Kind: captions
Language: en
what is the heroic action for scientists
in nazi germany science in many respects
actually is a full collaborator
in the most horrific
forms of nazi genocide nazi exclusion
what goes to the mind 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 there's no contest
cigarettes have killed far more
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
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 one 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
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
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 two 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
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
let us then move forward with humility
so that history will remember this
period as one 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
what is the story of science and
scientists doing the rise
rule and fall of the third reich
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
fascists they go nazi with hitler
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 uh
that's kind of a a relatively untold
story in the sense that uh
when we think of science in the third
reich we think of joseph mingley
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
uh campaigns of nazi destruction
and what i looked at in particular in in
actually 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
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 bias to rise
to a very different type of science in
the soviet union by the way the soviet
union is more on the nurture side
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
going to 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 a russian okay we're
gonna have to talk about that but i got
excluded
from uh
fulfilling that dream
but one 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
lysincoast lamarcism 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 some of the
twisting of science in the soviet union
but nonetheless there are these
interesting complexities and
what's amazing about nazi sciences 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 so what was the
connection between the ideology and the
science
if you can just linger on it longer well
we tend to think of
science and ideology as completely
separate when i think the reality is
there is there not
if you look at why the mayans in the 7th
and 8th century a.d 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 the of
venus with what's called the heliacal
rise rising namely the rising of venus
before the
rising of the sun in which which
at which moment venus is destroyed by
the light of the sun
well
they developed this elaborate
calendrical astronomy which required
detailed observation detailed
chronicling of movement of the heavens
in particular the planets
for the purpose of celebrating
this cycle of renewal that they thought
was sacred and and uh holy and magical
so where's the ideology where's the
science there's the the sort of
instrumentation the calendrics the
measure the measurement all in the
service
of this
magical moment
and i think that's true of a lot of
science 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
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 end up ends up working on
hardening
silicon chips against nuclear war
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 practice of science often gets
pushed into and is is woven into
ideological practices and sort of in the
same way that you get beautiful
um medieval cathedrals built
uh in service of of catholicism
well what's in the mind of an individual
scientist so this this process of
ideology polluting science or is it
science empowering ideology
so
almost like uh if you can zoom in and
zoom out
effortlessly into the individual mind of
a scientist then back to the whole
scientific community 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 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 that uh in a concentration camp
what are they thinking
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 maybe they don't want
to know
maybe they have ways of of lying to
themselves
maybe they are the one person who agreed
to do it in
99 refused
so you know 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
you know 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 widget
building and that leads to the
possibility that they can become easily
instrumentalized
in a particular
in a particular action which is maybe
horrific or or glorious
the other thing to keep in mind is that
sciences as we say what scientists do
and
that can include a lot of things that
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
uh
skein meaning to cut
or divide
and so it's cognate with
scissors
schism
skin 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 uh between
science and shit or science and cutting
with 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
and that taxonomic impulse can be very
static
it's actually one of the things that
darwin had to overcome in recognizing
evolution that the taxonomies are in
motion
um
but it also can lead to a kind of myopia
that my job is done when i've classified
something is is is this bird an x a y or
a z and
that again can be
it can be ideological or it cannot be
but
scientists are humans humans and they're
fitting in
with a world with a world practice
and that's that's 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 that we're walking in
yeah and it's fascinating because i
think ideologies also have an impulse
towards forming taxonomies and there is
um
so just uh so uh 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 and it 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
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 um
you know some sometimes people say
scientists want to make money and uh or
they have a big kind of
ideological drive behind it i think
there's just
nice one
the widgets you like building anyway
somehow somebody convinces you some
