Is There A WAR On Science? Lawrence Krauss - #505

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 In a sweeping conversation sparked by his new book The War on Science, Lawrence Krauss charts how well-intentioned campus DEI bureaucracies, politicized funding mandates, and “language-as-violence” taboos are eroding the core scientific virtues of open inquiry and empirical scepticism, while drawing historical parallels from Lysenkoism to today’s hiring rubrics and challenging listeners to defend freedom of thought with the same passion they reserve for social justice. He then pivots from diagnosis to remedy, outlining a five-point rescue plan—slashing ideological litmus tests, restoring merit-based evaluation, insulating grant agencies from mission creep, teaching students to steel-man opposing views, and benchmarking success against China’s unencumbered research surge—arguing that only by re-centering evidence over ideology can science remain humanity’s most reliable truth-seeking enterprise. — Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 01:04 The most dangerous idea threatening science today 02:35 The role of universities and academic freedom 10:26 Tenure and indirect costs in academia 14:58 Sanctions against free speech 17:39 The problem with tuition 18:42 Decolonializing STEM 23:57 What Trump is doing to address these issues 28:03 Free market education? 36:46 Judging a book by its cover 38:44 The distortion of science during COVID 44:12 Inequality in science 48:43 If Lawrence were president of the US 52:33 Audience questions 55:28 Outro — Additional resources: 📚 The War On Science by Lawrence Krauss: https://a.co/d/6ntEbll — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating⁠⁠ 🔔 YouTube:⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠ 📝 Join my mailing list:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠⁠ ✍️ Check out my blog:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/⁠⁠ 🎙️ Follow my podcast:⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/podcast⁠⁠ — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  There is no systemic racism in universities. Universities used to be the most tolerant environments and the most enlightened environments for that reason. And to pretend that they're not and to point out every single problem and suggest that its basis must be in racism or sexism without presenting evidence, it's not what you should be doing. Some ideas are heretical and should not be talked about, but nothing is heretical in science. Things are heretical in religion. If you say that ideas are too dangerous, then we're back at Galileo. It's too dangerous to say the Earth orbits the Sun. 80% of them wrote under pseudonyms because they were afraid. That sounds like the Stasi in East Germany or the KGB in Russia. One of his colleagues said, "You should stop talking about EDI. You've got a family," he said. "Think about your kids." That sounds like the mafia.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  It sounds like Sopranos, not a university. Someone who was academically unqualified to be president, who was hired for identity reasons. We analyzed using ChatGPT all National Science Foundation grants from 2023 and looked at the words like diversity, equity, inclusion, et cetera, et cetera, and looked at them. And we got about $800 million was going towards these things that weren't science. Lawrence Krauss.

• 2:01Brian Keating?

  What is the single most dangerous idea that's threatening science today?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  I think it's the idea that some ideas are heretical and should not be talked about. And the people who talk about them should be dispensed with. I think that's probably the biggest obstacle to science because science is based on not only open inquiry, but it's a social kind of you. It's based on being able to speak and have your ideas attacked and then defend them. But nothing is heretical in science. Things are heretical in religion. Things are not heretical in science and they shouldn't be.

• 2:30Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, there's so much in this book that I quite frankly felt depressed. I felt this is a book, Lawrence, correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been on the podcast five times now. I feel like this is the book that you wished you didn't have to write. Am I wrong?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I wish I didn't have to talk about this at all. Yeah. And I got around it by helping other people write part of it for me. Well, it's really important that it not just be me speaking out because that I speak out anyway, but it's important that this be a comprehensive group of people from within. Because a lot of people attack academia and science from without, and that's fine. We're used to that. But the people are within and distinguish people across the realm of all scholarship and also equally important across the realm of political ideology. We have people from the right and the left to show that we are concerned enough to speak out. And so, sure, I speak out a lot, but I think it's really important that others do. And you're right. It's a, it's a, it's a, I certainly wish I didn't have to deal with this.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  I, you know, there are two things I'd often wish I didn't have to deal with. One was this and the other is science versus religion.

• 3:31Brian Keating?

  Well, you're in luck. We'll talk about all those.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, somehow I get with you. We're gonna get both. So.

• 3:36Brian Keating?

  We're gonna talk about Donald Trump and all the wonderful reforms that he's been making. But first I want to get to something really important before we get to the five-point rescue plan that you outline in this book. And I should say that, you know, half the book is written by, you know, friends of mine, past guests on the podcast. And so forth. So I couldn't be more delighted to see this lineup. But again, it's depressing. It was depressing to read it. I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It was a it's a wonderful read because of the diversity of true intellectual firepower that comes from all genders, all sexualities, you know, as if that's important, all races in this book, all continents except for Antarctica. I don't know why you discriminate against my former continent, Lawrence, but

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Well, you know, if I could get someone who was in Antarctica to write, I would.

• 4:19Brian Keating?

  Well, you lay out this five-point plan, but I think that, you know, I want to start with the universities, which I've always thought of as a bastion, as a safe space in the truest sense, not a flower kind of sense, but in a true safe space for intellectuals until 2023, which really opened my mind after October 7th. It became a hostile place, a place of hatred, vilification, of outright exclusion of me and my Jewish colleagues and friends here, excluded from parts of campus, so much so that I had to testify in Congress about my experiences. But I want to ask you, when did you come to realize this? Because you were probably a canary in the coal mine, and we'll get to your personal experience later. But when did you realize that it was a hostile workspace for intellectuals that didn't toe the sort of woke line, so to speak?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  It began as long ago as 1993, when I became chair of the department that you were a student in. And I learned then, and that as chairman of apartment, I could not hire just anyone, or that not just me, the search committee could not hire anyone, that if we did not hire or put on the shortlist a woman, we always had to write an extremely long letter explaining why that wasn't the case. And now I was happy, in fact, I was the, when I was chair, we hired the first two female members of the faculty, which was nice. But the recognition that we were, that we had to moderate our search and make an argument for why we weren't hiring us for on the basis of gender or race, it rubbed me the wrong way even then.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  And then later, actually, I had another experience at case, which I don't talk about in the book. And I'll actually hadn't talked about this in the book either, probably. But the arbitrariness of it, of this kind of identity politics, there was a physicist, exceptional physicist from a well-known Midwestern university. And he was a, he was, he's really first-rate physicist. His wife was a scholar in some other field, and the university wanted to hire Her and he wanted to come as basically a target of opportunity. And he's black and it was a great opportunity for our department to be able to snag this person. And then when we went through all the details, it turned out we couldn't hire him as a target of opportunity as minority hire because he was from the Bahamas. So he wasn't the right kind of black.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  And, you know, again, that kind of nonsense began to weigh on me. But then it was more certainly for me, it's been in the last eight years. I wasn't the first to begin to think about it. I started to look at it earlier, but when I started to look at what scientific organizations, my own American Physical Society was doing. And also seeing the kind of things that were going on in hiring in my own university. And it became clearer and clearer because I had really good students. That my white male students who were exceptional had very little likelihood of getting a job, even getting to the point of being interviewed for a job. Issues like this or free speech issues have been a big issue for me. During the Bush administration, I spoke out, I had a big debate. I remember having a big debate at an American Physical Society meeting with the president's

