set their ethics just a little bit to the side and did a great job of scaring the public about nicotine. But now, like you said, we have physicians, people who should absolutely know better, 80% of physicians incorrectly believe that nicotine is carcinogenic.
10:50 - 11:54
[SPEAKER_00]
In a recent CBC News story, a senior tobacco control officer said, and quote, It hurts my soul to say that we've talked to some students who are using tobacco as a form of cessation from vaping because there's less nicotine in a cigarette or a pack of cigarettes than there is in that vile substance they're using in e-cigarettes. Think about that, a public health official so convinced that vaping is the greater evil that he describes teens smoking cigarettes to quit vaping as somehow understandable, almost virtuous. And the CBC, so lost inside the same illusion, frames this story as a tragedy of vaping, not the tragedy of what they've done to these kids. They never stopped to ask, how did we reach the point where lighting a cigarette is seen as the lesser harm? In that moment, what both the CBC and Tobacco Control have done is to endorse teen smoking as an acceptable way to stop vaping.
11:56 - 13:18
[SPEAKER_01]
It's very depressing. And I believe there are people who genuinely believe what they're saying. They genuinely believe that there is a greater harm. But it comes down to what you think is harm and what is health and what is beneficial. And again, this is one of the reasons why I don't think people like that should be in the position of making that choice. for everybody else because someone who's in public health might decide that the outcome they care about the most is how many years of life somebody lives no matter if the you know you live an extra eight five eight years but all of your freedoms are taken away all of the joy is taken out of it you have to constantly go to somebody to say does this count as health does this not count as health like and and a lot of people if given most people would say i want to live forever right i want to live as long as i possibly can as many healthy years as i can as well but You then ask them if to get five extra years, would you be willing to give up X, Y, and Z? And a lot of people would start to think about it. And again, those are the trade-offs. Everything in life has risk, whether you drive to work or walk to work, they all have risks. And it really ought to be up to the individual to make the decision about based on what they want from their life, which risks are worth taking and not. And there's a place for public out there, of course, for communicating to the public accurate risk information to let them know, for somebody like you in this situation, here are the risks. But at the end of the day, the choice should be left up to the individual.
13:19 - 13:32
[SPEAKER_00]
Michelle, in a recent article that you wrote for Reason, the FDA's plan to fast track nicotine pouches is long overdue, but why aren't vapes included? What a great question. Why aren't vapes included?
13:33 - 16:55
[SPEAKER_01]
Why didn't they start with vapes? I mean, nothing against nicotine pouch. It's a great technology. Everything we've seen so far seems to indicate that they're one of the lowest risk alternatives, popular alternatives versus medicalized alternatives for cigarettes. However, there's just so much more data and scientific analysis and research and corporate research and analysis and clinical trials when it comes to e-cigarettes that it's kind of questionable why we would start with nicotine. I mean, I guess the one answer, and I've not heard anything from anybody in the administration or anywhere else to suggest this is the reason that they would even give. But the only thing I could maybe come up with is just that there's a little less controversy with nicotine pouches so far. I'm sure that will change in the future. But E-cigarettes are just, because it's an inhalation method of delivery, there are slightly more risks there always just generally when that's the mode of administration. So I guess maybe that's why they could choose nicotine pouches over e-cigarettes. The good news is, it's not really news, but internal meeting transcripts from the FDA, the current acting director of the Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA did indicate that maybe possibly the pilot fast tracking that they're doing for nicotine pouches could inform their updates to other categories, the review process for other categories. It's all very squishy right now. We still don't even know what this fast tracking really means, other than to say that they're going to drop certain requirements for studies for manufacturers when they apply for their PMCA, when they apply for approval to sell their products in the U.S. And based on that information it sounds like a somewhat sound approach to trying to streamline that process of approval rather so instead of you know still have to the products would still have to prove that they're safe for the individual this kind of thing but it seems like one of the requirements they'll be dropping are for companies to do