charismatic person that this widget
is actually has a grander
purpose and you don't almost feel think
about the negative or whether it's
positive just the fact that it's grand
is already super exciting yeah yeah i
think that's right i think that's the
story of vernafun brown
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
uh
and then but his rocket then gets
compressed into the the western world or
the american world and
basically launches us to the moon and we
forget about the sauce how the sausage
was made
uh originally
what can you talk about him a little bit
more because he's such a fascinating
character
because he so he's he was
a nazi but he was also an american and
it had such a grand impact on on
both and like there's this uncomfortable
fact that he's you know
one of the central figures that gave
birth to the american space exploration
efforts
yeah he's an interesting figure
fascinated in a kind of a tunnel vision
way with
space flight he made these beautiful
rockets already beginning in the 20s
early 30s
ends up for a while at panamunda using
slave labor to build
v2 engines and and so forth like that i
remember going to pennamunda
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
these engines used to rain terror
uh on 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 the panama to burn
it's called because they find yellow
phosphorus they think it's amber they
put it in their pocket and then it dries
out and then explodes and creates this
big burn
uh
burn on their legs
but the whole nazi regime is is full of
things like that it's full of these
scholars who get twisted
into a mindset and
uh
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 uh there are versions of it
but
things get on a new meaning gain a new
meaning in light of subsequent events
and there's a entire propaganda machine
that makes it easier for you to
to 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
that's right and
we have to remember that
gerbil's office was not the office of
propaganda it was the office of
enlightenment of popular enlightenment
and propaganda so enlightenment
enlightenment was part of his
just the new era of enlightenment from
his perspective it was supposed to be
the new age the new era of enlightenment
it's a little bit like the the kind of
myth of hitler's failed artist and you
know his art is not that bad
you know there are a lot of artists who
are
who are worse and
i had a very interesting conversation
once with my 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 eight years old
her dad was like a gal lighter for the
nuremberg area
and she said that for 15 minutes hitler
goes out onto the balcony with her
and has this conversation alone with
this you know eight-year-old girl
and she said he was charming and funny
and then he said he loved kids and she
she said he was the most you know
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
you know that's there's more to it than
that that's really really really
important to think about
when we make a scarecrow
because
that gives you actionable
like it 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
they talk about enlightenment
you have to kind of think all right am i
being duped on certain things you have
to kind of have a i mean that's the
problem with jeffrey epstein that people
don't seem to talk about i don't i i
never met the guy but just given the
people he talked to whom i know
it feels like he must have been
charismatic yeah like people think about
like oh it's because of the women it's
because of the money
uh
i don't the people i know i don't think
they're going to be influenced
ultimately it has to be how you are in
the room and make it's it's exactly like
you said the enlightenment i think that
excites the the scientists of course as
a charismatic person you have to know
what to pick
in terms of what excites you but that
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 yes there's a famous
story about gerbils who would do a party
trick
where for 15 minutes 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 yeah and
individualism and then for 15 minutes he
would rouse the world to nazism and
apparently he was quite convincing
in each of those performances well all
those ideologies are pretty powerful
i mean they
and i think it's not even the 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 yeah
like workers unite the
the common people stand together
they'll overthrow the powerful the
greedy yeah and yeah share the
the outcomes of our hard work yeah well
it's kind of like the fan the story of
the two-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 an ideology are very revealing
if we can just linger on this a little
bit longer
what have you learned
from this period of the nineteen
about the scientific process
so
one of the labels you can put on your
work
and you as a scholar is a philosopher of
science
and you also talk about nazi germany as
a singular
moment in time or like a a rebirth of
the
integration between
ideology and science
so the
like um
in terms of valueless science i think is
the term value freestyle value free
science uh
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
what um
difficult truths have you learned about
the scientific process and what hopeful
things have you learned about the
scientific process
well
i guess the saddening thing is how
easily people can become part of a
machine
uh if there's power
people can be found to follow it
you know one of the things i work on is
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 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
you know doing the lord's work they
thought they were cleaning the world of
filth
you know i mean
if you really thought you know jews are
a parasitic race you know why wouldn't
you you know get rid of them
so there's an ontology there's there's a
theory of the world
that they're building on
and interestingly one that was
um
also present in the united states and
one 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 meaning getting rid of
