#268 – Robert Proctor: Nazi Science and Ideology

Robert Proctor is a historian of science at Stanford University. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Theragun: https://therabody.com/lex to get 30 day trial – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit – Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: Robert’s Website: https://history.stanford.edu/people/robert-n-proctor The Nazi War on Cancer (book): https://amzn.to/3hjYzdZ Agnotology (book): https://amzn.to/3viS8A1 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (09:40) – Ideology and science (21:14) – Wernher von Braun (28:21) – The scientific process (38:23) – Censorship (47:37) – Anthony Fauci (52:47) – Courage in science (1:00:07) – Tobacco industry (1:23:52) – Nazi medicine (1:34:02) – The Nazi War on Cancer (1:39:14) – Science funding (1:50:08) – Ignorance (1:57:49) – Ideology in academia (2:04:09) – Human origins (2:14:02) – Hobbies (2:21:19) – Diversity in the universe (2:24:54) – Stones (2:33:49) – Conspiracy theories (2:37:59) – Nazi impact on Soviet science (2:43:14) – Nazi tobacco industry’s denial campaign (2:47:30) – Hope for the future (2:50:04) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:56Lex Fridman?

  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. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. First is Theragun, the device I use for post-workout muscle recovery. Second is BetterHelp, an online therapy service. Third is Indeed, a hiring website. Fourth is Grammarly, a service I use to check spelling, grammar, and readability. And fifth is Eight Sleep, a self-cooling mattress cover I sleep on.

• 3:41Lex Fridman?

  So the choice is health, wealth, or linguistic eloquence. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Theragun, a handheld percussive therapy device that I use after a workout for muscle recovery. The kind of workout I've been doing recently. Like, I just ran 15 miles today, so I'm getting the miles up. I can't unfortunately do that every single day. The body's still not quite there. I do a run every other day, or sometimes if I'm super lazy,

• 4:26Lex Fridman?

  and I am super lazy, I do a run and then rest for two days. And what I mean by rest is I instead do pushups and pullups. And for whatever hurts, just some basic recovery, I use Theragun. It's surprisingly quiet, easy to use, comes with a great app that guides you through everything you need to know. Try it for 30 days at therabody.com/lex. Theragun Gen 4 has an OLED screen, personalized Theragun app, and is both quiet and powerful, starting at $199. Go to therabody.com/lex. This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.

• 5:08Lex Fridman?

  They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. I just mentioned running. That is where I go to face my demons, to face my own thoughts, to face the memories, the darker memories, the memories I haven't quite dealt with or have been able to make sense of, or for some reason, they bother me when they shouldn't, and I need to understand why. That's what therapy is about. So for me, thinking through a third-person perspective reflection of my own mind, that's what I do when I run, that's what I do when I meditate, that's what I do when I have conversations

• 5:49Lex Fridman?

  in a podcast, and that's what I think is what makes talk therapy powerful. So go with BetterHelp if that's something you think is interesting. It's easy, private, affordable, and available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done and teams I've led in the past. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match, giving you quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately.

• 6:26Lex Fridman?

  Work gives life meaning. Activities that you pursue, a large fraction of your day, even if it's menial jobs, I still think it's possible to notice the magic, to seek the craftsmanship. And I think a big part of that is if you're surrounded by people that also seek the magic and the craftsmanship. So you should use the best tools for the job. Indeed is certainly one of them that I have used often. Right now, get a free 75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/lex, indeed.com/lex. Terms and conditions apply. Go to indeed.com/lex.

• 7:11Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Grammarly, a writing assistant tool that checks spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Grammarly Premium, the thing you have to pay for, and they're really hoping you do pay for, has a bunch of extra features. I pay for it. They don't give it to me for free. I pay for it because I love it. My favorite is the clarity check, which helps detect rambling, overcomplicated chaos that many of us can descend into. I know I certainly do. That's actually why I like tweeting, because I don't have the luxury of just spilling it all out. And again, use the best tools for the job. Grammarly is excellent at this.

• 7:55Lex Fridman?

  It's available on basically any platform, major sites, apps like Gmail and Twitter and so on. Do more than just spell check, get your point across more effectively with Grammarly Premium. Like I said, if you want a discount, you get discount, 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at grammarly.com/lex. That's 20% off at grammarly.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod Pro mattress, one of my favorite sponsors because their product brings me joy. Few things I love in life than a good nap.

• 8:33Lex Fridman?

  I probably like naps more than sleeping. I mean, sleeping is really important. It's great. But it's like, ah, all right. Okay, I guess we'll have to shut off for many hours. But a nap for 20 minutes. And then when you wake up, it's like the world is new again. I love it. On a cooled bed with a warm blanket. That's heaven. And that's what Eight Sleep does for you. Their Pod Pro cover. You can just add it to your mattress. Go to eightsleep.com/lex to check out the Pod Pro cover and save $200 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom. That's eightsleep.com/lex.

• 9:18Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Robert Proctor.

• 9:40Lex Fridman?

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

• 9:48Speaker 01

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

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Instead of being primarily a source of resistance, science in many respects actually is a full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion. And that's kind of a relatively untold story in the sense that when we think of science in the Third Reich, we think of Josef Mengele 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,

• 11:08Speaker 01

  participating in every phase of the campaigns of Nazi destruction. And what I looked at in particular, and actually in my first book, was how physicians in particular, but also biomedical science, was collaborating with the regime in 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,

• 11:50Speaker 01

  and they're firmly on the side of nature, which interestingly gives rise to a very different type of science in the Soviet Union, by the way. 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 gonna write a book about it until I was barred from access to the Soviet Union. There have been different times in my life where I was a Russianist. A Russianist. Okay, we're gonna have to talk about that. But I got excluded from fulfilling that dream. But one of the things I was gonna look at

• 12:32Speaker 01

  when I got a Fulbright in the 1980s was to go over and look at the anti-Nazi

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Genetics and anthropology of the Soviets and how a lot of their lysenkoist Lamarckism was actually anti-Nazi, anti-genetics on the nurture side of nature. And that's really an untold story. It's an uncomfortable story. Because it sounds like someone, we might want to make heroes out of some, out of the twisting of science in the Soviet Union. But nonetheless, there are these interesting complexities. And what's amazing about Nazi science is, is how there was this collaboration. And you're talking about a culture where they're inventing things like electron microscopy.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  They're doing all kinds of studies in anthropology. So a lot of that's an untold story.

• 13:31Lex Fridman?

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

• 13:37Speaker 01

  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 seventh and eighth 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 Venus with what's called the heliacal 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.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  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 holy and magical. So where's the ideology? Where's the science? There's the, the sort of instrumentation, the calendrics, the measurement, all in the service of this magical moment.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  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. Yet when Ronald Reagan took office, the budgets for solar and alternative energy were essentially zeroed out and Reagan takes off the solar panels off of the roof of the White House. So my friend ends up, 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

• 15:34Speaker 01

  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 woven into ideological practices, sort of in the same way that you get beautiful medieval cathedrals built in service of Catholicism.

• 16:01Lex Fridman?

  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 if we can zoom in and zoom out effortlessly into the individual mind of a scientist, then back to the whole scientific community. 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?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  I think sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, right? You think of the chemists working to develop the cyanide that will be used to kill Jews at, 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 lying to themselves. Maybe they are the one person who agreed to do it and 99 refused.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  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,

• 17:53Speaker 01

  in a particular action, which is maybe horrific or glorious. The other thing to keep in mind is that science is, as we say, what scientists do. And that can include a lot of things, it can exclude a lot of things. The word science itself is interesting because it's cognate. It actually comes originally from the Proto Indo European, uh, 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.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  And so there's this cognate 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. But it also can lead to a kind of myopia that my job is done when I've classified something. Is this bird an X, a Y, or a Z?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  And that again can be, it can be ideological or it cannot be, but scientists are humans, humans, and they're fitting in.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and it's fascinating because I think ideologies also have an impulse towards forming taxonomies. And there is, um, so just, so 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 I started to wonder, how did all these people at MIT that I admire would hang out with this person? Just lightly, just have conversations. I don't mean any of the bigger things, but even just basic conversations. And I think this has to do, you said scientists are widget builders and taxonomizers. I think there's power in somebody like the Nazi regime or like a Jeffrey Epstein,

• 20:29Lex Fridman?