like population level studies of their specific product when it comes to smoking cessation reducing or quitting smoking which isn't exactly needed. Well, for one thing, it's very difficult to do. It's extremely expensive to do population level studies like that. It's hard to extrapolate out from that what the effect will be at the population level of somebody's product. But more importantly, and this seems to be where they're headed with the fast tracking, is that if you have products, if you think about the e-cigarette market, for example, you've got like However many vapor devices and however many pods of two to three strengths, and most of them have exactly the same ingredients, maybe you have a few different flavors. There's no need for each individual company to study the effects of smoking cessation of all of their tobacco flavor at 3% or tobacco flavor at 1.5%, that kind of thing, versus what it seems like the FDA is going to do, which is allow the manufacturers to use category specific research on that one particular issue of smoking cessation or reduction so if they can show that nicotine pouches generally or nicotine pouches like the ones that they're trying to get approval for if there's evidence that they lead to smoking cessation or reductions in smoking then they can submit that instead of doing you know their own clinical cohort trials or whatever like long-term cohort trials or whatever they're going to be doing
16:55 - 17:36
[SPEAKER_00]
Isn't the biggest stumbling block, though, that FDA, Center for Tobacco Products, is holding the company's feet to the fire on the public health? Like, you know, it must be appropriate for the benefit of public health. And that... The FDA and CDC has said time and time again that that really just comes down to you have to prove that flavors are not going to attract kids to use the vaping product. So are they not going to apply that same strict review to nicotine pouches? Is that really the key thing? This will be fast track as long as we gloss over that issue.
17:37 - 19:07
[SPEAKER_01]
I wish I could tell you, but we honestly have no idea. This information first became public, not through an announcement, but through leaked transcripts, then an announcement at the FDA, which did not provide very clear. And that is actually the biggest problem, which this fast tracking is not fixing as far as I can see, which is that The FDA, when it comes to this process of approving new tobacco products, has pretty much given companies a whole list of the types of evidence that they could submit, but it doesn't tell them which or how many of them are sufficient to gain approval. So it's kind of just do as much as I guess, and I'm stealing a line from Clive Bates here, do as much as you can afford and kind of hope that it's enough. do as much as you can afford, which is just, that's a financial race there, which already weights it in favor of the largest, most financially well-off companies. But yeah, when it comes to the youth attraction issue, I think that gets into the population level effects. Honestly, I'm not sure what kind of evidence and what they're going to be looking for. We still don't even have a very good definition from the FDA about what for the protection of public health actually means. Now we have a situation where youth smoking is absolutely cratered and there is no celebration about that. There is no real acknowledgement that at the same time or over the same period of time where we had this so-called youth vaping epidemic, we had an absolute cratering in youth smoking.
19:07 - 19:15
[SPEAKER_00]
Yeah, which is astonishing. I mean, they should be jumping up and down for joy. There should be parades and yet just total silence.
19:16 - 20:26
[SPEAKER_01]
Yeah, because I think part of the reason is that there is no end to the goals when it comes to, I mean, the end for tobacco control, right, it's in the name, is to control tobacco use, however they choose to define it, which obviously they now include any type of nicotine use that isn't. in a medicalized setting like the nicotine patch or the gum. So the fact that they've had this success, you know, we don't also see them celebrating successes like the adult smoking rate dropping, and they'll talk about it, mostly to say how much they did that, you know, to say how much it was their work that created that. But then they move very quickly on to the next dragon, the next dragon that they have to display. And I think part of this comes from a fear, both financial and otherwise, that if you say, we did a good job, we did good here, that people will stop caring about an issue. So if public health starts celebrating the end of youth smoking, right, there is no end of course, but like youth smoking is functionally non-existent now, I think some of them worry because they worry so much about how they message things, especially to youth, that it will somehow convince youth and the greater population that youth smoking is not a problem anymore.
20:27 - 20:35
[SPEAKER_00]
So back in December of 2018, you wrote this fantastic report called Fear Profiteers. Tell us about that.
