Speaker 1: Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do
Speaker 1: good scientists sometimes crowd out great scientists? Do we still
Speaker 1: have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship
Speaker 1: between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in
Speaker 1: a larger game that they barely see? What if the
Speaker 1: most important ideas are the ones you're not allowed to
Speaker 1: hear about. From universities to public health to Watson and
Speaker 1: crick and nuclear bombs and AI. Today we're going to
Speaker 1: cover it all with physicists and mathematician and iconoclast Eric Weinstein.
Speaker 1: So get ready for a great brain stretch. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and
Speaker 1: an author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail
Speaker 1: deeply into our three pound universe to understand how we
Speaker 1: see the world, and as we'll discuss today, we don't
Speaker 1: always see what we believe we're seeing. We usually think
Speaker 1: of science as a calm enterprise that's cumulative. You have
Speaker 1: thousands of people testing hypotheses, you have vast amounts of
Speaker 1: data getting gathered and knowledge slowly accretes. But underneath that
Speaker 1: veneer sometimes things can be a little more turbulent, because
Speaker 1: what happens sometimes is that scientific discoveries can quickly reshape
Speaker 1: economies and alter what nations can do to each other,
Speaker 1: and redraw political boundaries and redirect the future long before
Speaker 1: most of us even notice. In other words, ideas that
Speaker 1: begin on a chalkboard can end up steering history. But
Speaker 1: we very rarely pause to ask whether the way science
Speaker 1: is organize today is matched to the power it now holds.
Speaker 1: Who decides which questions get asked or which lines of
Speaker 1: inquiry get funded. How much of scientific progress depends on conformity,
Speaker 1: and how much of it depends on rule breakers who
Speaker 1: are willing to look crazy before they are proven right.
Speaker 1: These questions sit at the intersection of labs and nations,
Speaker 1: and they matter more than ever in a world where
Speaker 1: any single discovery could reverberate globally. My guest today is
Speaker 1: someone who spent years thinking about science from that high altitude.
Speaker 1: Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, a physicist, and a public
Speaker 1: intellectual who is unusually thoughtful about the architecture of knowledge,
Speaker 1: like how ideas are filtered by the system and how
Speaker 1: originality survives or fails inside universities. Eric hosts a podcast
Speaker 1: called the portal, and he has a reputation for asking
Speaker 1: questions that make people uncomfortable and for refusing to treat
Speaker 1: existing structures as inevitable just because they are familiar. Today,
Speaker 1: Eric and I are going to talk about how discovery
Speaker 1: really happens, who it serves, and what might be required
Speaker 1: if we want science to live up to its highest
Speaker 1: ideals in the decades ahead. Here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. So, Eric,
Speaker 1: Jim Watson recently passed away, and I know that you
Speaker 1: were close with him and you really admired him. Tell
Speaker 1: me about that.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: I spent time with Jim, and for the time that
Speaker 3: we were together was very intense. But Jim is in
Speaker 3: many ways my spirit animal. And one of the things
Speaker 3: that's really important is to recognize who Jim was as
Speaker 3: a scientist, who he was as a writer, and to
Speaker 3: relegate everything else that he was to a tertiary status
Speaker 3: that shouldn't distract us from the miracle that was Jim.
Speaker 1: Give me example of that.
Speaker 3: What's happened is that people who are not close to
Speaker 3: science have set up a mimetic complex, which Jim Watson
Speaker 3: auto completes somehow to a bunch of things that are
Speaker 3: much less relevant.
Speaker 1: So you know, can you unpack that? Sure?
Speaker 3: Imagine that you knew Archimedes personally, and Archimedes had some
Speaker 3: sort of like personal hygiene problem.
Speaker 2: They didn't brush, you know.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you imagine that everybody in Archimedes time. Oh
Speaker 3: the breath on Archimedes was so terrible, you know, but
Speaker 3: that's Archimedes. We important to recognize that that was Jim Watson.
Speaker 3: Jim Watson was a blinding figure of science, world science,
Speaker 3: American science in particular, and he auto completes to some
Speaker 3: stuff that is far less relevant and salient. And so
Speaker 3: it's important to me that we discussed Jim Watson and
Speaker 3: not be captured by when we happen to be having
Speaker 3: the conversation, because this is a ten thousand year. As
Speaker 3: long as there are humans and as long as there
Speaker 3: will be life as we know it, Jim Watson will
Speaker 3: be one of the most important people who ever lived.
Speaker 1: And when you say auto completes, you mean in people's
Speaker 1: heads they think Jim Watson and then they think X
Speaker 1: Y Z.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, but again we're falling into the trap. So
Speaker 3: let's briefly go into the trap and then only to
Speaker 3: like it's a picture plant. Let's go into the picture plant,
Speaker 3: help ourselves to a couple of deep gulps, and then
Speaker 3: get the hell out. Okay, great, Okay, So Jim Watson
Speaker 3: auto completes right now to Rosalind Franklin. Ah And if
Speaker 3: you ask me, if you care about Rosalind Franklin, you
Speaker 3: should be carrying about Irwin Chargaff.
Speaker 2: Nobody talks about chargaph interruption.
Speaker 1: So Krick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA, published
Speaker 1: that in April of nineteen fifty three, and they ended
Speaker 1: up winning the Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins for that work.
Speaker 1: People then came out and said, look, Rosalind Franklin had
Speaker 1: taken the first photographs of the structure and didn't recognize
Speaker 1: what it was, the double helix structure, but should have
Speaker 1: gotten credit. That's what we're referring to here. Just so
Speaker 1: not really okay.
Speaker 3: Roslind Franklin had taken done the X ray crystallography on
Speaker 3: nucleic acid and had this famous Maltese cross, which Watson
Speaker 3: and Krick took to mean that the structure of the
Speaker 3: nucleic acid was likely to be helical, not double helic.
Speaker 2: Just helical.
Speaker 3: They were under suspicion by their colleagues of not knowing anything,
Speaker 3: of being so enamored of Linus Paulling's great achievement in
Speaker 3: that discovery the alpha helix, which ended up as a
Speaker 3: secondary structure of protein that they were trying to copy
Speaker 3: palling and to shove nucleic acid into a form that
Speaker 3: there was no reason to think that it had to
Speaker 3: be that. And so the part of the the part
Speaker 3: of the problem of this story is that Rosslyn Frank
Speaker 3: was absolutely correct. There was no reason that DNA had
Speaker 3: to be helical. That's good science, it's very good science.
Speaker 3: And it's an absolute cautionary tale. Why you can't let
Speaker 3: good scientists run science.
Speaker 1: Ah, because you're making a distinction between good scientists and
Speaker 1: great scientists. Okay, I see.
Speaker 3: Jim Jim Watson, in my opinion, was not a good scientist.
Speaker 1: He was a great scientist.
Speaker 2: He was a great scientist.
Speaker 3: And there it's not that you take good science and
Speaker 3: turn it up to eleven to get great science. It's
Speaker 3: a different process.
Speaker 1: Okay. And you think of this as cowboys is that?
Speaker 1: Which is that correct? You call cowboys science? YIPI ka, Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's unpack that. So, yeah, what does cowboy science
Speaker 1: look like? And actually let's continue this story in that context.
Speaker 3: Well, you see, Jim and Francis were searching a much
Speaker 3: smaller landscape because they were convinced that it was going
Speaker 3: to be helical. Okay, so they didn't have to think
Speaker 3: about all the possible like if you ever spend time
Speaker 3: with the protein data bank, my god, does nature get
Speaker 3: up to some fun architecture really, I mean just unbelievably
Speaker 3: beautiful things. And they didn't think it was going to
Speaker 3: be any of those things. So Jim and Francis were
Speaker 3: in part not reasonable people, and they made a point
Speaker 3: of telling everybody that if you weren't working on nucleic acid,
Speaker 3: you were an idea that they didn't have time to
Speaker 3: go to seminars that were mere distractions. This is the
Speaker 3: difference between good science and great science.
Speaker 1: Exactly what we're.
Speaker 3: Doing is we're driving great science out of academics and
Speaker 3: out of research so that we have this proliferation of
Speaker 3: good science. Don't do this, people who are not a
Speaker 3: walking hr nightmare. Yeah, which is a catastrophic decision.
Speaker 2: So just before we get to that, just for the audience,
Speaker 2: I want to mention.
Speaker 1: So Eric knew Jim Watson, I as a postdoc worked
Speaker 1: with Franciskriek. Neither of us knew the other one, but
Speaker 1: we both got to spend time with these two giants
Speaker 1: of my god a biology. Yeah. Okay, So so you're
Speaker 1: categorizing that as great scientists as opposed to good scientists.
Speaker 1: So what's the problem that you see in academia in
Speaker 1: terms of support of good science and not great science.
Speaker 3: Well, you need both, You absolutely need both. And one
Speaker 3: of the tasks for people in the great science model
Speaker 3: is not to crap all over their good science colleagues.
Speaker 3: And in fact, Jim was extremely kind in my experience
Speaker 3: to Roslin. Franklin and I discussed her at great length,
Speaker 3: and he didn't pritify the story and by which you
Speaker 3: mean making a pretty Yeah, well he was an ass.
Speaker 3: He met your daughter and wife right, and he behaved
Speaker 3: abysmally towards them. But then he behaved in a very
Speaker 3: kind fashion as well, like what my daughter asked him
Speaker 3: a question, as I recall in a crowded room, I
Speaker 3: don't know, age twelve or thirteen, about the origin of
Speaker 3: the organelles or how did mitochondria end up in the
Speaker 3: eukaryotic cell. Was it an infection? And he looked at
Speaker 3: her and he said, you know this Nobel Laureate eighty eight,
Speaker 3: world famous. Oh, I don't have any interest in that,
Speaker 3: you know. It reminds me of Miles Davis talking to
Speaker 3: a three year old kid who was seeking his autograph,
Speaker 3: and I think that his famous line was something like,
Speaker 3: he looks up expecting to see an adult shows her.
Speaker 3: I sees this tiny kid tugging at his pant leg.
Speaker 3: He looks at it, says, fuck off, kid, Oh god, okay,
Speaker 3: all right. But then Jim came back, you know, at
Speaker 3: some point, and he said, which one is your wife?
Speaker 3: And I said, the economist who mopped the floor with
Speaker 3: you intellectually at dinner last night.
Speaker 2: He said, oh, she's very good.
Speaker 3: Because he was completely dismissive of her being female and
Speaker 3: all these things. He said, you want to know why
Speaker 3: your children are so intelligent? I said, excuse me. He said, well,
Speaker 3: your daughter is obviously very intelligent, as is your son,
Speaker 3: because he knew both of them. So even though he
Speaker 3: was cruel, he thought very highly. And I said why
Speaker 3: do you think He said, well, you can't just do
Speaker 3: it with one set of genes. You should thank your wife.
Speaker 3: Oh it's lovely. Well, but he was a misogynist, but
Speaker 3: women loved him. But he was very kind and active
Speaker 3: in promoting female careers. Like you don't understand the complexity
Speaker 3: of this particular guy. Was he a horse's ass?
Speaker 1: He was?
Speaker 3: And I'm not saying that's great. I got a chance
Speaker 3: to tell him to shut up multiple times and he
Speaker 3: took it.
Speaker 1: But you had to back it up.
