Ep142 "Do breakthroughs require rule-breakers?" with Eric Weinstein

Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great ones? Do we still have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in a larger game they barely see? What if the most important ideas are the ones you’re not allowed to hear about? From Crick and Watson to nuclear bombs and AI, today we’ll cover it all with physicist, mathematician, and iconoclast Eric Weinstein.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do
good scientists sometimes crowd out great scientists? Do we still
have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship
between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in

(00:26):
a larger game that they barely see? What if the
most important ideas are the ones you're not allowed to
hear about. From universities to public health to Watson and
crick and nuclear bombs and AI. Today we're going to
cover it all with physicists and mathematician and iconoclast Eric Weinstein.
So get ready for a great brain stretch. Welcome to

(00:51):
Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and
an author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail
deeply into our three pound universe to understand how we
see the world, and as we'll discuss today, we don't
always see what we believe we're seeing. We usually think

(01:21):
of science as a calm enterprise that's cumulative. You have
thousands of people testing hypotheses, you have vast amounts of
data getting gathered and knowledge slowly accretes. But underneath that
veneer sometimes things can be a little more turbulent, because
what happens sometimes is that scientific discoveries can quickly reshape

(01:47):
economies and alter what nations can do to each other,
and redraw political boundaries and redirect the future long before
most of us even notice. In other words, ideas that
begin on a chalkboard can end up steering history. But
we very rarely pause to ask whether the way science

(02:10):
is organize today is matched to the power it now holds.
Who decides which questions get asked or which lines of
inquiry get funded. How much of scientific progress depends on conformity,
and how much of it depends on rule breakers who
are willing to look crazy before they are proven right.

(02:33):
These questions sit at the intersection of labs and nations,
and they matter more than ever in a world where
any single discovery could reverberate globally. My guest today is
someone who spent years thinking about science from that high altitude.
Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, a physicist, and a public

(02:54):
intellectual who is unusually thoughtful about the architecture of knowledge,
like how ideas are filtered by the system and how
originality survives or fails inside universities. Eric hosts a podcast
called the portal, and he has a reputation for asking
questions that make people uncomfortable and for refusing to treat

(03:19):
existing structures as inevitable just because they are familiar. Today,
Eric and I are going to talk about how discovery
really happens, who it serves, and what might be required
if we want science to live up to its highest
ideals in the decades ahead. Here's my conversation with Eric Weinstein. So, Eric,

(03:45):
Jim Watson recently passed away, and I know that you
were close with him and you really admired him. Tell
me about that.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Well.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
I spent time with Jim, and for the time that
we were together was very intense. But Jim is in
many ways my spirit animal. And one of the things
that's really important is to recognize who Jim was as
a scientist, who he was as a writer, and to

(04:13):
relegate everything else that he was to a tertiary status
that shouldn't distract us from the miracle that was Jim.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
Give me example of that.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
What's happened is that people who are not close to
science have set up a mimetic complex, which Jim Watson
auto completes somehow to a bunch of things that are
much less relevant.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
So you know, can you unpack that? Sure?

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Imagine that you knew Archimedes personally, and Archimedes had some
sort of like personal hygiene problem.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
They didn't brush, you know.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Okay, so you imagine that everybody in Archimedes time. Oh
the breath on Archimedes was so terrible, you know, but
that's Archimedes. We important to recognize that that was Jim Watson.
Jim Watson was a blinding figure of science, world science,
American science in particular, and he auto completes to some

(05:11):
stuff that is far less relevant and salient. And so
it's important to me that we discussed Jim Watson and
not be captured by when we happen to be having
the conversation, because this is a ten thousand year. As
long as there are humans and as long as there
will be life as we know it, Jim Watson will

(05:32):
be one of the most important people who ever lived.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
And when you say auto completes, you mean in people's
heads they think Jim Watson and then they think X
Y Z.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Well, yes, but again we're falling into the trap. So
let's briefly go into the trap and then only to
like it's a picture plant. Let's go into the picture plant,
help ourselves to a couple of deep gulps, and then
get the hell out. Okay, great, Okay, So Jim Watson
auto completes right now to Rosalind Franklin. Ah And if
you ask me, if you care about Rosalind Franklin, you
should be carrying about Irwin Chargaff.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Nobody talks about chargaph interruption.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
So Krick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA, published
that in April of nineteen fifty three, and they ended
up winning the Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins for that work.
People then came out and said, look, Rosalind Franklin had
taken the first photographs of the structure and didn't recognize

(06:24):
what it was, the double helix structure, but should have
gotten credit. That's what we're referring to here. Just so
not really okay.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Roslind Franklin had taken done the X ray crystallography on
nucleic acid and had this famous Maltese cross, which Watson
and Krick took to mean that the structure of the
nucleic acid was likely to be helical, not double helic.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Just helical.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
They were under suspicion by their colleagues of not knowing anything,
of being so enamored of Linus Paulling's great achievement in
that discovery the alpha helix, which ended up as a
secondary structure of protein that they were trying to copy
palling and to shove nucleic acid into a form that

(07:11):
there was no reason to think that it had to
be that. And so the part of the the part
of the problem of this story is that Rosslyn Frank
was absolutely correct. There was no reason that DNA had
to be helical. That's good science, it's very good science.
And it's an absolute cautionary tale. Why you can't let
good scientists run science.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
Ah, because you're making a distinction between good scientists and
great scientists. Okay, I see.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Jim Jim Watson, in my opinion, was not a good scientist.

Speaker 1 (07:42):
He was a great scientist.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
He was a great scientist.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
And there it's not that you take good science and
turn it up to eleven to get great science. It's
a different process.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay. And you think of this as cowboys is that?
Which is that correct? You call cowboys science? YIPI ka, Okay,
So let's unpack that. So, yeah, what does cowboy science
look like? And actually let's continue this story in that context.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Well, you see, Jim and Francis were searching a much
smaller landscape because they were convinced that it was going
to be helical. Okay, so they didn't have to think
about all the possible like if you ever spend time
with the protein data bank, my god, does nature get
up to some fun architecture really, I mean just unbelievably

(08:26):
beautiful things. And they didn't think it was going to
be any of those things. So Jim and Francis were
in part not reasonable people, and they made a point
of telling everybody that if you weren't working on nucleic acid,
you were an idea that they didn't have time to
go to seminars that were mere distractions. This is the

(08:47):
difference between good science and great science.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Exactly what we're.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
Doing is we're driving great science out of academics and
out of research so that we have this proliferation of
good science. Don't do this, people who are not a
walking hr nightmare. Yeah, which is a catastrophic decision.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
So just before we get to that, just for the audience,
I want to mention.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
So Eric knew Jim Watson, I as a postdoc worked
with Franciskriek. Neither of us knew the other one, but
we both got to spend time with these two giants
of my god a biology. Yeah. Okay, So so you're
categorizing that as great scientists as opposed to good scientists.
So what's the problem that you see in academia in

(09:30):
terms of support of good science and not great science.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Well, you need both, You absolutely need both. And one
of the tasks for people in the great science model
is not to crap all over their good science colleagues.
And in fact, Jim was extremely kind in my experience
to Roslin. Franklin and I discussed her at great length,

(09:56):
and he didn't pritify the story and by which you
mean making a pretty Yeah, well he was an ass.
He met your daughter and wife right, and he behaved
abysmally towards them. But then he behaved in a very
kind fashion as well, like what my daughter asked him
a question, as I recall in a crowded room, I

(10:17):
don't know, age twelve or thirteen, about the origin of
the organelles or how did mitochondria end up in the
eukaryotic cell. Was it an infection? And he looked at
her and he said, you know this Nobel Laureate eighty eight,
world famous. Oh, I don't have any interest in that,

(10:41):
you know. It reminds me of Miles Davis talking to
a three year old kid who was seeking his autograph,
and I think that his famous line was something like,
he looks up expecting to see an adult shows her.
I sees this tiny kid tugging at his pant leg.
He looks at it, says, fuck off, kid, Oh god, okay,
all right. But then Jim came back, you know, at

(11:04):
some point, and he said, which one is your wife?
And I said, the economist who mopped the floor with
you intellectually at dinner last night.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
He said, oh, she's very good.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Because he was completely dismissive of her being female and
all these things. He said, you want to know why
your children are so intelligent? I said, excuse me. He said, well,
your daughter is obviously very intelligent, as is your son,
because he knew both of them. So even though he
was cruel, he thought very highly. And I said why
do you think He said, well, you can't just do

(11:39):
it with one set of genes. You should thank your wife.
Oh it's lovely. Well, but he was a misogynist, but
women loved him. But he was very kind and active
in promoting female careers. Like you don't understand the complexity

(12:00):
of this particular guy. Was he a horse's ass?

Speaker 1 (12:03):
He was?

Speaker 3 (12:05):
And I'm not saying that's great. I got a chance
to tell him to shut up multiple times and he
took it.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
But you had to back it up.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
You know, you can't just mumble something about racism or
sexism because DNA and its implications are absolutely profound and
most of us haven't wrestled with. And I also believe
that Jim came from a place of kindness and goodness
that isn't recognized.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Is there anything that we can learn from the story
of Roslin Franklin and Jim Watson that allows us to
do better science?

