David Bloomberg, legal "engineer" behind Survivor’s iconic rules, reveals how vague laws—like toxic chemical regulations—fuel adversarial exploitation. His team countered a lawyer’s attempt to reclassify injection molding by citing textbook definitions, yet courts often prioritize anecdotes over science, such as linking brain cancer to a chemical proven only to cause stomach cancer. Bloomberg critiques modern legal systems for weaponizing ambiguity, undermining trust and enabling misinformation, while acknowledging rules’ imperfect balance between certainty and societal expectations. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good, good.
How are you?
Pretty good.
Before we get started, I'm going to remind everyone that if you have any complaints, any critiques, any compliments, anything at all you want to tell us about the podcast, that email should be sent to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Is that a rule that they have to do it that way?
Well, yes.
Yes, I don't accept any other method.
Okay.
That's the rule.
Okay.
Which is a segue into the episode today, which is about rules.
Rules.
I mean, it seems why should we have any episode about rules?
Everyone knows what rules are and what they're for, right?
They're sort of fences to keep our behavior in line with all the things we're meant to do.
I actually have a principle about rules that I use to learn things about the people who make rules.
And the principle is that you only ever make a rule for a thing that you don't think people will do if you didn't actually state the rule.
So in stating the rule, you're saying something about the level of expectation you have of the people that you're making the rule about.
So let's say you go to work at a new company and they have a series of rules.
You know, you're going to do this in the office.
You're going to do that or whatever.
And then you have one that just seems out of place.
Let's say it's no one's allowed to stomp on anyone else's foot.
And you think to yourself immediately, why does anyone need to be told that?
I mean, that seems really obvious that no one should do that.
Most people in everyday life don't do that.
Why did they need this actual rule for that thing?
What kind of a situation am I getting into?
What other things did they not think about making rules for that they probably should have because they needed to be told this?
So we don't have rules about the quote-unquote obvious things, right?
We don't have, and this kind of we talk in society about this all the time, the warning labels on things that we think shouldn't be needed, but for some reason they're still there.
The McDonald's coffee that needs to be written on there, that it's very hot or whatever.
That anyone needs to be told these things can seem a little obscene, right?
A little bit odd, like we're devolving somehow.
But you, of course, are kind of a rule specialist, as it were.
Yes.
In your internet time, you are well known for making a certain set of rules, which I think other people have even mentioned aren't really rules.
But, you know, we're not going to buggy about that too much, too much today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's fine.
We can call them rules.
It fits well in a t-shirt.
And it's, you know.
Yeah, maybe we should explain for those who don't know.
I am, I am more or less known for a set, having created a set of rules for playing and winning the game survivor.
And these I wrote an original version of way back after the first season after Richard Hatch won.
Spoiler alert.
So I wrote these as a newspaper article originally and then expanded on them and they've become much, much bigger.
Kind of like you said, they take into account things that happen as they happen.
Like you wouldn't think you would need to say certain things, but well, it, you know, they happen.
Like the rules are for winning the game.
So I had to at one point explain the rules are for winning the game because some people come to survivor and are like, well, I just want to create a new society and commune with nature.
Well, okay, that you do that, but you're not going to win.
And so, yes, by technical definition, it has been pointed out to me that perhaps these aren't rules because, like, if you don't follow them, the producers aren't going to come in and say, you're out of here.
You broke the rule.
Here's your penalty.
Instead, what will generally happen is your fellow players will vote you out.
So, in that regard, they are kind of self-enforcing.
Of course, not everybody follows the rules and not even every winner follows the rules, but they're, you know, generally there and meant to guide people on how to best play the game.
And, you know, they have they've been around, like I said, for many years.
People have been sneaking copies of them into the pregame, you know, to study them since like the fifth or sixth season.
You know, several have in recent years.
It's my understanding that two did in this season that's about to start.
So it's been going on.
And, you know, people look at them and look at the examples and try to remember, okay, these are the things that I should and shouldn't do.
But what's interesting and what for a long time, I guess I don't know that I made the connection on myself, is that in my work life, I wrote and interpreted and enforced rules.
You came by naturally.
Yes, yes.
And those were environmental rules for a state agency.
