Speaker 1: Pushkin. Welcome to a Brave New Planet. My name is
Speaker 1: Eric Lander. I'm your host for this new podcast. In
Speaker 1: the upcoming episodes, we'll explore frontiers of science and technology
Speaker 1: that are both exciting and challenging. Artificial intelligence that's unleashing
Speaker 1: artistic creativity, but also enabling deep fakes that undermine truth
Speaker 1: and democracy. A plan to modify the Earth's atmosphere to
Speaker 1: hold off climate change that might buy time or might
Speaker 1: keep us from solving the real problem. A new genetic
Speaker 1: technology for engineering nature that might prevent malaria but might
Speaker 1: get out of hand. Computer algorithms that can diagnose diseases,
Speaker 1: tell companies who to hire, and judges had a sentence,
Speaker 1: but might also automate or human biases. And we'll ask
Speaker 1: whether it's time to turn war over to robots. We'll
Speaker 1: look at the amazing upsides and also ask what could
Speaker 1: possibly go wrong. But for this short first episode, I
Speaker 1: thought i'd better explain who I am and why I'm here.
Speaker 1: I'm a scientist. I grew up in New York City,
Speaker 1: a product of the public schools, where I fell in
Speaker 1: love with math. Not long after I did my PhD
Speaker 1: in mathematics, I became captivated by genetics. By luck, that
Speaker 1: was just a few years before biologists began dreaming about
Speaker 1: reading out the complete human genetic code, all three billion
Speaker 1: letters of DNA. I got involved in this crazy idea
Speaker 1: called the Human gene Project, and became one of the
Speaker 1: leaders of that international collaboration. As the work neared its end,
Speaker 1: I helped launch a research institute, the Broad Institute of
Speaker 1: MT and Harvard, that I still lead today, to apply
Speaker 1: that same collaborative spirit to help a new generation of
Speaker 1: remarkable scientists propel the understanding and treatment of human diseases
Speaker 1: outside the laboratory. I've always cared a lot about how
Speaker 1: science affects the world. For eight years, I also co
Speaker 1: chaired the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
Speaker 1: for the Obama White House. We got a chance to
Speaker 1: wrestle with some of the nation's biggest opportunities and problems,
Speaker 1: from energy to influenza, cybersecurity to aging, and through it all,
Speaker 1: I've continued to teach introbiology to MIT students, who every
Speaker 1: year restore my faith in the future. But that future
Speaker 1: is on the line today in ways it's never been before.
Speaker 1: The decisions we make or don't make will affect us
Speaker 1: all for generations to come. So to kick off Brave
Speaker 1: New Planet, I wanted to talk with someone who has
Speaker 1: boundless curiosity and might help us think about what's at stake.
Speaker 1: I reached out to Malcolm Gladwell. He's the author of
Speaker 1: books like Talking to Strangers and Outliers and the host
Speaker 1: of the podcast Revisionist History. To my delight, he agreed
Speaker 1: to join us. Malcolm Gladwell, Welcome to Brave New Planet.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Eric. I am delighted to be here and
Speaker 1: fascinated to learn more about your new podcast. But before
Speaker 1: we get into it, I wanted to talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about you. I'm very curious about how your initial
Speaker 1: ideas about science were formed and why what led you
Speaker 1: into this world in the first place. You know, looking
Speaker 1: back growing up in New York as a kid in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, it was pretty amazing. I was raised
Speaker 1: by my mom and we didn't have a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but she figured out everything free and everything cheap that
Speaker 1: you could do, dragonist to museums. She let us stay
Speaker 1: home and watch all the space launches, and then nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four sixty five was the World's Fair, the New
Speaker 1: York City World's Fair, and that was amazing. There was
Speaker 1: this the Unisphere, the big globe that was the symbol
Speaker 1: of the World's Fair. It's it's the thing that gets
Speaker 1: destroyed in Men in Black at the end of the movie,
Speaker 1: and there was a guy in a jet pack who
Speaker 1: flew over the unisphere and they told us all we
Speaker 1: would be going to work in jetpacks. I still am
Speaker 1: waiting for my jetpack. But there were all these other things.
Speaker 1: There was like the ge Carousel of Progress where they
Speaker 1: were singing There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. And there
Speaker 1: was Belle Labs premiering the picture phone, and du Pont
Speaker 1: with its wonderful world of Chemistry, which I think became
Speaker 1: the better slogan better living through chemistry. And they had
Speaker 1: this time capsule that we're going to dig up in
Speaker 1: five thousand years. And it was also the era of
Speaker 1: Star Trek, where everybody, all races and genders, we were
Speaker 1: going to go out together and boldly go and so
Speaker 1: it was a period of like infinite possibility, amazing optimism
Speaker 1: about what you could do in the world. There are
Speaker 1: obviously lots of tensions bubbling under the surface, but as
Speaker 1: a seven eight year old kid I wasn't wear any
Speaker 1: of that yet, and so I think I was formed
Speaker 1: in this world that thought science was going to be
Speaker 1: incredibly important to progress and the world was gonna it
Speaker 1: was just going to become a better and better place.
