Decoding the Gurus - Eric and Bret Weinstein: A Dark Horse Gallops through the Portal

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Matt and Chris introduce themselves and the overall concept for the podcast then take a deep dive into an infamous episode of Eric Weinstein's podcast 'The Portal', featuring his brother Bret Weinstein (Episode 19). They cast a critical eye over Eric and Bret's claims that they are fighting back against the 'Distributed Idea Suppression Complex' and alerting the world to one of the greatest untold scientific scandals of the modern era.

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where two academics listen to content or read content from the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what on earth they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown, I'm a psychologist from Australia, and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh. He's a cognitive anthropologist from some obscure place in the British Isles, and as we're both fully credentialed gatekeepers of the institutional narrative, we are ready to get to the bottom of whatever shit is going down in our interconnected online world culture.

Does that sound about right, Chris? That sounds very good. So the world of conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists and secular gurus is expanding in the internet era and we have found a kind of corner that's interesting and potentially untapped to look at from a critical perspective. So hopefully we have some interesting things to say and can connect it to the pre-existing well-trodden paths of conspiracy theorists and various types of gurus. Yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot of interesting connections there, a lot of good stuff to unpack.

So we'll see how we go. Hopefully interesting. I'm sure it'll be hit and miss sometimes, especially at the beginning, but we'll have some fun fun so I guess the first thing we should do is introduce ourselves so do you want to go first Chris sure so like you said I'm in academia I'm a cognitive anthropologist but I actually teach in a psychology department so I kind of moonlight as a psychologist on the border of anthropology, all very academic and interesting. But the relevance for this podcast is that basically I've had a longstanding interest, not just academically, but personal interest in conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience communities, alternative health communities. And like I said, the internet has led the blossoming of these spaces with a whole spectrum of people from your Alex Joneses to Jordan Peterson to even mainstream figures. And as the president, it's become ever more mainstream. I think that our background could contribute to saying something interesting

about this phenomenon. Maybe not in the elegant way that I've just done it now, but hopefully some better expressed things as we get more used to it. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I think you're right. A lot of things are coming together right now with the internet and the various sources of media. things are coming together right now with that with the internet and the various sources of media the traditional religions and traditional belief systems I guess sources of authority are kind of breaking down a little bit and you have these alternative things arising so it's a rich environment maybe a target rich environment as well so we should have some fun. So about me, I'm a psychologist from Australia. I mainly do research now. And so my background sort of interconnects with yours in some ways as well.

My main area is in addiction and public health and behaviours that contribute to that. I've had a longstanding interest in paranormal beliefs, religious beliefs, and also conspiracy ideation. in paranormal beliefs, religious beliefs, and also conspiracy ideation. So it sort of all goes back to the fundamental goal of psychology, which is to understand why people are so crazy. And, you know, one of the reasons people can be a bit crazy is that they believe all kinds of interesting things, and we're social animals, and we develop those beliefs in cooperation with other people.

So it's really interesting to focus on, it's not so much the psychology, but the sort of sociology of it, I suppose, which is the way these ideas spread and what ideas are appealing and whether or not they're connected to reality. So, yeah. And I also, following on from your introduction, Matt should probably mention that that i have a slight accent that is no no no chris no that's not no yeah i'm sure i'm sure nobody had picked up on it till now but i'm i might have mentioned that i'm also from northern ireland and i have lived outside for a while and now living in japan so my my accent is a little bit strange but it's mostly belfast influenced in

northern ireland and yeah so what you're saying is although we're two white guys we're very diverse that's right there's there's an untapped market for white academics talking about niche topics in podcasts this is a you know a rich man that nobody has fought to exploit. So it's good that we got there first. Well, I'm sure the Australian Northern Ireland connection is an untapped vein. Well, yeah, maybe with the possible exception of like Aussie rules football and Gillick football crossovers, but that is not what this podcast is about.

Well, they don't have a podcast. That's the thing. They don't. Maybe we'll end up getting into that when we exhaust topics. But the other point that I realized I probably should mention in an introduction is that my main field

is the cognitive science of religion. So in my actual research, I focus heavily on religion and particular ritual psychology so the conspiracy theorist area is a side interest in my research but actually you know in many ways relates in with religious belief and this kind of thing so yeah i i may have mentioned what my main academic speciality is so yeah there we go yeah that's right. And you reminded me also another sort of thing which we have in common, which is related directly to the topic of this podcast, which is that cognitive aspect, you know, the various heuristics

and biases and cognitive fallacies and so on. Basically those mechanisms of reasoning that, you know, us human beings try to do. But, of course, we're not computers and we're very, very fallible, all of us. So it's just endlessly fascinating, all of the little quirks and mistakes or errors that we all make, but also in communication and language and how people, especially gurus, how they convey ideas. There are various tricks, of course, that can convey a sense of truthiness,

sometimes called deepities, which we'll hopefully get into as well. Yeah. And I think both of us, we've talked off the podcast about this, that we don't think that this is the kind of things that we're going to be talking about require you to be an academic to know this or to pick up. But rather, academia does put an emphasis on critically evaluating and stuff, but there's plenty of academics who don't, and there's plenty of non-academics who are very critical when they're assessing things so the the techniques that people use in order to make themselves sound more convincing and authoritative we we know a thing or two about them from our research and academic backgrounds but the things that we're talking about are not stuff that anybody you that you need to be an academic to find out about or to consider.

And everybody has their biases. Nobody's immune to them, including us. So this isn't an attempt to say what everyone else gets wrong except us. Except, of course, that we are perfectly correct and everyone else is wrong. That's the only point to make there. Yes, yes.

So we should get into the podcast itself, I guess, to talk about what we're doing. So it's called Decoding the Gurus, unless we change our minds and change the name. But for the time being, Decoding the Gurus. So, yes, we're talking about gurus. We're not talking about all kinds of gurus, right? We're not talking about, maybe we will end up doing this, but at least at the start, we're interested in not the religious gurus or alternative medicine kind of hinterland that we've discussed as kind of secular gurus, where they might invoke religion or various traditions, existing traditions. meaning systems for people that don't fall into those traditional categories of people

like religious believers or uh like spiritual seekers but maybe they all would wise would so so yeah like figures like jordan peterson or uh eric weinstein like we'll talk today but yeah yeah stefan molnier um well i know I don't know how to pronounce it. How do you say his last name? No, you got to write this right. Stéphane Molnier. Oh, good. Good, good.

Yeah. Yeah, so these people, as you said, they're not religious. They're not sort of spiritual people like Deepak Chopra. And I guess the only reason we're avoiding those guys in the first instance is they're almost almost it's almost like shooting ducks in a barrel to talk about what's going on with Deepak Chopra I suppose yeah and I think another thing is that the the kind of skeptical community in general tends to not have an issue with pointing out the problems with figures like Deepak Chopra or the food babe or whatever,

these kind of people do attract critical attention. But when it veers more into politics or social commentary, there's political-based critiques, usually from the far left side, which can be very critical of many of the people that we're talking about. But aside from that, there doesn't tend to be that much engagement from groups like the skeptical community or atheists or that. In actual fact, they're often argued to be the kind of pipeline

that feeds the majority of the people that we're interested in. Although one point to make is that we're not only focusing on like figures that lean more to the right or within the intellectual dark web. We're interested basically in anybody, including people from the left-wing side that are offering these kinds of grand narratives and presenting themselves as kind of guru figures so maybe in later weeks we'll we'll address people from across the political spectrum yeah yeah and i think the other thing to say too is that we're we're not really interested in taking people on in term in any terms of um like some sort of political disagreement or say oh you know this

this type of talk violates our own personal political opinions or something like that. Are you saying you're not going to cancel anybody, Matt? That's not your goal. No, I'm not going to call, we're not going to call people out for various things either. Well, we might call people out,

but I don't think we're going to call for them to be cancelled or like de-platformed. No, no. Well, look, where I was going with that is that I guess our intent, I think, with this is not to take shots at people just for the sake of it. Although that's obviously a lot of fun. I mean, what we hope to do, I think, is break down some of this content and hopefully use it as a bit of an illustrative example to kind of understand the kinds of things you have to watch out for

if you want to be a critical consumer of this kind of content. And, you know, there's lots of great content out there. A lot of the people will cover a lot of interesting topics and I think their audiences are attracted to them because they do, you know, dig deep on topics that are of interest to people and often stuff that might get neglected by the more mainstream media. So the attraction is real and understandable.

