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Speaker 1

00:00

What is the heroic action for a scientist in Nazi Germany?

Speaker 2

00:04

Science in many respects actually is the full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion.

Speaker 1

00:14

What goes to the mind

Speaker 2

00:15

of a big tobacco executive? Cigarettes have killed more than any other object, than all the world of iron, all the world of gunpowder. Nuclear bombs have only killed a few hundred thousand people, Cigarettes have killed hundreds of millions.

Speaker 2

00:33

There's no contest. Cigarettes have killed far more

Speaker 3

00:37

and are far more preventable. What is the nature of human ignorance? The following is a conversation with Robert Proctor, historian at Stanford University, specializing in 20th century science, technology, and medicine, especially the history of the most controversial aspects of those fields.

Speaker 3

00:59

Please allow me to say a few words about science and the nature of truth. The word science is often used as an ideal for a methodology that can help us escape the limitation of any 1 human mind in the pursuit of truth. The underlying idea here is that individual humans are too easily corrupted by bias, emotion, personal experience, and the usual human craving for meaning, money, power, and fame. And the hope is that the tools of science can help us overcome these limitations in striving for deeper and deeper understanding of objective reality, from physics to chemistry, biology, genetics, and even psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience.

Speaker 3

01:43

But history shows that these tools of science are not devoid of human flaws, of influence from human institutions, of manipulation from people in power. As we talk about in this conversation with Robert Proctor, in the 1930s and 40s there was the Nazi science and there was communist science, and each had fundamentally different ideas about, for example, genetics and biology of disease. This history also shows that scientists can be corrupted, slowly or quickly, by fear, fame, money, or just the ideological narratives of a charismatic leader that convinces each scientist and the scientific community that their work matters for the greater cause of humanity, even if that cause involves the genetic purification of a people, the extermination of a cancer, and the unrestricted experimentation on the bodies of living beings who do not have a voice, whose suffering will never be heard. All of this for the greater good.

Speaker 3

02:56

In some periods of human history, science was deeply influenced by the ideology of governments and individuals. In some, less so. The hard truth is that we can't know for sure about which of the 2 periods we're living through today. So let us not too quickly dismiss the voices of experts and non-experts alike that ask the simple question of, wait, are we doing the right thing here?

Speaker 3

03:25

Are we helping or hurting? Are we adding suffering to the world or are we alleviating it? Most such voices are nothing more than martyrs seeking fame, not truth, and they will be proven wrong. But some may help prevent future atrocities and suffering at a global scale.

Speaker 3

03:47

Let us then move forward with humility so that history will remember this period as 1 of human flourishing and where science lived up to its highest ideal. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robert Proctor.

Speaker 1

04:08

What is the story of science and scientists during the rise, rule, and fall of the Third Reich?

Speaker 2

04:16

Well, we tend to think of science as always on the side of liberty, as always on the side of enlightenment, as always on the side of enlarging human possibility. And here we have this phenomenon in the 1930s of really the world's leading scientific power, the Third Reich, which collectively had won a big chunk of all the Nobel Prizes. Suddenly they go fascist, they go Nazi with Hitler.

Speaker 2

04:51

And instead of being primarily a source of resistance, science in many respects actually is a full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion. And that's kind of a relatively untold story in the sense that when we think of science in the Third Reich, we think of Joseph Mingeli injecting dye into the eyes of twins, or we think of horrific human experiments, and those are real. But it's also the story of a huge scientific apparatus, a bureaucracy, you could almost say, participating in every phase of the campaigns of Nazi destruction. And what I looked at in particular, and actually in my first book, was how physicians in particular, but also biomedical science, was collaborating with the regime and that it's wrong to think of the Nazi regime as anti-science.

Speaker 2

06:01

It's anti a particular type of science. In particular, it was radically against what they call Jewish science, communist science. Certain types of science they did not like. There's a whole nature-nurture dispute in that period and they're firmly on the side of nature, which interestingly gives rise to a very different type of science in the Soviet Union, by the way.

Speaker 1

06:29

The Soviet Union is more on the nurture side?

Speaker 2

06:31

The Soviet Union is on the side of the nurture side in the dimension of genetics, and this is sort of an untold story. I was actually gonna write a book about it until I was barred from access to the Soviet Union. There have been different times in my life where I was a Russianist.