Speaker 1: I'm amazed, like in your description of that, how frictionless
Speaker 1: your access to knowledge as a kid was seems to
Speaker 1: have been. I mean, all the stuff's on your doorstep,
Speaker 1: like the New York's Fairest. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 1: what subway you're taking, or maybe a couple of buses,
Speaker 1: but but I mean the point is, like, you don't
Speaker 1: have to have a lot of money. You're going to
Speaker 1: lost a dollar for kids to get in. Yeah, now
Speaker 1: dollar was worth more than but still, you know, my
Speaker 1: mom dragged us fourteen times to the World's Fair and
Speaker 1: it was she was amazing. Fourteen times. I love it.
Speaker 1: You remember how many times? Oh yeah, So you have
Speaker 1: this coming out of your childhood, you inherit, this sense
Speaker 1: of infinite possibility. What happens to that sense as you
Speaker 1: get older? Is it still there? Well? It's interesting, I mean,
Speaker 1: where does that sense come from? An infinite possibility? It's
Speaker 1: it's no accident that the nineteen sixties are like that.
Speaker 1: It's after World War Two, where science played a big
Speaker 1: role in winning the war, radar, early computers, penicillin, of course,
Speaker 1: atomic bombs, and the US makes this decision after the
Speaker 1: war that science is going to be a cornerstone of
Speaker 1: society going forward, that we're going to fund science at universities,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna train people, and we'll have this virtuous
Speaker 1: cycle of public knowledge producing technologies and wars and companies.
Speaker 1: And then of course, nine months after I'm born, Sputnik
Speaker 1: goes up. I don't remember it, but I know it
Speaker 1: was exactly nine months after I was born, and like
Speaker 1: everything goes into overdrive. Science is central to the survival
Speaker 1: of the country. We pass laws for science education, we
Speaker 1: start the space race to get a man on the
Speaker 1: moon first. So you know, this is the world that
Speaker 1: shaped that New York City of the nineteen sixties was
Speaker 1: the sense that science was going to discover what's true,
Speaker 1: technology was going to figure out what's possible, and society
Speaker 1: reaps the benefits. And that assumption, that idea that the
Speaker 1: scientific method, you know, you figure out what's true by evidence,
Speaker 1: not authority. It's all about honesty, not advocacy. There was
Speaker 1: a set of assumptions that underlay that world where this
Speaker 1: country really bought into the ideas of science, and it
Speaker 1: paid off amazing dividends. You know, through the rest of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. You think about all the things that
Speaker 1: happened from what had to have been a bit of
Speaker 1: a crazy bet. The US didn't invest in science a
Speaker 1: lot before the war. But afterwards you look at the
Speaker 1: things that start happening. You get polio vaccines, measles, and
Speaker 1: smallpox vaccines and eradicate smallpox. And you get computer technology
Speaker 1: and the Internet and GPS systems and like Google searches
Speaker 1: come out of a National Science Foundation grant, and then
Speaker 1: molecular biology and gene cloning and this Human Genome Project
Speaker 1: I got very involved in, and onward and onward and onward,
Speaker 1: and you get these industries that grow up around all
Speaker 1: these things. So I think it paid off in huge ways.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting is it's only accelerated since then in
Speaker 1: terms of the science, even though there are a lot
Speaker 1: of tensions, you know from the any of you of
Speaker 1: the science. You look at the last two decades or
Speaker 1: so and you start seeing, you know, artificial intelligence, we
Speaker 1: can translate languages, by computers and spot lung cancers by computers,
Speaker 1: and people are making self driving cars and quantum computers.
