October 12, 2020 • 19 mins
Malcolm Gladwell joins host Dr. Eric Lander for a conversation about science, society, and how the decisions we make today will impact generations to come. At a moment when science is becoming more important than ever for meeting the challenges ahead, can we solve the growing tensions between society and science?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Welcome to a Brave New Planet. My name is
Eric Lander. I'm your host for this new podcast. In
the upcoming episodes, we'll explore frontiers of science and technology
(00:38):
that are both exciting and challenging. Artificial intelligence that's unleashing
artistic creativity, but also enabling deep fakes that undermine truth
and democracy. A plan to modify the Earth's atmosphere to
hold off climate change that might buy time or might
keep us from solving the real problem. A new genetic
(01:00):
technology for engineering nature that might prevent malaria but might
get out of hand. Computer algorithms that can diagnose diseases,
tell companies who to hire, and judges had a sentence,
but might also automate or human biases. And we'll ask
whether it's time to turn war over to robots. We'll
(01:24):
look at the amazing upsides and also ask what could
possibly go wrong. But for this short first episode, I
thought i'd better explain who I am and why I'm here.
I'm a scientist. I grew up in New York City,
a product of the public schools, where I fell in
(01:46):
love with math. Not long after I did my PhD
in mathematics, I became captivated by genetics. By luck, that
was just a few years before biologists began dreaming about
reading out the complete human genetic code, all three billion
letters of DNA. I got involved in this crazy idea
(02:08):
called the Human gene Project, and became one of the
leaders of that international collaboration. As the work neared its end,
I helped launch a research institute, the Broad Institute of
MT and Harvard, that I still lead today, to apply
that same collaborative spirit to help a new generation of
remarkable scientists propel the understanding and treatment of human diseases
(02:31):
outside the laboratory. I've always cared a lot about how
science affects the world. For eight years, I also co
chaired the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
for the Obama White House. We got a chance to
wrestle with some of the nation's biggest opportunities and problems,
from energy to influenza, cybersecurity to aging, and through it all,
(02:55):
I've continued to teach introbiology to MIT students, who every
year restore my faith in the future. But that future
is on the line today in ways it's never been before.
The decisions we make or don't make will affect us
all for generations to come. So to kick off Brave
(03:16):
New Planet, I wanted to talk with someone who has
boundless curiosity and might help us think about what's at stake.
I reached out to Malcolm Gladwell. He's the author of
books like Talking to Strangers and Outliers and the host
of the podcast Revisionist History. To my delight, he agreed
to join us. Malcolm Gladwell, Welcome to Brave New Planet.
(03:41):
Thank you, Eric. I am delighted to be here and
fascinated to learn more about your new podcast. But before
we get into it, I wanted to talk a little
bit about you. I'm very curious about how your initial
ideas about science were formed and why what led you
into this world in the first place. You know, looking
back growing up in New York as a kid in
(04:03):
the nineteen sixties, it was pretty amazing. I was raised
by my mom and we didn't have a lot of money,
but she figured out everything free and everything cheap that
you could do, dragonist to museums. She let us stay
home and watch all the space launches, and then nineteen
sixty four sixty five was the World's Fair, the New
York City World's Fair, and that was amazing. There was
(04:27):
this the Unisphere, the big globe that was the symbol
of the World's Fair. It's it's the thing that gets
destroyed in Men in Black at the end of the movie,
and there was a guy in a jet pack who
flew over the unisphere and they told us all we
would be going to work in jetpacks. I still am
waiting for my jetpack. But there were all these other things.
(04:48):
There was like the ge Carousel of Progress where they
were singing There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. And there
was Belle Labs premiering the picture phone, and du Pont
with its wonderful world of Chemistry, which I think became
the better slogan better living through chemistry. And they had
this time capsule that we're going to dig up in
(05:10):
five thousand years. And it was also the era of
Star Trek, where everybody, all races and genders, we were
going to go out together and boldly go and so
it was a period of like infinite possibility, amazing optimism
about what you could do in the world. There are
obviously lots of tensions bubbling under the surface, but as
(05:31):
a seven eight year old kid I wasn't wear any
of that yet, and so I think I was formed
in this world that thought science was going to be
incredibly important to progress and the world was gonna it
was just going to become a better and better place.