And, you know, as I as I've mentioned previously, I think I am now retired, which means I can speak even more freely.
But yeah, I was an engineer and a manager in the group that handled regulations for, you know, like I said, different environmental matters.
I wrote a lot of rules, even though you might think, well, the lawyers write that.
Well, I was what some people called an engineer at law.
So I wrote a lot of rules.
I interpreted a lot of rules.
For a while, for a decade or so, I was in compliance.
And so I enforced a lot of rules and told people what they were doing wrong.
And so it is no understatement to say that rules have been a very large chunk of my life.
Well, I got the right guy then.
What a coincidence.
Yeah, yeah.
Every so often, there's these when you're looking up rules, I was ran into some of these as I was doing some Google searches.
There are lists of really strange rules that have been laws and whatnot that have been implemented in various jurisdictions.
And I think these are comical mostly, but I think most of them are, I mean, they're not meant to be taken seriously as rules to guide your life.
I mean, here's an example.
I'm not sure if any of these are true or not, but feel free to correct me or whatever, internet at large.
But apparently it's illegal to ride a cow while drunk in Scotland, for example.
I mean, that makes sense.
You know, no drunk driving.
You shouldn't do that.
Very specific, right?
I mean, one would imagine it's apparently okay to ride a horse while drunk in Scotland.
I mean, they might have another cow while sober would be okay.
Yeah, I mean, they may have another law for the horse, but that doesn't get picked up because that's not as funny.
Well, we also didn't really worry about anyone riding a horse drunk because the horse usually wasn't drunk.
Yeah.
Usually.
But you can see, I mean, they've zoomed in and they have this rule that probably you imagine must have been for some extremely, extremely specific hedge case where I don't imagine it was more than one or two people that were ever riding a cow while drunk that had one hooligan that was riding a cow drunk and causing a ruckus of some kind.
And then they decided, oh, we'll stop this guy's madness.
We'll make a rule against doing this exact one thing that he's doing.
These sorts of rules are not useful, usually.
I mean, obviously, the crazy person who was riding the cow while drunk went away.
They don't need the rule anymore, but it kind of stays in the books in case some other madman decides to start doing the same thing again.
You just can't have that.
These, these things are just, they make rules seem like they're in general made by people that don't know anything.
And we get this sort of thing a lot with all kinds of rules where you get people that just say, oh, that rule comes from the same trough where they come up with bad rules.
I mean, they once said you couldn't ride a cow while drunk in Scotland for crying out loud.
Like, who's coming up with these rules even?
Like, it's a thing that tends to poison the well, right?
Yeah.
I will say now I'm going to pick nits.
Well, split hairs.
That's what I'm going to do.
Split hairs.
So what I wrote was mostly rules.
There's a difference between a rule and a law.
Well, yeah.
Because the legislators actually make the laws and they give, at least, you know, where I was, they give the agency the ability to make rules to kind of address those laws.
So, for example, there might be a law that says you need to make the air cleaner.
And then the state and the state agency has to figure out, okay, how do we do that?
Yeah.
What reasonable method is there to write?
What does this mean?
Yes.
And I will tell you, I also worked on some laws, and I will tell you that I have encountered lawmakers from both parties who have no freaking clue how to write a law.
Okay.
They don't, they just don't.
I mean, they would send us language and we'd be like, you, you haven't even used a definition.
You haven't defined this term.
You haven't used the term consistently.
You're all over the place.
You're just throwing things around here.
And it's like, if you wanted to do this, why didn't you just tell us you had an idea and we'd write it for you?
But instead, everyone, you know, wanted to get their special piece written up.
And it's clear that these people, this was not what they did.
You know, they were politicians and maybe some of them were lawyers and maybe some of them had some good ideas.
But when it came to the actual mechanics of writing a rule and writing a rule that was logical, rational, enforceable, reasonable, so many of them just could not do it.
And so, yeah, it definitely shed new light on my views of the lawmakers in terms of can you even write something that makes sense.
Now, by the time it was eventually done, the ones that I worked on, they mostly made sense because of all the different voices involved getting it to that point.
They didn't 100% make sense.