Speaker 2 (12:35):
I think so.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
I mean, I think that recognizing that there are these
different styles of science and that we need all of
these styles of science would be very helpful, and that
in general, I don't think a Jim Watson would want
to drive a Rosalind Franklin out of science at all.
But the problem is is that there is absolutely no

(12:58):
place for this cowboy science within the standard framework. So
if you look, for example, at the interactions with Chargaff,
Chargaff is absolutely merciless to Watson and Crek. He calls
them two pitchmen in search of a helix.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Okay, wait, hold on, So first tells who Chargraph is
and tells what a pitch man is. I don't know
that term.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
So Irwin Chargaff is a Columbia professor. I believe that
he came probably from Vienna. I think he spoke five languages,
maybe English was his fifth. He wrote one of the
most amazing books in the history of biology, called Heracletian Fire,
which nobody's read, and in it he tells the story
of figuring out that the equimolar relations, where he figured

(13:38):
out that the amount of the nucleotides was exactly paired
when you chopped up whatever the nucleic acid was.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
So we had this.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Meaning you have the same amount of a's and t's
and the same amount.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Of seeds as that's right and so.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
But there was no explanation for it. So it was
what we would call a fine tuning mystery. Now, isn't
it interesting? What is it fine tuning mystery?

Speaker 1 (14:00):
Well, that's usually we.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Encounter it in physics, like is the universe finally tuned
for life? If the proton were a little bit less
heavy or a little bit more heavy, it wouldn't work.
And how is the curvature exactly? Everything is just so right?
And usually what there is is there's an explanation in
this case, like the hydrogen bonds which enforced the pairing.

(14:21):
It wasn't an accident. And of course people always somebody
will always say, maybe it's a coincidence.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
You can't conclude that right.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
So what Watson and Crick did is they took that
information of CHARGEV and CHARGAV, I believe came up with
a mobius band theory of nucleic acid. He said, if
he'd only been able to work with a Rosalind Franklin,
he would have gotten it. And Jim, to his credit, said,
if Rosalind Franklin had simply spent one day decamping from

(14:49):
her atomacy, that we didn't have enough information to say
it was a helix. He said she would have gotten
it in an afternoon, an amazing claim that Rosalind Franklin
would have gotten the double helix in an afternoon but
for her insistence on being a good scientist. I see,
And so you have to understand that what Jim was
willing to acknowledge about Rosalind Franklin was in many ways

(15:12):
incredibly complimentary. But Chargaff writes very clearly that these pitchmen,
he means, you know, think about Silicon Valley where you
now it pitched me bro Okay. He saw them as
a couple of ne'er dwells. They didn't know any biochemistry,
That's what he says. He says, they don't know anybody.

(15:33):
You know, after they get the double helix, he writes,
you can tell how late in the day it is
in biology that such pigmies would throw such long shadows.
You have to understand that this you and I, I
mean you knew Francis, I didn't I. And to be blunt,
I think Francis was the more intellectually deep of the two.

(15:57):
And I told you before that even though I thought
France and this was smarter, I thought Jim was far
more important. And they represented two halves of great science.
And Jim was that brash. I think he was taken
into the University of Chicago at age fifteen, So shout
out to the University of Chicago. Let's get back to

(16:18):
taking twelve year olds, thirteen year olds, and fourteen year
olds into our universities. In the University of Chicago in
particular is probably our top university, with every other one
falling off of some cliff. For God's sakes, we don't
know why that brashness that Jim had and that eccentricity
that Francis had were essential in Chargef's chargeff Oh, I

(16:42):
wish I could read it just he writes so beautifully,
But he talks about the fact he said, the idea
that the odds that two geniuses would fall into his orbit,
knowing nothing of biochemistry and solve this problem was so
vanishingly small that it didn't even warrant consideration.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
Wow. Wow, this is why peer review doesn't work. Right.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
So, in large measure, the history of DNA and the
history of the genetic code again discovered by someone outside
the fabled RNA TI club, so that all the top
people were assembled to crack the genetic code, and the
guy who was outside of it, named Marshall Nierenberg was
the one who cracks it ten years later in sixty three.

(17:27):
This is the greatest story of recent years that you
and I are within the living memory of Watson and Crick.
And by the way, that book, the Double Helix, you know,
great literature begins with things like it was the best
of times, it was the worst of times, or in
the beginning, or some memorable call me Ishmael.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Watson began and ended that book.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Saying he's never seen Francis Crick in a humble mood,
modest mood, modest mood.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
Right, yeah, perhaps he is with others, but it's not
so with me or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Oh my god, can that guy write? I mean that
was literature, man, Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
So anyway, I just I love Jim unapologetically, and I'm
well aware of the total of the total nature of
the man, and I'm not going to sweep any of
that into the rug. And by the way, I don't
think we stripped him of his official titles at cold
Spring Harbor until two thousand and seven, and I don't

(18:25):
think we stripped him of his honorary titles until twenty
nineteen or something like that. And that, my friends, was
the American system that we could be proud of, that
a complete horses ass like Jim Watson would be kept
within the system of our institutions and celebrated and not

(18:45):
be seen as a walking hr problem waiting to happen.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
I mean he was seen as that walking again was
by walking hr problem waiting to happen.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
He was that twelve times a day. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
But my point is we didn't throw him out until
very late in the game when we were determined to
lose our mojo.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Interesting, okay, And so coming back to this idea of
cowboy science, it's the Krick and Watson's it's the Nuremberg.
It's the ways of coming in from the outside and
proposing something breaking the rules.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Yeah, it's based on the middle finger. It's based on
being true to science and telling the National Security Complex,
the National Interest Complex, your department, your funder to sit
down and shut up.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
And by the way, you know, I've talked about purity
view before, but one thing we know is that when
Krick and Watson came up with this structure and they said, hey,
we think it's a double helix, or the as and
t's and c's and g's are wanting to each other.
They sent the typed manuscript over to Nature. Crick's wife
drew the double helix picture, which is gorgeous picture by

(19:57):
gorgeous picture because he was terror trying and she was
really adeal no deal exactly. She was a good artist. Anyway,
they sent it over to Nature, which Kriik told me
at the time was a man and two boys, and
the yailed the mandscript over yeah, the editor, and it
got published. There was no peer review at the time.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
There was no peer review until nineteen sixty five to
seventy five. This is a fabricated story, largely due to Merton,
that was backfitted and retconned into outside reviewing and outside
refereeing which occurred being turned into peer review. But basically
it's a fabricated story of the history of science.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
Sorry you're saying. The fabricated story is that peer review
wasn't drew to at some point, and then it was
claimed that it was older than that.

Speaker 3 (20:47):
The story is that peer review begins with the founding
of the Royal Society and has been with science ever since.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Usually that's not true.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
No, it's untrue. And the willingness of the Academy to
lie about that, bold faced lie about this it might
be ignorance.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
No, it's not.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Well, it depends who you mean by the Academy. Had
you asked me before you told me about peer review,
I would have. But if I showed you, yeah, the
history of peer review. Right, the Academy wants to say
that outside refereeing is peer review, and it isn't. The
double helix is a great example of something. I believe

(21:26):
that in Horace Judson's Eight Day of Creation it could
be sourced elsewhere. The claim was that Watson Creek couldn't
be peer reviewed because there was too much information in
the one page paper. You know, as you know, they
had a fight as to whether to write something very
complete or something very incomplete. And you will notice that

(21:47):
there's a phrase it has not escaped our notice that
you know this? Yes, yes, so more or less that
was a twenty page paper.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
It has not escaped. I noticed that.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Right by the way for the audience, it's they were saying,
it is giving this double heelos ructure, it has not
escaped our notice that. You know, you could unzip this
and duplicate it this way where each strand of the
DNA then gets the complementary nucleotides on it, and you
can do this amazing thing that way. Right, They just
mentioned it when well, have you been to the Eagle Pub?

Speaker 2 (22:15):
I have not. You have to go.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
Oh, I'd love you again for the audience. This is
where Crick and Watson burst into the Eagle Pub? Was
it the Eagle and Child or the whatever?

Speaker 2 (22:25):
I think?

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Oh, maybe they burst into the pub and in early
nineteen fifty three and said we have discovered the secret
of life.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, I'd love to go see that. Goosebumps.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yeah, yeah, okay. So, by the way, one other thing
I just want to make it clear is that peer
review is you write up a science paper and you
submitted to a journal, and then the journal sends it
to several of your colleagues in the field, something like
the jury system that we have in court, something like that,
where your colleagues who are expert in the field also

(22:57):
review your thing. The thing that scientists find sting about
this is oftentimes peers are incentivized to stand in the
way of something getting published. And also, I would get
you tell me if I'm right, but I would guess
that you would think oftentimes your peers are good scientists,
not great scientists, and so they might block something for

(23:19):
six months or a year or longer because they want
to see more of this or that. But the important yeah,
I would assume you'd say, and I'd agree with you
that the important part sometimes is just to get something
out there. If Krick and Watson had been wrong about
the structure, fine, it's in the public eye.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
And their review just happens when the world of your
colleagues see something. This is peer injunction.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah. And it's competitor injunction. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:47):
And it's one sided where you, generally speaking, can't see them,
but they can see you. What if somebody doesn't like you?
What if Jim Watson is pissed off everybody?