Speaker 3: You know, you can't just mumble something about racism or
Speaker 3: sexism because DNA and its implications are absolutely profound and
Speaker 3: most of us haven't wrestled with. And I also believe
Speaker 3: that Jim came from a place of kindness and goodness
Speaker 3: that isn't recognized.
Speaker 1: Is there anything that we can learn from the story
Speaker 1: of Roslin Franklin and Jim Watson that allows us to
Speaker 1: do better science?
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that recognizing that there are these
Speaker 3: different styles of science and that we need all of
Speaker 3: these styles of science would be very helpful, and that
Speaker 3: in general, I don't think a Jim Watson would want
Speaker 3: to drive a Rosalind Franklin out of science at all.
Speaker 3: But the problem is is that there is absolutely no
Speaker 3: place for this cowboy science within the standard framework. So
Speaker 3: if you look, for example, at the interactions with Chargaff,
Speaker 3: Chargaff is absolutely merciless to Watson and Crek. He calls
Speaker 3: them two pitchmen in search of a helix.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, hold on, So first tells who Chargraph is
Speaker 1: and tells what a pitch man is. I don't know
Speaker 1: that term.
Speaker 3: So Irwin Chargaff is a Columbia professor. I believe that
Speaker 3: he came probably from Vienna. I think he spoke five languages,
Speaker 3: maybe English was his fifth. He wrote one of the
Speaker 3: most amazing books in the history of biology, called Heracletian Fire,
Speaker 3: which nobody's read, and in it he tells the story
Speaker 3: of figuring out that the equimolar relations, where he figured
Speaker 3: out that the amount of the nucleotides was exactly paired
Speaker 3: when you chopped up whatever the nucleic acid was.
Speaker 2: So we had this.
Speaker 1: Meaning you have the same amount of a's and t's
Speaker 1: and the same amount.
Speaker 2: Of seeds as that's right and so.
Speaker 3: But there was no explanation for it. So it was
Speaker 3: what we would call a fine tuning mystery. Now, isn't
Speaker 3: it interesting? What is it fine tuning mystery?
Speaker 1: Well, that's usually we.
Speaker 3: Encounter it in physics, like is the universe finally tuned
Speaker 3: for life? If the proton were a little bit less
Speaker 3: heavy or a little bit more heavy, it wouldn't work.
Speaker 3: And how is the curvature exactly? Everything is just so right?
Speaker 3: And usually what there is is there's an explanation in
Speaker 3: this case, like the hydrogen bonds which enforced the pairing.
Speaker 3: It wasn't an accident. And of course people always somebody
Speaker 3: will always say, maybe it's a coincidence.
Speaker 2: You can't conclude that right.
Speaker 3: So what Watson and Crick did is they took that
Speaker 3: information of CHARGEV and CHARGAV, I believe came up with
Speaker 3: a mobius band theory of nucleic acid. He said, if
Speaker 3: he'd only been able to work with a Rosalind Franklin,
Speaker 3: he would have gotten it. And Jim, to his credit, said,
Speaker 3: if Rosalind Franklin had simply spent one day decamping from
Speaker 3: her atomacy, that we didn't have enough information to say
Speaker 3: it was a helix. He said she would have gotten
Speaker 3: it in an afternoon, an amazing claim that Rosalind Franklin
Speaker 3: would have gotten the double helix in an afternoon but
Speaker 3: for her insistence on being a good scientist. I see,
Speaker 3: And so you have to understand that what Jim was
Speaker 3: willing to acknowledge about Rosalind Franklin was in many ways
Speaker 3: incredibly complimentary. But Chargaff writes very clearly that these pitchmen,
Speaker 3: he means, you know, think about Silicon Valley where you
Speaker 3: now it pitched me bro Okay. He saw them as
Speaker 3: a couple of ne'er dwells. They didn't know any biochemistry,
Speaker 3: That's what he says. He says, they don't know anybody.
Speaker 3: You know, after they get the double helix, he writes,
Speaker 3: you can tell how late in the day it is
Speaker 3: in biology that such pigmies would throw such long shadows.
Speaker 3: You have to understand that this you and I, I
Speaker 3: mean you knew Francis, I didn't I. And to be blunt,
Speaker 3: I think Francis was the more intellectually deep of the two.
Speaker 3: And I told you before that even though I thought
Speaker 3: France and this was smarter, I thought Jim was far
Speaker 3: more important. And they represented two halves of great science.
Speaker 3: And Jim was that brash. I think he was taken
Speaker 3: into the University of Chicago at age fifteen, So shout
Speaker 3: out to the University of Chicago. Let's get back to
Speaker 3: taking twelve year olds, thirteen year olds, and fourteen year
Speaker 3: olds into our universities. In the University of Chicago in
Speaker 3: particular is probably our top university, with every other one
Speaker 3: falling off of some cliff. For God's sakes, we don't
Speaker 3: know why that brashness that Jim had and that eccentricity
Speaker 3: that Francis had were essential in Chargef's chargeff Oh, I
Speaker 3: wish I could read it just he writes so beautifully,
Speaker 3: But he talks about the fact he said, the idea
Speaker 3: that the odds that two geniuses would fall into his orbit,
Speaker 3: knowing nothing of biochemistry and solve this problem was so
Speaker 3: vanishingly small that it didn't even warrant consideration.
Speaker 2: Wow. Wow, this is why peer review doesn't work. Right.
Speaker 3: So, in large measure, the history of DNA and the
Speaker 3: history of the genetic code again discovered by someone outside
Speaker 3: the fabled RNA TI club, so that all the top
Speaker 3: people were assembled to crack the genetic code, and the
Speaker 3: guy who was outside of it, named Marshall Nierenberg was
Speaker 3: the one who cracks it ten years later in sixty three.
Speaker 3: This is the greatest story of recent years that you
Speaker 3: and I are within the living memory of Watson and Crick.
Speaker 3: And by the way, that book, the Double Helix, you know,
Speaker 3: great literature begins with things like it was the best
Speaker 3: of times, it was the worst of times, or in
Speaker 3: the beginning, or some memorable call me Ishmael.
Speaker 2: Watson began and ended that book.
Speaker 1: Saying he's never seen Francis Crick in a humble mood,
Speaker 1: modest mood, modest mood.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, perhaps he is with others, but it's not
Speaker 3: so with me or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, can that guy write? I mean that
Speaker 2: was literature, man, Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 3: So anyway, I just I love Jim unapologetically, and I'm
Speaker 3: well aware of the total of the total nature of
Speaker 3: the man, and I'm not going to sweep any of
Speaker 3: that into the rug. And by the way, I don't
Speaker 3: think we stripped him of his official titles at cold
Speaker 3: Spring Harbor until two thousand and seven, and I don't
Speaker 3: think we stripped him of his honorary titles until twenty
Speaker 3: nineteen or something like that. And that, my friends, was
Speaker 3: the American system that we could be proud of, that
Speaker 3: a complete horses ass like Jim Watson would be kept
Speaker 3: within the system of our institutions and celebrated and not
Speaker 3: be seen as a walking hr problem waiting to happen.
Speaker 1: I mean he was seen as that walking again was
Speaker 1: by walking hr problem waiting to happen.
Speaker 2: He was that twelve times a day. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: But my point is we didn't throw him out until
Speaker 3: very late in the game when we were determined to
Speaker 3: lose our mojo.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: Interesting, okay, And so coming back to this idea of
Speaker 1: cowboy science, it's the Krick and Watson's it's the Nuremberg.
Speaker 1: It's the ways of coming in from the outside and
Speaker 1: proposing something breaking the rules.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's based on the middle finger. It's based on
Speaker 3: being true to science and telling the National Security Complex,
Speaker 3: the National Interest Complex, your department, your funder to sit
Speaker 3: down and shut up.
Speaker 1: And by the way, you know, I've talked about purity
Speaker 1: view before, but one thing we know is that when
Speaker 1: Krick and Watson came up with this structure and they said, hey,
Speaker 1: we think it's a double helix, or the as and
Speaker 1: t's and c's and g's are wanting to each other.
Speaker 1: They sent the typed manuscript over to Nature. Crick's wife
Speaker 1: drew the double helix picture, which is gorgeous picture by
Speaker 1: gorgeous picture because he was terror trying and she was
Speaker 1: really adeal no deal exactly. She was a good artist. Anyway,
Speaker 1: they sent it over to Nature, which Kriik told me
Speaker 1: at the time was a man and two boys, and
Speaker 1: the yailed the mandscript over yeah, the editor, and it
Speaker 1: got published. There was no peer review at the time.
Speaker 3: There was no peer review until nineteen sixty five to
Speaker 3: seventy five. This is a fabricated story, largely due to Merton,
Speaker 3: that was backfitted and retconned into outside reviewing and outside
Speaker 3: refereeing which occurred being turned into peer review. But basically
Speaker 3: it's a fabricated story of the history of science.
Speaker 1: Sorry you're saying. The fabricated story is that peer review
Speaker 1: wasn't drew to at some point, and then it was
Speaker 1: claimed that it was older than that.
Speaker 3: The story is that peer review begins with the founding
Speaker 3: of the Royal Society and has been with science ever since.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: Usually that's not true.
Speaker 3: No, it's untrue. And the willingness of the Academy to
Speaker 3: lie about that, bold faced lie about this it might
Speaker 3: be ignorance.
Speaker 2: No, it's not.
Speaker 1: Well, it depends who you mean by the Academy. Had
Speaker 1: you asked me before you told me about peer review,
Speaker 1: I would have. But if I showed you, yeah, the
Speaker 1: history of peer review. Right, the Academy wants to say
Speaker 1: that outside refereeing is peer review, and it isn't. The
Speaker 1: double helix is a great example of something. I believe
Speaker 1: that in Horace Judson's Eight Day of Creation it could
Speaker 1: be sourced elsewhere. The claim was that Watson Creek couldn't
Speaker 1: be peer reviewed because there was too much information in
Speaker 1: the one page paper. You know, as you know, they
Speaker 1: had a fight as to whether to write something very
Speaker 1: complete or something very incomplete. And you will notice that
Speaker 1: there's a phrase it has not escaped our notice that
Speaker 1: you know this? Yes, yes, so more or less that
Speaker 1: was a twenty page paper.
Speaker 2: It has not escaped. I noticed that.
Speaker 1: Right by the way for the audience, it's they were saying,
Speaker 1: it is giving this double heelos ructure, it has not
Speaker 1: escaped our notice that. You know, you could unzip this
Speaker 1: and duplicate it this way where each strand of the
Speaker 1: DNA then gets the complementary nucleotides on it, and you
Speaker 1: can do this amazing thing that way. Right, They just
Speaker 1: mentioned it when well, have you been to the Eagle Pub?
Speaker 2: I have not. You have to go.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'd love you again for the audience. This is
Speaker 1: where Crick and Watson burst into the Eagle Pub? Was
Speaker 1: it the Eagle and Child or the whatever?
Speaker 2: I think?