  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, sometimes people say scientists want to make money and, or they have a big kind of ideological drive behind it. I think there's just, nice when 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.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think that's the story of Werner von Braun, you know, and the fascination with rockets. And this will, you know, enlarge something in the world. And here he is, he's an SS officer, he's working around slave labor. And then, but his rocket then gets compressed into the, the Western world or the, the American world and basically launches us to the moon. And we forget about the sauce, how the sausage was made originally.

• 21:47Lex Fridman?

  Well, 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.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's an interesting figure fascinated in a kind of a tunnel vision way with spaceflight. He makes these beautiful rockets already beginning in the 20s, early 30s. Ends up for a while at Penamunda using slave labor to build V2 engines and so forth like that. I remember going to Penamunda where people have actually tracked the flights of aborted V2 rockets and found some of these beautiful, beautiful old engines, just the most like works of art, these, these, these engines used to rain terror on, on the British. It's interesting because in that same spot, I was hunting for amber, Baltic amber, because

• 22:56Speaker 01

  I'm a stone collector. And among the amber collectors there, there's a famous story of the Penamunda burn, it's called, because they find yellow phosphorus, they think is amber. They put it in their pocket and then it dries out and then explodes and creates this big burn, 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 it's also important to realize that people didn't often see what was coming. And we look back and we say,

• 23:39Speaker 01

  how could you X, Y, or Z? But before the Holocaust, there's not the Holocaust. There are versions of it, but Things get on a new meaning, gain a new meaning in light of subsequent events.

• 23:53Lex Fridman?

  And there's an 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.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  That's right, and we have to remember that

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Goebbels office was not the office of propaganda. It was the office of enlightenment, of of popular enlightenment and propaganda. So enlightenment.

• 24:26Lex Fridman?

  Enlightenment.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Was part of his.

• 24:29Lex Fridman?

  Just the new era of enlightenment from his perspective.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  It was supposed to be the new age, a new era of enlightenment. It's a little bit like the the kind of myth of Hitler's failed artist. 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 gauliter 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.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  And she said he was charming, 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, there's there's more to it than that.

• 25:36Lex Fridman?

  That's really, really, really important to think about when we make a scarecrow. Because that gives you actionable.

• 25:46Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:19Lex Fridman?

  Like people think about like, oh, it's because of the women, it's because of the money. Ah, 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, it's exactly like you said, the enlightenment. I think that excites the, the scientist. 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, in, 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.

• 27:01Lex Fridman?

  There must have been charisma that one-on-one, in a quiet conversation, he was convincing.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yes. There's a famous story about Goebbels, 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. And then for 15 minutes, he would rouse the world to capitalism.

• 27:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:32Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:49Lex Fridman?

  Like workers unite, the common people stand together, the overthrow the powerful, the greedy.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:58Lex Fridman?

  And yet, share the outcomes of our hard work.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's kind of like 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.

• 28:17Lex Fridman?

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

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Value-free science.

• 28:54Lex Fridman?

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

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Well, I guess the saddening thing is how easily people can become part of a machine. If there's power, people can be found to follow it. You know, 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 who are willing to work for the Nazi regime.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  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 a theory of the world that they're building on. And interestingly, one that was 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,

• 30:31Speaker 01

  racial separation, and saw themselves in a kind of competition to become the world's racial leader as the, as the most purified racial form. And that this required this kind of cleansing process. And the cleansing meant getting rid of the physically handicapped, it meant getting rid of racial inferiors, as they imagined them. It meant getting rid of cancer-causing chemicals in the air and in our food and our water. These were all of a piece. There's a famous illustration that Richard Dahl talks about, the great, great cancer

• 31:14Speaker 01

  theorists of, of studying in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. And he's shown a lecture where cancer cells are shown as Jews and X-rays are shown as stormtroopers and these stormtroopers are killing the, the cancer cells who are also Jews. And so there's this metaphorical work of, of cleaning, extermination, sanitation. Purification of a sort. Purification. There's definitely a kind of purity quest and you see that at multiple levels. And so.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  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. If we imagine that nothing like this went on here in the United States, that would be a big mistake. The Nazis are looking to the Save the Redwoods League, to their, you know, to the Aryan supremacists, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the, to the separation of blacks and whites. Blacks were not allowed to join the American Medical Association until after World War II. So you have racial segregation. You have massive sterilization in the United

• 32:33Speaker 01

  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 called the mentally ill and the physically handicapped. Well, that had been going on since around World War I in the United States, and even earlier in certain states, in the form of castration of prisoners in order to prevent their demon seed from being propagated further into the race. So there's a kind of a racial Internationale that's going on, and that part of the story also needs to be told.

• 33:12Lex Fridman?

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

• 33:16Speaker 01

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

• 33:57Speaker 01

  university presidents in the Nazi period was a guy named Karl Astell, A S T E L. And he was a rabid Nazi, high up in the leadership.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  But to pretend as if that never happened, or to erase history in that way, I think is is a big, big mistake.

• 34:35Lex Fridman?

  Can I look at that point? So I haven't gotten through it yet, but I've been trying to get to the Mein Kampf. And, you know, throughout its history, it's 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 the hate in their heart will grow. So they're not using it for educational purposes. You can't put a plaque on the Mein Kampf. You're ruining Mein Kampf then.

• 35:17Lex Fridman?

  Like you can't, I mean, this, you know, Amazon can't do a warning saying like,

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Or an expurgate, you could do expurgated version of Mein Kampf. Take out the word Jew, you know?

• 35:28Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  As if that would solve anything.

• 35:30Lex Fridman?

  So it still just stands on its own.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:33Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's not well written. So you could 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 can you steel man the argument that Mein Kampf should be banned? And can you steel man the argument that it should be not banned?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  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 Two, 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.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  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 Texas. I don't see the harm in being able to buy Mein Kampf. It's so out of this world in now, by now, just the language. And if anything, there probably is more good done by people being shocked at how dumb it is than the evil that might be done by someone reading it. I can't imagine people being really gripped by that now, partly just because it's kind

• 37:08Speaker 01

  of outdated and crazy, crazy talk. So in that case, I would not be 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, I think, in many of these cases, there's an add-on view would fix a lot of the problems.

• 37:33Lex Fridman?

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

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Let me just add one thing on that. Recently, the name of McMillan, 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 name of that building at Caltech. And also, the memory is lost and the lesson is lost when you could have kept the McMillan 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.

• 38:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Well, let me take a small tangent and ask you about censorship and this particular period we're living through. So my friend Joe Rogan has a podcast. He hosts a few folks on there and they're folks of differing opinions. And as we speak, there's kind of a battle going on over whether Joe Rogan should be on Spotify and allowed to spread scientific misinformation. In particular, there's a guy named Robert Malone that's talking about that that's making a case against, at least against the COVID vaccine and so on. So outside of the specifics

• 39:04Lex Fridman?

  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 to censor, 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 approaches will go wrong in some ways, which is more likely to go wrong? One where

• 39:46Lex Fridman?

  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 history?

• 40:07Speaker 01

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

• 40:13Lex Fridman?

  Not trillion, yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 01

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

• 41:00Speaker 01

  They have, there are all kinds of codes of, 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.

• 41:25Lex Fridman?

  But when I watch, unfortunately, the pressure these platforms feel to identify and to censor misinformation, that pressure is ideological in nature currently. So if you just objectively look, there's a certain political lean to people that are pressing on the censorship on misinformation, which makes me very uncomfortable because now there's an ideology to labeling something as misinformation as opposed to kind of having a, you know, valueless evaluation of what is true and not.

• 42:04Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 42:46Lex Fridman?