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (24:00):
So my feeling is, who the hell are these peers?
Get them the hell out of my way. Let's go
back to the system that works.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
So, by the way, what do you think of the
pre print system now where people submit things STI, let's
say archive or other prens.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
I think it's fascinating because I don't know, let's just
talk about how funny the system is. First of all,
it comes out of where where's the archive come out of?

Speaker 2 (24:22):
I don't know. I believe it's Los Alamos National fascinating.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
Now there's a whole question going back to the founding
of Los Alamos about security review, and I think that
was it Bright who ran the voluntary board that said, look,
papers on neutrons and chain reactions are so dangerous that
everything will be submitted and we will figure out what's

(24:46):
safe and what isn't. So in part, you have to
ask the question about whether or not this layer is
there as part of security review, because what if somebody
wants to publish weaponized anthrax, or what if they want
to publish something that's relevant nuclear weapons, or but.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
The advent of the internet allows that anyway.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Now, yes, yes, but as you'll notice, many of your
colleagues won't take something seriously unless it's gone through channel. Okay, yeah,
that's right. And then the question is who is entitled
to post there? Do you need a dot edu address?
There's a moderator group that turns down papers that people
don't recognize, So there is a review aspect. Yeah, and

(25:28):
let me keep going. Our taxpayer dollars pay for research,
which is then put under a paywall by let's say Elzevir.
Then you're forced to quote research and if you don't
have a subscription, you can't get behind the paywalls. You
have to pay forty dollars per paper to see if
it's relevant. This is nonsense. This is an old style

(25:52):
control mechanism. And even the archive is refereed at some level.
It has an endorsement system, and it appears probably to
catch certain things and to relegate them to If you
know that, there's this horrible thing called visra. I don't
know this fixer's archives spelled backwards, and that's where crazy

(26:16):
people are sent.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
What do you mean they're sent as in, if someone
has an idea that's.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
Oh, my friend Garrett Liasy, for example, submitted something. He's
a PhD in physics from U SEE San Diego, and
he's told this is not right for the archive.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
Wow, just for the audience. Archive is supposed to publish
anything that's reasonable. I don't know in theory they're supposed to.
That's the idea. That's the idea is that it's an
open preprint server.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
As as Paul ginsparg about that.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Paul Ginspark set this up and he used a device
like I come to Barry Caesar not to praise him,
and he said, no, this is we're not trying to
go around peer review. This is a holding tank for
things that are only those things that are seeking per
re view. But the biggest question is what do we

(27:05):
do with the science. It is powerful that goes against
the narratives which have policy implications.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
The science has policy implications. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
For example, Jim and Francis, together with Marshall Nahrenberg, unlocked
something which allows you, with Crisper cast nine and other tools,
to write code directly into nucleic acid. Now, most of
us got locked down for two years because somehow twelve
nucleotides coded for four codons assembling four amino acids into

(27:43):
a furin cleavage site that got spliced in this spike
protein in coronavirus, which made this virus very human transmissible. Now,
my claim is, what does that tell you about the leverage.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
Of this code? Who is allowed to do?

Speaker 3 (28:04):
What? If you can shut down planet Earth for two
years with twelve nucleotides, what are we talking about here?
Why are we doing this out in the open? Why
are we pretending that there aren't military implications? Why are
we pretending that there aren't national interest implications and national
security implications? This is the unforgivable sin of modern university science.

(28:27):
Pretending that what we're doing is something that's g WI
is interesting. Everybody should do science. Science is fun. You
could be a scientist too. Well, Shit, first of all,
it's incredibly hard. It's incredibly demanding. It's like telling a
person who's five to ten that they can join the NBA. Yeah,
maybe there are people who are five to ten in
the NBA, but your odds are not good. Almost nobody

(28:50):
belongs at here. It's super dangerous, it's super powerful. It's
boring as hell, it's exciting as hell. We're just not
honest about what science is. We've got to break the
dependence on the university system and the federal granting agencies
of sciences to continue.

Speaker 1 (29:08):
So this is fascinating because what you're what you draw
attention to that I really don't know anyone else drawing
attention to, is this point that science is extraordinarily powerful,
and therefore it has the attention of, and maybe even
the control of, in some ways organizations that are much
bigger than what's happening in the lab or in the university.
And I think your point, tell me if I'm correct

(29:30):
about this, is that most scientists don't realize that most
academicians don't know that they think they're just doing a thing,
but in fact there's a there's so much leverage going
on that they're playing in a bigger game without realizing it.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Yeah, Like you know, let's imagine you were a computer programmer.
You could program tic tac toe or checkers or something
and that would be amusing.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Or you could.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
Program wire shark and that's wireshark. That's exactly the point.
You don't know what wireshark is.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Correct.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Wire Shark sits on your network and sniff's packets, which
means that any message that you're sending around your network
might be unencrypted and we can just read whatever emails
and messages you're sending. But because you don't know that
there's an application that allows you to read it, you
just sort of imagine, oh, I don't know I send
on email. You don't know about SMTP. The problem is

(30:20):
is that mostly what you're dealing with is not your
computer is not a computer. To you, it's just an
application serving device. But to somebody who lives on the
command line, just the way somebody could live on the
command line of DNA, they see an entirely different world.
So my claim is is that if you're writing something
like wireshark, you're very well aware of what you could

(30:41):
be doing. And if you're studying coronavirus, like the Cohealth
Alliance was studying coronavirus, or Ralph Barrack in North Carolina
was studying viruses, those people are very well aware of
what it takes to humanize and weaponize a virus platform
and tells who Berrick is a very talented scientist at

(31:04):
the University of North Carolina. And we signed a bio
weapons convention, and I think we signed two treaties in
the nineteen seventies which prohibit us from exploring offensive weapons.
But a lot of what you hear is what we
have to explore defensive weapons. In order to explore defensive
weapons against the weapons, we have to create the weapons

(31:24):
to begin with, so that we know what we're defending against.
So we're engaged in high level bullshit in order to
explain what we're doing messing around in a place like Wuhan, China.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Oh, you're saying we developed the bullshit to cover our
tracks at Wuhan, is what you mean?

Speaker 3 (31:45):
We don't want to be caught off guard in a
prisoner's dilemma where we agree not to do something and
the other party decides to cheat on their agreement. So
we are cheating on the agreement that we signed, the
agreement being don't develop offensive. Yeah, that's the spirit of
the agreement. A word that is very rarely used in

(32:07):
this capacity called pettifogging, where you can talk about arbitraging
the letter against the spirit. We are engaged in arbitraging
the letter of the Bioweapons Convention against the spirit of
the Bioweapons Convention. But we are not doing this at
a credible level. We are telling tall tales that are

(32:29):
not befitting of adults, let alone scientists. And so what
we have is we have these sort of storytellers in chief.
So Francis Collins was a storyteller in chief, Anthony Fauci
was a storyteller in chief. That allows people like Peter
Dazac at the Cohalth Alliance in Ralph Barrick in North
Carolina to do the scientific and administrative work that are

(32:51):
engaged in our bioweapons program where we take see, if
you've just had something called NIID the National Institute of
Infectious Diseases, it would be too clear that it was
probably something military related.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
So if you throw allergies.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
In the middle of it, you get the National Institute
of Allergies and Infectious Disease.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Oh, these people are going to cure me of hay fever.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
And so your view, My view is.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
That we just went through a national security, national interest
exercise that was catastrophic for science. That there was a
world science experiment and the world looked to us as
scientists to say, what the hell is going on?

Speaker 2 (33:31):
We let the world down?

Speaker 1 (33:33):
So let's unpack that. In what ways did we let
the world down?

Speaker 2 (33:37):
They wanted to know where this virus came from.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
So there's a tension between national security interests and what
they're able to tell the public and what academic scientists
even know.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
Well, do you remember when OJ was going to look
for the real killers? Yeah, so we're going to find
the origin of this virus if it kills us.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
But do you think the people who knew about national
security buy weapons were the people doing that or other
academics who who really didn't know. We have two groups.

Speaker 3 (34:06):
The first thing I want to know is I want
to put Ralph Barrick and Peter dejac on the stand,
and I want to ask them a ton of questions,
and I want to do that to Francis Collins, and
I want to do that to Anthony Fauci.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
And I want those questions to be asked not by.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
Random senators and congressmen. I want our best, heterodox pro
science thinkers coming up with exactly the right questions. And
I don't want it time limited by oh, you know,
the five minutes allotted are out. No, if this turns
out to be something that came out of a lab,

(34:40):
how many people did we just kill? I want to know,
did we kill zero? Good news? Did we kill millions?