Speaker 1

06:50

A Russianist, okay, we're gonna have to talk about that.

Speaker 2

06:53

I got excluded from fulfilling that dream, but 1 of the things I was gonna look at when I got a Fulbright in the 1980s was to go over and look at the anti-Nazi genetics and anthropology of the Soviets and how a lot of their Lysenkous Lamarckism was actually anti-Nazi, anti-genetics on the nurture side of nature. And that's really an untold story. It's an uncomfortable story because it sounds like someone, we might want to make heroes out of the twisting of science in the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2

07:39

But nonetheless, there are these interesting complexities and what's amazing about Nazi science is how there was this collaboration. And you're talking about a culture where they're inventing things like electron microscopy, they're doing all kinds of studies in anthropology. So a lot of that's an untold story.

Speaker 1

07:59

So what was the connection between the ideology and the science, if you can just linger on it longer?

Speaker 2

08:05

Well, we tend to think of science and ideology as completely separate when I think the reality is they're not. If you look at why the Mayans in the 7th and 8th century AD had the world's most accurate calendar, accurate to within 17 seconds per year. That was all part of a ritual practice to celebrate the rise of Kukulkan, the rise of Venus with what's called the heliacal rising, namely the rising of Venus before the rising of the sun in which, at which moment Venus is destroyed by the light of the sun.

Speaker 2

08:49

Well, they developed this elaborate calendrical astronomy which required detailed observation, detailed chronicling of the movement of the heavens, in particular the planets, for the purpose of celebrating this cycle of renewal that they thought was sacred and holy and magical. So where's the ideology, where's the science? There's the sort of instrumentation, the calendrics, the measurement, all in the service of this magical moment. And I think that's true of a lot of science.

Speaker 2

09:24

I had a friend years ago who was Mennonite and wanted to study solar cells and to improve silicon chips to make more efficient solar energy. There was no money for that. Yet when Ronald Reagan took office, the budgets for solar and alternative energy were essentially zeroed out, and Reagan takes off the solar panels off of the roof of the White House. So my friend ends up working on hardening silicon chips against nuclear war.

Speaker 2

09:57

So he becomes part of the nuclear war protection defense apparatus, even though he wanted to work on alternative energy. Doing very similar work with silicon chips, but in a different framework. And so the practices of science often gets pushed into and is woven into ideological practices. Sort of in the same way that you get beautiful medieval cathedrals built in service of Catholicism.

Speaker 1

10:29

Well, what's in the mind of an individual scientist? So this process of ideology polluting science, or is it science empowering ideology? So, almost like if you can zoom in and zoom out effortlessly into the individual mind of a scientist and then back to the whole scientific community.

Speaker 1

10:49

Like do scientists think about nuclear war, about the atrocities committed by the Nazis as they're helping on the minute details of the scientific process?

Speaker 2

11:01

I think sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, right? You think of the chemists working to develop the cyanide that will be used to kill Jews in a concentration camp. What are they thinking?

Speaker 2

11:16

You can imagine a whole range of thoughts. Maybe they don't know what they're doing. Maybe they do. Maybe they know a little bit, but not a lot.

Speaker 2

11:25

Maybe they don't wanna know. Maybe they have ways of lying to themselves. Maybe they are the 1 person who agreed to do it and

Speaker 1

11:36

99

Speaker 2

11:38

refused. So, it's hard if not impossible to know what's in the soul of anyone. But when you have enormous power directing the motion and the currents or the ocean, it's not hard to find people willing to fill that in, especially if they're narrow technocrats, if they're just doing their job, if they're just building the widget. And I think a lot of scientific training is in widget building, and that leads to the possibility that they can become easily instrumentalized in a particular action, which is maybe horrific or glorious.

Speaker 2

12:27

The other thing to keep in mind is that Science is, as we say, what scientists do. And that can include a lot of things, it can exclude a lot of things. The word science itself is interesting because it's cognate, it actually comes originally from the Proto-Indo-European, skein meaning to cut or divide. And so it's cognate with scissors, schism, skin.

