How Government Censorship Destroyed Trust in Science: Cameron English on COVID Suppression

Cameron English [00:00:00] You had people saying, like, working for, you know, like a nonprofit that's funded by the government, right? They're, they're going to Twitter and they're flagging content and they're saying this is true, but it's being misinterpreted, right? So we don't want people to read this too frequently because it might inspire vaccine hesitancy.

Vance Crowe [00:00:18] Where now kind of the established position is that the left likes GMOs because they're pro science.

Cameron English [00:00:26] You have the scientific establishment working with the federal government to silence science.

Vance Crowe [00:00:36] I'm Steven Fairbanks, a writer and teacher from St. Louis, Missouri, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Well, we are going to have a man named Cam English on the podcast. I've known Cam since all the way back in my monan days, and he has stayed in the science writing world where he is talking about pushing back on a lot of the popular narratives that get put out into the world. So we're gonna get to that interview with Cam in just a moment. But first I want to talk about something I'm really proud of. My team for the last three months put together a really amazing Legacy Interviews website. And the reason I say that is because when we started this business, we had really no idea what we were doing. I thought like, Hey, there are people that want me to record their stories. Let's just sit down and do that. But as we've started to do hundreds of these interviews, we've realized that the real value that we're creating is the ability for people to take the family history that they have and they know about and pass it on to future generations. So those future generations know where they came from. So in times of anxiety and depression, they can look back on their family history knowing, Hey, this is what my family has overcome to get where I'm at today. We have some really cool new videos on there. We have some blogs describing what we do and how we do it. And ultimately, if a legacy interview isn't for you, it just doesn't work for you to get to the studio, or maybe it's beyond your means right now, we're also putting up as much information as we can about how you can do your own interviews, everything from setting the situation up, to editing to even, what kinds of questions do we ask?

Vance Crowe [00:02:11] And we've started doing this because we believe that one of the most important things that you can do as a person contributing to the responsibilities of a family is to make sure you capture the stories of the people that came before you, and you pass your own stories on to the future. Because this way people know where they came from, what they can go through, and what's possible. So if you're interested in learning more about Legacy Interviews, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Cam English. Cam English, welcome to the podcast.

Cameron English [00:02:44] Hey, thank you so much, Vance. It's, it's my pleasure.

Vance Crowe [00:02:48] Well, the, I was looking through your stuff over the weekend and I'm, I'm proud to be with a guy that's been on, not only written hundreds and hundreds of articles, but also been on Dr. Phil and, and pushing back on science narratives. I, I think you have a very interesting career. So, maybe to begin, what do you do? How, how is it that you make a living? What have you been doing all these years?

Cameron English [00:03:10] Yeah, yeah, it's a great, great question. So, I just discovered probably towards the end of high school that I love to write, and I did really well in classes where that was, you know, the focus was long form writing. And so in my early twenties, I just started doing it, or, or asking people rather, you know, I think that's really good advice if anyone wants that, is if you wanna do something, just email someone and say, Hey, can I do this? And you'll be surprised how many times they'll, they'll say yes. But that led to internships that led to part-time jobs that led to freelance work. And then pretty soon after, probably a decade or so, I got to a place where I had enough of a reputation where people would say, Hey, come work for me. You know? And so I was in sales before that, which was a great career, but this is, you know, what I'm passionate about. So I said, bye. I'm, you know, done with cold calls and, you know, and so here I am, it's been this way for, you know, over a decade now doing this kind of work.

Vance Crowe [00:04:07] And what is the focus of most of your writing?

Cameron English [00:04:10] It's, it's pretty diverse, but I, I'd say most of it is science policy and science communication. You know, a lot about, especially during the pandemic, a lot about vaccines and lockdowns and those sort of topics. But more broadly, a lot about agriculture. You know, as you well know, the GMO debate has, it's starting to, to we down a little bit, but for a long time that was a real controversial issue. Pesticide safety is always in the news. I'm talking about that almost constantly. So anything really that has an, an effect on public health and is controversial, chances are, I've written at least one thing about it.

Vance Crowe [00:04:46] Yeah, about GMOs. This is an interesting topic because when I first started with Monsanto and we were pushing back against the anti GMO narrative that was coming, there were all these symbols coming on like that this product is non GMO. There was like a lot of activism about being anti Monsanto, but I would say by and large, that pressure is almost completely gone. I mean, you can still find non GMO labels, but it never crosses my radar in terms of like the public discourse. Is that what you're seeing?

Cameron English [00:05:19] I think so. I think the reason that's happening is because the, the, the groups and the activists that we're pushing that narrative have sort of shifted focus to focus on glyphosate as, you know, a topic you're very familiar with. But they're, they're focusing on pesticide safety as a way to attack conventional agriculture more generally. And so they're going through the courts, they're basically end running the, the regulatory process. So instead of making scientific arguments in academic journals and working with agencies like the EPA, they're just, they, they publish a, you know, a dubious study or they publish something that's not even peer reviewed. And then they go into court with that. And all they have to do is convince 12 people that, you know, corporation X, you know, deliberately harmed their customers, which is silly for a number of reasons that, that we can get into if you want. But they are, they're attacking agriculture still. I just think they've changed the route of attack. 'cause the GMO thing just started to fall flat, I think, because nothing happened. You know, and, and people can have whatever views they want. And I've, and I don't knock organic agriculture in any way, you know, that's not my, that's not my approach, but they, they are still trying to attack conventional ag. They've just given up on that issue. 'cause there was no health impacts. I think that's basically what happened.

Vance Crowe [00:06:42] Yeah, there's like, I think a bunch of things that happened that are, that are worth noting, and I haven't heard of anybody really talk about this very much. I'm glad that we're on together because one of the things that happened with GMOs is because I would go out and do these talks, I would find out that people themselves often didn't have that many fears about GMOs. They were actually just like, I don't know, but I hear all these other people are worked up and upset about this. And so I feel like I'm, I would be irresponsible if I didn't also have suspicion about this. And what that took was a huge, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in PR and advertising being done to do the anti GMO campaigns through groups like Greenpeace or the environmental working group that e the, that always comes out with the Dirty Dozen. And people had this sense that these working groups were like somehow like do gooders, and they couldn't, they couldn't detect that these are actually really high-end PR firms that are just designed to create a bunch of fear and then be like, Hey, we've got something that doesn't have this fearful thing in there that you should, you should consider like this danon product or whatever. Is that your take on it?