Speaker 2 (34:48):
I want to know. This is so bad?

Speaker 3 (34:51):
And I don't think people understand within the academy that,
you know, let's imagine that you're doing development and zebra fish.
You say, well, science is basically working. Of course people
are going to have issues because it involved the Wuhan
Institute of Virology, and of course there's stuff going on
with bioweapons. You'd be naive to think that that's not okay. Well,

(35:14):
you allowed people to say that public health was science.
Public health is not science. Public health involves noble laws,
it involves coercive activities, nudging to use the cast Sunstein concept.
It's important that science cancel its credit card that it's
given to public health. No, that's not us. You're on

(35:38):
your own. You screwed up. We didn't screw up. What's more,
we know how to get to the bottom of these things.
We can figure out ohts. And the public looked to us,
and we sat there with Anthony Fauci and Francis's colins,
hands around our throat for funding, and we said, yes, boss,

(36:00):
well we're not supposed to have a boss. This is
what academic freedom is about. This is what public spirited
science is about. And yes, you can do some stuff
in terms of national interest, but when you allow something
potentially to get out of a lab and infect an
entire planet and kill millions, and then you force people
more or less through coercion, to inject themselves with something
that you're not explaining, well, you need to answer an

(36:23):
infinite number of questions from the world's smartest people, and
they need to know that they have a job on Monday,
if they do their job on a Friday.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
You and I know.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
People inside of the institutions who would have been very
capable of shouldering that burden. There was a lot of
fear inside of the universities that this was a bioweapon,
and then we pretended that people who said that on
the internet were stupid, they were crazy, they were conspiracy theorists.
How could you possibly imagine that this came out of
the wool One Institute of Virology? My god, are you

(36:53):
a racist? And the Lancet you know, fell behind, and
we had like, you know, seven seven Nobel laureates saying,
please don't shut off the grant of poor Peter Dajak.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
Come on, this is just not adult level fiction, because
if we could.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Do it over again, you're saying we should look at
all the hypothesis, keep everything on the.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
Time, saying that scientists have a right to be in
a more than equal relationship to the national interest complex. Yeah,
we are not your employees. We're not here to do
your dirty work. We're not here to cover up your mistakes.
We are public spirited individuals focused on truth. And don't

(37:36):
ever ask us to lie like this ever again.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Ever, who was asked to lie? Though, you're saying, in
terms of shutting down conversation about did this come out.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
To Jabaria was asked to lie? Let's just start there,
great unpack that.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
Okay, we have three fringe epidemiologists from fringe schools Stanford,
Harvard and Oxford. These crazy fringe epidemiologists who require, I
think from Francis's Collins and Email, a swift and devastating
takedown of their ideas. Swift and devastating takedown of their ideas. David,

(38:16):
this is madness. I talked to Jay, Jay's a friend.
Jay asked me, how did you learn how the universities
actually work so early in your career. I said, I
stumbled on it by making discoveries. I said, what do
you mean. He said, well, I was at Stanford I think,
he said, for thirty five years of my adult life
something like that. And he said I never had any

(38:39):
idea how this worked. And I said, what do you mean?
He said, It wasn't until I said, you know, we
don't do this for any pandemic. This is not the
standard operating procedure for any pandemic. What's not the standard
operating pu whatever we did in the face of COVID
two weeks to flatten the curved masks, yes, masks, no.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
This you know what.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
I had the Hong Kong flu in the end of
the sixties. It was a full on pandemic. That's what
happened during Woodstock. Woodstock took place during a pandemic. Right,
we don't remember the Hong Kong flu. Right, we're not
even allowed to call this the Wuhan flu or the
Wuhan virus. So their point was, what are we doing

(39:23):
as epidemiologists and virologists. We know that we have protocols
and we're not following them. What's happening. This is where
Francis Collins says, we need a swift and devastating takedown
of the ideas of these fringe epidemiologists. Suddenly, Ja Bodicharia
goes from being a darling of Stanford University, I think,
with an MD and a PhD in economics, some guy

(39:44):
who's like totally unassailable, to some fringe lunatic with an email.
You've never had this, David, You've never had this treatment,
and if you've ever had this treatment, you'll never forget it.
It's like you say something and it's treated like farting
in church.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
The point is that their national security interests. Jay went
against that. He didn't know that he was doing without
knowing it, and found himself shut down.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Exactly.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
The point was he was just trying to do what
he knew how to do. He's saying, I'm an expert,
let me contribute my expertise. We don't do this. This
is not standard operating protocol. So nobody pulled Jay aside
and said, hey, we may have created this. We have

(40:34):
a little bit of an issue of sensitivity with our
Chinese partners. I can't tell you everything. It's a need
to know basis. You see, in general, you have people
who know what a special access program is or an
unacknowledged special access program is, and you have people who
complain about conspiracy theories.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
So tell us what that program is.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
Well, I'm just saying it's a category of secrets stuff.
An unacknowledged special access program is some black budget thing
that we don't even talk about, and we don't even acknowledge.
It's a covert operation. It's deniable if it's ever discovered.
The right question about Wuhan and COVID is did this

(41:18):
involve a covert operation, did this involve a special access program?
And did it in particular involve an unacknowledged special access program?
And when you ask that question, you're clearly indicating that
you have knowledge of the architecture of how we keep secrets.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
As a nation. We are entitled to keep secrets. We
have to keep secrets.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
But somehow science and something called SSP or State Secrets privilege,
have collided, and now the world thinks that we're not
very good at our job. And my feeling is is
that we should say, hold my beer and we should
let our friends at Gspatial intelligen since the CIA the
NSA know that we are not in the business of

(42:04):
lying about science at this level, so let.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
Me just zoom out to the big picture. The difficulty
is that you have scientists, academic scientists like me, for example,
who I would say I've been I'm very naive to this.
It's at the interface where there's all these problems because
it's not that I or my colleagues, to my knowledge

(42:42):
ever said hey, we'll do your bidding. But you're saying
just being naive is enough of a problem.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Great point.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
Okay, So for example, we've known each other a long
time and one of the things that I loved was
mister potato head, thank you. Now, mister data is a
great idea that the brain is an all purpose computer
with default peripherals.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Correct me, if I'm wrong, that's perfect.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
So now I've got my olfactory default peripherals in my nose,
in my mouth, I've got my visual default peripherals in
my eyes and ears that pick up frequencies either of
light or of sound waves. And I've got my skin.
But the question is what if I want to start
umvelt hacking. So I take the things that I can't perceive,
like ultraviolet or infrared light or polarization, let's say, and

(43:30):
I start coming up with new peripherals, and I jack
into the general all purpose computer that is my brain.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Okay, that is.

Speaker 3 (43:37):
Such a cool idea which I've just loved. Right one day,
somebody shows up and says, your lab is locked. Why
we're concerned that what you're doing is is that you're
developing something that equips a soldier to be able to
perceive aspects of the battlefield that are currently not available
to our adversaries. We believe that what you're doing is

(44:00):
creating a technology that allows for total situational awareness of
a soldier on a battlefield to be able to see
the battlefield in a way that no one else can.
And therefore we are going to restrict your technology. You
didn't think mister potato head, it's a goofy name, right.
It's just as you talk about this stuff and you
do science, this is how you get into trouble. Mister

(44:24):
potato head is an amazing military concept.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
I see.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
So this is how scientists accidentally bump up against.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
This sort of thing at some point in their career.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Possibly.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
Let's imagine you're not part of the Manhattan Project, and
during the Manhattan Project, we tried to create disinformation that
didn't call attention to the fact that uranium and plutonium
were particularly promising for physile material.

Speaker 1 (44:49):
The Manhattan Project being where the world's great physicists all
gathered in the middle of New Mexico and Los Alamos, well,
they were actually more distributed. They were at the University
of Chicago and Oak Ridge.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Yes, the majority of them.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
We're in this group of white badges, I believe at
Les Alamos who had access to the super secret information.
And one of the things we did is we engaged
in haystacking, which is that we talked about many more
elements than we thought were relevant in order to allow our.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Haystacking means you throw out more information.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
You have a needle. I want to come up with
a haystack in order to hide it. So imagine that
you're like some guy who's not contacted by the Manhattan
Project and you say, actually, you know, it's really just
yourm and plutonium that we should be focused on.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
You're doing science as far as you know. Ah.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
But if I were that guy, I might receive a phone.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
Call, or you might find that none of your work
is published. I see, suddenly the referees keep sending things back.
I see it requires further data, promising, but incomplete.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
Got it.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
Yeah, So my point is that you haven't bumped up
against this yet. It's just you haven't thought enough about
how powerful you are and how powerful national interest is
and the way in which science and national interests interact.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
So let's get back to cowboys science then. So what
does that look like? What does that mean to you
to be able to do something outside of the standard channels.