Speaker 2

12:59

Skin is that which divides you from the world. Shit or scat is that which has been divided from you into the world. And so there's this cognate between science and shit or science and cutting

Speaker 1

13:12

with

Speaker 2

13:12

the whole idea being that you're dividing into parts, classifying. It's the taxonomic impulse. And to know is to know where something belongs, to divide it into its parts and put it in its proper place.

Speaker 2

13:27

And that taxonomic impulse can be very static. It's actually 1 of the things that Darwin had to overcome in recognizing evolution, that the taxonomies are in motion. But it also can lead to a kind of myopia that my job is done when I've classified something. Is this bird an XAY, or a Z?

Speaker 2

13:49

And that again can be, it can be ideological or it cannot be, but scientists are humans and they're fitting in with a world, with a world practice. And that's limiting, it's kind of inevitable. It's unavoidable, It's hard to be, if not impossible, out of the world that we're walking in.

Speaker 1

14:13

Yeah, and it's fascinating because I think Ideologies also have an impulse towards forming taxonomies. So just being at MIT, I've gotten to learn about this character named Jeffrey Epstein. I didn't know who this was until all the news broke out and so on.

Speaker 1

14:33

And I started to wonder how did all these people at MIT that I admire would hang out with this person? Just lightly, just have conversations. I don't mean any of the bigger things, but even just basic conversations. And I think this has to do, you said scientists are widget builders and taxonomizers.

Speaker 1

14:51

I think there's power in somebody like the Nazi regime or like a Jeffrey Epstein just being excited about your widgets and making you feel like the widget serves a greater purpose in the world. And so it's not like you're, you know, sometimes people say scientists wanna make money and, or they have a big kind of ideological drive behind it. I think there's just nice when the widget, so you like building anyway, somehow somebody convinces you, some charismatic person, that this widget actually has a grander purpose. And you don't almost think about the negative or whether it's positive, just the fact that it's grand is already super exciting.

Speaker 2

15:42

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think that's the story of Werner von Braun, you know, and the fascination with rockets and this will, you know, enlarge something in the world. And here he is, he's an SS officer, he's working around slave labor.

Speaker 2

16:00

But his rocket then gets compressed into the Western world or the American world and basically launches us to the moon and we forget about how the sausage was made originally. Well, can you talk about him a little bit more because he's such a fascinating character.

Speaker 1

16:21

So he was a Nazi, but he was also an American, and it had such a grand impact on both. And there's this uncomfortable fact that he's 1 of the central figures that gave birth to the American space exploration efforts.

Speaker 2

16:39

Yeah, he's an interesting figure, fascinated in a kind of a tunnel vision way with spaceflight. He makes these beautiful rockets already, beginning in the 20s, early 30s. Ends up for a while at Penamunda using slave labor to build V2 engines and so forth like that.

Speaker 2

16:57

I remember going to Penamunda where people have actually tracked the flights of aborted V2 rockets and found some of these beautiful, beautiful old engines, just the most like works of art, these engines used to rain terror on the British. It's interesting because in that same spot, I was hunting for amber, Baltic amber, because I'm a stone collector. And among the amber collectors there, there's a famous story of the penamunda burn, it's called, because they find yellow phosphorus, they think is amber, they put it in their pocket and then it dries out and then explodes and creates this big burn on their legs. But the whole Nazi regime is full of things like that.

Speaker 2

17:49

It's full of these scholars who get twisted into a mindset. And it's also important to realize that people didn't often see what was coming. And we look back and we say, how could you X, Y, or Z? But before the Holocaust, there's not the Holocaust.

Speaker 2

18:14

There are versions of it, but things get on a new meaning, gain a new meaning in light of subsequent events.

Speaker 1

18:21

And there's an entire propaganda machine that makes it easier for you to hold the narrative in your head. Even if you kind of intuitively know there's something really wrong here, because of the propaganda you can kind of convince yourself to be able to sleep at night.

Speaker 2

18:38

That's right, and we have to remember that Goebbels' office was not the office of propaganda, it was the office of enlightenment, of popular enlightenment in propaganda. So enlightenment was part of his vision.

Speaker 1

18:57

It was the new era of enlightenment from his perspective.