20:35 - 22:26
[SPEAKER_01]
Well, that really just stemmed from, you know, I get a lot of questions when I write about this stuff. And I was encountering all of these public health institutions, all of these NGOs, these nonprofits, these think tanks. and i come from sort of a public health background i care about public health and so when i was learning about e-cigarettes and the technology and reading the research and the data and to me it was very obvious that this is a net good having these products available for smokers is a net good even if some people who quote otherwise wouldn't have smoked might be attracted to these products but i would look at these organizations that i previously trusted that i had you know they have stellar reputations who were saying some really, frankly, crazy things. Like the messaging they were putting out there was unscientific, not data-driven, cherry-picked data, and obviously exaggerated language about the harms and the potential risks here. So I really started to kind of dig into what was going on in the background, right? Like, is it just some individuals? Is it just dogma? Is there some kind of financial network that's happening here? And Fear profiteers that paper. My ultimate conclusion as I was doing that research was that there, you know, I came to the conclusion that there is a public health industrial complex that is funded by a lot of money. And it's not necessarily nefarious, like someone spending money saying we got to do X, Y, or Z, but it is a structure of incentives that pushes public health people, public health research, the public health messaging towards people scarier, more exaggerated, more fear-based conversations to scare the public into doing whatever they think is best. And often that has perverse outcomes for both public health and academic research and public health as a functioning tool in society.
22:27 - 22:52
[SPEAKER_00]
Michelle, let's also revisit another one of your works, which, if I may say, was groundbreaking and prophetic. It was an article you wrote in 2021 titled Bloomberg's Philanthro-Colonialism, a threat to global health and science. And we saw this on great display at the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, COP11, just this past November. So tell us, what is Philanthro-Colonialism?
22:53 - 27:01
[SPEAKER_01]
Well, it's a term I don't remember. I wish I had cited the person that I heard that term from. I don't remember. I don't think I came up with that myself. But I've also heard philanthropic capitalism. But it's this idea that people, individuals with a lot of money, billionaires, we'll say that for now, billionaires, give to charity or they have philanthropic works. But what they're actually doing when they spend their money is profiting in some way or another. But the reason that it's considered colonialism is because you have someone from usually a Western country showing up in an area, another country or some area of their own country and saying, I know what's best for you. And then spending more money than any of the actual voting population might have to have their voices heard. So they're functionally drowning out the voices of the people who live in the area in terms of talking to their representatives and telling their elected officials what they want they're drowning that out and then they're passing legislation that they want and the way that this operates you know when i was writing about that i was writing specifically about bloomberg but there are other people who do this out there in the world and i was writing about his behavior in the philippines where what i observed was a very rich person coming into a relatively small in terms of gdp country and spending a significant percentage of that GDP on think tanks, on universities, on city programs, on federal programs, training people who write legislation, taking lawmakers to training trips or seminars, that kind of thing. And what that is, is it's functionally a takeover of civil society. This isn't to say that those groups that were there that were accepting the money and doing that work didn't necessarily believe what they were doing i'm sure they did but what it does say is that there might have been other groups who were operating there who weren't saying the things that bloomberg wanted them to would have liked for them to say they didn't get that bloomberg money and their operations you know were a less competitive than their peers who would be willing to take on the issues that michael bloomberg cared about The more important thing for me is that the way that we communicate with our elected officials, with our government is at an individual level, right? It's just one person, your voice, calling, emailing, showing up to meetings. But if you have one person who can hire, not really hire, but who can pay the way for hundreds if not thousands of people to engage on that same topic, your voice as the individual who might have something to say is completely drowned out. That's why it's sort of philanthropic capitalism, philanthropic colonialism. And then there's the other side of this, that even though somebody like Michael Bloomberg maybe does believe or is saying that they're spending this money and trying to pass these laws for good reasons, they want to help. What they're also doing a lot of the times is helping their own business interests down the line. For example, if you're giving a grant to a specific locality in China to enact their tobacco control policies, you help get those passed through the World Health Organization because China is part of the World Health Organization. And then these smaller towns need money to implement those programs. You give them that money and now you have a foot in the door. with that government. If there's something else you want to do and the other side is that with somebody like Michael Bloomberg, oftentimes the legislation that he's trying or the policy that he is trying to get passed functionally requires his services, requires either his data terminal services or his consultants to help. If you're thinking about his environmental work, for example, he's trying to get cities to sign on to this carbon emissions and all of this, but in order to track whether the cities are meeting the goals of that program, they need access to proprietary like company data about emissions and stuff like that, that they can only get through a company like Bloomberg LP. So I'm not saying there's necessarily that's the behind his brain idea, but that does happen. And it would be a smart billionaire business move. Like they're not exactly known really for just giving their money away for no return on that investment. So it seems like there's a pretty clear connection between Michael Bloomberg's charitable works and then his own personal corporate profit.