Speaker 3 (46:21):
Well, one thing it means is that if a cowboy
bumps up into the national interest complex, the national interest
complex comes and tells you, hey, you're riding on the
range here in New Mexico or Nevada, and we've got
some aerospace stuff going on, and maybe some nuclear stuff.
We need your cooperation. You should not train any of

(46:42):
us if you can't talk to us later us being scientists,
you should not train somebody at my level if you
can't have a conversation about national interest. If you think
that you can't trust me with a secret, then don't
train me.

Speaker 1 (46:59):
You're saying the problem is scientists get trained and then
they might find something.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
A mentally retarded eight year old child would not be
able to believe some of the lies told by Tony Fauci,
like what give me an example, two weeks to flatten
the curve?

Speaker 2 (47:13):
What was that? Or we don't need masks?

Speaker 3 (47:18):
We do, we don't, we do, we don't clearly based
on whether or not there was a failure to replenish
PPE after it was drawn down, I believe during the
Bush administration, like we didn't follow surge protocols or the
idea that it was racism to ask whether or not
something emerge from a lab and to emerge from a

(47:39):
lab in Wuhan. All of this stuff is nonsense and
it's absolutely insulting. Or vaccines are safe full stop, No
they're not. Water isn't safe, full stop.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
So let me understand what this what do you see
as a solution to this?

Speaker 3 (47:57):
First thing is I think twice three times before you
train somebody at public expense.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
But you don't want to not train brilliant young physicists.
So what's a better solution?

Speaker 3 (48:09):
No, no, I do want to not train. If we
have a class Fuchs, I don't want them trained. I'm sorry,
who's class fuchs? They spy at Los Alamos. If we
have somebody who's not patriotic enough to understand that in
the wake of Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project and the
teller Ulam design, that physics is not kidding around.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
Don't train that person.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
How do you determine I don't know, especially an interview
sixteen year old kid, give them an interview, Okay, you know, Okay, yeah,
I have a different view of science than anyone else
on planet Earth. So you happen to be foolish enough
to invite me to sit down. So here's you're getting something.
I think that we are intellectual ninjas.

Speaker 3 (48:49):
We are dangerous. What we do is important. It's not cute,
it's not fun, it's not interesting. It's life and death.
Particularly within six months between nineteen fifty two and nineteen
fifty three. From November to April, everything changed, and it
changed in physics, and it changed in biology because of

(49:11):
the discovery of televite device in nineteen fifty two in
November and the explosion of ivy mic, which was a
successful thermonuclear test in the Pacific with a three stage weapon,
and because of the discovery of the repeating structure of
nucleic acid perfectly suited to being a data store translated

(49:33):
by ribosomes into protein, which are the machines that determine
everything in the world that matter. Right, This is the
structure of DNA, past structure of DNA leading to the
central dogma of translation of DNA into RNA and RNA
into protein and the genetic code. We have power that

(49:57):
is inconceivable, and if we are going to have national
interest issues, we need to have those national interests issues
out early, not late. I don't know why we're inviting
the Chinese to staff our labs. Is that because we
have an agreement with China that we are somehow going
to avoid war. But our graduate students are not graduate students,

(50:21):
they are workers. It is a cryptic labor program for
the universities and the best in the brightest is not that,
because we compete in a labor market. It's the best value,
not the best minds. Furthermore, the American product, the cowboy
scientists think Bruce Willis is in a lab code. That

(50:41):
product has high variants, but much much higher.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Mean.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
We are the best in the world at science and engineering,
full stop. We being America, We being America, and our
friends the French of the world's greatest mathematicians. You know,
some of our friends are our Russians. The West. Something
happened in the West and in Japan. It just didn't

(51:09):
happen in the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 (51:10):
What is that?

Speaker 3 (51:11):
I don't know, the Enlightenment, the scientific method, some compounding
effect from colonization. Maybe it had to do with the
exploitation of the Third World. I don't know. But something
happened where the West got insanely powerful, and the US,

(51:34):
in part because of World War two and the mismanagement
of Europe by Adolf had learned Mussolinian other became the
dominant scientific power the world has ever seen. And we're
great at what we do. We've got all these scientific
employers who just lie, lie, lie, as long as the
day is long. About how Americans are lazy and they're

(51:55):
stupid and they can't do work. And we have to
look at the fact that we're being eaten by India
and China. We're not being beaten by Indian China. We
have to worry about England and France. And by the
way Indian China are going to get there, particularly India's
choice of the ITS and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

(52:16):
China is buying up our talent left and right. We're
laying down on the job. My old officemate, Michael Kratzios,
I think, is the head of the Presidential Council on
Science and Technology as well as the Office of Science
and Technology Policy so P CASS and OSTP. I believe
that was a job previously held by Isidore Robbie, the
Nobel Laureate in physics. I love Michael Cratsios, he's a friend,

(52:40):
he's a great guy. But we are not taking science
and the destruction of science in the US as the
seventeen alarm fire that it is. We need to get
money and our own people, and we need to shove
them down the throats of our employers with government help.

(53:01):
And we need absolute scientific dominance, and it needs to
be much more public spirited, much less under the thumb
of the national security community. And it needs to be
friendly to the military. We cannot pretend that we are
not military adjacent.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
How could it be friendly to the military and not
aligned with the national security interests.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
We have to align with the national security interest The
national security community is not as good as we are.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
There are two things that I'm trying to understand, which
is so One issue is that science. I've always loved
viewing as an international fellowship.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
I can travel anywhere in the world.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
If I meet someone who studies science like I do,
we can talk sometimes just with equations, whatever it is.
We get each other so deeply and fundamentally. But it
sounds like, on the other hand, you're saying it's it
shouldn't actually be.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
I had the same feeling.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
Yeah, And then suddenly all these physicists in Iran met
an end during the recent war. When I go for
a talk at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which
by the way, is the nicest part of Bombay, really
just beautiful, I have to go through a military checkpoint
to go to my string theory talk because it's in

(54:19):
Navy Nutgart what is that. It's in the naval base. Okay,
science is not what you're trying to make it out
to me. We've got this naive singsong view of science,
which we love. Yeah, right, because when you're doing science,
you don't care where somebody was born.

Speaker 1 (54:36):
You know what. I think, it's so much of the
territory of science. If I were going to make up
a number, let me just make up ninety percent of
the territory. Really is the sing song international fellowship stuff, kumbaya,
my friend? Yeah, exactly. You could go anywhere and talk
to people about zebrafish and the neurons and what's going on.
But I see where you're coming from. There is this

(54:58):
ten percent what I make up the number where it
actually really matters. And suddenly it's serious stuff, as you said,
life and death stuff. And that's where we can't put
that all under the same umbrella because.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
It's a giant problem. David.

Speaker 3 (55:14):
Let's imagine that you care about for manifold topology, no
known problem. Let's imagine you care about elliptic curves. Suddenly
you have to do it at fort Meat because it's
involved in cryptography. The naive sing song thing. None of
us should hold that perspective.

Speaker 1 (55:36):
Could we hold that perspective by saying, look, I mean
I think I would say most of the stuff I do,
maybe not the potato, and you didn't think you're correct.
I did not think about that. But let's say plenty
of other stuff that I've done about sleeping and dreaming
and brain plasticy and vision and visual illusion.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
How important sleep is to our Tier one operators in
Delta force and ground branch at the CIA. We don't
You don't know.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
I'm just saying I agree, I don't know the things
that I do when I'm stepping on something that This
is my point.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Is we can't afford this extended childhood as scientists.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
I think that's an excellent point. Here's the part I'm
trying to understand, though, is it sounds like you're saying
we need to mature as scientists to understand.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
Wow, there's real national security interests here.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
But I think I'm also hearing you saying we don't
want to be bossed around by national correctists.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
No, but we need to be I'm really glad we're
having this. This is a very difficult conversation, so nobody
I'd rather be having it within you. People don't understand
my perspective on universities, on science and national interest. Great
science and good science are continuing to happen inside of universities.
There's much less great science. There's much more good science.

(56:58):
But I am a talks regularly at Caltech and UCLA
probably should be going to USC. I don't see any
of the tech leaders who are opining about science, and
any talks that I ever go to, it's just academicians.
There's nobody from outside. So I am a huge defender
that the universities are not over. Standard thing in my
tech circles is yep, science is over, universities are over.

(57:20):
Not true, far from true. I am also a major
critic of science, saying the public can see that we
blew it oh on COVID multiple ways. We're not honest
about things like the measurement of inflation. I can promise
you that. And they are detecting that there's a hidden

(57:41):
hand and that scientists are somehow not acting in the
public interest. And I believe that there's really something to
that and that we scientists have to talk about that.
I believe that the national interest community and the national
security community are extremely important I believe in national interest,
and I believe in national security. I believe that many
people in that community are not good enough to be

(58:03):
our bosses. Ah, and I believe that we are not
good enough to be our bosses because part of being
a grown up in that idiom is to say, I
think about quarks. Quarks make up nucleons, and nucleons make
up nuclear weapons. So yes, I don't know whether something
I'm going to discover or might have a security implication.