Speaker 2

19:00

It was supposed to be the new age, a new era of enlightenment. It's a little bit like the kind of myth of Hitler's failed artist. You know, his art is not that bad.

Speaker 2

19:10

You know, there are a lot of artists who are worse. And I had a very interesting conversation once with my college roommate who became a librarian at Harvard. And at Harvard he met an old, old librarian, a German woman who had met Hitler as a kid when she was like 8 years old. Her dad was like a Gauleiter for the Nuremberg area.

Speaker 2

19:33

And she said that for 15 minutes, Hitler goes out onto the balcony with her and has this conversation alone with this eight-year-old girl. And she said he was charming and funny. And then he said he loved kids, and she said he was the most charming sort of person. And that's part of the history too, that we tend to forget when we make a scarecrow image of this rabid, raging fanatic.

Speaker 2

20:02

You know, there's more to it than that.

Speaker 1

20:04

That's really, really, really important to think about when we make a scarecrow, because that gives you actionable, like It forces you to introspect about people in your own life or leaders in your life today, ones you admire. They're charismatic, they're friendly, they love kids, they talk about enlightenment. You have to kind of think, all right, am I being duped on certain things?

Speaker 1

20:32

You have to kind of have a, I mean that's the problem with Jeremy Epstein that people don't seem to talk about. I never met the guy, but just given the people he talked to whom I know, it feels like he must have been charismatic. Like people think about like, oh, it's because of the women, it's because of the money. The people I know, I don't think they're going to be influenced.

Speaker 1

20:57

Ultimately, it has to be how you are in the room and make, it's exactly like you said, the enlightenment. I think that excites the scientists. Of course, as a charismatic person, you have to know what to pick in terms of what excites you, but that is also the fascinating thing to me about Hitler is all of these meetings, even like with Chamberlain, inside rooms, whether he was screaming or whatever he was saying, it seems like he was very convincing. There must have been passion in his eyes, there must have been charisma that one-on-one in a quiet conversation he was convincing.

Speaker 2

21:34

Yes, there's a famous story about Goebbels who would do a party trick where for 15 minutes he would rouse the crowd to communism. Workers of the world unite. Then for 15 minutes he would rouse the world to capitalism and individualism.

Speaker 2

21:53

Then for 15 minutes he would rouse the world to Nazism. And apparently he was quite convincing in each of those performances.

Speaker 1

22:01

Well all those ideologies are pretty powerful. And I think it's not even the reason that matters as much as the power of the dream of the vision of the enlightenment. I mean, the vision of communism is fascinatingly powerful.

Speaker 1

22:16

Yeah. Like workers unite, the common people stand together, they'll overthrow the powerful, the greedy, and yet share the outcomes of

Speaker 2

22:29

our hard work. Well it's kind of like the story of 2 thirds of the things that Marx calls for in the Communist Manifesto are already just part of the liberal state. And so the parts we remember or forget about in ideology are very revealing.

Speaker 1

22:46

If we can just linger on this a little bit longer, what have you learned from this period of the 1930s about the scientific process? So 1 of the labels you can put on your work, I knew as a scholar as a philosopher of science. And you also talk about Nazi Germany as a singular moment in time, or like a rebirth of the integration between ideology and science.

Speaker 1

23:16

So like in terms of valueless science I think is the term.

Speaker 2

23:22

Value-free science.

Speaker 1

23:22

Value-free science that you use. I mean it seems like Nazi Germany is a important moment in history, I mean it probably goes up and down. What difficult truths have you learned about the scientific process, and what hopeful things have you learned about the scientific process?

Speaker 2

23:44

Well, I guess the saddening thing is how easily people can become part of a machine. If there's power, people can be found to follow it. You know, 1 of the things I work on is big tobacco and we'll probably come to that, but it's amazing to me how easily people are willing to work for big tobacco.

Speaker 2

24:06

It's amazing to me how many scientists and physicians were willing to work for the Nazi regime for multiple reasons. Partly because a lot of them really thought they were doing the Lord's work. They thought they were cleaning the world of filth. I mean, if you really thought Jews are a parasitic race, why wouldn't you get rid of them?

