Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #136: Unveiling the Truth: The Epidemic of Scientific Fraud

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Episode #136: Unveiling the Truth: The Epidemic of Scientific Fraud · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: In modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then they conclude modern research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: This means that most of the research studies are not reproducible.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And as we know, reproducibility in science is a hallmark of good science.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome everyone to another episode of Beyond Labels, the podcast with yours truly, Joel Salatin, the farmer, and our favorite researcher, Dr.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Cena McCullough.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to answer a question from a viewer.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we, as you know, we love questions from viewers, from listeners.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Keep them coming.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's always great to get that kind of communication.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and again, just a little plug, remember, to uh tell your friends about this.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you think this these podcasts are helpful, tell a friend, and uh, and and we'll grow our base a little bit.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: But we do very much appreciate the interaction we have with all of you.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: So Sharon Newman sent in a uh a tremendous question here uh recently based on a Wall Street Journal article that she read that that was asking how to vet science.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: How can we actually know what's fraudulent, what's not fraudulent, uh so we make those kind of decisions.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so um I can't think of any better person to address this question to than Sina.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I'm gonna let her run with this a little bit uh because I'm not, you know, I'm in the same boat as Sharon is.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so uh I'll be excited to learn along with all of you uh what Sina has to say on the fraudulent science vetting topic.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh thanks, Joel.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for the vote of confidence.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, this topic is near and dear to my heart because I am a scientist, right?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been in the belly of the beast, shall you say?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I've I've witnessed it, I've experienced the pressure um to publish that is placed on scientists, which tends to fuel this fraudulent cycle that we have now.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I've witnessed esteemed professors crumble under the pressure.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So lots of memories and first-hand experience accounts flooded through my mind when I read Sharon's um her email.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with one of the ways that you can identify fraud is if you know the ways in which fraud is entering the scientific community.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so let's start there.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And Sharon had sent to us two uh different publications.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: One was from the Wall Street Journal, as Joel mentioned, and the other was from Science.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the title of the science article was Artificial Research.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: A recent surge of academic fraud spells trouble for scientific integrity.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now according to this article, it said, quote, the number of research articles retracted in 2023 hit an all-time high.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: There were over 10,000 papers pulled for fraudulent practices.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: The fraud ranged from images that were recycled from previous papers to entirely fabricated data sets, right?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: That means that the scientist um made up the numbers, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so in entirely fraudulent studies being published.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it also went on to say that the number of papers that were retracted between 2013 and 2023 increased more than fivefold.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, according to a 2012 study in the Proceedings of Natural Academy of Sciences, they found that two-thirds of all the papers in the biomedical and life sciences area, two-thirds of those that were retracted, were withdrawn due to misconduct, including fraud, duplicating publications, and actually plagiarism.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this is actually a rampant problem, and it has been for quite some time for decades, and it's actually getting worse.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we talked about this at our last Beyond Labels Health Summit.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this was a topic that I covered.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And one of my favorite quotes that really emphasizes why we should care, right?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is these are scientists doing this, and they're publishing scientific papers.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And how many of us actually read scientific papers, right?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, why is this actually important to you?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and I want to get into that, and then we'll get into how you can start identifying the fraud.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, according to the Public Library of Science Medicine, this is what they said.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: In modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Then they conclude modern research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields, right?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: This means that most of the research studies are not reproducible, right?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And as we know, reproducibility in science is a hallmark of good science, right?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're finding is people are publishing studies and then you can't actually reproduce them.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So this is one potential marker of some type of fraud going on when you can't duplicate a study.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is really important for all of us, all of us consumers, right?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: As non-scientists, because for example, some of these studies we're talking about are related to drug trials, right?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: These are like preclinical drug studies, for instance.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: So Amgen, which is a biotech company, they actually analyzed 53 different cancer-related studies.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: These were called landmark studies.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: These are of the utmost importance because these studies are actually going to determine the potential um drugs that are given to cancer patients and the potential dosages that will be given to a cancer patient.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Out of all these 53 landmark studies, only 11% were reproducible.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: They said that they concluded that 89% of those studies were actually false findings.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, which is, I mean, if you think about that for a moment, as I said, these are the studies that are actually setting protocols for how we treat cancer.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when they analyze preclinical drug studies, just generalized drug studies, that same company found that 85% of those studies could not be replicated.