1:56

sum

2:00

of $12 million. Throughout

2:02

the course of 1996, they're doing, you

2:05

know, it's like pre-trial stuff. They're like the motion

2:07

to do this and the motion to do that. And they're like arguing

2:09

over like technical stuff. So it's

2:11

not until January of 1998 that

2:15

the trial actually starts. It's wild

2:18

how goddamn long

2:20

trials and the legal system take. Like

2:24

I absolutely remember this from organizing days

2:26

when people would be like, we just need to take it to the Supreme

2:28

Court. And they'll overturn the whole thing.

2:30

And I'm like, cool, hang out for like

2:32

a decade. I actually remember this growing

2:35

up. Do you remember growing up that Oprah actually filmed

2:37

her show in Texas for six weeks?

2:40

No, I don't remember this. So this is one

2:42

of the weirdest

2:43

footnotes to the story that Oprah

2:46

was under contract to produce

2:48

a certain number of shows per year.

2:50

So she couldn't just like take time

2:52

off and go beyond trial in Texas.

2:55

So they rented

2:57

out the largest theater in Amarillo,

3:00

Texas and like did

3:02

her show there. So every day for

3:04

six weeks, she would be in trial like

3:06

in a courtroom all day. And then at

3:08

night,

3:09

she would go straight to this theater and film an episode

3:12

of Oprah. And it was really weird

3:14

because the judge imposed a gag

3:16

order. Oprah was not allowed to say anything,

3:20

even like tangentially related to any

3:22

of the issues that came up in the trial. And like she

3:24

constantly made jokes about this on TV. She's

3:27

like, you're gonna tell a talk show host not to say

3:29

anything. Like this kind of became a running joke.

3:32

So there's these like genuinely like pretty

3:33

funny and charming clips of her

3:36

interviewing celebrities. Like there's one where

3:38

she's talking to Patrick Swayze and he's telling some

3:40

story and he's like, I was driving around and I ate a hamburger

3:43

and then Oprah sort of like leans into the microphone and

3:45

she's like, I have no opinion about hamburgers. I

3:47

have none, no thoughts in my brain about

3:49

beef.

3:49

Sure, this is the Jay Leno

3:52

Conan O'Brien of its day. No

3:54

one's saying anything, but everything's kind

3:57

of about it. Also, I just

3:59

looked up.

3:59

The population of Amarillo, Texas

4:02

in 1998 was 170,000 people. Yeah,

4:06

it's a very small city. It's a small

4:09

city and Oprah is in it in 1998

4:13

at the height of her powers.

4:14

It's also very ironic because

4:16

the lawyers for the cattlemen deliberately

4:19

chose Amarillo as a venue

4:21

to fuck over Oprah. Because this is a town

4:24

who's almost their entire economy depends

4:26

on beef. The largest employer

4:28

is a slaughterhouse, 25% of

4:31

the country's cattle is produced in

4:34

this region. And Amarillo is

4:36

kind of like a hub for the entire industry.

4:38

So the population of people there,

4:40

and

4:40

the jury pool is all

4:43

super pro beef. So it's actually

4:46

pretty fucked up. But it also speaks

4:48

to Oprah's power because she's so popular

4:50

and her popularity transcends all

4:53

kinds of lines of race and ethnicity

4:55

and age and class that she goes

4:58

down there and pretty soon there's a line

5:00

around the block starting at 4 a.m.

5:02

to get tickets to her show. And

5:04

she becomes this really celebrated figure.

5:07

So apparently there's this dueling

5:09

battle of bumper stickers that

5:12

people will have bumper stickers in their car that are like,

5:14

Amarillo hearts Oprah. And

5:16

then people are also

5:18

putting bumper stickers on their car

5:20

that say the only mad cow in

5:22

Amarillo is Oprah. Holy

5:25

shit. Whoa, getting

5:27

into some deeper

5:29

topics

5:29

there. Calling a black

5:31

woman a mad cow. Yeah, good

5:33

God. It

5:36

does appear to be the case that overwhelmingly

5:39

like public opinion eventually

5:41

swung

5:41

toward Oprah over the course of the

5:43

six weeks. This is like when a celebrity

5:45

shows up in Portland, Oregon and

5:48

everyone loses their minds. It's

5:50

like when people

5:50

from Seattle pretend that Tom Skerritt is a celebrity.

5:54

Tom Skerritt lives here like, who knows who that is. You're

5:56

not in Seattle, it's fine. We

5:58

used to have the Everclear. guy.

6:00

Yeah. I

6:04

also want to read some of the the

6:07

either great or terrible headlines

6:10

coming out of this trial, depending on your perspective that

6:12

this as we discussed last episode, this

6:15

is like the height of bad dad

6:17

puns. So there's of course Cattleman

6:20

have cow over Oprah show classic.

6:22

Is there a move over?

6:25

No, this is the one I wanted to do. This is what

6:27

I feel like they're leaving it on the table. Really?

6:29

You got to have a moo one Cattleman have

6:31

bad mood to stations. Yeah.

6:35

Love it. There's also

6:37

Oprah comma Cattleman lock

6:39

horns. Good. Texas jury

6:41

hears meaty libel case.

6:45

I feel like maybe the best what I saw is it just

6:47

says a lot at stake and

6:49

it's

6:50

pretty good. Really?

6:52

I enjoyed the steak. There's an editorial

6:55

in the Tennessean that says beef

6:57

against Oprah is a case of baloney,

6:59

which I don't

7:01

know. Baloney isn't like made of beef. I don't think

7:04

so. I don't know if it works literally knows what baloney

7:06

is made of. And then the best academic

7:08

article about this I saw it was called apocalypse

7:11

cow. Also

7:15

quite good. God, that would be great

7:17

anywhere, but especially

7:20

in an academic setting. I love it when academics

7:22

are like, fuck it. I'm going in and

7:24

then I am also going

7:26

to send you one of the richest

7:28

fucking texts I've ever seen. This

7:30

is from the Kitty Kelly biography

7:33

of Oprah. If it wasn't you,

7:35

we wouldn't be talking about this, but

7:37

I think that this is going to make you melt down. You're

7:39

like maybe the only person who when

7:41

you say I'm going to send you something

7:43

and it's going to make you melt down. I'm like, yeah, like

7:46

who going in. Let's go.

7:49

OK.

7:49

The

7:52

female judge refused to allow women

7:54

to wear pants in her courtroom so Oprah

7:56

wore a skirt every day. 1996.

7:58

It's not. 19. It's not 1951. It's 1996.

8:02

Quote, I love the fact that no cameras

8:04

were allowed in the courtroom. She said those

8:07

artist renderings made me look skinny.

8:10

Even with her trainer and chef in tow,

8:12

she still battled her weight, at

8:14

least for the first few days.

8:17

Then she said she gave herself over to, quote,

8:19

Jesus and the comfort of pie. That's

8:22

the title of my memoir, by the way. She

8:26

gained 22 pounds during the six

8:28

week trial. Quote, my trainer,

8:30

Bob Green, was very upset with me. He

8:33

said, it's like you gained it and you're

8:35

very proud of it. I'd say, yes,

8:37

I ate pie. I ate pie. And

8:39

we had macaroni and cheese with seven different

8:42

cheeses.

8:43

Her co-defendant, Howard Lyman, a

8:46

cattle rancher turned vegetarian, was

8:48

not allowed to mention weight or food to

8:50

her. Quote, her attorneys told

8:52

me I couldn't talk to her about her diet

8:54

during the trial. They felt she

8:57

was under enough

8:58

pressure. What are your thoughts? What kind

9:00

of fucking gremlin? I know is

9:02

like, oh, Oprah Winfrey, here's

9:04

my chance to tell this lady

9:06

about diets. It's very

9:08

clear from what Oprah says about this later

9:10

that like, this is a huge source of anxiety

9:13

for her. This is the first time she had been sued

9:15

in this way.

9:16

I think she was kind of waking up to the fact of like

9:18

how big of a deal she was and

9:20

the fact that she was now going to become a target for

9:22

these kinds of lawsuits. And it appears that she was very

9:25

nervous about losing. Yeah. But then because

9:27

she's a public figure and a woman

9:29

and a black woman, she has this extra layer

9:32

of anxiety on top of it of like, oh, my God, what if

9:34

I gain weight? Yeah, totally. Which is just such a fucking

9:36

weird thing to throw in there. And

9:39

also the fact that she did gain weight and

9:41

it ends up in her fucking biography. Yeah, it's

9:43

just wild to me how much that has

9:46

become. Like sometimes

9:48

by her own sort

9:50

of bringing it up, sometimes not

9:53

how much that has become just a baked in part

9:55

of her story. Right. That

9:57

like people are currently pretty in.

