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 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 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
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 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 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.
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 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 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, Jim Watson recently passed away, and I know that you were close with him and you really admired him. Tell me about that.
Well.
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 relegate everything else that he was to a tertiary status that shouldn't distract us from the miracle that was Jim.
Give me example of that.
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.
So you know, can you unpack that? Sure?
Imagine that you knew Archimedes personally, and Archimedes had some sort of like personal hygiene problem.
They didn't brush, you know.
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 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 be one of the most important people who ever lived.
And when you say auto completes, you mean in people's heads they think Jim Watson and then they think X Y Z.
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.
Nobody talks about chargaph interruption.
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 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.
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.
Just helical.
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 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.
Ah, because you're making a distinction between good scientists and great scientists. Okay, I see.
Jim Jim Watson, in my opinion, was not a good scientist.
He was a great scientist.
He was a great scientist.
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.
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.
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 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 difference between good science and great science.
Exactly what we're.
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.
So just before we get to that, just for the audience, I want to mention.
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 terms of support of good science and not great science.
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, 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 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,
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 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.
He said, oh, she's very good.
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 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 of this particular guy. Was he a horse's ass?
He was?
And I'm not saying that's great. I got a chance to tell him to shut up multiple times and he took it.
But you had to back it up.
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.
Is there anything that we can learn from the story of Roslin Franklin and Jim Watson that allows us to do better science?
I think so.
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 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.
Okay, wait, hold on, So first tells who Chargraph is and tells what a pitch man is. I don't know that term.
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 out that the amount of the nucleotides was exactly paired when you chopped up whatever the nucleic acid was.
So we had this.
Meaning you have the same amount of a's and t's and the same amount.
Of seeds as that's right and so.
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?
Well, that's usually we.
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. It wasn't an accident. And of course people always somebody will always say, maybe it's a coincidence.
You can't conclude that right.
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 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 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. 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.
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 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 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.
Wow. Wow, this is why peer review doesn't work. Right.
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. 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.
Watson began and ended that book.
Saying he's never seen Francis Crick in a humble mood, modest mood, modest mood.
Right, yeah, perhaps he is with others, but it's not so with me or whatever it is.
Oh my god, can that guy write? I mean that was literature, man, Yeah, agreed.
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 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 be seen as a walking hr problem waiting to happen.
I mean he was seen as that walking again was by walking hr problem waiting to happen.
He was that twelve times a day. Yeah, exactly.
But my point is we didn't throw him out until very late in the game when we were determined to lose our mojo.
Ah.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The story is that peer review begins with the founding of the Royal Society and has been with science ever since.
Ah.
Usually that's not true.
No, it's untrue. And the willingness of the Academy to lie about that, bold faced lie about this it might be ignorance.
No, it's not.
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 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 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.
It has not escaped. I noticed that.
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?
I have not. You have to go.
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?
I think?
Oh, maybe they burst into the pub and in early nineteen fifty three and said we have discovered the secret of life.
Yeah, I'd love to go see that. Goosebumps.
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 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 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.
And their review just happens when the world of your colleagues see something. This is peer injunction.
Yeah. And it's competitor injunction. Yeah.
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?
Yeah?
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.
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.
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?
I don't know. I believe it's Los Alamos National fascinating.
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
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.
The advent of the internet allows that anyway.
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 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 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 people are sent.
What do you mean they're sent as in, if someone has an idea that's.
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.
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.
As as Paul ginsparg about that.
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 do with the science. It is powerful that goes against the narratives which have policy implications.
The science has policy implications. Yeah.
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 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.
Of this code? Who is allowed to do?
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. 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 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.
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 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.
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.
Or you could.
Program wire shark and that's wireshark. That's exactly the point. You don't know what wireshark is.
Correct.
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 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
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 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 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.
Oh, you're saying we developed the bullshit to cover our tracks at Wuhan, is what you mean?
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 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 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 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.
So if you throw allergies.
In the middle of it, you get the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease.
Oh, these people are going to cure me of hay fever.
And so your view, My view is.
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?
We let the world down?
So let's unpack that. In what ways did we let the world down?
They wanted to know where this virus came from.
So there's a tension between national security interests and what they're able to tell the public and what academic scientists even know.
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.
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.
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.
And I want those questions to be asked not by.
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, how many people did we just kill? I want to know, did we kill zero? Good news? Did we kill millions?
I want to know. This is so bad?
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, 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 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, 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 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.
You and I know.
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
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.
Come on, this is just not adult level fiction, because if we could.
Do it over again, you're saying we should look at all the hypothesis, keep everything on the.
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 ever ask us to lie like this ever again.
Ever, who was asked to lie? Though, you're saying, in terms of shutting down conversation about did this come out.
To Jabaria was asked to lie? Let's just start there, great unpack that.
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, 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 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.
This you know what.
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 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 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.
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.
Exactly.
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 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.
So tell us what that program is.
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 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.
As a nation. We are entitled to keep secrets. We have to keep secrets.
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 lying about science at this level, so let.
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 ever said hey, we'll do your bidding. But you're saying just being naive is enough of a problem.
Great point.
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.
Correct me, if I'm wrong, that's perfect.
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 I start coming up with new peripherals, and I jack into the general all purpose computer that is my brain.