Speaker 1: Oh, maybe they burst into the pub and in early
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three and said we have discovered the secret
Speaker 1: of life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd love to go see that. Goosebumps.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay. So, by the way, one other thing
Speaker 1: I just want to make it clear is that peer
Speaker 1: review is you write up a science paper and you
Speaker 1: submitted to a journal, and then the journal sends it
Speaker 1: to several of your colleagues in the field, something like
Speaker 1: the jury system that we have in court, something like that,
Speaker 1: where your colleagues who are expert in the field also
Speaker 1: review your thing. The thing that scientists find sting about
Speaker 1: this is oftentimes peers are incentivized to stand in the
Speaker 1: way of something getting published. And also, I would get
Speaker 1: you tell me if I'm right, but I would guess
Speaker 1: that you would think oftentimes your peers are good scientists,
Speaker 1: not great scientists, and so they might block something for
Speaker 1: six months or a year or longer because they want
Speaker 1: to see more of this or that. But the important yeah,
Speaker 1: I would assume you'd say, and I'd agree with you
Speaker 1: that the important part sometimes is just to get something
Speaker 1: out there. If Krick and Watson had been wrong about
Speaker 1: the structure, fine, it's in the public eye.
Speaker 3: And their review just happens when the world of your
Speaker 3: colleagues see something. This is peer injunction.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's competitor injunction. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's one sided where you, generally speaking, can't see them,
Speaker 3: but they can see you. What if somebody doesn't like you?
Speaker 3: What if Jim Watson is pissed off everybody?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So my feeling is, who the hell are these peers?
Speaker 3: Get them the hell out of my way. Let's go
Speaker 3: back to the system that works.
Speaker 1: So, by the way, what do you think of the
Speaker 1: pre print system now where people submit things STI, let's
Speaker 1: say archive or other prens.
Speaker 3: I think it's fascinating because I don't know, let's just
Speaker 3: talk about how funny the system is. First of all,
Speaker 3: it comes out of where where's the archive come out of?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I believe it's Los Alamos National fascinating.
Speaker 3: Now there's a whole question going back to the founding
Speaker 3: of Los Alamos about security review, and I think that
Speaker 3: was it Bright who ran the voluntary board that said, look,
Speaker 3: papers on neutrons and chain reactions are so dangerous that
Speaker 3: everything will be submitted and we will figure out what's
Speaker 3: safe and what isn't. So in part, you have to
Speaker 3: ask the question about whether or not this layer is
Speaker 3: there as part of security review, because what if somebody
Speaker 3: wants to publish weaponized anthrax, or what if they want
Speaker 3: to publish something that's relevant nuclear weapons, or but.
Speaker 1: The advent of the internet allows that anyway.
Speaker 3: Now, yes, yes, but as you'll notice, many of your
Speaker 3: colleagues won't take something seriously unless it's gone through channel. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's right. And then the question is who is entitled
Speaker 3: to post there? Do you need a dot edu address?
Speaker 3: There's a moderator group that turns down papers that people
Speaker 3: don't recognize, So there is a review aspect. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: let me keep going. Our taxpayer dollars pay for research,
Speaker 3: which is then put under a paywall by let's say Elzevir.
Speaker 3: Then you're forced to quote research and if you don't
Speaker 3: have a subscription, you can't get behind the paywalls. You
Speaker 3: have to pay forty dollars per paper to see if
Speaker 3: it's relevant. This is nonsense. This is an old style
Speaker 3: control mechanism. And even the archive is refereed at some level.
Speaker 3: It has an endorsement system, and it appears probably to
Speaker 3: catch certain things and to relegate them to If you
Speaker 3: know that, there's this horrible thing called visra. I don't
Speaker 3: know this fixer's archives spelled backwards, and that's where crazy
Speaker 3: people are sent.
Speaker 1: What do you mean they're sent as in, if someone
Speaker 1: has an idea that's.
Speaker 3: Oh, my friend Garrett Liasy, for example, submitted something. He's
Speaker 3: a PhD in physics from U SEE San Diego, and
Speaker 3: he's told this is not right for the archive.
Speaker 1: Wow, just for the audience. Archive is supposed to publish
Speaker 1: anything that's reasonable. I don't know in theory they're supposed to.
Speaker 1: That's the idea. That's the idea is that it's an
Speaker 1: open preprint server.
Speaker 2: As as Paul ginsparg about that.
Speaker 3: Paul Ginspark set this up and he used a device
Speaker 3: like I come to Barry Caesar not to praise him,
Speaker 3: and he said, no, this is we're not trying to
Speaker 3: go around peer review. This is a holding tank for
Speaker 3: things that are only those things that are seeking per
Speaker 3: re view. But the biggest question is what do we
Speaker 3: do with the science. It is powerful that goes against
Speaker 3: the narratives which have policy implications.
Speaker 2: The science has policy implications. Yeah.
Speaker 3: For example, Jim and Francis, together with Marshall Nahrenberg, unlocked
Speaker 3: something which allows you, with Crisper cast nine and other tools,
Speaker 3: to write code directly into nucleic acid. Now, most of
Speaker 3: us got locked down for two years because somehow twelve
Speaker 3: nucleotides coded for four codons assembling four amino acids into
Speaker 3: a furin cleavage site that got spliced in this spike
Speaker 3: protein in coronavirus, which made this virus very human transmissible. Now,
Speaker 3: my claim is, what does that tell you about the leverage.
Speaker 2: Of this code? Who is allowed to do?
Speaker 3: What? If you can shut down planet Earth for two
Speaker 3: years with twelve nucleotides, what are we talking about here?
Speaker 3: Why are we doing this out in the open? Why
Speaker 3: are we pretending that there aren't military implications? Why are
Speaker 3: we pretending that there aren't national interest implications and national
Speaker 3: security implications? This is the unforgivable sin of modern university science.
Speaker 3: Pretending that what we're doing is something that's g WI
Speaker 3: is interesting. Everybody should do science. Science is fun. You
Speaker 3: could be a scientist too. Well, Shit, first of all,
Speaker 3: it's incredibly hard. It's incredibly demanding. It's like telling a
Speaker 3: person who's five to ten that they can join the NBA. Yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe there are people who are five to ten in
Speaker 3: the NBA, but your odds are not good. Almost nobody
Speaker 3: belongs at here. It's super dangerous, it's super powerful. It's
Speaker 3: boring as hell, it's exciting as hell. We're just not
Speaker 3: honest about what science is. We've got to break the
Speaker 3: dependence on the university system and the federal granting agencies
Speaker 3: of sciences to continue.
Speaker 1: So this is fascinating because what you're what you draw
Speaker 1: attention to that I really don't know anyone else drawing
Speaker 1: attention to, is this point that science is extraordinarily powerful,
Speaker 1: and therefore it has the attention of, and maybe even
Speaker 1: the control of, in some ways organizations that are much
Speaker 1: bigger than what's happening in the lab or in the university.
Speaker 1: And I think your point, tell me if I'm correct
Speaker 1: about this, is that most scientists don't realize that most
Speaker 1: academicians don't know that they think they're just doing a thing,
Speaker 1: but in fact there's a there's so much leverage going
Speaker 1: on that they're playing in a bigger game without realizing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like you know, let's imagine you were a computer programmer.
Speaker 3: You could program tic tac toe or checkers or something
Speaker 3: and that would be amusing.
Speaker 2: Or you could.
Speaker 3: Program wire shark and that's wireshark. That's exactly the point.
Speaker 3: You don't know what wireshark is.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 3: Wire Shark sits on your network and sniff's packets, which
Speaker 3: means that any message that you're sending around your network
Speaker 3: might be unencrypted and we can just read whatever emails
Speaker 3: and messages you're sending. But because you don't know that
Speaker 3: there's an application that allows you to read it, you
Speaker 3: just sort of imagine, oh, I don't know I send
Speaker 3: on email. You don't know about SMTP. The problem is
Speaker 3: is that mostly what you're dealing with is not your
Speaker 3: computer is not a computer. To you, it's just an
Speaker 3: application serving device. But to somebody who lives on the
Speaker 3: command line, just the way somebody could live on the
Speaker 3: command line of DNA, they see an entirely different world.
Speaker 3: So my claim is is that if you're writing something
Speaker 3: like wireshark, you're very well aware of what you could
Speaker 3: be doing. And if you're studying coronavirus, like the Cohealth
Speaker 3: Alliance was studying coronavirus, or Ralph Barrack in North Carolina
Speaker 3: was studying viruses, those people are very well aware of
Speaker 3: what it takes to humanize and weaponize a virus platform
Speaker 3: and tells who Berrick is a very talented scientist at
Speaker 3: the University of North Carolina. And we signed a bio
Speaker 3: weapons convention, and I think we signed two treaties in
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies which prohibit us from exploring offensive weapons.
Speaker 3: But a lot of what you hear is what we
Speaker 3: have to explore defensive weapons. In order to explore defensive
Speaker 3: weapons against the weapons, we have to create the weapons
Speaker 3: to begin with, so that we know what we're defending against.
Speaker 3: So we're engaged in high level bullshit in order to
Speaker 3: explain what we're doing messing around in a place like Wuhan, China.
Speaker 1: Oh, you're saying we developed the bullshit to cover our
Speaker 1: tracks at Wuhan, is what you mean?
Speaker 3: We don't want to be caught off guard in a
Speaker 3: prisoner's dilemma where we agree not to do something and
Speaker 3: the other party decides to cheat on their agreement. So
Speaker 3: we are cheating on the agreement that we signed, the
Speaker 3: agreement being don't develop offensive. Yeah, that's the spirit of
Speaker 3: the agreement. A word that is very rarely used in
Speaker 3: this capacity called pettifogging, where you can talk about arbitraging
Speaker 3: the letter against the spirit. We are engaged in arbitraging
Speaker 3: the letter of the Bioweapons Convention against the spirit of
Speaker 3: the Bioweapons Convention. But we are not doing this at
Speaker 3: a credible level. We are telling tall tales that are
Speaker 3: not befitting of adults, let alone scientists. And so what
Speaker 3: we have is we have these sort of storytellers in chief.
Speaker 3: So Francis Collins was a storyteller in chief, Anthony Fauci
Speaker 3: was a storyteller in chief. That allows people like Peter
Speaker 3: Dazac at the Cohalth Alliance in Ralph Barrick in North
Speaker 3: Carolina to do the scientific and administrative work that are
Speaker 3: engaged in our bioweapons program where we take see, if
Speaker 3: you've just had something called NIID the National Institute of
Speaker 3: Infectious Diseases, it would be too clear that it was
Speaker 3: probably something military related.
Speaker 2: So if you throw allergies.
Speaker 3: In the middle of it, you get the National Institute
Speaker 3: of Allergies and Infectious Disease.
Speaker 2: Oh, these people are going to cure me of hay fever.
Speaker 1: And so your view, My view is.
Speaker 3: That we just went through a national security, national interest
Speaker 3: exercise that was catastrophic for science. That there was a
Speaker 3: world science experiment and the world looked to us as
Speaker 3: scientists to say, what the hell is going on?
Speaker 2: We let the world down?
Speaker 1: So let's unpack that. In what ways did we let
Speaker 1: the world down?
Speaker 2: They wanted to know where this virus came from.
Speaker 1: So there's a tension between national security interests and what
Speaker 1: they're able to tell the public and what academic scientists
Speaker 1: even know.
Speaker 3: Well, do you remember when OJ was going to look
Speaker 3: for the real killers? Yeah, so we're going to find
Speaker 3: the origin of this virus if it kills us.
Speaker 1: But do you think the people who knew about national
Speaker 1: security buy weapons were the people doing that or other
Speaker 1: academics who who really didn't know. We have two groups.
Speaker 3: The first thing I want to know is I want
Speaker 3: to put Ralph Barrick and Peter dejac on the stand,
Speaker 3: and I want to ask them a ton of questions,
Speaker 3: and I want to do that to Francis Collins, and
Speaker 3: I want to do that to Anthony Fauci.