racial inferiors as they imagined them
it meant uh
getting rid of cancer-causing chemicals
in the air and in our food and our water
these were all of a piece
uh there's a famous uh illustration that
richard dahl talks about the great great
cancer theorists of
of of studying in nazi germany in the in
the 1930s and
he's shown a lecture where
cancer cells are shown as jews and
x-rays are shown as a stormtroopers and
these stormtroopers are killing the the
cancer cells who are also jews and so
there's this metaphorical work of of
cleaning extermination sanitation
purification of the 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 sort of
point about the scarecrow which i think
is very important uh
if we imagine that nothing like this
went on here in the united states that
would be a big mistake
the the nazis are looking to
the save the redwoods league to their uh
you know to the the aryan supremacists
to the ku klux klan to the to the
uh 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
one of the first things the nazis do
from a racial hygiene point of view is
start sterilizing what they call the
mentally ill and the physically
handicapped well that had been going on
since around world war one
in the united states and even earlier in
certain states in the form of castration
of 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
and scientists were able to carry those
ideas in their mind from from your work
of course of course i mean that's one of
the things going on with all the
renaming of buildings now
uh is scientists who were eugenesis 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 it's usually
better to add on rather than subtract in
other words to add history rather than
erase history or pretend as if
history had never existed let me let me
give you a specific example of that
uh one of the most powerful and
diabolical
university presidents
in the nazi period was a guy named carl
astell
a-s-t-e-l and
he was
a rabid nazi
high up in the leadership
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
yeah but to pretend as if that never
happened or to erase history in that way
i think is is a big big mistake can't
look at that point so i
haven't gotten through it yet but i've
been
trying to get to minecomp and you know
throughout his history has been taken
down and up 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 there's a large number of people
that will read that
and um
the hate in their heart will grow
so they're not using it for educational
purposes you can't put a plaque on the
mine comp you're ruining mineconf then
like you can't i mean this is you know
amazon can't do a warning
saying like um
so it still just stands on its own yeah
i mean it's uh
not well written
so you can maybe convince yourself that
it's okay because it's not well written
so it's not it's not like this inspiring
book of ideology that could easily
convince
but uh
can you steal man the argument that my
column should be banned and can you
steal man the argument that it should be
not banned
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 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 text i don't see the harm in
being able to buy mineconf it it's so
out of this world and now by now
just the language and
uh 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 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 uh in favor
of that
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 uh i think
in many of these cases there's an add-on
view it would fix a lot of the problems
we'll jump around a little bit we'll
come back to uh medicine and uh war on
cancer but let me just add one thing on
and recently the
the name of uh macmillan who works on
the charge of the electron in 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 it wasn't a central aspect of his
actual work it's not why he was put on
the 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 some something to
make a teaching moment instead of just a
forgetting moment
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 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
in particular there's a guy named robert
malone that's talking about
that that's making a case against of
at least against the covet 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 realms of
scientific ideas or should we try to get
it under control like what which way
obviously all
uh approaches will go wrong in some ways
which is more likely to go wrong
uh one 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 like try to like 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
of uh history well that used to be a
million dollar
question of course now it's a
multi-billion dollar question not
trillion yeah um
we're talking about
powerful internet platforms becoming
essentially publishers
and publishers can't say whatever they
want
there are limits
uh there's you know they can't yell fire
in a crowded theater but there are uh
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 there are large
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
or the new york times
either they have they're all kinds of
codes of ethics and legal obligations so
i uh 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 going to be
difficult and there the mistakes are
going to be made but it can't be a
let everything fly kind of situation but
when i watch
unfortunately
the pressure these platforms feel
to identify and to censor misinformation
that pressure is uh
ideological in nature currently
so if you just objectively look there's
a certain political lien to people that
are
pressing on the censorship of the
misinformation which makes me very
uncomfortable
because now there's an ideology to
labeling something as misinformation as
opposed to kind of uh
having a you know value
less
evaluation of what is true or not and
and you also have to acknowledge
that it says something
that there's a very large number of
people
that um
for example follow robert malone or