Okay, that is.
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 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 potato head is an amazing military concept.
I see.
So this is how scientists accidentally bump up against.
This sort of thing at some point in their career.
Possibly.
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.
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.
Yes, the majority of them.
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.
Haystacking means you throw out more information.
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.
You're doing science as far as you know. Ah.
But if I were that guy, I might receive a phone.
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.
Got it.
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.
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.
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 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.
You're saying the problem is scientists get trained and then they might find something.
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?
What was that? Or we don't need masks?
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 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.
So let me understand what this what do you see as a solution to this?
First thing is I think twice three times before you train somebody at public expense.
But you don't want to not train brilliant young physicists. So what's a better solution?
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.
Don't train that person.
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.
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 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 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 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, 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 product has high variants, but much much higher.
Mean.
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 happen in the rest of the world.
What is that?
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, 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 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.
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, 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. 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.
How could it be friendly to the military and not aligned with the national security interests.
We have to align with the national security interest The national security community is not as good as we are.
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.
I can travel anywhere in the world.
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.
I had the same feeling.
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 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.
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 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.
It's a giant problem. David.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is we can't afford this extended childhood as scientists.
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.
Wow, there's real national security interests here.
But I think I'm also hearing you saying we don't want to be bossed around by national correctists.
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. 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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.
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.
I think Michael Cratzios should be relocated to some terrific office because I think he's an able and capable person.
Tell us about him.
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.
Okay.
You can ask scientists minorly to hold off on something or to play ball, but you cannot ask them to just lie.
Right.
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, 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.
You know.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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
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
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 intelligence complex, the national interest complex, national security complex, who has thought about the fact that we are destroying ourselves.
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 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.
You're saying it should be much more.
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?
Wow?
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.
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?
Twenty seventeen, Google Brain publishes the Transformer Model.
Yeah, now that paper is called the Tension is all you need?
Yes? How many authors are there on it?
Three?
I remember and it's eight?
Oh okay?
What are their names? Any of them? Oops? Tell me something. What are some names that you associate with Google?
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.
An expert shout out to Adam Brown. Yeah, quantum gravity going on at Google?
Yeah okay, but of course demis.
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. 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 massive blowout of the genie coefficients. I want scientists to participate in the world they created for everyone else.
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 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 huge opens up, and that, unfortunately is a matter of luck. Someometimes I have a totally different view on that. Okay, tell me yours.
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.
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.
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.
See, it's because it.
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.
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.
Oh boy. We were not allowed to publish our findings in science until we took out our findings from the paper.
Tell me what kind of stuff.
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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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.
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, 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.
But again, I'm not against.
You have nothing against.
The good scientists might come up with something you don't expect.
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.
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.
How is that consistent with national security interest?
This is what we did before we had a bunch of really crazy.
People, good crazy, I see mean good crazy mostly okay, but these are strong spices. Right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Need national interest exemptions for science?
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.
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 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 from her professorship at Harvard to send a message we don't.
Do that anymore.
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 imagine fifty percent of the time we get it right. Let us do our work.
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?
Ad mean that they don't have to hire? According to some.
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.
What does it mean.
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.
Fine, in the agreement was scientists can do anything they want.
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 they could call on us in times of war, that they would not call on us frivolously.
We have an agreement.
It's a series of interlocking tacit understanding. Some of them made explicit, most of them not.
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.
Given that you welched on our last agreement, so I think we need to reassert ourselves and say we're not playing ball.
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.
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, 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 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.
Students, particularly foreign exchange students.
They're not. They're workers. They're workers who do not have protections of workers because you've classified them as students.
But the idea is the situation where now is those students are very unlikely to become professors someday because there's just too many.
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 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 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 the old AEC turned into the Department of Energy by
Jimmy Carter. What was the Atomic Energy Commission?
You know?
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 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 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, 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.
So what would you say, She's the path, the best path for us to get there.
Hold a conference of smart people, do it quietly.
Like in a silamar where you're inviting the who exactly you write the national interest people as well as the scientist.
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, 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 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. And we need to save theoretical physics.
First.
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.
You're referring, for example, string theory.
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 fifty two years?
And has it not moved because it's so successful, or you're saying it.
It's very successful. Okay, But imagine that you knew.
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.
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?
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.
But is it that it's a hard problem and that's why the other codons haven't been figured out.
Yeah, it's a very hard problem.
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 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 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.
Does that mean that in that model that somebody has broken through that wall and they met Well, we don't know.
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 to continue and these guys said, well, what do you mean, it's just based on math.
You can't outlaw math.
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 of Technology in New Jersey.
And he is.
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.
So we can just know.
We don't have to guess or speculate as to what it looks like when national interest in science run into each other.
We can say, oh, here's what happened.
Like.
Scientists ideas were shut down from the public that kind of thing, or what are we talking about?
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 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.
Right.
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 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.
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.
I'm in favor of getting rid of the g willakers attitude towards science.
It's garish. Science is fun enough, Science is too important.
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.
And so the.
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 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
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.
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 view iin Rand as a collectivist. I am off the charts individualist. But I'm not stupid.
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 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.
We're going straight down the drain.
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 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.
Enough, it's over.
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 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 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.
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.