Speaker 2: And I want those questions to be asked not by.
Speaker 3: Random senators and congressmen. I want our best, heterodox pro
Speaker 3: science thinkers coming up with exactly the right questions. And
Speaker 3: I don't want it time limited by oh, you know,
Speaker 3: the five minutes allotted are out. No, if this turns
Speaker 3: out to be something that came out of a lab,
Speaker 3: how many people did we just kill? I want to know,
Speaker 3: did we kill zero? Good news? Did we kill millions?
Speaker 2: I want to know. This is so bad?
Speaker 3: And I don't think people understand within the academy that,
Speaker 3: you know, let's imagine that you're doing development and zebra fish.
Speaker 3: You say, well, science is basically working. Of course people
Speaker 3: are going to have issues because it involved the Wuhan
Speaker 3: Institute of Virology, and of course there's stuff going on
Speaker 3: with bioweapons. You'd be naive to think that that's not okay. Well,
Speaker 3: you allowed people to say that public health was science.
Speaker 3: Public health is not science. Public health involves noble laws,
Speaker 3: it involves coercive activities, nudging to use the cast Sunstein concept.
Speaker 3: It's important that science cancel its credit card that it's
Speaker 3: given to public health. No, that's not us. You're on
Speaker 3: your own. You screwed up. We didn't screw up. What's more,
Speaker 3: we know how to get to the bottom of these things.
Speaker 3: We can figure out ohts. And the public looked to us,
Speaker 3: and we sat there with Anthony Fauci and Francis's colins,
Speaker 3: hands around our throat for funding, and we said, yes, boss,
Speaker 3: well we're not supposed to have a boss. This is
Speaker 3: what academic freedom is about. This is what public spirited
Speaker 3: science is about. And yes, you can do some stuff
Speaker 3: in terms of national interest, but when you allow something
Speaker 3: potentially to get out of a lab and infect an
Speaker 3: entire planet and kill millions, and then you force people
Speaker 3: more or less through coercion, to inject themselves with something
Speaker 3: that you're not explaining, well, you need to answer an
Speaker 3: infinite number of questions from the world's smartest people, and
Speaker 3: they need to know that they have a job on Monday,
Speaker 3: if they do their job on a Friday.
Speaker 2: You and I know.
Speaker 3: People inside of the institutions who would have been very
Speaker 3: capable of shouldering that burden. There was a lot of
Speaker 3: fear inside of the universities that this was a bioweapon,
Speaker 3: and then we pretended that people who said that on
Speaker 3: the internet were stupid, they were crazy, they were conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 3: How could you possibly imagine that this came out of
Speaker 3: the wool One Institute of Virology? My god, are you
Speaker 3: a racist? And the Lancet you know, fell behind, and
Speaker 3: we had like, you know, seven seven Nobel laureates saying,
Speaker 3: please don't shut off the grant of poor Peter Dajak.
Speaker 2: Come on, this is just not adult level fiction, because
Speaker 2: if we could.
Speaker 1: Do it over again, you're saying we should look at
Speaker 1: all the hypothesis, keep everything on the.
Speaker 3: Time, saying that scientists have a right to be in
Speaker 3: a more than equal relationship to the national interest complex. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we are not your employees. We're not here to do
Speaker 3: your dirty work. We're not here to cover up your mistakes.
Speaker 3: We are public spirited individuals focused on truth. And don't
Speaker 3: ever ask us to lie like this ever again.
Speaker 1: Ever, who was asked to lie? Though, you're saying, in
Speaker 1: terms of shutting down conversation about did this come out.
Speaker 2: To Jabaria was asked to lie? Let's just start there,
Speaker 2: great unpack that.
Speaker 3: Okay, we have three fringe epidemiologists from fringe schools Stanford,
Speaker 3: Harvard and Oxford. These crazy fringe epidemiologists who require, I
Speaker 3: think from Francis's Collins and Email, a swift and devastating
Speaker 3: takedown of their ideas. Swift and devastating takedown of their ideas. David,
Speaker 3: this is madness. I talked to Jay, Jay's a friend.
Speaker 3: Jay asked me, how did you learn how the universities
Speaker 3: actually work so early in your career. I said, I
Speaker 3: stumbled on it by making discoveries. I said, what do
Speaker 3: you mean. He said, well, I was at Stanford I think,
Speaker 3: he said, for thirty five years of my adult life
Speaker 3: something like that. And he said I never had any
Speaker 3: idea how this worked. And I said, what do you mean?
Speaker 3: He said, It wasn't until I said, you know, we
Speaker 3: don't do this for any pandemic. This is not the
Speaker 3: standard operating procedure for any pandemic. What's not the standard
Speaker 3: operating pu whatever we did in the face of COVID
Speaker 3: two weeks to flatten the curved masks, yes, masks, no.
Speaker 1: This you know what.
Speaker 3: I had the Hong Kong flu in the end of
Speaker 3: the sixties. It was a full on pandemic. That's what
Speaker 3: happened during Woodstock. Woodstock took place during a pandemic. Right,
Speaker 3: we don't remember the Hong Kong flu. Right, we're not
Speaker 3: even allowed to call this the Wuhan flu or the
Speaker 3: Wuhan virus. So their point was, what are we doing
Speaker 3: as epidemiologists and virologists. We know that we have protocols
Speaker 3: and we're not following them. What's happening. This is where
Speaker 3: Francis Collins says, we need a swift and devastating takedown
Speaker 3: of the ideas of these fringe epidemiologists. Suddenly, Ja Bodicharia
Speaker 3: goes from being a darling of Stanford University, I think,
Speaker 3: with an MD and a PhD in economics, some guy
Speaker 3: who's like totally unassailable, to some fringe lunatic with an email.
Speaker 3: You've never had this, David, You've never had this treatment,
Speaker 3: and if you've ever had this treatment, you'll never forget it.
Speaker 3: It's like you say something and it's treated like farting
Speaker 3: in church.
Speaker 1: The point is that their national security interests. Jay went
Speaker 1: against that. He didn't know that he was doing without
Speaker 1: knowing it, and found himself shut down.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: The point was he was just trying to do what
Speaker 3: he knew how to do. He's saying, I'm an expert,
Speaker 3: let me contribute my expertise. We don't do this. This
Speaker 3: is not standard operating protocol. So nobody pulled Jay aside
Speaker 3: and said, hey, we may have created this. We have
Speaker 3: a little bit of an issue of sensitivity with our
Speaker 3: Chinese partners. I can't tell you everything. It's a need
Speaker 3: to know basis. You see, in general, you have people
Speaker 3: who know what a special access program is or an
Speaker 3: unacknowledged special access program is, and you have people who
Speaker 3: complain about conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: So tell us what that program is.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm just saying it's a category of secrets stuff.
Speaker 3: An unacknowledged special access program is some black budget thing
Speaker 3: that we don't even talk about, and we don't even acknowledge.
Speaker 3: It's a covert operation. It's deniable if it's ever discovered.
Speaker 3: The right question about Wuhan and COVID is did this
Speaker 3: involve a covert operation, did this involve a special access program?
Speaker 3: And did it in particular involve an unacknowledged special access program?
Speaker 3: And when you ask that question, you're clearly indicating that
Speaker 3: you have knowledge of the architecture of how we keep secrets.
Speaker 2: As a nation. We are entitled to keep secrets. We
Speaker 2: have to keep secrets.
Speaker 3: But somehow science and something called SSP or State Secrets privilege,
Speaker 3: have collided, and now the world thinks that we're not
Speaker 3: very good at our job. And my feeling is is
Speaker 3: that we should say, hold my beer and we should
Speaker 3: let our friends at Gspatial intelligen since the CIA the
Speaker 3: NSA know that we are not in the business of
Speaker 3: lying about science at this level, so let.
Speaker 1: Me just zoom out to the big picture. The difficulty
Speaker 1: is that you have scientists, academic scientists like me, for example,
Speaker 1: who I would say I've been I'm very naive to this.
Speaker 1: It's at the interface where there's all these problems because
Speaker 1: it's not that I or my colleagues, to my knowledge
Speaker 1: ever said hey, we'll do your bidding. But you're saying
Speaker 1: just being naive is enough of a problem.
Speaker 2: Great point.
Speaker 3: Okay, So for example, we've known each other a long
Speaker 3: time and one of the things that I loved was
Speaker 3: mister potato head, thank you. Now, mister data is a
Speaker 3: great idea that the brain is an all purpose computer
Speaker 3: with default peripherals.
Speaker 2: Correct me, if I'm wrong, that's perfect.
Speaker 3: So now I've got my olfactory default peripherals in my nose,
Speaker 3: in my mouth, I've got my visual default peripherals in
Speaker 3: my eyes and ears that pick up frequencies either of
Speaker 3: light or of sound waves. And I've got my skin.
Speaker 3: But the question is what if I want to start
Speaker 3: umvelt hacking. So I take the things that I can't perceive,
Speaker 3: like ultraviolet or infrared light or polarization, let's say, and
Speaker 3: I start coming up with new peripherals, and I jack
Speaker 3: into the general all purpose computer that is my brain.
Speaker 2: Okay, that is.
Speaker 3: Such a cool idea which I've just loved. Right one day,
Speaker 3: somebody shows up and says, your lab is locked. Why
Speaker 3: we're concerned that what you're doing is is that you're
Speaker 3: developing something that equips a soldier to be able to
Speaker 3: perceive aspects of the battlefield that are currently not available
Speaker 3: to our adversaries. We believe that what you're doing is
Speaker 3: creating a technology that allows for total situational awareness of
Speaker 3: a soldier on a battlefield to be able to see
Speaker 3: the battlefield in a way that no one else can.
Speaker 3: And therefore we are going to restrict your technology. You
Speaker 3: didn't think mister potato head, it's a goofy name, right.
Speaker 3: It's just as you talk about this stuff and you
Speaker 3: do science, this is how you get into trouble. Mister
Speaker 3: potato head is an amazing military concept.
Speaker 2: I see.
Speaker 1: So this is how scientists accidentally bump up against.
Speaker 2: This sort of thing at some point in their career.
Speaker 1: Possibly.
Speaker 3: Let's imagine you're not part of the Manhattan Project, and
Speaker 3: during the Manhattan Project, we tried to create disinformation that
Speaker 3: didn't call attention to the fact that uranium and plutonium
Speaker 3: were particularly promising for physile material.
Speaker 1: The Manhattan Project being where the world's great physicists all
Speaker 1: gathered in the middle of New Mexico and Los Alamos, well,
Speaker 1: they were actually more distributed. They were at the University
Speaker 1: of Chicago and Oak Ridge.
Speaker 2: Yes, the majority of them.
Speaker 3: We're in this group of white badges, I believe at
Speaker 3: Les Alamos who had access to the super secret information.
Speaker 3: And one of the things we did is we engaged
Speaker 3: in haystacking, which is that we talked about many more
Speaker 3: elements than we thought were relevant in order to allow our.
Speaker 2: Haystacking means you throw out more information.
Speaker 3: You have a needle. I want to come up with
Speaker 3: a haystack in order to hide it. So imagine that
Speaker 3: you're like some guy who's not contacted by the Manhattan
Speaker 3: Project and you say, actually, you know, it's really just
Speaker 3: yourm and plutonium that we should be focused on.
Speaker 2: You're doing science as far as you know. Ah.
Speaker 1: But if I were that guy, I might receive a phone.
