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 view another one is
the tobacco industry i think really
doesn't like their customers except for
the fact that they like their their
money
when you look at their documents they
talk about target targeting against
young adults or against women or against
uh
homosexuals there's a whole project
reynolds has called
project scum which is project
subculture urban markets where they're
targeting homeless and homosexuals in
san francisco so what kind of business
model regards their customers as as scum
or talks about them
uh as as
as one famous
reynolds executives you know we don't
smoke this stuff we reserve that for the
poor the black and the stupid
that's a direct quote
uh from one of the winston models so
it's a company culture that sees
the customers almost like
as the enemy or like uh
or worthless losers losers you know so
you have
these executives
you know if we don't do it someone else
will
if people are dumb enough to buy our
product right let them buy it
maybe it's a personal choice maybe
they're libertarians
maybe they're just
as you said seduced by the money and the
money is enormous the money is enormous
and these these the you know tobacco
executives make tens of millions of
dollars per year just in their salaries
um i so i think there's a whole series
of of logics some at some point some of
the companies have become food producers
in the 1980s and 90s philip morris which
uh makes marlboro was the largest food
producer in the united states
and so
they could say well we're producing many
products many
addictive desirable desirable products
i think one project i'm working on now
actually is looking at how the industry
maintains morale in their own workforce
and they create a kind of parallel world
of prizes and rewards and
tobacco queens and tobacco princesses
and tobacco sports teams and tobacco
it's this whole separate world a world
within a world and
we all live in bubbles of a sort and so
there is this kind of tobacco world
where you're with us or you're against
us
and i even found evidence that the
tobacco
industry lies to its own employees so
they censored their own
employee information so that everyone
would be on board that well maybe it
doesn't really cause cancer the evidence
is all statistics
can't trust mice experiments because
mice are not men
they hire the guy
daryl huff who wrote how to lie with
statistics the best-selling statistics
book in the history of the world
they paid him to write a book called how
to lie about smoking with statistics
now that was never published
when when sort of word of some other
dirty tricks got out
so
one way they're able to
gain legitimacy gain normalcy
gain you know these are supporters of
the arts you know there are universities
named
for
tobacco executives you know we have duke
university and we have the george
weissman school i think is of arts and
sciences at cuny
and
there are
prizes you know philip morris
essentially created women's tennis as a
spectator sport billie jean king
joins the board of directors of philip
morris
she signs coupons the two to one coupons
for buying virginia slim cigarettes
so the industry is able to acquire this
talent
and then through a kind of a
an application of causality purely into
the individual smoker if you smoke you
did it to yourself
and so in a sense we have nothing to do
with it it's sort of the same argument
exxon is making now with uh carbon it's
like well we just make the gas we don't
burn the gas so really we're not the
problem it's it's whoever drove here in
a car that burned gas
and
so there's a very interesting question
how who who is liable who is responsible
for
is the manufacturer just immune because
it's a legal product and people make the
foolish decision to smoke
or does the addiction play a role in the
liability so these are all really
interesting legal questions and
philosophical questions
where do you attribute the success in
the fight against big tobacco so i mean
there's been a lot of progress made
maybe two questions one is that and two
how much more is to be done
well
there's been in my view not that much
progress
to the tobacco industry basically won
the war
against cigarettes in the 1950s
the broader assumption inside and
outside the industry would be what was
that
if tobacco if cigarettes are ever shown
as causing cancer obviously they'll be
banned
the famous slogan in the 50s was if if
spinach
were ever shown to cause one-tenth the
harm of
cigarettes it would be banned overnight
flash forward you know 50 years we still
have
[Music]
we still have 200 some billion
cigarettes smoked in the united states
every year
globally we still have
about six trillion cigarettes smoked
every year that's 350 million miles of
cigarettes smoked every year
that's enough to go to make a continuous
chain of cigarettes from the earth to
the sun and back
was enough left over for several round
trips to mars but it's much fewer than
before i mean okay so culturally
speaking
i grew up in soviet union
uh everybody smoked
everybody smoked well by everybody you
mean about half well by everybody i mean
culturally so
so what does it feel like when everybody
smokes right what percentage is that
right now in the united states it feels
like nobody smokes feel i'm talking
about culturally do you see
uh famous actors and actresses
do you see movies all the time you do
you can't watch a hollywood movie
without
pretty pretty much continuous smoking
but i mean look at peaky blinders look
at
uh you know in any of the modern series
now it's pretty much a one non-stop
you're right there has been a change i
mean that that's true the the purest
metric in the united states is number of
cigarettes smoked per year and that
peaks in 1981
at 640
billion cigarettes wow that's declined
now to the level it was in 1940
which is about 240
billion cigarettes wow now globally the
number has increased
see but but the perception and sorry to
interrupt but the
that's interesting even in the united
states the numbers the decrease is not
as significant as i thought it is
because
just in my own experience with people
you know people speak negatively about
smoking yeah well for one thing smokers
do i mean smokers hate the fact they
smoke right so this is the interesting
observation i'm speaking to is
uh even the smokers
are talking negatively about smoking but
they're still smoking so even though i'm
seeing this shift where smoking is no
longer the cool thing
where it's uh like when i was growing up
and i smoked for a time
it was like a way to bond with strangers
to uh to talk to you
share a moment and share a moment
together i mean it's a beautiful thing
and it it's it's interesting because we
need to find other ways to share moments
uh but you know you bum you almost smoke
from a stranger i mean that was seen as
a good thing now did you ever smoke oh
you did yeah for how many years uh
two years i was in music so
what happened is i was a musician i was
in a band well there you go and
no there is a bonding aspect to it and i
think i stopped smoking when they
uh banned
um smoking inside bars yeah exactly
which was uh i mean that was
i mean looking back now it seems
it's such a powerful move i mean maybe
you can speak to that because
that was one of the moments that woke me
up wait a minute
like um that was a big shift for me and
i'm sure i'm not alone where
it's not just
like
it forced me to rethink the the effect
of smoking has on me yes and also to
think can i actually live a life without
smoking can i
um you know some people have that i
haven't i haven't gone through that
process yet but some people have that
with drinking yeah can i have fun
without drinking
um i think the answer to that is yes but
i'm still drinking
[Music]
so that that's a big shift for example
if they
ban drinking at certain places and
there's a lot of negative things to say
about alcohol well i'm i'm older than
you and i remember when
mother and i think you weren't even in
the in this country then but there was
something called mothers against drunk
driving
and if you look at movies from the 50s
60s even 70s being drunk was just kind
of a funny thing yeah and you would
drive drunk
what's the big deal really and mothers
against drunk driving really
denormalized
drinking and driving much like seat
belts when i was a kid you know there
were no seat belts you just lie in the
back of the car and you drove out west
with your with your parents and you'd
lie flat it was wonderful seat belts
come along and now it's pretty
normalized that you buckle up it's
pretty normalized that you don't drink
and so the moment you identify is is
absolutely crucially important a lot of
it started in california
where
there were bands on
on cigarettes some of it actually
started in the computer industry because
some of the early bugs that were found
on tapes in the 70s were caused by smoke
and some of the earliest indoor smoking
bans were actually in computer rooms
which were supposed to be clean enough
that the tapes wouldn't spin and get
caught by some
snag of soot
and the workers started saying wait a
minute if
if the smoke can hurt the tapes
can it hurt my lungs as well and so some
of these early laws already in the late
70s early 80s
pushing it out was a huge struggle the
tobacco industry marshaled an army of
experts
to say that second-hand smoke is an
entirely different kind of smoke it
can't hurt you they eventually lost that
battle
and now we have so-called smoke-free
laws
where you can't smoke
in most workplaces in most restaurants
and
that denormalization has been crucial
because remember aristotle says tell me
who you walk with and i'll tell you who
you are
and if your friends are smoking if your
friends are
doing whatever it it makes it easier
the tobacco industry has been a genius
at manipulating and really creating the
material culture of the modern world
if your shirt has a pocket
that's to fit cigarettes
right if your car has a has a plug in
every car that
i used to have had a cigarette lighter
it had an ashtray every plane that i
flew when i was a kid when i was younger
anyway
there was smoking on it originally
and then there were ashtrays
and even today
every plane by law has to have ashtrays
in the bathrooms because people still
smoke in the planes
there's a special technique they have
where they go in and
light up your cigarette and put your
mouth right down in the middle of the
toilet and then flush it right at that
same moment
and that's why they're i think it's a
good big puff
puff and flush it
and to prevent people from bringing down
the plane by putting the cigarette out
in the trash
every plane must have ashtrays
so that tells you something about the
power of addiction the power of normalcy
and it's related to your question of
this this crucial moment if you can no
longer smoke in a bar if you can no
longer smell and by the way that's
different from drinking
most people who smoke
wish they didn't
most people to drink that's not true
most people who drink they don't wish
there are some addicts you know five
percent we say but you're talking about
70 80 90 of people who smoke cigarettes
regularly or wish they did not and
that's actually where i learned about
uh
the idea that we could get rid of
cigarettes entirely was just from