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And again, this is a big deal because oh yeah, go ahead.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm just just to make sure everybody's on the same page here.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, we live we live in a time where we think we're really clever.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, we I'm being very collective here, you know, um, especially here in the West.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we think we're really clever.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and so we've got this thing called, you know, Western science.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: But it's it's not a religion, and some people treat it like a religion.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it it has a limitation.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: The the scientific limitation is you have to be able to observe it and you have to be able to duplicate it.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the kind of the two, I mean, if you want to drill right down to the foundation um uh uh uh that that uh of of of what we call Western science, you have to be able to see it and you have to be able to duplicate it.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the limitation of science.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think sometimes people just feel like, well, you know, science is some sort of almost uh, you know, a divine, you know, uh thing, and and it's not, it's very much limited to the human, to the human capacity uh in this regard.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: So so um if I may push a little bit, the you know, the the point is that things like like creation, things like the supernatural, these are outside the scope of science because we can't see them.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um now, you know, we we can infer things, but uh man, when you say these these cancer studies are not duplicatable, what it means is that somebody set up a protocol, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm just trying to think through with you, somebody set up a protocol, but then they were able to either cherry pick the data or or manipulate the manipulate the protocol in such a way that it gave a whatever, uh a false finding uh uh in other words, well, I I'm reminded of the early GMO potato studies where um uh Monsanto fed GMO potatoes, genetically modified organisms, GMO potatoes to geriatric rats.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: And said, well, it didn't have any effect on behavior, cognitive ability, you know, any of this stuff.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And when the same study was done in Scotland on juvenile rats, all sorts of problems showed up.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so it is that is that I mean, I'm assuming if somebody used geriatric rats again, they'd have the same results.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you suss out that type of fraud?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't we do this?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we go through the different categories of fraud?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so because if you understand where fraud is entering these, this say I picture it as there's a pathway to get to publication, right?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where it starts from the scientist uh working in the lab.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, technically they have a team of people working with them.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's gonna start in the lab through the creation of the scientific study, right?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Their their study design.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be funding involved uh because you need money to conduct these studies, and then there's going to be um statistical methods that are applied to analyze the results, and then you need to write up the study, and then you need to submit it for publication to a journal, right?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then the publication has a review committee and they review and edit the article, um, and then it gets published.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that is the generalized pathway.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're gonna do is look at areas along this pathway where fraud can and often does enter into the picture.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So um let's start out with this quote.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of my favorite quotes because this will help you understand how this why this fraud is entering the pathway.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: This was published um by the British Medical Journal Um Opinion in 2013.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: They said, quote, most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now that's a kind of harsh statement against the scientists, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And like as a scientist myself, I'm like, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I know I've I I know these scientists, right?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've known them for decades.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So um there's another, there's a flip side to this coin, okay.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers, scientists, their livelihood, right?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Their potential in their career trajectory is largely based on three different metrics, okay, which is kind of sad because this is more of a reductionist thinking.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Your career path boils down to three numbers in us, in essence.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: One is your number of publications, so that's how many articles you've been able to publish, um, like in scientific journals.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: The second number is the number of citations.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how many times your article has been cited by other scientists.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Once it's published, how many times are they actually citing your work in their own studies?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, the the higher quality the research, the more applicable the results, the higher the number of citations, usually.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third number is called an H index.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't need to get into the details, but it basically roughly quantifies the researchers' productivity and their impact.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So number of publications, the number of times they're cited, and then this calculation of the H index.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: So to boil that down, what this really means is it's better for a scientist to publish six papers that are good enough versus one great, profoundly impactful paper.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: So you publish or perish is the words that we would use.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: You publish or perish, right?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you've already set up a system here where the scientists, in order to be um credible, like to thought of as credible, um, in order to get grant money, get funding, right?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because all of these three numbers are going to dictate all this.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to dictate how people view you, if you're credible or successful or not, if you're able to get grant funding, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're able to publish, these things all are a feed-forward mechanism.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we've incentivized them now that instead of trying to pursue truth, right, instead of trying to actually figure out an answer to something without any bias or influence from funding sources, instead of doing all that, they now are in this system where they need to publish and they need to publish a lot of papers.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that is the general um perception I want everyone to have as we go into the ways that basically fraud comes into place.