Speaker 1: And in biology you have you know, new therapies for cancer, immunotherapies,
Speaker 1: and this Human Genome project where we spent three billion
Speaker 1: dollars to read one genome. It now costs a couple
Speaker 1: hundred bucks to read a genome. There are technologies that
Speaker 1: let you edit genomes like Crisper, and just keeps going
Speaker 1: and going, and I think, if anything, it's accelerating in
Speaker 1: terms of the science and the impact on society. I've
Speaker 1: just curious, Eric, you've chosen to do this now? Is
Speaker 1: there a reason why now? I mean, you could have
Speaker 1: done this five years ago, You could have done this
Speaker 1: five years from now. So there's something compelling you at
Speaker 1: this moment in time. Yeah. Absolutely. It is so glaringly
Speaker 1: out obvious that we are going to need science to
Speaker 1: solve a lot of the problems ahead. Climate change. It's
Speaker 1: in our face right now. It was theoretical to people,
Speaker 1: but the last three or four years, it's so obvious
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to solve that. The pandemic that we're
Speaker 1: living through right now, it's clear there's no way to
Speaker 1: solve pandemics without a lot more science than we've brought
Speaker 1: to bear on it so far. And then I think
Speaker 1: about things like Alzheimer's. It's going to be costing US
Speaker 1: a trillion dollars a year as the usages, and we
Speaker 1: really don't know how to do anything other than support people.
Speaker 1: So we've got to come up with solutions, and those
Speaker 1: solutions that got to come from science. I could go
Speaker 1: on and on, and so it seemed like a moment
Speaker 1: when we just had to decide are we going to
Speaker 1: rally a world together around science. It's Matt Damon's famous
Speaker 1: line from the movie The Martian when he branded on
Speaker 1: Mars and he knows nobody's coming back for him soon,
Speaker 1: and he says, I guess there's only one option. I'm
Speaker 1: going to have to science the shit out of this.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to do that right now. And I
Speaker 1: think the last several years have made that so apparent.
Speaker 1: We really have to reconnect between science and society because
Speaker 1: that connection is going to be so important going forward.
Speaker 1: Do you think if you were an eight year old today,
Speaker 1: you would have to describe what your eight year old
Speaker 1: self today would think if is it the same sense
Speaker 1: of infinite possibility. I think there's a frustration right now,
Speaker 1: a sense that we're not doing all we can with this,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of reasons for it. The bright
Speaker 1: shininess of science would discover the truth and technologies would
Speaker 1: show us what's possible, and society would reap the benefits.
Speaker 1: That simple social compact is getting frayed in some ways,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of different ways it's getting fred
Speaker 1: it's not surprising that after sixty years things would would
Speaker 1: begin to get a little tattered. But you know, if
Speaker 1: you think about it, science sometimes conflicts with economic interests.
Speaker 1: We began to see that companies might start attacking science
Speaker 1: because they really don't like the answers. I think the
Speaker 1: first case was when it became clear that cigarettes caused cancer,
Speaker 1: and tobacco companies decided to pay people to put up
Speaker 1: smoke screens and question the evidence. And then, of course,
Speaker 1: climate changes is where we see it most today, where
Speaker 1: despite massive amounts of evidence, the solutions just deny it.
Speaker 1: You know, we've got massive wildfires in California, and we've
Speaker 1: got wildfires a couple of years ago above the Arctic circle.
Speaker 1: We got glaciers retreating powerful hurricanes, you know, the last
Speaker 1: six years, the hottest years in history, and people just say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, nothing to see here, that's all just a fluke.
Speaker 1: And I think that that ability to not even have
Speaker 1: to engage is one tension that we're trying to deal
Speaker 1: with right now. Is is there a shared assumption that
Speaker 1: we have to deal with the evidence. But then there's
Speaker 1: other things. I think on science's side, sometimes science just
Speaker 1: seems to overpromise, and sometimes probably does overpromise. There are
Speaker 1: people who say, wait, wait a second, I thought you
Speaker 1: were curing cancer. How come cancers not cured yet? I
Speaker 1: think going overboard on promises and not giving people a
Speaker 1: sense of the fact that, yeah, science is amazing, but
Speaker 1: it takes a while to deliver can backfire. And I
Speaker 1: think I think there's also people who you just want
Speaker 1: answers to things and science doesn't have answers for them,
Speaker 1: and they got to go seek them somewhere. Yeah, is
Speaker 1: this kind of these kinds of ways what led you
Speaker 1: to want to do a podcast? Well exactly, you know,
Speaker 1: I think this compact between science and society is so important.
Speaker 1: It's getting tattered and we have to do something about it,
Speaker 1: and that requires drawing more people into hard problems and science.
Speaker 1: We can't we can't ignore the fact that the problems
Speaker 1: are hard. Sometimes these bright shiny futures that we talk
Speaker 1: about we really get instead dystopian outcomes. Things really can
Speaker 1: go wrong. The better living through chemistry can turn into
Speaker 1: toxic waste. The Internet that's supposed to give us all
Speaker 1: the world's information can bring us disinformation. You know. Social
Speaker 1: media that's supposed to bring us together can tear us apart.