talking to ordinary smokers those are
the people
who
are willing to say you know let's let's
get let's get cigarettes all together
and get rid of them all together because
it's not a recreational drug it's very
different from alcohol and the genius of
of the alc of the tobacco industry is to
turn
basic to trivialize addiction into just
something we all like
it's addictive i like it
and also to say that basically smoking
is like drinking which in fact it's not
alcohol tends to be a recreational drug
and
cigarettes are more like heroin
so
how do we get that 200 billion down
closer to zero
well the good news and i know you like
good news and i i do too
is that every year
we have about eight billion fewer
cigarettes smoked in the united states
so
we're going in the right direction we're
going to solve this you know they're not
every problem you can solve in the world
this is a very solvable problem it's an
enormous problem arguably as big as
covid in certain respects
much more invisible than covet
but very solvable and actually will be
solved
probably because of
of climate change because we're going to
need to find ways to
reduce carbon footprints across the
board and that's going to be a
a kind of uh
cultural revolution of sorts
once we have a category 6 hurricane and
you know
hundreds of thousands of people start
dying from the
storms that are coming
but we'll be it's like that metaphor of
you know there
there's a uh
a sci-fi film from 1950 where they're
trying to uh get back to earth from the
moon and
uh they have to jettison their toolbox
and their ladder and this and this and
this that's sort of i think what the
world we're going to be and we're going
to have to jettison a lot of things and
cigarettes will be
one of the things we can get rid of
let's come back to nazi germany for a
time you uh also wrote the book titled
the nazi war on cancer right what is the
main storyline and thesis of this book
well i had been
researching
nazi medicine
i went over to germany i didn't know
what i wanted to do i got a fulbright i
originally wanted to go to russia
i went to germany partly because my
girlfriend was going there lana
shebinger
and i was quick with the
language and uh
my old landlady
was
born in 1900 and i was renting a room a
tiny room in in berlin
and she told me she had been a nurse in
world war one and told me how sad it was
that all the mentally ill
uh had died
in in that war
and that how the same thing happened in
world war ii
and she told me about how sad it was
that she'd never gotten married because
there were no german men
around after world war one
but i also started taking classes uh in
in germany
and at that time there were still a few
old nazi
professors
just about to retire you know very very
old and i remember there was one guy who
would talk about
the impact on ovaries of women exposed
to stress and how this would damage
their ovaries and that this was like
people who'd uh
you know been told they were about to be
executed and they would do a before and
after on these ovaries one of these
horrific experiments this was a
physician in in berlin
and so i got involved in it with a group
of people
and really as a kind of intellectual
garlic
for living in
uh berlin and this is in in 1980
81 i started
reading medical journals from the nazi
period and even the librarians didn't
like that
i remember the process of stats
bibliotheque in downtown berlin they're
like why do you want to you know you're
not supposed to be reading these
old nazi journals these are just medical
journals hundreds and hundreds of
journals
and i just read them and read them and
read them and read them and looking for
details i'd find like a veterinary
medicine
journal that would have a joking section
where they'd say oh we found a cow with
a swastika on his forehead a natural
black swastika isn't that funny you know
or i'd find stories about tobacco i find
stories about
abortion i'd find stories about
excluding jewish medicine or jews from
medicine or who's been promoted who's
been demoted
who's been nazified
i discovered there was an entire nazi
physicians league that was just the top
nazi the most nazi
of the physicians i discovered that
physicians joined the nazi party in a
higher proportion than any other
profession that they joined the ss in a
higher proportion than any other
profession why is that do you think you
do have a sense because the nazi regime
is a kind of sanitary utopia right it
was to create this purified world
of that would control the mind and the
and fertility so
gynecologists physici and psychiatrists
were the top they were the most notified
of the various medical professions
control the body through sterilization
abortion control the mind through
psychiatry
they killed a lot of the mentally ill
and you can read their professional
journals and
i'm not sure these had ever been read
since
i also went to east germany because
remember this is way before the wall
fell
and they had a very special
collection of taboo
literature it's kind of your point about
should mein kampf be read well of course
in east germany nowhere close right and
so but not only that time magazine
couldn't be read and newsweek couldn't
be read and
this
file this this like chamber that the
foreign scholars were allowed to look
through had all of the old nazi
literature and nazi scientific
literature and time magazine and
newsweek and a whole pornography section
as well so all of the taboo topics so
here i'm researching
in the west i'm researching these topics
the librarians didn't even want me to
look at in the east i was sort of going
over there you know i would hitchhike
over there and overstay my welcome and
things like that
but in any event um
i i noticed that there was this kind of
taboo of talking about the big eugenics
i'd already been
as a kind of a
radical graduate student at harvard
working with all the
the marxist biologists there we'd
already had a critique of eugenics and
women being excluded from science and
south african apartheid was a big deal
and
uh arthur jensen's you know blacks have
lower iqs and so there's a whole nest of
controversial hot topics you know
around sociobiology around race and iq
around women and scholarship and so
forth
but we weren't looking at nazi medicine
so i thought i'll look at the big
eugenics not just this
smaller stuff only 50 000 people are
sterilized in
in in california but there were you know
huge numbers sterilized in in nazi
germany so
the more i i looked into that i realized
there was a book there
but i had also started noticing
this other weird stuff why were they
anti-tobacco why did they recognize uh
why were the nazis the first to
recognize asbestos as as causing
mesothelioma
why did they try to ban food dyes
why did they
why are they the first culture in the
world to encourage women to do breast
self-exams
i told my mom this and she she told me
that in the 50s women weren't even
supposed to touch their breasts in texas
and here in nazi germany you've got
these mandatory breast self-exams way
before this was done
in the united states
you had the first laws banning the
x-raying of pregnant women
already in the early 1930s
it was standard medical practice they
recognized that this could harm the
fetus harmed the race
way before radiation was recognized as a
hazard
in england or or america i started
noticing these things and i have an eye
for uh oddities i like the weird the
contradictory that which doesn't fit
and i remember
finding a
german magazine a newspaper actually
from 1919 that talked about a holocaust
of six million jews using that language
how could this be you know i researched
it was i thought it wasn't even real and
so i went and actually got the original
newspaper and there it was
it's just one of those oddities
of
life that just happens just weird stuff
happens right
that's the source of conspiracy theories
right exactly uh so weird stuff happens
but you know there's a inkling
you know that
that couldn't have been written in
another time in history it was much less
likely that little coincidence to have
happened in another so it has uh some
kind of
resonance
with something yeah that captures
something deep to the culture yeah
that's why i'm interested in probing i
mean history is about seeing the
universal through the particular in a
way and so you look for the weird
particular and then pull at that string
to see if there's something there is it
that weird you know i i did a project i
never published on it's what i call
pseudo swastikas which is a lot of
companies in nazi germany made logos
that look pretty much like a swastika
you start looking at them
they're you know they're disturbingly
like a swastika and i call those pseudo
swastikas it's one of the many things i
filed a way to be a great project just
to write how did this kind of visual
iconography
you know you weren't supposed to do that
you weren't supposed to sell your you
know bathroom cream with a swastika on
it yeah you know
so they would do these little things
that looked pretty much like a swastika
or i looked at i would look at humor
what are they laughing at what are they
smiling at i i didn't even know germans
had humor
yeah
that's a good discovery oddly enough
even hitler had a sense of humor there's
one speech he gives which is actually
pretty funny where he's ridiculing all
the 29 tiny tiny political parties oh
there's this party you know that party
it's actually kind of funny
so we do have this again this scarecrow
image even of of hitler and his
personality and this and that
but i started noticing
that
there was this
stuff that looks like kind of modern
hitler being a vegetarian and uh trying
to limit alcohol and this and that and
and then i got a call but i'd sort of
filed it away and then i got a call from
the holocaust museum would i like to be
the first
senior scholar in residence at the
holocaust museum
i said well i wasn't really
working on nazi stuff that much anymore
but i did have this idea maybe
looking at how it could be that the
nazis had the world's most aggressive
anti-cancer campaign
which is kind of like an amazing fact
and i said it's not exactly about the
holocaust in a way it's about the
opposite
it's about what was nazism that it was
so seductive
that it could become so powerful that
something like the holocaust could be
could be possible and they said no that
sounds great do whatever you want you
know and so i went down to washington dc
and they were you know helped them build
a little bit some of the racial hygiene
exhibits
some of the push and to show the sort of
the medical aspect of the holocaust and
so i ended up writing this
this book on uh the nazi war on cancer
which talks about how right before
hitler is about to invade poland he's
talking late into the night about uh how
to cure cancer
so for nazis racial hygiene
encompasses like
way more than we might
think so it's like purifying it always
and one terrifying and it's also
much more normal and more familiar
it's like regular
in regular discussion it's like the
famous line that if nazism ever comes to
britain it'll be wearing a bowler hat
and
you know we we create an image of nazism
which is this fantasy image yeah and
you know they're human beings making
these decisions
and when it's tied to things like
removing cancer so you're saying they