So I suppose we could humbly offer people a few tips and tricks for critical evaluation of this material. So you can just be a smart and informed consumer of content, basically. I'm sorry, Matt, this is not what I signed up for. I want to destroy people, ruin their careers, and financially bankrupt them. That's my motivation motivation it's pure vendetta that motivates everything i do but no i i am well you're you're you're a heidecker's i know that yeah so so people seem to think but actually like just to be clear that sarcasm that like i know that sometimes that doesn't travel that well but they it's unfortunately the default mode in in northern ireland but i think that in many of the occasions although i might fundamentally disagree with some

of the people that we talk about or or think that they are advancing messages that you know aren't great or or have some problems by and large that's i don't think that's the issue. It's fine to disagree. And I hope and I think we plan to deal with people that we might overall agree with as well. So it isn't necessarily a case that this is just a teardown of people that we don't like. Hopefully there's more to it than that. But yeah, so maybe we should get into it and see what happens. Yeah, absolutely. Let's give it a whirl. I will say one final thing about why you and I are eminently qualified

to do this job, which is that like a lot of these people get criticized a lot from certain sources, basically from people who are diametrically opposed to them, just fundamentally in terms of their politics and so on. And they get criticised in the most overblown way a lot of the time too. And, you know, I'm generally not too impressed by the kinds of criticisms that, for instance, have been levelled at Jordan Peterson, for instance. I think a lot of them missed the mark. So I think, you know, having, you know, knowing you reasonably well now, Chris, I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we're basically politically very moderate, like,

you know, in the liberal progressive yeah liberal progressive left of center but speaking for myself anyway i'm very milquetoast i don't have any i don't have any extremely um strong fanatical political opinions um i think i inhabit the hinterland where depending on who is speaking to me, I'm either presented as like the champion of wokeness or like a hidden conservative pretending to be left-wing. But I feel no need to self-identify as a classical liberal. So I think that at least we aren't there. Not that there aren't reasonable classical liberals out there. I'm sure there are a handful. Many fine people, Chris. Many fine people on both sides. So basically, Matt, the point that you thought it's important to mention before is that

we should annoy the far left. I should annoy the classical liberals, and maybe we intrinsically just alienate the far right because, like, yeah, to make clear, we're not so far right. Just that disclaimer is probably useful to the kids. Okay, okay. Hopefully no one's going to be writing letters to our employers. Yeah, that's it. I'm sure we've carved out, you know, the biggest possible audience of like just cancelling out all these segments that are usually the ones interested in this topic.

Good. So if you're still listening, we could get started. So what's on the menu for today, Chris? I see we've decided to start with Brett Weinstein and his brother, Eric Weinstein, and a particular episode of theirs. Yes. So no surprise to people, anybody that follows me online, our first topic relates to Brett and Eric Weinstein, actually, I think. And this, I would say, one of the masterpieces of the past year or so.

So this is episode 19 of The Portal, which is Eric Weinstein's podcast. And it's titled Brett Weinstein, The Prediction and the Disc. So just to interrupt, before we get into it and them, I guess just a note on the disc so just to interrupt before we get into it and them yeah uh i guess just a note on the format we're going to follow for the for this episode and for for all of them i guess you know every one of the every one of the people will cover and talk about they they produce just massive amounts of content just reams and reams of content and it's really not possible to cut to kind of attempt to summarize it all and cover it all in any kind of way so I think what we decided is look we're just going to take one bit it could be a chapter of a book it could

be an episode of a podcast some some manageable bit of content and we're gonna work through it and see what they're saying in it and yeah take a critical look and yeah give it a critical analysis so so i guess i think this is a good way to approach these figures and these ideas because even though you're taking a limited amount of content it's often pretty representative of the kind of stuff that's going on in many other episodes and we can always come back and return to particular people that we cover for a second round if they produce something interesting we want to go through.

So we have to start somewhere. So we're starting off with we had to pick someone. So Brett and Eric Weinstein, lucky first off the lot. And we'll cover this episode. Yeah. And so just to add to that point, there's podcasts that I listen to, which are, for example,

Knowledge Fight is a podcast that focuses on Alex Jones content week in and week out. And they dive very deep on, and he's pushing out content in a manner that you talk about every day. And I think both of us feel that if we were to do that for some of these people, that we might go mad if it became our sole focus just to consume the content.

So a kind of pick and mix approach is both mentally more healthy, and also I think we can illustrate that there are these parallels across these diverse range of people with different goals, different philosophies, but in many respects, a lot of overlaps in the techniques and rhetorical tricks, if you want, Yeah, and rhetorical tricks, if you want, that they use to make their point. So for anybody who doesn't know already, Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who came to fame because of being involved with protests at a previously lesser-known college called Evergreen in America, where he was a biology

teacher. We don't need to get into them in detail, but just to say, he ended up having some conflicts with students who were protesting, I think fair to say, from the social justice end of the spectrum. And eventually he was kind of left his position and got a settlement from the college. And since then, he's taken up a position within the intellectual dark web, arguing for freedom of speech and against the excesses of social justice, the common things in that sphere. Briller, who is a mathematician of sorts, but his day job is working as a managing director for one of Peter Thiel's investment firms. And then he also rose to prominence recently for the rise of the intellectual dark web, and he gave the term, came up with the moniker. As we'll see, he quite likes coming up with various new terminology and acronyms. But he, previous to that, about eight years before that, had rose to a little

bit of attention by claiming to have produced a unified theory of physics, so a grand theory of everything. And he got some coverage as, is this the next Einstein or is this like a cook? So yes, that's the two characters. And Eric has this podcast, The Portal, where he seeks to promote voices that he considers outside or silenced by the mainstream institutions, be they academic, political, economic, whatever. So the portal is to introduce people to these new viewpoints and new thinkers, outside-the-box thinkers. And this episode with Brett was presented as the kind of phase two of the portal. First phase was him introducing various revolutionary thinkers. But the second one was where he began to attack the institutional suppressive

constructs that he sees. So this was the kind of opening for fears too of the disk. So an interesting episode to look at. Yeah. Yeah. So so so episode to look at. Yeah. So this suppressive phenomena is called the disk, which stands for the distributed idea suppression... Complex. Complex. Distributed idea suppression.

Suppression complex. Suppression complex at the disk. Yes. So, yeah. Yeah, so that's interesting, isn't it? So Brett's background is in evolutionary biology, mainly involved in teaching at Evergreen. As we will see, yes, it ended, unfortunately, I understand. That was something I did know beforehand about that Evergreen crisis,

which is a whole story in itself, isn't it? Eric's background is theoretical physics in the sense of he did his PhD in it. He proposed this idea of geometric unity, a potential unified theory of physics, which is definitely shooting for the stars. Yes. He believes the theory might allow us to travel beyond the speed of light so yeah that's colonized

the distant world so yes that's great just because I am aware of how fanatical some of the fans can be his thesis was not on geometric unity that was like kind of burbling along the

background being developed his thesis was on some obscure part of you know mathematics related to uh i believe related to theoretical physics but uh yeah geometric unity came after that. I see. Yes, yes, yes. That was that talk that he gave. You might have got confused by the gated institutional narrative, the GIN, which is another acronym that

Eric talks about. So all these talks of disks and GINs and geometric unities and this is very much a feature of the man. A lot of acronyms. Yes, and a lot of acronyms and a lot of complex terminology. Yeah, yeah. So, good.

Okay, so that's the characters. They've both got their own podcasts. Brett's got his own podcast, hasn't he, Chris? Yes, Dark Horse. The Dark Horse, yep, yep. Dark Horse and the Portal. And the Portal. Yeah, it's got a certain feel to it, hasn't it?