follow people i mean what does that say
about society yeah and that there's a
deeper
lesson in there that's not just about
blocking misinformation
it's uh distrust in science and
institutions distrusting leaders like it
feels like you have to fix that
and censorship of misinformation is not
going to be fixing that it's only going
to like
throw gasoline on the fire
you got to put out the fire
well that's that's certainly possible
yeah i mean the uh
i think people are distrustful of
certain institutions and not others
right and uh i think a lot of distrust
is is good
uh 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
uh we're ki 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 twitter verse
going and
it doesn't matter if it's peer-reviewed
or it doesn't matter if it's
been supported by evidence it's just
you know a kind of
outburst
it's it's interesting to contrast it
with say a hundred years ago i mean what
would
a crazy person or a uh
a flat earther or anything
what venue would they have i mean maybe
they could go to a church or someplace i
mean
uh
so now we have this in 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 so it's kind of a radical
democracy in a way that kind of the one
of the weaknesses of democracy is if
everyone has an equal voice
and if everyone has equal power
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 communication i think people like
scientists are just like upset that they
have to do like better work at
communicating now they used to be lazy
and you could just like say i have a phd
therefore everyone listen to me 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 wrong that's it you have to
like show
you have to uh make
like i mean not the earth is round part
but
things like that
you have to actually be a great
communicator and great do great lectures
do documentaries and so on and to battle
those ideas
and then also to defend
the sort of uh
the people labeled as crazy
you know in nazi germany
if you were protesting against
uh some of the uses of science of
medicine
to commit atrocities you would also be
labeled crazy yeah so well those voices
are important yeah there's so many good
points there the
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
buu bufol's loves of the plants
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 and
scents and pleasant odors and so
you get this
scientific paper format you know
introduction discussion
methods conclude you know results
conclusions
and it's 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
uh widget builders the cogs and the
machine
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
uh that you did have you know the
requirement that uh at auschwitz that
people be you know that physicians
supervise the killings
uh
you know
the the horrors of you know tuskegee and
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 so there's a long history of
dirty
bad science
that you don't solve just by saying we
should have trusted it
let's just stay
uncovered 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 by the way i'm you know 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
maybe i'm very wrong on this but so
he said that he represents science if
you've taken in full context
i understand the point he's making which
is you know when people
attack
um
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 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
like you
like anthony fauci just like scientific
leaders during nazi germany could have
made a difference it feels like
uh positive and negative
and so it's like there's a lot of stake
uh there's a lot at stake
in terms of scientific leadership
if i've asked about 17 questions if
there's something worthwhile answering
in that
well fauci i think is doing as
as good as job as he can i mean he's a
you can't turn on the television without
seeing him
um
but no that's
what's the goal of the job that means he
appears a lot but there's uh
he does not come off as somebody who
with authenticity like i admire so many
science communicators about 10x 100x
more than him
including his boss francis collins who
have i recently lost respect for
given some of the emails that leaked
there's ego in those emails yeah and it
upsets me because like i i hope all that
stuff comes out and wakes
young scientists up to don't be a
douchebag
don't don't be humble
be honest be authentic be real put
yourself out there 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 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
the this like this uh
the distaste for the public opinion
builds and then
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 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
that humble you anyway i i i'm
i'm bothered by it because i feel like
science is under attack
uh people distrust science more and more
and more yeah and uh it is perhaps
unfair to put place like anthony fauci
to blame for that but you know what
leaders
take
take care of the responsibility so when
you're saying that he's um doing the
best job he can
i would say he's doing a reasonable job
but not the best job he can yeah well i
don't know what his capabilities are on
that i mean like one time or the other
right like what 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 that there's a
lot of people there's a lot of people in
leadership position that can heal the
division you can you can 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
could think of scientific leaders like
anthony fauci they could heal division
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
want to point out the emperor has no
clothes when the leaders are like eh the
kind of mediocre yeah because it feels
like not i guess
i'll take it to a question about nazi
germany what is the heroic action for a
scientist
in nazi germany like
to stand
to see what's right
when uh
you're under this cloud of ideology
yeah
well it's an almost impossible
task in nazi germany uh
maybe the heroic task would have been
before