9:59

capable of talking about Oprah without talking

10:02

about her body. I feel similarly

10:04

about the lawsuit as I do about the body stuff,

10:06

which is essentially like, no matter how much

10:09

of either of those things you get,

10:11

it's never not going to be stressful.

10:14

Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah. And the idea that on

10:16

top of all of that stress, you also

10:18

need to be extremely

10:21

assiduous about what you eat is

10:23

like, Jesus Christ. Although, I'm

10:25

glad that she was able to have pie

10:26

and let go of this for a little while.

10:29

It seems like she deserves it. That mac and

10:31

cheese sounds good. Normalize it. Normalize

10:34

pie and seven cheeses. Yeah.

10:36

So the trial starts in January

10:38

of 1998. They are

10:40

suing her under the Texas

10:43

Perishable Foods Act. This is

10:45

one of these veggie libel

10:47

laws that passes in this wave

10:49

of legislation that happens in the early 1990s. It's

10:51

the first time this law has ever

10:53

been used. So it's kind of a test

10:56

case for this Texas veggie

10:58

libel law and a test case for kind

11:00

of like these laws writ large, because

11:03

they've been on the books for five years now and

11:05

they've never been used. So the

11:08

country's legal establishment is

11:10

watching this to see whether it

11:12

works

11:12

and whether these laws could potentially be

11:14

overturned. It seems like

11:17

the highest stakes possible

11:20

test litigation.

11:20

Oh, yeah. If you're going to sue

11:23

Oprah. So to find

11:25

Oprah guilty, the lawyers have to prove

11:28

that Oprah and Howard, this is

11:30

in the law, they have to have stated

11:32

or implied that a perishable

11:35

food product was not safe for consumption

11:37

for the public. So

11:39

they cite Oprah's comment that this

11:41

has put me off eating another burger.

11:44

One of

11:45

the claims they're contesting is just four words

11:47

long, feeding cows to cows.

11:50

They also focus on Howard's comparison

11:53

of the US to the UK. This

11:56

is from the eventual appeal

11:57

that is filed years later. says,

12:00

Branding Lyman an extremist, the Cattlemen

12:03

cite two of his inflammatory statements

12:05

during the April 16th Oprah Winfrey Show. First,

12:07

the Cattlemen challenge as patently false

12:10

Lyman's assertion that mad cow disease could

12:12

make AIDS look like the common cold. Second,

12:15

they maintain that Lyman falsely accused

12:17

the United States of treating mad cow

12:19

as a public relations

12:20

issue as Great Britain did, and

12:23

failing to take any substantial measures to

12:25

prevent a mad cow outbreak in this

12:27

country.

12:28

They're also suing

12:30

over the editing. This is actually

12:32

really interesting. They're saying that the show

12:35

was deceptively edited because

12:37

as we talked about

12:38

last episode, they did in

12:40

fact have like a somewhat independent

12:43

USDA genuine expert on

12:45

mad cow disease, and they cut

12:48

his appearance from eight

12:50

minutes down to 37 seconds. As

12:52

an audio editor, I actually

12:56

agree

12:56

with the concept that you could very

12:58

easily libel somebody with editing. No

13:01

question. It would be so fucking easy.

13:03

Michael, you do it to me

13:05

every show. Well,

13:08

we had, I don't know if you remember this, right? Like

13:10

very, very early in the show, we

13:13

had like a rough cut. We were sort of taking

13:15

apart pieces of the episode and putting it back together. And

13:18

there was a point

13:18

where there was some like artifacts of the previous

13:21

edit. And I said at one point, I was like, well,

13:23

that is why so many kids like die

13:25

in road accidents in America. And then you cackled

13:28

for like two minutes, which was just

13:30

like, it was like, I had cut out something else

13:32

there like a joke, but because I

13:35

had like children dying and then you laughing,

13:37

it was like, wow, Aubrey's a

13:39

monster. This is also, Michael, I'm

13:42

so glad you bring this up. We're now back in bachelor

13:44

land. This is what the bachelor does all the damn

13:46

time. You got a villain edit

13:49

in your season, but they want to bring you back

13:51

as the bachelor. Congratulations. You're

13:53

going on bachelor in paradise.

13:54

You're about to get the best edit possible.

13:57

Yeah. Nick vial. This is why I'm

13:59

so nervous. having parasocial relationships with

14:01

us because I keep wanting to stress that I'm a normal

14:03

person who's a dick sometimes, and I don't want

14:06

you to experience that as a betrayal. Yeah, that's right.

14:08

That's right. No. Mike has bad

14:10

takes and is sometimes a prick. Podcasters.

14:12

They're just like us. Exactly.

14:16

So the lawsuit

14:18

is mostly over these false

14:21

claims, and it really rests on

14:23

this claim that Howard Lyman made that

14:25

America is treating mad cow

14:27

disease like Britain, right? It's basically

14:30

treating it like a public relations

14:31

issue rather than like a public

14:34

health issue. So for

14:36

you and I to adjudicate

14:39

whether this claim has any merit, we need

14:41

to talk for the next two hours about

14:43

the history of mad cow disease.

14:45

Delightful. Can't wait. Rodding brains.

14:48

Let's go. Speaking of which, what do you remember about

14:51

mad cow, like just as a disease,

14:53

as a condition from last week? What

14:55

I remember is feeling very upset by

14:57

the effects of it. It's very upsetting. It's really upsetting.

15:01

It essentially like creates

15:04

holes in your brain. Am I remembering

15:06

that right? Yeah. The actual name of it is bovine

15:09

spongiform encephalopathy.

15:11

Spongiform. Yeah. And

15:13

that's because it like your brain looks

15:15

like a fucking sponge. Yes. I under

15:18

it. That's a very effective name in

15:21

terms of conveying what happens and

15:23

that it's like degenerative and pretty rapidly

15:26

degenerative. Is that right? Yeah. So it's, it lives in

15:28

your body for a very

15:29

long incubation period of

15:31

years. And then you're dead

15:34

within a year. Yeah. That seems horrible. So

15:37

the weird thing about this condition is

15:39

that it

15:39

takes place in almost all mammal

15:42

species. So you can find it in

15:44

like minx and in elks, it's called

15:46

chronic wasting disease. In sheep,

15:49

it's called

15:49

scrapie, which is

15:51

a great disease name. I like diseases that sound

15:53

like diseases. That sounds like Cropsey.

15:55

Yeah. You know what I mean? That sounds like an urban legend.

15:58

Bad guy. In humans. it's called Creutzfeld-Jacob

16:02

disease. There are these little things

16:04

in your nerve cells, mostly

16:07

in your brain and your spine called prions.

16:10

We don't really know what they do.

16:13

The current theory apparently is that they help

16:15

your brain communicate with itself

16:17

and communicate with your nervous

16:18

system, but they're all over the place and they

16:20

propagate themselves by folding. They're constantly

16:23

folding into these three-dimensional shapes. Every

16:26

once in a while, this is extremely rare, they

16:29

get an error message, like a little

16:32

404 and they fuck up. Then they fold in

16:34

on themselves and capture the little

16:36

error message and start repeating the

16:38

error message.

16:38

Holy shit. The traditional

16:42

version of it is called spontaneous

16:44

Creutzfeld-Jacob disease. It just fucking

16:47

happens in your brain and then it starts propagating

16:50

itself and then you start to get these awful symptoms

16:52

which are very similar to dementia

16:54

at first. It mostly

16:57

happens in older people. The median age of onset

16:59

is 66. The bad

17:01

news is that there's no way

17:04

of testing for it before you get symptoms and

17:07

there's no treatment for it. The

17:09

good news is that it's very

17:12

difficult to spread. It's not airborne,

17:14

it doesn't come out in your poo

17:16

or your pee or any of your fluids. Once

17:19

one person gets it,

17:21

they just get it spontaneously and then

17:23

they die. There's a couple

17:26

instances of cannibal

17:29

tribes getting it where you

17:31

can spread it from one person to the other if you're eating

17:33

someone else's brain. Again, it's fairly

17:36

rare behavior in mammals to

17:39

eat an entire carcass of another thing. Luckily,

17:41

it can't really become a pandemic. It's

17:44

just something unbelievably unfortunate that

17:46

happens to an individual basically. What

17:49

is important about the mad cow outbreak

17:51

of 1996 specifically is

17:53

that it had never been seen in cows before.

17:57

We knew that it was in sheep. We also

17:59

knew that humans cannot get it from sheep.

18:02

Humans can eat the meat. Humans don't eat a lot

18:04

of sheep brains, but apparently even if

18:06

you do, humans don't get it from

18:08

sheep and other animals don't get it from sheep. Interesting.