Speaker 2

24:36

So there's an ontology, there's a theory of the world that they're building on. And interestingly, 1 that was also present in the United States, And 1 of the things I did find out in my earliest research was that the Nazis had looked lovingly and enviously over at the United States in terms of racial segregation, racial separation, and saw themselves in a kind of competition to become the world's racial leader as the most purified racial form. And that this required this kind of cleansing process. And the cleansing meant getting rid of the physically handicapped, it meant getting rid of racial inferiors as they imagined them.

Speaker 2

25:26

It meant getting rid of cancer-causing chemicals in the air and in our food and our water. These were all of a piece. There's a famous illustration that Richard Dahl talks about the great cancer theorist of studying in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and he's shown a lecture where cancer cells are shown as Jews and x-rays are shown as stormtroopers, and these stormtroopers are killing the cancer cells who are also Jews. And so there's this metaphorical work of cleaning, extermination, sanitation.

Speaker 2

26:08

Purification of a sort. Purification, there's definitely a kind of purity quest, and you see that at multiple levels. And so you see how easy it is for people to fall into that, given a particular theory. And again, coming back to that earlier point about the scarecrow, which I think is very important, If we imagine that nothing like this went on here in the United States, that would be a big mistake.

Speaker 2

26:39

The Nazis are looking to save the Redwoods League, to the Aryan supremacists, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the separation of blacks and whites. Blacks were not allowed to join the American Medical Association until after World War II. So you have racial segregation. You have massive sterilization in the United States way before the Nazis.

Speaker 2

27:04

1 of the first things the Nazis do from a racial hygiene point of view is start sterilizing what they called the mentally ill and the physically handicapped. All that had been going on since around World War I in the United States and even earlier in certain states in the form of castration of prisoners in order to prevent their demon seed from being propagated further into the race. So there's a kind of a racial international that's going on and that part of the story also needs to be told.

Speaker 1

27:40

And scientists were able to carry those ideas in their mind from your work?

Speaker 2

27:45

Of course, of course. I mean that's 1 of the things going on with all the renaming of buildings now is scientists who were eugenicists are now getting their names pulled off of buildings. My personal view is that it has to be done on a case-by-case basis, but in general, I think it's usually better to add on rather than subtract.

Speaker 2

28:11

In other words, to add history rather than erase history or pretend as if history had never existed. Let me give you a specific example of that. 1 of the most powerful and diabolical university presidents in the Nazi period was a guy named Karl Ostel, A-S-T-E-L. And he was a rabid Nazi, high up in the leadership.

Speaker 2

28:39

And in his portrait at the University of Vienna, there he is in full SS uniform, that painting was taken down. Now, what I would have done is left the painting and put a, you know, add a plaque. But to pretend as if that never happened or to erase history in that way, I think is a big mistake.

Speaker 1

29:04

Can I linger on that point? So I haven't gotten through it yet, but I've been trying to get to the Mein Kampf. And throughout its history, it's been taken down and up.

Speaker 1

29:15

It actually was taken down from Amazon for a while recently. What can you say about keeping that stuff up? So the reason it was taken down from Amazon, I mean, there's a large number of people that will read that. And the hate in their heart will grow.

Speaker 1

29:37

So they're not using it for educational purposes. You can't put a plaque on the Mein Kampf. You're ruining Mein Kampf then. Like you can't, I mean, Amazon can't do a warning saying like,

Speaker 2

29:52

this per gate, you get an expurgated version of mine copy. Take out the word Jew, you know? Because that would solve everything.

Speaker 1

29:59

So it still just stands on its own. I mean, it's not well written, so you can maybe convince yourself that it's okay because it's not well written. So it's not like this inspiring book of ideology that could easily convince.

Speaker 1

30:16

But can you steelman the argument that Mein Kampf should be banned? And can you still man the argument that it should be not banned?

Speaker 2

30:26

Well, I wouldn't say it should be banned. I think, if anything, that might make it forbidden fruit. Now this might be different when we come to statues on the public square.

Speaker 2

30:37

After World War II, the statues of Hitler, there must have been thousands of them were taken down. Now I think even the most rabid opponents of cancel culture would not say there was something wrong with taking down the statues of Hitler that were in every office building, every post office. So I think a lot depends on the placement and the purpose of icons, of statues, of texts. I don't see the harm in being able to buy Mein Kampf.