uh hitler was essentially elected
uh
and the reichstag is burned
so in the 30s because it's building when
it's building uh what the other
alternatives are
um maybe it's events in in world war one
that that could have made
nazism less inevitable
um
you know maybe it's uh
going back
in to the british empire which
had a giant empire and and germany
wanted a big empire too
right and that part of the history of
world war one is is often often
forgotten
so
you know the heroic act is is to stand
up and tell the truth
and fight against evil
and of course you can get oh science
interrupt but of course you have some
courage
you know but i also so i i personally
don't always
have complete respect of people who
stand up and have courage because it's
not often effective i what i what i have
the most respect for
is uh
long-term courage like that's effective
because like you know if you're just an
activist and you speak out this is wrong
that's not gonna be effective because
everybody around you
is uh saying nah it's
like we like our widgets yeah so you
have to somehow like steer this titanic
ship yeah
and i guess you're right the easiest way
to stare is to do it earlier
well everyone has different skills
um
you know musk is building electric cars
and
[Music]
other people are trying to you know
build solar and wind and there are all
kinds of problems that we're going to
solve right people are building better
vaccines you know
there's a thousand ways to do good in
the world and the thousand ways to do
bad in the world
i mean part of the problem in science is
that we don't look
enough at what i call the causes of
causes
so cigarettes cause cancer but what
causes cigarettes
yeah so the deeper yeah yeah so obesity
causes heart disease but what causes
obesity and it's not just gluttony and
sloth it's
it's the decision to pump up the sugar
industry and to allow soda in school
and i'm a big fan of loot what i call
loop closing
um
we're all worried about
climate change and reducing our carbon
footprint but what about the
hidden causes
the unprobed causes i'm doing a project
now with london shebinger on
looking at
how voluntary family planning could
actually have a big
role in reducing carbon footprint
throughout the world and these
literatures are never joined or rarely
joined
that we have this huge um
carbon emissions problem but we also
have
you know too many people on the planet
and the cause of that is because too few
women and men have access to
birth control
and
if you join those
realms
open
there's going to be new possibilities
uh and
that's it's kind of like looking at uh
uh the flip side of fascism and the kind
of things the discoveries they made that
have been ignored that's one of the
things i'm interested in is finding
some of the gaping holes the ideological
gaps that have been ignored because of
ideology left or right by the way
all both of which are involve blinders
and so there's all kinds of blinders
that we live in that's part of ideology
is what what don't we even see and that
would
uh prevent us from seeing some deep
objective scientific truth right some
truth and there's actually so just to
mention there's
some people including elon who are
saying
um there's not too many people there's
not enough people
right that if you just look at the birth
rates
it's and so it's like some of this is
actually very difficult to figure out
because that there's there's these
narratives you mentioned tobacco
obesity with sugar
there's been narratives throughout the
history and it's very
um
there are certain topics on which it's
um
easy to almost become apathetic
which because like you just see
in history how narratives take hold and
fade away you know people were really
sure
what that tobacco is is not at all a
problem and then it fades and then they
figure it out and then other things come
along what other things came along now
you know well you asked about ideology
and one of the things i always ask
students
before class whether i'm teaching
magnetology or
world history of sciences
what makes fish move
and 90 of americans will say some
version of mussels fins
you know neurons
when the reality is at least in salt
water fish don't
swim places they're moved by currents
fish are moved by currents that's what
makes fish move this is not even
counting the rotation of the earth
on its axis sort of the rotation of the
earth around the sun or the rotation of
the solar system around the
galaxy you know ignore all that
even on earth
fish arrive up in alaska they didn't
they don't swim there they come by
currents and this is known to people who
understand the ecology
of of of fish
but we as sort of individualistic
americans
think that the fish pulled itself up by
his booster holds itself up by his
bootstraps right and whatever you know
gumption and and uh courage you know
made his own world instead of thinking
of something like
cigarettes for example hitting a village
like an epidemic
hitting the village like cholera or
pneumonia or something like that so
there's a big ideology we have of
personal choice
a great example of that is in in the
tobacco world where people always
there's a whole field called cessation
that always means cessation of
consumption never cessation of
production
all blame is put on the individual
smoker instead of looking at how they
get smoked
and
looking at that bigger picture i think
is is is part of the story
so a few years ago you wrote that
the cigarette is the deadliest object in
the history of human civilization
cigarettes kill about 6 million people
every year a number that will grow
before it shrinks
smoking in the 20th century killed 100
million people
and a billion could perish in our
century unless we reversed the course
can you
explain this idea that it's the
deadliest object in the history of human
civilization maybe just
also talk about big tobacco and your
efforts there
well
cigarettes have killed more than
any other object and 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
and every year kill about as many as