kind of
the the effort of purification walks
alongside with this effort of
fighting cancer and then the final the
difficult
truth here is that there's a lot of
innovation
you know leading
scientific innovation on fighting cancer
it's not a bunch of blind robots
following orders
it's a period of massive innovation
i mean they declared this
soybeans to be the official bean of the
third reich
because they realized how you know how
useful soy could be in in protein for
for the people
they built a whole car out of soybeans
they
pushed for a whole grain bread calling
white bread a french revolutionary
capitalist
product and and they're they're right
about whole grain bread it's better than
you know so allegedly so far so far
that's what we think
we'll discover eventually that bread is
the thing that's killing us
uh well by the way i'm eating mostly uh
meat so mostly carnivore and that's been
a discovery for me i don't care what
like
i'm not making a general statement about
the population but me personally how i
feel i i like i've discovered fasting so
i often like on days like this when it's
pretty stressful
um i'll eat once a day and only meat or
mostly meat and that's
that's amazing to me from a scientific
discovery perspective that that makes me
feel way better
you know there's not scientific support
why might make you feel but i don't care
the point is i've done the experiments
on the end of one
and it just makes me feel better well i
think fasting is way undervalued
i mean where do we get the idea you need
three meals a day i have a friend at
harvard and he he'll go seven or eight
days
periodically without food he drinks
water
but he considers it a kind of
purification and
you know we're in a world where
it's too easy to get food yeah we're in
a world i mean most animals are living
in a sense at the on the brink of
starvation but we have technologies
and
social conditions that allow
it
it's way too easy to to find a piece of
cake or a donut
and that's not something we evolved with
we've been talking about purification in
that negative context but you know
there's appealing ways of
uh
of minimalism of removing things from
your life of of seeking
especially for me being like ocd
and and a scientist i i do like this
simplification of things of the this
taxonomy things i just recently um
storage got uh hacked by ransomware uh
for you see storage devices called qnap
nas
and you know 50 terabytes of data
locked up
and you i can't so it's lost but you
know it was at first it was a gut punch
and it really hurts and a bunch of stuff
is gone
um
but it's also uh freeing yeah
well there's a uh my favorite new yorker
cartoon is
where the guy's about to die as i say
he's 90 years old he's got tubes in his
nose very last words are i wish i'd
bought more crap
uh
yep
and that's now in this amazing world
applies to digital world too like you
don't need to store everything you just
live in the moment and live for the
people well that's one of my fears of
bitcoin is losing your password i know
a friend his son you know mined i don't
know how many dozens of bitcoins and and
lost his password you know and so what
can he do and there's a whole i think
silicon valley episode about something
like that where
the three three comma club
you know asshole billionaire is trying
to find his old uh laptop with the
password on it
yeah that's the kind of dread people
feel in the modern age losing your
bitcoin password
or for me it'd be like last pass
password
it's hilarious we're funny funny
creatures what um
what else can we say
outside of cancer about medicine about
engineering
lessons about medicine lessons about
engineering and lessons about sort of
applied science and nazi germany
so before we leave the subject is there
some
truths that resonate with you
still that's applicable for today
well you know historians celebrate
contingency or at least recognize
contingency and we always say things
didn't have to turn out the way they did
they were
you can't always you know foresee what's
going to happen
um
and
there were definitely missteps and
uh
the potency of that ideology was such
that it
it it trapped a lot of people and
i guess
by the time it becomes essentially a
wartime operation that becomes very very
dangerous when it's bl whatever the
ideology is
once it's blended with
uh warfare that's
that's catastrophic
one of the things that's ignored i'm
very interested in things that are
ignored
and one of the things that we ignore now
on on something even like the climate
catastrophe is the role of the military
i mean there's a huge amount of carbon
emissions from
military operations
again just part of the loop we're not
we're not closing
well
military is really interesting because
you know i'm a ai person robots and most
of my work when i was a pg student
was
darpa and dod funded
and i think that's probably true for a
lot of science that's funded
especially engineering is funded by the
military
and you know
again
i don't
i really want to be careful drawing
parallels between nazi germany and any
anything else
but you know there there is a sense in
which i remember when i was a
it hit me when one one of the people
close to me when i was a phd one of the
faculty um
she refused to take funding from from
dod from darpa that was interesting to
me i thought but what's the
i mean it's not
like you're not you're not taking a
stand against the war
you just don't want to take money from
tangentially associated military kind of
efforts
and that little stand i mean that had an
impact on me you know that the
last at least it woke me up to
to
like this is something we should be very
very careful with for me artificial
intelligence
is uh
you know much of the
darpa
research on autonomous vehicles and all
kinds of robotics drones
i mean that's pure research some of the
biggest discoveries like i didn't think
of it as military i thought of it as
engineering and science but then
when the
drums of war start beating like
say in some future time
all of that machine is already there to
turn it into
into now lex is walking around and
working on autonomous drones they're
going to
um
you know
swarm china
or swarms whoever some terrorist
um
part of the world
and then all of a sudden all my widgets
are being used for that that's why i've
been waking up more and more
to uh there's been something released
called like the ai reports eric schmidt
was one of the co-authors of it which is
essentially saying that because china is
developing autonomous weapons systems
us should not ban autonomous weapons
systems and should also be doing it so
basically put ai
into our
weapons of war and that
that escalation that race is terrifying
uh just like all the things you
mentioned but that particular one for me
is close because
now
too closely are the ideas of ai and war
are being linked very much yeah i mean
one of the things i think that is
rarely taught
in universities is what would you not do
for money
right
i mean in a basic
class on machine learning or
even statistics or history what would
you not do for money what should you not
do for money
i have a lot of my own colleagues who
work for big tobacco you know carrying
water for them in court
a huge essentially a mercenary army of
historians a vast
undiagnosed you know essentially a
hidden invisible army they don't put it
on their cvs
and it's going on the same thing with a
lot of the technical fields
what wouldn't you do for
for money at stanford
there used to be secret phds secret
research projects that was that was
kicked off campus in 1971 with the
whole 60s radicalism
but nonetheless uh individual professors
still work for
all kinds of military operations
we're setting up a new school of
sustainability at stanford and
it's going to be
pretty much in bed with big oil as well
big oil is going to be funding a lot of
that
you know what kind of influence if they
have a seat at the table if they're
giving money if they're gifts
if their names are on
certain projects
what influence is that going to have
this is what really bothered me people
don't often have
they don't have integrity
uh in the way that i hope they would
this is one of the things i learned in
academia
i think a lot of people from money
you know if i give you a million dollars
to murder somebody i think most people
would not right
uh a billion dollars that number starts
uh decreasing but it's still pretty like
it i think we'll be happy with direct
murder not being done for money
but like subtle stuff
just pressures and it could be with like
let me buy you a drink
and just you know laugh about stuff
become friends that's a subtle pressure
i'm very upset
with how many people would just
unknowingly like
tell themselves the story ah what's the
harm
and i see that with uh for example me
personally at mit
a lot of people i admire a lot of people
i still admire friends of mine
i mean
for example in doing autonomous vehicle
research there's car companies that fund
that research
and the car companies say no of course
we're not going to influence anything
no that's like you do
it's wide open
do whatever you want
but the fact is you know they give
millions of dollars
and i'm disappointed that actually a lot
of scientists in that context
are still afraid even though legally it
says they cannot the car company cannot
at all influence the research they still
start leaning slowly
towards the ideas that that company
espouses
and that's a harmless perhaps topic
versus big tobacco but i would argue it
has harm on innovation yeah well it
skews innovation the yeah what happened
at stanford was
philip morris and the other big tobacco
companies they had a massive denial
campaign to deny that exposure to
someone else's smoke could kill you when
in fact it can it kills tens of
thousands of americans every year still
they set up an entire conspiracy body
called the center for indoor air
research and funded
hundreds of scientists to basically
say you know it's all genetic if you get
cancer well you had it coming
right because of your genes your
ancestor your hormones whatever
well that was just
that that was broken apart through what
was called the master settlement
agreement but it it was
rejuvenated and reinvigorated by
something called the philip morris
external research program which
continued with the same facts lines and
executives
funding universities like stanford
millions and millions of dollars and
when i came to stanford there were
millions and millions of dollars being
given to medical professors by philip
morris as part of the philip morris
external research program
well what were they researching they're
researching genetics they're researching
diet anything but cigarettes causing
cancer and giving the
non-giving the friendly research as as
philip morris often called
a bigger voice
they got money they got jaw you know it
amplified that as a research tradition
remember there's nothing natural in a
university about
how many professors there are of
human origins versus
a.i this is all a political decision in
a very non-democratic institution
universities are less democratic
than the vatican you know the at least
the pope is elected
who elects
uh you know a president of a university
or a dean for that matter
and so
what happened was uh i helped launch a
campaign to get philip morris off campus