• 7:17Speaker 02

  science advisor about the war on science at that time, free speech and being able to talk about things like climate change and other things. So I guess I've been attuned to that. And, and then because of my public profile, I heard more and more about things and traveling around the world. And I had people come and basically write me for help. And that was probably another big factor. And once I started to write about it, the fact that the problem was much worse than I imagined became clear. In fact, I was going to say, when you find the book depressing, there's hope. We obviously there's we try and give arguments for what should be done. But it's depressing because you wouldn't, some of these things you wouldn't believe if they weren't real. You couldn't believe this. And one of the things that really, when I realized how bad it was, I wrote a piece,

• 7:59Speaker 02

  I think it was in 2020 or 2021 for the Wall Street Journal on the ideological corruption of science. And I got letters from a number of people I didn't know from around the country, academics, who said that, who thanked me for writing it, agreed with me. But every single one wrote under a personal email, and eighty percent of them wrote under pseudonyms, because they were afraid that their colleagues or the administration would find out that they agreed with me. Now, that sounds like the Stasi in East Germany, or the KGB in Russia. It doesn't say, I mean, that's the antithesis of academia. Where, when I was growing up, and what I loved about academia, was being able to speak your mind,

• 8:41Speaker 02

  provoke people and have discussions, and be controversial. I like, you know, I like, I think provoking people is a good thing, because it gets them to think. And I certainly do in my teaching, too, and, or have done in my teaching. And the fact that you, people are afraid for their positions to even agree with someone, or to have people know they agree with someone. There's a, you know, there's a great quote in, in, in, from one of the pieces in, in, in the book. This is a biochemist, I have to read this to you, because it was, it shocked me. When he said, he was questioning, he's a biochemist in his department, this is in Canada, in Wilford-Laurie University. And he was asking about the process of hiring a faculty member, and the requirements of,

• 9:21Speaker 02

  he called it EDI, we call it DEI, or some people call it DIE, diversity, equity, and inclusion. And he quoted, one of his colleagues said, "You should stop talking about EDI." My colleague suggested to me over lunch. "You've got a family," he said, "think about your kids."

• 9:36Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Boy, that, that sounds like the mafia, it sounds like Sopranos, not a university. Anyway, so, it was one of these growing things that, I came at this, as you know, my politics generally have been left of center. I'm now called a right-wing pundit, which is amusing to me. I didn't even know what the term woke was, until I wrote a piece once, because I was concerned with the ridiculous fixation about Islamic terrorism in the States. At the time, this was years ago. And I wrote a point saying, if you look at the number of people who died in the States, your likelihood of being killed by a, well, you know, in this case, killed by a right wing gunman is greater than being killed by an Islamic terrorist in the United States. But I actually pointed out, if you actually did the numbers, it was actually more likely that a refrigerator would fall on you. And then I heard, learned, I was a woke snowflake.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  I never heard of those terms before. And it's kind of amusing me. And that's the point. I mean, we often talk about, I try not to use the word wokeness because I say woke fundamentalism, just like I, when I talk about Islam, I talk about Islamic fundamentalism. Woke originated as a good term. It was people being concerned about inequalities in a society and trying to make it better. And so it had good intentions, but as you know, the road, good intentions, you know, take you off and down bad roads. And that's exactly what happened. This thing has become extreme to the point where, and when you see in the book, universities are places where people are afraid to speak out, where sound science is often stifled,

• 11:04Speaker 02

  where people are fired for speaking out, and where merit, which would be the central part of universities, the central thing in universities. Universities should not be democracy. I've never felt that way. There should always be a meritocracy. And that's the basis of creating great institutions of learning and scholarship, where merit is being thrown out the window.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18 plus.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  No. Yeah, I wanted to just sort of take a step back because when we think about the university, I think a lot of people look at us as, you know, fighting these incredibly petty, you know, minimalistic, you know, kind of solipsistic, narcissistic, whatever istics you want to use, battles that aren't really that important, that don't really affect the common man or woman or.

• 12:09Brian Keating?

  Zijder's or whatever they want to call themselves, that's fine. But they're kind of confined because as the joke goes, you know, the battles are intense because the stakes are so low. But actually, I think things have bled over into the highest stakes of all, which is the public's perception of science and their funding of science, as we're now seeing in the US, is being radically slashed and cut to the bone. And that's inevitably predictable, or was, from these other effects, which is the superstructure, this exoskeleton, whatever you want to call it. The publishers, the, you know, primary school education, social media, not mainstream media, all these different things that cause this skeleton to kind of feed and eat itself from the outside.

• 12:49Brian Keating?

  So what about this, you know, kind of complex, this scientific industrial complex, educational complex? What was most predictable and what was most surprising? In other words, tenure, let's just start with tenure, which is something that, you know, people vaguely know about. Is it necessary for, you know, you or I or a scientist to have tenure in doing science versus someone who studies gender critical theory? Is it more or less necessary for a scientist to have it? And if so, why do we have them at the same university, fed from the same funds that get IDC infringed benefits, paid from science grants to non-science granting institutions? So talk, walk us through the role that tenure plays.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Okay, we can start with tenure. I mean, but your key point about the public's concern about science, obviously, if somebody spent much of his life trying to help the public understand science, you're right, that's a problem, and we'll get to it. But the current reaction, which is horrendous, and in fact, in my mind, more dangerous than what I, than the internal war that's coming from the Trump administration right now to the future of science, is understandable. It's a reaction to this. So they distrust scientists because of the things we talk about in the book, and then, and their reaction is extreme in the other direction. But let's talk about tenure. I happen to think tenure is important because it should be. It isn't anymore. But it should be a guarantee that people can say what they want and think what they want without being subject