Speaker 3: Call, or you might find that none of your work
Speaker 3: is published. I see, suddenly the referees keep sending things back.
Speaker 3: I see it requires further data, promising, but incomplete.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So my point is that you haven't bumped up
Speaker 3: against this yet. It's just you haven't thought enough about
Speaker 3: how powerful you are and how powerful national interest is
Speaker 3: and the way in which science and national interests interact.
Speaker 1: So let's get back to cowboys science then. So what
Speaker 1: does that look like? What does that mean to you
Speaker 1: to be able to do something outside of the standard channels.
Speaker 3: Well, one thing it means is that if a cowboy
Speaker 3: bumps up into the national interest complex, the national interest
Speaker 3: complex comes and tells you, hey, you're riding on the
Speaker 3: range here in New Mexico or Nevada, and we've got
Speaker 3: some aerospace stuff going on, and maybe some nuclear stuff.
Speaker 3: We need your cooperation. You should not train any of
Speaker 3: us if you can't talk to us later us being scientists,
Speaker 3: you should not train somebody at my level if you
Speaker 3: can't have a conversation about national interest. If you think
Speaker 3: that you can't trust me with a secret, then don't
Speaker 3: train me.
Speaker 1: You're saying the problem is scientists get trained and then
Speaker 1: they might find something.
Speaker 3: A mentally retarded eight year old child would not be
Speaker 3: able to believe some of the lies told by Tony Fauci,
Speaker 3: like what give me an example, two weeks to flatten
Speaker 3: the curve?
Speaker 2: What was that? Or we don't need masks?
Speaker 3: We do, we don't, we do, we don't clearly based
Speaker 3: on whether or not there was a failure to replenish
Speaker 3: PPE after it was drawn down, I believe during the
Speaker 3: Bush administration, like we didn't follow surge protocols or the
Speaker 3: idea that it was racism to ask whether or not
Speaker 3: something emerge from a lab and to emerge from a
Speaker 3: lab in Wuhan. All of this stuff is nonsense and
Speaker 3: it's absolutely insulting. Or vaccines are safe full stop, No
Speaker 3: they're not. Water isn't safe, full stop.
Speaker 1: So let me understand what this what do you see
Speaker 1: as a solution to this?
Speaker 3: First thing is I think twice three times before you
Speaker 3: train somebody at public expense.
Speaker 1: But you don't want to not train brilliant young physicists.
Speaker 1: So what's a better solution?
Speaker 3: No, no, I do want to not train. If we
Speaker 3: have a class Fuchs, I don't want them trained. I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: who's class fuchs? They spy at Los Alamos. If we
Speaker 3: have somebody who's not patriotic enough to understand that in
Speaker 3: the wake of Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project and the
Speaker 3: teller Ulam design, that physics is not kidding around.
Speaker 2: Don't train that person.
Speaker 1: How do you determine I don't know, especially an interview
Speaker 1: sixteen year old kid, give them an interview, Okay, you know, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a different view of science than anyone else
Speaker 1: on planet Earth. So you happen to be foolish enough
Speaker 1: to invite me to sit down. So here's you're getting something.
Speaker 1: I think that we are intellectual ninjas.
Speaker 3: We are dangerous. What we do is important. It's not cute,
Speaker 3: it's not fun, it's not interesting. It's life and death.
Speaker 3: Particularly within six months between nineteen fifty two and nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty three. From November to April, everything changed, and it
Speaker 3: changed in physics, and it changed in biology because of
Speaker 3: the discovery of televite device in nineteen fifty two in
Speaker 3: November and the explosion of ivy mic, which was a
Speaker 3: successful thermonuclear test in the Pacific with a three stage weapon,
Speaker 3: and because of the discovery of the repeating structure of
Speaker 3: nucleic acid perfectly suited to being a data store translated
Speaker 3: by ribosomes into protein, which are the machines that determine
Speaker 3: everything in the world that matter. Right, This is the
Speaker 3: structure of DNA, past structure of DNA leading to the
Speaker 3: central dogma of translation of DNA into RNA and RNA
Speaker 3: into protein and the genetic code. We have power that
Speaker 3: is inconceivable, and if we are going to have national
Speaker 3: interest issues, we need to have those national interests issues
Speaker 3: out early, not late. I don't know why we're inviting
Speaker 3: the Chinese to staff our labs. Is that because we
Speaker 3: have an agreement with China that we are somehow going
Speaker 3: to avoid war. But our graduate students are not graduate students,
Speaker 3: they are workers. It is a cryptic labor program for
Speaker 3: the universities and the best in the brightest is not that,
Speaker 3: because we compete in a labor market. It's the best value,
Speaker 3: not the best minds. Furthermore, the American product, the cowboy
Speaker 3: scientists think Bruce Willis is in a lab code. That
Speaker 3: product has high variants, but much much higher.
Speaker 2: Mean.
Speaker 3: We are the best in the world at science and engineering,
Speaker 3: full stop. We being America, We being America, and our
Speaker 3: friends the French of the world's greatest mathematicians. You know,
Speaker 3: some of our friends are our Russians. The West. Something
Speaker 3: happened in the West and in Japan. It just didn't
Speaker 3: happen in the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 3: I don't know, the Enlightenment, the scientific method, some compounding
Speaker 3: effect from colonization. Maybe it had to do with the
Speaker 3: exploitation of the Third World. I don't know. But something
Speaker 3: happened where the West got insanely powerful, and the US,
Speaker 3: in part because of World War two and the mismanagement
Speaker 3: of Europe by Adolf had learned Mussolinian other became the
Speaker 3: dominant scientific power the world has ever seen. And we're
Speaker 3: great at what we do. We've got all these scientific
Speaker 3: employers who just lie, lie, lie, as long as the
Speaker 3: day is long. About how Americans are lazy and they're
Speaker 3: stupid and they can't do work. And we have to
Speaker 3: look at the fact that we're being eaten by India
Speaker 3: and China. We're not being beaten by Indian China. We
Speaker 3: have to worry about England and France. And by the
Speaker 3: way Indian China are going to get there, particularly India's
Speaker 3: choice of the ITS and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Speaker 3: China is buying up our talent left and right. We're
Speaker 3: laying down on the job. My old officemate, Michael Kratzios,
Speaker 3: I think, is the head of the Presidential Council on
Speaker 3: Science and Technology as well as the Office of Science
Speaker 3: and Technology Policy so P CASS and OSTP. I believe
Speaker 3: that was a job previously held by Isidore Robbie, the
Speaker 3: Nobel Laureate in physics. I love Michael Cratsios, he's a friend,
Speaker 3: he's a great guy. But we are not taking science
Speaker 3: and the destruction of science in the US as the
Speaker 3: seventeen alarm fire that it is. We need to get
Speaker 3: money and our own people, and we need to shove
Speaker 3: them down the throats of our employers with government help.
Speaker 3: And we need absolute scientific dominance, and it needs to
Speaker 3: be much more public spirited, much less under the thumb
Speaker 3: of the national security community. And it needs to be
Speaker 3: friendly to the military. We cannot pretend that we are
Speaker 3: not military adjacent.
Speaker 1: How could it be friendly to the military and not
Speaker 1: aligned with the national security interests.
Speaker 3: We have to align with the national security interest The
Speaker 3: national security community is not as good as we are.
Speaker 1: There are two things that I'm trying to understand, which
Speaker 1: is so One issue is that science. I've always loved
Speaker 1: viewing as an international fellowship.
Speaker 2: I can travel anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: If I meet someone who studies science like I do,
Speaker 1: we can talk sometimes just with equations, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: We get each other so deeply and fundamentally. But it
Speaker 1: sounds like, on the other hand, you're saying it's it
Speaker 1: shouldn't actually be.
Speaker 2: I had the same feeling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then suddenly all these physicists in Iran met
Speaker 3: an end during the recent war. When I go for
Speaker 3: a talk at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which
Speaker 3: by the way, is the nicest part of Bombay, really
Speaker 3: just beautiful, I have to go through a military checkpoint
Speaker 3: to go to my string theory talk because it's in
Speaker 3: Navy Nutgart what is that. It's in the naval base. Okay,
Speaker 3: science is not what you're trying to make it out
Speaker 3: to me. We've got this naive singsong view of science,
Speaker 3: which we love. Yeah, right, because when you're doing science,
Speaker 3: you don't care where somebody was born.
Speaker 1: You know what. I think, it's so much of the
Speaker 1: territory of science. If I were going to make up
Speaker 1: a number, let me just make up ninety percent of
Speaker 1: the territory. Really is the sing song international fellowship stuff, kumbaya,
Speaker 1: my friend? Yeah, exactly. You could go anywhere and talk
Speaker 1: to people about zebrafish and the neurons and what's going on.
Speaker 1: But I see where you're coming from. There is this
Speaker 1: ten percent what I make up the number where it
Speaker 1: actually really matters. And suddenly it's serious stuff, as you said,
Speaker 1: life and death stuff. And that's where we can't put
Speaker 1: that all under the same umbrella because.
Speaker 2: It's a giant problem. David.
Speaker 3: Let's imagine that you care about for manifold topology, no
Speaker 3: known problem. Let's imagine you care about elliptic curves. Suddenly
Speaker 3: you have to do it at fort Meat because it's
Speaker 3: involved in cryptography. The naive sing song thing. None of
Speaker 3: us should hold that perspective.
Speaker 1: Could we hold that perspective by saying, look, I mean
Speaker 1: I think I would say most of the stuff I do,
Speaker 1: maybe not the potato, and you didn't think you're correct.
Speaker 1: I did not think about that. But let's say plenty
Speaker 1: of other stuff that I've done about sleeping and dreaming
Speaker 1: and brain plasticy and vision and visual illusion.
Speaker 3: How important sleep is to our Tier one operators in
Speaker 3: Delta force and ground branch at the CIA. We don't
Speaker 3: You don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying I agree, I don't know the things
Speaker 1: that I do when I'm stepping on something that This
Speaker 1: is my point.
Speaker 3: Is we can't afford this extended childhood as scientists.
Speaker 1: I think that's an excellent point. Here's the part I'm
Speaker 1: trying to understand, though, is it sounds like you're saying
Speaker 1: we need to mature as scientists to understand.
Speaker 2: Wow, there's real national security interests here.
Speaker 1: But I think I'm also hearing you saying we don't
Speaker 1: want to be bossed around by national correctists.
Speaker 3: No, but we need to be I'm really glad we're
Speaker 3: having this. This is a very difficult conversation, so nobody
Speaker 3: I'd rather be having it within you. People don't understand
Speaker 3: my perspective on universities, on science and national interest. Great
Speaker 3: science and good science are continuing to happen inside of universities.
Speaker 3: There's much less great science. There's much more good science.
Speaker 3: But I am a talks regularly at Caltech and UCLA
Speaker 3: probably should be going to USC. I don't see any
Speaker 3: of the tech leaders who are opining about science, and
Speaker 3: any talks that I ever go to, it's just academicians.
Speaker 3: There's nobody from outside. So I am a huge defender
Speaker 3: that the universities are not over. Standard thing in my
Speaker 3: tech circles is yep, science is over, universities are over.
Speaker 3: Not true, far from true. I am also a major
Speaker 3: critic of science, saying the public can see that we
Speaker 3: blew it oh on COVID multiple ways. We're not honest
Speaker 3: about things like the measurement of inflation. I can promise
Speaker 3: you that. And they are detecting that there's a hidden
Speaker 3: hand and that scientists are somehow not acting in the
Speaker 3: public interest. And I believe that there's really something to
Speaker 3: that and that we scientists have to talk about that.