It's got a vibe. Yeah, like retro with synth bands. Dark Horse and the Portal. I'd listen to it, I think. I would, I'd listen to it too. Okay, so good. All right, so let's, yeah, so this sounds like a watershed type episode. So it's a good one to start with.

I've listened to it at your bidding, Chris. And yeah, it was a wild ride. It was interesting. And we've taken some notes and we've got some clips as well. So I guess what we're going to do is we'll work through some of the themes that they sort of cover,

not necessarily in strict chronological order, but sort of thematically arranged. So maybe one thing that would be helpful to do at the start is if I give a kind of steel man synopsis of what this episode was about from their perspective. We'll hear it in their own words in the various clips anyway, so I won't spend that long. But just to make clear what their fans

and what they would probably frame what this episode was about is that Brett as a young PhD student through his insight into evolutionary theory made a prediction about the nature of telomeres that kind of the ends of genes and the relationship with aging and cancer growth and various things that will probably come up later. But anyway, he made some deep theoretical insight and then sought to introduce it to the academic world, publish a paper about it, and he contacted some of the leading figures in the field, only to have his revolutionary insight squashed by the distributed idea suppression complex, which was protecting the gated institutional narratives. His insight was kind of too revolutionary and as a result, it was suppressed by the various powers that be, including an eventual Nobel laureate.

And this episode is the older brother, Eric, convincing Brett that he hasn't taken up his place in the history of science and that it's time to rectify that, smash through the disk and let everyone know about his important discovery and maybe start to set things to right. Hmm. Right. Good. So is that anything else or just that? I mean, is that not enough?

If I wanted to, I might add that they are at various points in this podcast claiming that it's Nobel prize winning insight that was suppressed and that it has implications for health, cancer, drug testing, the entire scientific enterprise. So if that's not enough for you, Matt, I don't know what's wrong with you. Maybe you needed to listen twice. I don't know what's wrong with you. Maybe you needed to listen twice. No, no, that's enough for me. Yeah, just reminding myself here.

Yeah, that's true. So, yeah, I think most of it is dedicated to setting out the story of the suppression and I guess not just suppression, it was also idea theft also took place. And they go into detail about how these ideas were stolen without or taken, used without credit. And essentially, Brett has been unfairly dealt with, it would be fair to say. Yes, yes. So maybe starting with a clip would be useful because I think one of the things that I did like about this some people really didn't like this but I find the dynamic between the two brothers to be like so some people

find it very grating where Eric is kind of pushing Brett and berating him about not living up to his potential but I actually find the dynamic between them quite endearing because like in many respects eric seems to regard his brother as like an unacknowledged genius maybe only surpassed by him and that and and to see him as very much advocating for his like younger younger brother so like yeah yeah which is very very understandable um yeah like and i i their interactions are like someone comedic in that respect you know i have an i have a brother as well and i can imagine him trying to lecture me about how to live my life and you know the so that dynamic was quite interesting and the first thing i can play this clip for us where this is eric

talking about how he sees breath i always resented the fact that you really excelled at and enjoyed teaching as much as you did and you saw this in terms of a place to play with ideas to teach students to have a pleasant and enjoyable life healthy as it was in the great outdoors etc etc blah blah blah and i still see these characteristics in you and it drives me nuts because you're you're your own worst enemy in some ways to me what you really are to me is an unbelievable thinker and researcher and beneath this kind of very nice friendly pedagogue is a thinker that the world doesn't know and i've watched recently your interactions with richard dawkins and it was absolutely infuriating. So this topic of how Dawkins treated Brett in their onstage interactions comes up again later.

And the general view is that he failed to appreciate Brett's genius adequately. But that's a good clip to start off with too because it kind of sets out, you know, it's really quite clear in the motivation for the theme of the podcast, which is that, yeah, Eric feels that Brett has been, you know, he's sort of his genius, to use his words, has been unrecognised, whereas, you know, Eric who knows him very well sees him as a genius.

Broader society, the broader world hasn't really recognised this. He's been, when he was working at Evergreen, which ended unhappily, but while he was there, it was mainly focused on teaching. And, you know, from what I've heard of Evergreen, even though it certainly seems to have its faults, it did seem to, you know, if you could afford to send your kids there, it certainly seemed to provide a very enriching experience. But, you know, even though I think Brett enjoyed his time teaching there, like, you know, really loved interacting with students and teaching and so on. I think there's obviously this issue there where it's almost like a research career has been thwarted or nipped in the bud without him getting a chance to grow in that direction.

Yeah, so on that, I'll play a second clip about Dawkins feeling to appreciate who Brett really is. So, I mean, he's very clear. He's like, well, Brett is a real hero so far as free speech and standing up for free inquiry goes, but he's very confused. Well, no, I don't think that that's right. I think that you guys had a really substantive interaction about biology,

which I wish he would spend more time on because he's phenomenal at it when he's focused on it. Yes. So this is Dawkins feeling the property graph along with everyone else that Brett is not just this figure who stood up for free speech, but is a revolutionary researcher. Now, one issue with this narrative concerns the fact that Brett hasn't published much of anything in the 20 odd years in his career. Now, this podcast is in many respects trying to explain, to account

for that. However, if you are wanting to claim the status of being an influential theoretical thinker. It is a very odd situation to be in to not be publishing or not conducting field research or experiments. I mean, maybe Brett is taking trips with students or these kinds of things. But yeah, it's hard to see how anyone would have perceived Brett to be a major evolutionary thinker because there's little evidence that that's the case. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I guess I agree with that assessment. I mean, it does feel like the intent of this episode is to some degree to present Brett as an important thinker at the forefront of evolutionary biology, which is obviously very nice. His brother would be keen to do that. But, you know, as you know, being a career academic like myself, I mean, one doesn't get that recognition just by announcing it to people. You really need a track record and the recognition needs to happen in the field. Both you and I have published quite a lot of papers, and yet I don't think either of us would

think of ourselves, I'm not sure who the analogous person to Richard Dawkins is in psychology, but I don't know if I'd be able to present myself so confidently as just to be self-proclaimed as someone who needs to be taken extremely seriously. Yes, and I think part of this is that the people who are recognized, as Brett kind of acknowledges, you know, Richard Dawkins is understood as a good popularizer of evolutionary theory and previously an influential theorist for the Genes Eye View and some of his earlier work with like the BB birds pecking and that kind of thing. But most of the people that are talking about are really more popularizers or people who are well known because they're popularizers like Jerry Coyne or when they're talking about the failure to recognize them.

Now, these people do have research careers as well, but the point is that I think the people that have expressed doubt about Brett's understanding of evolutionary theory, I think that part of that is that they have a point, not that they have missed, kind of deeply misunderstood things, because there's been some criticisms, for example, about Brett has put some lectures on YouTube where he discusses various aspects of evolutionary theory and has some of its own ideas. And people like Jerry Coyne have criticized them on kind of traditional grounds

or kind of on evolutionary theory. And Brett has at various times quoted controversy by expressing criticism of traditional Darwinian theory. criticism of traditional Darwinian theory. Now, he's often doing so in a way that it isn't entirely clear what he's arguing for, right? It's generally pointing out there are some problems with like neo-Darwinian theory and that this is causing problems or making the field

feel to advance. But when pressed for details, they often, you know, kind of retreat to vagaries or, oh, epigenetics is doing interesting things or people are failing to appreciate groups' election. And I have a nice illustration of this about Brett noticing that the field is stuck where others don't. I've been very clear and very public about the fact that I think my entire field is spinning its wheels, that they've gotten caught by a few bad assumptions and that they are spending decades in the weeds for no good reason, that there is a way out that i didn't know what it was for a long time i did figure out what it was and getting their attention on the question

of what they're doing wrong is a herculean task i've made that clear yeah i might jump in with my gut my gut response to you which um which is this doesn't really make sense. Like if you are wanting to point out fundamental problems with the main framework in a whole discipline like evolutionary biology, then I think you can't just say that to people, tell them that I've got problems and say it to some popularizers or famous figures and that that is not a that that is not going to happen you you one needs to have like a a track record and actually have built up it usually takes decades it takes a huge amount

