00:00We live in a world of military secrecy, a world where large, powerful corporations create
00:07bodies of ignorance deliberately.
00:19Years ago at Harvard, I noticed that cigarettes were the leading preventable cause of death
00:25in the United States and the world more generally.
00:27I started realizing that the tobacco industry was deliberately creating ignorance through
00:33what I call distraction research.
00:35They were massive funders of research into everything but cigarettes causing cancer.
00:41And actually, at least 25 Nobel laureates have taken money from big tobacco, and they
00:47essentially brainwashed the public to that effect, and that's why we still have six trillion
00:51cigarettes smoked worldwide every year.
01:10Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?
01:12Cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction.
01:17There is no intoxication.
01:18We'll take that as a no.
01:49Tobacco denial of all kinds of harms.
01:52The Lead Institute says that lead doesn't cause brain harm.
01:57The Global Climate Coalition says that climate change is a myth and a fantasy.
02:03So the tobacco denial framework, that distraction research, that decoy research, that became
02:10a template for lots of other powerful industries to deny that they're causing harm.
02:16And so that's why we say big oil is the new big tobacco.
02:35We live in a world of ignorance.
02:36Ours is, in fact, I call it golden age of ignorance.
02:40We live in a world where misinformation spreads at the speed of light.
02:45And no one was studying this.
02:46If you have something like Twitter or something like Facebook, where you can buy information
02:53and buy advertising and actually buy page ranks and manipulate page rank and plant stories,
03:00it becomes much cheaper, much easier for a few bad actors to have an enormous influence.
03:06And it's not just by a few bad actors like big tobacco or big oil, but now governments
03:12of all kinds and all kinds of other bad actors.
03:15I think we need organized resistance against the distributors of big misinformation.
03:22And that's a lot of that can be done just by shining light on it.