I'm amazed, like in your description of that, how frictionless
your access to knowledge as a kid was seems to
(05:53):
have been. I mean, all the stuff's on your doorstep,
like the New York's Fairest. I mean, I don't know
what subway you're taking, or maybe a couple of buses,
but but I mean the point is, like, you don't
have to have a lot of money. You're going to
lost a dollar for kids to get in. Yeah, now
dollar was worth more than but still, you know, my
mom dragged us fourteen times to the World's Fair and
(06:14):
it was she was amazing. Fourteen times. I love it.
You remember how many times? Oh yeah, So you have
this coming out of your childhood, you inherit, this sense
of infinite possibility. What happens to that sense as you
get older? Is it still there? Well? It's interesting, I mean,
where does that sense come from? An infinite possibility? It's
(06:37):
it's no accident that the nineteen sixties are like that.
It's after World War Two, where science played a big
role in winning the war, radar, early computers, penicillin, of course,
atomic bombs, and the US makes this decision after the
war that science is going to be a cornerstone of
(06:57):
society going forward, that we're going to fund science at universities,
and we're gonna train people, and we'll have this virtuous
cycle of public knowledge producing technologies and wars and companies.
And then of course, nine months after I'm born, Sputnik
goes up. I don't remember it, but I know it
(07:18):
was exactly nine months after I was born, and like
everything goes into overdrive. Science is central to the survival
of the country. We pass laws for science education, we
start the space race to get a man on the
moon first. So you know, this is the world that
shaped that New York City of the nineteen sixties was
(07:39):
the sense that science was going to discover what's true,
technology was going to figure out what's possible, and society
reaps the benefits. And that assumption, that idea that the
scientific method, you know, you figure out what's true by evidence,
not authority. It's all about honesty, not advocacy. There was
(08:01):
a set of assumptions that underlay that world where this
country really bought into the ideas of science, and it
paid off amazing dividends. You know, through the rest of
the twentieth century. You think about all the things that
happened from what had to have been a bit of
a crazy bet. The US didn't invest in science a
(08:22):
lot before the war. But afterwards you look at the
things that start happening. You get polio vaccines, measles, and
smallpox vaccines and eradicate smallpox. And you get computer technology
and the Internet and GPS systems and like Google searches
come out of a National Science Foundation grant, and then
(08:45):
molecular biology and gene cloning and this Human Genome Project
I got very involved in, and onward and onward and onward,
and you get these industries that grow up around all
these things. So I think it paid off in huge ways.
And what's interesting is it's only accelerated since then in
terms of the science, even though there are a lot
(09:07):
of tensions, you know from the any of you of
the science. You look at the last two decades or
so and you start seeing, you know, artificial intelligence, we
can translate languages, by computers and spot lung cancers by computers,
and people are making self driving cars and quantum computers.
And in biology you have you know, new therapies for cancer, immunotherapies,
(09:32):
and this Human Genome project where we spent three billion
dollars to read one genome. It now costs a couple
hundred bucks to read a genome. There are technologies that
let you edit genomes like Crisper, and just keeps going
and going, and I think, if anything, it's accelerating in
terms of the science and the impact on society. I've
(09:53):
just curious, Eric, you've chosen to do this now? Is
there a reason why now? I mean, you could have
done this five years ago, You could have done this
five years from now. So there's something compelling you at
this moment in time. Yeah. Absolutely. It is so glaringly
out obvious that we are going to need science to
solve a lot of the problems ahead. Climate change. It's
(10:16):
in our face right now. It was theoretical to people,
but the last three or four years, it's so obvious
we're gonna have to solve that. The pandemic that we're
living through right now, it's clear there's no way to
solve pandemics without a lot more science than we've brought
to bear on it so far. And then I think
about things like Alzheimer's. It's going to be costing US
(10:39):
a trillion dollars a year as the usages, and we
really don't know how to do anything other than support people.
So we've got to come up with solutions, and those
solutions that got to come from science. I could go
on and on, and so it seemed like a moment
when we just had to decide are we going to
(11:02):
rally a world together around science. It's Matt Damon's famous
line from the movie The Martian when he branded on
Mars and he knows nobody's coming back for him soon,
and he says, I guess there's only one option. I'm
going to have to science the shit out of this.