and
people started coming out of the
woodwork like well does this mean i
shouldn't be working for the cia does
this mean i shouldn't be working for big
oil does it's like what you work for big
oil
and our faculty voted against pushing
philip morris off campus
but philip morris got bad press from it
and so they voluntarily
withdrew the entire program so we
started it was kind of a a lesson in
that you can lose a battle
but win a war
if you're doing the right thing and so
by standing up even though our own
faculty wouldn't
you know back us in kicking philip
morris out of the medical school
philip morris did a cost benefit
analysis found well probably really not
worth the
kudos we get for you know embracing
stanford
so it can have an influence and in this
case the influence was simply by
rewarding giving voice to the
people who were
blaming cholesterol rather than
cigarettes
and of course we know that historically
the tobacco industry created a lot of
these theories
these alternative theories of what
causes heart disease that stress causes
heart disease that salt or that
anything but cigarettes they funded that
that research to to
skew the whole research in their
direction
you are
edited a book titled
agnetology this is an interesting term
so you mentioned it earlier the making
and unmaking of ignorance
where you explore the topic of ignorance
or the authors explore the topic of
ignorance in different applications in
different contexts oh
let me ask the ridiculous big
philosophical question what is the
nature of human ignorance
well the first thing to say is that it's
infinite
einstein quote or stupidity or something
i forget what it is yeah well
attributed the point is that
you know there's there's probably
trillions of planets in the universe and
we know one you know a tiny piece of one
but not only that who are the we i mean
we're all born
as you know we started as single-celled
organisms right some sperm and some egg
get together
that's certainly ignorant and then we're
ignorant and we're each one of us
there's an ontogeny of of knowledge you
say but an ontogeny of ignorance is well
we grow up we have to learn
but almost everything that has been
known has been forgotten if you think
about the names of
ordinary people and names of the
neanderthal did they even have names
most of the history of the world has
been forgotten the we have a few shreds
a few traces that we try history is a
kind of
resurrection projects a kind of
archaeological project and a
genealogical project where we look back
and
and we find traces and and it's very
biased
uh i'm interested in in empires that we
don't even know anything about you know
and there are whole empires that have
that are gone if things don't leave a
written trace you know we know something
about
mayan cosmology because we've got some
of their stele and a few of their
codices four codices
but we know that dozens that were burned
by diego delanda the
you know inquisitorial spanish friar who
thought these were just heresies and so
burned so that knowledge is all lost you
think there's
a lot of
like deep wisdom about reality that is
lost forever of course
of course that's so sad well it is sad
but the human condition is sad i mean
but but then if we can study ignorance
that's also a positive thing agnetology
the study of ignorance the study of the
cultural production of ignorance
is cultural production sites interrupt
cultural production of ignorance yes yes
you can so the ignorance is not just a
manifestation of what it means to be
human it's also
forced back onto you through the culture
that's the missing piece that people
don't pay enough attention to it's not a
natural vacuum we explore like some
empty cave it's
it's there are factories of ignorance
the tobacco industry when they built
their propaganda engines
to deny that cigarettes caused cancer
they measured exactly how much ignorance
could be created by watching one of
their
videos they would show that
uh watching one of their propaganda
videos in the 1970s produced a 17
increase
in the people
not willing to say that cigarettes cause
cancer
so this is this is i call it agnometrics
they actually measured the success of
their propaganda and i'm sure this has
been done
in
in in marketing and in other fields as
well but the that framing of it
somehow is um
[Music]
terrifying
because it seems like a very effective
way to be scientific about how to sort
of um
create doubt in the mind exactly it's
diabolical and luckily we have some of
the
tobacco industries
own internal documents the one that is
ones that were not destroyed
and we actually know we have some traces
as to which ones were destroyed we know
that the most sensitive were destroyed
and we know that some of the ones that
were sequestered by whistleblowers
or by
you know disgruntled spouses or whatever
that those contain the real gems and the
truth
and one of the ones that was leaked
already in 1981 was the doubt is our
product memo that we don't just make
cigarettes we make two products we make
doubt and we make cigarettes we make
cigarettes but we can only keep selling
cigarettes
so long as we can keep selling ignorance
and that then becomes a template of
sorts
for climate denial and for
all kinds of other denial engines
that are produced by the 1500 trade
associations in in washington dc
so this this is something new in the
research
enterprise of the world after world war
ii you have
this enormous trust in science trust and
research
so what could be more effective than big
tobacco saying look
we're supporting research we want to get
at the truth we're funding hundreds of
millions of dollars of research which is
what exactly what they did
what they didn't say was it was all an
effort
to distract
from the truth that cigarettes caused
cancer and a million other diseases too
blindness
amputation
all kinds of other diseases all of that
was hidden covered up
through a distraction process
richard nixon declares war on cancer in
1971 it's called the war on cancer
cigarettes were excluded even though
cigarettes caused a third of all cancers
all cancer deaths
cigarettes were excluded because the
tobacco industry successfully argued
that cigarettes cause cancer is not a
scientific fact but a political opinion
much like the argument that guns don't
cause death you know pulling the trigger
causes death or shooters or whatever in
other words it's all about breaking down
the chain of causation
into pieces that
serve your interests so it's not that
cigarettes cause cancer it's this maybe
the smoky them at most the way they're
even denying that
it's the fact you have lungs that cause
cancer it's
it's blaming the victim and they had a
thousand ways to
blame the victim
i mean there's some legitimacy to this
line of our argument which is why it
sticks which is figuring out what is the
causation of things is hard to figure
out a lot of the politics of science
have to do with which parts
of the causal chain
do you view as real
or not real
when we say that carbon causes climate
change well what causes carbon if it's
exxon causing carbon is it the person
driving the car causing it or is it the
republican party causing
that or is it the tea party causing that
or is it big tobacco and big oil
controlling the republican party or is
it
what
is it the jews controlling the weather
which is where the conspiracy theories
come in or the lizards
so and and whatever sticks you try it
out and if you're a tobacco company
you're going to actually literally be
scientific about it and try different
options the genius of the tobacco
conspiracy the tobacco denial campaign
which is born on
december 14 1953 we know
on an hour-by-hour basis how it worked
is to create an alliance between
solid
research or as they called it
impassionate dispassionate
research and to tar all of their
opponents as fanatical emotional
hysterical political
you mentioned uh marxism and at harvard
a couple decades ago or something like
that
so 30 years ago you wrote the value free
science book
purity and power and modern knowledge
which is interesting
that you kind of
what you were describing then seems to
be a concern for people now still so
you're i think referencing more nazi
germany and how social scientists would
attack or defend marxism feminism and
other social movements using science
there's a
you know depending on who you talk to i
just spent a day with jordan peterson
you know there's some arguments that
science is not being leveraged in some
part of the university which bothers me
because most of the university at least
like mit is doing engineering and not
ideology doesn't
seep in yet but the concern they have is
ideology seeps in eventually if you let
it in at all anyway i ask all that do
you do you have some modern concerns
about
the seeping in of ideology into academic
research in these social movements for
or against marxism
for or against you know
uh well nobody's for racism but you know
on the topic
like anti-racism all those kinds of uh
critical race theory things and then
also on the feminism and gender studies
and all those kinds of things yeah i
mean these have always been in the
university
when people have been most adamant
in saying that science is a neutral
value free enterprise
it's times like the 1950s when there
weren't blacks and there weren't even
women in universities so
what i discovered was that value
neutrality or this ideology of that we
are value-free it really arose
as a defensive shield
to prevent
greater
inclusion to prevent
you know
questioning of
the priorities of science
the practice of science the nature of
science
now we're in a period now i think of a
kind of inclusive revolution where
people are realizing well
we can't have
you know universities that look too much
a certain way
there's probably going to be
in that omelette making you know there's
going to be a few uh eggs that get
broken
and uh
i think
people may exaggerate the extent to
which that's going in is it's definitely
real like cancer culture all those kinds
of things i mean it's definitely real
but it's also they're in a way it's also
a distraction
from
looking at
big power in a university
if
big oil is going to control
or at least influence
the direction of the sustainability
school at stanford isn't that a bigger
issue than than whether we have we can't
say certain words on campus
in other words there's
there's some very interesting and
complex
complex aspects to this
and
the idea that certain words should not
be said
or that certain people should not be
invited an invitation to a university is
always political i mean who do you
invite who do you not invite
much as
an admissions process is if a student is
admitted to stanford what that really
means is 96
of the applicants did not get in they
were rejected they were cancelled from a
stanford move four percent are admitted
they call it an admissions committee
they should should call it a rejection
committee yes when we hire someone in in
my department
at stanford we get 300 applications and
maybe we accept one
it's not a hiring committee
it's a non-hiring committee that sounds
like toxic cancer culture all these
rejections
everybody should be accepted in that
sense it's the essence of meritocracy is
that
selection is involved in any hiring
decision in any
because in a way when you were hired