• 14:13Speaker 02

  To punishment and say things that are unpopular. The only thing they'll have to do is defend their arguments on the basis of reason. That is ultimately important and the purpose of tenure is to basically ensure that. Now, as I say, it's a fake insurance assurance and many people with tenure have learned it's a fake assurance in the modern world. Universities can get rid of people and will get rid of people. And there's a number of stories in the book about this where they'll turn on a dime. They will, universities are not interested, especially university, the real culprits here are academic administrators and academic leaders. Who are not interested in free speech or scientific integrity or any of those things. They're basically salesmen, they have to raise money and they're more interested in perceptions.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  And they are so willing to think of what is the best thing for the university in terms of, not in terms of the quality of its research or the free speech or the integrity of the institution. But what's the best thing for it looking good? And they will immediately find reasons to switch what they're doing and how they behave about people they once valued. And throw them out the window. And you know what's unfortunate? When you were talking about these sort of epicenter or prototypical best science or best place. I thought you might be talking about Harvard, which is unfortunately the best example of both sides of this Harvard. And in particular, someone who was academically unqualified to be president, who was hired for identity reasons.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  But played a role in doing just this to several people who spoke out and said unpopular things. Eric Pryor, a world famous renowned young economist who basically got punished indirectly. Because he, his research showed that there, that claimed evidence of racism was not evidence of racism. Carol Hooven, one of the people who did write in the book, who was a biologist, spoke out about the scientifically correct fact that sex is binary. And eventually had to resign, she didn't get fired, but the point is the university which had valued her did not defend her when she was being attacked, in fact, quite the opposite. Reprimanded her. So they're much more willing to side with the mob than with their faculty.

• 16:20Brian Keating?

  I remember being told my father was a professor at Cornell, my late father in the sixties. In the late sixties, there was huge uprisings, Black Student Union, the Black Panthers took over the president's office. And they would just let them have free run, according to my mom. And that was one of the reasons that they agreed to move down to Stony Brook to start the math department with Jim Simons at Stony Brook. So this is not new. I mean, that's 50 plus years ago, right?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's not new, but in fact, if you look at the level and depth with which it's happening, with which departments are being sanctioned, individuals are being sanctioned. I mean, I think the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, I think it's called that now. It may have a different name, FIRE, is its acronym. It's recorded, if you take the present time compared to the McCarthy era, where, which is the time we all think of, the communist scare where faculty and everyone else was afraid to talk about. The number of faculty who've been removed or sanctioned severely for more or less free speech reasons is about a factor 20 times larger now. It is much deeper and much more prevalent, I think.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  And academics are humans, most of them, and one is always going to be subject to rivalries. But the system's supposed to try and protect you against that. It's always been difficult for people to speak out about politically incorrect things. But what shouldn't be happening is that the institution itself should not support those sanctions against free speech. And that's what's happening. And that's part of what's happening. That and the fact that the real problem, and as a scientist, and this is why I wrote about the ideological corruption of science that we talked about in the book. Science is based, look, you know, I'm a theorist and we've had this discussion before. As a theorist, I'm the first one to say that science is an empirical discipline. What matters in science is experiment. Theory's okay, and it's useful from time to time, and I try and be useful as a theorist.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  But empirical evidence is what determines what makes science work. And then empirical evidence is how you test your ideas and you base your ideas on empirical evidence. And what has happened instead is you see scientific organizations making blanket statements about racism or sexism being endemic in physics without providing one iota of evidence or medical organizations talking about gender-affirming care for minors as being the right tool to use without any empirical evidence and claiming empirical evidence wasn't there. So all that I've said actually most of my career is that sound public policy should be based on evidence. Universities create knowledge, they also should be disseminating it for the good of society.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  And one of the reasons that it should disseminate it is it could be the basis of rational, sound decision-making by the public.

• 19:01Brian Keating?

  Yeah. What role do you think that tuition plays in all of this? I mean, let's take a giant step back before I get to tuition, which is out of control.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is out of control. I mean, I grew up in Canada where, you know, I remember my tuition was $500 a year and they were raising it by $50 and we marched on Parliament Hill because we said no one would be able to afford $550. I remember that.

• 19:23Brian Keating?

  It's a far cry from that now, but certainly in the US where, you know, even an out-of-state student pays 70 grand the same as they pay in

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I know, I have a daughter and I've had to, you know, pay a hun- over, yeah, a lot each time.

• 19:35Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so I want to ask about that, but before we get there, let's walk through for the non-EDU, you know, customer that's watching the podcast right now. When I do research, I apply for a grant, I get money from the federal government or from private foundation and the university for the support that they are providing for me, laboratory, electricity, vacuum, hot air flowing through, which I generate enough of, chilled water, let me say that, which you have a bunch

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say not hot air, it's not a good example.

• 20:30Brian Keating?

  You have chilled water in abundance up there in the north. But so they have all this infrastructure, which is obviously necessary. In the medical school, it's much more so because you have human subjects, you have trials, you have animals and so forth, legal requirements and ethics boards. But just in the natural sciences, which is our purview and I, what we practice, although there are medical doctors in this book, obviously. And when we go through it, we get a grant and we might at a private institution pay upwards of 65 cents on every dollar in what's called fringe or IDC, which supports, you know, the health care for health insurance, rather, for me or for my students and tuition. And then there's IDC on top of the tuition, all these different things. But a lot of that because of the fungibility of money since the time of the Phoenicians

• 21:12Brian Keating?

  inventing the material that we use, that fungibility allows them then to support institutions that get $0 from any federal government entity or even private entity. It's not like there's massive, you know, market forces that are pushing to decolonize, you know, STEM and so forth, outside of STEM and doing it in the ethnic studies department here, which is rampant, as you might know.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Well, let me just interrupt you because I love interrupting you. The sad thing, you know, we're used to ethnic studies departments and gender studies departments making, you know, talk about decolonizing and oppression and victims. What is really the scary part is we're seeing it happen within the science departments. I mean, I began, I think I began the book talking about, I was at Yale before I became chairman of the department you were a student in, and we were up on Science Hill. And, and when I was there, Yale was a center of something called deconstructionism, which was emerged in the literature department. So it basically said, all knowledge is contextual. You have to look at the, you have to deconstruct every sentence and decide what issues of power and oppression in society affect that statement, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  And we used to just laugh. We'd say, never here. And then what you see is that the scary thing is that's permeated the scientific disciplines. I mean, even, you know, you have the Physical Review, which you and I know is a preeminent journal in our country. The Physical Review, you know, publishes this article on observing whiteness in the physics classroom or whiteboard are an example of white supremacy. And so you're seeing the same kind of postmodernist nonsense coming in science. But I mean, so I just want to say that. But if you're asking about indirect costs, which maybe you're asking about, you know, it's interesting to me because I remember before, maybe not, I was before, just around the time, no, it was after the election, I for some reason or other, because of people