We're gonna have to do that right now. And I
think the last several years have made that so apparent.
(11:26):
We really have to reconnect between science and society because
that connection is going to be so important going forward.
Do you think if you were an eight year old today,
you would have to describe what your eight year old
self today would think if is it the same sense
of infinite possibility. I think there's a frustration right now,
a sense that we're not doing all we can with this,
(11:49):
and there's a lot of reasons for it. The bright
shininess of science would discover the truth and technologies would
show us what's possible, and society would reap the benefits.
That simple social compact is getting frayed in some ways,
and there's a lot of different ways it's getting fred
(12:10):
it's not surprising that after sixty years things would would
begin to get a little tattered. But you know, if
you think about it, science sometimes conflicts with economic interests.
We began to see that companies might start attacking science
because they really don't like the answers. I think the
(12:31):
first case was when it became clear that cigarettes caused cancer,
and tobacco companies decided to pay people to put up
smoke screens and question the evidence. And then, of course,
climate changes is where we see it most today, where
despite massive amounts of evidence, the solutions just deny it.
(12:53):
You know, we've got massive wildfires in California, and we've
got wildfires a couple of years ago above the Arctic circle.
We got glaciers retreating powerful hurricanes, you know, the last
six years, the hottest years in history, and people just say, well,
you know, nothing to see here, that's all just a fluke.
And I think that that ability to not even have
(13:17):
to engage is one tension that we're trying to deal
with right now. Is is there a shared assumption that
we have to deal with the evidence. But then there's
other things. I think on science's side, sometimes science just
seems to overpromise, and sometimes probably does overpromise. There are
people who say, wait, wait a second, I thought you
were curing cancer. How come cancers not cured yet? I
(13:40):
think going overboard on promises and not giving people a
sense of the fact that, yeah, science is amazing, but
it takes a while to deliver can backfire. And I
think I think there's also people who you just want
answers to things and science doesn't have answers for them,
and they got to go seek them somewhere. Yeah, is
(14:02):
this kind of these kinds of ways what led you
to want to do a podcast? Well exactly, you know,
I think this compact between science and society is so important.
It's getting tattered and we have to do something about it,
and that requires drawing more people into hard problems and science.
We can't we can't ignore the fact that the problems
(14:22):
are hard. Sometimes these bright shiny futures that we talk
about we really get instead dystopian outcomes. Things really can
go wrong. The better living through chemistry can turn into
toxic waste. The Internet that's supposed to give us all
the world's information can bring us disinformation. You know. Social
(14:45):
media that's supposed to bring us together can tear us apart.
I know you're you're really interested in these topics yourself,
and I think there are times when when there's just
been failures of imagination to think about what could possibly
go wrong. Whatever the compact was in the nineteen sixties
where you kind of left it to the scientists and
(15:07):
the politicians to work at all out, We're now going
to need everybody on board. We're gonna need to open
this up to more people and recognize that science might
have a lot of answers about the science, but we're
not going to have all the answers about how it
should be applied in the world. And that was really
the heart of the podcast. If we really are now
(15:28):
all the stewards of a brave new planet, then we
got to figure out how to draw everybody in on
that and open it up. Would you describe yourself still
as an optimist? Oh, I am a tremendous optimist in
spite of lots of evidence to the contrary, because in
(15:49):
the end, I really don't see any alternative. So I
am a very realistic optimist. I think we're gonna need
to fight for truth. It's not a gimme like it
might have been a half century ago. I think we
are gonna need to bring everybody in to help make
decisions about how we should use this. It's not going
(16:11):
to be easy. And uh, you know, there's nothing about
the podcast that's advocating specific answers to anything. It's it's
really meant to model smart, thoughtful, passionate people struggling with
what do we do with our future? And so it's
meant to invite people into that because you know, in
my most optimistic self, that's how we make it through
(16:33):
is we we all work together to struggle through hard
problems that have amazing upsides, maybe big downsides, and together
we make it through. And you know, these are things
that they're just too big to fit in a tweet.