  You gotta put out the fire.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Well, that's certainly possible. Yeah, I mean, I think people are distrustful of certain institutions and not others, right? And I think a lot of distrust is good. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do know there have been a lot of conspiracies. And that, you know, people work behind scenes to do powerful bad things. And that's what needs to be exposed. The other thing I worry about, which is relevant to your question, again, it's a billion or trillion dollar question, is we're, I think, in a world of kind of flattening where all news or all information or all data is kind of equal

• 43:33Speaker 01

  in some way. And so you get the Twitterverse 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 interesting to contrast it with, say, 100 years ago. I mean, what would a crazy person, or a flat-earther, or anything, what venue would they have? I mean, maybe they could go to a church, or someplace. I mean, so now we have these empowering engines, then that's what's new historically, is that basically anyone can

• 44:15Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 44:32Lex Fridman?

  So there's, of course, the flip side to that, where everyone has equal power, it forces the people... Or quote unquote experts to be better at 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 listened 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 round, that's it. You have to like show, you have to uh make like, I mean, not the earth is round part, but

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:04Lex Fridman?

  Things like that. You have to actually be a great communicator, great, do great lectures, do documentaries and so on.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:12Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:33Lex Fridman?

  Those voices are important.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  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 uh, Buffon'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

• 46:12Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  The truth with flowers and decorations and and and scents and pleasant odors. And so uh, 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 uh, inhumane, non-humanistic kind of rhetorical way. And that's a big problem. And so you get That combined with just the rise of the research lab and the ever narrower widget builders, the cogs in the machine, it's not surprising that people might not trust certain aspects of

• 46:53Speaker 01

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

• 47:37Lex Fridman?

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

• 47:54Lex Fridman?

  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 has 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.

• 48:33Lex Fridman?

  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 Anthony Fauci, just like scientific leaders during Nazi Germany could have made a difference, it feels like, positive and negative. And so it's like, there's a lot of stake.

• 49:15Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of stake in terms of scientific leadership. If I've asked about 17 questions, if there's something worthwhile answering in that.

• 49:26Speaker 01

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

• 49:37Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, that's what's the goal of the job. That means he appears a lot, but there's a, 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 I recently lost respect for, given some of the emails that leaked. There's ego in those emails. And it upsets me because like, I hope all that stuff comes out and wakes young scientists up to, don't be a douchebag. Don't, don't be humble. Be honest, be authentic, be real, put yourself out there. Don't play the PR game, don't play politics.

• 50:22Lex Fridman?

  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 this taste 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.

• 51:06Lex Fridman?

  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'm,

• 51:21Lex Fridman?

  I'm bothered by, because I feel like science is under attack. People distrust science more and more and more.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:27Lex Fridman?

  And 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 in you 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.

• 51:46Speaker 01

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

• 51:49Lex Fridman?

  I mean, like that.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  One way or the other.

• 51:51Lex Fridman?

  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 positions that can heal the division. You could, you could think of, um, tech leaders, they can heal the division because they have the platform. They can speak out with eloquence. You could think of political leaders, presidents that can speak out and heal the division. You could think of scientific leaders like Anthony Fauci, they can heal a division. None of these are doing a good job right now. And which is, you know, leadership is hard,

• 52:34Lex Fridman?

  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, kind of mediocre.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Cause it feels like in not, I guess, I'll take it to a question about Nazi Germany. What is the heroic action for scientists in Nazi Germany? Like to stand, to see what's right.

• 53:02Lex Fridman?

  When you're under this cloud of ideology.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's an almost impossible task in Nazi Germany. Maybe the heroic task would have been before Hitler was essentially elected.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  And the Reichstag is burned.

• 53:24Lex Fridman?

  So in the 30s, because it's building.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  When it's building, what the other alternatives are. Maybe it's events in World War One that could have made Nazism less inevitable.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  You know, maybe it's going back to the British Empire, which had a giant empire. And Germany wanted a big empire too, right? And that part of the history of World War One is often, often forgotten. So, you know, the heroic act is to stand up and tell the truth and fight against evil. And.

• 54:05Lex Fridman?

  Well, of course you get, oh, sorry to interrupt, but of course.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Have some courage, you know?

• 54:09Lex Fridman?

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

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:38Lex Fridman?

  So you have to somehow like steer this Titanic ship.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:42Lex Fridman?

  And I guess you're right. The easiest way to steer is to do it earlier.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Well, everyone has different skills. You know, Musk is building electric cars and other people are trying to, you know, build solar and wind. And there are all kinds of problems that we're going to solve, right? People are building better vaccines, you know? There's a thousand ways to do good in the world and a 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.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  So cigarettes cause cancer, but what causes cigarettes?

• 55:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so the deeper, yeah, yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  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 loop, what I call loop closing.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  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 Londa Schibinger 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 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.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And if you join those realms, open, there's going to be new possibilities. And that's, it's kind of like looking at the flip side of fascism and the kind of things, 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,

• 57:05Speaker 01

  both of which are, involve blinders. And so there's all kinds of blinders that we live in. And that's part of ideology is what, what don't we even see?

• 57:13Lex Fridman?

  And that would prevent us from seeing some deep, objective, scientific truth.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Right. Some truth.

• 57:20Lex Fridman?

  And it's actually, just to mention, there's some people, including Elon, who are saying, there's not too many people. There's not enough people, right? That if you just look at the birth rates. And so it's like, some of this is actually very difficult to figure out because there's, there's these narratives, you want your tobacco, obesity with sugar. There's been narratives throughout the history and it's very.

• 57:48Lex Fridman?

  There are certain topics on which it's

• 57:53Lex Fridman?

  easy to almost become apathetic.

• 57:57Lex Fridman?

  Because like you just see in history, how narratives take hold and fade away. You know, people were really sure what that tobacco 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?

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Well, you asked about ideology. And one of the things I always ask students before class, whether I'm teaching agnotology or world history of sciences, what makes fish move? And 90% of Americans will say some version of muscles, fins, you know, neurons. When the reality is, at least in saltwater, 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, or the rotation of the earth around the sun, or the rotation of the solar system around the galaxy, you know, ignore all that.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  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-

• 59:17Lex Fridman?

  The fish pulled, pulled itself up by its bootstraps.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Pulled itself up by its bootstraps, right? And whatever, you know, gumption and, and 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 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.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  And looking at that bigger picture, I think, is part of the story.

• 1:00:07Lex Fridman?

  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 reverse 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?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Well, 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. And every year kill about as many as COVID. 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

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  on a sidewalk. They'd be no more likely to be in a presidential debate than, you know, sneezing in the wrong place. So, we live in this world where most things are invisible. You know, 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.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:08Lex Fridman?

  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 action by the tobacco companies to keep this invisible?

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  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's an anti-villainy clause. The industry can't be made even visible in those ads. In some, they get away with it, but...

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  The industry operates through very powerful agents, you know, powerful senators. They used to count three quarters of the members 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,

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  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 and 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 microarchitectural collaboration. So there's multiple, multiple means that they use. Plus, a lot of their targeting is hyper-specific.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  They use the internet very effectively. They use email and that are customer, customer targeting.

• 1:05:31Lex Fridman?

  What goes through 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.

• 1:05:53Lex Fridman?

  With, 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 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.

• 1:06:37Lex Fridman?

  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, that kind of idea of making money pollutes you. It's the widget building. It is, it's 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, this, that's the wrong choice for human civilization.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  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 lung, that lung, you know, on a daily basis.

• 1:07:31Lex Fridman?

  Cause of causes.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  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 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,

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  who maybe would refuse something like this.

• 1:08:18Lex Fridman?

  But those don't survive the journey.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Those survive the journey, who can make it through 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 bee down the chimney into Auschwitz. "Well, if I didn't do it, someone else would, so what's really the difference between me doing it 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 money. When you look at their documents, they talk about targeting against young adults, or against women, or against homosexuals.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  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 scum? Or talks about them as, one famous Reynolds executives, "We don't smoke this stuff, we reserve that for the poor, the black, and the stupid." That's a direct quote from one of the Winston models.

