Is There A WAR On Science? Lawrence Krauss

There is no systemic racism in university. 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 is 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 where 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 Stazzy 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. Sounds like Sopranos, not a university." Someone who was academically unqualified to be president who was hired for identity reasons. We analyzed using chat GBT the all National Science Foundation grants from 2023 and looked at the words like diversity, equity, inclusion, etc., etc., and looked at them and we got about $800 million was going towards these things that weren't science. Lawrence Krauss, what is the single most dangerous idea that's threatening science today? 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 cuz 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. 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? 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 that 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. I you know there are two things I often wish I didn't have to deal with. One was this and the other is science versus religion. Well, you're in luck. We'll talk about all those. new with you. We're going to get both. So, we're going to 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 well, you know, if I could get someone who was in Antarctica to write, I would. Well, you lay out this five-fame 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 tow the sort of woke line, so to speak. 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 department I could not hire just anyone or the not just me the search committee could not hire anyone that if we did not hire or put on the short list 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 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. And then later actually I had another experience at case which I don't talk about in the book and well actually I didn't talk 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 uh 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 a minority hireer because he was from the Bahamas. So he wasn't the right kind of black. 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 8 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 cuz 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 science adviser 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. 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 I 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 to who thanked me for writing it, agreed with me. But every single one wrote under a personal email and 80% 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 Stazzy 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 provoke people and have discussions and be controversial. I 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. in the Canada in Wilford Laurier University and he was asking about the the process of hiring a faculty member and the requirements of he called it EDI we call it DEI or some people call DIE diversity equity and inclusion and he quoted one of his colleagues said you should stop talking about EDI my colleague suggested me over lunch you've got a family he said think about your kids right they're health that sounds like the mafia 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, you know, 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 and I learned I was a woke snowflake. I never heard of those terms before and it's kind of amusing to 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 and 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 where people are fired for speaking out and where merit which should be the central part of universities the central thing in universities universities should not be democracy I've never felt that way they 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. 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 solopistic, narcissistic, whatever you want to use, battles that aren't really that important, that don't really affect the common man or woman or the Z 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 superructure the 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. 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 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 infringeed benefits paid from science grants to non-science granting institutions. So talk walk us through the role that tenure plays. Okay, we can start with tenure. I mean, but your key point about the public's concern about science obviously as someone who 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 even than the internal war that's coming from the Trump administration right now to the future 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 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 insure assurance. 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 especially unity. 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 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 epicenter or prototypical best science or best place. I thought you might be talking about Harvard whi which is unfortunately the best example of both sides. Harvard and in particular someone who was academically unqualified to be president who was hired for identity reasons but played a role in doing just this to several people who spoke out and said unpopular things. Eric Prio, a world famous renowned young economist who basically got punished indirectly because he his research showed that there that ev 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. I remember being told, my father was a professor at Cornell, my late father in the 60s. In the late '60s, there was huge uprisings. Black student union, 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? So well 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 and 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 to to the McCarthy era where which is the time we all think of the commia 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 of 20 times larger now it is much deeper and much more prevalent I think 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 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 is okay and it's useful from time to time and I try and be useful as a theorist 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 isn'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 there also should be disseminating it for the good of society. And one of the reasons that it should disseminated is it could be the basis of rational sound decision-m by the public. 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. 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. It's a far cry from that now. But certainly in the US where you know even an out ofstate student pays 70 grand the same as they pay and stepdaughter and I've had to you know pay over Yeah. a lot each time believe. Yeah. So I want to ask about that but before we get there let's walk through for the nonedu you know customer that's watching the podcast right now when I do research and 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 I was going to say not hot air it's not a good idea exactly 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, the legal requirements and ethics boards. So just in the natural sciences which is our perview you 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 and 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 fungeability of money since the time of the phoenetians inventing the material that we use that funggeability allows them then to support institutions that get zero dollars from any federal government entity or even private entity. It's not like there's massive, you know, market forces that are pushing to decolonialize, 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. What's 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, talking 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 be 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 in which was in emerged in the literature department. So basically said all knowledge is contextual. You have to look at the you have to deconstruct every sense and decide what issues of power and oppression and society affect that statement blah blah blah blah. 