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with one of the easier ones, ones that we've all heard of.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is the funding source.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is if you look at a journal article, they are required to list conflicts of interest and funding sources.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a source of fraud because failure to disclose the financial or personal conflicts of interest are sometimes not reported.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes these things are not reported.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give you an example too.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Even the government sometimes does not report these things.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So let me talk a little bit about funding source fraud.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So lots of studies and lots of articles have been published about how commercial sponsorship of research affects what is studied and how it is studied.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: It also affects what research is actually going to get published for the public.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Usually when research does not further the commercial interest, it's not likely to, number one, attract more funding and it's not likely to see the light of day.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you're probably not going to see it.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if, in other words, that means if the scientist was funded by some commercial outlet, by industry, for instance, and the results were not favorable, it's probably not going to be published.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so we won't ever know.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it also means that that 99% of the research that's undertaken is undertaken at the behest of an agenda.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Which means which means that just pure I would call pure research for the fun of learning, just for the fun of, hey, let's let's throw some stuff up against the wall and see what sticks.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that is almost gone.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's very little, just pure cure curiosity research.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's very specifically driven.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, if if no if nobody's interested in this topic, nobody's interested in this thing, then it never gets researched.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that actually happened to me in graduate school.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: The professor I was working with, um, he was trying to contradict a currently accepted theory in exercise physiology.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because he was contradicting an accepted mainstream theory, he could not get any funding.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: So he he actually died when I started grad school.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then I made him the promise that I would pick up his research because it otherwise it would die with him.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I changed what I was studying and started studying his topic, and I couldn't get any funding for it either.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Even though I piggybacked with professors who were reputable in the field, nobody would fund the research.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I ended up going through grad school with no funding.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And basically, that's how I became a TA, a teaching assistant.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And thank goodness I did, because that is what gave me such a profoundly solid background in biochemistry, because that's what I ended up teaching to get myself through grad school.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is, if it's not a favorable topic, you already have that resistance head on that you can't get the funding.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, scientists, you know, when I went decided to become a scientist, I was under this false illusion that it was still a pursuit of truth, right?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: That you got to um work in academia and basically pick a topic that you are passionate about.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you got to design these studies with trying to remove as much bias as possible and simply try to find the truth in that in that question, right?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the answer to that question.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's not actually the reality of science.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to appease the funding agencies because if you don't get funding, you get fired, in essence, right?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have funding to have your lab.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And as you were saying, there's a lot of funding now that is commercially based.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so industry is funding these scientists, industry is funding academic departments, for instance.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, there are entire companies that are set up to pay scientists to produce results that are favorable to the industry.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, there is a Canadian firm.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: This came out of the Monsanto court trials with glyphosate.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: We found out that there is a Canadian firm that was rehired that was hired to recruit scientists specifically to publish studies that would defend glyphosate.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so companies now are set up to hire scientists to defend certain positions of these companies.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, in that case, some of those studies that those scientists created were actually reviewed by Monsanto before they were ever published.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so deep ties.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you I found this um article in the Journal Call Journal of Medical Association, um they said that the odds, the odds of a commercially sponsored study favoring the sponsor's product is 3.6 to four times greater than if it was studied without the commercial funding.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: So about four times greater, it's gonna promote it.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I wrote about this in my first book in terms of aspartame, right?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Aspartame was marketed under the name Nutrasuite.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And by 1995, aspartame was extensively studied.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: There were about 165 peer-reviewed studies that looked at his safety at that point.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: About half of those found no problems, okay?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: 100% of those studies were funded by the manufacturer.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: In contrast, the independent, the independent funding sources that studied aspartame, out of those, 92% of them found problems with it.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's just one example of the influence of corporate industry.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um now, another example is is this one.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is from the Journal of Um Psychiatry.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: They did a survey of psychiatric drugs, and what they found is that there were five trials that were paid for by um Eli Lilly.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the drug was um Zyprexa.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: In those five trials, the the Zyprexa came out looking superior to the drug made by Jansen, which was um Resperidol.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So when Eli Lilly funded the study, in those five trials, their drug came out superior to Jansen.