of work to well you know i think your problem is that you're coming from a disc perspective you're just trying to suppress the revolutionary insights so the the issue that's certainly the way that like brett would see that or or eric would see that right that focusing on publications focusing on track records is a like a red herring now i agree with you that like if you want the claim to have me a revolutionary insight you need a like significant amount of evidence so like when darwin introduced natural selection the way he convinced people wasn't just because he you know tell people i have a revolutionary theory he brought mountains of evidence and even then it took time to convince people so it's worth bearing in mind from the

context of this that Brett has been post PhD from 2009 so only 10 years but if you count like the time to PhD seems you know he was on PhD track for 10 years before that or so. So you have maybe 20 years of being involved in this kind of research academic world. In that time, he published two papers and the thesis, which if you focus on teaching, there's nothing wrong with that as a career choice. There's plenty of people that are good teachers, also good theorists. But if you're looking to make significant impacts on your field and theoretically and you're not publishing papers or you're not publishing books or producing these challenging things then a lot of it just feels like armchair being an armchair academic that you're saying well everybody in the field is

doing it wrong I would do it right I could have been a contender, springs to mind as an analogy. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, yeah, what it boils down to is that if one wants people to accept a fundamental change in thinking, to really change the course of an entire discipline, then you have to come to the table with some pretty substantial stuff. And it's not that, you know, having a publication track record or having an appointment at a prestigious university is like some sort of imprimatur of authority. It's more just that you have to do the work. You have to gather, as you said, mountains of evidence in order to change people's

minds. And at the very least, you have to articulate what it is you're suggesting. Clearly, you have to write it down. You have to distribute it in some way, shape or form in order for it to be properly considered. And if people reject it because there is no evidence for your proposal, then you have to understand that what you're doing is no different from sending a letter to, you know, an angry letter to the Guardian or writing an email to an academic telling them that you've got your own new theory of physics that you really think they should look into. I mean, the academic is not going to be interested. I think we should say at this point that like, so this is Brett talking about like his potential contribution to like evolutionary theory or like evolutionary biology. So this is not really his focus on the telomeres part, which was what the podcast is about.

But these kind of asides come up in the discussion where Eric is framing Barrett as a revolutionary figure. So there's kind of like two separate points. One is like, and I think the reason I mentioned it is because I suspect you would say, well, I did bring problem with lab mice and telomeres that we'll get into, but I made a theoretical prediction and it turned out to be right. And that's the evidence. But even if that was true, so you find some interesting finding that is unexpected and it's predicted by theory and that's very good. That gives you an influential paper. It doesn't revolutionize a field. What would revolutionize a there's a research program that constantly demonstrated how these

insights apply and how they could be expanded on. And Brett certainly has the hope that he could have that, but there's no evidence that he has that. And I want to just play one clip, which maybe will serve as a contrast to the way that we are presenting how science is advanced and done. So I think this is Brett speaking towards the end of the podcast. This story has many levels of importance. Personally, it gave me the ability. I was already, as you are, very good at not being persuaded by the fact that everybody else disagrees with you that that has an implication every great idea starts with a minority of one

and you have to be able to endure being alone with a great idea in order to advance the ball significantly yeah you know relating this to to this to other content, this rings to me of the Galileo gambit, where people present that the only reason they are being unrecognized is because other people are trapped in a paradigm that makes them feel to recognize the inside, just like Galileo or just like Einstein or you know various figures are invoked but the reason it's called the Galileo gambit is because the amount of people who invoke themselves as these misunderstood Galileo's is exponentially greater than the amount of people who actually are you know the the lurking geniuses who can revolutionize a field. Those people do exist, but they're very, very rare. And also, in almost all cases, some revolutionary insight

only becomes strongly persuasive once people do the work to back up that the insight is valid. And the initial observation or the initial theoretical insight is often important, but the actual work has to be done. Otherwise, it's fantasizing. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, look, what I really have to do with this podcast is to sort of take, go from the specific and actually draw some general lessons from it. And I think one of the lessons here is that just because somebody claims something is true or or claims to be a genius you know you can't you cannot that's not enough um as you said for every for every isaac newton there's there's an awful lot of cranks i'm not saying these guys are cranks but i am saying there's a lot of people who think that they have done what Isaac Newton did. Yeah. For every Isaac Newton, there's a Bert Newton who was like burning his dog's poop to transmute, call the dirt or call the gold. That's the usual way that goes. Yeah, exactly. And it's nothing, it's not even uncommon. Like it's normal. All of us feel

And it's nothing, it's not even uncommon. Like, it's normal. All of us feel a little bit special. And we all get, I guess, entranced with our own ideas. Our own ideas always seem really good to us. So, you know, it's not an unusual thing. And I guess the other parallel I'll draw, it's a bit more of a stretch than yours, but that's the sort of parallel to the Galileo gambit

in the realm of conspiracy theories. And again, I'm not calling these guys conspiracy theories or whatever, but, you know, all in good time. But it's an extraordinarily common feature of conspiracy theories, which is that the broader community, and whether it's experts, scientists, the public or whatever, cannot accept this revolutionary, groundbreaking idea that the conspiracy group holds, because it is too threatening, because it is too challenging to their worldview. For instance, flat earthers cannot accept the fact of the flat earth because

it would just destroy their entire concept of how the world works and that's too frightening the last thing i'll say is that the reason i mentioned that is that all um let's say idiosyncratic belief systems have a similar problem to solve which is that they they need an explanation for why everyone else can't see the obvious thing that they feel is right in front of their nose. Sure. And, you know, I see a slight thing here too, which is that there has to be a reason why, say,

Brett's obviously fantastic ideas have been unrecognized and, you know, there's usually an explanation. An explanation is required for why that isn't forthcoming. Yes. Anyway. Yeah, no, I agree. And I also think, as you say, there's always an explanation for why the person is unrecognized.

And also, there is usually a nefarious entity that is responsible for that. And in traditional conspiracy theorist frameworks, it's the system or the Illuminati or the Greys or whoever it may be, various fantastical people, the fourth-dimensional reptiles that people laugh at. In this case, it's the distributed idea suppression complex. So that's like a wordier name but when

I think about what that means it comes very close to like the system or the man right it's just institutions and like academia or you know the government's these kind of things so and this is not to say that they are always correct but that that having this kind of looming boogeyman gives you a reason it even gives you a reason like why we made this podcast right we are part of the disc so we we don't get the at least not yet we haven't got the checks from the disc for our work in suppressing the uh counter narratives but but maybe they'll be forthcoming. We're doing this idea of suppression pro bono, man. Our problem is, in a marketing framework, we've already

got our false consciousness and now we're defending the high priests. So we're doomed, Matt. I think the thing is that we are doomed. And related to that, I have a clip that will express this quite clearly this this is one of my favorite clips i have to say from this episode which i think is perhaps one of the best illustrations of eric and brett and how they see themselves i'll play it and then we we can discuss it i think you and i share a certain delight when we do our homework and we discover something interesting and absolutely nobody else gets it that would feel

bad to most people because they would feel like what am i doing wrong why does nobody else understand this point to you and me that feels good It is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody else can even recognize it gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be. Yes. but I just want to say that for me, this is like encapsulation of Brett and Eric's tendency towards what I would call science hipsterism, where what's important is that you find something outside that other people couldn't recognize and that you're so far ahead of the curve that you're talking about things that other people don't even know are on the horizon. And Brett displays some insight when he's like,

most people might cause the fact that everyone disagrees with them to look again at maybe I'm wrong. But in his case, it just cements that obviously that means him and eric are right and the like both of them clearly as he expresses get the light in the sensation that they are so far ahead of the game um so yeah i'm interested to hear your thoughts on that i guess i guess none of them are short of self-confidence. There's a, you know, there's an awful lot of self-confidence there.