Cameron English [00:07:53] Yes. That, that's 100% correct. You know, and it's, it's sort of funny to me that a lot of these activists, if you see them on Twitter or X, now, you know, they've got the farm in the background and it's real scenic and beautiful, but they're headquartered in Manhattan or San Francisco and they work in high rise buildings and they have law degrees or, or they're public relations experts like you said. But I think that that goes to why they're so effective is because they know the pain points to press on people. And, and especially I'm a relatively new dad, you know, so there's all of these emotions that have welled up over the last couple years as you start to raise a child. And I totally appreciate on a whole nother level why, you know, a, a scare campaign about pesticides or, you know, lead in baby food or any of those issues. I get why that resonates with parents. And those groups do that over and over and over. That's the playbook is just scare people as much as you can. And it's, it's incredibly frustrating. But I, I think you're absolutely right about that.

Vance Crowe [00:08:52] Where does the money come from for these activist groups to do all this stuff?

Cameron English [00:08:58] It, it varies. I mean, in some cases it's the organic food industry. And, and again, I wanna stress not the entirety of organic agriculture, but there's a, there's a subset of groups within that that have really taken on that activist model. So they will fund some of this work, particularly in the anti GMO era. That was a big, you know, big source of funding. But a lot of it comes from foundations that are, that were founded by billionaires who were either no longer alive or on their way out, you know, so they've just, they've established these giant institutions with all of this money, and it goes to very specific political causes. And one of those, unfortunately, is attacking agriculture.

Vance Crowe [00:09:41] Yeah. There's been something that's happened though since, I mean, 'cause I started at Monsanto, I think you were in the game about this time, like 2015, something like that. And like, one of the things that I noticed is that it used to be that a lot of the criticisms about GMOs and pesticides came from the left. And then I think there were a lot of people on the left that then started taking on the mantra of trust the science. And so now you have these two things where people are like, we are gonna trust the science, the like establishment. And there are GMOs out there that scientists are telling us are okay. And so now it, it's, it's a weird thing. My friends and I kind of call it the flippant, where now kind of the established position is that the left likes GMOs because they're pro-science. Do you see this?

Cameron English [00:10:32] Yeah, I, I think it's, it's one of these issues. And the vaccine issue is another one where you have this weird broad coalition of people that agree on almost nothing else, but they agree that, you know, big pharma is bad and big ag is bad, and the FDA and the EPA, right? This is, there's this evil cohort that's working against our, all of our interests, you know, so they come together on that issue. But I noticed it, I wanna say in like 2017, 18, because I did a, a podcast appearance. It's one of the biggest ones I had done at the time. And I was expecting a sympathetic audience because of the way the, you know, the opinions of the show or the ho the show host that I was familiar with. But I got on and it was not like that. And, and it was, it was good just as you know, from a career perspective. But I think I realized that a lot of people who lean right, or they identify as libertarians or whatever particular label they have, they see big things generally as bad, you know? So, and, and the narrative changes. So on the left, it's, you know, big, big capitalism, big corporations are evil on the right, the way that they approach. It's to say, you know, the FDA has been paid off, and you know, this is, this is cronyism, this is rent seeking. And therefore, because of that, I don't have to trust anything that anybody says about crop biotechnology or pesticides.

Vance Crowe [00:11:54] Yeah. Which makes it difficult because like, you have to believe something, right? You have to have a model in your mind about like, who is trustworthy, who are the people, what are their incentives? Why are they doing what they're doing? And I think during all this cultural kind of chaotic moment that we're in a lot of the, the base places, you know, like, oh, this, the, the left, it follows these poles, the right follows these poles, they don't, they don't really make sense anymore. And I think you're watching, it's not gonna be a pleasant thing as people's trust in institutions break down, and then they, they give that trust to some other thing, right? You're gonna trust something. So it's not just like, oh, our, our institutions have lost trust. Then what's, what's picked up that trust?

Cameron English [00:12:40] It's, it's all sorts of things that people turn to, you know, sometimes it's an influencer on social media, or sometimes it's their doctor, you know, they might have a physician that has a, you know, a unique take on a, on a topic, especially during COVID, you know, I saw that a lot. You know, people would say, I'm not getting this vaccine because my doctor told me that I don't need it. Or that there could be this risk, you know? So, or it could be a family member. You know, it's, it's, it's anyone that has built trust with you and maintained it. And that, this is something I've been pounding my desk about for like four or five years now, is that you have scientific institutions that are damaging their own reputations often for political reasons, which is really, really concerning. You know? So they take up these causes that they shouldn't, or that they, they know they're wrong on, they have to know that they're wrong on, but they're doing it because it's the, it's the current thing. It's the fashionable. This is how you make everyone else know that you have the right opinions. And so that I think has been a very, very significant contributor to the declining trust in science and in public health, or our political institutions more generally. And I, I don't think the people that you and I work with really, really appreciate that because I see documents from like the American Academy of Pediatrics or some of one of these health associations, and they're just scratching their head publicly, like, gee, we just can't convince anyone to, you know, get a vaccine or to feed their kids a nutritious diet or whatever. And they don't realize. It's like, well, yeah, because you endorsed every silly thing that occurred during the pandemic, or, you know, on, on the biological sex issue, right?

Cameron English [00:14:18] You just come out and you say that the craziest things, and then the average parent goes, there's no way I'm taking advice on anything from you. You know, it's just in, in other words, if you live in the real world, it's, it's readily apparent that this is a problem. But if you live in a bubble, you know, in DC or in Manhattan, like I said earlier, it's, it's not clear to you 'cause you're not interacting with the people that you're giving advice to. And I think that's a real problem.

Vance Crowe [00:14:45] Yeah, I think that's definitely true. The, the big houses where all this information is getting pumped out is either in DC or in New York. And one of the reasons that this all occurs is because you have an organization, like let's say doctors th they wanna be doing medical work, they wanna be seeing patients, they wanna be building their practices. They wanna be, so they do what all good practices do. They create a group of people that they say, Hey, we're gonna take a little bit of our money and we're gonna put it towards this group that's gonna do lobbying for us. They're gonna make sure our professional accreditations are strong and that we stay at the top of our field. And ultimately, from my perspective, a lot of that bureaucracy that they set up becomes ultimately like a part of the larger web of bureaucratic institutions where they're swapping people in and out that are not from the medical field, but instead from the bureaucratic field. And as you've done that, you've created this lattice work where all of the professional organizations deep inside of their institutional memory are the things that have been created by the bureaucrats that were in there, people that want to take positions on stuff that does not fit the professional definition. And you start having these doctors groups take positions that are totally insane because they're communications people, they're bureaucrat people are the ones supporting it, and then they don't even know where their group has gone. Right? They, like, it's just happened so deeply that the, the, that that it's almost difficult for them to detect how it happened.