And I'm really interested. I know you are in ideas
(16:54):
that are too big to fit in a tweet but
will end up, you know, shaping the future in a
big way. And so that that was the heart of
the podcast. Has there been a moment maybe not doing
this podcast, but when you're dealings with others scientists in
fields not your own? Is the rare for a moment
when you're over your head? Will you say I have
(17:15):
no idea what these guys talking about? Oh? Yeah, oh yeah.
Frequently there were occasional times I was really deeply an
expert in the subject, but you know, many many other
different things. You know, I'm not an expert, and so
I think what I had to learn was the right
kind of scientific humility to ask dumb questions and say
what exactly does that mean? And you can learn a
(17:38):
lot from that. Yeah, yeah, I am. I am. That
actually is a lovely place to end. I'm in total
agreement with you. I think the key to being an
effective journalist, explainer, podcast host, whatever is the willingness to
ask really dumb questions. Indeed, thank you so much. This
is I cannot tell you how excited I am to
(18:00):
listen to this and how delighted I am that you
have you of all people, have decided to tackle this subject.
It's it is greatly needed. Oh Malcolm, thanks so much
for helping us kick off this first episode. Thank you
America and to all of you listeners. Come join us
for episode two, where we'll hear President Richard Nixon console
(18:25):
a grieving nation about the tragic outcome of America's failed
mission to land a man on the Moon. Good evening,
my fellow Americans. Fakes has ordained that the men who
went to the Moon to explore and peace will stay
on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men,
(18:48):
Meal Armstrong and Edwin Auburn know that there's no pup
for their recovery. Deep Fakes next time on Brave New Planet.
Brave New Planet is a co production of the Broad
Institute of MT and Harvard Pushkin Industries in the Boston
Globe support from the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation. Our show
(19:12):
is produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with Mary Dow. Theme
song composed by Ned Porter, mastering and sound designed by
James Garver, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and a Stitt
and Enchant. Special thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts
at Clarendon Communications, to Lee McGuire, Kristen Zarelli and Justine
Levin Allerhand at the Broad, Tamil o'bell and Heather Faine
(19:36):
at Pushkin, And to Eli and Edy Brode who made
the Broad Institute possible. This is brave new planet. I'm
Eric Lander.
Pushkin. Welcome to a Brave New Planet. My name is
Eric Lander. I'm your host for this new podcast. In
the upcoming episodes, we'll explore frontiers of science and technology
(00:38):
that are both exciting and challenging. Artificial intelligence that's unleashing
artistic creativity, but also enabling deep fakes that undermine truth
and democracy. A plan to modify the Earth's atmosphere to
hold off climate change that might buy time or might
keep us from solving the real problem. A new genetic
(01:00):
technology for engineering nature that might prevent malaria but might
get out of hand. Computer algorithms that can diagnose diseases,
tell companies who to hire, and judges had a sentence,
but might also automate or human biases. And we'll ask
whether it's time to turn war over to robots. We'll
(01:24):
look at the amazing upsides and also ask what could
possibly go wrong. But for this short first episode, I
thought i'd better explain who I am and why I'm here.
I'm a scientist. I grew up in New York City,
a product of the public schools, where I fell in
(01:46):
love with math. Not long after I did my PhD
in mathematics, I became captivated by genetics. By luck, that
was just a few years before biologists began dreaming about
reading out the complete human genetic code, all three billion
letters of DNA. I got involved in this crazy idea
(02:08):
called the Human gene Project, and became one of the
leaders of that international collaboration. As the work neared its end,
I helped launch a research institute, the Broad Institute of
MT and Harvard, that I still lead today, to apply
that same collaborative spirit to help a new generation of
remarkable scientists propel the understanding and treatment of human diseases
(02:31):
outside the laboratory. I've always cared a lot about how
science affects the world. For eight years, I also co
chaired the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
for the Obama White House. We got a chance to
wrestle with some of the nation's biggest opportunities and problems,
from energy to influenza, cybersecurity to aging, and through it all,
(02:55):
I've continued to teach introbiology to MIT students, who every
year restore my faith in the future. But that future
is on the line today in ways it's never been before.