into a university you were
hired to control the means of production
at least part of it and
this part of the politics of it is
invisible to the undergraduates because
they are consumers and you're free as a
consumer to eat whatever you want
but you're not free to own the means of
production
to say what's on the menu and that's
that's where the power is you have to
ask the question where is the power in
the university i think that uh like at
mit
the entire administration should get
fired regularly and and more power put
in the hands of faculty and students
there is an overgrowth that happens that
it feels like
administrators
are more easily influenced by big
tobacco
than faculty and maybe it's me being
sort of romantic about the idea of
faculty but
if you're in the battle doing the
research i feel like
well i don't know
i don't know i don't know but it feels
like
at the the administration helps you
delude yourself
longer
so it prevents you from waking up it's
like no it's okay to take this fine oh
jeffy epstein that's okay and oh okay so
he got he went to prison let's just keep
it a little bit secret it's fine just
keep taking the money and i feel like
that comes from the administration more
than the faculty well there's certainly
a cult of celebrity a cult of money
donors have the remember in the whole
scandal about the side door entrance
uh
in in universities there's always been
the
you know the front door and the back
door where the the back door is the the
rich donors the kids of the rich donors
the legacy
kids that you still get
so
there are a lot of ways universities get
corrupted they get corrupted through
money they get corrupted through
influence
and that should be recognized
we're jumping around a little bit but
you i read you also do work on human
origins so we we
we mentioned this earlier let me ask
another big philosophical question
um
what what's human what makes us human
what is human and uh
where did that humanness come from
that's exactly the question we need to
problematize because it's what i call
the gandhi question it's like
uh you know gandhi's ask what do you
think of western civilization and he
says it would be a good idea
you know and so when did humans evolve
you know well
not yet
so
we don't talk about you know when did
you know
we talk about the rise of modern
humanity
and what's happened in the last
50 or 60 years or so which i think is a
good thing intellectually is that we've
smeared out humanness to mean many
different things it's not just tool use
it's not just upright posture upright
posture goes back at least five million
years
tool use goes back at least two and a
half million years stone two years but
since wasps and chimpanzees use tools
then it's got to be even older
so that that's actually one of the
things i'm interested is
how have different notions of what is
human
influence our theories of
human origins
and
in particular there's sort of the
problem with of what i call like sodomy
in the uncanny valley which is
how long ago would you be willing to
date someone say
someone that existed say 5 million years
ago 10 million years ago 3 million years
ago in other words when is it a date or
one night stand i mean that's strong
okay either one all right
let's say be the
the mother of your children
um that's a lot of commitment but yeah
but it's an interesting question because
after world war ii
as a result of
nazism
no one wanted to be the one to say that
this particular fossil we've just found
was anything less than fully human
so there's a projection of humanness
arbitrarily back
into the past
so that even these little monkey-like
creatures ramapithe scenes
rhombopithicus were being declared to
have folkways and mores and language
which is ridiculous
no one want to be
one to say that neanderthals were
anything less than fully human so it's a
very interesting question
at what point are they us i mean human
origins is very much an identity quest
it's when did we become us which sort of
begs the question what are we who are we
um and how much is that is the hardware
evolution question and versus the
software like what
the actual development of society like
can't you argue that we became human
with uh with agriculture
i mean can't you argue that we became
human with the industrial revolution
well certainly by then
they are us
but
agriculture is only 12 000 years ago
that's a blink in the eye right that's
that's yesterday
it's interesting prior to the 19th
century
most scholars thought that the pyramids
were at the beginning of time
essentially they were closer to the
beginning of time than they are to us
now
it's a blink in the eye you know we use
the metaphor of a meter you know the
earth is 5 billion
so that's a meter
the natural history of upright humans is
5 million so that's
that would be like one millimeter this
would be the thickness of the white
of your fingernail
and then the pyramids are five thousand
so that's
a thousandth
of a millimeter a micron which is the
amount taken off
when you brush your
fingers on your
your jacket
so
the there's a natural history of
humanity and then there's the history of
our constituents we're all stardust
because all of our complex atoms began
in
supernovas
many billions of years ago
but
upright posture 5 million
agriculture only a few thousand
years ago
we cultivate dogs a couple hundred
thousand years ago so those are
paleolithic instruments cats are
neolithic instruments because they're
used to kill vermin dogs are used to
to hunt with us
but there is what you say this
co-evolution our social aspect yeah and
our physical aspect even the fact that
we have whites of the eyes we're the
only animal with whites of the eyes
and the whites of the eyes
tell intent
they tell direction they tell interest
they know
if you look at something i can tell what
you're looking at because there's a
lateral
resolution i can tell what you're
looking at
that's recent
and
the people who do reconstruction for
museums they want to create what i call
an ethnographic identity with the viewer
and so they
fantasize about all these other early
hominids non-human pre-human hominids if
that's a word
as having eyes like us but they probably
didn't
and they were probably
not self-aware
at least the early ones i can't have
been self-aware the way we are insofar
as we are
they may not have spoke
so i'm interested in
basically when did we become what we
think is human it's clear that when we
start
burying the dead and making jewel making
jewelry and and
when we in a sense invent fantasy
when we invent deception
that's human that's full of human we
become human
by
thinking there's a world that really is
not
i mean that's that feels like we're
starting to operate in the space of
ideas more and more so to have deception
to have imagination
you start to be able to have ideas and
share them and it feels like the sharing
is the thing that really develops the
idea so it's not you come up with ideas
and you we become able to sort of
understand what each other is thinking
some animals can do this to a certain
extent dogs have a certain empathy but
it's it's limited it's highly limited
but you could probably argue that the
dogs got that from the humans yeah i
mean humans and dogs have co-evolved
have definitely co-evolved because it's
over a hundred thousand years we've been
working together there
but but all our hands have evolved with
tools
and so i'm trying to figure out now the
original purpose is the purpose of a
julian hand axis the old the first
beautiful tool made by humans which
were made unchanged what kind of axe is
this they're called the shulian hand
axes they're the
these beautiful teardrop shaped
objects that go back 1.5 million years
and what's your thought about his
possible purposes
well the
most important thing to murder is that a
jealous jealous husband comes home
what's astonishing is that no one knows
what they were used for so they may have
been
maps they may have been weapons they may
have been chopping devices
they may have been sexual displays
oh
like ornaments
to display something versus actual
products like the peacock's tail right
something to attract a mate
uh no one really knows but
what's interesting is how in becoming
ignorant
of those that's a form of knowledge
in other words a lot of this is one
reason i'm interested in ignorance is
that really
to understand something and especially
to to teach something you have to know
what people don't know
and that's that's hard often it's very
hard to
remember what it's like to not know
something once you know it
very hard very hard to do but you sort
of have to do that
to recreate that moment you can
you can teach well one nice thing i like
about the internet
is you can look at old tweets of yours
and to be like okay it for some reason
it brings to mind like okay that's where
my mind was another interesting exercise
is like google search history so i i
think
for everybody it keeps you can look up
your own history of what you search for
it's so cool to go back to like
2008 or something like that like okay i
remember where your mind was and
immediately actually it's a nice way to
restore
at least an inkling of the ignorance you
had like have a peek into the ignorance
you had about the world
and also to discover the things you've
forgotten the new ignorance you have now
he's like oh right
right i was really concerned about you
know this and that and it it's i i do
think that as you're saying it's um it's
both sad and
illuminating to think about
that most of what we've known even like
the deep wisdom is forgotten as a human
civilization
but you know we we create it new all the
time as well so
right hopefully forgetting is a feature
and not just a bug it's like those mice
that can't forget they go insane right
if you imagine
all of your memories as present
yeah that's that's a recipe for insanity
you have to to forget to learn right
learning is unlearning
and
[Music]
which is uh
why i drink no uh
and uh then write some blues songs um
about
forgetting a broken heart okay you
mentioned uh
amber and stone collection i just have
to ask does that connect to human
origins or just a personal love
what is it about stone collecting that
attracts you well scholars tend to be
text oriented i tend to think books are
overrated
uh we
uh we evolved without books
uh
you know i walk for a couple of hours in
the forest every day i gather mushrooms
and all kinds of things just
located pieces of the
1953 resolution airplane crash uh
outside of
um half moon bay just a couple days ago
i like finding things have you ever
found uh pieces of a crash ufo
no not yet okay all right let me know
please if you do but of course we have
extraterrestrial other stuff i mean we
have i have i'm like meteorites
so i'm i'm into that
uh and so i i'm interested in stone
stone quality i grew up in southern
texas
and grew up surrounding surrounded by
people who who would
hunt for stone and gather stone and cut
stone i cut stone as well i'm a lapidary
and so i have this interest in the
physical qualities of objects
sometimes it's called material culture
but it's just stuff
and
i'm interested to know how different
cultures have manipulated stuff worked
stuff stone wood
things like that
and also the fantasies people project
into it so i'm doing a