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 in in our country. The physical review you know publishes these this article on observing whiteness in the physics classroom where whiteboards are 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 no, I was before or just around the time, no, it was after the election, I for some reason or other because of people 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 it and I said to him that's a huge mistake I mean one might want to moderate it adatically 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 a,000 DEI administrators of average salary of $200,000 that's happening in the University of Cal 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 experiment experiments. The first thing you have to do is you have to make a grant proposal for the next 3 or 5 years and you base it on what the on what on on what you need with that indirect cost level and you know it's going to go to support your postocs 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 on so you can't do it in a here 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 I also recognized it as necessary in general and these kind 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 worsen 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 going to we're going to penalize the best scientists in the world to make a point. But aren't we isn't that because of our good old friend Vanver 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 cuz it's up to date. It's surprisingly, you know, it's you have stuff in here from like a couple weeks ago. I don't know how you snuck that past the publishers, but all my books that require it be frozen a year and a half where I insisted on a few little additions, but yeah. Well, you did a great job with it. So, you're the redactor, the compiler. 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. I have with the other thing because I believe in academic freedom once I chose people I said you write about whatever you want to write about. 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 push back here with love. You okay? as I do with my friend people like Eric Weinstein or even people like that I've met like Peter Teal. You are you going to quote scientists or not? Anyway, go on. Sorry. He claims to be a Democrat like you you know he's Jewish from birth. He's a devout atheist, not maybe not a militant atheist. I think you coined that term. Yeah. Well, though I get called a militant atheist and I don't know what that means. Does that mean you throw pamphlets at people? I don't really know what a military I don't know. Maybe you throw stones back or you have a shield when the stones hit you? I don't know. It's a wonderful word. Milton atheist. I have no idea what it means. I think that was a I think that was a neolism or a what does Stephen our friend Steven Pinker call these things? A portmanto, right? A portmanto. He loves that word, right? He loves dumping. Anyway, let's get to the facts here. Okay, so Trump since he came into office has radically cut back on a variety of different things including, you know, funding to institutions that openly tolerated if not had some affiliation with anti-semitism with extreme. Let's take it. Let's take theirs a great example. Yeah, 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 Bodachario who's a personal friend director of the NIH he was persecuted by the by Stanford by Fouchy by Collins isn't he doing some good can you give Trump a little bit of Trump first came in I wrote a piece 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 a to me is like a stop a broken clock so every now and then it's right but it's you know at best twice a day and in his case not that often. Look this is my point. Harvard has not only allowed rampant anti-semitism while under the guise of free speech while 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 we analyzed using chat GPT the all National Science Foundation grants from 2023 and looked at the words like diversity equity inclusion etc etc and looked at them to see what fraction of the money coming from the NSF it budget of $8 million or so or $7 million at time and we got about $800 million was going towards these the 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 the 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 administration. So we're going to penalize a thousand researchers at Harvard or and the best physicists I know some of them for who's been funded for 35 years non-stop just got their National Science Foundation grant cut. And you don't take to the National Science Foundation, you don't cut the National Science Foundation by 60% because you because they're wasting 15%. 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 Grock. 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 Saxs, who's the president's special adviser on science, technology, and crypto, etc., etc., who's almost got an open disdain for science. Let's say you're talking to him, Lawrence. How do you do it? How do you instantiate this? A wonderful idea. Go through with a 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 11dimensional antid space but studying you know the CMBB polarization is a good thing to stud I mean how do you actually instantiate that in reality I don't I wouldn't try and convince him of that what I 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 a national academy of sciences had a publication called Rising Above the Gathering Storm, I think. And ahead of that was a 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 curiositydriven research supported 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 cuz 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 on Canada but then come to pen and you know create Tesla and SpaceX 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 mo most of gender studies research and to the extent 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 it discussed and shown how those buzzwords mean exactly the opposite of what they actually mean is but again since changing anything since cash is fungeible 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 advised students there including a black I think one of your first PhD students was African-American right my supervisor was African-American oh you're super that's right even more you know demonstrative of your long-term commitment but Lawrence it's fungeible 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 fungeability if I I you know according you know to to my grants I have to supply there's not chance you know it's not there's no chance of me not submitting it right that's not completely illogical the problem is only partially the problem well the problem is that Universities are not free enterprise in that sense. In free enterprise, what works I was going to 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 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 a university to value scholarship because English literature and history are a vital part of understanding ourselves as human beings and what makes people educated. But why not read Lawrence? Why not read an Adam the story of Adam 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 Bolognia adopted in the year 1080. Why is that still relevant and 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 is 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 non-fiction as I'm addicted to. But Lawrence, you can learn a lot, you know, as Galileo didn't take many, you know, literature classes. I mean, Galileo would have learned. Look, I've I've learned as a professor that the illusion of teaching is often illusion that the very best students don't need me. They're going to do fine without me. Okay? I can guide them. I can help them make it easier for the process, but they're going to 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 the 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 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 or 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 mo 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 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 going to learn how to think critically better than physics because 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 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's those are countries where there are the fewest obstacles to women. So there clearly are biological and other and cultural 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 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, advised people to not speak or not to do not do 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 the it's too dangerous to say the earth orbits the sun. Let's go into a 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. Hey book lovers, we're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it, but it into the impossible. There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books. 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? 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 battle, 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 in 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 in science to be clear there are people in here there's a great article by Joshua Katz and Sve gold his partner about well about the class classics at Princeton where Princeton for example has decided that it's in order to be more 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 a 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 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. 