The decisions we make or don't make will affect us
all for generations to come. So to kick off Brave
(03:16):
New Planet, I wanted to talk with someone who has
boundless curiosity and might help us think about what's at stake.
I reached out to Malcolm Gladwell. He's the author of
books like Talking to Strangers and Outliers and the host
of the podcast Revisionist History. To my delight, he agreed
to join us. Malcolm Gladwell, Welcome to Brave New Planet.
(03:41):
Thank you, Eric. I am delighted to be here and
fascinated to learn more about your new podcast. But before
we get into it, I wanted to talk a little
bit about you. I'm very curious about how your initial
ideas about science were formed and why what led you
into this world in the first place. You know, looking
back growing up in New York as a kid in
(04:03):
the nineteen sixties, it was pretty amazing. I was raised
by my mom and we didn't have a lot of money,
but she figured out everything free and everything cheap that
you could do, dragonist to museums. She let us stay
home and watch all the space launches, and then nineteen
sixty four sixty five was the World's Fair, the New
York City World's Fair, and that was amazing. There was
(04:27):
this the Unisphere, the big globe that was the symbol
of the World's Fair. It's it's the thing that gets
destroyed in Men in Black at the end of the movie,
and there was a guy in a jet pack who
flew over the unisphere and they told us all we
would be going to work in jetpacks. I still am
waiting for my jetpack. But there were all these other things.
(04:48):
There was like the ge Carousel of Progress where they
were singing There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. And there
was Belle Labs premiering the picture phone, and du Pont
with its wonderful world of Chemistry, which I think became
the better slogan better living through chemistry. And they had
this time capsule that we're going to dig up in
(05:10):
five thousand years. And it was also the era of
Star Trek, where everybody, all races and genders, we were
going to go out together and boldly go and so
it was a period of like infinite possibility, amazing optimism
about what you could do in the world. There are
obviously lots of tensions bubbling under the surface, but as
(05:31):
a seven eight year old kid I wasn't wear any
of that yet, and so I think I was formed
in this world that thought science was going to be
incredibly important to progress and the world was gonna it
was just going to become a better and better place.
I'm amazed, like in your description of that, how frictionless
your access to knowledge as a kid was seems to
(05:53):
have been. I mean, all the stuff's on your doorstep,
like the New York's Fairest. I mean, I don't know
what subway you're taking, or maybe a couple of buses,
but but I mean the point is, like, you don't
have to have a lot of money. You're going to
lost a dollar for kids to get in. Yeah, now
dollar was worth more than but still, you know, my
mom dragged us fourteen times to the World's Fair and
(06:14):
it was she was amazing. Fourteen times. I love it.
You remember how many times? Oh yeah, So you have
this coming out of your childhood, you inherit, this sense
of infinite possibility. What happens to that sense as you
get older? Is it still there? Well? It's interesting, I mean,
where does that sense come from? An infinite possibility? It's
(06:37):
it's no accident that the nineteen sixties are like that.
It's after World War Two, where science played a big
role in winning the war, radar, early computers, penicillin, of course,
atomic bombs, and the US makes this decision after the
war that science is going to be a cornerstone of
(06:57):
society going forward, that we're going to fund science at universities,
and we're gonna train people, and we'll have this virtuous
cycle of public knowledge producing technologies and wars and companies.
And then of course, nine months after I'm born, Sputnik
goes up. I don't remember it, but I know it
(07:18):
was exactly nine months after I was born, and like
everything goes into overdrive. Science is central to the survival
of the country. We pass laws for science education, we
start the space race to get a man on the
moon first. So you know, this is the world that
shaped that New York City of the nineteen sixties was
(07:39):
the sense that science was going to discover what's true,
technology was going to figure out what's possible, and society
reaps the benefits. And that assumption, that idea that the
scientific method, you know, you figure out what's true by evidence,
not authority. It's all about honesty, not advocacy. There was
(08:01):
a set of assumptions that underlay that world where this
country really bought into the ideas of science, and it
paid off amazing dividends. You know, through the rest of
the twentieth century. You think about all the things that
happened from what had to have been a bit of
a crazy bet. The US didn't invest in science a
(08:22):
lot before the war. But afterwards you look at the
things that start happening. You get polio vaccines, measles, and
smallpox vaccines and eradicate smallpox. And you get computer technology
and the Internet and GPS systems and like Google searches
come out of a National Science Foundation grant, and then
(08:45):
molecular biology and gene cloning and this Human Genome Project
I got very involved in, and onward and onward and onward,
and you get these industries that grow up around all
these things. So I think it paid off in huge ways.