• 23:02Speaker 02

  I know, actually had dinner with some people who were going to be significant in the Trump administration, which was a new experience for me. And one of them who's involved in ultimately deciding indirect costs for the biggest government science agency, the National Institutes of Health, basically said, we want to do away with that, you know, we want to do away with that. And I said to him, that's a huge mistake. I mean, one might want to moderate it adiabatically over time, but universities depend on this to be able to recruit the best faculty and provide them the services they need to be able to do the research they're doing. And it may be excessive, and I'm sure it's being abused, and I'm sure the University of California took some of that and used it to support the over 1,000 DEI administrators

• 23:44Speaker 02

  of average salary of $200,000 that's happening in the University of California system, of which you're a part. And so that's, that, those are the kind of things one has to look at, but you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think you say, okay, look, there are abuses of the system, let's investigate them, but let's try and make sure that the purpose of indirect costs, which is to provide an infrastructure, so the university can recruit the best possible researchers and provide them the necessary infrastructure so they can do the work they need to do, let's ensure that has happened. And just cutting it blankly from 65 to 15% in one day, well, that destroys research, whole research enterprises, because as you know, someone who is involved in large experiments,

• 24:28Speaker 02

  the first thing you have to do is you have to make a grant proposal for the next three or five years, and you Base it on what you need with that indirect cost level. And you know, it's going to go to support your postdocs and your, and some of the staff that you have in your laboratories. And then if that gets cut, and you, then, and the university says, well, you know, we can't, you know, we offered you, you know, this many TAs for your students, but we don't, we can't, we don't have it anymore. Sorry, you can't have these students. Your whole research program goes out. So you can't do it in a year. If there's a concern, you have to moderate it, but slowly. And I'm, while I recognize, and of course, as a scientist, while I used to curse indirect costs, because you're right, 50, in my case, it was like 50 cents on every dollar would go to the university.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  I also recognized it as necessary in general. And these kinds of things can't be taken with a sledgehammer. They have to be done with a scalpel. That's why I've, you know, just written a piece that's actually going to come out, I think today, called Trump's War on Science, which is saying that this reaction to what I'm talking about is in many ways worse than the problem. You can't attack intolerance with intolerance. You can't attack and say, some, you know, scientists are woke and therefore all scientists are woke. And therefore all scientists don't do good science. So we're gonna, we're gonna penalize the best scientists in the world to make a point.

• 25:44Brian Keating?

  But aren't we, isn't that because of our good old friend Van Ever Bush and his endless frontier, Lawrence? That we are throwing the baby out, the orange baby out with the orange bath water, thanks to the orange man. But isn't that sort of a mistake? I mean, sometimes Lawrence, the enemy of your enemy is your friend, right? I mean, there's good stuff that you point out in the book, because it's up to date. It's surprisingly, you know, it's, you have stuff in here from like a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how you snuck that past the publishers, but all my books, they require, it'd be frozen a year and a half.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  One of the things where I insisted on a few little additions, but yeah.

• 26:15Brian Keating?

  Well, you did a great job with it. So you're the redactor, the compiler.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  I'm the editor and I also wrote the introduction and I framed the context of, I chose the people and framed the issues. Yeah.

• 26:26Brian Keating?

  Well, this is a problem I have with this.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Because I believe in academic freedom. Once I chose people, I said, you write about whatever you want to write about.

• 26:33Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly. And we'll have some questions from some of your co-authors in the book or people that you edited. We'll have those later. Stay tuned. That's a breadcrumb for later. But Lawrence, come on, I'm going to give you a little bit of, of pushback here with love and respect.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:46Brian Keating?

  As I do with my friend, people like Eric Weinstein, or even people like that I've met like Peter Thiel.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  You're gonna, are you gonna quote scientists or not? Anyway, go on, sorry.

• 26:55Brian Keating?

  Well, he claims to be a Democrat like you. You know, he's Jewish from birth. He's a devout atheist. Maybe not a militant atheist. I think you coined that term.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, those, I get called a Milton atheist, and I don't know what that means. Does that mean you throw pamphlets at people? I don't really know what a Milton atheist is.

• 27:09Brian Keating?

  Maybe you throw stones back, or you have a shield when the stones hit you.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's a wonderful word, Milton atheist. I have no idea what it means.

• 27:15Brian Keating?

  I think that was a, I think that was a neologism, or a, what does Steven, our friend Steven Pinker, call these things? A portmanteau, right? A portmanteau. He loves that word, right? He loves dumping. Let's get to the facts here. Okay, so Trump, since he came into office, is radically cut back on a variety of different things, including, you know, funding to institutions that openly tolerated, if not had some affiliation with antisemitism, with exclusions.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Harvard, let's take it, let's take theirs, a great example, yeah.

• 27:43Brian Keating?

  Let's go for it, yeah. So, isn't, why do you have, you know, is there at some level, again, the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Fighting back against this idea and putting people in that were persecuted, like Jay Bhattacharya is a personal friend, director of the NIH. He was persecuted by the Academy, by Stanford, by Fauci, by Collins. Isn't he doing some good? Can you give Trump a little bit of credit?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Well, Trump first came in, I wrote a piece, and I think it was the Wall Street Journal, or maybe it was somewhere else, within a week, when he put an executive order about diversity, equity, and inclusion regulations, which were polluting the universities, and I wrote a piece saying how good it is. Of course, that was important. But Trump is like, to me, is like a stop, a broken clock. So every now and then it's right, but it's, you know, best twice a day. And in his case, not that often. Look, this is my point. Harvard has not only allowed rampant antisemitism while, under the guise of free speech, well, at the same time, you know, fighting free speech. And the National Science Foundation, I did, I wrote a piece showing the National Science Foundation, this was before Trump was elected. We analyzed using ChatGPT all National Science Foundation grants from 2023,

• 28:49Speaker 02

  and looked at the words like diversity, equity, inclusion, et cetera, et cetera, and looked at them to see what fraction of the money coming from the NSF, its budget of $8 million or so, or $7 million at a time. And we got about $800 million was going towards these, these things that weren't science. So the solution to this is to get the university to really respect free speech, to really protect the rights of the students and their safety. And if you think the National Science Foundation is wasting 15% of the money, you cut them 15%. You don't, what you don't do is say, "The whole university is bad, because some administrators have a ridiculous notion of what free speech is, and the university isn't acting correctly among the administration.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  So we're going to penalize 1,000 researchers at Harvard, and the best physicists I know, some of them, who've been funded for 35 years nonstop, just got their National Science Foundation grant cut." And you don't think with the National Science Foundation, you don't cut the National Science Foundation by 60% because they're wasting 15%.