Speaker 2

31:15

It's so out of this world by now. Just the language and if anything, there probably is more good done by people being shocked at how dumb it is than the evil that might be done by someone reading it. I can't imagine people being really gripped by that now, partly just because it's kind of outdated and crazy, crazy talk. So in that case, I would not be in favor of that.

Speaker 2

31:44

When it comes to monuments or other types of things, it's a judgment call in each case. I think it has to be probably voted on, but it also, I think, in many of these cases, there's an add-on view would fix a lot of the problems.

Speaker 1

32:01

We'll jump around a little bit. We'll come back to medicine and war on cancer.

Speaker 2

32:06

Let me just add 1 thing on that. Recently, the name of Macmillan, who works on the charge of the electron in the early part of the 20th century, his name was taken off of a building at Caltech. Well, to take his name off, what do you really do?

Speaker 2

32:24

It wasn't a central aspect of his actual work. It's not why he was put on the name of that building at Caltech. And also the memory is lost and the lesson is lost when you could have kept the MacMillan name on the building and added a plaque, you know, this guy was a racist or this guy was a eugenicist or something to make a teaching moment instead of just a forgetting moment.

Speaker 1

32:50

Yeah, well, let me take a small tangent and ask you about censorship and this particular period we're living through. So my friend Joe Rogan has a podcast. He hosts a few folks on there, and they're folks of differing opinions, and as we speak, there's kind of a battle going on over whether Joe Rogan should be on Spotify and allowed to spread scientific misinformation.

Speaker 1

33:20

In particular, there's a guy named Robert Malone that's talking about, that's making a case against, at least against the COVID vaccine and so on. So outside of the specifics of this person, in this battle of scientific ideas that are sometimes tied up with ideology, in our modern world, what do you think is the role? Like who gets the sensor decide what is misinformation or information? Should we let ideas fly in the scientific realm, so scientific ideas, or should we try to get it under control?

Speaker 1

34:06

Like which way, obviously all approaches will go wrong in some ways, which is more likely to go wrong? 1 where you try to get a hold of like, all right, this is a viral thing and it doesn't fit with scientific consensus so we should probably try to quiet it down a little bit or do you let it all just fly and let the ideas battle? Do you think about this kind of stuff in the context of history?

Speaker 2

34:36

Well, that used to be a million dollar question. Of course, now it's a multi-billion dollar question.

Speaker 1

34:42

Not trillion, yeah.

Speaker 2

34:44

We're talking about powerful internet platforms becoming essentially publishers. And publishers can't say whatever they want. There are limits.

Speaker 2

34:57

There's, you know, they can't yell fire in a crowded theater. But there are, there's a kind of social responsibility that is there. And I know some of these, I don't know a lot about this topic, but I know some of the large platforms do have dedicated offices to trying to rein in misinformation, as you would expect any publisher to do. You can't just let anything fly in Time Magazine or the New York Times either.

Speaker 2

35:29

There are all kinds of codes of ethics and legal obligations. So I'm a fan of the efforts, or I think some of the large internet platforms should be congratulated, at least for trying to make an effort to rein in misinformation. It's gonna be difficult, and mistakes are gonna be made, but it can't be a let everything fly kind of situation. But

Speaker 1

35:53

when I watch, unfortunately, the pressure these platforms feel to identify and to censor misinformation, that pressure is ideological in nature currently. So if you just objectively look, there's a certain political lean to people that are pressing on the censorship on misinformation, which makes me very uncomfortable because now there's an ideology to labeling something as misinformation as opposed to kind of having a value, less evaluation of what is true or not. And you also have to acknowledge that it says something, that there's a very large number of people that, for example, follow Robert Malone, or follow people, I mean, what does that say about society?

Speaker 1

36:50

And there's a deeper lesson in there that's not just about blocking misinformation. It's distrust in science and institutions, distrust in leaders, Like it feels like you have to fix that. And then censorship of misinformation is not going to be fixing that. It's only going to like throw gasoline on the fire.

Speaker 1

37:14

You gotta put out the fire.

Speaker 2

37:16

Well that's certainly possible. Yeah, I mean the, I think people are distrustful of certain institutions and not others, right? And I think a lot of distrust is good.