Cameron English [00:16:17] Yeah. It's, it's a real problem. I, I, there's two things broadly that I think are the issue. The, the first is that all of these institutions want to fit in, and that makes perfect sense, right? Is, you know, you're trying to maintain your reputation with society more generally. And so you're gonna say the things, and we all do this to a certain extent, you're gonna say the things that people expect you to say, and then you're gonna say the things that help you avoid controversy. You know, and I, this is true, and you can relate to this, this is true in big corporations, it's true in trade groups, it's true in nonprofits. Most people and most organizations, they wanna focus on the thing that they do, right? So the best way that they've come up with, and I think this is mistaken, but the way they come up with this is we're just going to avoid controversy. So if somebody attacks us for one reason or another, we'll just try to sweep it under the rug, or we'll try to make peace with them, and then we get back to what we want to do. And, and again, I get that, especially if you're in medicine, you, as you said, you wanna take care of sick people, you wanna make people better, you don't wanna spend all your time, you know, having Twitter debates with, you know, whomever is on the other side. So I understand that, but I think you have to change how you communicate in some cases. And then broadly, this is having a very, very serious impact because, you know, these groups come out and they say, you know, let's, let's put kids on drugs that are totally untested for the purpose we're using, right? And then everyone just goes, yes, of course, of course. It's, it's the new civil rights movement. It's like, no, this is absurd, right? This, you wouldn't, you wouldn't accept this on any other scientific issue, right?

Cameron English [00:17:52] But, but because of the political climate, this is allowed, not only allowed, but it's celebrated in, in the, the sectors of society that should be pumping the brakes.

Vance Crowe [00:18:01] Well, and then to your point, like if you start taking these, you know, positions that are clearly politically motivated, it makes rational sense that the people that you were originally connecting with would say, wait a second, I can very clearly spot where you jumped off the rails from your, like, scientific knowledge, what you have an expertise in, into your political ideology. And then, like, if somebody doesn't then deny that they have authority on the other subjects, they're being obtuse, right? Because you, you, you, like, if you've just watched somebody make this terrible mistake and you say, well, okay, I'm gonna just turn the page over on their bad take on this one, and then accept theirs on how they feel about, you know, other vaccines or about smoking, or about drugs, or about the, the way to live your life. Like you've just given over the credibility that you had in order to make, you know, stay in the political class.

Cameron English [00:18:56] Yeah, it's really troubling. And, and I started with the, the assumption that, you know, if we just pointed this out enough, then people would write their ship and then they would start to go, maybe I shouldn't talk about this issue. For one, it's outside of my expertise, but it's also, it's a Molotov cocktail, right? It's gonna torch my credibility with the people I need to convince. But I think it's more likely that they have their own political opinions and their own biases, and those are increasingly bleeding through. And you see this everywhere. It's not a left thing, it's not a right thing, it's just, it's becoming more common for people to come up and say, you know, I'm a this or that, and I believe this and this, and if you don't like it, then you're evil. You know? And so in that climate, it's harder for people to step back and say, oh, let me rethink what I said here. You know? And again, it's a very human trait to not want to say you were wrong. I, I get that, and I've been there too. But it's important because if you don't right, you, I mean, you know, you're gonna lose your credibility.

Vance Crowe [00:19:58] Well, you've been in an interesting position because I think for like from the outside, you'd say, Hey, he's a science writer, he's gonna be able to get ostensibly on the, the side of the left or the side of the people that are participating in Science Orthodoxy. But the way that you and I got rein touch just recently was that you were flagging an article about like, Hey, wait a second, there was a bunch of censorship done by the left about scientific stuff that we should be able to talk about. I can't, Ima imagine that makes you popular among the establishment.

Cameron English [00:20:32] Yeah, I don't care. I just, it does, and I, and I mean, you know, I'm hardly a celebrity, don't get me wrong. Like, I don't, I don't think of myself that way, but nevertheless, if it comes down to it, I'll just go dig ditches for a living. I'm just not gonna, I'm not gonna say something or write something I don't believe just to appease whoever, you know, it's, it that, that's, that's silly to me. So yes, to your, to your point, that article was about, it was more about the scientific community's response to what was going on. But yeah, the, the Biden administration was very clearly censoring content on social media that they had deemed myths or disinformation. And I can't stand those terms, by the way, but, you know, they say these are these, you know, this post is bad, or this account needs to be de platformed, or, or this tweet needs to be, you know, you need to throttle this down. We don't want as many people seeing this. And then there were threatening consequences, you know, so that you have these, and a lot of this came out in discovery in, in the, the Missouri v Biden lawsuit that's on its way to the Supreme Court in the next little while here, you have White House staffers talking to people at Twitter and Facebook, and they're saying, you know, you're not doing enough to control misinformation. And there's a lot of concern here at the White House, and I mean, at the highest levels, wink, wink, right? So like, the implication is the president himself is really, really irritated with what you're doing here, you know? And then other places they'll say, we're considering our, our options internally, right?