• 29:51Brian Keating?

  Many of you are watching this on a television. And I know that if you love the cosmos as much as I do, you'll want to subscribe now. It's a little more tricky on TV, but it's well worth your time. Click down below, and don't forget to leave a thumbs up. More minds, more mysteries, more multiverse awaits you. But Lawrence, you have an IQ of north of 170, according to Grok. When you were trying to communicate this to, you know, someone with a 130 or below IQ, let's say you're talking to David Sacks, who's the president's special advisor on science, technology, and crypto, et cetera, et cetera, who's almost got an open disdain for science.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:27Brian Keating?

  Let's say you're talking to him, Lawrence. How do you do it? How do you instantiate? This is a wonderful idea. Go through with the scalpel, blah, blah, blah. But how do you teach them that, yeah, studying string theory, which I think that you've written quite a good deal about before I was born, as you used to say? How do you convince them that, you know, people studying, you know, wormholes in AdS/CFT is not valuable, perhaps, because we don't know that we live in 11-dimensional anti-deситер space? But studying, you know, the CMB polarization is a good thing to study. I mean, how do you actually instantiate that in reality?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  I don't, I wouldn't try and convince them of that. What I'd try, I think the argument, and it was one I was involved in years ago when you were a baby. Probably, again, I think, under the Bush administration, there was National Academy of Sciences, had a publication called Rising Above the Gathering Storm, I think. And ahead of that was the head of General Dynamics or something like that. And I spent time with him. And, you know, and the idea was to show, and they documented, that a half of the, well, part of the idea, that probably half of the gross national product of the United States today, or at that time, came from curiosity-driven research supported

• 31:34Speaker 02

  A generation or two earlier. What I would say is that if you're interested in an economy that functions and how the United States can compete in a world of technology in the 21st century, what you need to do is recruit the best and brightest and have that's determined by obviously by experts in the field or to the extent they can. And give them the resources they need to look at the interesting problems and some of them will be doing string theory in 11 dimensions and that's okay. Cause who knows, you know, but some will be inventing, you know, some of them will be Stanford graduate students and creating Google. Or maybe some of them will be engineering students who started in Canada, but then come to Pan and, you know, create Tesla and SpaceX.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And I don't know if they were, if they entered illegally or not, but anyway, so that's what you've got to do. You've got to realize that you can't, the government should not be saying, we wholesale don't like. I don't like, I think most of gender studies research and you can call it research. If you look at the quality of the work is very bad. Okay. But I don't think the government can come in and say, you cannot study this. Or you cannot discuss diversity equity inclusion, because I'd like to discuss and shown how those buzzwords mean exactly the opposite of what they actually mean.

• 32:53Brian Keating?

  But again, Lawrence, since money is-

• 32:55Speaker 02

  And changing anything.

• 32:56Brian Keating?

  Since cash is fungible, necessarily you're going to get a science. I look at it differently. You spent time at MIT, right? You were there for your PhD, correct? And you advise students there, including a black, I think one of your first PhD students was African American, right?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  My supervisor was African American.

• 33:11Brian Keating?

  Oh, you're super, that's right. Even more, you know, demonstrative of your long-term commitment. But Lawrence, it's fungible. So why not adopt a super MIT? Just have the departments that can survive on their own in a capitalist country. America I'm talking about, not Canada. If we can make it work and through our grants, through our brilliance, I don't think we need tenure and I don't think we need IDC. In other words, to support these other departments, which is necessary and sufficient because of the fungibility. If I, you know, if you're according, you know, to, to my grants, I have to supply, I just not chance, you know, it's not, there's no chance of me of not submitting it, right?

• 33:45Speaker 02

  That's not completely logical. The problem is-

• 33:48Brian Keating?

  Only partially.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  The problem, well, the problem is that universities are not free enterprise in that sense. In free enterprise, what works, sorry, I was gonna say what's the best succeeds, but it's not always the way. It's what works, you know, gets rewarded and, you know, eight tracks versus, you know, there were all sorts of arguments. So what was better, but something wins out. But the risk of that, I think, is that you start valuing departments by the money they bring in. And I don't think that, and obviously that's not right. I think for universities to value scholarship because English literature and history are a vital part of understanding ourselves as human beings. And what makes people educated.

• 34:24Brian Keating?

  But why not read Lawrence, why not read an atom, the story of atom? Or how about this, read a universe from nothing. It's incredibly, you're a gifted writer, read Quantum Man, read losing the Nobel Prize, read all these other books. Why do we have to have separate departments? Again, why not reimagine the university? We're still using the same model that that Galileo taught in 400 years ago, that the University of Bologna adopted in the year 1080. Why is that still relevant in some guy or gal scraping on a piece of rock with another piece of rock? Why not in the age of AI completely reinvent everything and have the literature outsourced as important? I'm not saying that I love writing my kids, I teach, you know, the importance of reading every single day and not just nonfiction as I'm addicted to. But Lawrence, you can learn a lot, you know, as Galileo didn't take many, you know, literature classes.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Of course you can. I mean, Galileo would have learned, look, I've always, I've learned as a professor that the illusion of teaching is often illusion. That the very best students don't need me.