And in fact, it's my understanding there's some in one recent one that I had just before I retired, there's some litigation because certain things were not explicitly stated and the agency had to make an interpretation.
And then someone, someone like begged the agency to make an interpretation, and then they didn't like that interpretation.
So they sued.
It's like, well, So that's, I mean, you know, that's what could happen with, you know, is it poisoning the well to say, well, look at these people?
Yes.
But sometimes you do look at these people and it's like, oh my gosh, what are you doing?
Yeah.
I mean, how we word rules makes a very big difference to what happens.
I'm glad you mentioned it there.
The wording on these things makes every bit of difference.
We have an idea about rules that there's the letter of the law, like the, we say it about laws, but for many situations, rules and laws are interchangeable.
There's the spirit of the law, and then there's the letter of the law.
Right.
And we can, we're not, we're supposed to follow, I think, the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law is probably, you know, something we should adhere to more.
But we, some people say that you can't know what was in the minds of the person who wrote the law.
Although I think that's problematic too.
I mean, when you look at, let's take a set of rules like the Ten Commandments.
And, you know, first of all, back to my first point, you can tell quite a bit about the people who lived at that time based on the rules that they were meant to live by.
I mean, clearly they were a bunch of murdering thieves who slept with each other's wives, right?
I mean, they needed rules to tell them to not steal, not kill, and not partake of each other's wives.
That's, you know, they needed to be told that.
That wasn't, you know.
Right.
And that's, you know, it's an interesting point because Pendalette, well-known magician, atheist, and other, you know, has told a story many times about how people come up to him and say, if you're an atheist, what stops you from raping and murdering and doing whatever you want?
And he says, I have raped and murdered exactly the number of people that I have ever wanted to rape and murder.
Zero.
That's right.
So I didn't need a rule telling me not to rape and murder.
Right.
Yeah.
But the one of the probably the most famous of the Ten Commandments is thou shalt not murder.
One might first point out that it didn't actually say that.
It was written in probably Hebrew originally.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then translated several times to other languages, probably including Greek.
Now it translated in English as thou shalt not murder.
Well, actually, a lot of times it says it's translated to thou shalt not kill, which is different than thou shalt not murder.
Right.
So that's, that's kind of my point is that, first of all, I mean, getting into the weeds on just the Ten Commandments, there's the interpretation factor.
But people look at this and say, well, if we shouldn't kill anyone, then we shouldn't go to war.
And that's a very good point, except that they say, well, it says thou shalt not murder.
Killing is what soldiers do.
And that's somehow different.
Like gets kind of mealy mouthed there.
And I think that the, it's hard to say what God meant when he told Moses to write that down.
Just ask any of the people who speak directly to God.
I'm sure they'll.
Yeah.
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
I haven't gotten around to speaking to him myself, but maybe eventually I have a list of things to do first, though.
There's a former survivor player who's said on Twitter many times that God spoke directly to her.
So you can track her down right after you get her to explain how God assured her that Trump won the second term and would serve a second consecutive term.
Yeah, there's some very specific wording from God on that one, too.
Yeah.
So like I say, the wording here becomes, it can get really mealy mouthed.
And you can say, well, you know, it says, thou shalt not murder, not, thou shalt not kill.
And I even wonder sometimes whether they had a difference between these two words in ancient Hebrew, right?
I mean, not all languages have as many synonyms.
According to my old rabbis, yes, there was a difference between murder and kill.
Oh, okay.
All right.
So, at least according to my memory, my recollection of discussions about the difference between murder and kill.
But you're right.
I mean, that is why, you know, I mentioned earlier the law that I was working on that didn't have any definitions.
That's why definitions are so important.
Yeah.
And I've encountered that many times over my career, where you have to define your terms to start with.
Yeah.
You know, I remember, so we had a rule dealing with metal furniture.
Okay.
Yeah.
And we had a metal furniture manufacturer who argued we were enforcing against them, saying you didn't follow this rule.
And he said, no, you're wrong.
A lamp is not furniture.
A wastebasket is not furniture.
I've looked it up in the dictionary, and those things are not furniture.
And so we had to have a meeting with him in the attorney general's office because he was fighting it that hard to point out to him, I don't care what the dictionary says.