Cameron English [00:22:05] You know, like if someone says that to you and they have authority over you, what does that mean? Well, that means, you know, do what I want, or there's gonna be consequences. And then of course, publicly, the whole time during the campaign, during the Biden Harris campaign, and then once the administration took office, they were saying publicly, we're going to reform section two 30 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives the platforms immunity for most of the third party content on their platforms. And they were talking about antitrust litigation, you know, and this is, this is in the administration itself, but in congress too, you have, you have people saying, we're gonna break up your company and we're gonna, you know, you're not doing enough to, to silence this anti-vaccine misinformation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So if you are an executive at Twitter or Facebook, like what are you gonna take from that? You know, like, you're gonna go to war with the federal government on this, you know, probably not, you know, to the point we made just a little while ago. It's easier to comply. And that's, that's what happened. So that's, that's the starting point for the story. My long-winded summary of the issue,

Vance Crowe [00:23:09] Well, this is great. I mean, keep going. So as you've been able to, to point out, hey, clearly there was censorship going on, and like, even like in ostensibly what it was, was information that they were saying, we don't want to get out. That later ended up ultimately not being as bad information as you thought. So it was like, now the, the establishment is protecting a narrative that, that, you know, like proved to be. It's just crazy. So what, what's going on now that the, that you're able to point out, hey, this is like obvious censorship

Cameron English [00:23:44] Again, the reaction from, from scientists has, has been alarming to me, you know, so in, in the article, I was brought responding to two of my colleagues at the American Council on Science and Health, who are great, they do a lot of great work. But on this issue, I just thought they were mistaken because they're, they're taking an argument that's very common. You know, they'll say, well, this was voluntary, the social media companies complied. And then they go on and they say, well, we need experts monitoring what goes on on Facebook and Twitter. 'cause we want people to get good information, right? We want people to get a vaccine based on the best available science. And that's true in the abstract, and I agree with it, of course. But as I pointed out in the article, you had people saying, like, working for, you know, like a nonprofit that's funded by the government, right? They're, they're going to Twitter and they're flagging content and they're saying, this is true, but it's being misinterpreted, right? So we don't want people to read this too frequently because it might inspire vaccine hesitancy. And this isn't like, you know, Joe's blog, you know, deep in the internet, this is like a New York Times story about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, for example, you know, and you have these, these busy bodies. It just, these people drive me insane. The mindset that motivates somebody to do this kind of work, where you're like, I'm gonna dictate what you may read on Twitter. It's like, who, you know, I don't know you, I didn't, you know, it's just silly. But in any case, they're taking it.

Vance Crowe [00:25:10] But you can imagine like the righteous younger mind or the mind that's saying like, oh, we, like all those other people are bad and they're being misled by bad people. So we need to have the opposite thing. And, you know, I, I've, I've gotta go out and do my part to protect it. I mean, I can very clearly see how somebody could get the righteousness bug and then that allow them to do horrible, horrific things.

Cameron English [00:25:33] Well, yeah. But, but I'm imagine, well, no, you don't have to imagine. It's so incredibly condescending, you know, to, to like, to look at an, the average person and say, you know, you vote, you pay taxes, you raise kids, but you're too dumb to understand a New York Times article. You know, I just, that that's never stated outright, but that's the clear assumption behind a, you know, a, a movement or a campaign like this is that, you know, you need me, you need your benevolent overlord to explain to you what you should do, and you can't get any other opinion because you're, you're stupid, you know? So, so that to me is wild. But I think it's, it's, it brings up another important point, which is that, you know, when these people make their case to the public, they don't say, we're going to kick some factual information off of Twitter, or we're gonna kick this scientist off Twitter. What they say is, there's harmful disinformation out there. There's people deliberately lying to you for profit or for ideological reasons, and we're going to silence them. But then when you get into discovery in a lawsuit like this, or you look at the Twitter files that were released by Matt Taibbi after Elon Musk bought Twitter, you know, you see very clearly it wasn't just false information, it was true information, and it was, it was information about policy, right? So they started flogging content related to vaccine mandates, not vaccine safety, but, you know, mandates themselves and research related to breakthrough infections and research related to natural immunity.

Cameron English [00:27:06] So in other words, you, you have the scientific establishment working with the federal government to silence science. You know, it's, it's absurd. It's like, it seems so self-evident that I, it's crazy that you have to make that argument today to people to say, you don't, you don't see the problem with the federal government coming in and cutting off one half of the discussion. You know? It, it, and it creates so much confusion, right? Not only are you cutting off information, but you're, you're silencing people. You're like, trust scientists, just not these ones.

Vance Crowe [00:27:41] I think what makes your point a lot more real to me is that it's very easy to come on and be like, everything that they're telling you is a lie. They're wrong. I'm gonna tell you about the secret truth that I've found and discovered, and, but you're actually in a very unusual position in that I read an article that you wrote, I don't know, not that long ago that was like, Hey, let me explain to you how safe the vaccine is. So this is coming from a guy that is willing to stand on the side of like, Hey, the vaccine had positive benefits and it was designed in this way, and the downsides are this way. And yet I'm still pissed off that you are, are choosing which scientists to believe. So maybe you could clarify your position on kind of where, what the vaccine is, and then kind of tie that into like how you, you're kind of standing on an island 'cause there's not many people doing what you're doing.

Cameron English [00:28:32] Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a problem from time to time. But I, I got the COVID shots, I got the primary doses. I ended up not getting boosters because it became clear that people in my age cohort weren't really at risk, you know? And then as time got went on, the vaccines got less and less effective at controlling transmission. And then in some cases controlling, you know, severe disease that people were getting. So as a result of that, I reached a point where I said, you know, I, I'm good, you know, I got the vaccines, there's a chance I've probably been infected and I just didn't know it. 'cause you know, it's, it's basically endemic at this point, I think is what, what people are saying, experts are saying. So I don't have any problem with, with the COVID vaccine or any vaccine generally, you know, I have a young son, he's got all the shots he's supposed to have. I have a young daughter on the way, she's going to get her vaccines, you know? But I think my primary concern is that when you mandate something, you immediately send off an alarm in someone's head. You know, it's like, why do you need to force me to do this? And again, you're a parent, you understand this very, very well, right? What's the first thing a kid's gonna do if you say, don't do that? Right? They're gonna go, they're gonna go do that. Right? And, and that doesn't change as we age, right? We get more sophisticated in the way we think and so on. But if, you know, if particularly a politician you don't like, gets on TV and they say, you're gonna do this or you're gonna lose your job, you know, like coming out of the pandemic, or I guess it was the middle of the pandemic at that point, you know, people are really strapped already.