book on all the different ways different
cultures have found different images in
stone like rorschach tests
and so in in india they love agates with
hindu temples in them and and altars and
uh in america they like you know three
crosses on the mount and
uh if you can find a stone with the word
allah in it that's beloved in yemen or
saudi arabia so there's a long history
of people
projecting fantasy into stone and i'm
using that as a kind of a
a metaphor they also i'm also looking at
the rise of hobbies
and
and amateur
stonework and how a lot of our
gem gemologic techniques were actually
invented by amateurs
which means just lovers as opposed to
professionals the amateur is the lover
and
hobbies i don't know if you know but the
word hobby comes from a hobbled horse
and so you would hobble a horse me to
keep it from running that's hobbling it
with a with a stick or a
string and then kids would ride a
hobbled horse
for play a horse on a stick
and riding a hobbled horse becomes
riding a hobby horse and then that
becomes a hobby
and so hobbies become this so-called job
you can't lose in the great depression
in the 1930s and then they explode
um
and so when i was a kid people would
collect coins or stamps or fossils or
this or that so i'm interested in that
collecting
passion so it's interesting um the
development of hobbies because it feels
like the future of human civilization
would be very hobby driven
like um
some of the
like i i often now
because of this particular little thing
i'll do with the podcast i get to
interact with photographers and
videographers
and i'm disappointed to find
how many professionals are not very good
and how many hobbyists are very good
yeah it's so it's well if they're
amateurs they're the lovers i mean
they're loving it
that's what that means from a moor
you're an amateur if you're a lover of
the thing and it you're not in for the
money yeah you know because you're
obsessed but the sort of as the
gdp as the
as our freedom grows to sort of
financially to be able to have a hobby
it feels like there'll be more lovers
more amateurs in the world and not just
for the artistic pursuits but like
science
uh technology development
building you know uh building all kinds
of technologies almost like as a hobby
yeah
you have much more freedom to figure out
what is the thing you love doing
and actually over time
that just you won't even notice but i'll
start making money
and yeah that's really fascinating and
yeah it does
kind of uh
i mean
when did that originate just the
collection the
white it goes through different stages
people have always
gathered the odd thing
to make something else
but
you also get this tradition of what's
called curiosity cabinets
especially in the renaissance
which replaced the kind of treasure
chambers of the ancient sultans or kings
or whatever and you get these curiosity
cabinets they were often linked with
magical practices alchemical practices
people would gather
besoirs or they would gather they would
have an alligator hanging from the
ceiling or they would have a rare you
know shrunken head or whatever
and
that's part of the rise of natural
history the idea you taxonomize the
world you classify the world you look
for the rare object the rarity
and rarity still is a kind of virtue
like the recent
news about trying to figure out ball
lightning when i was growing up ball
lightning was the big question does it
exist does it not exist and now there's
new evidence of how it actually might
wait what really there's new evidence
yes yeah there's i grew up with that
my dad when i was young told me i asked
him like how do i win a nobel prize
he said uh invent a time machine or
figure out how ball lightning works
and so i got really excited i was like
damn it i'm gonna figure out how this
ball lightning works it's very
interesting from a history of science
point of view because it's so rare
that in a way it doesn't exist it you
can't replicate it you can't make it
does it really exist it's a little bit
like libyan glass another thing i
collect is libyan glass which is a
tectite
which
falls
as a result of a meteorite a meteorite
hits the earth blasts earth up into
space it falls back down
as a glass that's called a tectite and
there's a rare form of it called libyan
glass
which fell probably around 20 million
years ago and now works out of the
sahara every now and then it was the
most valuable stone of
antiquity the centerpiece of tuttan
kamon's breastplate is made of this
beautiful yellow
gemstone libyan glass
so
rarity is something that
the hobbyists have always liked
to cherish the rarity the odds and
science has a kind of often aversion
as a kind of a love-hate relationship
with rarity and novelty science is often
trying to pursue novelty to make
discoveries
but if you can't replicate it it's kind
of like well does it really exist yeah
which is why i mean ufos and aliens and
all those kinds there's a general
aversion to that because it's like it's
a one-time event
uh right
it's
it's sad because there's uh
just like you said
singular events or rare events are
somehow really inspiring to us
and so you kind of have to balance that
yeah there's a scientific process but
you also have to like oh the it's the
thing you you find with the weird the
the peculiar it's like huh yeah what is
it even the universe itself it could be
that
the universe begins
and then we'll end say in a cold death
and that's it
i mean it could be a one-off thing or it
could be one of an infinite many cycles
oh and maybe all of the laws of nature
are recreated anew with each cycle yeah
or maybe
what we're assuming about the big bang
there's some element of falsity maybe
the speed of light is not constant
but changes over time that would throw
into question all kinds of theories
about
dark matter and dark energy yeah and
even the age of the universe and i to me
there's very likely trillions
of uh conversations going on like this
on other planets yeah in different yeah
no doubt that's exactly there were
different kinds of drugs different
communication
styles different
time scales at which life form is or
what life looks like or how life behaves
or what life is and all those things it
kind of yeah every time you think about
this it's more and more humbling
just this whole fog of ignorance yeah i
mean i mean
what drives me crazy is wondering about
the beautiful gemstones on other
planets i call them exo agates you know
they must be
unbelievable features and forms
which are unimaginable
to us because one thing we do know is
that nature is very creative i mean we
are the product of nature and we seem to
be fairly creative
and so imagine what else uh nature's
created but even that's unknown it you
know is how common is life in the
universe is it
is it common or is it rare we only have
a sample size of one
you know it could be quite common or it
could be even unique yeah
i i tend to believe it's everywhere
except for the fact that we don't even
know how to define what life is like
what is everywhere exactly we're talking
about it's it's very possible that
there's
not
anywhere in the universe
an organism with two legs and two arms
with two eyes and mostly hairless
walking around
at this time scale but like well there
could be very different kind of other
things
um it was interesting that some people
this is not a common belief but a friend
now named lee cronin
he's a chemist and uh biologist
and he believes that if we ran evolution
over and over and over and over on earth
you get very different not just you
wouldn't just get different organisms
you get very different biology yeah
that's quite impossible yeah and that's
a weird thing to i mean most people kind
of assume well it kind of you know it
fits to the environment and you're going
to get similar things maybe not humans
and so on but
to get very different biology like
starting from the bacteria to the you
know just how
well the idea that it would be dna based
dna on some other planet that seems to
me like saying they're speaking swahili
on some other planet i mean the odds of
that particular architecture i think are
infinitesimally small
what's the coolest stone you've ever
seen
oh my god there's so many
and what what what defines is it rarity
is it just raw beauty what what
captivates your
i like
excitement a storied stone
i have a very beautiful fair burn agate
which is multiple layers
and there's something i call agate
paralysis because
to polish it
you have to go through the layers
which means you're destroying the layers
and maybe what should be done is it
should be like a movie where you you
film
the entire process of cutting and
polishing so that
it's not dead
in other words what was the diamond when
it started rough the the rough diamond
is gone but if you could sort of do a
filmic version yeah of a cutting process
so that the
the stone would exist in a from a
pre-polished to a polished state all as
a kind of
nft or something
another that should be nfc that's right
so
the other thing i fantasize about is how
pattern recognition technology will
probably in the future allow us to
discover all kinds of amazing stones
including for example fossil skulls
fossil skulls of humans
now it's kind of a chance process that
you discover a skull in
east africa but why not have a drone
moving constantly scanning for pattern
recognition
of human skull human teeth very slowly
and then on the surface you mean just
above the surface just 10 feet above the
surface 20 feet above the surface no
sorry you think you'll be able to find
skulls on the surface yes
yes in the middle of a place that no one
has looked which
these areas are vast right
so it could be found on the surface then
move to the next layer then then find it
under the surface as well there's lidar
there's all kinds of ways we're finding
jungles and
jungle cities in in under the amazon
that people didn't know about do you
think there's something
out there
that would just blow your mind oh for
sure
for sure
yeah no doubt oh man
and uh how much of it is a little bit
underground right or how much of it is
in the ocean yeah i mean here right here
we are in the bay area
we know that
much of the native american civilization
here was under the bay
because six thousand years ago the bay
was dry it was a river not a bay
and so all of those whatever
material culture archaeological traces
existed there
are now at least preserved under the
water
so i think we're just beginning to to
touch the it could be treasure too
i mean like literally like you said we
lose the wisdom or we'll lose the
knowledge but
i i mean um
if there's the pyramids right it's the
great wonders of the world there might
be other wanderers that are completely
lost yeah just i mean one of the stones
you asked about stones i like i
i like
stones for example
every now and then dinosaurs would eat
rocks
as gizzard stones and then you find them
in their in their guts and their bones
well every now and then they would eat a
piece of petrified wood
so the idea that something was a tree
and then stone and then swallowed by a
dinosaur and ground up in the gizzard
and polished and then left in a you know
yeah so i like things that have been
through dramatic there's a story there
there's this yeah i mean that that's
okay the the really fascinating thing
why