• 1:09:33Lex Fridman?

  So it's a company culture that sees the customers almost like as the enemy? Or worthless?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Losers.

• 1:09:42Lex Fridman?

  Losers.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  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, 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 tobacco executives make tens of millions of dollars per year just in their salaries.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  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 bestselling statistics book in the history of the world.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  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 Weisman 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.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  She signs coupons, 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 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 whoever drove here in a car that burned gas. And so, there's a very interesting question. Who is liable? Who is responsible for?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:26Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Well, there's been, in my view, not that much progress. 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 cigarettes are ever shown as causing cancer, obviously, they'll be banned. The famous slogan in the 50s was 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 200-some billion cigarettes smoked in the United States every year.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Globally, we still have about 6 trillion cigarettes smoked every year. That's 350 million miles of cigarettes smoked every year.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  That's enough to go to make a continuous chain of cigarettes from the earth to the sun and back with enough left over for several round trips to Mars.

• 1:14:41Lex Fridman?

  But it's much fewer than before. I mean, okay, so culturally speaking, I grew up in Soviet Union, everybody smoked, everybody smoked.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Well, by everybody, you mean about half.

• 1:14:53Lex Fridman?

  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 famous actors and actresses? Do you see movies?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 1:15:12Lex Fridman?

  You do?

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  You can't watch a Hollywood movie without saying, pretty, pretty much continuous smoking. I mean, look at Peaky Blinders, look at, you know, any of the modern series now, it's pretty much a one nonstop. You're right, there has been a change. I mean, that's true. The purest metric in the United States is number of cigarettes smoked per year. And that peaks in 1981 at 640 billion cigarettes.

• 1:15:41Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  That's declined now to the level it was in 1940, which is about 240 billion cigarettes.

• 1:15:51Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Now globally, the number has increased.

• 1:15:55Lex Fridman?

  See, but, but the perception, 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.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, for one thing, smokers do. I mean, smokers hate the fact they smoke.

• 1:16:17Lex Fridman?

  Right, right. So this, this is the interesting observation I'm speaking to is 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 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 bullshit with friends.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  Share a moment.

• 1:16:44Lex Fridman?

  Share a moment together. I mean, it's a beautiful thing and it's, it's interesting because we need to find other ways to share moments. Uh, but you know, you bum, uh, you bum a smoke from a stranger. I mean, that was seen as a good thing now.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Did you ever smoke?

• 1:16:57Lex Fridman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Oh, you did? For how many years?

• 1:16:59Lex Fridman?

  Uh, two years. I was a musi- so what happened is I was a musician. I was in a band.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Well, there you go.

• 1:17:07Lex Fridman?

  And, no, there is a bonding aspect to it and I think I stopped smoking when they banned um, smoking in bars.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:17Lex Fridman?

  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, that, 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 that smoking has on me.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:43Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Lex Fridman?

  Can I have fun without drinking? Um, I think the answer to that is yes, but I'm still drinking. So that, that's a big shift. For example, if they banned drinking at certain places. And there's a lot of negative things to say about alcohol.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  And you would drive drunk. What's the big deal really? And Mothers Against Drunk Driving really denormalized.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  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 and 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 bans on, on cigarettes. Some of it actually started in the computer industry. Cause some of the early bugs that were found on tapes in the seventies were caused by smoke. And some of the earliest indoor smoking bans were actually in computer rooms,

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  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 seventies, early eighties, pushing it out. It was a huge struggle. The tobacco industry marshaled an army of experts to say that secondhand smoke is an entirely different kind of smoke. It can't hurt you. They, they eventually lost that battle. And now we have so-called smoke-free laws where you can't smoke in most workplaces and most restaurants. And that denormalization has been crucial because remember Aristotle says, tell me

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  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, that I, I used to have had a, had a cigarette lighter. It had a, 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.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  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

• 1:20:58Lex Fridman?

  Take a good big puff.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Take a good big 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 crucial moment. If you can no longer smoke in a bar, if you can no longer smoke. And by the way, that's different from drinking. Most people who smoke wish they didn't. Most people who drink, that's not true. Most people who drink, they don't wish. There are some addicts, you know, 5% we say. But you're talking about 70, 80, 90% of people who smoke cigarettes regularly are wish they did not.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  And that's actually where I learned about 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. Get rid of them all together because it's not a recreational drug. It's very different from alcohol. And the genius of the tobacco industry has to turn basically 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.

• 1:22:27Lex Fridman?

  So how do we get that 200 billion down closer to zero?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Well, the good news, and I know you like good news, and I do too. Is that every year we have about 8 billion fewer cigarettes smoked in the United States. So we're going in the right direction. We're going to solve this, you know, there are 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.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Much more invisible than COVID, but very solvable and actually will be solved. Probably because of 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 kind of cultural revolution of sorts. Once we have a category six 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's a sci fi film from 1950 where they're trying to get back to Earth from the moon. And they have to jettison their toolbox and their ladder and this and this and this.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:52Lex Fridman?

  Let's come back to Nazi Germany for a time. You also wrote the book titled The Nazi War on Cancer.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:00Lex Fridman?

  What is the main storyline and thesis of this book?

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Well, I'd 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. Went to Germany partly because my girlfriend was going there, Landa Schibinger. And I was quick with the language. And my old landlady was born in 1900. And I was renting a room, a tiny room in Berlin. And she told me, she'd been a nurse in World War I and told me how sad it was that all the mentally ill had died in in that war

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  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 I. But I also started taking classes 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, you know, been told they were about to be executed and they would do a before and an after on these ovaries. One of these horrific experiments.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  This was a physician 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 Berlin. And this is in 1980, 81. I started reading medical journals from the Nazi period. And even the librarians didn't like that. I remember the Prozessstaatsbibliothek 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.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  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 its forehead, a natural black swastika on it. 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.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:02Lex Fridman?

  Why is that, do you think, do you have a sense?

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Because the Nazi regime is a kind of sanitary utopia.

• 1:27:07Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  It was to create this purified world of, that would control the mind and fertility. So gynecologists and psychiatrists were the top, they were the most Nazified 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.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  But in any event, 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 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 Arthur Jensen's, you know, blacks have lower IQs. And so there was a whole nest of controversial hot topics, you know, around sociobiology, around race and IQ, around women and scholarship and so forth.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  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 California, but there were, you know, huge numbers sterilized in Nazi Germany. So the more I looked into that, I realized there was a book there. But I'd also started noticing this other weird stuff. Why were they anti-tobacco? Why did they recognize, why were the Nazis the first to recognize asbestos as causing mesothelioma? Why did they try to ban food dyes?

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  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 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-ring of pregnant women. Already in the early 1930s, it was standard medical practice. They recognized that this could harm the fetus, harm the race, way before radiation was recognized as a hazard in England or America.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  I had started noticing these things, and I have an eye for 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 6 million Jews using that language. How could this be? You know, and I researched it. 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?

• 1:31:15Lex Fridman?

  That's the source of conspiracy theories, right?

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:31:18Lex Fridman?

  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 some kind of resonance with something.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:35Lex Fridman?

  That captures something deep to the culture.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I'm interested in probing. I mean, history is about seeing the universal through the particular in a way. And

• 1:31:44Lex Fridman?

  So you look for the weird particular and then pull at that string to see if there's something there.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Isn't that weird? You know, I did a project I never published on 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, you know, they're disturbingly like a swastika. And I call those pseudo swastikas. It's one of the many things I've filed away to be a great project, just to write a, 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.

• 1:32:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  You know, so they would do these little things that look pretty much like a swastika. Or I looked at, I would look at humor. What are they laughing at? What are they smiling at?

• 1:32:30Lex Fridman?

  I didn't even know Germans had humor.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:35Lex Fridman?