There's literally a definition in the rules that says what metal furniture consists of.
It's included with the rules that states the rules.
Yeah, right.
You know, and it says a lamp and a wastebasket are metal furniture.
And I don't care what you say.
I don't care what the dictionary said.
And at the time I came up, and this was 25 years ago, probably, I came up with an example that I used in various ways many times.
If a rule or a law defines a chicken as having four legs, giving milk and mooing, then for the purpose of that rule or law, that's called a chicken.
You know, and you can't ride your drunk chicken in Scotland, but it doesn't make sense.
And people may say, well, but that's not what a chicken is.
Well, for the purpose of this rule or law, it is until you change it.
And so the fact that this manufacturer said, I don't make metal furniture, I make metal accessories.
No, not according to the rule.
And again, it all comes down to the definition and the specifics.
And like you said, the wording.
And it can come down to a single word.
It can sometimes come down to a single comma.
You know, people used to wonder why I was so gung-ho on the Oxford comma.
And was commas can literally mean the difference between what something says in a rule or a law.
And people have won lawsuits based on the placement of a comma.
You know, so these things get to that level because everyone needs to be playing.
I hate to say this, playing by the same rules, playing on the same field.
And it does see, it does sometimes seem to go to extremes.
But in a system that ends up being adversarial, each side is going to say, no, that's not what it means, or yes, that is what it means.
And that's why these rules, as you said, this level of expectation of who you're dealing with, it's why it has to go to that level of detail.
Right.
We can make all the lawyer jokes we like here, but some people in our world seem to specialize in the practice of what I call like twisting away from the obviously intended meaning of a rule.
And I call this kindergarten bullshit.
I call it being a lawyer, but yeah.
Well, it's not a thing that's not a practice that's only found with lawyers.
I've seen this with everyday people in all areas of life, blue collar, white collar, red collar, doesn't matter.
There are some people that just they, it's like they take a rule and it's, oh, well, the rule says that.
Well, it doesn't say we can't do this.
And you think to yourself, well, actually, maybe it's, it's not explicitly stated, but I think that's what they mean, right?
I mean, kindergarten bullshit cuts between the wording of a rule and the meaning of the rule and attempts to make some space there, right?
Yeah.
And you'll see that sort of behavior.
I've seen it like if you're playing a game, you know, whether it's a role-playing game, role-playing games have lots of rules, but there's always some space in between or a tabletop game, any sort of game.
And someone will be like, well, it doesn't say in the rules, I can't do this.
It's like, come on.
It's, you know, clearly, you know, and yeah, there's not going to be an actual lawyer.
There's not going to be a court that determines that.
If you do that enough, people are going to be like, I don't want to play with this person anymore.
Yeah.
And so those are those rules.
But then you've got the rules that could, you know, that really are meaningful.
And so I have, you know, I mean, I have hundreds of stories like that where, you know, sometimes a lawyer wants to make sure their interpretation is correct, you know, to protect the company they work for.
Sometimes they want to do it to get ahead.
Sometimes they, there's all sorts of different reasons.
You know, some, like I said, want to get around the rule.
Some want to make sure they're within the rule.
You know, an example of someone who wanted to make sure they were within the rule, I got a call from a lawyer at home on my day off before a three-day weekend.
And they said the company that they were representing was concerned and they wanted to shut down operations for the whole three-day weekend.
And this would be a major undertaking, major money involved, because the rule that they were following said they needed to get 95% control.
And their systems were showing 94.7% control.
Now, sounds like they're in trouble, but no.
I said, what does the rule say?
Does it say 95% or 95.0%?
Yeah.
I said, well, it's 95%.
Well, rounds up.
Yes, exactly.
Significant figures, significant digits.
94.7 is 95.
Yeah.
And so I told her that.
I said, they're fine.
She's like, good to know.
And they went on their way.
Now, we had to remember that when we were writing rules in the future, if we wanted someone to have an emission limit of 0.0009, we couldn't say it was 0.0009.
We had to say it was 0.00090.
Yeah.
You know, or else they'd be emitting 0.0094.
Yeah.
Rounding up, rounding down.
Yeah.