Cameron English [00:30:10] 'cause you have these lockdowns and there's all of these other cultural issues that are in play that's just chaos. And then, you know, the government comes out and says, you're gonna do this, or you're fired. Right? I mean, like, I can't think of a worse way to sell a vaccine to somebody. You know? And again, you, you've worked in science communication a long time. We both know a lot of the same people. They'll all tell you, you don't destroy somebody's values in the process of trying to win them over. Right? You're supposed to appeal to what they're concerned about. And that was all thrown out during the pandemic, you know, stay in your house. Of course, unless you want to go to this protest that's perfectly acceptable, otherwise stay in your house. This is a deadly virus, you know? And that happened over and over again. It happened with masking, it happened with all sorts of policies. And, you know, again, people look at that and they go, why? Like, why am I gonna trust anything that you're saying? So that in a, in a roundabout way, that was my motivation for all of those stories. 'cause I wrote a bunch about vaccine mandates. I wrote a bunch about masking, and that was always my, my, my central theme was, you are eroding the public's trust in you. And I don't understand how you can't see this. Stop doing this, stop doing this stop. Do you know? So that, that's why I, I've continued to hit on that theme. And you're seeing the results. You know, the polls show very clearly that people are losing trust in what scientists say.

Vance Crowe [00:31:37] Yeah. And like, it, it's an odd thing that somebody would sit during a, like a, Hey, what are we gonna do about this problem? That they would be like, let's just tell them they're not allowed to do anything else. Because the only person that that works on is the person that's like, either I already agree with what's being said here, or I'm extremely compliant. Every other person, every other personality type, even people that are not disagreeable, but the, the mama bear that's like, wait, wait, wait, I'm, I'd be fine if you were just forcing me, but now you're forcing my child. And, and like, I don't ever actually see, I, I'm kind of torn in these two thoughts because on the one hand, I don't see a way back. Like, I don't actually understand how you could get the, the idea that, that the people in power also represents science accurately. But then on the other hand, I also totally believe that given enough propaganda, a vast swath of the population will forget what they just learned, you know, a year ago or two years ago and, and make the exact same mistakes again.

Cameron English [00:32:44] It could be, I don't, I don't predict the future. I don't know. I think what has probably happened is there's enough of a contingent of people that aren't gonna believe that the, the, you know, the sanctified official experts, the next time this, hopefully this never happens in again, our lifetimes, but the next time there's a public health crisis, there's enough people that have been turned that are saying, I'm just not gonna, I'm not gonna go along with this. Right? And maybe next time the advice is good and people aren't gonna follow it, you know? And when that happens, right? No one's gonna go, gee, you know, we, this was, we really messed this up the last time. Our bad right? They're, they're gonna blame it on those people. You know, all those disinformation doesn't, right? The RFK junior's at it, again, it's like he is, he's bad in many ways, and I'm very frustrated with a lot of the things he says and the litigation he's involved in. But his reach is limited. You know, his name's well known, but if you go up to the average person in the grocery store, they don't know what he thinks about vaccines or pesticides or whatever, right? But they heard Dr. Tony Fauci on TV day after day for three years, and they heard the president and they heard his press secretaries, and they heard this scientist and they saw, you know, again, the American Academy of Pia Pediatrics come out and say, we need gun control and you know, we need to affirm children as they want to transition. You know, like, like they hear all this stuff and they're getting it constantly, right?

Cameron English [00:34:15] Deliberately. So, and then we're ignoring the impact of that, and we're like, yeah, it's this, it's this RFK guy, or it's Joe Mercola, or it's, you know, it's like, yeah, these guys are bad. But the problem is clearly more complex then.

Vance Crowe [00:34:30] Yeah. So you mentioned RFK in, in the world of ag, like he is a person that, like, it's just an interesting thing when I hear him describing who he is, where he came from, people will cite, oh, he clean, he's the guy that cleaned up the Hudson River. Is that your take on on RFK? What did, where are you at with the work he's done?

Cameron English [00:34:52] It's, it's generally bad, you know, and be, because as a, just as a very typical example, he was heavily involved in the glyphosate litigation. And, and that's, we don't have to rehash the argument, but most of your audience knows this, this chemistry is perfectly safe as it's used. It's been studied to death. You know, it's 10,000 different studies, different study designs from researchers all over the world. It's like, if there's any issue that we could go, yeah, you know, let's not worry about this. Let's worry about any other of the dozens of public health issues we have. But nevertheless, he worked with the other lawyers who were responsible for that, that multi-district litigation and, you know, right. Took billions of dollars from a company that didn't do anything wrong and under false pretenses, you know, so I, I generally have a low view of him, but I understand why he's able to appeal to people, especially as we've been talking about. They're fed up with what they've been told from the people that are in power, you know? So that's another risk as they turn to people like RFK because he's the, the savior figure, right? I've got this figured out. Come listen to what I have to say.

Vance Crowe [00:36:02] Yeah. I mean, I think, so he's a part of the kind of larger class action lawsuit world that people are astonished when they find out how it works. So there's a bunch of different ways this works. And this is just an outsider's perspective, but there are, for example, conventions. You go to Los Las Vegas and you go to a giant convention hall, and as you walk up and down, just like at a, at an agri show, you'd see a bunch of tractors or people selling different types of farm insurance or whatever you would sell at a, at an agri show. Now you have these same things, but therefore class action attorneys, and a lot of these people are setting up booths and putting on presentations to be like, look, we found that this, there's a, there's a study that shows that, for example, there's asbestos in this type of body powder. And so what we're gonna do is line lineup investors that want to, to that want to go to loss, do want to want to go to court over this, and we'll take your investment money and we'll turn it into billboards and late night television shows and just pepper the world with nice attorneys asking people, have you been harmed in this very specific way? Well, if you have, call this number. So then they collect all these people that want to go into a lawsuit, then they go to the company and they say, Hey, do you wanna fight this? Or do you want to just settle it? And hopefully the, for, from the lawsuits standpoint, they need to get more money out of it than what they took in his investment. So they know what their costs are. And then they go to court. And even if we take it away from Johnson and or from the glyphosate stuff that happened with Monsanto, my very favorite product in the whole world, gold Bond is now being produced without talcum powder because they're so afraid of being sued that, that their talcum powder had, you know, some amount of asbestos in it.

Vance Crowe [00:37:51] And meanwhile, there's products being taken off and other people that won these either lawsuits or settlements. And those lawyers are RFK, that's the, the, that was his business model.