  That's a good discovery.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  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 a this party and a that party. It's actually kind of funny. So we do have this, again, this scarecrow image even 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 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?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  And I said, well, I wasn't really working on Nazi stuff that much anymore, but I did 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, I went down to Washington DC and they, 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.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  And so I ended up writing this, this book on the Nazi war on cancer, which talks about how right before Hitler's about to invade Poland, he's talking late into the night about how to cure cancer.

• 1:34:15Lex Fridman?

  So for Nazis, racial hygiene encompasses like way more than we might think. So it's like purifying in all ways.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Purifying, and it's also much more normal and more familiar.

• 1:34:30Lex Fridman?

  It's like regular, in regular discussion.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:34:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, they're human beings making these decisions.

• 1:34:52Lex Fridman?

  And when it's tied to things like removing cancer, so you're saying that 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.

• 1:35:11Lex Fridman?

  You know, leading scientific innovation on fighting cancer.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  It's not a bunch of blind robots following orders. It's a period of massive innovation. I mean, they declared the soybeans to be the official bean of the Third Reich. Because they realized how, you know, how useful soy could be in protein 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 they're right about whole grain bread. It's better than, you know, so.

• 1:35:55Lex Fridman?

  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 like, I've discovered fasting. So I often like on days like this, when it's pretty stressful, of 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.

• 1:36:36Lex Fridman?

  You know, there's not scientific support why it might make you feel, but I don't care. The point is I've done the experiments on the N of one, and it just makes me feel better.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:37:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  Right. We're in a world, I mean, most animals are living in a sense that they're 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 doughnut. And that's not something we evolved with.

• 1:37:28Lex Fridman?

  We've been talking about purification in that negative context, but you know, there's appealing ways of of minimalism, of removing things from your life, of of seeking, especially for me being like OCD and and a scientist, I do like this simplification of things of the this taxonomy of things. I just recently, um, storage got hacked by ransomware for these these 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, there was, at first, it was a gut punch and it really hurts and a bunch of stuff is gone.

• 1:38:10Lex Fridman?

  But it's also freeing.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there's a, uh, my favorite New Yorker cartoon is where the guy's about to die. Let's say he's 90 years old. He's got tubes in his nose. The very last words are, I wish I'd bought more crap.

• 1:38:26Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Well, that's one of my fears of Bitcoin is losing your password. I know, 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? 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 laptop with the password on it.

• 1:39:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's the kind of dread people feel in the modern age, losing your Bitcoin password. Or for me, it'd be like LastPass password.

• 1:39:10Lex Fridman?

  It's hilarious. We're funny, funny creatures. What, um, what else can we say outside of cancer, about medicine, about engineering?

• 1:39:21Lex Fridman?

  Lessons about medicine, lessons about engineering, and lessons about sort of applied science in Nazi Germany. So before we leave the subject, is there some truths that resonate with you still that's applicable for today?

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  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. There were... You can't always, you know, foresee what's going to happen. And there were definitely missteps, and the potency of that ideology was such that 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... Whatever the ideology is, once it's blended with warfare, that's catastrophic.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  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 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 closing.

• 1:40:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, military is really interesting because, you know, I'm an AI person, robots, and most of my work when I was a PhD student was DARPA and DoD funded. And I think that's probably true for a lot of science is 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 anything else. But, you know, there is a sense in which... I remember when I was a...

• 1:41:22Lex Fridman?

  It hit me when one of the people close to me when I was at PhD, one of the faculty, she refused to take funding from DOD, from DARPA. And that was interesting to me. I thought, but what's the, I mean, it's not, like, 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 at least it woke me up to, like, this is something we should be very, very careful with. For me, artificial

• 1:42:01Lex Fridman?

  intelligence is, 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 that are going to, you know, swarm China, or swarms whoever, some

• 1:42:42Lex Fridman?

  terrorist 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, there's been something released called, like, the AI Report. Eric Schmidt was one of the co-authors of it, which is essentially saying that because China is developing autonomous weapon systems, the US should not ban autonomous weapon systems and should also be doing it. So, basically, put AI into our weapons of war. And that escalation, that race is terrifying. Just like all the things you mentioned, but that particular one for me is close because now

• 1:43:24Lex Fridman?

  too closely are the ideas of AI and war are being linked.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  That was, that was kicked off campus in 1971 with the whole 60s radicalism. But nonetheless, 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 their gifts, if their names are on certain projects, what influence is that going to have?

• 1:44:56Lex Fridman?

  This is what really bothered me. People don't often have, they don't have integrity 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.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:18Lex Fridman?

  A billion dollars, that number starts decreasing, but it's still pretty, like, I think we would be happy with direct murder with 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 a story, ah, what's the harm? And I see that with, 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.

• 1:46:05Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it skews innovation.

• 1:46:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  What happened at Stanford was

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:47:20Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  Because of your genes, your ancestry, your hormones, whatever. Well, that was disbarred, that was broken apart through what was called the master settlement agreement. But it was rejuvenated and reinvigorated by something called the Philip Morris External Research Program, which continued with the same fax 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,

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  anything but cigarettes causing cancer and giving the non, giving the friendly research, as Philip Morris often called it, of bigger voice. They got money, they got job, 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 AI. This is all a political decision in a very non-democratic institution. Universities are less democratic than the Vatican. You know, at least the Pope is elected. Who elects, you know, a president of a university

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  or a dean for that matter? And so what happened was 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 sort of, it was kind of 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

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  They funded that, that research to basically skew the whole research in their direction.

• 1:50:08Lex Fridman?

  You edited a book titled, "Ignatology," this is an interesting term. So you mentioned it earlier, "The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance."

• 1:50:20Lex Fridman?

  Where you explore the topic of ignorance, or the authors explore the topic of ignorance in different applications and in different contexts. Oh, let me ask the ridiculous big philosophical question. What is the nature of human ignorance?

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing to say is that it's infinite.

• 1:50:39Lex Fridman?

  An Einstein quote, or stupidity, or something, I forget what it is, yeah.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:50:43Lex Fridman?

  A tribute.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  As, you know, we started as single-celled organisms, right? As some sperm and some egg get together. That's certainly ignorant, and then we're ignorant, and we're ignorant. Each one of us, there's an ontogeny of, of knowledge, you say, but an ontogeny of ignorance as well. We grow up, we have to learn.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  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. We have a few shreds, a few traces that we try. History is a kind of resurrection project, it's a kind of archaeological project and a genealogical project, where we look back and, and we find traces. And, and it's very biased. I'm interested in empires that we don't even know anything about, you know? And there are whole empires that are, 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 stelae and a few of their codices, four codices.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  But we know the dozens that were burned by Diego de Landa, the, you know, inquisitorial Spanish friar who thought these were just heresies and so burned. So that knowledge is all lost.

• 1:52:12Lex Fridman?

  You think there's a lot of, like, deep wisdom about reality that is lost forever?

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  Of course. Of course.

• 1:52:20Lex Fridman?

  That's so sad.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  Well, it is sad, but the human condition is sad. I mean, but then if we can study ignorance, that's also a positive thing. Agnotology, the study of ignorance, the study of the cultural production of ignorance.

• 1:52:33Lex Fridman?

  Cultural production, sorry to interrupt, cultural production of ignorance?

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, you can.

• 1:52:38Lex Fridman?

  So ignorance is not just a manifestation of what it means to be human. It's also forced back onto you through the culture?

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  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 cause cancer, they measured exactly how much ignorance could be created by watching one of their videos. They would show that 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 agnotometrics. They actually measured the success of their propaganda.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  And I'm sure this has been done in, in, in, in marketing and in other fields as well.

• 1:53:37Lex Fridman?

  That framing of it somehow is terrifying because it seems like a very effective way to be scientific about how to sort of create doubt in the mind.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's biological and luckily we have some of the tobacco industry's own internal documents, the ones that were not destroyed. 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 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.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  And that then becomes a template of sorts for climate denial, and for all kinds of other denial engines that are produced by the 1,500 trade associations in Washington DC. So this is something new in the research enterprise of the world. After World War II, you have this enormous trust in science, trust in 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 exactly what they did. What they didn't say was it was all an effort to distract from the truth that cigarettes cause cancer,

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  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 cause 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

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  into pieces that serve your interests. So it's not that cigarettes cause cancer, it's maybe the smokey them at most, the way they're even denying that. It's the fact you have lungs that cause cancer. It's blaming the victim, and they had a thousand ways to blame the victim.