And sometimes, even though, you know, that sounds like a very small number in the work we were doing, sometimes that made all the difference.
Sometimes you were right on the edge of something.
And so it's that sort of situation where you have to both read what the rule intended and, you know, what it actually says.
Did the original people who wrote that 20 years prior really mean 95.0?
I don't know.
I wasn't one of them, but I could tell you what it says now.
Yeah.
And then on the flip side, the people who try to gain an advantage, there was a lawyer who represented a company that did injecting, injection molding.
I don't know that everybody knows what injection molding is.
It's rather specific, but it's basically like if you take a plastic and you blow it into the mold, into the shape you want.
So think of a milk jug.
It's put in, it's blown in, and now you have a nice hollow shape.
And so there was no specific rule on the books for injection molding, which meant it defaulted to what we called a generic rule.
They were not meeting this generic rule.
And so this lawyer comes in and says, oh, but there's a rule for extruding.
And we meet the rule for extruding.
And this injection mold machine has an extrusion screw.
So therefore, it's an extruder.
What she didn't know was my degree was in material science.
I had taken classes in like the difference between different methods of manufacture.
And so I was able to, I literally took out one of my college textbooks and was like, nope, here it is.
Nice try.
And this lawyer who almost never lost, she gave up.
She was like, ah, you got me.
But, you know, she was trying.
She was trying to get around the intent of the rule by trying to, you know, latch on to this one little thing that I think in a lot of cases, people probably would have been like, ah, okay, you're right.
And she just happened to try it on the wrong person.
Yeah.
And that's, I like that we have rules in our life.
Like chaos is not an option.
You know what I mean?
But the way we treat rules sometimes in this way, where we get lawyers who are professional arguers, essentially, they're meant to know the rules, but they're also meant to advocate for a position sometimes that is on the edge or actively against the rules.
That's a thing that becomes problematic.
I wouldn't say it's untenable.
I wouldn't say it's a thing we should get rid of, but it's a thing we should be aware of, a thing we should be careful of, right?
That, you know, like you say, another person might have got away with that if they were trying to wedge in this other definition of a whole other kind of manufacturing process with a person that didn't happen to have knowledge of how that really worked.
And I worry that that process, in some ways, especially now with our information age, isn't part of a system that helps people lose trust in things, in rules, in society, in how everything is going.
I mean, I wonder if that isn't creating a gap in which misinformation sits.
How do you feel about that?
I don't know.
It's hard.
I mean, it's a difficult situation because if you think about it, our whole legal system is based off of this, off of what you described.
You know, two opposing lawyers hashing it out in a courtroom.
Like, okay, did he, like we were talking about earlier, was it killing someone or was it murdering someone?
Yeah.
You know, if someone comes at me with a knife and I have a gun, which I don't, but if I did and I, you know, shot him, well, did I murder him or did I kill him?
Well, most courts would say, no, you, you know, it was self-defense killing, but not all courts.
It depends where you ended up.
Quite frankly, it depends on perhaps my skin color, my gender, you know, various other things.
And so, you know, we have this legal system where, yes, it is oppositional.
And there's always going to be different views because that's the only way you hash it out on these things that aren't as obvious, like you were saying.
I mean, we would like to think that certain things are obvious, but things that you and I would agree are obvious, I guarantee we can find someone on Twitter.
I could open up Twitter right now and find someone who does not believe the same thing is obvious.
You know, I believe it is obvious that a certain football player was at the Super Bowl.
Okay.
There are people on Twitter who believe it was his clone because he's dead.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, I mean, that doesn't necessarily, that particular thing doesn't necessarily lead to any rules other than the rules of reality, I suppose.
But that's the situation we're in where even when something seems obvious, you know, don't cross the street if there's traffic coming.
Yeah.
Some people are like, nope, car's going to stop for me.
You know, and there are rules that pedestrians have the right of way, although also there are other rules that a pedestrian can get a ticket for jaywalking.
Yeah.
So it just, it's so situational.
And like I said, it's this oppositional system where you have advocates on each side arguing about, well, what did this really mean?
And sometimes to circle back to something you said earlier, sometimes the intent is important.
So there are laws that have been passed that say certain things are forbidden.