And what's interesting is it's only accelerated since then in
terms of the science, even though there are a lot
(09:07):
of tensions, you know from the any of you of
the science. You look at the last two decades or
so and you start seeing, you know, artificial intelligence, we
can translate languages, by computers and spot lung cancers by computers,
and people are making self driving cars and quantum computers.
And in biology you have you know, new therapies for cancer, immunotherapies,
(09:32):
and this Human Genome project where we spent three billion
dollars to read one genome. It now costs a couple
hundred bucks to read a genome. There are technologies that
let you edit genomes like Crisper, and just keeps going
and going, and I think, if anything, it's accelerating in
terms of the science and the impact on society. I've
(09:53):
just curious, Eric, you've chosen to do this now? Is
there a reason why now? I mean, you could have
done this five years ago, You could have done this
five years from now. So there's something compelling you at
this moment in time. Yeah. Absolutely. It is so glaringly
out obvious that we are going to need science to
solve a lot of the problems ahead. Climate change. It's
(10:16):
in our face right now. It was theoretical to people,
but the last three or four years, it's so obvious
we're gonna have to solve that. The pandemic that we're
living through right now, it's clear there's no way to
solve pandemics without a lot more science than we've brought
to bear on it so far. And then I think
about things like Alzheimer's. It's going to be costing US
(10:39):
a trillion dollars a year as the usages, and we
really don't know how to do anything other than support people.
So we've got to come up with solutions, and those
solutions that got to come from science. I could go
on and on, and so it seemed like a moment
when we just had to decide are we going to
(11:02):
rally a world together around science. It's Matt Damon's famous
line from the movie The Martian when he branded on
Mars and he knows nobody's coming back for him soon,
and he says, I guess there's only one option. I'm
going to have to science the shit out of this.
We're gonna have to do that right now. And I
think the last several years have made that so apparent.
(11:26):
We really have to reconnect between science and society because
that connection is going to be so important going forward.
Do you think if you were an eight year old today,
you would have to describe what your eight year old
self today would think if is it the same sense
of infinite possibility. I think there's a frustration right now,
a sense that we're not doing all we can with this,
(11:49):
and there's a lot of reasons for it. The bright
shininess of science would discover the truth and technologies would
show us what's possible, and society would reap the benefits.
That simple social compact is getting frayed in some ways,
and there's a lot of different ways it's getting fred
(12:10):
it's not surprising that after sixty years things would would
begin to get a little tattered. But you know, if
you think about it, science sometimes conflicts with economic interests.
We began to see that companies might start attacking science
because they really don't like the answers. I think the
(12:31):
first case was when it became clear that cigarettes caused cancer,
and tobacco companies decided to pay people to put up
smoke screens and question the evidence. And then, of course,
climate changes is where we see it most today, where
despite massive amounts of evidence, the solutions just deny it.
(12:53):
You know, we've got massive wildfires in California, and we've
got wildfires a couple of years ago above the Arctic circle.
We got glaciers retreating powerful hurricanes, you know, the last
six years, the hottest years in history, and people just say, well,
you know, nothing to see here, that's all just a fluke.
And I think that that ability to not even have
(13:17):
to engage is one tension that we're trying to deal
with right now. Is is there a shared assumption that
we have to deal with the evidence. But then there's
other things. I think on science's side, sometimes science just
seems to overpromise, and sometimes probably does overpromise. There are
people who say, wait, wait a second, I thought you
were curing cancer. How come cancers not cured yet? I
(13:40):
think going overboard on promises and not giving people a
sense of the fact that, yeah, science is amazing, but
it takes a while to deliver can backfire. And I
think I think there's also people who you just want
answers to things and science doesn't have answers for them,
and they got to go seek them somewhere. Yeah, is
(14:02):
this kind of these kinds of ways what led you
to want to do a podcast? Well exactly, you know,
I think this compact between science and society is so important.