• 35:17Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  They're gonna do fine without me. Okay, and I can guide them, I can help them make it easier for the process, but they're gonna do it without me. But that's, you're not just having those students. I think, I mean, Galileo would have done fine, no matter without, you know, and did do fine, but he was Galileo. I think that what you really need to realize is that you have to ask yourself, is it important for people to understand? Not just how to write, but how to read critically. And also what the canon of literature and history is so they can understand the culture in which they grew up. These are all, I think, important parts of a liberal education. I think they add wisdom. I did degrees in mathematics and physics, but before

• 36:00Speaker 02

  that I would do history. And I think it was vitally important for my ability now as a writer, among other things, and a communicator. I have no problems with there being just technical schools and people choosing to go to them. And to some extent, MIT or Caltech are that, but they're not completely that. And but it's really important, I think, to have liberal arts colleges as well. I think for most because remember, most students are not going to become academics. No, no, that's right. What their experience in university should be how to think. And there should be many examples of that. And physics, of course, is the best example of learning how to think. But learning how to think critically as a philosopher even or as a or think critically in trying to understand literature, if that if, you know, for certain people. And in

• 36:42Speaker 02

  particular, and this is really relevant when it comes to this issue of disparities, demographic disparities in STEM. Some people prefer certain things to other things. And so some people are not going to learn how to think critically about even physics if they hate it, or they hate math, or they find they're not they don't feel comfortable with math. But they love biology, or they love Renaissance literature. And if you can take what people what they love and use that as a source to help them expand as to be lifelong learners, then that's what's important. And we have to realize that people have different preferences. And as and, you know, one of the things that's one of the ridiculous things that's argued here by governments and by universities is that demographic disparities in STEM, there

• 37:24Speaker 02

  being more males or in certain fields than others are due to racism or sexism, is ridiculous when there's tons of evidence that people choose to do different things. The countries that are most egalitarian, like the Nordic countries, have the biggest disparities in say, in terms of sort of the number of women in STEM, for example, where that where that's those are countries where there are the fewest obstacles to women. So there clearly are biological and other and cultural.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  determiners of why people choose to do what they do and to argue that those things don't exist and they can't exist, heaven forbid, women aren't, can't be different than men, that kind of nonsense. If you take that as one of your sacred dogmas, then anything heretical, you know, you can't, you won't listen to it and you can't, people can't say it. One of the articles in our book talks about the fact that it advises people, this was a biology study, advise people to not speak it or not to do, not to research on gender and race, for example, because it's too dangerous to do that. Well, you know, if you say that ideas are too dangerous, then we're back at Galileo where it's too dangerous to say the earth orbits the sun.

• 38:33Brian Keating?

  Let's go into

• 38:35Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 39:00Brian Keating?

  Uh, work of great literature. Let's judge your book by its cover. We've added a new feature on the podcast since last time we've added a jingle.

• 39:20Brian Keating?

  Okay, Lawrence, take us through the cover art and the title and subtitle of The War on Science. Haven't I seen that book before?

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, well, yeah, in fact, it's kind of funny because I often forget things I write. When we came up with the War on Science title, I forgot that I'd actually written the introduction for a book eight or nine years ago, written by a friend of mine, written called The War on Science. It was at that time, a different war, maybe a decade ago. It was more like the Republican War on Science. And we thought of changing it and we talked about a lot of different ideas, but it is a war. And, you know, and it's not just a war on science, to be clear. There are people in here, there's a great article by Joshua Katz and Sauve Gold, his partner, about, well, about the classics at Princeton, where Princeton, for example, has decided that it's in order to be more

• 40:08Speaker 02

  equitable and so that everyone can do classics. You don't have to learn either Latin or Greek to get a degree in classics. Which of course is, from an intellectual perspective, ridiculous. It's also patronizing and racist because the argument is that some people and some groups are not going to be able to learn Latin or Greek, and therefore we shouldn't force them to do that. The reason I included that is because, you know, the classics are really the basis of many ways of science. And so, and then there's a long subtitle, "39 Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process." And that tells what's really happening. But anyway, I thought of calling it "The War on Science and Scholarship," "The War on Reason." Yeah, well, there were a variety

• 40:51Speaker 02

  of reasons. And as you probably know, from having written books yourself, including the nature of the cover, the nature of the title isn't always entirely up to you either.

• 40:58Brian Keating?

  Let's go back to a very dark period, the summer of 2020. And we witnessed great upheaval. We had COVID running rampant and at least upheal, you know, upheaving, if that's a word, the society here in the States, I'm sure there too. But then there was a more pernicious, insidious, and vidious sort of indoctrination campaign that made us all out to be racist, you know, homophobic, STEM-hating individuals. And that then permeated to other areas. It bled through the blood-brain barrier to get to publishers, to get through books, to get through cancellation and the rampant cancellation culture. But what sorts of, you know, publications

• 41:39Brian Keating?

  that did make it through the very, you know, tendacious goalposts of that time? What most kind of thought that, what most caused you to think that SoCal was riding under a pseudonym again? What most egregiously exhibited this kind of insanity that SoCal first brought to our attention in the 1990s?

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I actually use that analogy. It's not so much of the COVID era with the distortion. Of science, and again, I'm going to take on a slight detour because I remember when COVID first came out, I thought this is going to be a great example, a learning experience for people to learn how science works. Because it, you know, one of the big, I wrote a book, as you know, the physics of Star Trek, and I said, one of the biggest mistakes, or one of the biggest misconceptions that Star Trek gives, is that every major problem can be solved in an hour by Scotty or someone else, that every technological, and when in fact, it takes a long time. And COVID is this unknown thing, and I was going to say, and science works by tentative steps, it turned to be wrong, and then you learn the right thing, and you move around,

• 42:45Speaker 02

  and the experiments tell you this, and I thought, what a great way for science, for people to see how we learn about vaccines, and how we learn about what the disease is. And it was such a missed opportunity, where instead of people saying, I think this may be the case, but we have to test it, to people saying, I know this is the case, you know, I thought it'd be a great chance for people to see how science is done by baby steps, and often, ideas are wrong, and we learn from them, and we move beyond them, and instead, we heard, because in politics, and on TV, people are afraid to say, you know, I might be wrong, and this must be the case, and you see these dogmatic statements that were made, follow the science when we didn't quite know what the science was. I think that was a lost opportunity, and I'm not, I'm, by the way, I'm not part of

• 43:29Speaker 02

  the camp that thinks that it was a vast conspiracy. I do think vaccines were good, I'm glad the COVID vaccines were created, and I do think they saved millions of lives. And it's a great example, in retrospect, in history, of the fastest development of vaccines, and just looking at the way that, the way the pandemic proceeded, when those vaccines were created, it's clear evidence that vaccines work, so I'm not part of that. I was against, however, having heterodox people be silenced, of course, should you close down schools, should you not, those are interesting issues, but to argue that you can't have that discussion is what I'm talking about, where heresy becomes heresy. But when Sokol, with more, for me, the examples that I talked about them, I think in the introduction of the book, the Sokol, and for the people who don't know what happened,

• 44:14Speaker 02

  in 1996, I think, Alan Sokol, who's a mathematical physicist.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Wrote a spoof paper for the journal, I think it was called Social Choice, in which he used the postmodernist language of oppression and heteronormativity and patriarchy, and applied it to ideas from string theory, and wrote this ridiculous article with a ridiculous title, which I could look up if I had to. And the point-

• 44:40Brian Keating?