Speaker 1: I know you're you're really interested in these topics yourself,
Speaker 1: and I think there are times when when there's just
Speaker 1: been failures of imagination to think about what could possibly
Speaker 1: go wrong. Whatever the compact was in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: where you kind of left it to the scientists and
Speaker 1: the politicians to work at all out, We're now going
Speaker 1: to need everybody on board. We're gonna need to open
Speaker 1: this up to more people and recognize that science might
Speaker 1: have a lot of answers about the science, but we're
Speaker 1: not going to have all the answers about how it
Speaker 1: should be applied in the world. And that was really
Speaker 1: the heart of the podcast. If we really are now
Speaker 1: all the stewards of a brave new planet, then we
Speaker 1: got to figure out how to draw everybody in on
Speaker 1: that and open it up. Would you describe yourself still
Speaker 1: as an optimist? Oh, I am a tremendous optimist in
Speaker 1: spite of lots of evidence to the contrary, because in
Speaker 1: the end, I really don't see any alternative. So I
Speaker 1: am a very realistic optimist. I think we're gonna need
Speaker 1: to fight for truth. It's not a gimme like it
Speaker 1: might have been a half century ago. I think we
Speaker 1: are gonna need to bring everybody in to help make
Speaker 1: decisions about how we should use this. It's not going
Speaker 1: to be easy. And uh, you know, there's nothing about
Speaker 1: the podcast that's advocating specific answers to anything. It's it's
Speaker 1: really meant to model smart, thoughtful, passionate people struggling with
Speaker 1: what do we do with our future? And so it's
Speaker 1: meant to invite people into that because you know, in
Speaker 1: my most optimistic self, that's how we make it through
Speaker 1: is we we all work together to struggle through hard
Speaker 1: problems that have amazing upsides, maybe big downsides, and together
Speaker 1: we make it through. And you know, these are things
Speaker 1: that they're just too big to fit in a tweet.
Speaker 1: And I'm really interested. I know you are in ideas
Speaker 1: that are too big to fit in a tweet but
Speaker 1: will end up, you know, shaping the future in a
Speaker 1: big way. And so that that was the heart of
Speaker 1: the podcast. Has there been a moment maybe not doing
Speaker 1: this podcast, but when you're dealings with others scientists in
Speaker 1: fields not your own? Is the rare for a moment
Speaker 1: when you're over your head? Will you say I have
Speaker 1: no idea what these guys talking about? Oh? Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Frequently there were occasional times I was really deeply an
Speaker 1: expert in the subject, but you know, many many other
Speaker 1: different things. You know, I'm not an expert, and so
Speaker 1: I think what I had to learn was the right
Speaker 1: kind of scientific humility to ask dumb questions and say
Speaker 1: what exactly does that mean? And you can learn a
Speaker 1: lot from that. Yeah, yeah, I am. I am. That
Speaker 1: actually is a lovely place to end. I'm in total
Speaker 1: agreement with you. I think the key to being an
Speaker 1: effective journalist, explainer, podcast host, whatever is the willingness to
Speaker 1: ask really dumb questions. Indeed, thank you so much. This
Speaker 1: is I cannot tell you how excited I am to
Speaker 1: listen to this and how delighted I am that you
Speaker 1: have you of all people, have decided to tackle this subject.
Speaker 1: It's it is greatly needed. Oh Malcolm, thanks so much
Speaker 1: for helping us kick off this first episode. Thank you
Speaker 1: America and to all of you listeners. Come join us
Speaker 1: for episode two, where we'll hear President Richard Nixon console
Speaker 1: a grieving nation about the tragic outcome of America's failed
Speaker 1: mission to land a man on the Moon. Good evening,
Speaker 1: my fellow Americans. Fakes has ordained that the men who
Speaker 1: went to the Moon to explore and peace will stay
Speaker 1: on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men,
Speaker 1: Meal Armstrong and Edwin Auburn know that there's no pup
Speaker 1: for their recovery. Deep Fakes next time on Brave New Planet.
Speaker 1: Brave New Planet is a co production of the Broad
Speaker 1: Institute of MT and Harvard Pushkin Industries in the Boston
Speaker 1: Globe support from the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation. Our show
Speaker 1: is produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with Mary Dow. Theme
Speaker 1: song composed by Ned Porter, mastering and sound designed by
Speaker 1: James Garver, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and a Stitt
Speaker 1: and Enchant. Special thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts
Speaker 1: at Clarendon Communications, to Lee McGuire, Kristen Zarelli and Justine
Speaker 1: Levin Allerhand at the Broad, Tamil o'bell and Heather Faine
Speaker 1: at Pushkin, And to Eli and Edy Brode who made
Speaker 1: the Broad Institute possible. This is brave new planet. I'm
Speaker 1: Eric Lander.