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 upheel, 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 pernitious, insidious, invidious 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 bloodb 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 that did make it through the very, you know, tendacious goldposts of that time? What most kind of thought that what most caused you to think that Soal was writing under a pseudonym again? What most egregiously exhibited this kind of insanity that Soal first brought to our attention in the 1990s when when I was in I mean I actually use that analogy. It's not so much of the co era with the du this the distortion of science and again I'm going to take you on a slight detour because I remember when co 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 in in an hour by Scotty or someone else that every technological and when in fact it takes a long time and co is this unknown thing and I was going to say and science works by tenative steps that turn to be wrong and then you learn the right thing and you move around 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 t that 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 the camp that that thinks that it was a vast conspiracy I do think vaccines were good. I'm glad the co 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 the 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 so-cal more for me the examples and I I talk about them I think in the introduction of the book the so-cal and for the people who don't know what happened in in 1996 I think Alan soal who's a mathematical physicist 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 ridicul article with a ridiculous title which I could look up if I had to. And the on the hermeneutics of string theory. Yeah. The hermeneutics of this. I didn't even didn't even know what hermeneutics was till he wrote that piece. And then he submitted it was clear gobbledegook. And he submitted social choice. It was published. And then he pointed out it was just complete nonsense. It was a big deal. It embarrassed a lot of people and allowed the scientists to make fun of the social scientist 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 talked about the journal chemical education published an article, a special topics class in chemistry on feminism and science as a tool to disrupt the disconcious racism in STEM. This physical review article, you know, called observing whiteness in physics. A math meeting, the biggest math meeting in the world. One of the papers was on undergraduate mathematics education as a white cis ciseteropatriarchical space and opportunities for structural disruption to advance queer of color justice. I mean these things are straight out of soal and actually something that's even closer to soal 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 and physics where you know black women must according to Einstein's principle of coariance 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 end up awarding person who wrote that their communication prize 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. All right. Well, you know what I'm going to do now? I'm going to be a steelman for the other side of the case. Okay. So Lawrence, we know that our ancestors, not us, but our great grand adviserss enjoyed a a surplus of opportunities that that we don't enjoy. Certainly, they would have been cancelled. Your former teacher, Richard Fineman, you know, for example, was known for his Oh, he Yeah, he would have been cancelled. Y 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, you white grandfathers, you know, most likely. And how else can we, you know, how else can we sort of write 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 forth. Here at UCSD, for example, we took in Maria Mayor who won the Nobel Prize. We had Ver Rubin here. The reason that we got them, Lawrence, was because places like Argon and Johns Hopkins and you Chicago rejected women and many of them rejected Jews. You know, Fineman was rejected. Yeah. Almost. Well, look, the point is to not deny that these things existed. But, you know, you weren't even born at the time when Mayor wasn't allowed as a woman or Emmy Nuther wasn't allowed in the math department in Genen. You know, one of the great mathematicians of the 20 early late 19th and early 20th century. And as a Jew, you weren't subject to the same problems that Richard Feman 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 some when since I'm now Jewish I'm not viewed as white by everybody 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 ancestor were in pilgrims in Russia. I mean, you know, nothing to do with that. And the point is we have to realize those things were happen. 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 know, 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, my neither my parents went to college and I know what I had to go through to to get to where I was. But the ridiculousness of somehow saying that we have to counteract, we have to make up for that and that fact that Richard Feman, you know, may 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's 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 was 7,000 articles removed from the archives 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 give 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. 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 is 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. Now, the last thing before we move on to more light-hearted 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 and you have born in the US so I can become president. Yeah. 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 Krauss mandate and why? I'd be very careful about executive orders, of course, unlike some people. But I would try and mandate guarantees for the you know, 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 by the content of their character. What could be more motherhood and apple pie than that? Well, the American Physical Society came out against it 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 Argon National Laboratory that equate colorblindness and meritocracy with actions of bias or from Sandia that said an emphasis on rationality over emotionality is characteristic of white males were inappropriate material. 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 should 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 are executive orders are very special. 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 pre 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 Chris Rufo who in some ways was on the right side on the of some of this in my opinion when he was arguing against quotas and things at universities and what they were doing to to get in the way of merit argued that public institutions are anible to legislators and therefore have to teach the values of the legislators and I think that's completely wrong. I think one of the most one of the best quotes is the reason I put it at the very beginning of the book 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 in which those people later go out and become leaders or active citizens. So the 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? 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 cuz Donald Trump doesn't or whoever doesn't think climate change is real? Of course not. 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 asterk by their names? Why did you apologize for that? From social pressure, or did you really believe it? 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 of wonderful, highly talented female scientists 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 of minorities for job for computer science or physics or jobs. You can advertise a job and say this is only open to people who selfidentify 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 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 cuz 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 of a good leader is to know that you don't know everything and to get the right adviserss. 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 viable candidate. But I realized that the problem with that and I also considered becoming university president. I was asked to 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' I've gotten into have been because I've spoken out in a variety of things. Yeah. And that Astra statement may may have been one of them, but I've never taken it back as far as I know. 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, to compile, to have your fellow authors contribute to. I know that's a thankless job and I know it was ultimately what's that? It's like hurting cats. Yeah, that's an insult to cats. We just got a cat around here at the 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 podcast. You know, I don't give out these endorsements cheap, Lawrence, but for other people's podcast, OP, as the kids say. Thank you so much, and I wish you a great summer up there. as brief as it will be 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 to you know even so that's great. You're right. It's a book I wish we didn't have to write but I think it's an 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. was why I wrote it.