0:00 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
0:45 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
1:31 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
2:17 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
3:03 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
3:50 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
4:36 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
5:21 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
6:07 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
6:53 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
7:39 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
8:26 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
9:11 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
9:57 so he becomes part of the nuclear war protection defense apparatus even though he wanted to work on alternative energy doing very similar work with silicon chips but in a different framework and so the 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
10:43 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
11:29 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
12:15 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
13:00 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
13:47 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
14:32 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
15:17 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
16:04 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
16:50 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
17:37 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
18:23 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
19:10 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
19:57 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
20:44 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
21:29 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
22:14 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
22:59 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
23:45 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
24:32 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
25:17 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
26:05 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
26:51 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
27:37 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
28:24 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
29:10 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
29:59 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
30:47 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
31:35 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
32:21 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
33:08 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
33:56 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
34:42 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
35:28 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
36:14 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
37:02 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
37:47 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
38:32 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
39:19 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
40:06 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
40:51 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
41:37 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
42:24 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
43:10 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
43:56 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
44:43 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
45:29 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
46:16 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
47:02 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
47:48 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
48:35 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
49:20 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
50:06 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
50:52 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
51:39 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
52:25 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
53:11 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
53:57 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
54:44 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
55:30 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
56:17 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
57:03 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
57:50 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
58:36 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
59:21 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
1:00:08 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
1:00:54 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
1:01:40 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
1:02:28 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
1:03:14 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
1:04:01 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
1:04:49 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
1:05:34 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
1:06:20 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
1:07:05 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
1:07:51 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
1:08:38 flash forward you know 50 years we still have 300 [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
1:09:23 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
1:10:08 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
1:10:54 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
1:11:41 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
1:12:26 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
1:13:12 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
1:13:58 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
1:14:44 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
1:15:29 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
1:16:15 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
1:17:01 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
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