Speaker 3: I believe that the national interest community and the national
Speaker 3: security community are extremely important I believe in national interest,
Speaker 3: and I believe in national security. I believe that many
Speaker 3: people in that community are not good enough to be
Speaker 3: our bosses. Ah, and I believe that we are not
Speaker 3: good enough to be our bosses because part of being
Speaker 3: a grown up in that idiom is to say, I
Speaker 3: think about quarks. Quarks make up nucleons, and nucleons make
Speaker 3: up nuclear weapons. So yes, I don't know whether something
Speaker 3: I'm going to discover or might have a security implication.
Speaker 3: So more or less, we've got all of these contradictions.
Speaker 3: We're not playing at an adult level, and that I
Speaker 3: want our national security community to get better. I want
Speaker 3: scientists to be full partners. I want us to be
Speaker 3: pushing back on particularly bad national interest to people and saying,
Speaker 3: don't ever force me to repeat these laws to the public.
Speaker 3: And nobody's even having anything remotely like this conversation so
Speaker 3: far as I know it, I'm basically having it with
Speaker 3: myself on podcasts.
Speaker 1: Would you see this as being a self maturation among
Speaker 1: scientists and among national security people, or would you see
Speaker 1: a somebody in charge of that, the president and whoever,
Speaker 1: is saying okay, guys, everyone get to the table.
Speaker 3: I think Michael Cratzios should be relocated to some terrific
Speaker 3: office because I think he's an able and capable person.
Speaker 1: Tell us about him.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter, he's not a leading scientist. That office,
Speaker 3: that team that advises the president should not be selected
Speaker 3: for on presidential loyalty to Donald Trump, full stop. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: I understand that Donald Trump has been treated in some
Speaker 3: ways unfairly by the outside world, and that he has
Speaker 3: a reason to surround himself with loyalists. Science is not loyal.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: You can ask scientists minorly to hold off on something
Speaker 3: or to play ball, but you cannot ask them to
Speaker 3: just lie.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: We need somebody with universal respect. The Jason's pe cast
Speaker 3: and OST and the National Academy of Sciences and the
Speaker 3: National Science Board need to be top people and team players,
Speaker 3: and a lot of players with one another, team players
Speaker 3: with the national interest community. Okay, and this is gonna
Speaker 3: sound contradictory, but it isn't massive individualists. It's a very
Speaker 3: tricky thing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Leo Zillard, who wrote the original letter to start off
Speaker 3: the Manhattan Project, wasn't allowed into the Manhattan Project because
Speaker 3: it was too independent.
Speaker 1: So you're saying the solution is what we need is
Speaker 1: a maturation across both communities. But I want to make
Speaker 1: sure I understand what would be the path there that
Speaker 1: you that you might see. I mean, maybe you think
Speaker 1: it's just a difficult, thorny problem, but do you see
Speaker 1: twinny squint.
Speaker 3: Suddenly Donald Trump invites a list of the top American scientists,
Speaker 3: not good scientists, but very often great scientists. Tomorrow lago
Speaker 3: the same way all our friends in the entertainment world,
Speaker 3: the business world, the finance world, the tech world have gone,
Speaker 3: and he says, we are going to have a scientific
Speaker 3: renaissance full stop. There's no way we are going to
Speaker 3: continue to destroy our seed corn for technology. We need
Speaker 3: to know. I hear you guys are suffering. I hear
Speaker 3: you guys are precarious. I want to know why nobody
Speaker 3: stood up Defauci and Collins the way we needed them to.
Speaker 3: What does it take to get academic freedom. We understand
Speaker 3: that we've tasked you with protecting the nation and making
Speaker 3: us rich and powerful, and you're not participating. How do
Speaker 3: we get you back to second homes? How do we
Speaker 3: get you retirements? How do we get you raising three
Speaker 3: to four kids on one income? With help in the house.
Speaker 3: You're our a team man, So my feeling is suck
Speaker 3: it up, open your pocketbook, shut your mouth, learn to
Speaker 3: deal with science as what it is, and learn to
Speaker 3: deal with scientists as equals and team players. And don't ever, ever, ever, ever,
Speaker 3: take the world's smartest people and feed them a B
Speaker 3: minus lie and expect them to shut up or repeat
Speaker 3: it because you control whether or not they can function.
Speaker 3: It is time for the scientists to mutiny, not against
Speaker 3: the United States of America, but to mutiny against our
Speaker 3: agreement with the National Interest Complex. You guys broke the deal.
Speaker 3: We had something called the Endless Frontier. You pass something
Speaker 3: called the Mansfield Amendment around nineteen seventy, which removed military
Speaker 3: funding from Blue Sky research. You've been eroding US ever since.
Speaker 3: You passed the Immigration Act of nineteen ninety based on
Speaker 3: a fraud that you perpetrated through the National Science Foundation
Speaker 3: in the Reagan era under Eric Bloch. Enough enough, you
Speaker 3: were going to treat scientists properly, and if you don't
Speaker 3: expect them to move to China and then you're going
Speaker 3: to deal with American scientists helping the Chinese. I just
Speaker 3: really don't know, is there no one in the national
Speaker 3: intelligence complex, the national interest complex, national security complex, who
Speaker 3: has thought about the fact that we are destroying ourselves.
Speaker 1: I just don't grasp it destroying ourselves in terms of
Speaker 1: not helping scientists blossom and thrive. What do you think
Speaker 1: about a million dollar salary per year for scientists for
Speaker 1: a scientists? What do you think about bonuses that look
Speaker 1: like bonuses granted to investment bankers? Right now, I think
Speaker 1: there's a million dollar prize for solving P equals NP
Speaker 1: and a million dollar prize for the Remont hypothesis. Like,
Speaker 1: I think you're missing a few zeros on that.
Speaker 2: You're saying it should be much more.
Speaker 3: Reach deep into your heart and into your checkbook, and
Speaker 3: when you get serious, come back to me with a number.
Speaker 3: How how dare you? I mean, who are these people?
Speaker 3: A million dollars for the Remonnt hypothesis?
Speaker 2: Wow?
Speaker 1: And your point is if they offered way more than that,
Speaker 1: let's it was fifty million dollars for doing that, you'd
Speaker 1: attract more people there and it would be more reflective
Speaker 1: of what the value is.
Speaker 3: Tell me something you're interested in AI. When do you
Speaker 3: think the large language model thing reached its point of
Speaker 3: just unbelievable discontinuity with respect to the intellectual underpinnings. What
Speaker 3: paper would you associate with?
Speaker 1: Twenty seventeen, Google Brain publishes the Transformer Model.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now that paper is called the Tension is all
Speaker 3: you need?
Speaker 2: Yes? How many authors are there on it?
Speaker 1: Three?
Speaker 2: I remember and it's eight?
Speaker 1: Oh okay?
Speaker 3: What are their names? Any of them? Oops? Tell me something.
Speaker 3: What are some names that you associate with Google?
Speaker 1: Probably all the ones that come to mind or the
Speaker 1: executives give me who are you thinking? Well, you know
Speaker 1: Larry and SERGEI and Eric Schmid so on, anyone else?
Speaker 1: The people at Google X Maybe Jeff Okay, I mean
Speaker 1: I would name Jack Cadari and Adam Brown and other
Speaker 1: friends of mine who had.
Speaker 2: An expert shout out to Adam Brown. Yeah, quantum gravity
Speaker 2: going on at Google?
Speaker 1: Yeah okay, but of course demis.
Speaker 3: Okay, But my point is this is what we're doing.
Speaker 3: People create value, and you know I want to hear. Okay,
Speaker 3: he got plane rich from that paper? Hmm, by which
Speaker 3: you mean he could afford a private plane? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: you know he used to fly from lax to to JFK.
Speaker 3: Now he flies from Van Eys to Teeterborough. I used
Speaker 3: to swim naked with rowrobot off of his place in
Speaker 3: Martha's Vineyard. He was a Harvard professor, Casper Gratstein professor,
Speaker 3: and he had a second home on Martha's Vineyard. That's
Speaker 3: normal professors on Professor's Row. It was named Professor's Row
Speaker 3: because professors could afford the houses there. We've had a
Speaker 3: massive blowout of the genie coefficients. I want scientists to
Speaker 3: participate in the world they created for everyone else.
Speaker 1: One question is in the same way that you mentioned
Speaker 1: Fuchs before. It's very difficult to determine during somebody's career,
Speaker 1: first of all, whether they're patriot or they have other interests.
Speaker 1: And it's also difficult to determine who is going to
Speaker 1: make contributions and who is not. Really, it is because
Speaker 1: science is such a complex road. I know so many
Speaker 1: smart people, surely you do to who spent their lives
Speaker 1: doing hard work on things that happened to never yield something.
Speaker 1: And other people who are playing the what was that
Speaker 1: game with where you uncover squares with Mind's Minecraft? Not Minecraft,
Speaker 1: it's the Mind Sweeper mina. I'm sorry, Yeah, where you
Speaker 1: know you happen to click on a square when something
Speaker 1: huge opens up, and that, unfortunately is a matter of luck.
Speaker 1: Someometimes I have a totally different view on that. Okay,
Speaker 1: tell me yours.
Speaker 3: When somebody gets really lucky, really early, it often changes
Speaker 3: their brain chemistry, it changes how they swagger, how they
Speaker 3: approach the world. So in part, really good fortune, really
Speaker 3: early in life is a good thing can be. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what happened with Krick and Watson. Well, it didn't
Speaker 3: happen with Quick because Creek was in his thirties. It
Speaker 3: happened with Watson because he.
Speaker 1: Was, like, thirties is still pretty good. And come on, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: Krick was one of the great scientists of the I
Speaker 1: don't half at the twenty in the beginning of the
Speaker 1: twenty for such old man, my friend. No, he wasn't.
Speaker 3: He was in his thirties. It's different in biology, the
Speaker 3: whole thing has shifted. Well, but you don't know why
Speaker 3: it's different in biology.
Speaker 1: See, it's because it.
Speaker 2: Takes years to get a feeling for the organism. No
Speaker 2: it doesn't. Let me, let me explain why it happens.
Speaker 2: I'll tell me your opinion. Yes, well tell me.
Speaker 3: The American Society for Cell Biology ASCB worked with me,
Speaker 3: and I went around and I got to ask, I
Speaker 3: don't know, twenty twenty five of the world's top principal
Speaker 3: investigators why things were the way they are.
Speaker 2: Oh boy. We were not allowed to publish our findings
Speaker 2: in science until we took out our findings from the paper.
Speaker 1: Tell me what kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: One of the things that we collected in interviews with
Speaker 3: principal investigators is a discovery that when they did an analysis,
Speaker 3: they found that an unusually high number of female principal
Speaker 3: investigators changed their research patterns after the birth of their
Speaker 3: first child, that they found motherhood so fulfilling that it
Speaker 3: competed with what they were doing previously to run their labs.