Cameron English [00:38:02] Yeah. Well, I'm out here in California where a lot of this litigation gets filed. 'cause you have the ninth circuit, the, the federal circuit that is most sympathetic. But in San Francisco, you have juries that are very, very friendly to this, this, this, I call it the Aaron Brockovich story, right? This, there's bad corporations, they're lying to you, they want to make you sick so they can make money. That story sells well out here, and we have this, we have a law called Proposition 65 out here, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners are for, are familiar with. But essentially it regulates certain chemicals in the state of California, right? And so if you come out here, you'll see signs everywhere. It says, you know, this restaurant uses a chemical or an, or an ingredient that's known to the state of California to cause cancer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the, it's so corrupt that you have the plaintiff's law firms and the defense law firms, they will host conferences like the one you're talking about. They will host conferences where they work together and they have industry trade groups come in and they have the activist groups that file prop 65 lawsuits come in and they all work together to basically come up with settlements, right? Because the, the, the plaintiffs, they just sue anyone that they can think of. And the law's very, very friendly to that. It was established that way. And then the defense attorneys realized that, well, we can make more money if we just come to a settlement with these other guys. So let's have a conference. And we'll all just, you know, so it's like the game is so seriously and severely rigged that you have, you have businesses, they will just join trade groups that are part of settlements, that are part, part of Prop 65 settlements where they just, they join, they pay a fee, and that's their contribution to the settlement.

Cameron English [00:39:46] And then they get to do business without fear of more lawsuits. You know, it's like the whole thing is just a waste of time and resources

Vance Crowe [00:39:54] That yeah, it's this wild like parasitic system, right? Where, where eventually the corporations say, ah, you know, it's just easier for us to go along with it in this way. And so you have people behind the scenes that aren't building anything. They're not creating anything. They're not making the world safer, but they are like poking these corporations. And they do have some ambivalence about this because, you know, if you've ever stood outside the walls of a major corporation, you realize like, this corporation can marshal together resources that I can possibly do on my own. And so you need to have a legal system that allows for the little guy to be able to push back on a corporation that has millions or billions of dollars to be able to dedicate to fighting off your lawsuit or your complaint. But on the other hand, when you open up this crack, you expose part of your flank to being able to be necrotic and have parasites all over it. And it, it really causes a lot of problems that are probably more important than my gold bond one. But that's the one I'm mad about in the middle of summer when I chafe, because they can't use talcum powder. You laugh, I'm, I'm, I'm pissed about this.

Cameron English [00:41:04] I know, I know, I know, I know what you're feel, what you're feeling. You know, like, like with the non GMO stuff, I go to the grocery store and I'll buy my son these little vegetable pouches, and it's a great way to get him to eat vegetables. But they all have that stupid butterfly, you know, non GMO project certified, and I have to pay an extra buck 25 for each one, you know, so I get it, right? I mean, all of the, all of this litigation, all of this, you know, these scare tactics that are employed against big companies primarily, they have real consequences, you know, and sometimes it's subtle, right? Sometimes it's just a slight increase in food prices or maybe it's a product that you have a harder time getting, or, you know, sometimes it's more severe. And, and that I think is the problem is that people don't see until it's too late. It's like, you know, you cheerlead these lead these, these lawyers right now and these plaintiffs, 'cause they're fighting the, they're fighting the man. And, you know, everyone loves that underdog story. But if we don't get this under control, there could come a time when our agricultural system is really threatened because you're pulling so many chemistries off the market, or you're so restricting, you know, the amount of greenhouse emissions that can come from agriculture that it's, it's,

Vance Crowe [00:42:18] Yeah, I don't think it's just a threat. I think it is absolutely categorically changing modern agriculture. And you know, if you, if you listen to my, one of my latest podcast guests, John Kemp, he would say, Hey, probably good that we change away from this large petro ag chemical system. But I'll say that it would be there, there have been almost no chemistries developed by large corporations in the last 15 to 20 years. And it's because they know the regulatory burden to bring a new chemistry, a new, a new way of saying, Hey, we have been able to kill that weed without killing the crops or without, you know, degrading the soil in some important way. And so they don't want to even bring it into the regulatory world, which means there's no r and d going in there. So we have this sort of scientific dark era where the threat of litigation is so strong that it keeps people from trying new things. And so what we end up doing is wearing out the one thing, the things that we do have available to us instead of continuing to move along that path of developing new ones.

Cameron English [00:43:23] Yeah, I forget the exact figures, but it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it's probably 10 years of r and d to get a new chemistry on the market or, or a new crop trade or whatever. And that's, you know, I mean, you need regulations in place to protect public health and make sure that you're not introducing something that's harmful. But does it cost, you know, $600 million to do that? I, I have my doubts. You know, if you go to the EPAs website, they have a pesticide registration manual. And I've joked on my own podcast, if you ever have trouble sleeping, just crack this thing open. I promise you'll con right out because it's 25 chapters, it's absurdly long, it's boring and technical. But that's what every registrant has to go through in order to get anything approved through EPA, you know, and, and again, this is more economics than it is science, but that's one of the, the unseen impacts that people never realize They're, you know, they're losing, right? It's resources wasted on regulatory nonsense instead of actually developing, developing product.

Vance Crowe [00:44:25] Yeah. And what I've heard from people in the ag industry is that the next big movement is towards the Endangered Species Act. So like they've clamped down on the EPA and the ability to bring new products to market, but now how, what can they use that's already there that can start to restrict the use of things that exist? And one of the ways that they're starting to see the activist move is towards saying, Hey, we need to revisit the Endangered Species Act. We haven't put a new animal on it in, you know, 30, 40 years, something, some 1970s or eighties. So what we should do is start opening it up and seeing are there any voles or any ground owls or any, you know, insects that are getting harmed by these chemicals that are now we can put them on the Endangered Species Act, and now you have to really change the way you apply these chemicals or what, where they're appropriate. And so it seems like this is the, the temperature is gonna get turned up even more in the next few years.

Cameron English [00:45:22] Yeah, it could be. I, I'm not as familiar with the, the trends with, with the ESA, I know that one of the things they will do is they will go into that law and they will find, you know, some obscure regulation that, like when you're testing a pesticide, you have to, you know, you have to do this dance and then you have to wear this hat, you know, and if, if the company doesn't wear this hat when they do the test, then they sue them or they sue EPA and then they say, you didn't make them wear this hat when they were testing their pesticide, therefore this can't go to market. And then it gets clogged up in, in, in federal court for, for 10 years. You know, so it's, that's the thing that concerns me is, is that what they say publicly, like these an, these anti pesticide groups, they'll say, you know, this is, this causes cancer, or this will give your kid autism, or, you know, it causes birth defects. But when they go argue in federal court, what they say is, you know, you forgot to cross a T at line 127. You know, so it's like these very technical, you know, obtuse arguments and they work 'cause, you know, court is court, but it, it, you know, has very serious consequences for everybody.