18:11

So the first case that is documented

18:14

in a cow is in 1986 in the UK. This

18:19

cow was acting really weird and cows

18:22

haven't really done this before. Cows can get rabies

18:24

apparently, but rabies has very specific

18:26

symptoms and a farmer's like,

18:29

this doesn't really seem like rabies. Eventually

18:31

somebody tests the brain of the cow

18:33

after it dies and is like, oh, this is spongy

18:35

as fuck. I think we have a new

18:37

thing on our hands. And then

18:39

after they identify the first

18:42

couple cases, they start testing for it more

18:44

widely and it's just galloping

18:48

throughout the cattle industry. So by the

18:50

end of 1988, there's 95 confirmed cases on 80 farms. By 1989,

18:55

there's 2200 cases. By 1990,

19:00

there's 10,000 cases. And

19:03

by 1991, there's 24,000 cases. Good

19:06

God. There are many, many, many things written

19:09

about the botched UK government

19:11

response to the mad cow

19:13

epidemic. And I read three

19:16

books about this. I read the parliamentary

19:18

inquiry that is eventually published about

19:20

every single step along the

19:22

way that they fucked up. So the

19:25

first thing that the British government fucked up in responding

19:27

to this is they realized what they had on their hands

19:29

in March of 1987, but they didn't announce

19:31

it until May. So this

19:34

was

19:34

spreading within the cow population

19:37

and they didn't tell farmers.

19:39

They didn't tell people that this was happening,

19:41

basically. Yeah, that stuff is always so

19:44

tricky, right? You don't want people to

19:46

panic, but also withholding

19:49

information seems like

19:51

a real bad practice. So

19:54

fairly early, almost immediately,

19:56

the

19:57

UK government figures out that this has

19:59

to be spreading through cows

20:01

eating cow brains. Like that's the only

20:03

way we know that animals can get this

20:06

is eating their own species brains

20:08

and like spinal cords and shit. And so like

20:10

they look around the cattle industry and they're like, oh

20:12

yeah, it's a fairly common practice for

20:14

cattle to be ground up and turned into this like bone

20:16

meal protein stuff that they give other cows.

20:19

So it's like they know relatively

20:21

quickly like how this is spreading. So

20:23

it's not until June of 1988, nearly two

20:25

years after they find the first case that they

20:28

ban the practice of feeding bone

20:30

meal to cows. And

20:33

this is so baffling to me, they give them a grace

20:35

period. So they announce it

20:37

in June, but they're like, oh, you don't have to

20:39

implement it until like five weeks later in

20:41

July. But like this is

20:43

like poisonous, like they're feeding poisonous food

20:46

to other cows. It feels a little bit

20:49

like the time when very early

20:52

on in the COVID-19 pandemic,

20:55

when people are like, N95

20:58

masks don't even work. And

21:00

it was just so that there were enough for healthcare

21:02

providers versus being like, hey,

21:04

it's most important that the people who are exposed

21:07

to this the most have the protection that

21:09

they need. So we're putting them over here, right? Like

21:11

this feels like

21:12

it's in the same neighborhood of

21:14

like, boy, I see how

21:16

you got here, but like reorganize

21:20

your principles here, reorganize

21:22

your priorities. This is not

21:24

the way to do it. There's also a weird

21:26

naivete about how farmers

21:28

are going to react to this. So they basically in 1988

21:31

tell farmers, like you can't use

21:33

this stuff anymore, right? It's poison,

21:35

don't feed it to your cows anymore, but they don't give them any

21:38

compensation. What? So the farmers

21:40

are like, well, I've spent tens of thousands of

21:42

pounds on food. Like

21:44

cows need a lot of food. This is like a fairly

21:47

sizable industry, this like protein

21:50

meal that they're making. And it's like, oh

21:52

yeah, like all of that is worthless.

21:54

Bye. Yeah, and famously

21:56

a pretty low margin business

21:59

for farmers.

21:59

farmers and ranchers, like they're

22:02

not exactly like making bank. It

22:04

also just like totally destroyed trust between

22:06

the government and the farmers because the farmers were like,

22:08

well, fuck you. You're just telling me not to use

22:10

this stuff. And like, you're not giving me any compensation.

22:13

It feels really insulting. So a lot of the farmers just kept using

22:15

it until their supplies were gone. And

22:17

this is another super duper botched

22:20

government response thing. The UK government

22:22

didn't ban exports. What?

22:25

Of the bone meal. So this is another thing that like

22:27

they're selling it to like French farmers,

22:29

Swiss farmers, Belgian farmers. This

22:31

is like part of the industry. So like all

22:33

of the cases of mad cow that we get

22:35

in Europe in the early years

22:38

of this

22:38

are from like French cows eating

22:41

British bone meal. Oh,

22:43

interesting. They also fucked up

22:45

the compensation in telling

22:48

farmers to destroy their

22:50

herds as well. So the government

22:53

bans all this poisonous food. They

22:55

also tell farmers that they have

22:57

to kill any cows that have like

23:00

symptoms of mad cow. But

23:02

they have this whole compensation scheme

23:05

where any cow

23:06

that you kill, like a normal cow,

23:08

they pay you 100 percent of the value

23:11

of the cow. However, if the cow

23:13

has mad cow disease, they only

23:15

pay you 50 percent of the value of the

23:17

cow. But the logic, I guess is

23:19

like, well, it has mad cows. Like it's worthless. So

23:21

we shouldn't be paying as much. But the problem is, as

23:24

soon as farmers start to see symptoms in

23:26

their cows of mad cow disease, they

23:28

kill the cow and grind it up and

23:30

put it in the food. Right.

23:32

They slaughter it. They sell it. They

23:34

get rid of it because it's about to lose half of its fucking value. I

23:37

remember growing up like

23:39

my dad's a pilot and

23:42

he would talk about how

23:45

if you had a mental health diagnosis

23:48

on the books, you would be grounded as a

23:50

pilot. You couldn't fly. Oh, yeah.

23:52

So you just don't get diagnosed. Right. Which

23:54

just meant there were like a bunch of people with like

23:57

untreated and undiagnosed mental

23:59

illnesses.

23:59

sort of disincentivized like a

24:02

generation or more of pilots

24:04

from like seeking mental health care that they

24:07

may have really needed. Yeah, it's super

24:09

predictable. I mean, this is like really 101

24:12

stuff. The

24:14

one non-botched

24:17

government response that they did is they also

24:19

assign researchers to find out how

24:21

this started. So there's actually like a fairly

24:24

interesting mystery that they have to figure

24:26

out. They know that mad

24:29

cow disease is spreading through this practice of grinding

24:31

up cows and feeding it to other cows. Cows

24:33

eat cow brains. That's how they get mad cow,

24:35

right? They know that's happening. However,

24:38

this practice is very

24:40

widespread.

24:41

Like America does it, every country in

24:43

Europe does it. This is like a pretty well entrenched

24:46

part of the cattle industry by this point. And

24:48

in Britain, they've been doing this since the 1920s. This

24:51

is actually like something that Oprah

24:53

is kind of reacting to and like the rest of the public is

24:55

reacting to. He's like, oh, we're doing

24:57

this regularly. And the whole cattle

24:59

industry is like, yeah, you don't want to think about

25:01

like the conditions

25:02

under which your beef is produced. But

25:04

like, yeah, there's a lot of like waste products

25:07

when you kill a cow and like, we're going

25:09

to try to do something with those waste products. So

25:11

it's like, okay, well, then why

25:14

is mad cow happening in Britain

25:16

and why is it happening now?

25:19

So this is actually pretty interesting. They managed

25:22

to triangulate the

25:24

source of the outbreak based on all these like incubation

25:26

periods and when the cows are

25:28

getting it, where the cows are getting

25:29

it. They trace it back to

25:32

the winter of 1981 to 1982. Something

25:36

changed in that winter

25:38

to start spreading mad cow

25:40

throughout the cow population. So there's

25:43

a couple different factors that appear

25:45

to have led to this.

25:45

The first is the increasing

25:48

use of this bone meal protein

25:50

stuff that basically cows need

25:53

a lot of protein to grow up

25:55

and get like big muscles. This is like just like human

25:57

beings. We all need protein. And this

25:59

is one of the. cheap way is to produce

26:01

protein is like grind up meal and like feed

26:04

it to cows. And so there's a

26:06

weird thing that like the price of

26:08

like soybeans and other, you know,

26:11

quote unquote natural forms of protein

26:13

spiked that winter. So in

26:15

the winter of 1981, the percentage of

26:17

like

26:20

cow feed that was this

26:22

bone meal went from 1% to 5%, which

26:24

was the highest in Europe. No

26:28

other country was using that much bone meal.