Actually, one, one point to make there is that the reaction to this episode, I mean, so we were listening to the isolated clips now, but the general reaction to this episode was, well, Eric is,

you know, pushing things too much and he's making like kind of grandiose claims, poor Brett didn't want to speak out and he was forced by Eric. But when you listen to the clips where this is Brett speaking, I really don't think Brett is lacking for confidence in his abilities or insight. I wouldn't say his issue is like an excess of modesty. No, no. Yeah, look, I guess, how can I put this? I think it returns to my point before, which is that if you have a really big claim, a really big claim that you've got this brand new insight, you understand things so much better than people who have been extremely influential

and really driven a field forward for decades. You've got this amazing insight. I think if no one else agrees with you, you haven't convinced anyone else, and you haven't brought evidence to the table that actually convinces them, then you have to keep in mind that you may be delusional. You know, we all have a natural fondness for our own ideas.

We all find our own ideas very convincing. That's kind of normal. But when you kind of combine that with a real massive level of self-regard and self-confidence, then I think it can lead you down a certain path. And, yeah, so I guess, look, I guess my recommendation for people who are listening to anything or reading anything from someone, from Deepak Chopra to to to Eric

Weinstein or Stefan Bonior anybody I mean if they're if they're simply proclaiming to you that they have a unique insight then my suggestion is to take that with a grain of salt sure sure and I also think the thing is that that what they're expressing is genuine and heartfelt. People often get accused of being grifters, and I think there's various things that people do that justify that critique. But when it comes to Eric and Brett, my impression is that they are expressing their true belief about how they see themselves, how they see the theory and the field. So it isn't just a matter that it's all based on opportunism or these kinds of things. I get the impression that these are honest sentiments. And I think because of that,

they end up with these very weird conclusions. So I've got an example here. This is after Eric has introduced what happened to Brett at Evergreen. And he's talking about how the American biology establishment responded. Okay. When Brett found himself as professor in exile, along with his wife, Heather Hying, I had thought that the American biology establishment would realize that one of their own had been thrown overboard as Jetsam and that he would have been invited to many universities to give seminars in biology.

Right. And this repeats, but I remember when I originally heard that, my reaction was, But I remember when I originally heard that, my reaction was, why? Even if he was unjustly fired, was he giving seminars before in prestigious universities about his theory? And the answer is no. And then, okay, so even if he was legitimately the subject of this unfair witch hunt by students or whatever way the evergreen events are seen, it doesn't mean that he suddenly has revolutionary insight that would mean that he should be invited to present at departments, especially if he's not talking about that event. Yeah. I mean, I could give you a personal example here, a very recent one, which is just this week, several colleagues of mine at my university have sadly lost their positions as a result of the massive drop in international students due to coronavirus. Australian academic establishment pointed up

to start invading them? No, no, they haven't yet, Chris, and I don't think they will. And, you know, I should say that some of these academics, you know, the academics I'm thinking of have a much longer and more substantial academic, like, research track record than Brett. So, of course not. Like, as you said, why? There is no system or there is no board of academics who are monitoring this thing.

And they don't have a kind of program to take care of disenfranchised academics with a seminar schedule or something like that. No. Why would they? Unless you were famous. And, you know, perhaps if you were a legitimately famous person with a massive track record who was just really held in... Even then, I understand that in this case, Eric is saying that Brett is a victim. Of course.

But there's an inherent paradox that he's saying, my brother should not be known for this event. And then he's saying because of this event, he should have been invited to give like lectures and, and talks. And I think that he's on the one hand saying it's not because of that, but then immediately, you know,

kind of contradicting that by. Yeah. The contradiction is clear. And likewise, you know, I think Eric acknowledges at the beginning that for various reasons,tt hasn't been well known in the research you know it doesn't have a strong research profile and you know as we said there's nothing wrong with that at all um there's nothing wrong with focusing on teaching but you can't sort of have your cake and eat it too if you're not

well known and recognized for your research profile then there's no reason for people to offer you a seminar series and things like that when they see that you've um you're out of a job unfair though it may have been so so look i mean my main takeaway from this chris is that i mean more than anything this illustrates like a disconnect with reality, frankly? You want me to help illustrate this disconnect in a way that will be palpable, I think, to everyone. So as you mentioned, you know, this already, there's just this like random example of, you know, seminars and being invited.

It's already suggesting a skewed perspective. But I'm going to play a clip from a previous episode. So this is from episode 18 of The Portal, where Eric is talking about the distributed idea, suppression complex, and how it applies to his family. And following on from what you said about, you know, detachment from reality, let's see how he presents his family. It is time to do battle with the oppressive structures that have been used to silence new ideas. If in my family, I assert that there might be as many as three revolutionary Nobel quality

ideas in one clutch, how many ideas might there be suppressed if that is actually true? No, you heard Nobel level, right? So even granting that that is not directly claiming that Nobels are warranted, it is that the insight is at the level deserving of other Nobel prizes. And remarkably, Eric, his wife, Pia, her Nobel idea is in economics, his is in theoretical physics, and Brett's is in evolutionary biology. So three Nobel Prize-level ideas in one family. Can you believe it? Yeah.

No, I can't believe it. I mean, it'd be interesting to try to estimate the probability of that. I'm not a mathematician, but I suspect it's not high. It's not high. No, I would say it's not high. So, like, I don't know if it's obvious. I mean, what's obvious to you and me, being career researchers, may not be obvious to every listener. But I mean, I'm beginning to think it might be, which is that what they're suggesting isn't just not unlikely or implausible. It's really, really implausible.

It's an indicator that perhaps someone's view of the world is a bit distorted and not not in touch with reality or really maybe just not really having any idea of how the system actually works like it i mean but i think most people could figure that out like it's not hopefully you say that you say that but i i genuinely think that like when you hear these clips in isolation it sounds wow they said that but when it's in a stream of consciousness and it's going through and there's many different claims and and disclaimers issued around it it's often very hard to truly appreciate that somebody just claimed that their family has three nobel level people who could have won the Nobel Prize in it.

So I think very often the audience just doesn't notice these points. And when people point them out, they say, well, look, you're just focusing on this one point. It's not really representative of the arguments they're making. and you can forget about the whole Nobel issue and their arguments still stand but the point that you make that you know it's illustrative of the way that they see the world and also their inability to kind of critically evaluate things that that makes it important another illustration of this is eric encouraging brett to break his silence about this event so let's just see how he frames it because you're going to do this thing where you downplay your gift and i'm sick of it i'm tired of it i'm just i've had it and part of it what happened is that

you are now distorting the history of science you have a place in the history of science that you are not taking up. You are not advocating for. There's something that you don't like about this. No, no, I don't. I don't think this is true. I just think I'm pursuing it. Maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it doesn't work out in the end, or maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it would. So, yeah, like, I would say that, you know, viewing yourself as having a place in the history of science is a pretty grandiose claim, right? And you don't hear Brett say like, no, no, hold on.

Like my theory, you know, is important, but I'm not claiming to be like a grand figure in the history of science. Instead, you hear, look, yeah, I agree. But, you know, maybe I'm not going to go about it the same way as you. And yeah, I've met many kind of very influential theorists. At conferences and stuff, you meet kind of big names in the field or my PhD supervisor is like a big name in my field and these kind of things. And those people, by and large, like with some exceptions, there's a lot of, there are egos in academia and people attached to their degrees, but like, I've never heard anyone frame themselves in those grandiose terms

that their place in the history of science is waiting. And these are people who could claim in some respect to have influenced grand theories or scientific research paradigms so the level of self-aggrandizing and delusion is it's pretty hard to overstate yeah it is hard to overstate i think we've probably i think we've probably stated it well enough. I think an unfortunate thing that we might have just noticed or both realized is that the clips that I'm playing are not supposed to be

about this kind of CM theme, but they just have a habit of kind of slipping these things into a lot of their statements. So yeah. of kind of slipping these self-aggrandizing things into a lot of their statements. I forgot what our theme is. What theme are we covering?