Speaker 3: The claim was, we then decided to push academic freedom
Speaker 3: closer and closer to the point of geriatric pregnancy, so
Speaker 3: that we would not be surprised and that female principal
Speaker 3: investigators who had previously been all out in terms of
Speaker 3: their research would have zero or one children, but not
Speaker 3: multiple children and not get bogged down. And if you
Speaker 3: actually go back to the fifties and you look at
Speaker 3: some of the most successful female biologists before women's liberation,
Speaker 3: they were often fairly well to do and had help
Speaker 3: in the house, and we interviewed some people, for example,
Speaker 3: who had a child in the next day, brought the
Speaker 3: child into a playpen in the lab despite the presence
Speaker 3: of radioactive markers and mutagens, to show how serious they were.
Speaker 3: So my claim is that we've developed an entire rationale
Speaker 3: for why it now takes so long to become a
Speaker 3: full professor in biology. But it actually has different reasons.
Speaker 3: And when we put these quotes, because I recorded these
Speaker 3: on microconsettes, when we put these quotes into the paper,
Speaker 3: Science magazine, which is one of the top journals in biology,
Speaker 3: said you're going to have to take out these conclusions
Speaker 3: or we can't publish it. So I have a publication
Speaker 3: in Science, and the only reason that I have a
Speaker 3: publication in a top journal is that my co authors
Speaker 3: agree to take the findings out of the paper. This
Speaker 3: is how the game is really played. People say, well, Eric,
Speaker 3: you know you're against peer review because you can't pass it.
Speaker 3: I have peer reviewed papers. The issue is is that
Speaker 3: I know what it is. They won't let you publish
Speaker 3: the most interesting stuff if it disrupts the field.
Speaker 1: So this brings us back to the main theme of
Speaker 1: cowboys side. So what should that look like or what
Speaker 1: could that look like? First of all, we agree that
Speaker 1: there are great scientists and good scientists. This is your
Speaker 1: framing of it, which I agree with. The great scientists
Speaker 1: those are the ones that you want to do the
Speaker 1: cowboys science, whereas the good scientists are the ones sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, doing the hard, good work, but not coming
Speaker 1: up with the giant new frameworks on stuff they could.
Speaker 1: They could. But I'm just trying to frame your framework
Speaker 1: in a hopefully act.
Speaker 2: But again, I'm not against.
Speaker 1: You have nothing against.
Speaker 2: The good scientists might come up with something you don't expect.
Speaker 1: They might click on the square and mind sweeper that
Speaker 1: opens up something exactly exactly. Okay, So, but how do
Speaker 1: we encourage cowboy science? How do we make sure that
Speaker 1: the Jim Watson's and the so many others.
Speaker 3: We need national interest exemptions from the Civil Rights Act,
Speaker 3: we need slush funds, We need a lack of oversight.
Speaker 3: We need to be able to determine who the smart
Speaker 3: people are based on our own determinations, and screw off
Speaker 3: if you don't agree with us.
Speaker 2: How is that consistent with national security interest?
Speaker 3: This is what we did before we had a bunch
Speaker 3: of really crazy.
Speaker 2: People, good crazy, I see mean good crazy mostly okay,
Speaker 2: but these are strong spices. Right.
Speaker 3: If you look at Elon Musk, he makes his own
Speaker 3: rules every chance he gets. Our guys made their own rules.
Speaker 3: We had Elon Musk's and science.
Speaker 1: Who are you thinking of when you say that Alexander
Speaker 1: Grothendieg is a door singer Sidney Brenner. See you got
Speaker 1: Reverend Sidney Brenner. Yeah, I knew him as well at
Speaker 1: the Amazing, Amazing guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not supposed to know who that is. But like,
Speaker 3: these are my heroes. These people in general, they need
Speaker 3: to not ask mommy and daddy whether they can fund somebody.
Speaker 3: They need to not worry about their students being able
Speaker 3: to get a job. They pick up the phone and
Speaker 3: they say my student needs a job, and that they
Speaker 3: put it down and there's not some process.
Speaker 1: M I wonder about that. Let me give you a
Speaker 1: quick analogy. In Silicon Valley, what I see are startups,
Speaker 1: young startups. You got three people in a garage things,
Speaker 1: And then you see what happens as companies mature, when
Speaker 1: they become Google and Facebook and Amazon and so on,
Speaker 1: and they have to or they feel that they have
Speaker 1: to put the rule books in place and make these
Speaker 1: judges a number.
Speaker 3: I think it's like fifteen employees and suddenly the rules
Speaker 3: change on. Yeah, that's right, That's what I'm trying to say, right, So, okay,
Speaker 3: so how do we.
Speaker 2: Need national interest exemptions for science?
Speaker 1: I see you're saying the national interests. They're the ones
Speaker 1: who in this future, in this utopia that that we're
Speaker 1: trying to get to what it could look like. They watch,
Speaker 1: they see who the young scientists are who are doing
Speaker 1: something very bold, and they say, you have an exemption.
Speaker 3: We're going to Yeah, I see if there's some Okay,
Speaker 3: if there's some c elegans researcher who also wants to
Speaker 3: have her own OnlyFans account, I may not be thrilled,
Speaker 3: but that is a life choice. But I don't want
Speaker 3: to tell her that she has to leave the academy
Speaker 3: because she's behaving inappropriately. If people want to take drugs
Speaker 3: and go to Burning Man, they need to take drugs
Speaker 3: and they need to go to Burning Man. If people
Speaker 3: want to tell a joke about two imms go into
Speaker 3: a bar, they need to be able to tell a
Speaker 3: joke about two imms go into a bar, get out
Speaker 3: of the way of great science. We know how to
Speaker 3: do this. We need to go back to being the
Speaker 3: United States of America. We need to fire Claudine Gay
Speaker 3: from her professorship at Harvard to send a message we don't.
Speaker 1: Do that anymore.
Speaker 3: We don't do rich we don't protect plagiarists and pretend
Speaker 3: to people. I remember getting my Harvard Alumni magazine, and
Speaker 3: I think that the cover article when Clauding Gay was
Speaker 3: being announced was a scholars scholar and I knew from that.
Speaker 3: It's like, you're trying too hard. We know who's good
Speaker 3: more or less. We don't always get it right, but
Speaker 3: imagine fifty percent of the time we get it right.
Speaker 3: Let us do our work.
Speaker 1: Let me make sure I understand one thing, though. So
Speaker 1: if you say, hey, these scientists over here are really
Speaker 1: brave and bold and smart, and we're going to give
Speaker 1: them national security exemption, what does that exemption mean? Does
Speaker 1: that mean that I don't know?
Speaker 2: Ad mean that they don't have to hire? According to some.
Speaker 1: Here's the question. If let's say one of these brilliant
Speaker 1: young scientists comes up with the next thing, the next
Speaker 1: thing that can be turned into a great, big weapon,
Speaker 1: the exemption means that they're free to publish that or
Speaker 1: they're not free to it.
Speaker 2: What does it mean.
Speaker 3: Look, I think it's important to understand what I'm advocating.
Speaker 3: I'm advocating that we begin a new relationship based on
Speaker 3: the fact that the National interest complex welched on the
Speaker 3: last one. We had an agreement, you broke it. The
Speaker 3: agreement is called the Endless Frontier of vanavar Bush. So
Speaker 3: you welched on a series of tacit agreements.
Speaker 2: Fine, in the agreement was scientists can do anything they want.
Speaker 3: The agreement was that more or less science was a rebellious,
Speaker 3: fiercely independent part of the National interest complex. The National
Speaker 3: interest complex agreed to fund us through universities, that that
Speaker 3: would be where they would do their the line share
Speaker 3: of their research. That we would have academic freedom, that
Speaker 3: they could call on us in times of war, that
Speaker 3: they would not call on us frivolously.
Speaker 2: We have an agreement.
Speaker 3: It's a series of interlocking tacit understanding. Some of them
Speaker 3: made explicit, most of them not.
Speaker 1: I see, and that has changed. But you're saying, let's
Speaker 1: get back to that. Let's get back to the spirit
Speaker 1: that we want. We want to get back to the
Speaker 1: spirit of the endless frontier. So endless Frontier take two.
Speaker 3: Given that you welched on our last agreement, so I
Speaker 3: think we need to reassert ourselves and say we're not
Speaker 3: playing ball.
Speaker 1: And endless front of your Part two looks like what
Speaker 1: it looks like. Hey, here's a brilliant scientist. I'm going
Speaker 1: to make sure that they have what they need to
Speaker 1: do their science.
Speaker 3: We train people, we plan to employ. We stop pretending
Speaker 3: that we are going to train you up only to
Speaker 3: abandon you to say I can't believe you ever got
Speaker 3: the idea you were going to have a research career.
Speaker 3: See if you look at Norman Steenrod, who is a
Speaker 3: mathematician active in I don't know the forties and fifties,
Speaker 3: all of his students survive to become professors. He has
Speaker 3: twenty three or something except for the last one around
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy two seventy three. And if you just take
Speaker 3: in and you raise it to hire and higher power,
Speaker 3: you can't keep having twenty three offspring and expecting them
Speaker 3: all to become professors. So you need something like you
Speaker 3: social employment, where most of us don't end up producing anyone.
Speaker 3: But you need to employ them, and you need to
Speaker 3: stop pretending that the graduate students are.
Speaker 2: Students, particularly foreign exchange students.
Speaker 3: They're not. They're workers. They're workers who do not have
Speaker 3: protections of workers because you've classified them as students.
Speaker 1: But the idea is the situation where now is those
Speaker 1: students are very unlikely to become professors someday because there's
Speaker 1: just too many.
Speaker 3: Of them and we're training our rivals. I look, nobody
Speaker 3: has thought this through. This is a lot like what
Speaker 3: happened with USAID. USAID was a slush fund for the
Speaker 3: CIA and the State Department. So you look at it,
Speaker 3: it doesn't make any sense. Why are we funding a
Speaker 3: transgender opera in Bolivia? I would imagine we are trying
Speaker 3: to topple the Bolivian regime and trans issues are fabulously divisive. Okay,
Speaker 3: now you can decide whether that's a good thing or
Speaker 3: a bad thing. But we didn't just fund that stupidly, right,
Speaker 3: that was an issue of stake craft. Well, science is
Speaker 3: also an instrument of state craft, but science is also
Speaker 3: just science. So what I'm trying to say is that
Speaker 3: rather than having these colleagues who put their finger in
Speaker 3: their cheek and say gosh, she will you know, she whiz?
Speaker 3: You sound like a conspiracy theorist. For God's sakes, man,
Speaker 3: you're part of the National Interest complex, act like it.
Speaker 3: The Department of Energy is the Department of Physics. It's
Speaker 3: the old AEC turned into the Department of Energy by
Speaker 3: Jimmy Carter. What was the Atomic Energy Commission?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: So the idea is, well, maybe it's oil and gas. Really,
Speaker 3: is that what they told you? We have a fake
Speaker 3: cryptic system and it used to work when there were
Speaker 3: smart people who could do the crypsis, and then around
Speaker 3: about nineteen seventy it all broke. So we're now like
Speaker 3: fifty five years into a cryptic system that's getting weaker
Speaker 3: and weaker all the time. We need a new van
Speaker 3: of var Bush and it needs to come through the
Speaker 3: Office of Science and Technology Policy OSTP, and it needs
Speaker 3: to go through Pea CAST, and it needs to go
Speaker 3: through the National Academy's complex. And it needs to be
Speaker 3: a highly elite and the elite have a terrible name
Speaker 3: because the people we've been calling elite aren't so elite
Speaker 3: surgeons still have a great name, or elite athletes have
Speaker 3: a great name, or elite Tier one operators in special
Speaker 3: forces have a great name, but the elite has a
Speaker 3: terrible name, because that's what we associate with Davos, people
Speaker 3: gathering on their private jets to tell us to lower
Speaker 3: our carbon footprints. Right, So basically we need to go
Speaker 3: back to public spirited elite scientists. We're very well compensated,
Speaker 3: very well protected. We're public spirited who do not allow
Speaker 3: themselves to get pushed around trivially, but in a pinch,
Speaker 3: know how to behave as patriotic Americans. And we need
Speaker 3: to lead the West, and we need to help out
Speaker 3: our European friends and our Japanese allies. This just isn't
Speaker 3: that hard. It's just nobody gets it.