26:31

There was also a change in the

26:33

way that they create bone meal.

26:36

So I know if this is a trigger

26:38

warning, but if you're eating right

26:39

now, stop eating. This is like, this

26:42

is so fucking gross. If you've been eating beef in

26:44

particular for any of this, maybe,

26:46

yeah, maybe, maybe finish your

26:48

lunch and then, then come back

26:50

to us in a couple hours.

26:51

This is so fucking gross Aubrey, but we

26:53

have to talk about it. So the way that

26:56

this bone meal protein stuff works

26:58

is they

26:58

basically take like cow carcasses

27:01

and oftentimes they'll throw in other animals to

27:03

like other sort of farm animals that are around.

27:06

They grind them all up into this

27:08

kind of like flop. And so

27:10

there's all these industrial processes to separate

27:13

the fat in that slop

27:15

from the protein. And what's super weird

27:18

is the fat part is actually very

27:20

valuable. This is like beef tallow and it's

27:22

like an industrial additive

27:25

that like they use it in cosmetics. They

27:27

use it in like printing money. Like it's

27:29

part of plastics. I believe famously

27:32

it was what gave McDonald's fries

27:34

their flavor for years and years and years,

27:37

right? This is like a very refined

27:40

industrial process to like separate out

27:42

the constituent parts of this like gross

27:45

animal slop. And as

27:47

the industry was getting bigger and

27:49

consolidating, especially in

27:51

the 1970s in Britain, they

27:54

switched from creating

27:56

this bone meal in batches.

27:58

Like you do a bunch of tons of it at once. doing

28:00

it continuously. So they have like a conveyor

28:02

belt that does it just all the time. And

28:05

as part of that process, they weren't heating

28:07

the

28:08

bone meal up as high. So

28:10

it used to be that they were heating it to like 220 degrees

28:13

and that dropped to like 180 degrees

28:15

or something like that. They just weren't getting

28:17

it up to as high temperatures and keeping it

28:19

at those high temperatures for as long when they

28:21

switched to this new process. There was

28:23

also a really interesting

28:25

change in processing that it

28:27

used to be that, you know, because tallow

28:29

is so much more valuable

28:31

than this like protein shit, they

28:33

would use chemical solvents. So

28:35

after they heated it up, they would blast it

28:37

with these like weird chemicals to kind of dissolve

28:40

the fat and then they could reconstitute it through

28:42

other chemical processes later. But

28:45

the industry started increasingly

28:47

relying on that in the 1970s. And then

28:49

there were some like really grisly fires

28:52

and explosions at these

28:54

rendering plants because the solvents that they were using were

28:56

extremely dangerous. Boy, boy.

28:58

So as like an occupational health and safety

29:00

thing,

29:01

they phased out these solvents.

29:03

I will say I'm glad to hear that

29:06

part. I feel generally wary

29:10

of conversations about like the gross

29:12

nature of food production, not

29:15

because we shouldn't those aren't things we should talk

29:17

about, but because it's so quickly tips

29:19

into like that bread is made out of the same

29:21

thing as yoga mats are made out of.

29:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of sensationalized claims

29:26

that are designed to squick people out and

29:28

make them think that their food is dangerous

29:31

when like water is a thing that's

29:33

used in making bread and yoga mats,

29:35

right? Like there are plenty of things that sort

29:37

of go in both categories. But from

29:40

an occupational safety standpoint,

29:42

that feels like a place where

29:43

we are generally like asleep

29:46

at the wheel as consumers, right?

29:48

Like there's like very little discussion

29:50

of

29:50

like, what is the safety of farm

29:52

workers picking your vegetables and

29:55

fruits? What is the safety level

29:57

of folks who are sort of working on this process?

29:59

So I'm like.

29:59

Very glad to hear that

30:02

the occupational safety part sort

30:04

of wins the day. It's a really weird,

30:06

like perfect storm of like

30:08

the price of international

30:11

like fish meal production

30:13

went up and they

30:15

reduced the heat by like

30:18

a little bit in these processes

30:20

and the protein

30:22

that they were feeding the cows went from like 5%

30:25

fat to 12% fat. None

30:28

of these things on their own seem like that big of a deal,

30:30

right? They're like little tweaks. Okay,

30:33

like these are the little things that happen

30:34

in industrial processes all the time and like

30:37

none of us ever find out about it. It's like, oh, okay,

30:39

just like a little tiny practice that doesn't really make

30:41

any big difference. But all of these things

30:43

together, because the heat

30:45

wasn't as high and fat

30:48

protects microorganisms from heat.

30:51

So the fat produced a barrier around

30:53

like the protein stuff that meant that it

30:56

wasn't getting heated to the same temperatures. So

30:59

basically there was some process in place to

31:02

destroy all of the prions and like it

31:04

just fell below the

31:06

threshold at which it could get rid of all

31:08

the prions and it left a couple of the prions

31:11

in the little like protein cakes. Also,

31:13

these cakes sound fucking disgusting. Apparently

31:17

I read a really good book called Deadly Feasts by

31:19

Roger Rhodes about like how all of this happened.

31:21

And he described them as scab

31:23

colored. Oh. And said that they just like

31:26

smell like a dead body.

31:28

So just like fucking gross, these like little

31:30

patty cakes of like flesh

31:34

stuff that you feed to fucking cows. I

31:36

really love that a running

31:39

theme of this show is you being

31:41

like, these are the things that are too

31:44

gross for me and I can't talk about

31:46

it. And then you bring episodes.

31:49

And then I share them. And then I have to tell other

31:51

people about them to share my grossed

31:53

outness. Well, and then you get like

31:56

a wave for however long of like

31:58

social media response.

31:59

And for their prompts, they're like, Check this

32:02

out. Yeah, totally. It's

32:06

a very particular hell of your own making,

32:08

bud. So basically, by the

32:10

1980s, they've kind of figured

32:12

out what happened. There's still,

32:15

it's actually very interesting, there's still

32:17

debate about where

32:19

the first case came from. So

32:22

one theory, the theory in the parliamentary inquiry,

32:25

is that just like a cow got it one

32:27

day, the same way humans do. It's like prions

32:29

are like doing their little folds. And

32:32

then there's like a little 404 that gets folded

32:34

into the cow brain, and the cow gets

32:35

ground up and fed to other cows, and so on,

32:38

right? That's one theory. The other theory

32:40

is that it was a variant

32:43

of scrapie. Because

32:45

it was relatively

32:46

widespread in sheep, and everyone

32:49

thought that other animals couldn't get it

32:51

from sheep, they were grinding up sheep

32:53

in these like sheep parts in this slop

32:56

stuff too. And that's how it

32:58

got into the feed for the cows. So

33:01

that is still a mystery, like the actual origin

33:04

point, like the big bang of all of this. But

33:06

once you start having these

33:08

like diseased cow brains

33:10

in the food, because you've had so much industrial

33:13

consolidation, you're making this in like huge

33:16

batches, right? So one infected

33:18

cow goes into like a huge

33:20

batch, and then gets spread out to like hundreds

33:23

of farms. So that's how this ended

33:25

up spreading, underneath everybody's radar,

33:28

throughout the entire country in the early 1980s. So

33:31

what Howard Lyman said on

33:34

Oprah, that everyone's gonna fight about

33:36

in Texas in another decade, is

33:38

that the British government essentially

33:40

treated this as a public relations problem,

33:43

and not as like a threat to human health. And

33:45

that is on some level true,

33:48

because before this, there had

33:50

never been a case where a version

33:53

of mad cow had spread from

33:55

animals to humans. Hmm. It

33:57

is true that like when you look at the government,

33:59

response, the government was basically

34:02

seeing this as like an animal disease and

34:04

was trying to protect the British

34:06

cattle industry. But they weren't doing

34:08

this. It's not like there was some like flashing red light,

34:11

like this is about to jump to humans at any time.

34:13

There were actual scientists and like specialists

34:15

in this who were like, no, no, we've been eating

34:18

sheep with scrapie for centuries. We've never

34:20

gotten scrapie in humans. Right. So they're calibrated

34:23

to like completely the wrong

34:25

scale of thinking and they're approaching

34:27

an incomplete list

34:30

of like institutions that need to be engaged

34:32

and all kinds of stuff. Right. Like, so

34:35

if you're focused

34:36

on the wrong problem from jump

34:38

or a small fraction of the total

34:41

problem from jump, like of course you're

34:43

going to come up with solutions that don't fix the whole

34:45

thing. If you don't know the whole thing exists. Yeah. Like given

34:47

the information that they had at the time, this

34:50

really

34:50

wasn't on anybody's radar.