Look, I think in this case, the point that there is perceived to be a Nobel Prize insight here. Yeah, yeah. That this is one of the greatest moments in evolutionary theory, perhaps in the history of science, and the potential impact is being ignored. Like, even before getting to the evidence and the whole controversy that this is actually about,

these are such big claims that you you at when i was hearing this i remember thinking okay so what is it like what is the and i'm sure the audience has a similar has a similar sense the first time they hear it what is this groundbreaking breakthrough yeah but it had a big a bit i guess what you're saying is it had a big build-up it had a big build-up um i guess look here's-up. I guess, look, here's the thing. I mean, I do agree with you, actually, that I think these guys are in good faith. You know, they do actually feel this way

and they do have this healthy self-regard and regard for each other. And in some ways, as I said at the beginning, it's kind of endearing, really, to feel that way about your brother and want to hold them up high for the world to admire. You you know there's there's an aspect of that which is kind of sweet but the other side of the coin even though i think that's true it's in good faith the other side of the coin is you getting back to the theme of our podcast is you you don't get to be a guru

by being modest and self-effacing. Humble, yeah. Humble. You do. No, you really don't. I mean, this is a common thing for all would-be gurus. You really have to go all in in terms of building yourself up. It doesn't matter what the context is. You could have a small kind of interesting sort of fringe religion of some kind

or you could be building just a just a bit of a weird kind of cult like um professional group or something like that where everyone does what you say and nods their head when you say things and do your bidding and you know again i'm not accusing these guys of this but it is a thing that gurus do which is self-aggrandizement it's a pretty simple point but i felt like it had to be pointed out oh yeah i i think it helps and now that we hammered it into the the grind we certainly have we we've made that clear we can move on to like perhaps another point and i think a nice one so for anyone listening who hasn't listened to the the original podcast the insight that brett had is basically as a graduate student he he basically

posited this trade-off between the length of telomeres that if they're very long you can live immortally and your cells can continue to divide. But that increases your risk of cancer. More cell divisions lead to more cancer. Shorter telomeres place limits on how much the cells can divide through these things called Hayflick limits. And so there's a kind of balancing act between processes that allow cells to divide and grow and the potential for the formation of cancer. And so this telomere length is a crucial seesaw element in nature that relates to senescence, aging, and cancer formation.

And he found some issues where particularly laboratory mice, they have very long telomeres, but they're short lived. And so why, and also prone to cancer. So like, well, long telomeres would make them prone to cancer, but like their lives are short. And so this seemed to be an issue. But the point that you made, that they have particularly long telomeres, is something which was not known, or at least was not experimentally validated. And Brett thought that they should have long telomeres because of their proneness to cancer.

And he saw that mice being known to have short telomeres kind of and yet to kind of produce mass amount of cancer was a kind of contradiction and so he hypothesized that maybe this isn't true and that mice actually do have short telomeres. And this is why they're short-lived. And when he contacted researchers who worked on telomeres and this kind of area, and they looked into, and this is through Brett's telling, and they looked into his idea, they found that, lo and behold, the most commonly used laboratory mouse species, the model animal, actually did have

very long telomeres, and that this was a surprising result, and that it was the result of kind of breeding protocols which selected for individuals younger in life. So they could kind of, the later life genetics were distorted, right? Because the negative effects that did not emerge before they bred, right? So they could kind of stack up. And so they have these very long telomeres, which makes them very good at cell repair, but cancer prone as well. And that this makes them a terrible model organism for humans because it means that when we test treatments on them, that we might see not detect damaging effects,

which would emerge if you are human without these massively elongated telomeres, which allow cell repair. So yeah, this insight, he theoretically predicted it and it was confirmed by some other researchers who were looking at the same topic. And he thinks that this could undermine the drug safety of all drugs and most of the drugs, at least across America, and that it has implications for just everything like senescence research, so on so forth so so yeah in not dreaming perhaps

it's more clear why you know the audience would would agree that this is a important discovery and like that that its suppression is important right yes thathmm. Right. Yes. That was a pretty good overview of a reasonably technical topic. Actually, it's a quick question. I mean, when I listened to this

and I got the impression that it was rather technical. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it seemed important. It seemed useful. But,

you know, as you know, in any field, there are sort of technical results and then there's the kind of the grand theoretical type, really big stuff. And, you know, the small stuff is still important. You know, you need to get all of those little things right. And if there's a problem, for instance,

with your model animal or whatever, that needs to be identified and so on, it can lead to problems. So, but it seems the general scope of the whole thing seems reasonably, yeah, technical and limited. Well, yes. I ask that because maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there's an implication here which kind of would change

our entire view of how evolutionary biology works, how aging works. I mean, I think that in their framing it does because it relates to drug treatments and relates to aging and it relates to cancer and it's a fundamental element of life. But your point that, okay, but all of this comes from the telomeres of mice is is reasonable and more reasonable by the fact that if you introduce this point about laboratory mice not being perfect analogs for humans it's already a well-known fact in the field. And there are other papers talking about the limitations of like mice models.

And there are many other species of mice. And like, it is also true that we don't just talk about laboratory mice, right? We talk about laboratory rats and all drug studies are conducted in, like with humans require three phase trials with humans, tolerance studies and the dosage response and so on, right up to clinical trials and studies with sick patients and study with healthy volunteers. So there's a whole infrastructure around that and masses of researchers working on these questions, there tons of there's a whole research field focusing on telomeres and what they do and so given that it's 20 years

uh since this issue it would it would seem that you know even if it was what they're saying what what's happened since then or you know the the fields have progressed and there's there's i i think basically what i'm saying is like the the chance of overstating the significance is is great and what's what makes that more likely is that we as we'll kind of get to a lot lot of this podcast revolves around what was published or what wasn't acknowledged about this discovery. But this discovery that we're talking about, this revolutionary discovery, is mentioned in at least two papers. One by Brett in 2001, I believe,

by Brett in 2001, I believe, and won by a Nobel laureate, Carol Greider, and her student in 2000. So the insight, the finding that Brett is talking about is in the literature. Yeah, it found its way into the literature. Yeah, sure. the literature yeah it found its way into the literature yeah sure yes and uh brad's paper is cited 64 sorry 2002 is cited 64 times and uh i don't have the hey the other one in front of me but i think it's it's it's significantly more maybe like 200 or 300 which is like a significant very good citation rate but not's not, you know. Yeah, it's not the kind of, like there are, as you know,

there's this really long tail when it comes to citations and papers that are massively influential get this just huge number of citations and the rest of us poor suckers who are writing normal papers that get normally cited are part of that long tail so yeah if the citations and are for this for this finding which as you said has been published which is in the sort of 60 to a few hundred mark then you know it's not nothing it's good it's a good respectable impact and obviously people paid attention um and cited it but it's not yeah it's not it's not well it's not like yeah i don't know i think it's you know as

academics we like some of this is intuitive but like a paper that cited that cited 64 times over 20 years is not a revolutionary paper even the same people that cited like 300 times or whatever there are papers that are cited 6 000 times or these kind of, like those are revolutionary papers. A good example is Claude Shannon's paper on information theory. It's when he published the mathematical theory of communication, cited 50,459 times, right? So that's a groundbreaking paper. Okay, so we're back.

So I think because of the magic of audio technology, we're going to stitch this together, but we're reconvening after a little break in time and we're going to get to the meat of the episode now, I think, where we're going to at what brett talks about in terms of his experience uh in submitting his his paper to nature and just take a look at that i think chris so do you want to give us a bit of a bit of a backstory of what's going on here yeah so after maybe over an hour where we have decided to actually talk about the main point of the podcast,

the repression by the disc of one Brett Weinstein. And it's a saga for the ages, but the way that they tell it is it revolves around this paper that Brett has written to alert the world to this discovery about telomeres and the potential problems with mice models and this trade-off between the length of telomeres and propensity for cancer. So the saga is mostly about what happens with this paper. And as academics of sorts, we have experience with papers and peer review. So I think we can maybe put into context how surprising some of the things are that Eric and Brett present about what happened and just how much suppression is involved. Yeah. Yeah.

So I remember from listening to this, there were a lot of things presented as, I guess, a little bit outrageous and just exceptional or mysterious or concerning about the process, which didn't quite ring true to me from memory. But yeah, we can work through them and see what we think, I guess. Yes. And it's hard to know where to start, but I think a good place is that the nature submission is at the heart of the whole episode. And nature, for anyone who doesn't know, is like one of the premier journals for science, like getting published in Nature is a very big deal, career-making for some people.