Speaker 1: So what would you say, She's the path, the best
Speaker 1: path for us to get there.
Speaker 2: Hold a conference of smart people, do it quietly.
Speaker 1: Like in a silamar where you're inviting the who exactly
Speaker 1: you write the national interest people as well as the scientist.
Speaker 3: You figure out who knows how to play okay, and
Speaker 3: you do it as a closed conference and everybody checks
Speaker 3: their phone at the door, and you have the people
Speaker 3: in the fields that really matter. I want cryptography people,
Speaker 3: I want people who do fundamental physics. I want people
Speaker 3: in molecular biology, and you say, look, we had a deal,
Speaker 3: what is our new version of that deal. Because it's
Speaker 3: not poverty, it's not being precarious, it's not begging for
Speaker 3: a grill. Please Tony Fauci continue my funding. We need
Speaker 3: to tell Fauci in Collins to take a hike when
Speaker 3: they are behaving counter to the interests of the United
Speaker 3: States of America, to the interests of science. The public
Speaker 3: needs to be able to rely on us for ground
Speaker 3: truth ninety eight percent of the time and the two
Speaker 3: percent that they can't, We've got to be very careful.
Speaker 3: I understand that you have, you know, weaponized answers. I'm
Speaker 3: not saying be naive, publish everything science, science science, but
Speaker 3: for the most part, we have to be absolutely reliable.
Speaker 3: And we need to save theoretical physics.
Speaker 2: First.
Speaker 3: Fundamental physics is in such bad shape and you can't
Speaker 3: peer review your way out of it because all the
Speaker 3: peers are infected with the same mind virus. So you're
Speaker 3: just going to get more of the same. If you
Speaker 3: keep saying peer peer peer, you need to ask, Okay.
Speaker 1: You're referring, for example, string theory.
Speaker 3: Here, I'm referring to particle theory of the standard model
Speaker 3: the basis of general relativity need to be advanced. In
Speaker 3: Neither of these theories is measured by their fundamental constituent
Speaker 3: called the Lagrangian or the action has really moved in
Speaker 3: fifty two years?
Speaker 1: And has it not moved because it's so successful, or
Speaker 1: you're saying it.
Speaker 2: It's very successful. Okay, But imagine that you knew.
Speaker 3: Twenty three of the sixty four codons in biology, and
Speaker 3: fifty two years later you still knew exactly that number
Speaker 3: of codons and you didn't have the rest of the
Speaker 3: genetic code.
Speaker 1: Enough in that analogy, though those twenty three are still correct,
Speaker 1: we're just looking for the remainder. But is that how
Speaker 1: you see that? Pretty much?
Speaker 3: The standard model is amazing, But you know again, crocodile
Speaker 3: rock is amazing, and that came from the same exact era,
Speaker 3: and I cannot stand listening to crocodile Rock on repeat
Speaker 3: for fifty two years.
Speaker 1: But is it that it's a hard problem and that's
Speaker 1: why the other codons haven't been figured out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very hard problem.
Speaker 3: But it gets a lot harder when you only listen
Speaker 3: to suspiciously ten leaders of the field who all are
Speaker 3: interchangeably convinced of the same wrong things, which is quantum
Speaker 3: gravity was not what we were Well, it's not even
Speaker 3: string theory. Who said quantum gravity was the task that
Speaker 3: we all needed to get on in nineteen eighty three
Speaker 3: eighty four, who said that the standard model is ugly.
Speaker 3: It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Who said
Speaker 3: that we stopped listening to our colleagues and we call
Speaker 3: them names, as opposed to saying, well, do you have
Speaker 3: a different idea. There is no world in which our
Speaker 3: physics thing makes sense except for a security context. So
Speaker 3: either we now have the world's worst accidental culture in
Speaker 3: fundamental physics, or we have a security regime in which
Speaker 3: we're not supposed to actually advance and what we're doing
Speaker 3: is safe.
Speaker 1: Does that mean that in that model that somebody has
Speaker 1: broken through that wall and they met Well, we don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm almost positive that we don't have a
Speaker 3: fundamental theory. But you know, we know that Marc Andreessen
Speaker 3: and Ben Horowitz were in the White House during the
Speaker 3: Biden administration and they said they were told don't invest
Speaker 3: in AI startups because we're not going to allow them
Speaker 3: to continue and these guys said, well, what do you mean,
Speaker 3: it's just based on math.
Speaker 2: You can't outlaw math.
Speaker 3: And they said, we will classify math just the way
Speaker 3: we classified fields of theoretical physics. Hmm, okay, so nobody
Speaker 3: knows what that means. Didn't sound like it was just
Speaker 3: nuclear physics. I highly recommend everyone go to a website
Speaker 3: run by Alex Wellerstein. It was at the Stevens Institute
Speaker 3: of Technology in New Jersey.
Speaker 2: And he is.
Speaker 3: I think the world expert on the atomic security. And
Speaker 3: you can learn all the things we did around science
Speaker 3: around nuclear weapons from his sites.
Speaker 2: So we can just know.
Speaker 3: We don't have to guess or speculate as to what
Speaker 3: it looks like when national interest in science run into
Speaker 3: each other.
Speaker 2: We can say, oh, here's what happened.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 1: Scientists ideas were shut down from the public that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, or what are we talking about?
Speaker 3: Newspaper stories were spiked, disinformation was distributed in the scientific literature.
Speaker 3: Volumes were taken off of the shelves that thought were
Speaker 3: thought to be advantageous to the enemy. Review boards were
Speaker 3: set up that would intermediate between journals and researchers in
Speaker 3: case somebody submitted something that might have security implications, so
Speaker 3: we know exactly what it looks like when the national
Speaker 3: interest complex decides that something like neutrons is too dangerous
Speaker 3: to simply do as g wiz science.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: And so as a result of this, if you tell me, well, Eric,
Speaker 3: that's conspiracy theorizing, I'm just going to tell you, go
Speaker 3: find a blog called restricted Data. Knock yourself out and
Speaker 3: tell me why you imagine that secret facilities, secret protocols,
Speaker 3: secret agreements aren't all through national interests interfaces with the
Speaker 3: scientific community, because clearly we know that that it has
Speaker 3: been the case. We have it documented eight ways to Sunday.
Speaker 3: Why are you claiming that this is somehow the product
Speaker 3: of an overactive imagination. You're just not well read.
Speaker 1: But in some sense you're in favor of that right,
Speaker 1: in the sense of the call it the two percent
Speaker 1: of science that you think for national security interests should
Speaker 1: be masked, you would or wouldn't be in favor of.
Speaker 3: I'm in favor of getting rid of the g willakers
Speaker 3: attitude towards science.
Speaker 2: It's garish. Science is fun enough, Science is too important.
Speaker 3: We have the right to national security interests, and we
Speaker 3: have the right to not have national security interests completely
Speaker 3: destroy our credibility with each other, the public, and the world.
Speaker 2: And so the.
Speaker 3: Issue is, I want a high resolution relationship where we
Speaker 3: think a great deal about these issues. We continue to
Speaker 3: going back. If you can't be done in an open environment,
Speaker 3: take it into the national labs. If it can't be
Speaker 3: done in the national labs, do it in an unannounced facility.
Speaker 3: But what I don't want is I don't want us
Speaker 3: training up super smart people who can see through the liawes,
Speaker 3: not being told that they're part of some sort of
Speaker 3: agreement that they never signed up for, and sitting there
Speaker 3: getting destroyed through let's say, COVID influence campaigns, where suddenly
Speaker 3: you know, every time you say anything in public, there's
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty accounts that suspiciously never have people
Speaker 3: behind them that are constantly starking at you. I mean,
Speaker 3: whatever this thing is, it's intolerable, and we should we
Speaker 3: should put a bullet through it. We should drive a
Speaker 3: stake through its heart and kill off whatever this thing
Speaker 3: is in favor of a reasonable agreement between the scientific world,
Speaker 3: the tech world, and the national interest world.
Speaker 1: And your point is that if scientists grow up understanding
Speaker 1: that that's the situation that the stuff they do matters.
Speaker 1: Then if you're okay with this, there are plenty of
Speaker 1: couriers for you. Yeah, if you want to believe that
Speaker 1: somehow science is just about open inquiry and g whiz. Look,
Speaker 1: I'm all for cowboys, I'm all for hyper independence. I
Speaker 1: view iin Rand as a collectivist. I am off the
Speaker 1: charts individualist. But I'm not stupid.
Speaker 3: And so my claim is is that an Oppenheimer of
Speaker 3: Annoyman a Fineman worked within a world in which they
Speaker 3: respected the national security complex. Put somebody at the top,
Speaker 3: like a Leslie Groves and you'll get compliance. But you
Speaker 3: can't have this as some sort of low level administrative thing.
Speaker 3: This is life and death to the United States. And
Speaker 3: China is going to eat our lunch. I guarantee it.
Speaker 3: They will hire our best people away because we are
Speaker 3: in some sort of a mental spiral.
Speaker 2: We're going straight down the drain.
Speaker 3: Because we don't think that a scientist should be able
Speaker 3: to check in at the four seasons without thinking about it,
Speaker 3: that they shouldn't be able to fly business class, that
Speaker 3: they shouldn't have a retirement and a second home. And
Speaker 3: I just I want the people who think that that's
Speaker 3: garish and that this is like, as the phrase goes,
Speaker 3: welfare queens and white lab coats. I want them to
Speaker 3: choke on this particular fur ball, and I want them
Speaker 3: to recognize. Now, what you did is you took the
Speaker 3: world's greatest scientific community. You asked them to keep you safe,
Speaker 3: you asked them to keep you rich, and you told
Speaker 3: them to stay outside while you held a party.
Speaker 2: Enough, it's over.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Eric Weinstein. So wrapping this up. Generally,
Speaker 1: when we talk about science, we think of discoveries as
Speaker 1: having a pretty simple structure. A paper against published, or
Speaker 1: a breakthrough gets announced, maybe a prize is awarded. But
Speaker 1: the truth is that underneath every insight is a huge
Speaker 1: scaffolding of institutions and incentives and traditions and also unspoken rules.
Speaker 1: That scaffolding shapes which questions feel askable and which ideas
Speaker 1: feel risky, in which paths seem invisible until someone insists
Speaker 1: on walking them anyway. Conversations like today's remind us that
Speaker 1: science is not just a method for understanding the world.
Speaker 1: It is also a human system with pressures and power
Speaker 1: dynamics that influence its trajectory, paying attention to that system,
Speaker 1: questioning how it works and who it serves, and how
Speaker 1: it evolves. This might be as important as any single experiment.
Speaker 1: Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on
Speaker 1: my substack and check out Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on
Speaker 1: YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments
Speaker 1: until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is inner Cosmos.