It's getting tattered and we have to do something about it,
and that requires drawing more people into hard problems and science.
We can't we can't ignore the fact that the problems
(14:22):
are hard. Sometimes these bright shiny futures that we talk
about we really get instead dystopian outcomes. Things really can
go wrong. The better living through chemistry can turn into
toxic waste. The Internet that's supposed to give us all
the world's information can bring us disinformation. You know. Social
(14:45):
media that's supposed to bring us together can tear us apart.
I know you're you're really interested in these topics yourself,
and I think there are times when when there's just
been failures of imagination to think about what could possibly
go wrong. Whatever the compact was in the nineteen sixties
where you kind of left it to the scientists and
(15:07):
the politicians to work at all out, We're now going
to need everybody on board. We're gonna need to open
this up to more people and recognize that science might
have a lot of answers about the science, but we're
not going to have all the answers about how it
should be applied in the world. And that was really
the heart of the podcast. If we really are now
(15:28):
all the stewards of a brave new planet, then we
got to figure out how to draw everybody in on
that and open it up. Would you describe yourself still
as an optimist? Oh, I am a tremendous optimist in
spite of lots of evidence to the contrary, because in
(15:49):
the end, I really don't see any alternative. So I
am a very realistic optimist. I think we're gonna need
to fight for truth. It's not a gimme like it
might have been a half century ago. I think we
are gonna need to bring everybody in to help make
decisions about how we should use this. It's not going
(16:11):
to be easy. And uh, you know, there's nothing about
the podcast that's advocating specific answers to anything. It's it's
really meant to model smart, thoughtful, passionate people struggling with
what do we do with our future? And so it's
meant to invite people into that because you know, in
my most optimistic self, that's how we make it through
(16:33):
is we we all work together to struggle through hard
problems that have amazing upsides, maybe big downsides, and together
we make it through. And you know, these are things
that they're just too big to fit in a tweet.
And I'm really interested. I know you are in ideas
(16:54):
that are too big to fit in a tweet but
will end up, you know, shaping the future in a
big way. And so that that was the heart of
the podcast. Has there been a moment maybe not doing
this podcast, but when you're dealings with others scientists in
fields not your own? Is the rare for a moment
when you're over your head? Will you say I have
(17:15):
no idea what these guys talking about? Oh? Yeah, oh yeah.
Frequently there were occasional times I was really deeply an
expert in the subject, but you know, many many other
different things. You know, I'm not an expert, and so
I think what I had to learn was the right
kind of scientific humility to ask dumb questions and say
what exactly does that mean? And you can learn a
(17:38):
lot from that. Yeah, yeah, I am. I am. That
actually is a lovely place to end. I'm in total
agreement with you. I think the key to being an
effective journalist, explainer, podcast host, whatever is the willingness to
ask really dumb questions. Indeed, thank you so much. This
is I cannot tell you how excited I am to
(18:00):
listen to this and how delighted I am that you
have you of all people, have decided to tackle this subject.
It's it is greatly needed. Oh Malcolm, thanks so much
for helping us kick off this first episode. Thank you
America and to all of you listeners. Come join us
for episode two, where we'll hear President Richard Nixon console
(18:25):
a grieving nation about the tragic outcome of America's failed
mission to land a man on the Moon. Good evening,
my fellow Americans. Fakes has ordained that the men who
went to the Moon to explore and peace will stay
on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men,
(18:48):
Meal Armstrong and Edwin Auburn know that there's no pup
for their recovery. Deep Fakes next time on Brave New Planet.
Brave New Planet is a co production of the Broad
Institute of MT and Harvard Pushkin Industries in the Boston
Globe support from the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation. Our show
(19:12):
is produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with Mary Dow. Theme
song composed by Ned Porter, mastering and sound designed by
James Garver, fact checking by Joseph Fridman, and a Stitt
and Enchant. Special thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts
at Clarendon Communications, to Lee McGuire, Kristen Zarelli and Justine
Levin Allerhand at the Broad, Tamil o'bell and Heather Faine
(19:36):
at Pushkin, And to Eli and Edy Brode who made
the Broad Institute possible. This is brave new planet. I'm
Eric Lander.
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