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now Jansen sponsored its own trial, and their product was the winner three out of four times.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then when Pfizer funded their study, their drug was like Geodon.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Their drug was the best.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so what they found was that they concluded that the tendency for the sponsors drug trial medication to perform the best held true 90% of the time.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so 90% of the time, the drug spot, the drug company that sponsored it, their drug was the best.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so so drug company money is behind a great deal of the medical research that is done today, actually.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: The majority of the medical research is done is conducted by or funded by these drug companies.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some is still done by some universities and public health authorities, like the NIH and the CDC, of course.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing: a huge portion of the budget comes from big pharma and the big medical advice companies.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this is not a secret.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can quickly do a search.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Even through Google, you could do a search and you can find this out.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when I searched this, I found out that up to 75% of the FDA's drug division budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it comes from largely in the form of user fees.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: So when a drug company is gonna file for new drug approval, they pay a fee to the FDA for the FDA to review that drug, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, right in then then and there, that sounds like a conflict of interest, right?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, but in exchange, in exchange, like this is something that Congress set up, actually, this this negotiation.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: So in exchange, the for this user fee, the FDA agreed to shorten the drug approval times and to get industry input regarding the decision-making process that the FDA should go through to approve drugs.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the critics are now saying that the FDA is actually beholden to the drug companies because of this funding source.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Another issue, though, that is not largely talked about, um, and this is my last issue for um the funding sources, and I'll let you jump in and I'll move on to the next fraud sources.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: But this issue is not talked about a lot.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: The FDA actually has advisors.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they have advisory panels that get together and decide which drugs to approve.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And there's dozens of these advisory committees that meet and they vote each year on which drugs should be approved for the US market.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: So what happened was this is one example.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: In 2010, there were seven medical researchers and one patient advocate that gathered together to vote to approve a drug that was supposed to limit blood clots and thereby help prevent heart attacks and strokes.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: There were no reported conflicts of interest, right?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Even by the FDA, there were no reported conflicts of interest.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Later, when sales took off from the drug that was approved by that committee, the drug company showered four of the medical researchers with money for travel and consulting advice.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: One cardiologist was paid over$200,000 for quote, for accommodations, honoraria, and consulting.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: So this is what had a new thing that has come up.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's called pay later conflicts of interest.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Pay later conflicts of interest.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, sure, you may not see conflicts of interest when they could when they met, but they know they're gonna get paid off later.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so when there was a um a study that examined the compensation records for the drug from drug companies to physicians who advised the FDA on whether to approve 28 different drugs for um kidney disease, arthritis, and psycho um psychopharmacologic drugs.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this was looked at between 28, 2008, and 2014.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: This was published in science.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they actually did find that this um pay later conflict of interest was rampant.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually widespread.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one way they're getting around the whole conflict of interest, right?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: So um, so this is so that's just a little encapsulation of the how the fraud can enter just from this one source of funding.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: But Joel, before I go on, do you want to jump in?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just wanted to uh, yeah.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the the pay later conflict of interest is like a it's like a quid quid pro quo.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, they they kind of they kind of wink wink handshake, and every everybody knows what the game is, but there's no formal written, there's no there's no actual agreement, there's no contract, it's just a kind of a uh an understanding among among friends, just among friends.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, as you were going on there, I couldn't help but think, listen, it it's it's not just uh drug companies and people, it's the same thing in livestock.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Goodness, over 30 years ago, I um was so frustrated with having the Virginia Tech um livestock specialists on their radio program, you know, the the noon hour.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: They they have this, uh at least in our area, we're rural, you know, so the radio stations have a kind of a uh an agriculture program at the noon hour when farmers are in eating lunch.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and and these guys were doing bulletins on uh pink eye, pink eye in cattle.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, you you put the antibiotic under, you you pull down the eyelid, you take a needle, and you inject uh an antibiotic in the conjunctiva of the eye, you know, and and and all this stuff.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I was so because I was frustrated because you know, we don't have any pink eye problems uh because we use uh kelp, uh seaweed, ascophylum to dosum, uh kelp.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I I kind of pushed back um and and uh got actually got a visit from the head Virginia Tech livestock, you know, um specialist.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um he came out, he saw what we were doing, and and he was very impressed.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I said, so so why can't you why can't you on your radio program say, well, you know, some farmers are are seem to be getting results with kelp, you don't have to endorse it, just just you know, just put it out there.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Some farmers uh say they're having success with kelp, you know, just just lay it out on the table.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: You said, Well, we we can't say anything unless there's a double by double blind study behind it.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: We we can't even mention what somebody else is doing unless we have done a double blind study.