So it's kind of the goal for everyone in hard sciences, social sciences. It's a big deal to get a paper in Nature. It's a very big deal. Like, you know, as a point of comparison, I haven't done too badly in academia. I'm a full professor, which is as high as they get. I'd be delighted if a paper of mine was accepted in a journal half or a quarter even as difficult to get into as nature. It doesn't happen to everybody by any means. Certainly doesn't happen to many PhD

students, Chris. So yeah, it's a moonshot. You know what I mean? It's a big thing. Yeah. So to submit it, the nature suggests that you think this paper is an important discovery, which Brett obviously did. And he elicited some help with the submission from big names or within relevant fields so he he mentions that contacting a kind of well-regarded evolutionary biologist called george williams to help with the submission so uh let me just play a short clip of we send it to ge Williams, the number one guy in the world, the number one senescence guy at the evolutionary level in the world. And he writes a beautiful recommendation letter for this piece. We're going to send it to nature. George Williams tells nature, you need to take this piece very seriously.

this piece very seriously. Okay. So, Matt, let me ask you just one question. This is even before we've got to how nature responds to this, but have you ever in your career asked someone who is not an author on the paper to write you a letter to the journal that you're submitting to say, you need to take this paper seriously. Yeah, no, I think you know my answer to this one, Chris. No, no, I've not done that.

I've never heard of anybody doing that. No. Yes, so I like to peek behind the scenes. When we discussed this originally, I didn't even realize that was what he was suggesting. For some reason, I had the notion that he was talking about a co-author writing a cover letter, which is a normal thing. But when you pointed out to me that,

actually, isn't that not somebody on the paper? It suddenly came home. How unusual and bizarre that would be because... Yeah, I mean, it's also incoherent, I guess, because I think one of Weinstein's sort of perennial gripes is the, I guess, hidden system of influence underlying academia, which is purportedly kind of acting as gatekeeping and controlling who gets to publish what and what gets out there.

Yet to play up the prestige of the person who's recommending your paper is exactly the kind of thing that, first of all, academics don't do and journals don't usually take into account anyway. But they're doing, you know, in my experience, at least to the limits of my experience, they are almost unique in being the only ones who are actually doing the thing which they are very upset about, which... Yeah. Am I being unfair there, Chris? No, you're not, I think, Matt,

because one of the big pillars of the Weinstein's complaint is how much of science is an old boys' network and that it's all people dealing behind the scenes and who you know and what kind of influential institution you're related to. So you would imagine that that would make them opponents of kind of getting big names to sign letters and you need to take this paper seriously. And I have another clip which kind of shows that far from being opponents, they are strong advocates of this approach

when it comes to Brett's work. So let me illustrate. But the problem, Brett, is that Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins did not know that Dick Alexander, Leonard Hayflick, and George Williams were all on this thing because that community had broken down. Oh, sorry. That's the wrong clip although it's it's illustrating the same point that the dawkins

and jerry coin being unaware of the prestigious people who had endorsed but the correct clip i think was maybe this one let's see hopefully very professional he was positive towards you williams was positive towards you and dick alexander those were the three that blew me away that's a huge amount of fire a lot of firepower and it wasn't enough so all of these examples uh and they're like out of context they might be a little unclear what they're referring to but i think the message which comes through is that brett and eric are certainly not averse to mentioning influential people and to using their prestige to argue that the for that reason people should heed what is being said and that nature this extraordinarily competitive journal, should publish the paper, yeah.

I mean, that's just not how things are done. That's not how things ought to be done. You know, peer review is a very systematised process, even though I haven't submitted to Nature personally, virtually certain the process there is the same as with every other journal, which is that the editor takes a cover letter uh the the the manuscript itself and takes it on its merits uh yeah and then evaluates it with respect um with with with reference to reviewers that this is not done through amassing

firepower of prestigious people telling the editor that they should accept this paper. On that note, though, that when it works, that is true. All of the points that you made about what should happen, that is the way when it's working. But it is the case that influential people can know people on editorial boards and can exert influence or some big name, the editor could treat their submission differently than they might do for a junior academic they don't know. So these objections are not entirely unreasonable, but it's more in line with what you described is the ideal. And it is also, I would but it's more in line with like what you described is the ideal and it is also i would say it's probably most of the time what happens that there is a fair process but

but the the bizarre bit is they're kind of simultaneously complaining about the informal networks and seeking to utilize them to get published. So also, I guess it's a little bit frustrating because I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the paper was ultimately not accepted by nature. Even despite all of the influential people that had been brought to bear, it wasn it wasn't and so i think um all of this this stuff is cited as evidence for the mysterious nature oh no wait let i i do have

that clip and this is not the wrong one about nature's response which i i think is important to hear but uh i think anyone listening should note in this context that I looked into the statistics about... So like a paper, when it goes to a journal, it can either be rejected by the editor. In that case, we talk about it being desk rejected. Or it can be assigned to reviewers who the editor sends it out and they may then review it and

recommend rejection or ask for revisions. So you can kind of get rejected at a second stage after reviews, or you can get asked for revise and resubmit. So there's like various stages, but the desk rejection stage is the first one and it's the first hurdle. And the nature, when I look back at the statistics around about the time Brett was submitting, desk rejection rate was around 60 to 70% of papers. So I mean, 60 to 70% of papers submitted to Nature get desk rejected, which would mean that if you're submitting to Nature, you should basically, your default assumption should be that you'll be desk rejected, even if you have a good paper.

I mean, generally people only submit really good papers to Nature because they know it's a waste of time otherwise. Yeah. Yes. I've been on papers submitted to Nature, including papers that went out for review, you know, that didn't get desk rejected. But even when they were going out for review, all of the people in the research group acknowledged it was a long shot. Right. And we're not surprised when eventually we ended up rejected.

So let's hear how Brett and Eric respond to this very predictable outcome. And they send it back with one of their absurd form letters that says that the nature of the article is such that it's probably not of interest to their readers. And we're, you know, I mean, we had a good laugh about that. You know, it's cancer. It's senescence. It's so bad. it's so bad. Like this is a response that indicates either malfeasance or an Eliza

program or the janitor ended up responding who didn't know any biology. It's the craziest thing. And you know, the cherry on top is that they're turning down George Williams recommendation. Like how great do they know who he is? Like what? Where is what on what

plan on what planet do you turn down his recommendation to look at something about senescence so look i just have to say it would be impossible to parody somebody you know more relying on prestige that actually states do they not do they know who he is like that's's a meme for like, you know, somebody relying on like prestige and having too much self-importance. Yeah, I'm trying to choose my words carefully here, Chris, because, you know, my instinctive reaction to this is not good. You know, it doesn't, I mean, and I don't want this to,

I don't want to be that guy, but, you know, there's nothing about that sentiment, which is good. Firstly, of course, that they send out form letters. Yeah, of course, they write something polite, which is unfortunately this topic of this article may not be of interest to our readers. We all have seen those letters a hundred times in our career that's not something you should be offended or insulted by

um but it feels like they're just that's anyway so their reaction is just completely weird to me it's it's like it's super hyperbolic and it just speaks to a massive lack of perspective about how peer review works. Not getting published in Nature is not a big deal for people. It's an expected outcome. And when that happens, your next step would be, okay got rejected at nature let's go to the next journal that's yep that's usually how people respond but here it's presented as this is a noteworthy you know event and i'm one of the why and it's for explanation yeah that's right it's represented as crying it's just being absolutely mind-boggling and mystifying and crying out for some kind of explanation. And I guess they feel that it's especially mystifying

because it was rejected despite having been endorsed by these very prestigious figures, which shouldn't be a factor in their decision at all. And I'm actually glad to see that it wasn't because that's how things ought to work. Yeah. And so if we move on from there, what happens next is that after getting this negative response,