• 1:56:30Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's some legitimacy to this line of argument, which is why it sticks, which is figuring out what is the causation of things is hard to figure out.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  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? 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?

• 1:57:07Lex Fridman?

  Is it the Jews controlling the weather, which is where the conspiracy theories come in, or the lizards? So, 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.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  The genius of the tobacco conspiracy, the Tobacco Denial Campaign, which is born on December 14th, 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.

• 1:57:49Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Marxism at Harvard a couple decades ago or something like that. So 30 years ago, you wrote the value-free science book, Purity, Empower, 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

• 1:58:34Lex Fridman?

  university, which bothers me because most of the university, at least like MIT, is doing engineering and not.

• 1:58:42Lex Fridman?

  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 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, well, nobody's for racism, but you know, on the topic, like anti-racism, all those kinds of critical race theory things, and then also on the feminism and gender studies and all those kinds of things?

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  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 like a certain way. There's probably going to be, in that omelet making, you know, there's going to be a few eggs that get broken. And I think people may exaggerate the extent to which that's going in. It's definitely real.

• 2:00:30Lex Fridman?

  Like cancel culture, all those kinds of things.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it's definitely real. But it's also, 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 some very interesting and complex aspects to this. And the idea that certain words should not be said, or that certain people should not be invited.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  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 canceled from a Stanford. What do you, 4% are admitted. They call it an admissions committee. They should call it a rejection committee.

• 2:01:40Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  When we hire someone 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.

• 2:01:52Lex Fridman?

  That sounds like toxic cancel culture, all these rejections. Everybody should be accepted.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:02:28Lex Fridman?

  And that's where the power is. You have to ask the question, where's the power in the university? I think that like at MIT, the entire administration should get fired regularly 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.

• 2:03:08Lex Fridman?

  The administration helps you delude yourself longer. So it prevents you from waking up. It's like, no, it's okay to take this money. Oh, Jeffrey Epstein, it'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.

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  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

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  in universities, there's always been the, you know, the front door and the back door, where the back door is the, the rich donors, the kids of the rich donors, the legacy kids that you still get.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:04:09Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:04:21Lex Fridman?

  What's human? What makes us human? What is human? And where did that humanness come from?

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  That's exactly the question we need to problematize because it's what I call the Gandhi question. It's like, 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, we talk about the rise of modern humanity.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  And what's happened in the last fifty or sixty 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 tool use. But since wasps and chimpanzees used tools, then it's got to be even older. So that's actually one of the things I'm interested is how have different notions of what is human influenced our theories of human origins? And in particular,

• 2:05:40Speaker 01

  there's sort of the problem 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, five million years ago, ten million years ago, three million years ago? In other words, when is it? Like date or one night stands? I mean, Either one. Strong. Either one. All right. Let's say be the the the mother of your children. 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

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  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, ramaphythescenes, ramaphythus, were being declared to have folkways and mores and language, which is ridiculous. No one wanted to be wanted 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?

• 2:06:57Lex Fridman?

  And how much is that is the hardware evolution question versus the software? Like what the actual development of society? Like, can't you argue that we became human with agriculture? I mean, can't you argue that we became human with the industrial revolution?

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  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 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 1 millimeter, it'd be the thickness of the white of your fingernail.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  And then the pyramids are 5,000, so that's a thousandth of a millimeter, a micron, which is the amount taken off when you brush your fingers on 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.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  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 hunt with us.

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  But there is what you say, this co-evolution, our social aspect 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

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  And they were probably not self-aware. At least, the early ones 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 jewelry and

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  when we, in a sense, invent fantasy, when we invent deception,

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  that's human, that's fully human. We become human by thinking there's a world that really is not.

• 2:10:21Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that feels like we're start 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 ideas. It's not you come up with ideas.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  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 limited, it's highly limited.

• 2:10:47Lex Fridman?

  But you could probably argue that the dogs got that from the humans.

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, humans and dogs have co-evolved, have definitely co-evolved, because it's over 100,000 years we've been working together there. But all our hands have evolved with tools. And so I'm trying to figure out now the original purposes, uh, purpose of a shulian hand axes, the old, the first beautiful tool made by humans, which were made unchanged.

• 2:11:12Lex Fridman?

  What, what kind of axes is?

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  They're called a shulian hand axes. They're the, these beautiful teardrop shaped objects that go back 1.5 million years.

• 2:11:21Lex Fridman?

  And what's your thought about its possible purposes?

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Well, the most important thing I think is that

• 2:11:28Lex Fridman?

  A jealous, jealous, jealous husband comes home?

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:11:42Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like ornaments to, to display something versus actual practical?

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  Like, like the peacock's tail.

• 2:11:49Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  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. Now there was a lot of, this is one reason I'm interested in ignorance, is that really to understand something and especially to, 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, uh, you can teach.

• 2:12:25Lex Fridman?

  Well, one nice thing I like about the internet is you can look at old tweets of yours and to be like, okay, you, it, for some reason it brings to mind like, okay, that's where my mind was. Another interesting exercise is like, uh, Google search history. So I, I think for everybody, it keeps, you can look up your own history of what you searched for. And 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, um, 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

• 2:13:06Lex Fridman?

  you have now. You say, oh, right. Right. I was really concerned about, you know, this and that. And 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.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  But you know, we create it new all the time as well, so.

• 2:13:32Lex Fridman?

  Right, hopefully forgetting is a feature, not just a bug.

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  It's like those mice that can't forget, they go insane, right? If you imagine all of your memories as present.

• 2:13:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  That's a recipe for insanity. You have to forget to learn, right? Learning is unlearning and.

• 2:13:53Lex Fridman?

  Which is exactly why I drink. No.

• 2:13:57Lex Fridman?

  And then write some blues songs about forgetting a broken heart. Okay, you mentioned 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?

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  Well, scholars tend to be text oriented. I tend to think books are overrated. We evolved without books.

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  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 outside of Hefu Bay just a couple of days ago. I like finding things.

• 2:14:42Lex Fridman?

  Have you ever found pieces of a crashed UFO?

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 2:14:46Lex Fridman?

  Not yet, okay. All right, let me know, please, if you do.

• 2:14:49Speaker 01

  But of course, we have extraterrestrial, other stuff. I mean, we have, I like meteorites, so I'm into that.

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  And so I'm interested in stone, stone quality. I grew up in Southern Texas and grew up surrounding, was surrounded by people 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 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.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  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 India, they love agates with Hindu temples in them and altars. And in America, they like, you know, three crosses on the mount. And 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 metaphor.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  They also, I'm also looking at the rise of hobbies and amateur stonework and how a lot of our gem, gem logic 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 to keep it from running. That's hobbling it 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.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  And so hobbies become this so-called job you can't lose in the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then they explode. 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.

• 2:17:09Lex Fridman?

  So it's interesting, the development of hobbies, because it feels like the future of human civilization will be very hobby-driven. Like, some of the, like, I often now, because of this particular little thing I 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.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:37Lex Fridman?

  So it's almost-

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  Well, if they're amateurs, they're the lovers.

• 2:17:40Lex Fridman?

  The lovers, yes.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  I mean, you can think, that's what that means. From Amur, you're an amateur, if you're a lover of the thing, and you're not in for the money.

• 2:17:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  You're in it because you're obsessed.

• 2:17:50Lex Fridman?

  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, technology development, building, you know, building all kinds of technologies almost like as a hobby.

• 2:18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:17Lex Fridman?

  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 it'll start making money. And that's really fascinating. And yeah, it does kind of, I mean, when did that originate? Just the collection?

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  Well, 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 that were often linked with magical practices, alchemical practices. People would gather beaux-voirs, 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 that you taxonomize the world, you

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  classify the world, you look for the rare object, the rarity. And rarity still is a, 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.