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, how do we do that?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, you have to pay for it.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's looking, I mean, just it was just he looked at me and said, You have to pay for it.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I can't pay, I can't pay for a kelp study.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: So the result is farmers.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the point, Cena, when you talk about fraud, farmers nationwide are completely denied, denied an idea simply because nobody at the top is interested, yeah, in that idea.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's not a lot of money behind that idea, right?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, where's the profit gonna come from?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like no, no, you don't you don't even need a vet.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: You you know, you don't need a drug, you don't need a vet, you don't need, I mean, you don't need to go to the hospital with a broken leg where a cow kicked you in the headgate, you know.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and it's that that that's the thing, and so so people think people think you know that that somehow out there in this universe of intellectual, you know, capacity, all the options have been looked at.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is there's a very narrow funnel of options that ever get looked at.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's just that's it's tragic.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, what's really tragic about it is that most of what's looked at is stuff that you and I, for example, don't necessarily align with principally, right?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: And but it provides this narrow um selection of solutions for citizens.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, so for instance, um science, these scientific journals, these scientific articles that are published, they affect us more than we actually think about, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: They affect you on a day-to-day more than you think about.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: So just a couple quick examples.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um the the scientific findings are used to help shape government policies and to create regulations.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, and those regulations and policies are used to nudge or kind of in some examples control our behavior as citizens.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, they want to ban gas stoves, right?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: They ban incandescent light bulbs, they want to ban livestock, right?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Have you eat bugs?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, the dietary guidelines, right?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this, Ansel Keys.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had a whole podcast about this, and he cherry-picked the data, right?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: He did the seven country studies and he cherry-picked the data that was favorable to his hypothesis so that he could quote unquote prove his hypothesis, right?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this happened after the dietary guidelines were already released.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: Those dietary guidelines are still affecting us today because they create all federal food and health policies and programs.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: They dictate what's fed to kids in at school lunches and breakfasts, they dictate what you can buy on the SNAP program, the meals for the elderly, what's fed to the hospital people or you know, patients, um, military.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like if it those dietary guidelines actually help determine which research studies will be funded by the NIH, right?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's used to control your food label.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the important nutrition facts that are listed on your food label that are supposed to help you choose healthy foods, it controls what's on that.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look even there at the fraud, those dietary guidelines are actually largely assembled by a group of supposed experts.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is the dietary guideline committee.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: They get their information from summaries or reviews of studies that came from food and drug companies.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the British Medical Journal actually said that that scientific community relies heavily on reviews from the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, and such, which are, quote, heavily supported by food and drug companies.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so once again, we have industry coming in funding studies that then these supposed trusted reputable organizations like the American Heart Association publish summaries on these studies and they advise these committee members for the government who are creating these guidelines and policies that are dictating our health care, our food, and what's on our food labels and what studies are going to be funded.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: That is just one example of how all of these um pieces of fraudulent input are connected together to directly affect you.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of this just comes back to the funding and not only the funding, but can you make profit from it?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one reason why you don't see a lot of uh uh like a plethora of studies about natural remedies, right?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you you can grow it yourself, there is no money in that, right?
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I want to add to the prescription drug, and I know we're about out of time, but I want to give you a little tidbit about the review process for prescription drug, and then I will quickly, very quickly, run through some of the other points of how um fraud can enter that scientific pathway.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: So prescription drugs are very interesting because depending on the statistics that you are relying on, that uh prescription drugs are either the third or the fourth leading cause of death in America.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, which is pretty astounding.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Half of those deaths occurred even though the patient took the drug as prescribed.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't an overdose.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if half of the people took the drugs as prescribed by the doctor and they died from the drug, it begs the question: how are doctors determining which medications to prescribe?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: So they largely, these medical doctors largely rely on drug trials that are sponsored by industry, as we've already mentioned.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, these drug trials go through what's called a peer review process.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And most people have probably heard about this.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um they peer reviewed studies are claimed to be higher quality studies, right?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because they were reviewed by your peers.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: But researchers who conduct the peer reviews of the drug company-sponsored studies, they actually usually don't get access to the raw data.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that data is actually confidential.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: All the reviewer can actually see is the drug company's analysis and summary of the data.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: So this leaves the door wide open to manipulation of that data.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: How are you actually going to review the data and see, oh, they they did the statistics right?