(58:23):
So more or less, we've got all of these contradictions.
We're not playing at an adult level, and that I
want our national security community to get better. I want
scientists to be full partners. I want us to be
pushing back on particularly bad national interest to people and saying,
don't ever force me to repeat these laws to the public.

(58:45):
And nobody's even having anything remotely like this conversation so
far as I know it, I'm basically having it with
myself on podcasts.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
Would you see this as being a self maturation among
scientists and among national security people, or would you see
a somebody in charge of that, the president and whoever,
is saying okay, guys, everyone get to the table.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
I think Michael Cratzios should be relocated to some terrific
office because I think he's an able and capable person.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Tell us about him.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
It doesn't matter, he's not a leading scientist. That office,
that team that advises the president should not be selected
for on presidential loyalty to Donald Trump, full stop. I'm sorry.
I understand that Donald Trump has been treated in some
ways unfairly by the outside world, and that he has
a reason to surround himself with loyalists. Science is not loyal.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (59:37):
You can ask scientists minorly to hold off on something
or to play ball, but you cannot ask them to
just lie.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
Right.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
We need somebody with universal respect. The Jason's pe cast
and OST and the National Academy of Sciences and the
National Science Board need to be top people and team players,

(01:00:09):
and a lot of players with one another, team players
with the national interest community. Okay, and this is gonna
sound contradictory, but it isn't massive individualists. It's a very
tricky thing.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
Leo Zillard, who wrote the original letter to start off
the Manhattan Project, wasn't allowed into the Manhattan Project because
it was too independent.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
So you're saying the solution is what we need is
a maturation across both communities. But I want to make
sure I understand what would be the path there that
you that you might see. I mean, maybe you think
it's just a difficult, thorny problem, but do you see
twinny squint.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
Suddenly Donald Trump invites a list of the top American scientists,
not good scientists, but very often great scientists. Tomorrow lago
the same way all our friends in the entertainment world,
the business world, the finance world, the tech world have gone,
and he says, we are going to have a scientific

(01:01:16):
renaissance full stop. There's no way we are going to
continue to destroy our seed corn for technology. We need
to know. I hear you guys are suffering. I hear
you guys are precarious. I want to know why nobody
stood up Defauci and Collins the way we needed them to.
What does it take to get academic freedom. We understand
that we've tasked you with protecting the nation and making

(01:01:38):
us rich and powerful, and you're not participating. How do
we get you back to second homes? How do we
get you retirements? How do we get you raising three
to four kids on one income? With help in the house.
You're our a team man, So my feeling is suck
it up, open your pocketbook, shut your mouth, learn to
deal with science as what it is, and learn to

(01:02:02):
deal with scientists as equals and team players. And don't ever, ever, ever, ever,
take the world's smartest people and feed them a B
minus lie and expect them to shut up or repeat
it because you control whether or not they can function.
It is time for the scientists to mutiny, not against
the United States of America, but to mutiny against our

(01:02:24):
agreement with the National Interest Complex. You guys broke the deal.
We had something called the Endless Frontier. You pass something
called the Mansfield Amendment around nineteen seventy, which removed military
funding from Blue Sky research. You've been eroding US ever since.
You passed the Immigration Act of nineteen ninety based on
a fraud that you perpetrated through the National Science Foundation

(01:02:49):
in the Reagan era under Eric Bloch. Enough enough, you
were going to treat scientists properly, and if you don't
expect them to move to China and then you're going
to deal with American scientists helping the Chinese. I just
really don't know, is there no one in the national

(01:03:10):
intelligence complex, the national interest complex, national security complex, who
has thought about the fact that we are destroying ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:03:20):
I just don't grasp it destroying ourselves in terms of
not helping scientists blossom and thrive. What do you think
about a million dollar salary per year for scientists for
a scientists? What do you think about bonuses that look
like bonuses granted to investment bankers? Right now, I think

(01:03:41):
there's a million dollar prize for solving P equals NP
and a million dollar prize for the Remont hypothesis. Like,
I think you're missing a few zeros on that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:51):
You're saying it should be much more.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Reach deep into your heart and into your checkbook, and
when you get serious, come back to me with a number.
How how dare you? I mean, who are these people?
A million dollars for the Remonnt hypothesis?

Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
And your point is if they offered way more than that,
let's it was fifty million dollars for doing that, you'd
attract more people there and it would be more reflective
of what the value is.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
Tell me something you're interested in AI. When do you
think the large language model thing reached its point of
just unbelievable discontinuity with respect to the intellectual underpinnings. What
paper would you associate with?

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
Twenty seventeen, Google Brain publishes the Transformer Model.

Speaker 3 (01:04:34):
Yeah, now that paper is called the Tension is all
you need?

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Yes? How many authors are there on it?

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
Three?

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
I remember and it's eight?

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
Oh okay?

Speaker 3 (01:04:45):
What are their names? Any of them? Oops? Tell me something.
What are some names that you associate with Google?

Speaker 1 (01:04:53):
Probably all the ones that come to mind or the
executives give me who are you thinking? Well, you know
Larry and SERGEI and Eric Schmid so on, anyone else?
The people at Google X Maybe Jeff Okay, I mean
I would name Jack Cadari and Adam Brown and other
friends of mine who had.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
An expert shout out to Adam Brown. Yeah, quantum gravity
going on at Google?

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
Yeah okay, but of course demis.

Speaker 3 (01:05:19):
Okay, But my point is this is what we're doing.
People create value, and you know I want to hear. Okay,
he got plane rich from that paper? Hmm, by which
you mean he could afford a private plane? Yeah, okay,
you know he used to fly from lax to to JFK.

(01:05:43):
Now he flies from Van Eys to Teeterborough. I used
to swim naked with rowrobot off of his place in
Martha's Vineyard. He was a Harvard professor, Casper Gratstein professor,
and he had a second home on Martha's Vineyard. That's
normal professors on Professor's Row. It was named Professor's Row
because professors could afford the houses there. We've had a

(01:06:05):
massive blowout of the genie coefficients. I want scientists to
participate in the world they created for everyone else.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
One question is in the same way that you mentioned
Fuchs before. It's very difficult to determine during somebody's career,
first of all, whether they're patriot or they have other interests.
And it's also difficult to determine who is going to
make contributions and who is not. Really, it is because
science is such a complex road. I know so many

(01:06:34):
smart people, surely you do to who spent their lives
doing hard work on things that happened to never yield something.
And other people who are playing the what was that
game with where you uncover squares with Mind's Minecraft? Not Minecraft,
it's the Mind Sweeper mina. I'm sorry, Yeah, where you
know you happen to click on a square when something

(01:06:54):
huge opens up, and that, unfortunately is a matter of luck.
Someometimes I have a totally different view on that. Okay,
tell me yours.

Speaker 3 (01:07:01):
When somebody gets really lucky, really early, it often changes
their brain chemistry, it changes how they swagger, how they
approach the world. So in part, really good fortune, really
early in life is a good thing can be. Yeah,
that's what happened with Krick and Watson. Well, it didn't
happen with Quick because Creek was in his thirties. It
happened with Watson because he.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
Was, like, thirties is still pretty good. And come on, yeah, well,
Krick was one of the great scientists of the I
don't half at the twenty in the beginning of the
twenty for such old man, my friend. No, he wasn't.

Speaker 3 (01:07:34):
He was in his thirties. It's different in biology, the
whole thing has shifted. Well, but you don't know why
it's different in biology.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
See, it's because it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:41):
Takes years to get a feeling for the organism. No
it doesn't. Let me, let me explain why it happens.
I'll tell me your opinion. Yes, well tell me.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
The American Society for Cell Biology ASCB worked with me,
and I went around and I got to ask, I
don't know, twenty twenty five of the world's top principal
investigators why things were the way they are.

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
Oh boy. We were not allowed to publish our findings
in science until we took out our findings from the paper.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Tell me what kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:08:15):
One of the things that we collected in interviews with
principal investigators is a discovery that when they did an analysis,
they found that an unusually high number of female principal
investigators changed their research patterns after the birth of their
first child, that they found motherhood so fulfilling that it

(01:08:35):
competed with what they were doing previously to run their labs.
The claim was, we then decided to push academic freedom
closer and closer to the point of geriatric pregnancy, so
that we would not be surprised and that female principal
investigators who had previously been all out in terms of

(01:08:58):
their research would have zero or one children, but not
multiple children and not get bogged down. And if you
actually go back to the fifties and you look at
some of the most successful female biologists before women's liberation,
they were often fairly well to do and had help

(01:09:19):
in the house, and we interviewed some people, for example,
who had a child in the next day, brought the
child into a playpen in the lab despite the presence
of radioactive markers and mutagens, to show how serious they were.
So my claim is that we've developed an entire rationale

(01:09:45):
for why it now takes so long to become a
full professor in biology. But it actually has different reasons.
And when we put these quotes, because I recorded these
on microconsettes, when we put these quotes into the paper,
Science magazine, which is one of the top journals in biology,

(01:10:06):
said you're going to have to take out these conclusions
or we can't publish it. So I have a publication
in Science, and the only reason that I have a
publication in a top journal is that my co authors
agree to take the findings out of the paper. This
is how the game is really played. People say, well, Eric,

(01:10:29):
you know you're against peer review because you can't pass it.
I have peer reviewed papers. The issue is is that
I know what it is. They won't let you publish
the most interesting stuff if it disrupts the field.

Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
So this brings us back to the main theme of
cowboys side. So what should that look like or what
could that look like? First of all, we agree that
there are great scientists and good scientists. This is your
framing of it, which I agree with. The great scientists
those are the ones that you want to do the
cowboys science, whereas the good scientists are the ones sort of,

(01:11:18):
you know, doing the hard, good work, but not coming
up with the giant new frameworks on stuff they could.
They could. But I'm just trying to frame your framework
in a hopefully act.

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
But again, I'm not against.

Speaker 1 (01:11:31):
You have nothing against.

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
The good scientists might come up with something you don't expect.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
They might click on the square and mind sweeper that
opens up something exactly exactly. Okay, So, but how do
we encourage cowboy science? How do we make sure that
the Jim Watson's and the so many others.

Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
We need national interest exemptions from the Civil Rights Act,
we need slush funds, We need a lack of oversight.
We need to be able to determine who the smart
people are based on our own determinations, and screw off
if you don't agree with us.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
How is that consistent with national security interest?

Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
This is what we did before we had a bunch
of really crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
People, good crazy, I see mean good crazy mostly okay,
but these are strong spices. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:12:18):
If you look at Elon Musk, he makes his own
rules every chance he gets. Our guys made their own rules.
We had Elon Musk's and science.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Who are you thinking of when you say that Alexander
Grothendieg is a door singer Sidney Brenner. See you got
Reverend Sidney Brenner. Yeah, I knew him as well at
the Amazing, Amazing guy.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):
Yeah, I'm not supposed to know who that is. But like,
these are my heroes. These people in general, they need
to not ask mommy and daddy whether they can fund somebody.
They need to not worry about their students being able
to get a job. They pick up the phone and
they say my student needs a job, and that they
put it down and there's not some process.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
M I wonder about that. Let me give you a
quick analogy. In Silicon Valley, what I see are startups,
young startups. You got three people in a garage things,
And then you see what happens as companies mature, when
they become Google and Facebook and Amazon and so on,
and they have to or they feel that they have
to put the rule books in place and make these
judges a number.

Speaker 3 (01:13:23):
I think it's like fifteen employees and suddenly the rules
change on. Yeah, that's right, That's what I'm trying to say, right, So, okay,
so how do we.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
Need national interest exemptions for science?

Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
I see you're saying the national interests. They're the ones
who in this future, in this utopia that that we're
trying to get to what it could look like. They watch,
they see who the young scientists are who are doing
something very bold, and they say, you have an exemption.

Speaker 3 (01:13:50):
We're going to Yeah, I see if there's some Okay,
if there's some c elegans researcher who also wants to
have her own OnlyFans account, I may not be thrilled,
but that is a life choice. But I don't want
to tell her that she has to leave the academy
because she's behaving inappropriately. If people want to take drugs

(01:14:15):
and go to Burning Man, they need to take drugs
and they need to go to Burning Man. If people
want to tell a joke about two imms go into
a bar, they need to be able to tell a
joke about two imms go into a bar, get out
of the way of great science. We know how to
do this. We need to go back to being the
United States of America. We need to fire Claudine Gay

(01:14:36):
from her professorship at Harvard to send a message we don't.

Speaker 1 (01:14:39):
Do that anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:14:40):
We don't do rich we don't protect plagiarists and pretend
to people. I remember getting my Harvard Alumni magazine, and
I think that the cover article when Clauding Gay was
being announced was a scholars scholar and I knew from that.
It's like, you're trying too hard. We know who's good
more or less. We don't always get it right, but

(01:15:02):
imagine fifty percent of the time we get it right.
Let us do our work.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
Let me make sure I understand one thing, though. So
if you say, hey, these scientists over here are really
brave and bold and smart, and we're going to give
them national security exemption, what does that exemption mean? Does
that mean that I don't know?

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
Ad mean that they don't have to hire? According to some.

Speaker 1 (01:15:26):
Here's the question. If let's say one of these brilliant
young scientists comes up with the next thing, the next
thing that can be turned into a great, big weapon,
the exemption means that they're free to publish that or
they're not free to it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
What does it mean.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
Look, I think it's important to understand what I'm advocating.
I'm advocating that we begin a new relationship based on
the fact that the National interest complex welched on the
last one. We had an agreement, you broke it. The
agreement is called the Endless Frontier of vanavar Bush. So
you welched on a series of tacit agreements.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Fine, in the agreement was scientists can do anything they want.

Speaker 3 (01:16:06):
The agreement was that more or less science was a rebellious,
fiercely independent part of the National interest complex. The National
interest complex agreed to fund us through universities, that that
would be where they would do their the line share
of their research. That we would have academic freedom, that

(01:16:26):
they could call on us in times of war, that
they would not call on us frivolously.

Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
We have an agreement.

Speaker 3 (01:16:31):
It's a series of interlocking tacit understanding. Some of them
made explicit, most of them not.

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
I see, and that has changed. But you're saying, let's
get back to that. Let's get back to the spirit
that we want. We want to get back to the
spirit of the endless frontier. So endless Frontier take two.

Speaker 3 (01:16:48):
Given that you welched on our last agreement, so I
think we need to reassert ourselves and say we're not
playing ball.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
And endless front of your Part two looks like what
it looks like. Hey, here's a brilliant scientist. I'm going
to make sure that they have what they need to
do their science.

Speaker 3 (01:17:04):
We train people, we plan to employ. We stop pretending
that we are going to train you up only to
abandon you to say I can't believe you ever got
the idea you were going to have a research career.
See if you look at Norman Steenrod, who is a
mathematician active in I don't know the forties and fifties,

(01:17:25):
all of his students survive to become professors. He has
twenty three or something except for the last one around
nineteen seventy two seventy three. And if you just take
in and you raise it to hire and higher power,
you can't keep having twenty three offspring and expecting them

(01:17:46):
all to become professors. So you need something like you
social employment, where most of us don't end up producing anyone.
But you need to employ them, and you need to
stop pretending that the graduate students are.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
Students, particularly foreign exchange students.

Speaker 3 (01:18:03):
They're not. They're workers. They're workers who do not have
protections of workers because you've classified them as students.

Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
But the idea is the situation where now is those
students are very unlikely to become professors someday because there's
just too many.

Speaker 3 (01:18:16):
Of them and we're training our rivals. I look, nobody
has thought this through. This is a lot like what
happened with USAID. USAID was a slush fund for the
CIA and the State Department. So you look at it,
it doesn't make any sense. Why are we funding a
transgender opera in Bolivia? I would imagine we are trying

(01:18:39):
to topple the Bolivian regime and trans issues are fabulously divisive. Okay,
now you can decide whether that's a good thing or
a bad thing. But we didn't just fund that stupidly, right,
that was an issue of stake craft. Well, science is

(01:19:00):
also an instrument of state craft, but science is also
just science. So what I'm trying to say is that
rather than having these colleagues who put their finger in
their cheek and say gosh, she will you know, she whiz?
You sound like a conspiracy theorist. For God's sakes, man,
you're part of the National Interest complex, act like it.
The Department of Energy is the Department of Physics. It's

(01:19:21):
the old AEC turned into the Department of Energy by
Jimmy Carter. What was the Atomic Energy Commission?

Speaker 2 (01:19:30):
You know?

Speaker 3 (01:19:30):
So the idea is, well, maybe it's oil and gas. Really,
is that what they told you? We have a fake
cryptic system and it used to work when there were
smart people who could do the crypsis, and then around
about nineteen seventy it all broke. So we're now like
fifty five years into a cryptic system that's getting weaker
and weaker all the time. We need a new van

(01:19:52):
of var Bush and it needs to come through the
Office of Science and Technology Policy OSTP, and it needs
to go through Pea CAST, and it needs to go
through the National Academy's complex. And it needs to be
a highly elite and the elite have a terrible name
because the people we've been calling elite aren't so elite

(01:20:14):
surgeons still have a great name, or elite athletes have
a great name, or elite Tier one operators in special
forces have a great name, but the elite has a
terrible name, because that's what we associate with Davos, people
gathering on their private jets to tell us to lower
our carbon footprints. Right, So basically we need to go
back to public spirited elite scientists. We're very well compensated,

(01:20:37):
very well protected. We're public spirited who do not allow
themselves to get pushed around trivially, but in a pinch,
know how to behave as patriotic Americans. And we need
to lead the West, and we need to help out
our European friends and our Japanese allies. This just isn't
that hard. It's just nobody gets it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:59):
So what would you say, She's the path, the best
path for us to get there.