• 2:19:42Lex Fridman?

  Wait, what, really? There's new evidence?

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:45Lex Fridman?

  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 then, so I got really excited. I was like, damn it, I'm gonna figure out how this ball lightning works.

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  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. 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. It'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 it works out of the Sahara every now and then. It was the most valuable stone of antiquity.

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  The centerpiece of Tutankhamun'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 odd, and, and science has a kind of often aversion. Is 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, what does it really exist?

• 2:21:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Which is why, I mean, UFOs and aliens and all those kinds, there's a general aversion to that. Cause it's like the one time event.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:21:19Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's sad because there's, 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, it's the thing you, you find with the weird, the, the peculiar. It's like, huh.

• 2:21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:42Lex Fridman?

  What is that?

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  Even, even the universe itself, it could be that the universe begins. And then will 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, of an infinitely many cycles. Or, and maybe all of the laws of nature are recreated anew with each cycle.

• 2:22:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  Or maybe what, what we're, 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.

• 2:22:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  And even the age of the universe.

• 2:22:22Lex Fridman?

  And I, to me, there's very likely trillions of conversations going on like this.

• 2:22:29Lex Fridman?

  On other planets.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:31Lex Fridman?

  In different.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no doubt.

• 2:22:34Lex Fridman?

  With 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. Every time you think about this, it's more and more humbling.

• 2:22:51Lex Fridman?

  Just this whole fog of ignorance.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm. What drives me crazy is wondering about the beautiful gemstones on other planets. I call them exoagates. You know, they must be unbelievable features and forms which are unimaginable.

• 2:23:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:09Speaker 01

  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 nature has created. But even that's unknown, 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.

• 2:23:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:34Lex Fridman?

  I, 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.

• 2:24:06Lex Fridman?

  It, it was interesting. There's some people, this is not a common belief, but a friend now named Lee Cronin, he's a, he's a chemist and biologist. And he believes that if we ran evolution over and over and over and over on Earth, you'd get very different, not just, you wouldn't just get different organisms, you'd get very different biology.

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's quite possible, yeah.

• 2:24:26Lex Fridman?

  And that's a weird thing. 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.

• 2:24:40Speaker 01

  Well, the idea that it would be DNA based.

• 2:24:43Lex Fridman?

  DNA based.

• 2:24:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:24:54Lex Fridman?

  What's the coolest stone you've ever seen?

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, there's so many.

• 2:25:00Lex Fridman?

  And what defines, is it rarity? Is it just raw beauty? What captivates your?

• 2:25:07Speaker 01

  I like a storied stone. I have a very beautiful Fairburn 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 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 rough diamond is gone. But if you could sort of do a filmic version of a cutting process, so that the stone would exist from a pre-polished to a polished state,

• 2:25:52Speaker 01

  all as a kind of NFT or something.

• 2:25:56Lex Fridman?

  That should be an NFT, that's right.

• 2:25:58Speaker 01

  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?

• 2:26:29Lex Fridman?

  Just on the surface, you mean?

• 2:26:30Speaker 01

  Just above the surface, just 10 feet above the surface, 20 feet above the surface.

• 2:26:33Lex Fridman?

  No, no, no, sorry. You think you'll be able to find skulls on the surface?

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, in the middle of a place that no one has looked. These areas are vast, right? So it could be found on the surface, then move to the next layer, then find it under the surface as well. There's LIDAR. There's all kinds of ways. We're finding jungles and jungle cities and under the Amazon that people didn't know about.

• 2:26:57Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's something out there that would just blow your mind?

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah, no doubt.

• 2:27:06Lex Fridman?

  Oh, man. And how much of it is a little bit underground, right? Or how much of it is in the ocean?

• 2:27:12Speaker 01

  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 6,000 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 touch the...

• 2:27:40Lex Fridman?

  Could be treasure, too. I mean, like, literally, like you said, we lose the wisdom or we lose the knowledge. But I mean, if there's the pyramids, right? It's the great wonders of the world. There might be other wonders that are completely lost.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:57Lex Fridman?

  Just...

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the stones, you asked about stones, I like. I like stones. For example, every now and then dinosaurs would eat rocks as gizzard stones. And then you find them in their guts, in 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?

• 2:28:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Speaker 01

  So I like things that have been through dramatic...

• 2:28:30Lex Fridman?

  There's a story there.

• 2:28:31Speaker 01

  There's a story.

• 2:28:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, okay. 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, it's been through so many generations of humans. It's like bigger.

• 2:28:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:28:51Lex Fridman?

  It's seen it all.

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  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...

• 2:29:07Speaker 01

  When is a stone the product of artifice? And when is it a geofact, produced by nature? And that was an important discovery in the 19th century. The zone of percussion, it's called, 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? 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 a face. It's called pareidolia.

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  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 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 pareidolia.

• 2:30:32Lex Fridman?

  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 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,

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Lex Fridman?

  the pattern is incredible. How do you?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  How do you know? How do you know it's a fossil? Is, is one question? Namely, the, 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, an artifact, or a geofact, or an antelopea fact.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  And that's, it's an intellectually challenging question, and people want to fantasize. They'll find a stone that looks like a carving that's 300,000 years old. Generally, I think those are just odd stones.

• 2:31:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  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 paleoanthropologists 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 in an object that you don't get. The Neanderthals 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, when is something art?

• 2:32:34Speaker 01

  And when is it just, oh, that's a rock that looks like a face?

• 2:32:37Lex Fridman?

  Or some, not necessarily understanding, but a conception that's mutually agreed upon, that we're able to, because maybe Neanderthals, maybe fish having a conception of art, they just.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:32:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  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 overproliferation of different species of hominids.

• 2:33:20Speaker 01

  Because there's no academic reward for finding yet another example of someone else's species.

• 2:33:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:26Speaker 01

  But there's a huge reward if you can find, you know, a Lex Fridmanite, you know, you can name it after yourself or whatever.

• 2:33:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  A new fossil. That, there's a huge professional award to be the first at something. And so those types of professional rewards also influence science and what kind of science gets done.

• 2:33:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so I'm always suspicious of, 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 Flat Earth has discussed stuff recently. It's kind of exciting for some reason.

• 2:34:15Speaker 01

  Fascinating, yeah.

• 2:34:16Lex Fridman?

  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. But 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 you can form a large movement. And it's like, hmm.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  Well, on such thin evidence. It's like if Loch Ness exists, there's just one? I mean, how does the reproduction work on that? How do you talk about an animal that has only one in a population? It just doesn't, some of the things don't make sense.

• 2:34:58Lex Fridman?

  No, but see, this is the logic side. I don't even go that far. 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 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. It's pretty logical.

• 2:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Very logical. If you're Logic is not the problem.

• 2:35:37Lex Fridman?

  Right. So it's, but it's 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 fragmenting of the, the common humanity who 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.

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's why things like ball lightning are cool because it's like, the scientist denied it, but here it is.

• 2:36:14Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. Exactly. And that's ultimately ends up

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  Everyone said I was insane, but

• 2:36:20Lex Fridman?

  And, but it's still, you said there's some breakthroughs. I need to look it up. It's really cool.

• 2:36:24Speaker 01

  Check it out. It's pretty exciting. Yeah. There's some new theories of how it actually might.

• 2:36:28Lex Fridman?

  Because I think, I mean, there's obviously several ways to prove that. Like one of them is to recreate in a lab, which is

• 2:36:34Speaker 01

  It's a good standard.

• 2:36:35Lex Fridman?

  That's probably very, very difficult. 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, called the Muammar.

• 2:36:45Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. The cigar shaped one.

• 2:36:48Lex Fridman?

  The cigar shaped. As a fan of rocks, what do you think about that one? So

• 2:36:50Speaker 01

  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. There are parts of the desert there in, in Utah where rocks move and create these long tracks. And it's, now we know it's from liquefaction and, and, and, and wind and various other 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.