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, there were no, like there weren't these outliers, right?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, most medical doctors don't know that.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know that the reviewers aren't seeing the raw data, that they're literally just trusting the summaries from the companies that are producing these uh prescription drugs.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's why the medical doctors aren't questioning the science, they're not questioning the drugs.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: They are just trusting and complying.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, between 2003 and 2016, um, drug companies paid fines of$33 billion.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And many of those cases came from, you know, illegally marketing drugs, but also included scientific fraud, hiding data that showed harm, and suppressing negative results.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: So this is another example of how modern science is largely controlled by the funding source, um, making it ripe with manipulation of fraud, and how you and I are not likely to see results from studies that were not favorable to the funding source.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let me run through the quick list of other ways in which fraud comes into play.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, number one is at the level of the scientists.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: We talked a little about this, falsifying data, like cherry-picking data, like Ansel Keys did, statistical manipulation, right?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's a big joke in the academia circles that you can manipulate the statistics to have a favorable outcome, no matter what it is you desire, right?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of play in statistics.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes scientists have been shown to outright make up the numbers, right?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like we started out this podcast saying they just make up the data.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: The newest form of fraud is using artificial intelligence, right?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: AI.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now you can use AI to generate entire data sets for you, also to generate images, right?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: You talked about, Joel, how part of science is seeing it, right, and then reproducing it.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now AI can generate even microscopic images.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: So an image that you might see under a microscope, and oftentimes they'll take photos of those images scientists in their lab, will have microscopes, and they'll see images under the microscope, and you can take a photo and you publish that as proof, right?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: You that that substantiate your claims in your journal, in your journal um article.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now we have artificial intelligence that can actually create those microscopic images.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we have like these fraudbusters out there.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: These are, you know, scientists and researchers who are trying to crack down on fraud and find these fraudulent people and organizations.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: And they're saying that when AI is generating these images, they can't tell the difference between them.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: They can't tell the difference between an AI-generated image and one that was actually generated in the lab.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a whole new level of fraud that's going on.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we can't detect that with our eyes.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, other quick categories of fraud.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's ghostwriting, which some people have heard of.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is typically when someone else writes the paper for the authors, for the scientists.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: I actually don't have a problem with ghostwriting, um, as long as because not all scientists are good at writing papers.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: So if you get someone else to do the write-up, as long as it's accurate, right?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then I actually don't have a problem with somebody asking somebody else to write it up for them.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, as um postdocs and whatnot, we often end up writing the papers for our um professors, right?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but but what I do have a problem is with is when the ghostwriting is done by the funding source.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this was shown in the glyphosate trials where Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to the academics, right?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: So they wrote it, Monsanto wrote it, and then they put the researchers' names on it.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's not okay for me.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's like unethical.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about having scientists for hire.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: These are the firms that hire scientists to create studies with a certain outcome.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: Then we have paper mills.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is something that most people probably aren't aware of.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so the and paper mills, paper mills are one of the reasons why we're having an uptick in retraction of papers.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: So a paper mill is when a third-party person or a group offers researchers um a range of different products.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: They may offer the researcher a data set.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: They may offer the researcher um a ghost to that they will ghostwrite a fabricated or fraudulent manuscript, right?
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, these are for a fee, of course.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the scientist pays a fee to a paper mill company or individual, and that company or individual gives them a research paper that maybe has fraudulent made-up data in it, right?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's a paper of really, really low quality.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: But like we said, it's it's good enough to get published in a journal.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so they'll get one more publication under their name.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a common practice in science now.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: And in articles that I was reading, they're saying that scientists are just chalking up this cost as just a cost to be a scientist nowadays, because you have to get more papers published.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: So then there are also review mills.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when a journal engages in expediting um superficial or even non-existent peer review processes, processes in order to um uh so they'll collect a fee, they'll collect a publication fee because sometimes you have to pay to publish an article in a journal.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the scientist is paying to publish this article.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the review mill, they will, it's an organization where they'll collect the fee from the author, and then in exchange, they'll do an expedite a review process.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, sometimes the the they won't even review it, right?
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's so minimal a review that it fails to assess the quality or the validity of the research.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it it's really like just giving it a free pass uh onto uh online.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um sometimes they will actually um they will actually do something called coercive citations.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: So this is where a journal editor puts pressure on an author to actually cite the editor's journal.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because just like for a scientist, the journals need more citations, right?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: The journals need people to cite their journals in order to get a higher impact factor.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: That means it's a more reputable journal, the more likely to get more money coming in.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so so basically they kind of coerce the scientists to uh here's your study and it looks great, but can you here cite this article that was published by our journal, right?