Like you are not allowed to sell alcohol on a Sunday.
Yeah.
Okay.
And you may say, well, okay, that's just a law forbidding alcohol on a Sunday.
But then you look at it.
Well, why aren't you?
Well, because according to many religions, Sunday is the Sabbath and you shouldn't be selling it on the Sabbath.
You should be going to church on the Sabbath.
Right.
And so you have to look back and say, well, that's really a religious exclusion law that should not be on the books by our government.
Right.
Sometimes there are laws passed where the representatives, the senators, whoever are dumb enough to say out loud that there are religious reasons why they're passing this law.
And then when they get challenged, they're like, no, no, the law is fine.
And someone whips out the transcript that says, you said you were doing this because of religious reasons.
Well, then the court has to take that into account.
And even if on the face of the law, it doesn't say we're doing this, you know, for religious reasons.
If it was done for those reasons, then that intent needs to be considered.
So it goes even beyond the letter of the law.
Yeah.
I mean, the rules we have and in the system of law that we use, the adversarial system, the part about it that bothers me is that there, I know why it exists.
It exists because it was implemented in a time when they knew they couldn't really determine what was objectively real in each case.
But we have advanced quite a few things since then.
We have cameras nearly everywhere.
But it bothers me that even in this age where we can know many, many more things and determine almost everything much more precisely, there is still very little need for either of the sides in a courtroom that is doing an adversarial court case that either side needs to adhere to reality.
They're meant to not lie.
Officers of the court generally are told that they cannot tell a lie.
But if you avoid the truth, you can still argue against the thing that is probably not true, even though you're only lying if you absolutely know it's not true.
Right.
So you get lawyers who will sometimes avoid learning about a certain thing.
I don't want to know it, or I'm not going to go to a thing to observe a situation so that I don't have to testify against my client or anything like that.
And that's bothersome because the point should be to get to objective reality.
I mean, that's the reason why they started this system, and it was brilliant in its time, was because they knew they couldn't.
They didn't have enough resources to know what objective reality was really saying in each case.
But now we're very close to knowing objective reality in nearly every case.
And still, we have this problem, right?
Maybe not quite exactly there for every case, but so much closer.
And that bothers me.
I think that's our tendency to not trust the rulemakers, the laws, the lawyers who argue them.
Generally, all of those people are all lawyers, all trained in the law.
So, to laypersons, like, well, maybe less you because you've been in the machinery of that thing.
But from my perspective, and everyone that I work with, they're all just in a different zone.
They're all making things up in a different spot.
They're in offices somewhere else, and they don't know how the quote-unquote real world works.
And from our perspective, they aren't seeing reality, and we are.
And of course, that's also potentially very not true because misinformation can lead people to think things are true that are very, very untrue.
But what we need in our world now is like an objective reality beacon.
And we don't really have that.
We don't really have that at all.
And our legal system isn't designed to do that.
It's designed to make something like objective reality because it's like a device that's meant to measure something that was made 800 years ago.
And it's meant to measure, let's say it's meant to measure magnetic north.
And it gets you approximately magnetic north every single time, more or less.
Approximately magnetic north.
We have much finer methods of finding magnetic north now.
And we can know where it exactly is.
Why would we want to still use a machine that's purpose and it's only design by its design is only ever going to get us approximate.
I don't know that you can do it without having an adversarial system or it gives too much power to those.
I mean, like, I don't trust prosecutors to always get the right answer.
I think we know, not, I think we know they don't.
Yeah.
You know, and whether intentional or unintentional, they don't.
And you need the defense to be able to point to poke holes.
You need rules saying that the prosecutor has to turn over all evidence so that they're not in a situation where, oh, we decided not to share this piece because it didn't matter to our case.
Well, okay, maybe it doesn't matter your case, or maybe it's because it doesn't point to your suspect.
Yeah.
You know, and your only job in that case is to show that this one person is guilty, not to find the guilty person.
Those, like I think we said it last time when we talked about the freedom of speech, those two things are almost identical in wording and have much different meanings.
Right.
Yes.
And so, you know, I think this adversarial, I was calling it oppositional.
I couldn't think of the right term.