Vance Crowe [00:46:28] So, speaking of government regulation, there, you have been pointing out something very interesting. I, I see this being pointed out in the uk, but very few people talking about it in the us which is about how the government has really come out very strongly against vaping when it's been shown pretty conclusively to help people get off of straight up smoking tobacco. So what have you discovered there? What's going on there that most people don't know about?

Cameron English [00:46:55] Yeah, it's a great topic. Well, let me say full disclosure, I write about this professionally and explicitly. My goal is to get the FDA to change its insane policies. So just wanna be clear about that. But the basic problem is this technology really exploded onto the market in the mid two thousands. And they started with devices that looked like little cigarettes, but they weren't, they just contained nicotine in a liquid and a solution that's vaporized. The research has shown very clearly over and over again, really well done, well designed studies and reviews. But like the Cochrane collaboration, which is a very respected scientific body, have shown over and over these products are, they carry a fraction of the risk of smoking and they help smokers quit because you can, you can maintain that hand to mouth habit that, that is, is really, its significant part of the, the addiction. It contains nicotine, which on its own is basically a mild stimulant. It really can't harm you in the doses that you'd find in a typical vaping device. Nevertheless, instead of embracing this technology and encouraging people to use it, the FDA, again, influenced by a whole cohort of different set of public health activist groups is crushing the, the vaping industry. So, you know, I I, I mean, you, you have a, a, an audience that's probably very familiar with these different dynamics, but it's not a coincidence that the only devices you can technically, legally buy right now are sold by big tobacco companies.

Cameron English [00:48:28] And you can only, you can only buy them in tobacco flavor and everything else. Like, and I mean, the FDA at this point has reviewed, I wanna say 20 million different product applications, and all of them except 23 devices and liquids have been approved. So, you know, you have these products and the FDA, by the way, knows that these products that they're banning are more popular. 'cause they did an internal study that was FOIA and released publicly, and it's very clear, right? They know that the flavored products that they're all concerned about are actually very popular with adults. We know from really good data that teen vaping is very low, and so is teen smoking, you know, so that's a non-issue as far as public health is concerned, but nevertheless, that is being used as the bludgeon that the federal government is destroying this, this industry with. And it, it's tragic, you know, I mean, the public health consequences of having a viable alternative to cigarettes, and you are denying that to many smokers. You know, you're, you're telling them there's health risk in this thing that could save their lives that's tragic on its own. But then this industry, it's, it's really cool in that it's mostly small and midsize manufacturers and little shops that are dedicated to selling these products. And most of these people, they quit smoking this way, and now their, their whole life's work is to help other people do it the same way. You know? So it's a very, or it was, it was a growing, exciting industry, and it has been almost completely eliminated by the federal bureaucrats that we were talking about earlier and by these billionaire funded activist groups.

Vance Crowe [00:50:12] Yeah. What do, what's the mechanism there? What is driving people to, to wanna ban this if it's so obviously like better than the alternative?

Cameron English [00:50:22] You know, it's hard to say. I think what happened is vaping really disrupted the anti-smoking operation, right? Because there was a, there was an activism model that groups like Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids followed, which is big bad tobacco companies make cigarettes, we chastises them for making cigarettes, then we tax cigarettes, then we get cigarette money to attack them again for making cigarettes. Then we collect more taxes, right? And then over time, the plan was we're going to reduce smoking that way, you know, we're just effectively gonna make it socially unacceptable to smoke cigarettes. And that worked to some extent, that did reduce smoking in the, in the nineties and in the early two thousands. But then vaping comes along, and for that remaining 30 million people that have not quit yet, this is, this is an easy way to do it. You know, it's like, I can still enjoy this habit without the harm, and there's interesting research on this. I can actually step down my nicotine dependence with one of these devices. So, in other words, if you completely solve the problem, then there's no money to be made in solving the problem. You know, you know what I'm saying here? So, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:51:38] Man, that's dark. That's dark. Yeah.

Cameron English [00:51:40] Yes. I, I, I know it is. I know it is. And no one's going to come out and say, you know, we want people to keep smoking so we can, you know, keep our budgets up, right? No one's gonna say that. But if you look, if you look at their actions, the actions of these different groups, that seems to be, to be the only explanation, you know? So for example, California was gonna pass a law, I think it was last year, that would've prohibited cigarette sales to anyone born after 2007, which is how, I know I'm getting old by the way, but they were gonna pass this law and say after 2000, if you're born after 2007, you can't buy cigarettes without exception. Every major anti-tobacco group oppose that law. And they said, you know, this is the right time for this. You know, we need to focus on flavored tobacco products. Right. They had some silly excuse, but, you know, it's like, it's like, will you in many cases get public money, public money to eliminate tobacco use? And this is like, this is prime real estate, right? This is California. They want to, they wanna stop young people from buying cigarettes. And you are like, you know, well, I don't know. I don't know. It's bad time for that. Right. So, and I mean, the economics of it make it clear is that, well this is, this is a threat to your activism model. I think that's what it's,

Vance Crowe [00:53:00] Well, another thing that you've been standing up for, which I think is not altogether all that popular, is that you're saying, Hey, wait a second on these painkiller, like the people that are, that are saying, oh, Oxycontin is just the worst thing to ever happen. And there's been multi-part series on Netflix about, you know, who is generating all this money from it. So it's interesting to me that you are in these spaces, but what's your take on what's going on with Oxycontin and, and the, the people trying to get rid of it?