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that's inflating their numbers artificially.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's another form of fraud.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, sometimes papers actually bypass the review process because the organization knows the authors, right?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's who you know, not what you're actually publishing.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: It just completely bypasses it.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: So so here, this is a you know, very quick summary of different ways that fraud can enter into this scientific pathway.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you can see that there's many different pathways.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: For the fraud to enter the scientific process.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact is that it is rampant.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really a detriment to our culture.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because as we said, public policies are being predicated on these journal articles, climate change, and all these things, you know, the damage that cows are doing, right?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's all it's predicated on these, a large part on these scientific articles, as well as your health care, right?
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of procedures you can have done, what kind of doctors you can see, what kind of treatments you can have done.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's all largely predicated on this.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, so solutions.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: There aren't great solutions, but we do have some.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is a website called Retraction Watch.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: Retraction Watch publishes articles that have been retracted and they explain why they were retracted.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're reading a journal article, um, sometimes even after they've been retracted, it can take months or over a year to get that article pulled off the internet.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: The process is very slow.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go to retraction watch and you can see if that article has been retracted.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can also go to retraction watch and you can read some of the explanations of why articles have been retracted, and that will teach you what to look for in different articles, right?
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's highlighting the fraud and the flaws in these articles, which is a way of learning it for yourself.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you have pulled up a scientific journal, uh a scientific article that you want to read, look at the funding source and look at if there's any listed conflicts of interest.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can also Google the name of the authors and you can Google the journal because believe it or not, sometimes they are fake.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's another easy thing you can do.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: There is a movement going on right now to set up crowdfunding in order to fund what's called the fraud detectors, uh, fraud detectives, excuse me, fraud detectives.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you can also contribute to a crowdfunding um effort if you'd like.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then you can also always send it to us right at the Beyond Labels Podcast.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, we could check it out um and report on it.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: So so there, those are just some easy steps that people can do to start learning about it and detect it when, you know, and also I would I would add, and then I'll throw it over to you, Joel, to sum up here.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: I will add, use your intuition, right?
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: As you start reading more and more scientific articles, or even just articles in general, you become more well-versed, um, more well practiced at it.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you if you're reading it and a little fret flag, red flag gets raised in your head, trust that, right?
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: Trust that little red flag.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because as we're seeing, you can't really rely on the science, right?
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: You must keep questioning the science with boldness.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: So instead start honing in on your own intuition and building that muscle.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's great, Cena.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we've it's been a little bit long, but boy, this is such good information to know.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because because knowing who to trust is is a big deal, you know, for for sleeplessness and and whatever.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so the fact is um in a time of breaking down more uh of moral breakdown and um and should we say, you know, um more and more people not knowing what true north is, compass breakdown, uh, you know, we we just we just have a lot more of this.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm sure as long as humans have existed, we've had these same, you know, whatever, pressures, temptations, whatever.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's just it just seems like in as you become more technologically sophisticated, uh, it becomes more well, it we're just generating more stuff, you know.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: We've just got more intellectual capacity, part of our problem of being of of luxury, I guess.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so my my summary uh harkens back to when organic certification first was bandied about.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm looking back, you know, uh 35, 40, you know, I'm getting to be the old geezer now.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember when the first discussions were developing in, you know, in our circles about organic certification.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I was on a committee here in Virginia to kind of, you know, uh set up the first certifying group.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I said, you know, what we really need to certify is um is is is is belief.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: We don't we don't need a bunch of rules and regulations.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: We need to certain so what we need to do is uh is is go in unannounced and photograph the reading material next to everybody's toilet.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and the and and the reading material next to their toilet will tell you, are they are they, you know, do they get it or do they not get it?
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and this is basically about belief.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and and I I think I think that um that here we are at this point in the discussion as a layman looking at these things, uh, you know, there are all sorts of cli can to walk together except they be agreed.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, birds of a feather flock together.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, so I I know for me, uh a lot of what I trust is based on the alliances, the links, the, you know, the reading material by the toilet.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's that that's where I'm gonna go for who I'm gonna believe and trust.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and I think I think uh your outline here of the uh of the temptations and the incentives uh that corrupt the system uh has been just outstanding.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes me realize uh I just need to continue pursuing friendships and fellowships with people that I can trust because we share a same value system, a same morality, a same ethics.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: And at the end of the day, that's probably about as good a security as you can be.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and so, if you trust Cena and I in Beyond Labels, uh hang with us, okay?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we we will do our best.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: We are not funded by drug companies, we are not funded by you know any of these outfits.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh we are, you know, we we are funded by you and we're funded by our own, you know, desire to present our culture uh good, trustworthy information.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for tuning in to another episode of Beyond Labels Podcast, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.