seeing allah or crosses in the stone
is it feels like the stone has wisdom
because
it's been
there's a there's a
it's been through so many generations of
humans it's like bigger
right it's seen it all also it's also
the intellectual question of intelligent
design in other words when people say
intelligent design mostly it's bogus but
there are several interesting examples
of actual intelligent design meaning
when is a stone the product of artifice
and when is it a geofact produced by
nature
and that's that was an important
discovery in the 19th century the the
zone of percussion it's called the the
percussion zone
or how do you know that a signal from
out of space is an intelligent signal
and as opposed to
hydrogen doing something or some
natural thing that's the genuine problem
of intelligent design how do you know if
it's pi
maybe if it's e if it's some
you know pattern
is how do you know that that's an
intelligent signal how do you know that
an artifact in the ground is
you know
we'll see in the clouds of a face
it's called paradoia we have a kind of a
built-in ability to see faces where they
really aren't there right that's why
kids like clowns
you know we've evolved that so babies
evolve it to recognize their parents and
so forth
but when is it a projection
and when is it really in the in the in
the stone
and that was a big question with the
rise of fossils you know if you find a a
curly thing
is that life or is it non-life is it you
know
people have made this mistake before you
know they'll find a rock on on the moon
or mars they say oh this is a face or
whatever well
you know no that's that's just
projection that's paradoia i guess
throughout science you have this problem
of signal it just because something is
beautiful
doesn't mean it was i mean that's that's
not a good signal to determine if it's
intelligent design or
natural
evolution or natural design just because
you're you see a stone that just
yeah the pattern is is incredible how do
you what do you know how do you know
it's a fossil is one question
namely the ex you know the remnants of
an organism
and how do you know if it was
manipulated by a human
you know this is a big problem in in
trying to figure out the oldest art
if you find scratchings on a bone
is that a tally is it is it someone
marking her her menstrual period is it
phases of the moon
or is it trampling by an antelope and
that's that's called the science of
taphonomy to discern when a marking on a
bone or a stone
is in a sense a an artifact or a
geofactor an antelope effect
and that's it's an intellectually
challenging question and people want to
fantasize they'll find a stone it looks
like a carving is 300 000 years old
generally i think those are just
odd stones yeah you don't find the
explosion
of carved stone
until around 60
000 years ago 50 60
000 years ago there seems to be
something that
paleontologists call the creative
explosion or the big bang of the mind
that produces a kind of ability to
to see in the distance to
identify a shape
in an object to create a shape and an
object that you don't get the
neandertals
don't seem to have ever done what we
would call art
that's a very interesting
phenomenon
you know but it requires that you have
some understanding
when is something art and when is it
just oh that's a rock that looks like a
face or some not necessarily
understanding but a conception that's
mutually agreed upon right that we're
able to because
maybe neanderthals maybe fish having a
conception of art they just uh
and this this also gets back to your
question about professional bias and
ideology because there's a huge reward
for finding the oldest art yeah
yeah if if everyone says it's 50 000
years ago and you find one that's 300
000 years ago that's a huge discovery
so
there's a there's a bias and this has
been one of the
things that's led to the
probably the over-proliferation
of different species of hominids
because there's no academic reward for
finding yet another example of someone
else's species
but there's a huge reward
if you can find you know
uh a lex friedmanite you know
new you can name it after yourself or
whatever yeah uh new fossil yeah that
there's a huge professional reward to be
the first at something and so those
types of professional rewards
also
influence science and what kind of
science gets done
yeah so i'm always suspicious of uh
and as we should all be when you can
kind of intuit a financial and otherwise
motivation i mean that's actually
often in the modern age where i'm
suspicious of conspiracy theories
it's not
that the logic doesn't make sense or
something like that i personally
actually just enjoy conspiracy theories
i've been listening to um flat earth has
discussed stuff recently it's kind of
exciting for some reason
it's like because i consider like what
if it's true it's exciting to discover
together like think through first
principles like what does the world look
like it's exciting i mean it's the
childlike discovery of a new idea uh but
the the reason i'm skeptical of a lot of
conspiracy theories is
when i see how popular you can get
propagating those conspiracy theories
how quickly it can form a large movement
and it's like
like
such thin evidence it's like if loch
ness exists there's just one i mean how
does the
reproduction work on that but now you
talk about an animal that has only one
in a population it just doesn't some of
the things don't make sense no but see
this is the logic side i don't even go
that far i i
the fact is if you say there's a loch
ness monster i just see how quickly the
idea spreads in popularity
it's the people are hungry to discover
something new just like you mentioned
uh with the hominids and i'm very
suspicious of where there's like a
strange hunger
for ideas because then
they're they're less likely to be
objective and rigorous in considering
the validity of that idea i'm not going
to the logic because actually flat earth
is pretty logical yeah very logical if
your logic is not the problem
right so it's but this spreads really
quickly and i and i once again with
conspiracy theories i think it
represents it's you have to think about
the cause of causes
or cause of cause of causes like you
talked about which is like it represents
some deeper
uh fragmenting
of the
the common humanity we have the
the
the trust in the
in the in the big
community that is science and the big
community that is government all that
kind of stuff
well that's why things like ball
lightning are cool because it's like
the scientists denied it but here it is
exactly exactly and that's ultimately
ends up everyone said i was insane but
uh
and but it's still exciting you said
there's some breakthroughs i need to
look it up yeah that's really cool it's
pretty exciting yeah there's some new
theories of how it actually might
because i think i mean there's obviously
several ways to prove that like one of
them is to recreate in the lab which is
standard that's probably very very
difficult
um just because we're on the topic of
rocks
i don't know if you've heard about this
interstellar rock that flew through our
uh called the muammar yes
the cigar-shaped one the cigar was a fan
of rocks what do you think about that
one so well i think that
generally i mean when the people were
speculating it might be a spaceship i
thought come on rocks do all kinds of
crazy things they do a lot more than you
realize they can do unbelievable
unbelievably cool things they're parts
of the desert
they're in in utah where rocks move and
create these long tracks and it's now we
know it's from liquefaction and and
and wind and various things but they're
still unbelievably cool rocks can do
almost anything
and so just the fact that one comes from
outside the solar system doesn't mean it
has to be a spaceship
so but nonetheless i thought it was
awesome i thought it was really
really cool and i i sort of
wish it would happen more often i kind
of hope it's trash from another alien
civilization that'd be fantastic because
if you're uh
if if humans are all a lesson that we
produce like more trash than we do
intelligent signal
and so the first thing to reach other
civilizations i feel like would be our
trash our pollution
before the intelligence signal reaches
them
you mentioned this interesting term
russianist uh the things we do for love
for some reason you went to germany yes
uh
so you said you're pretty eloquent with
german yeah like i learned german yeah
did you ever learn russian a little bit
i did learn russian yeah i studied
actually russian as an undergraduate at
indiana university
for several years and then i wanted to
do a rush i wanted to do russian and
chinese as a graduate student because i
thought this is kind of the future
and
harvard said nope has to be french and
german and so i essentially gave up on
my russian and chinese
and
the other part of that story is
nonetheless i wanted to do something
with russian i wanted to study
how
much the
lamarcian
ideology in biology in russia at the
time that led to their distrust of
genetics
under stalin
had to do with the fact that genetics
was being pushed by the nazis
and we tend to see those literatures in
isolation
the nazi nazis were racists
the russians were
you know environmentalists biased by
lamarckian theories of heredity and
rejected that part of
darwin when they're right next to each
other at the very same time there must
be a connection and so i started reading
into this and i was
actually got a fulbright
to go write a book on this
and
canceled all my classes i was teaching
at the new school for social research at
the time
and uh i was i couldn't get a visa into
the soviet union that was just barred
admission for
doing this project looking at how
stalinist science had this
anti-nazi aspect which we've overlooked
which year was this this was the soviet
union was still together yes it was in
the uh late 1980s but before
gorbachev was in power but it wasn't
before 89. but still then there was
a careful
uh attention to
well you never know how careful it was
or
through the cracks or you never know
when something fails
you don't always know why it failed but
i was very disappointed and it sort of
ended that
the project i didn't have access to
archives on it
i could have obviously done it later but
uh you know so like there was that
curiosity initially but and then you
focused on nazi and on the nazi side of
yeah i mean the other thing was i was
trying to figure out where to go for
for a fulbright on a different year and
i want to go to china
and turns out you could only go to
taiwan i didn't really want to go to
taiwan and it was one in 50 odds of
going to taiwan but it was one in three
of going to germany and
so i ended up going to germany i didn't
have any particular interest in germany
at that time
but uh
that's what i ended up doing is so i
wrote you know so i wrote one book in
german actually and i wrote two books on
nazi germany
and uh
you know otherwise i might have been
doing the same thing in russian or
chinese
yeah those are in other words history
chooses us
as much as we choose history
right
and those are really powerful cultures
right um
maybe can you comment on the german and
the russian and the chinese how much
language when you were reading those
medical journals
how
how much are you able to understand how