Cameron English [00:53:35] Yeah, it's, it's a tragedy what's happening because people are being denied medication that they need and they're killing themselves because they'd rather die than live in excruciating pain. And there's, there's all sorts of cases like, like this, but there's been, I wanna say hundreds of thousands of deaths related to the fentanyl epidemic. 'cause people either commit suicide or they go, they, you know, they're denied access to legal opioids. So they go to the street to get them and they overdose because that stuff's highly dangerous as people know. Or they commit suicide or they just live in excruciating pain. And just to one quick story to show how absurd this is that the woman who I co-host my podcast with Dr. Liza Dunn's, emergency medicine physician and a medical

Vance Crowe [00:54:27] Yeah, she's been a guest on the podcast. Yeah, yeah,

Cameron English [00:54:29] Yeah. She's, she's awesome. I, I love working with her. But she told me a story once about a patient who had overdosed on Percocet, who came into the er and it turned out she had metastatic cancer and she was in so much pain that she took too much of the medicine too quickly. And so the doctor who was in the ER at the time wrote a referral to go see Liza for an addiction consult. And, and Liza met the, met the woman and, you know, got, got a sense of her case and said, well, she's terminal. She's going to, she's gonna die in weeks or months, you know, she doesn't need an addiction consult. She needs you to adjust the medication so she can live in relative comfort, you know, for the little bit of time she has left. You know, so that's the, the absurd level we've gotten to. Again, this is driven largely by CDC guidance, which is again, is a theme here, right? It's driven by the, the DEA and people are suffering for this. And the evidence is very clear. There's a lot of really good experts speaking up on this. My, my colleague Dr. Josh Bloom at the American Council of Science and Health is a real, real expert on this, but it's a tragedy. And the, the thing that I wrote, the, the story about the Netflix is that they are just lying to people because they're trying to tell a story. You know? So there's, there's points in that, in that show where there's what happened, and then there's how they twisted the story to make it fit the narrative that they wanted to sell.

Cameron English [00:56:07] And they talk about this, you know, like, like every episode starts with a disclaimer. And this is, so this was so disingenuous to me. They would have the mother or father of a drug addict who had died from opioids or from, you know, heroin or whatever, and they would say, you know, certain parts of this show, certain names and places and dates and actual events have been changed for dramatic effect. But what hasn't changed is my daughter's story. And then they'd hold up a picture and, you know, they'd be like, this is Sally and she died. And Right. So in other words, they're using, I can't imagine what it's like to lose a child, but they're using this unbearable pain for people to justify lying in their show. 'cause what they're saying is, yes, we changed a lot of stuff, but people died. And here's right, here's Sally's mom. So, you know, you know, it's like, it's, it's a weird way to say, yeah, we changed things and here's the disclaimer, but also, you know, we're really telling you the truth. It's, it's, it's just outrageous.

Vance Crowe [00:57:06] So you write on all these different topics. You've been all over the board, right? From, from vaping to Oxy to COVID, you know, censorship. What, what are you looking out on the horizon and saying, this is the subject area I'm gonna start approaching 'cause it's not being covered enough.

Cameron English [00:57:23] Yeah. I enjoy controversy. So I'm gonna start writing a little bit more about the effects of pornography. I wrote the first story I have ever about that just a couple weeks ago. But NPR had published a story warning about this little subculture of men online who are banding together and they're giving up porn and they're teaching each other. You know, this is bad. Here's why you need to stop. Here's how you stop. It's, it's in so many ways, it's like a 12 step program without the label, but it's people coaching each other through giving up porn. And NPRs fear of this was not, or their response wasn't like, well that's good. That's probably, you know, if that helps them, then great. Their response was, well this is a, you know, this is a pipeline to radical right wing politics. You know, it's like, it's like, that's just so silly, right? And so I went through in that story, and I looked at the research and there's a lot of research that's been done that shows for men and women, but especially for men, there's a lot of serious, or potentially serious. 'cause not everyone's the same, but there's a lot of potentially serious impacts from, you know, frequent porn use over the years. So you'll have people reporting erectile dysfunction, or they're reporting, you know, dis dissatisfaction in their marriage, or, you know, in some cases domestic violence. I mean, there's all sorts of problems connected to this. And the, the, the, the causal link isn't always clear. So don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying if someone watches porn, they're gonna beat up their wife. It's not what I'm saying. But there are things that need to be explored and there's a lot of research on it.

Cameron English [00:58:58] And the reaction from the press has been, you know, well, you should keep watching it, I guess, so you don't become too ultra conservative. You know, it's just a silly kind of a narrative. But I, I'm gonna keep writing about that. 'cause I think it's, it's an overlooked issue.

Vance Crowe [00:59:14] Yeah. Why is kind of a difficult question here, but it is striking to me that the, because I saw your article or the, the conversation you had the podcast about the NPR article. Why do you think NPR is coming out on that side of it? Is it, is it like more of an ideological belief? They're trying to preserve something? What do you think?

Cameron English [00:59:36] There's, there's no firm answers. So I'm, I'm only speculating here, but what I, what I suspect is that if you acknowledge that there is some harm from porn, well then you have to say, well, why is it harmful? You know? And then you get into a place very quickly where you're starting to question some of what our culture says about sexuality. And so I think that makes reporters at NPR very uncomfortable, you know? So instead of, you know, addressing those questions, what they do is they say, well, you know, this is the right, this is the new alt-right. It's just so silly, you know? 'cause it's like most, most men are not, are not doing that, right? They go to these chat rooms or they go to these subreddits 'cause they're like, you know, I, I'm 29 and I'm experiencing symptoms of erectile dysfunction. What's going on? Right? That's unheard of at that age, you know, so it's a real problem for people. And their response to it is, you know, this is right. You leaving is bad. And I think that's what's, what's alarming. But basically, I think that's what it is. And again, just speculation. But that's, that's what it comes down to, I think, is, you know, we don't wanna talk openly about some of the harms that could come from our sexual proclivities, basically.

Vance Crowe [01:00:56] Well, that will be an interesting path to go down. I definitely see that happening out in the world. Like more and more podcasts, talking openly about it, people talking about, I, I just happened to catch a podcast called Tim Cast in Real Life and they ended up talking with people that had done a big investigation into how the porn industry works. And you start being like, man, I had no idea about how complicated this was, how much money there is. And I think that you're probably right on the beginning of that wave. 'cause I think it's gonna get a lot bigger.

Cameron English [01:01:27] Yep. We're gonna keep writing about it. But thank you for having me. This was a great conversation.

Vance Crowe [01:01:32] Yeah, man. Cam this, thank you so much for coming on. If people wanted to read more about what you're doing and, and connect with you, where could they go?

Cameron English [01:01:40] You can follow me on Twitter or X, whatever it's called. It's just at Cam J English. So all my writings there, you can follow me there. My website is cameron j english.net. Sign up for my newsletter. I don't send out frequent updates, so I won't spam you, but if you wanna get updates on my writing, go to the website and then of course, acs h.org is the organization.

Vance Crowe [01:02:00] Well, Cameron English, thank you so much for coming on.