27:02 - 27:06
[SPEAKER_00]
Well, and there are tax write-offs that come with charity work.
27:07 - 27:26
[SPEAKER_01]
Yeah, of course. Instead of giving your money for the people to make their own decisions about socially what they want that money to go towards, yeah, you can just take off a big chunk of that so the taxpayer doesn't have any say in where it goes and then put it somewhere where either it's your own pet interests or it's something that might down the road help your corporate interests.
27:26 - 28:08
[SPEAKER_00]
Let's take a look at COP 11. Bloomberg-funded NGOs, which were basically the only groups of people there representing civil society, they dominated the proceedings. Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids sent 31 delegates. The Global Alliance for Tobacco Control sent 61 delegates. The University of Bath sent 12. And Vital Strategies, which is essentially the marketing arm, for Bloomberg Philanthropies had another six. We're looking at almost 100 delegates and not one single consumer representative or harm reduction advocate were allowed into COP.
28:08 - 29:22
[SPEAKER_01]
Yeah, I mean, if you want to really... I have so much to say about that because it's one of those things where you're like, I can't pretend to know what's in the minds of the people who make decisions like this, of allowing this group of people to be represented but not other important stakeholders in the conversations and decisions that are being made. but you can look at the effect, right? And the effect is that the only people's voices who mattered there were a very elite group of people. And it maybe looks less like that elite group because you have all of these NGOs, but they are still the handpicked NGOs of one elite person. And what I see happening at the WHO with Michael Bloomberg and maybe Bill Gates and other like very wealthy people is at a global level, in a smaller way, what they're trying to do in some of these lower-income nations, where they are trying to take over civil society. The World Health Organization, for the countries that are part of it, they are global representatives for us, and I wouldn't be allowed to attend, even though they are functionally my representatives on a global stage. However, the hand-selected people by Michael Bloomberg, they're fine. They can have their voices heard.
29:23 - 30:05
[SPEAKER_00]
Yeah, and what's disturbing is that these delegates that are all cross-funded by Bloomberg and a little bit of Gates, right? It seems that there's a large number, a swath of civil society representatives there, but it's really all of them are funded by the same person. They all have the same agenda, and they're the only ones allowed to... manage, cajole, maneuver, and guide the national delegates. So the delegates from every country that show up, they get manhandled by these civil society NGOs, which have exclusive access to them.
30:06 - 31:05
[SPEAKER_01]
It's a really insidious strategy that's unfortunately extremely effective. And Michael Bloomberg has repeatedly employed Michael Bloomberg and the Campaign for Tobacco for Kids over and over again, which is that if you give a little bit of money to all of these various organizations, institutions, whatever, newspapers, you have news stories, you have journal articles, you have studies coming out, and to everybody else, including lawmakers or decision makers, what it creates is an echo, you know, it creates an echo chamber of seeming consensus. Like everybody in the room agrees, so there must be general consensus. However, you don't know what you don't know, right? So like outside of that room where it's not highly controlled types of opinions, you don't know what the opinions are out of it. But frankly, you know, this is a failure of the World Health Organization. And I think this COP in particular, based on the backlash from the indigenous community, has really highlighted the fact that they don't want to hear from all voices. They may want to have faces represented from each of these groups, but only if those faces are saying the things they want them to say.
31:06 - 31:12
[SPEAKER_00]
Yeah. One writer during COP called them Bloomberg's babies.
31:14 - 31:54
[SPEAKER_01]
I mean, I think that's a I feel not conflicted, but I feel for the organizations who are working within the Bloomberg network. Right. Like I said, I believe that a lot of these various institutions genuinely believe in what they're trying to do. And as an individual organization, especially the smaller ones, you know, the damage that they're doing based on, you know, crusading. is relatively small. But when you times that by thousands of organizations that are maybe $5,000, $10,000, maybe more, who are then convinced to kind of come out publicly and say something, what you're doing is participating in that echo chamber that drowns out other voices that are also valid.