important is it to understand language
deeply in order to understand the
culture did you struggle
and uh the opposite of that did you find
the beauty
of the moment like a richly
understandable because you had a hold of
the language
well in the russian or chinese case no i
never got that far with it i knew enough
i could read some russian and i could
tell
there were anthropologists who were
anti-nazi
and
therefore anti-genetics
and they saw genetics as essentially
nazi and that was enough for me i know
there's something there but i didn't
have enough time i wasn't allowed to go
and actually research it
in the german case
you never fully know
a language
you know we don't fully know english
um
there's always more to learn i'm always
learning new i i didn't know the word
done
last year d-u-n i mean some kind of
brown color
and i'm always finding new words you
know which is kind of
the words are near infinite as well
right
and new combinations i've coined several
words too in in my life
and um
but it did help understanding the humor
understanding the romance you know
and mainly just plowing through all of
these medical journals one after another
after another there's a kind of a
voyeuristic aspect to looking into this
lost world you're reading texts by
people who are who've died long ago
and direct it's not like reading books
by famous people it's like real people
it's real people and
they make mistakes and
fascinating little stories i was looking
at how the
nazi tobacco industry
had their own denial campaign
which was pro-nazi
but and pro-tobacco even though the nazi
regime was
anti-tobacco
and
they developed a lot of these
rhetorical tricks that were later used
by the americans like oh you can't trust
that evidence it's merely statistical
you can't trust the animal experiments
because all it proves is that mice
should not smoke
but i notice just in passing these
remarkable stories
little hints
there's a report from a japanese
military man in one of these tobacco
journals tobacco industry journals in
the nazi period
and they're talking about this
brotherhood of all men through
cigarettes
and the tragedy that the chinese and the
japanese who were fighting each other
in a way that wanted nothing more than
to smoke together
and the chinese
would sneak up to the japanese forts to
try to find a japanese cigarette that
had been thrown away and they'd be
glowing
and the japanese knew this and they
would throw their cigarettes out the
chinese would come and then the japanese
would kill these chinese
and then this guy is poetically
lamenting the fact that even though all
they want is a smoke yeah they
nonetheless end up in the crosshairs and
in death and so it's just weird i'm
reading this
translate from the japanese into german
in a nazi tobacco industry
newspaper i mean the layers of weirdness
are really fascinating and touching but
and those very kind of
brotherhood stories actually resonated
later because i mean that's how i feel
about cigarettes some of my favorite
moments in early life is about
people connecting over a cigarette of
course and that
you know that works that that's those
narratives yeah that's the movie that's
right the movies it's called meat cute
they
the tobacco industry when they put
cigarettes into a movie they put it in
right at the moment where
boy meets girl let me ask you just in
all the research you've done with uh
with nazi germany
just from me from a conversational
perspective
i i was listening to a bunch of
holocaust survivors uh recently just on
youtube listening to interviews
um also listening to nazi um ss soldier
like they're still live or recently
uh some of them
especially the ones that deny many
aspects of the holocaust
it's so interesting to watch
because they're
still
still it's so fascinating anyway i uh in
your research
are there interesting people to talk to
they're still alive are they mostly
that part of history is no longer living
is in the books it is mostly no longer
living that's one reason
in the 1980s when i started working on
nazi
science i really did interview quite a
few people
elderly people people who had sort of
slipped through the cracks you know
maybe even should have been prosecuted
so few people got prosecuted
um but these were people who had racial
theories who published
yeah
you know
on these topics and they were guarded
but
these were the lives they lived and you
know mainly they wanted
people not to be talking too much about
this so it gets sealed off and walled
off and that's why the reading the
medical literature itself was so much
more valuable
because there's no
self-censorship it's just there i'm sure
there's some censorship but
it's what they said is what they said
and it's it's immense it's immense and
largely unread
as i said there are hundreds and
hundreds of nazi medical journals and
people had not been reading those before
i really started looking at them
given that you studied these really
difficult parts of human history and
human nature with big tobacco and just
these mechanisms of manipulation what
gives you hope about the future oh all
kinds of things give me hope the
the forest gives me hope the wicked
nature
wikipedia gives me hope
space exploration gives me hope all
kinds of things give me hope the i had
this insight the other day i walked
through all of these
giant redwoods
which which were almost all cut
they're not very far from here just you
know half an hour straight west of where
we are now even up in in redwood country
and i had this idea that you know
they're growing back now
and every year they add how many you
know cubic miles of wood if you count
california as a whole but not only that
the roots are all old growth
if you think about it
these are re-sprouting they're not from
seeds these are re-sprouting so they
have this tremendous resource
underground
that even the loggers couldn't kill
right and so from these
stumps you get what are called fairy
rings which are you know like five trees
coming in a ring around it each one
competing to be the successor so they've
seen this story before
and they know to
to re-sprout yeah and
that i think is a very hopeful thing is
that the roots are old growth and
hopefully in 100 200 300 years
it won't peak until around a thousand
years from now you'll get these
restoration of all of this magnificent
uh old growth
um but so many other things you know
give me hope you know we have to have
hope and i think that uh
if the world is infinite there's
infinitely many many ways for it to
become
fixed i mean obvious that we have some
problems need to be fixed but they're
fixable that's really beautifully put
that is a really hopeful idea that
nature that life even human civilization
is resilient to all the mistakes we make
so the roots are there so it outlives us
it's patient with our
adolescent
fuck-ups
i mean we're a thin layer on the crust
and you know eventually the earth will
be swallowed by the sun and
humans won't it will have long gone
extinct by then
um
but yeah there's all kinds around
grounds for hope
uh so
us being a
thin layer of crust
what do you think is the meaning of this
layer what's the meaning of human
existence what's the meaning of life
well i think it depends who you're
talking to if you're
talking to a raccoon it might be
one thing if you're talking to an growth
tree
it's making sure you're straight up
upright and not you know on a slippery
slope of fish
yeah fish i guess they're trying to
avoid the hook
yeah right no fish ever
when they take the bait no fish in the
world has ever said i hope i get hooked
um and that's that's one of the problems
with tobacco is that there's all this
bait and
people get hooked
but uh
you know the fish don't have heads we
have heads one of the great innovations
in the history of
humanity going back way priming is the
invention of the head the mobile head
that turns and sees
you know
and
the fish didn't have that you know they
didn't have hands
the octopus kept cool stuff yeah um it's
not all about the head
it's not all about the head well in fact
the octopus basically they've got brains
in their fingers
and maybe brains is not even that good
of an invention and the long arc of
history
because the fish maybe got it right
[Laughter]
stay in the ocean well of course we
evolved from fish so
yeah
but uh we moved on
is there a why to this
uh or
is it just the way
it's it's like the current it's just
it's just like these pockets of
interesting complexity pops up like
like allah showing up on a rock this is
what human civilization is this weird
little thing that showed up on a rock
and then it'll disappear well we are
probably the most remarkable creation
that
nature has ever
belched forward we're probably the only
one if you don't count the
kt meteorite that just almost destroyed
the earth we're the only ones that can
really have the capacity to destroy the
earth
i'm fascinated by the meteorite that
wiped out everything bigger than four
feet long you know the
the mount everest size meteorite that
hit the earth 66 million years ago
and destroyed most species in in the
water and on land
there could have been some smart folks
around then too well actually one thing
i like to think about is that
232.3 million years ago
and 230
2.4 million years ago that's a hundred
thousand years that tiniest of a sliver
maybe a millimeter in most parts of the
earth
it's enough time for a species of
dinosaur to become intelligent
build a civilization and go extinct with
no traces
and uh maybe that happened
our ignorance
can fully engulf the fact that that
happened
oh there's the beautiful self-importance
of us of us humans
it's easy to forget
that multiple intelligent civilizations
could have lived on earth
it's possible and gone extinct or even
life may have evolved more than once
not only that but it proto-life may
still exist and we were not even looking
for it you know some type of clay
that
became life may still exist and people
one thing i like to think about is is
always what is the before time that is
now
i remember lecturing about this right
before kovat and it's sort of like what
is the what is the our world now that
we'll say what was it like to be then
before yeah before and that's the world
we live in we live in a before time for
something we really can't predict
probably physical
uh
you know appendages and you know and
being in person being able to touch each
other or wanting to touch each other
versus being in the digital world
right this whole idea of the metaverse
and more and more moving into a digital
space
what was it like
being born
before most of your your life wasn't on
the computer
yeah
um it's pretty damn good for the record
but maybe
i don't know the alternative robert this
is a fascinating conversation thank you
for
taking us through some dark periods of
human history but i think they contain a
lot of lessons for today that science
is often inextricably connected to our
values to our ethics to our politics
and that's something we have to contend
with so your work is really important
and thank you for shining a light on it
thank you
thanks for listening to this
conversation with robert proctor to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from carl sagan
somewhere something incredible is
waiting to be known
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you