• 2:37:31Speaker 01

  I thought it was really, really cool. And I, I sort of wish it would happen more often.

• 2:37:36Lex Fridman?

  I kind of hope it's trash from another alien civilization.

• 2:37:39Speaker 01

  That'd be fantastic.

• 2:37:40Lex Fridman?

  Cause, cause if you're, if, if humans are all a lesson, that we produce like more trash than we do intelligent signal. So the first thing to reach other civilizations, I feel like would be our trash, our pollution, before the intelligent signal reaches them. You mentioned this interesting term, Russianist, the things we do for love. For some reason, you went to Germany.

• 2:38:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:38:07Lex Fridman?

  So you said you're pretty eloquent with German.

• 2:38:10Speaker 01

  I learned German, yeah.

• 2:38:11Lex Fridman?

  Did you ever learn Russian a little bit?

• 2:38:14Speaker 01

  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 Russian, I wanted to do Russian and Chinese as a graduate student, because I thought this is kind of the future. And Harvard said, no, it has to be French and German. And so I essentially gave up on my Russian and Chinese.

• 2:38:39Speaker 01

  And the other part of that story is nonetheless, I wanted to do something with Russian. I wanted to study how much the Lamarckian ideology and 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.

• 2:39:05Speaker 01

  And we tend to see those literatures in isolation. The Nazis were racist, the Russians were, you know, environmentalists biased by Lamarckian theories of redity 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, I 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 I was, I couldn't get a visa into the Soviet Union. I was just barred admission.

• 2:39:43Lex Fridman?

  For?

• 2:39:44Speaker 01

  For doing this project, looking at how Stalinist science had this anti-Nazi aspect, which we've overlooked.

• 2:39:52Lex Fridman?

  Which year was this? This was when the Soviet Union was still together?

• 2:39:54Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, it was in the late 1980s, but before, Gorbachev was in power, but it wasn't before 89.

• 2:40:03Lex Fridman?

  But still then, there was a careful.

• 2:40:07Lex Fridman?

  Attention to.

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  Well, you never know how careful it was or 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 the archives on it. I could have obviously done it later, but you know.

• 2:40:26Lex Fridman?

  So like there was that curiosity initially, but and then you focus on Nazi and the Nazi side of.

• 2:40:32Speaker 01

  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 wanted 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 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, you know, otherwise I might have been doing the same thing in Russian or Chinese.

• 2:41:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, those are.

• 2:41:14Speaker 01

  In other words, history chooses us as much as we choose history, right?

• 2:41:20Lex Fridman?

  And those are really powerful cultures, right? Maybe can you comment on the German and the Russian and Chinese? How much language, when you were reading those medical journals? 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 the opposite of that, did you find the beauty of the moment, like richly understand the moment because you had a hold of the language?

• 2:41:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:42:05Speaker 01

  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. There's always more to learn. I'm always learning new. I didn't know the word dun last year. D U N means some kind of brown color. And I'm always finding new words, you know, it's just kind of. The words are near infinite as well, right? And new combinations. I've coined several words too, in my life.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 2:43:04Lex Fridman?

  And direct, it's not like reading books by famous people. It's like real people.

• 2:43:10Speaker 01

  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. Can't trust the animal experiments because all it proves is that mice should not smoke. But I noticed, just in passing, these remarkable stories, little hints.

• 2:43:55Speaker 01

  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 are fighting each other.

• 2:44:18Speaker 01

  In a way, not 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 that all they want is a smoke.

• 2:44:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:45Speaker 01

  They nonetheless end up in the crosshairs and in death. And so it's just weird, and 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.

• 2:45:03Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:45:18Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:45:19Lex Fridman?

  And that, you know, that works, that that's those narratives.

• 2:45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's the movies, right? The movies, it's called Meet Cute. They, the tobacco industry, when they put cigarettes into a movie, they put it in right at the moment where boy meets girl.

• 2:45:34Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you, just in all the research you've done with Nazi Germany, just for me, from a conversational perspective, I was, I was listening to a bunch of Holocaust survivors recently, just on YouTube, listening to interviews, also listening to Nazi SS soldier, like they're still alive or were recently. 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, in your research.

• 2:46:13Lex Fridman?

  Are there interesting people to talk to that are still alive? Or are they mostly that part of history is no longer living, is in the books?

• 2:46:22Speaker 01

  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 and elderly people, people who had sort of slipped through the cracks, you know, maybe even should have been prosecuted. So few people got prosecuted.

• 2:46:43Speaker 01

  But these were people who had racial theories, who published.

• 2:46:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:48Speaker 01

  You know, on these topics and they were guarded. But

• 2:46:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:47:10Lex Fridman?

  Cause there's no self censorship is just there.

• 2:47:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:47:30Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:47:40Speaker 01

  Oh, all kinds of things give me hope. The, the forest gives me hope, the Wikipedia.

• 2:47:46Lex Fridman?

  Wikipedia.

• 2:47:47Speaker 01

  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 the, 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.

• 2:48:28Speaker 01

  And 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 re-sprout.

• 2:48:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  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 1,000 years from now, you'll get these restoration of all of this magnificent old growth. But so many other things, you know, give me hope. You know, we have to have hope. And I think that if the world is infinite, there's infinitely many ways for it to become fixed. I mean, we have some problems that need to be fixed, but they're fixable.

• 2:49:27Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:49:44Speaker 01

  I mean, we're a thin layer on the crust. And, you know, eventually, the earth will be swallowed by the sun, and humans will have long gone extinct by then. But yeah, there's all kinds of grounds for hope.

• 2:49:59Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:50:09Speaker 01

  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 old growth tree, it's making sure you're straight up, upright and not, you know, on a slippery slope.

• 2:50:22Lex Fridman?

  What about fish?

• 2:50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, fish, I guess they're trying to avoid the hook. Right? No fish ever, when they take the bait, no fish in the world has ever said, I hope I get hooked. And that's, that's one of the problems with tobacco is that there's all this bait and people get hooked. But, you know, the fish don't have heads. We have heads. One of the great innovations in the history of humanity, going back way pre-human, 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 have cool stuff.

• 2:51:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:04Lex Fridman?

  It's not all about the head.

• 2:51:05Speaker 01

  It's not all about the head. Well, in fact, the octopus, basically, they've got brains in their fingers.

• 2:51:10Lex Fridman?

  And maybe brains is not even that good of an invention in the long arc of history. Cause the fish maybe got it right.

• 2:51:19Lex Fridman?

  Stay in the ocean.

• 2:51:20Speaker 01

  Well, of course, we evolved from fish, so.

• 2:51:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But we moved on. Is there a why to this? Or is it just the way? 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.

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  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 almost destroyed the earth. We're the only ones that truly have the capacity to destroy the earth.

• 2:52:05Speaker 01

  I'm fascinated by the meteorite that wiped out everything bigger than four feet long. You know, the Mount Everest sized meteorite that hit the earth 66 million years ago and destroyed most species in, in the water and on land.

• 2:52:22Lex Fridman?

  There could have been some smart folks around then, too.

• 2:52:25Speaker 01

  Well, actually, one thing I like to think about is that. 232.3 million years ago and 232.4 million years ago, that's 100,000 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 maybe that happened.

• 2:52:54Lex Fridman?

  Our ignorance can fully engulf the fact that that happened.

• 2:53:02Lex Fridman?

  Oh, the beautiful self-importance of us, of us humans. It's easy to forget that multiple intelligent civilizations could have lived on Earth.

• 2:53:12Speaker 01

  It's possible and gone extinct. Or even life may have evolved more than once. Not only that, but proto-life may still exist and we are 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 always, what is the before time that is now? I remember lecturing about this right before COVID. And it's sort of like, what is the, what is our world now that will say, what was it like to be then before?

• 2:53:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:42Speaker 01

  And that's the world we live in. We live in a before time for something we really can't predict.

• 2:53:46Lex Fridman?

  Probably physical, you know.

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  Appendages.

• 2:53:52Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:14Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:54:24Lex Fridman?

  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.