  It's like on the hermeneutics of string theory.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, the hermeneutics of this. I didn't even know what hermeneutics was till he wrote that piece. And then he submitted, it was a clear gobbledygook, and he submitted Social Choice, it was published, and then he pointed out it was just complete nonsense. It was a big deal and embarrassed a lot of people and allowed the scientists to make fun of the social scientists, humanities people, that's what I'm talking about, the kind of thing when I, 1996, you know, we could make fun of that. But then, almost exactly the same kind of articles started appearing in physics journals. I talk about the Journal of Chemical Education, published an article, "A Special Topics Class in Chemistry and Feminism in Science is a Tool to Disrupt the Disconscious Racism in STEM." This Physical Review article, you know, called "Observing Whiteness in Physics." A math meeting, the biggest math meeting in the world.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  One of the papers was on undergraduate mathematics education as a white cis hetero patriarchal space, and opportunities for structural disruption to advance queer of color justice. I mean, these things are straight out of Sokol, and actually, something that's even closer to Sokol, and which is even more discouraging, is an article published by a physicist called "Making Black Women Scientists Under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics." Where, you know, "Black women must, according to Einstein's principle of variance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression." Well, that's silly enough on its own, but the National Academy of Sciences ended up awarding the person who wrote that their communication prize.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  So we're seeing the same kind of nonsense creeping in to the scientific literature, and most of us said that would never happen. We have to be willing to call out the emperor's new clothes. We have to be willing to say, "This is nonsense." And it doesn't matter who wrote it. It doesn't matter what their ethnic, gender, or racial background is. It's nonsense.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 46:52Brian Keating?

  All right, well, you know what I'm gonna do now? I'm gonna be a steel man for the other side of the case. Okay, so Lawrence, we know that our ancestors, not us, but our great grand advisors, enjoyed a surplus of opportunities that we don't enjoy. Certainly, they would have been canceled. Your former teacher, Richard Feynman, you know, for example, was known for his- Oh, he would, yeah, he would have been canceled, yep. He would have been canceled. We don't have to get into it. But the point is, are we not paying the sins for our academic grandfathers, your white grandfathers, you know, most likely? And how else can we, you know, how else can we sort of right the ship and rectify it for people to then thrive in an environment, which was, the seeds of which may have been poisonous, rottenous, and so far, here at UCSD, for example?

• 47:37Brian Keating?

  We took in Maria Mayer, who won the Nobel Prize. We had Vera Rubin here. The reason that we got them, Lawrence, was because places like Argonne and Johns Hopkins and U Chicago rejected women, and many of them rejected Jews. You know, Feynman was rejected- Yeah, almost didn't get into Princeton.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Well, look, the point is to not deny that these things existed. But, you know, you weren't even born at the time when Mayer wasn't allowed as a woman, or Emmy Noether wasn't allowed in the math department in Göttingen, you know, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th, early, late 19th and early 20th century. And as a Jew, you weren't subject to the same problems that Richard Feynman had in 1942, when he almost didn't get into Princeton Graduate School because he was Jewish. These things exist, but to argue that because of the inequities of the past, we have to impose inequities in the present? That somehow I either have to pay, well, I mean, you know, the ridiculous thing is that I, as a quote "white," although since I'm now Jewish, I'm not viewed as white by everybody,

• 48:36Speaker 02

  but white male, but as a white person, have to somehow pay for the sins of the disgusting, horrible slave trade, when in fact, at the time, my ancestors were in pogroms in Russia. I mean, you know, nothing to do with that. And the point is, we have to realize those things were happening. We have to realize there are inequities in our society, and some of them are residual, and we have to work to try and resolve those in real ways, not in fake virtue signaling ways, but to argue that somehow we have to, the only, that two wrongs make a right, which is essentially what's happening, is that somehow you have to make up for the supposed privilege. You're like, "Look, I had some privileges as a person, but I, you know, there are a lot of people who had, you know, other privileges. You know,

• 49:19Speaker 02

  my neither, my parents went to college, and I know what I had to go through to get to where I was." But ridiculousness of somehow saying that we have to counteract, we have to make up for that, and that fact that Richard Feynman, you know, may have been a libertine in some way or another. Times were different, but that's the whole point. Let's, if we don't want, if we want to have a more equitable and more open society that, that takes into account people's needs and is generous and kind, and let's work towards that. But the past is the past. We should not ignore it, which is part of the reason we shouldn't take down, in Canada, I think there was just a, I just saw there were 7,000 articles removed from the archives

• 50:02Speaker 02

  and historical archives because they talked about, the RCMP, they talked about them at the time in terms which were far too glowing for what they were actually doing. But this is history. This is archives. You don't change the present by ignoring the past. In fact, you do the opposite. You try and understand the past, and you try and understand the present. And let me give you the example. We, in response to the fact that Vera Rubin and others were, you know, and Vera was a friend of mine, was, were, you know, experienced hardships because they were women. There were things instituted, and as I say, 1993 is, you know, 30 years ago. Over 30 years ago, I had to, even over 30 years ago, I had to write a letter if we didn't hire a woman.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  So it's not as if things, that's persisted. Those issues were solved a long time ago. There is no systemic sexism in universities. There is no systemic racism in universities. Universities are, or have been, in many cases, the most, used to be, the most tolerant environments and the most enlightened environments for that reason. And to pretend that they're not, and to point out every single problem and suggest that its basis must be in racism or sexism without presenting evidence, it's not what you should be doing. As my other late friend Christopher Hitchens would say, "Arguments that are made on the absence of evidence can be dismissed with the absence of evidence."

• 51:23Brian Keating?

  Now, the last thing before we move on to more lighthearted topics, like actual science that you've been working on, you have a paper out that I want to discuss. Well, you were born in the US, so if you were, when you become president of the United States-

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was born in the US, so I can become president, yeah.

• 51:37Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly. And you had the power to issue an executive order to NSF, NIH, DOE, NASA. What would it mandate? What would be the Kraus mandate and why?