34:52

And there was, this is like one of the most fucked

34:54

up things I've ever read. In 1985, there,

34:58

there were also all these other studies where people had

35:00

kind of tried

35:01

spreading prions from

35:03

like one species to another

35:06

or even within the same species. So

35:08

in 1985, there's an

35:11

article on like cannibal hamsters,

35:14

hamsters, hamster brains,

35:17

and they didn't get like hamster spongiform

35:20

encephalitis. When you say hang on,

35:22

we got to unpack cannibal hamsters.

35:25

You don't get to just skate by

35:28

cannibal hamsters. I'm

35:30

assuming that this is

35:31

a lab experiment, right?

35:34

Where hamsters are being fed. There's

35:36

not like a subset of

35:38

hamsters that are like Hannibal

35:41

hamsters, hamsters. There

35:43

was a plane crash and the hamsters had to resort

35:46

to eating one another. That makes more sense to me.

35:48

And I feel relieved

35:50

and very sad for those hamsters that

35:52

got fed hamster brains. That seems really

35:54

disturbing, but glad to know that

35:57

I can just love my unproblematic fave

35:59

hamsters. Again, at the

36:01

time, the conventional wisdom was

36:03

that like, even if cows

36:05

were eating cow brains, you would need like a lot

36:08

of brain material for

36:10

this to spread

36:10

from one animal to the other. And for

36:12

whatever reason, that turns out not to be true for

36:14

cows. So there's this big freak

36:17

out in the 1980s, but it

36:19

hasn't really crossed over to the

36:21

public yet. There's news stories, it's a big

36:23

deal, but it's kind of cast as like an agricultural

36:25

issue, right? Like

36:27

there's this weird disease in cows, but

36:30

the public isn't super duper tracking

36:32

this. So after this initial flurry,

36:34

a couple years go by

36:36

and then in 1990, there is a

36:38

cat named Max

36:43

who dies of mad cow

36:45

disease. Okay. It appears

36:48

that the cat became infected

36:51

from eating cat food that

36:53

had like ground up

36:55

cow brains in it. Oh my God.

36:58

First of all, it's like kind of scary that

37:00

mad cow is spreading from one

37:03

species to another, which like they said

37:05

couldn't happen, right? And then also

37:08

there's like, just like Oprah, you're like,

37:10

oh wait, we're all eating fucking cow brains? Totally.

37:13

Hang on.

37:14

Totally. It's like gross to think about. Cat

37:16

food didn't see it coming, but of course.

37:18

This kicks off a much larger

37:21

wave of panic than there had been

37:23

just when like cows had it. So

37:25

we actually get the coining of the term mad

37:28

cow, which was something the British tabloids came up with.

37:30

It has British tabloid written all over it.

37:33

That is for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It

37:35

also fits very well in headlines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But

37:37

what's amazing

37:38

to me, right, is the British

37:40

tabloids who you know, I hate

37:42

with like the depths of my heart. Like I loathe

37:45

British tabloids. But

37:47

this is a very weird case

37:49

for me because you know, I've looked into a million

37:52

moral panics at this point, and they all have kind of

37:54

like the same structure of

37:56

you know, especially this tabloid media, like whipping

37:58

up a bunch of fears about.

37:59

something that is fake, right? The British

38:02

tabloids at this time start

38:04

whipping up a panic about Mad Cow

38:07

and they're like, it could spread to humans.

38:08

And like, they're

38:10

fucking right. But

38:12

this is like a stopped clock is

38:15

right twice a day, right? It's so funny

38:17

to me. By accident slash

38:19

like compulsive sensationalization

38:22

of things that they hit on this, not

38:25

because they're like observing anything,

38:27

right? And they're quoting these like crank

38:29

doctors who are like, the medical

38:31

establishment doesn't want you to know, which

38:33

is true. That's

38:36

accurate. Like the medical establishment was

38:38

like super head in the sand about

38:41

the possibility of this spreading

38:44

to humans. And like the government at this

38:46

point

38:47

started doing all kinds of like PR shit. Like

38:49

the minister of agriculture went on

38:52

TV and fed his daughter a hamburger

38:54

as like a PR move to be like,

38:56

look how safe the beef is. Everyone should stop

38:59

slandering beef. And like

39:01

his daughter's fine,

39:02

it's all fine. But like it was

39:04

true that the government was doing

39:06

like, I wouldn't say a coverup, but the government

39:09

was definitely doing a lot of like pro beef propaganda

39:11

at the time. God, I just feel like our

39:14

next episode, you're gonna be like, there was

39:16

a bat boy and he did escape from

39:18

a Chicago lab. This is what's so

39:21

funny is because like this

39:23

has all

39:24

of the hallmarks of a moral panic, right? If

39:26

you looked at this structurally, right? There's

39:28

like some pseudo science stuff. There's

39:30

like taking a small number

39:32

of cases and blowing them up into these disaster

39:35

scenarios. But like it happened.

39:38

It then happens. So for

39:41

the first time ever, kudos to

39:43

the Daily Mail for getting it right. Jesus

39:46

Christ. It's bleak. Yeah.

39:49

So then a couple more years go

39:51

by. After the cat cow

39:53

panic kind of dies down, we

39:55

then get to 1993, which

39:57

is when the first. human

40:00

cases start to show up.

40:03

There's a farmer who one

40:06

of his cows had been diagnosed

40:08

with mad cow, and he ended up slaughtering

40:11

a bunch of his cows early.

40:13

Then he starts getting this weird dementia,

40:16

and people are like, this

40:19

feels weird. To my

40:21

knowledge, that has never

40:22

actually been confirmed as a case of mad cow.

40:25

It could be, and it could just be a really

40:27

unlucky guy who happened to get dementia really early.

40:29

We don't know yet. Boy, oh boy.

40:31

I hadn't encountered a couple weeks ago with someone

40:33

who was like, I had COVID before

40:35

they knew what it was. I was like, oh, in

40:38

January or something. This person

40:40

was like, no, in 2017. I was like, oh, yeah.

40:42

No, it hadn't leaked from the

40:45

lab yet. Also

40:48

in 1993, there's a little girl named Vicki

40:50

Rimmer who starts getting these

40:52

weird symptoms at the age of 15.

40:56

Her grandmother, this is

40:58

actually a really interesting example of something

41:00

that is usually bad, but is true

41:02

in this case. Her grandmother had

41:04

been reading the tabloids, and

41:07

her grandmother was like, I think this is mad

41:09

cow. She goes to the tabloids,

41:12

and the tabloids are like, mad cow and little girl,

41:14

and start whipping up panic. Again, under

41:16

any other circumstance, I'd be like, this

41:18

is very irresponsible, but it's fucking true.

41:20

It has now been confirmed that this

41:23

little girl had mad cow. Boy, oh boy. In 1994, there's a 15-year-old

41:25

girl who has it. In 1995, there's

41:32

another teenager who has it. After

41:35

a couple of these cases

41:36

start trickling out, it becomes

41:38

clear that something is happening.

41:41

On March 20th, 1996, the British government announces

41:46

that there have been 10 cases of

41:49

human mad cow disease. Do they have any

41:51

sense of why so many teenagers? It's

41:54

actually, to this day, it's not clear.

41:56

There appears to be some

41:58

weird, like, genetic marker. that

42:00

makes some people susceptible to it and

42:02

not others. But it's not clear to me why

42:04

it's happening in children. Although

42:07

the median age of these 10

42:09

cases is 28. It's also really

42:11

interesting. I actually spent like a long time trying

42:14

to figure out like where these cases originated.

42:16

Where like what did they eat

42:17

to give them mad cow, right?

42:19

But like you can't really trace it back because it's

42:22

been seven years since these people

42:24

ate the contaminated beef. Right, we've talked on the

42:26

show about like how bad people

42:28

are at self-reporting data of like

42:31

what they ate today. Like 10

42:34

ads, seven years. It's not

42:36

getting better. And it's like the only thing you could

42:38

even

42:38

do to investigate is like, well, did you eat beef between

42:40

like 1987 and 1989? Like

42:43

that's as good as you can do. And this

42:46

incubation period also foments

42:48

another like much more mainstream

42:50

wave of panic. I mean, this is when Oprah finds out about

42:53

it. This is when the rest of the world finds out about it. I mean, this is a

42:55

huge deal that it's like, okay, there's

42:57

tainted beef that has a 100% fatality rate

43:01

like eight years later. Like

43:04

that's fucking terrifying. Yeah, totally.

43:06

This is also when we get the,

43:08

you know, of course the tabloids now go

43:10

into overdrive and there's various

43:12

predictions of how many people will die. The highest

43:14

estimate is 500,000 people. Jesus

43:17

God. Eventually it's 177 people. So

43:21

like this model is like way fucking

43:24

out there, but it's like, yeah, you start counting

43:26

up the number of people who eat beef. Yeah, totally.

