Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by Professor Jennifer Jaquette. She is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University and the author of The Playbook, How to Deny Science, Sell Lies,

and Make a Killing in the Corporate World, a Very Useful Guidebook.

Professor Jack Watt, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Now, your book is probably the first book I've interviewed anyone about on this program that is written almost entirely

in sarcasm. So perhaps we could start by explaining the premise of the playbook.

So the playbook was written by my alter ego, who runs a consulting company called JJ and Friends,

and we work on behalf of our clients to help them understand how to both deny science and also use science to their advantage.

You know, a good accountant doesn't allow a new tax code to ruin its clients, right?

We're doing the same for science here at JJ and Friends.

So yeah, the book is written in a sarcastic way for a whole

bunch of different reasons. And I felt that looking at it from that side, I also taught at the

Stern School business for a long time at NYU, looking at it through that angle would actually

give me some kind of advantage. And I think it did. It helped me

sort of predict certain tactics that I was able to outline. So your book kind of starts from the

perspective, you know, I guess if I was a consultant and I accepted the Milton Friedman premise

that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits

and nothing more, and that there is a fiduciary duty to put the pursuit of profit above all else,

what then would be the various implications that flow from that in terms of how a corporation

was obligated to and ought to approach scientific research that threatened it?

Yeah, exactly, or just scientific knowledge in general.

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