kovit
they're they're sort of neck and neck
but if you took the last five years
there's no contest
cigarettes have killed far more
and are far more preventable
so we're in a world this bizarro world
where every night there's a covid report
and cigarettes would never be mentioned
cigarettes would no more likely to be
mentioned than if we were talking about
chewing gum on a sidewalk
they'd be no more likely to be in a
presidential debate
than you know
uh sneezing in the wrong place
so
we live in this world where most things
are invisible
you know we
we are
the eyes are in the front of the head
we don't see what's behind us we have a
fovea which means not only do we only
see what's in front of us we see in a
very narrow tunnel
and that's because we're predators we
don't have the eternal watchfulness of
prey we have a zeroed targeted focus and
that leads to
a kind of myopia or a tunnel vision and
all kinds of things
then when you get something like a very
powerful tobacco industry which is a
multi-multi-billion dollar industry
which still spends
many billions of dollars advertising
every year but nonetheless manages to
make themselves invisible you have this
powerful agent that is producing
producing this engine of death
that
is invisible it's been reduced to the
fish that move themselves in other words
there's not really a tobacco industry
there's just people who smoke and that's
a personal choice like what food we're
going to have for dinner tonight and
so it's erased from the policy world
it's as if it doesn't exist
and creating that sense of invisibility
to failure to understand the causes of
causes
is what allows the epidemic to continue
but
also not even to be acknowledged
how's the invisibility created is it
natural is it just human nature
that
ideas just fade
from our
attention or is it
malevolent still going on
kind of um
action by the tobacco companies to keep
this invisible it's still going on
even when you see
an ad
against cigarettes on television
that's dramatically curtailed because
the
law that made those even possible
required that there be there's an
anti-villainy clause the industry can't
be made in
even visible in those ads and some they
get away with it but
the
industry operates through very powerful
agents you know powerful senators
they used to count
three quarters of the members of of
congress as you know grade-a contacts
they had most of the senators in their
pocket a lot of the senators sometimes
they'll play both sides of the aisle
basically tobacco is democratic
democratic party
until
basically
the 70s and ronald reagan then it shifts
over to becoming
republican
they
create bodies like the tea party
they merged with big oil
the koch brothers
in the
1980s and 90s to form the tea party and
a whole series of fronts which
fight against all
regulation and all taxation in order to
prevent
gas taxes and cigarette taxes
which are bonded in the convenience
store
in walmart most cigarettes are actually
sold in places like walmart and
pharmacies and
7-elevens things like that
and through that locus then you have
gasoline and tobacco sort of in this
micro architectural collaboration
uh so there's multiple multiple means
that they use plus a lot of their
targeting is is hyper-specific
they use the internet very effectively
they use email and thing that are
customer
targeting what goes to the mind of a big
tobacco executive
this is connecting to our previous
conversations of scientists and so on
i always wonder about that i
talked to pfizer ceo for example
and there's a deep question with the
pfizer ceo
with with i i guess any ceo but big
pharma would you
it's like if you can come up with a cure
that gets rid of the problem
that's in the big pharma
would you want to because
you're going to lose a lot of money once
the cure fixes the problem it's nice to
like there's so many incentives to make
money
can you think clearly and make the right
decisions i'd like to believe most
people are good and
um it's almost like this steve jobs idea
just like do the right thing
and you'll make money in the end
it's like long term you'll make a lot of
money if you do the right action because
there's always going to be problems you
can fix you can always pivot the company
to focus on other things as long as
you're doing the best innovation the
best science the best development and
the
production and deployment and stuff
you're going to win
but there's another view where you might
um
that kind of idea of making money
pollution is the widget building it is
exciting when you can release a product
that makes a lot of money
and you start enjoying the charts that
say the money is going up
and you stop thinking about maybe
there's the
that's the wrong choice for human
civilization well one of the reasons i
was made a
courtesy appointment in pulmonary
medicine
at stanford was they recognized i was
doing more to save lives
by trying to stop big tobacco than they
were by yanking out
this long that long you know on a daily
basis cause of causes the cause of
causes which i which we can keep
returning to
your question about
how do people live with themselves is a
crucial one and
it's one i've thought about a lot it's
one you think about with in in any
context of horror
how do people live with themselves how
do they get up in the morning
i think there's a lot of incentives
one thing that
you have to keep in mind is that
whoever becomes ceo of a big tobacco
company
they have already made decisions along
the way and they are the remnant
of a whole series of aspiring
people who want to climb the ladder of
success who maybe would refuse
yeah something like this but those don't
survive the journey those survive the
journey who be who can make it through
and and i think they have a mixture of
ideologies one they'll say well if i
didn't do it someone else would
this is kind of the pour the cyclone be
down the chimney into auschwitz well if
i didn't do it
someone else would so what's really the
difference between me doing and someone
else so
that's one v