43:29

Totally. This is when like the rest of the world kind of like kicks

43:31

into action. There's something very funny that

43:33

the EU has a ban on British

43:35

beef in place for 10 years, but

43:38

even after they lift it, France just

43:40

keeps the ban in place like informally, even

43:42

though that's illegal under like EU rules. France

43:45

is like, no, no, no, we've got problems

43:47

with the British. We're gonna keep this. Feels

43:50

very France. Just

43:53

like we feel like it. What are you gonna do about it? Yeah,

43:55

fuck it. I'm just not gonna tell you guys about it. We never

43:57

liked you anyway. So we're

43:59

now. going to do back

44:01

to Amarillo, Texas. It's January 1998 again. It's a weird timeline

44:07

because the Mad Cow Panic in

44:09

America really peaked in 1996

44:12

when Oprah was doing her episode and then fell pretty

44:14

quickly. Once people figured out that

44:16

there had never been a case of Mad Cow in America

44:19

and there was no human case of Mad Cow

44:21

in America ever either. This remained

44:24

an extremely British phenomenon.

44:27

To this day, it's like 140,000 cattle in

44:29

Britain were

44:31

diagnosed with Mad Cow and in Portugal,

44:33

it's like 200. In France, it's like 150. It's really

44:38

isolated outside

44:39

of Britain. By

44:41

the time the trial starts almost

44:43

two years later, the country's kind of over

44:46

Mad Cow. Right. If it's unique

44:48

to this one industry in this one country,

44:50

then you figure out, if

44:55

you're not living in the

44:57

UK,

44:58

you figure out that you can

45:00

let go of some of that anxiety.

45:03

The trial itself begins.

45:06

Oprah and Howard Lyman both eventually

45:09

end up taking the stand. Oprah testified for three

45:11

days. I couldn't find trial

45:13

transcripts, which is really annoying.

45:15

I wanted to do a dramatic

45:17

reading of the testimony. All I know

45:19

is from what has been included in the

45:21

appeals and the various court decisions

45:23

and media reports, Howard Lyman

45:26

says the first question they

45:28

asked him when he got onto the stand was

45:30

like, are you a vegetarian? Yes or no. They

45:33

were casting him as an animal rights extremist.

45:36

It's like they're playing to the Amarillo crowd. Yeah,

45:38

totally. Aha. But then, okay,

45:41

I'm just going to spoil this.

45:44

They really never had a chance of winning

45:46

this lawsuit. Really? They have to prove

45:48

a series of things to win the

45:50

lawsuit. So a lot of the

45:52

trial rests on the

45:55

fact that Oprah, her show,

45:58

caused this huge drama.

45:59

in cattle prices in

46:02

April of 1996. The

46:04

prosecution calls like traders,

46:07

they call an economist who's

46:09

like, I see no other structural reasons

46:12

why the price of beef would have fallen at that

46:14

time. But then it's

46:16

really hard to prove this stuff,

46:19

right? Like why does the price of a commodity fall at

46:21

a particular time? Well, is Oprah's

46:24

show in there? Maybe.

46:27

But to get damages, they have to

46:29

show that she was basically single-handedly

46:31

responsible for it. And cattle prices

46:33

were down for 11 weeks. So

46:35

somehow they have to prove that Oprah's

46:37

show was like so powerful that

46:40

people stopped eating beef for three

46:42

months. Yeah, totally. Like honestly,

46:44

I buy it. Oprah

46:47

was extremely influential at that

46:49

time. I actually do too, honestly. Yeah. But like

46:52

to

46:52

prove it, again, this is like part

46:54

of what we come up against in nutrition research

46:56

all the time, right? In order to prove

46:59

this thing, you have to rule out every

47:01

other possible thing that could cause

47:04

this. And that's going to be really hard

47:06

to do when there is like a legitimate

47:08

public health issue at play. Yeah,

47:10

people are getting this news from more than

47:13

just Oprah. So you have to prove it

47:15

was Oprah and not 60 minutes

47:17

or Good Morning America or The Today Show

47:20

or whoever else covered it. This is what's so

47:22

weird to me. It's like if you Google around, you

47:24

can find a bunch of articles from the

47:26

time being like, could mad cow happen here? You

47:28

know, some of them are more responsible

47:29

than others, but like panic

47:32

about mad cow spreading to the US was very

47:34

widespread. It's something the entire media was doing.

47:36

It's not like Oprah like went out on a limb with this

47:38

segment, right? Yeah. There's also

47:40

the defense calls

47:43

various

47:43

other economists who

47:46

say that like prices of beef

47:48

had actually been falling for a while.

47:50

And

47:50

they call this guy to do this sort of

47:53

like rapid fire questions. Like, isn't

47:55

it true that demand in Asia

47:58

was falling at that time? And isn't it true? that

48:00

there was more supply coming out of

48:02

slaughterhouses at that time. There's

48:04

all these supply and demand things that

48:07

again, normal

48:07

people never really think about, but

48:09

all of these things are what these prices are really

48:12

based on is supply and demand,

48:14

intrinsic factors. They're like, well, there's all

48:16

this other stuff happening at

48:18

the time and it's really hard

48:20

to put all of this at the feet

48:22

of Oprah. I agree with you. I think that she

48:25

had something to do with it. The reputation

48:27

of beef fell, but there were

48:29

also children dying in

48:31

the United Kingdom from eating fucking

48:34

beef. There's also enough panic

48:37

in the population at large that

48:39

if children are dying from eating something,

48:42

people are going to stop eating it for a while. I get

48:44

that that sucks for your industry and it's unfair,

48:47

but you can't blame any one

48:49

media figure for that. Yeah, totally. I

48:52

feel similarly, honestly, about

48:54

the it feels like there's been an uptick

48:56

in the last few years in people

48:59

holding Oprah personally

49:00

responsible for Dr.

49:03

Oz and Dr. Phil and all of that kind

49:05

of stuff. Absolutely. She played an

49:07

influential role there and there is some

49:09

accountability to be had there, but

49:12

not more than there is

49:14

for those guys themselves.

49:16

She's a huge cultural

49:19

force and absolutely

49:21

there's more to talk about here, but again, the

49:24

degree to which people come

49:27

after her personally for

49:30

the big cultural waves that

49:32

sometimes she starts and sometimes

49:34

she rides seems

49:37

disproportionate to me. Also, even

49:39

under this lower standard, they still

49:42

have to prove that Oprah's statements

49:44

and Howard Lyman's statements were false and

49:46

that they knew that they

49:48

were false. That's a pretty

49:50

fucking high bar. If

49:53

you look at the actual statements that

49:55

they're accusing Oprah and Howard

49:58

of saying, Oprah says

50:00

it stopped me cold from eating another burger.

50:03

Well, that's not a factual statement. False.

50:05

No, it didn't. I saw you eat beef on your

50:07

show. We talked last episode about how opinions

50:10

are protected. And then Howard Limans,

50:12

he says this disease could make AIDS

50:15

look like the common cold. Well, that's a prediction

50:17

about the future. That's like me saying,

50:19

well, if self-driving cars become normal,

50:21

lots of bikers are going to get murdered in traffic, which

50:24

is fucking true, by the way. But also, that's an opinion.

50:26

That's my prediction of the future. That's not a fact.

50:29

It's very obvious from the structure of that,

50:31

that like it's an opinion. Well, and also

50:33

it's a figure of speech, right? X will make

50:36

Y look like Z. He's not giving

50:38

it enough legs for you to like have

50:40

a factual statement to debunk.

50:43

This feels a little bit like in

50:45

courtroom dramas when they'll like

50:48

have a witness on the stand and be

50:50

like, didn't you say you'd do

50:52

anything to be on this TV show? Like

50:55

it's treated as this big smoking gun moment.