Speaker 2

37:31

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do know there have been a lot of conspiracies. And that, you know, people work behind scenes to do powerful bad things, and that's what needs to be exposed. The other thing I worry about, which is relevant to your question, again, it's a billion or trillion dollar question, is we're, I think, in a world of kind of flattening where all news or all information or all data is kind of equal in some way. And so you get the Twitterverse going and doesn't matter if it's peer reviewed or it doesn't matter if it's been supported by evidence, it's just a kind of outburst.

Speaker 2

38:17

It's interesting to contrast it with say 100 years ago. I mean, what would a crazy person or a flat earther or anything, what venue would they have? I mean, maybe they could go to a church or someplace. I mean, so now we have these empowering engines, then that's what's new historically, is that basically anyone can have a blog or a Twitter feed, and that is new, and so that is, you can think of it also as a kind of clutter.

Speaker 2

38:52

So it's a kind of a radical democracy in a way, and kind of 1 of the weaknesses of democracy is if everyone has an equal voice, and if everyone has equal power.

Speaker 1

39:01

So there's of course a flip side to that, where everyone has equal power, it forces the people who are quote unquote experts to be better at communication. I think people, like scientists, are just upset that they have to do better work at communicating now. They used to be lazy and you could just say, I have a PhD, therefore everyone listen to me.

Speaker 1

39:20

Now they have to actually convince people. Like you have to convince people that the Earth is round. You can't just say the Earth is round, that's it. You have to show, you have to make, I mean not the earth is round part, but things like that, you have to actually be a great communicator, do great lectures, do documentaries and so on, to battle those ideas.

Speaker 1

39:42

And then also to defend the sort of, the people labeled as crazy, you know, in Nazi Germany, if you were protesting against some of the uses of science, of medicine, to commit atrocities, you would also be labeled crazy. Yeah, those voices are important.

Speaker 2

40:03

Yeah, there's so many good points there. On the scientists becoming good communicators, the history of scientists becoming bad communicators has a history. And the last original contribution to science written entirely in the form of a poem is Buffon's Loves of the Plants.

Speaker 2

40:25

And following that in the 18th century, you get the uglification of science, the deliberate uglification of science with the idea being that if you are clear and if you speak beautifully, if you write beautifully, you're hiding something. You're covering over the truth with flowers and decorations and scents and pleasant odors. And so you get this scientific paper format, introduction, discussion, methods, results, conclusions, and it's kind of policed in this inhumane, non-humanistic kind of rhetorical way, and that's a big problem. And so you get that combined with just the rise of the research lab and the ever narrower widget builders, the cogs in the machine.

Speaker 2

41:18

It's not surprising that people might not trust certain aspects of that. That combined with the dirty laundry history of a lot of science, that you did have the requirement at Auschwitz that people be, that physicians supervise the killings, the horrors of Tuskegee and all kinds of other things, or even something like the atom bomb, which is arguably more neutral, at least, but nonetheless horrific. And so it's not surprising that a lot of people don't trust science, and a lot of science shouldn't be trusted, right? There's science and then there's science.

Speaker 2

41:58

So there's a long history of dirty, bad science that you don't solve just by saying we should have trusted it.

Speaker 1

42:05

Let's just stay on COVID for a brief moment and talk about a particular leader that I think about is Anthony Fauci. I've thought about whether to talk to him or not. I have my own feelings about Anthony Fauci.

Speaker 1

42:24

By the way, I admire basically everybody and I admire scientists a lot. And there's something about him that bothers me. I think because I'm always bothered by ego and lack of humility and I sense that. Maybe I'm very wrong on this.

Speaker 1

42:45

But so he said that he represents science. If you've taken him full context, I understand the point he's making, which is when

Speaker 3

42:59

people

Speaker 1

43:01

attack him, they think of him as representing science, things like that. But there's ego in that. And what do you think motivates and informs his decisions?

Speaker 1

43:11

Is it politics or science? And the broader question I have, What does it take to be a great scientific leader in difficult times? Like these, and maybe you could say Nazi Germany was similar, when there's obviously, Anthony Fauci, just like scientific leaders during Nazi Germany, could have made a difference, it feels like, positive and negative. And so it's like there's a lot at stake, there's a lot at stake in terms of scientific leadership.