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
Hold a conference of smart people, do it quietly.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
Like in a silamar where you're inviting the who exactly
you write the national interest people as well as the scientist.

Speaker 3 (01:21:15):
You figure out who knows how to play okay, and
you do it as a closed conference and everybody checks
their phone at the door, and you have the people
in the fields that really matter. I want cryptography people,
I want people who do fundamental physics. I want people
in molecular biology, and you say, look, we had a deal,

(01:21:42):
what is our new version of that deal. Because it's
not poverty, it's not being precarious, it's not begging for
a grill. Please Tony Fauci continue my funding. We need
to tell Fauci in Collins to take a hike when
they are behaving counter to the interests of the United
States of America, to the interests of science. The public

(01:22:02):
needs to be able to rely on us for ground
truth ninety eight percent of the time and the two
percent that they can't, We've got to be very careful.
I understand that you have, you know, weaponized answers. I'm
not saying be naive, publish everything science, science science, but
for the most part, we have to be absolutely reliable.

(01:22:24):
And we need to save theoretical physics.

Speaker 2 (01:22:27):
First.

Speaker 3 (01:22:29):
Fundamental physics is in such bad shape and you can't
peer review your way out of it because all the
peers are infected with the same mind virus. So you're
just going to get more of the same. If you
keep saying peer peer peer, you need to ask, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:22:46):
You're referring, for example, string theory.

Speaker 3 (01:22:48):
Here, I'm referring to particle theory of the standard model
the basis of general relativity need to be advanced. In
Neither of these theories is measured by their fundamental constituent
called the Lagrangian or the action has really moved in

(01:23:10):
fifty two years?

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):
And has it not moved because it's so successful, or
you're saying it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):
It's very successful. Okay, But imagine that you knew.

Speaker 3 (01:23:22):
Twenty three of the sixty four codons in biology, and
fifty two years later you still knew exactly that number
of codons and you didn't have the rest of the
genetic code.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
Enough in that analogy, though those twenty three are still correct,
we're just looking for the remainder. But is that how
you see that? Pretty much?

Speaker 3 (01:23:42):
The standard model is amazing, But you know again, crocodile
rock is amazing, and that came from the same exact era,
and I cannot stand listening to crocodile Rock on repeat
for fifty two years.

Speaker 1 (01:23:58):
But is it that it's a hard problem and that's
why the other codons haven't been figured out.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):
Yeah, it's a very hard problem.

Speaker 3 (01:24:06):
But it gets a lot harder when you only listen
to suspiciously ten leaders of the field who all are
interchangeably convinced of the same wrong things, which is quantum
gravity was not what we were Well, it's not even
string theory. Who said quantum gravity was the task that

(01:24:27):
we all needed to get on in nineteen eighty three
eighty four, who said that the standard model is ugly.
It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Who said
that we stopped listening to our colleagues and we call
them names, as opposed to saying, well, do you have
a different idea. There is no world in which our

(01:24:49):
physics thing makes sense except for a security context. So
either we now have the world's worst accidental culture in
fundamental physics, or we have a security regime in which
we're not supposed to actually advance and what we're doing
is safe.

Speaker 1 (01:25:09):
Does that mean that in that model that somebody has
broken through that wall and they met Well, we don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:25:17):
I mean, I'm almost positive that we don't have a
fundamental theory. But you know, we know that Marc Andreessen
and Ben Horowitz were in the White House during the
Biden administration and they said they were told don't invest
in AI startups because we're not going to allow them

(01:25:37):
to continue and these guys said, well, what do you mean,
it's just based on math.

Speaker 2 (01:25:42):
You can't outlaw math.

Speaker 3 (01:25:44):
And they said, we will classify math just the way
we classified fields of theoretical physics. Hmm, okay, so nobody
knows what that means. Didn't sound like it was just
nuclear physics. I highly recommend everyone go to a website
run by Alex Wellerstein. It was at the Stevens Institute

(01:26:05):
of Technology in New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
And he is.

Speaker 3 (01:26:10):
I think the world expert on the atomic security. And
you can learn all the things we did around science
around nuclear weapons from his sites.

Speaker 2 (01:26:21):
So we can just know.

Speaker 3 (01:26:23):
We don't have to guess or speculate as to what
it looks like when national interest in science run into
each other.

Speaker 2 (01:26:28):
We can say, oh, here's what happened.

Speaker 3 (01:26:31):
Like.

Speaker 1 (01:26:33):
Scientists ideas were shut down from the public that kind
of thing, or what are we talking about?

Speaker 3 (01:26:39):
Newspaper stories were spiked, disinformation was distributed in the scientific literature.
Volumes were taken off of the shelves that thought were
thought to be advantageous to the enemy. Review boards were
set up that would intermediate between journals and researchers in

(01:27:01):
case somebody submitted something that might have security implications, so
we know exactly what it looks like when the national
interest complex decides that something like neutrons is too dangerous
to simply do as g wiz science.

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):
And so as a result of this, if you tell me, well, Eric,
that's conspiracy theorizing, I'm just going to tell you, go
find a blog called restricted Data. Knock yourself out and
tell me why you imagine that secret facilities, secret protocols,
secret agreements aren't all through national interests interfaces with the

(01:27:41):
scientific community, because clearly we know that that it has
been the case. We have it documented eight ways to Sunday.
Why are you claiming that this is somehow the product
of an overactive imagination. You're just not well read.

Speaker 1 (01:27:53):
But in some sense you're in favor of that right,
in the sense of the call it the two percent
of science that you think for national security interests should
be masked, you would or wouldn't be in favor of.

Speaker 3 (01:28:07):
I'm in favor of getting rid of the g willakers
attitude towards science.

Speaker 2 (01:28:15):
It's garish. Science is fun enough, Science is too important.

Speaker 3 (01:28:23):
We have the right to national security interests, and we
have the right to not have national security interests completely
destroy our credibility with each other, the public, and the world.

Speaker 2 (01:28:33):
And so the.

Speaker 3 (01:28:34):
Issue is, I want a high resolution relationship where we
think a great deal about these issues. We continue to
going back. If you can't be done in an open environment,
take it into the national labs. If it can't be
done in the national labs, do it in an unannounced facility.
But what I don't want is I don't want us

(01:28:55):
training up super smart people who can see through the liawes,
not being told that they're part of some sort of
agreement that they never signed up for, and sitting there
getting destroyed through let's say, COVID influence campaigns, where suddenly
you know, every time you say anything in public, there's
one hundred and fifty accounts that suspiciously never have people

(01:29:18):
behind them that are constantly starking at you. I mean,
whatever this thing is, it's intolerable, and we should we
should put a bullet through it. We should drive a
stake through its heart and kill off whatever this thing
is in favor of a reasonable agreement between the scientific world,
the tech world, and the national interest world.

Speaker 1 (01:29:36):
And your point is that if scientists grow up understanding
that that's the situation that the stuff they do matters.
Then if you're okay with this, there are plenty of
couriers for you. Yeah, if you want to believe that
somehow science is just about open inquiry and g whiz. Look,
I'm all for cowboys, I'm all for hyper independence. I

(01:29:58):
view iin Rand as a collectivist. I am off the
charts individualist. But I'm not stupid.

Speaker 3 (01:30:04):
And so my claim is is that an Oppenheimer of
Annoyman a Fineman worked within a world in which they
respected the national security complex. Put somebody at the top,
like a Leslie Groves and you'll get compliance. But you
can't have this as some sort of low level administrative thing.
This is life and death to the United States. And

(01:30:26):
China is going to eat our lunch. I guarantee it.
They will hire our best people away because we are
in some sort of a mental spiral.

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
We're going straight down the drain.

Speaker 3 (01:30:37):
Because we don't think that a scientist should be able
to check in at the four seasons without thinking about it,
that they shouldn't be able to fly business class, that
they shouldn't have a retirement and a second home. And
I just I want the people who think that that's
garish and that this is like, as the phrase goes,
welfare queens and white lab coats. I want them to

(01:31:00):
choke on this particular fur ball, and I want them
to recognize. Now, what you did is you took the
world's greatest scientific community. You asked them to keep you safe,
you asked them to keep you rich, and you told
them to stay outside while you held a party.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
Enough, it's over.

Speaker 1 (01:31:20):
That was my conversation with Eric Weinstein. So wrapping this up. Generally,
when we talk about science, we think of discoveries as
having a pretty simple structure. A paper against published, or
a breakthrough gets announced, maybe a prize is awarded. But
the truth is that underneath every insight is a huge

(01:31:40):
scaffolding of institutions and incentives and traditions and also unspoken rules.
That scaffolding shapes which questions feel askable and which ideas
feel risky, in which paths seem invisible until someone insists
on walking them anyway. Conversations like today's remind us that

(01:32:04):
science is not just a method for understanding the world.
It is also a human system with pressures and power
dynamics that influence its trajectory, paying attention to that system,
questioning how it works and who it serves, and how
it evolves. This might be as important as any single experiment.

(01:32:34):
Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on
my substack and check out Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on
YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments
until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is inner Cosmos.