50:58

And I'm like, honestly, like I said, I would

51:00

kill for a grilled cheese

51:01

yesterday. Like people don't,

51:04

let's not. It sort of feels like the same thing

51:06

with Howard's claim that the US

51:09

is treating this like a public relations

51:11

issue, just like Britain did. You

51:13

could say that that's like closer to

51:15

a factual claim than I'll

51:17

never eat beef again. But it also

51:19

very firmly falls into the category

51:22

of like analysis to me. Like it's

51:24

not a straightforwardly

51:24

factual claim. And it's

51:27

also not straightforwardly false. Like

51:30

one of the things that Howard mentioned on the Oprah show

51:33

is that the meat industry

51:35

instituted a voluntary ban

51:38

on putting brains and spines

51:40

in these like protein patty cakes. But

51:43

the US government didn't make it mandatory. And

51:46

what he's saying is that the US government is

51:48

treating this like a PR issue, not a threat to

51:50

human health. And like maybe you disagree

51:52

with that, or maybe you would put it differently,

51:55

but it's not just like a clear cut factual

51:57

statement. And it's not

51:59

in a clear cut. way wrong. Oprah

52:01

talks later about how her entire

52:04

strategy was basically making this a trial about

52:06

free speech. They talked about

52:08

the slippery slope. If my show

52:10

gets busted for asking questions

52:12

about the safety of beef, think about all of the

52:15

other shows that will have this huge chilling effect throughout

52:17

the entire journalism industry. In

52:20

Kitty Kelly's biography, she

52:23

has

52:23

a description of Oprah

52:25

testifying. She says, after

52:28

repetitive questioning, she leaned into the

52:30

microphone and in a commanding voice said,

52:33

I provide a

52:33

forum for people to express their opinions. We're

52:36

allowed to do this in the United States of America.

52:38

I come from a people who have struggled and died

52:41

in order to have a voice in this country and I refuse

52:43

to be muzzled. That's a strong

52:46

argument. Yeah, it totally is. Also, that's a

52:48

strength of speech

52:51

in her own

52:52

defense that you don't often

52:54

hear from Oprah, right? She'll

52:57

tackle issues that way. She'll do all kinds

52:59

of stuff, but maybe this is just

53:01

a sign of my age and

53:04

generation, but I don't remember

53:06

hearing Oprah talk in those

53:08

terms about herself. She also

53:10

says, this is also from the Kitty Kelly

53:13

biography, when she was asked about her integrity,

53:15

she said, I am a black woman in America,

53:17

having gotten here believing in a power greater

53:20

than myself. I cannot be bought. I answer

53:22

to the spirit of God that lives in us all.

53:24

She said her influence was not enough to drive

53:26

Americans away from beef. If I had that kind

53:29

of power, she said, I'd go on the air and heal

53:31

people. This is a tricky one because she is

53:34

extraordinarily influential

53:37

at this point in her

53:38

life and career. But

53:40

again, to trace all of this

53:43

sort of industry-wide impact

53:45

back to just her is

53:47

bonkers. I think that she's

53:50

fundamentally making

53:50

kind of a chicken shit defense throughout

53:53

the trial. She keeps saying, well, I'm not a journalist.

53:56

You can't expect me to have the same standards

53:59

as a sort of of traditional journalists, like I'm

54:01

an entertainment talk show. Then she

54:03

also hides behind this extremely

54:06

Gwyneth defense of like, I'm just asking questions.

54:08

That is chicken shit. Oprah has

54:10

huge influence. Whether

54:12

or not you say, go out and buy this book please. If

54:14

you say, this book is good, people are going to go buy the fucking

54:16

book. If you say beef is bad, people

54:19

are going to stop buying beef. Come the fuck on.

54:22

But then also, you

54:23

don't want to have a legal regime where

54:25

any time you say, driving

54:28

a Honda sucks and then fucking Honda

54:30

sues you. If that

54:32

becomes the legal standard,

54:34

then the chilling effect would be profound.

54:37

If you just can't even, as much

54:39

as I hate to use the term, ask questions

54:41

about whether a product is harming us. Oprah

54:45

should not have done this, but also the cattlemen

54:47

should

54:47

not have done this either. This is an ESH

54:50

situation. Michael Info Wars Hobbs,

54:52

just asking questions. I think

54:55

it's important to be able to ask the tough questions. It's

54:58

tricky because it's like an argument that like Fox

55:01

News makes too, right? To be

55:03

like, it's not news, it's opinion.

55:05

In this case, I take her point about the

55:08

sort of chilling effect on journalism

55:10

and I don't think that's wrong. Like

55:12

journalists are historically not

55:15

the most moneyed among us. So

55:18

if you

55:18

take on a particularly rich

55:21

or powerful industry,

55:24

they can file suit against

55:26

you and just wait until you

55:28

run out of money or will to fight

55:31

it, right? They can just drown you

55:33

in lawsuit and motions

55:35

and everything. So

55:37

the trial is very weird because weeks

55:41

before the verdict, it effectively

55:43

ends. To recap,

55:46

the Texas statute says,

55:49

the information states or implies

55:51

that a perishable food product is not

55:54

safe for consumption by the public.

55:56

So this is what the entire trial has been resting on. So

55:59

after the prosecution lays out its case.

56:03

Oprah's defense files a motion

56:05

to dismiss. My understanding is this is fairly

56:08

common that defense teams

56:10

would be like, we all saw how shitty that

56:12

case was. Let's get this whole

56:14

thing out of here.

56:15

So based on this motion to

56:17

dismiss, the judge rules

56:20

that beef is not perishable.

56:23

I'm sorry, what the fuck? It's

56:26

so fucking weird. So as

56:29

we discussed at length last

56:31

episode, because I was foreshadowing, all

56:34

of these veggie libel laws are

56:36

based on the argument

56:38

that existing libel

56:41

laws might be fine for

56:43

the Guineth Paltros of the world. But

56:45

because our products are

56:47

perishable, we should get

56:50

more protection from defamatory

56:52

claims. A huge

56:54

amount of the pretrial motions, the

56:57

interstitial things within the trial

57:00

are arguing over is cattle

57:03

a perishable product? Because if

57:05

it's not perishable, then this law doesn't

57:07

apply. Michael, this one from being

57:10

one of the most fascinating topics

57:11

we've gotten into to

57:15

the biggest pile of

57:17

brain rot notes. It's so

57:19

fucking weird. So the

57:22

judge in the case rules

57:25

in this motion to dismiss that

57:27

cattle is not perishable because

57:30

if the value of cattle falls

57:32

precipitously because Oprah made a TV show about how cattle

57:34

is bad, you can still sell your product.

57:37

She says you can sell it to hot dog

57:40

makers. You can grind up your old

57:42

diseased cows and put them in hot dogs. Right.

57:45

Exhibit A jerky. Exactly. The

57:49

phrase that they use is it's not beyond marketability

57:52

for a limited period of time.

57:54

Right? Which the entire law rests on.

57:56

I am so sorry. This is like the cannibal

57:58

hamsters. My brain.

57:59

We can't move on. Cattle is

58:02

like straightforwardly perishable. But

58:04

then when you think about it, I guess everything is perishable.

58:07

Humans are perishable. Yeah, long enough time goes

58:09

by, it's all fucking perishable. So they

58:11

were hoisted by their own petard. They

58:13

used this like fake thing

58:16

about like, oh, we're perishable so we don't count

58:18

to get these laws passed.

58:20

But then the judges are like, well, according to your own

58:22

bullshit ass law, your product

58:24

isn't perishable. Okay. As

58:27

a result of this motion to dismiss, the

58:29

trial then gets kicked down to

58:32

ordinary

58:33

business disparagement laws. So

58:36

under this law, they

58:38

not only have to prove that Howard

58:40

Lyman and Oprah statements were false, they

58:43

knew they were false. They also

58:45

have to prove that they said them anyway

58:47

out of malice. Oprah and

58:50

Howard Lyman hate these specific

58:52

cattle ranchers so much

58:55

that they're going to state a knowingly

58:57

false claim. I like the idea that

59:00

Oprah has like a red yarn

59:02

bulletin board somewhere in

59:04

her, like one of her 12 homes.

59:07

The cattle industry, it's

59:10

time. And we start with these

59:12

small fries. Yeah, and they, you

59:14

know, as we mentioned last episode, at no point did

59:16

she mention Texas or obviously

59:18

these specific people

59:20

in her episode. She was just talking about beef. So

59:23

it's just like a frivolous lawsuit then becomes

59:25

like triple frivolous. So

59:28

the trial goes on for a couple more weeks and then we finally get to the verdict

59:30

and it's like a

59:30

unanimous verdict and everybody's

59:32

just like, no, the claims are not

59:35

false. Like whether

59:37

or not they knew they were false, you haven't even proved that

59:39

they're fucking false. I mean, listen,

59:41

this is the Gwyneth Paltrow

59:44

ski trial where it's like everyone's

59:46

watching with baited breath. And then at the

59:48

end, everyone is of course like,

59:50

no, he said he didn't even see what happened.

59:53

He was just like, I think you're wrong. Like that's not

59:55

a huge fucking waste of everybody's time.