Speaker 1

43:48

If I've asked about 17 questions, if there's something worthwhile answering in that.

Speaker 2

43:54

Well Fauci I think is doing as good a job as he can. I mean he's a, you can't turn on the television without seeing him.

Speaker 1

44:05

But no, that's, what's the goal of the job? That means he appears a lot, but there's, he does not come off as somebody with authenticity. Like I admire so many science communicators, about 10x, 100x more than him, including his boss, Francis Collins, who I've recently lost respect for, given some of the emails that leaked.

Speaker 1

44:28

There's ego in those emails. And it upsets me, because like, I hope all that stuff comes out and wakes young scientists up to don't be a douchebag. Don't be humble. Be honest, Be authentic, be real, put yourself out there.

Speaker 1

44:47

Don't play the PR game, don't play politics. Just get excited about the widget building that you love. Communicate that and think about the difficult ethical questions there and communicate them. Be transparent.

Speaker 1

45:00

Don't think like the public, don't talk down to the public. Don't think the public is too dumb to understand the complexities involved. Because the moment you start to think that, when you're like 30, what do you think happens when you're 40 and 50? The slippery slope of that, the ego builds.

Speaker 1

45:17

The distaste for the public opinion builds and then you get into the leadership position at the time you're 60 and 70 and then you're just a dick And you're a bad communicator to the very public. So I think this is something that just builds over time is the skill to communicate, to be honest, to be real, to constantly humble yourself, to surround yourself with people that humble you anyway. I'm bothered by it because I feel like science is under attack. People distrust science more and more and more.

Speaker 1

45:56

And it is perhaps unfair to put places like Anthony Fauci to blame for that, but you know what? Leaders take care of the responsibility. So in you saying that he's doing the best job he can, I would say he's doing a reasonable job, but not the best job he can?

Speaker 2

46:15

Yeah, well I don't know what his capabilities are on that.

Speaker 1

46:18

1 way or the other. Like you can imagine how history sees great leaders that unite on which history turns. That's not a great leader because there's a huge division.

Speaker 1

46:35

There's a lot of people in leadership position that can heal the division. You could think of tech leaders, they can heal the division because they have the platform, they can speak out with eloquence. You can think of political leaders, presidents, that can speak out and heal the division. You can think of scientific leaders, like Anthony Fauci, that can heal a division.

Speaker 1

46:57

None of these are doing a good job right now. And which is, you know, leadership is hard, which is why when great leaders come along, history remembers them. So I just wanna point out, the emperor has no clothes when the leaders are like, kinda mediocre. Because it feels like, I guess, I'll take it to a question about Nazi Germany.

Speaker 1

47:19

What is the heroic action for a scientist in Nazi Germany? Like to stand, to see what's right when you're under this cloud of ideology?

Speaker 2

47:35

Yeah, well it's an almost impossible task in Nazi Germany. Maybe the heroic task would have been before Hitler was essentially elected and the Reichstag is burned. So in

Speaker 1

47:52

the 30s, because it's building,

Speaker 2

47:54

when it's building what the other alternatives are, maybe it's events in World War I that could have made Nazism less inevitable. Maybe it's going back to the British Empire, which had a giant empire, and Germany wanted a big empire too. Right, and that part of the history of World War I is often forgotten.

Speaker 2

48:25

So, you know, the heroic act is to stand up and tell the truth and fight against evil.

Speaker 3

48:34

And- Of course you get- Oh, sorry to interrupt.

Speaker 2

48:35

But of course you have some courage, you know?

Speaker 1

48:38

But I also, so I personally don't always have complete respect of people who stand up and have courage, because it's not often effective. What I have the most respect for is long-term courage, like that's effective. Because if you're just an activist and you speak out this is wrong, that's not gonna be effective because everybody around you is saying, nah, it's like we like our widgets.

Speaker 1

49:06

So you have to somehow like steer this Titanic ship. And I guess you're right, the easiest way to steer is to do it earlier.

Speaker 2

49:14

Well, everyone has different skills. Musk is building electric cars and other people are trying to, you know, build solar and wind. And there are all kinds of problems that we're gonna solve, right?