• 51:47Speaker 02

  I'd be very careful about executive orders, of course, unlike some people. But I would try and mandate guarantees for the, you know, I'll give you an example of an executive order that was, was actually, in the first Trump administration, was a great executive order, at least on, in verbiage, which was, it was in December 2020, it was Executive Order 13950, called Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, okay? It basically, it quoted Martin Luther King, stating that "a government-supported scientific institutions, people should not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character." What could be more motherhood and apple pie than that? Well, the American Physical Society came out against it

• 52:29Speaker 02

  and said that that order was in direct opposition to the core values of the American Physical Society. The order further argued that "materials from places like Argonne National Laboratory that equate colorblindness and meritocracy with actions of bias..."

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Or from Sandia, that said an emphasis on rationality over emotionality is characteristic of white males, were inappropriate materials. So now, where I would not have the order, is I would not, I don't think an executive order should say what people can or cannot say. But I think what we can say, what the argument should be, is that things that violate basic human rights, that violate equality of the race and gender and sex, that tend to do that, should be examined and sanctioned at universities. But what happened was the opposite in 2020. People, scientific societies came out against that because it was Donald Trump, among other things. One of the things I would say is that I would never answer your question immediately, because those things, executive orders are very special.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  But one of the things I really do believe is that government should not mandate what people can say. And all they can do is encourage the rights of people to say what they want, what they believe in. You know, I had a debate, actually, well, a mini debate, I was just at a meeting about this whole subject in England. And Christopher Rufo, who in some ways was on the right side of some of this, in my opinion, when he was arguing against quotas and things at universities and what they were doing to get in the way of merit, argued that public institutions are answerable to legislatures, and therefore have to teach the values of the legislatures. And I think that's completely wrong. I think one of the most, one of the best quotes, the reason I put it at the very beginning of the book,

• 54:12Speaker 02

  is from Larry Summers, who said universities need to abandon the concept that they have a central role in moral education. And Heather McDonald said, "A university has no capacity to eliminate hate, nor should that be its mission." Universities should teach people how to think, and hopefully, by teaching people how to think and question critically, they will enhance the morals of the society in which, in which those people later go out and become leaders or active citizens. So, part of the notion here is that universities have to be activists on a political front, have to be social justice activists, and the minute you impose Political goals on intellectual disciplines, you pervert the institution, the disciplines themselves. Because whose political goals are you supporting?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  I mean, you might say, well, I'm all in favor of these political goals because that's my politics. But what if another, what if Donald Trump comes in and he's got different political goals? Are you free to say that you can't do climate change research because Donald Trump doesn't, or whoever, doesn't think climate change is real? Of course not.

• 55:13Brian Keating?

  So Lawrence, now we're going to take questions from the audience. Lawrence, why did it take you so long to be active in this? What were you doing while people were being accused of this type of BS? Didn't you once take back a remark about something like affirmative action is bad because people will always have an asterisk by their names? Why did you apologize for that? From social pressure? Or did you really believe it?

• 55:34Speaker 02

  I never took back anything that I know of. I do think it's, that's a big problem. I stand by that. I think part of the problem is, and I know a lot, I'm a wonderful, highly talented female scientist. If they're, as the case in the country I now live, Canada, where you're legally allowed to hire only women, or only people minorities for job, for computer science, or physics, or jobs, you can advertise a job and say that this is only open to people who self-identify as women. I mean, it's, there are advertisements that say that. The problem is when those, whoever gets that job is always going to have an asterisk next to their name. Moreover, I have spoken out about free speech and scientific integrity and abuse of science for my entire career.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  And I was arguing against the Bush administration's anti-science, okay? But I also argued against the Biden administration's anti-science. And I, and in fact, I was, as you probably know, on the Obama advisory team, science advisory team during his election. I was honored to be part of it. Because what I was, impressed me about Obama at the time was that he had 40 advisory teams, and they were all made up of exceptionally good people. So I thought, one of the characteristics that seemed to me have a good leader is to know that you don't know everything and to get the right advisors. When he won, I'm not saying I would have been asked, but I considered whether it would be worthwhile going to that administration. And there's also times when I've considered running for political office at various times in my life, back when I might have been a

• 57:00Speaker 02

  viable candidate. But I realized that the problem with that, and I also considered being coming university president, I was asked to be consider that. And I realized that I could no longer say what I believed, what I feel. I would have to moderate. And I thought I, as someone who's achieved some level of public celebrity, or whatever the word you want to use is, I could do more by speaking out and being free to speak my mind as the occasion arose than to work within the academic system or the government system, where I would not, for various reasons, because I'm representing more than just myself, I'd have to muzzle myself. So I'm proud that I've always spoken out and I've gotten in trouble. Some troubles that I've gotten into have been because I've spoken out in a variety

• 57:45Speaker 02

  of things. Yeah. And that asterisk statement may, may have been one of them, but I've never taken it back, as far as I know.

• 57:50Brian Keating?

  Lawrence Krauss, joining us from a prince of an island, somewhere up north. I want to thank you for your time for this book that took a tremendous amount of courage to write, to redact, compile, to have your fellow authors contribute to. I know that's a thankless job. And I know it was ultimately...

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Herding cats.

• 58:06Brian Keating?

  What's that?

• 58:06Speaker 02

  It's like herding cats. Yeah.

• 58:08Brian Keating?

  That's an insult to cats. We just got a cat around here at the Keating House. Lawrence, thank you so much for being on and I wish you great success with the book and with your future essays, papers, writings, archives, and scrivenings. And don't forget to subscribe to Lawrence on Substack, which I am a paying member, Lawrence, you know that, for a long time. And others should, as well as donate to the Origins Project, as well as their competing podcasts. You know, I don't give out these endorsements cheap, Lawrence, but for other people's podcasts, OPP, as the kids say. Thank you so much. And I wish you a great summer up there, as brief as it will be.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  And it's brief. The spring is briefer. Spring is about three days long. But thank you very much. And, and it's always been a pleasure to be on your podcast. And I'm happy, I'm also happy we've exchanged podcasts at times. So as you know, you know.

• 58:51Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  So that's great. You're right. It's a book I wish we didn't have to write, but I think it's, I'm speaking out about it because I think it's really important. The only way we're going to cure this is if academics speak out, not just these academics. And if the public understands what's happening, then we might have a hope.

• 59:07Brian Keating?

  Save the world.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  That's why I wrote it.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, theHouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  When you spend enough time around great companies, you notice that the best ones treat trust as a growth strategy, not a box to check. Vanta helps companies build and prove trust from day one. Its Agentic Trust Platform connects compliance, risk, and trust at enterprise scale. Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. Learn why over 16,000 of the fastest-growing companies use Vanta at vanta.com.