59:57

Yeah. Ultimately. Like

59:59

what are you doing? There's a very weird thing on the courthouse

1:00:01

steps afterwards where everybody declares

1:00:04

victory. Oprah cries

1:00:06

in the courtroom. It's clear this is very emotional. It

1:00:08

was not clear that she was going to win. I

1:00:11

can see how this would be a hugely anxiety producing

1:00:13

thing. She then goes out on the courtroom steps and

1:00:15

says, free speech not only lives,

1:00:18

it rocks. She's casting this as

1:00:20

a free speech trial. The

1:00:22

cattlemen also on the steps say

1:00:25

that we have won because

1:00:27

we've firmly established

1:00:29

that US beef is safe. And not

1:00:31

perishable. I

1:00:35

also think that the cattlemen are just like factually

1:00:37

wrong. The mad cow

1:00:39

thing

1:00:40

was kind of already over at this point. The

1:00:42

beef industry had already bounced back.

1:00:45

What were you even trying to prove? Well, and

1:00:47

by this standard, American

1:00:49

beef to your point was always sort

1:00:52

of quote unquote safe in this way. I

1:00:54

feel like the real legacy

1:00:54

of this case is that like way more Americans knew

1:00:57

at this point that they grind up

1:00:59

cows and feed them to other cows than

1:01:01

did before. Which like that's not

1:01:03

great PR for your industry. The fact that

1:01:06

you're fighting the mad cow stuff, but like what

1:01:08

people are grossed out by is that.

1:01:10

Look in that way,

1:01:12

the real winner here is Howard

1:01:14

Lyman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. This

1:01:17

has taken a one hour

1:01:20

Oprah show and spun it into

1:01:22

years of publicity for

1:01:25

the guy who couldn't stop talking

1:01:27

about feeding cows to cows or whatever.

1:01:30

Yeah, yeah. Like chef's kiss incredible.

1:01:32

Also a little Lyman

1:01:34

epilogue. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos of like

1:01:36

where he's given talks where he talks about this. According

1:01:39

to him, Oprah's producers asked

1:01:42

him to pay them back for her legal

1:01:44

fees of five million dollars. Which

1:01:49

is so fucked. Yeah, that's fucked

1:01:51

up. No, it also I mean

1:01:53

who knows if this is true or whether Oprah

1:01:55

knew about this or whatever, but it does

1:01:58

reveal

1:01:59

like the fundamental. misunderstanding

1:02:01

of this, that like, Oprah, it's not that he said

1:02:03

it, it's that you aired it. Right, totally. You

1:02:05

found him, invited him on your show,

1:02:07

didn't edit out the parts where he

1:02:10

said a bunch of shit that was like scaring the public. To

1:02:13

put all of the responsibility on him for saying

1:02:15

it, and none of the steps

1:02:17

of the process

1:02:18

in which you amplified

1:02:20

it and platformed it, like come the fuck

1:02:22

on, you're way more responsible

1:02:24

for this. Look, if you are a very

1:02:27

famous wealthy person, you

1:02:29

are never disputing the check.

1:02:32

Yeah, there's then a series of appeals.

1:02:34

I've read all of the appeals,

1:02:35

they're like, they're more available than the original

1:02:38

court documents. Every single

1:02:40

time they appeal it, like every

1:02:42

district, judge, whatever is just like, what?

1:02:45

No. Like this is obviously

1:02:47

like, what the fuck are you talking about? These are not false claims.

1:02:50

These are not like libelous. A lot of them

1:02:53

are opinion.

1:02:53

This is very well protected

1:02:56

by like the First Amendment. And we

1:02:58

all know beef is like Twinkies,

1:03:01

it never goes bad. Cattle of Forever.

1:03:03

Yes. One of the rejected appeals, the

1:03:06

judge says, stripped to its essentials,

1:03:08

the Cattleman's complaint is that the dangerous

1:03:11

food episode did not

1:03:12

present the mad cow issue in the light

1:03:14

most favorable to United States beef. It's

1:03:17

like, yeah, you guys are mad that like you got bad PR.

1:03:19

Yeah, totally. And like not untrue.

1:03:22

It was not a flattering episode.

1:03:25

Also not untrue. It wasn't like

1:03:27

set up with an

1:03:28

eye toward a fairness or journalistic

1:03:31

integrity in a meaningful way. And

1:03:34

like that doesn't mean that someone owes

1:03:36

you 12 million dollars. But then the really

1:03:38

interesting epilogue of this is that

1:03:41

because of this decision that cows

1:03:43

live forever and the trial

1:03:45

getting kicked down

1:03:46

to ordinary business disparagement

1:03:49

statutes, this wasn't tried

1:03:51

under the veggie libel law. This wasn't a

1:03:53

test of the concept of veggie libel.

1:03:56

So they're all just kind of sitting there on

1:03:58

the books. I read actually a really

1:04:01

interesting article about why they haven't been tested. I think

1:04:03

because people are afraid that if you try

1:04:05

using them, they'll be struck down on First

1:04:08

Amendment grounds. They're pretty

1:04:10

blatantly unconstitutional, honestly. If

1:04:12

you use them, they

1:04:15

might get overturned. Whereas if you don't use them,

1:04:18

you can use threats of them and

1:04:20

the existence of them to have this chilling effect, which

1:04:22

is kind of what they want to do ultimately.

1:04:24

You just have to be more careful

1:04:26

if you're talking about an agricultural product in these 13 states

1:04:28

than you would for other products. There's

1:04:31

only been three cases tried

1:04:33

under the veggie level laws.

1:04:36

One

1:04:36

was dismissed and two were thrown out. I was going to say, what are

1:04:39

the other two? This

1:04:41

was going to be the ending quote. Do you want to read? Do you want

1:04:43

to read the paragraph? I do want to read

1:04:46

a paragraph. You're going to love this. This is the weirdest

1:04:48

fucking thing. Okay. Sending

1:04:50

this to you. A second

1:04:52

lawsuit was brought by a group of emu

1:04:55

ranchers against Honda Motor Company,

1:04:57

arising from a television commercial

1:05:00

for the Honda Civic. Emus

1:05:02

versus

1:05:03

sedans. In the ad, a young

1:05:05

man named Joe drives his civic

1:05:07

to meet with several potential employers

1:05:10

about career opportunities. He

1:05:12

then talks with a real estate developer

1:05:14

who tells him, Joe, let's not

1:05:16

call it a pyramid scheme. Just

1:05:19

after that, Joe goes to an emu

1:05:22

ranch where he and the rancher

1:05:24

observe a pen of grazing emus

1:05:27

and the rancher says, emu

1:05:29

Joe, it's the pork of the future.

1:05:32

A

1:05:33

group of ranchers sought suit

1:05:35

under the Texas statute. Incredible.

1:05:40

I don't think less of emus after this. I

1:05:42

think the emus are fine.

1:05:43

This group of geckos

1:05:46

filed suit

1:05:48

against Geico. What are we doing here? This is

1:05:50

another one where like a judge looked at it

1:05:52

for like three minutes and was like, what? No, go

1:05:55

away. This is not a real case. And then we can't

1:05:57

have duck suing Aflac. It's

1:06:00

not going to happen. That's

1:06:04

the kind of like bleak epilogue

1:06:07

of the veggie libel laws. The less bleak

1:06:09

epilogue of mad cow disease is it

1:06:12

like, yeah, it has kind of been dealt

1:06:14

with. It's

1:06:15

not really a big deal in Britain

1:06:18

anymore. We know the cause of it. It's

1:06:20

been addressed. We're not getting cases

1:06:22

anywhere near like we

1:06:24

used to. There was actually a case

1:06:26

of it discovered in the US in 2003. Again,

1:06:29

there's kind of these structural elements in the

1:06:31

US beef sector that kind of keep it from becoming

1:06:33

like a massive outbreak. They found another case

1:06:35

in 2005, another case in 2006, another case in 2012.

1:06:37

Every

1:06:40

once in a while, these things do pop up

1:06:42

in various countries, but it hasn't

1:06:44

really spread throughout the system. There's

1:06:46

been a couple other cases of mad

1:06:49

cow in humans, like very isolated cases,

1:06:51

but it's fewer than 200 people worldwide

1:06:53

total. 170 of

1:06:56

those were like the original outbreak in Britain. Yeah.

1:06:59

You can't say the risk is zero. This

1:07:02

isn't something that is like, this will never

1:07:04

happen again or whatever, but this is an

1:07:06

extremely, extremely rare thing

1:07:09

to happen. You're more likely to get it

1:07:11

just as you age randomly than

1:07:13

you are to get it from beef

1:07:14

at this point. Are they still

1:07:16

feeding cows to cows in the UK

1:07:19

or in the US? Is that still happening? My

1:07:21

understanding is they do still do this, but they

1:07:22

remove the brain and the spine, which

1:07:24

is where most of the mad cow stuff

1:07:26

is. Remove.

1:07:28

Tiny repeating machine

1:07:31

strikes again. Yeah.

1:08:00

you