So thank you.
But is a better way to do it.
I don't know.
I mean, there are certain things that it still doesn't work at all for.
If you circle, if you leave like criminal courts and you go to more civil courts and things like scientific questions, medical questions.
Like, for example, this company leaked this toxic chemical.
Joe Smith over here died of cancer.
Joe Smith's wife says it was this company's toxic leak that caused it.
Therefore, she sues and wins some humongous settlement.
Now, the actual facts are we know from studies this toxic chemical causes certain types of cancers at a certain rate.
What we can't prove in most cases is that it caused Joe Smith's cancer.
So it makes it very difficult because the courts do not determine scientific reality.
You know, that is determined by, well, either by reality or by scientific consensus to the best of the ability at that time.
And so, you know, it's a very difficult situation.
It's made more difficult when other people join in and say, well, not only did it cause Joe Smith's cancer, but I have asthma and it caused my asthma.
And then someone else says, well, I have stomach cramps and it caused my stomach cramps.
And someone else says, well, it caused my ingrown toenails.
And I know I'm getting pretty far down the way here and it almost sounds like I'm making fun, but I have been in situations where people have come to hearings where I've been testifying saying this caused X to me.
And we know that all the scientific studies show it doesn't.
And it's very sad situations.
I had one come and say, this caused my husband to die of brain cancer.
We know that certain levels of whatever chemical it was had caused stomach cancer in the past.
It was absolutely no indication it had ever caused brain cancer.
But what do I say to this person?
No, you're lying.
No, I mean, there's not a whole lot you can say.
You, you know, you just have to, you know, save it for the brief, the write-up, and explain there's science going on here.
And here's the situation.
And yeah, sometimes these sorts of things, they do cause people to have illnesses, but it's a combination not just of misinformation, but of lack of information, of motivated reasoning, of misconstruing of assumptions.
You know, one of the stories that was most interesting to me is was at a rulemaking hearing.
So to tie it to rules here, we were reducing the allowable emission rates of a certain chemical.
We were making it better.
And this older woman comes out and says, things have gotten worse since I have lived here when I was a child.
I used to go play out in the fields and eat fish from that river.
And we're thinking, lady, if you ate fish from that river 40 years ago, you're lucky you're alive because it was much dirtier then.
No one thinks that the environment was better or no one should think that the environment was better 40, 50, 60 years ago.
It was not.
And so we showed all the statistics, all the information.
They didn't care.
But one person said, well, my daughter has asthma.
And this was a fairly rural area.
And we know it's coming from that plant.
And we said, well, we don't know what to tell you.
You know, it's gotten better.
We, you know, we can't diagnose.
Well, as the years went on, this person kept returning and eventually her daughter got older and went to college in Chicago.
Well, she came to a hearing and said, again, in this rural area and said, I'll tell you how bad the air is here.
My daughter moved to Chicago and her asthma got better.
And I knew the woman wouldn't listen to me.
So I eventually pulled aside someone else who I had a better relationship with.
And I said, you need to tell this woman to take her daughter to a doctor who specializes in allergies because you're in a rural area.
There's a lot more allergens in a rural area.
You know what's not in Chicago?
A lot of the crop allergens because it's Chicago.
Yeah.
So if your asthma is getting better by moving to a city, that's a pretty big hint.
It wasn't the pollution that was causing it.
Yeah.
And I know that we've gone pretty far afield from rules, but it's the view of the people who want certain things to happen from these rules.
And in this person's eyes, we weren't doing enough.
We weren't making these rules tight enough, but you have to have a basis of information to set the rules.
And they have to be an agreed upon set of information.
And that's, again, where that adversarial system comes in.
We were proposing.
She was opposing.
We had science on our side.
It wasn't settled science, but it was better science.
She had her feelings on her side.
One anecdote.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I can certainly understand those feelings, but we can't base all our rules on someone's feelings.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, that's a good place to wrap this up.
Rules are here to provide a guideline for how we're going to live, some expectation of how everyone around us is going to live.
And they're not perfect.
Not everyone perfectly stays within the bounds.
In all moments, you never know.
When I'm in Scotland, I might just try riding a cow while drunk just to see what happens.