Brett decides to send the paper to Carol Greeter, the eventual Nobel Prize winner and sort of eventual villain of the piece, but who at this stage was seen as somebody who had provided the empirical data that proved like Brett's prediction correct and who would be an ally for this paper. So Brett asks, can he send it to her? And maybe she can give some advice about it or see what she thinks about it or what went wrong. And he reports back that he gets her,

she sends him this detailed response to the paper. And I think she FedExes it over. And this is a crucial piece of information that they have her handwriting on the paper, because she slams it. And Brett takes it as coming out of nowhere, that like there's, he describes, you know, there's tons of notes and it's like,

she hates the paper and she's extremely critical of it. So Brett's reaction to that is to assume that that is indicative of ulterior motives or something has changed or there's like something else at play because as he sees it her criticisms are incoherent and like completely contradictory but there's no there's no actual reason to accept that that's true because what it sounds like to me as somebody who has worked on or has sent papers to other people or received papers from people that you often do get back like very critical comments, especially from external reviewers who haven't

or aren't on the paper. Yeah. In fact, actually, Chris, sorry to interrupt. No, go ahead. But like, as my colleague and friend often says, he says that academia is like this long people and yeah in fact actually chris um sorry to interrupt but no go ahead like it yeah as as my colleague and friend often says he says that academia is like this long experience of being kicked in the nuts and then kicked in the nuts again and again and then saying okay thanks can i can i please be kicked in the nuts again it's it's a culture of criticism just incessant constant

critique yeah um and it's it's a good thing you know it it um you know you don't have to take the criticism on board you can um you can you know reject the criticism and not make the changes you can but in my experience there's almost always a lot of good you know even in criticism that's overly harsh or or misplaced in some respects there's usually a lot of gold in there you know when someone is actually taking the time to read your work and critique your work, a smart academic pretty much always takes that information on board and uses it to make the paper or the exposition of the paper better.

And, in fact, in having supervised a number of PhD students now, I've found that, yeah, one of the big predictors of success is the ability to take on critical feedback and not be precious about it but to actually take that on and and there are there's a particular kind of student that I've supervised I I have to say, and a colleague that I've worked with, or colleagues that I've worked with, who can't do that, and it's not a good sign, is it? No, and I 100% agree with that sentiment, that the ability to accept very harsh criticism,

especially when you're sending work. Because you have to remember that the original way Brett contacted Carol was as a kind of PhD student with some ideas and asking her opinion, right? And at that point, you might be friendly, supportive. Like if you're a good mentor, a kind person, you generally are encouraging a PhD student.

But what changes is when somebody wants to publish something in the literature then it it becomes a matter that you should give a professional critique so it could easily be that carol was you know supportive friendly encouraging and then she sees the paper and she feels he's completely wrong he doesn't really get it or like it it isn't the case that her reaction means that she was kind of lying at any point it's entirely possible that she's now just giving feedback to the paper which she doesn't like yeah yeah yeah no it's um yeah i've been in exactly the same boat myself yeah Yeah, it's entirely normal, as you say. It's a different standard.

Like when you're evaluating a paper, you're evaluating it from the point of view of what does this paper, it's not about being encouraging or supportive or nice. It's about looking at the work and going, what does that need in order to get into the literature and be well received? And that's a high bar. And it doesn't feel supportive. It feels highly critical. It's like getting reviewer feedback when you submit a journal. It never pats on the back and, aren't you clever? It's always just, yeah, harsh criticism.

It does feel to me that that is something that maybe Brett is not good at, or at least wasn't at that time good at receiving. But I'm just guessing here. I don't know all the circumstances, but one can't help but suspect. Yeah. So if we move to the next part, after the negative review from Carol, then Brett receives what we would know as a solicited submission. So there's another journal, the editor contacts Brett. And after some time,

I think Brett got disheartened by the response or something. But in any case, he's contacted by the journal who says, oh, we heard about this paper. We, you know, we'd be interested if you would submit it. And I think he speculates that it's likely to be through the connections of Bill Hamilton that he got this offer. And so Journal of Gerontology or something like that, which he points out is a significantly less prestigious journal than Nature. But nevertheless, they're a peer-reviewed journal. So he gets his request from that journal to submit and sends it in. Now, before we go into what happens at that journal, I just want to note that, again, getting a solicited submission because of a famous

person contacting an editor or a big name in the field leveraging their influence, in most cases, it sounds exactly like the thing Brett and Eric are reeling against again. But in this case, it goes unremarked or as a footnote. But solicited submissions for journals are, I think, relatively rare unless you're a prestigious person. And their status is somewhat ambiguous about not whether it's okay or not, but the way that they might get an easier ride than an unsolicited submission. Yeah, exactly. Actually, just by the by,

I happen to have been, I happen to receive a solicited invitation today, Chris. That's because of your huge prestige. That's because I'm kind of a big deal. Look, I've also, I will add, I also have had a solution. In my case, it's usually for commentary on someone bigger's article,

or it's because one of my co-workers, who has a bigger name, asks me to do it with them. So maybe they don't feel like writing the paper. And so I think I have a couple of chapters and books coming out this year. And obviously, they're all like requested by the editors of the book. So yeah, like it happens. I'm not looking down on people who receive requests. I'm saying that is an example of kind of like in the way that Brett tells it about prestige being leveraged in his favor,

which Eric and Brett should be opposed to. Yeah. And so one, it's a little bit exceptional for a PhD student to have that. Sorry, was Brett still a PhD student at this stage? Yes, at that stage. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. So that is exceptional and a real, you know, lucky break.

You know, I don't know whether, you know, somebody spoke to someone. Someone must have spoke to someone for them to be aware, I guess, of Brett. Had he published before at this point? So the timeline's a bit messy in my head, but I... No, he hadn't. I believe this is his first article. Or if there was, it was one before, but I'm pretty sure it's his first article. Yeah.

So, yeah, like, unless you're, like, a well-known name, which, of course, he wasn't at this point. But Bill Hamilton was. Oh, Bill. Yeah. Yes, that's right. So, yeah, like, he had friends in in high places and that definitely contributed to an easy ride. And as you said, it's a little bit ambiguous, even if you're, you know, well-established.

When you get a solicit invitation, it's kind of compromising the review process a little bit. You know what I mean? Because even though it does go to review and stuff like that, it's kind of a little bit implicit that it might have a an easier ride but um but yeah i mean um yeah as you said it goes unremarked but um but yeah it's um it should be like that's not something that a phd student would usually get so um no no so i guess i guess the disc has been, in this respect, has been kind. It's enlisted.

The disc is flying towards a publication. But there's a hurdle coming. My metaphor is breaking apart here, but there's a big hurdle coming in the shape of an anonymous reviewer. in the shape of an anonymous reviewer. So the solicited paper is sent out to anonymous review, which is good, that's the process, and it returns with an extremely negative review, basically slamming the paper. Now, at this point, Brett assumes that that is a review from Carol, because he suspects

it's in her field, obviously, and in her interest, and maybe he recognizes some parallels in the criticism. And he considers them all to be low quality, not actionable, and almost incoherent. So his response to receiving that very harsh review is to sit on the paper and he kind of reports that he didn't do anything for a long time. And then eventually he writes back to the editor and says he's not going to make any changes

because he doesn't consider the reviews high quality unless the editor specifically wants him to change something. So if the editor points out which ones are good, that he'll take a look at it. And as soon as he submits that, he reports within minutes, he gets word back that the paper is accepted. And he takes this as vindication that the review was not high quality and that the editor recognized that the comments and suggestions were all

invalid. What do you think? That's a little bit unusual. So in terms of the editor's response, that's unusual to the extreme because like editors are not editors have the ability to overwrite reviewers but they usually only do so you know if they have mixed reviews or whatever they might decide over the objections of one reviewer to uh to publish the paper but if they get only negative reviews it's rare for an editor an editor to accept the paper on their own grounds. So Brett's inference from that though seems unwarranted because the explanation which seems more parsimonious to me is that it's a solicited article and that he's

now refusing to do revisions or responded very negatively to revisions. And it sounds like the editor just said, well, okay then, and accepted that. Yeah. I mean, there are, you know, as you said, it's, as we said, it's a bit of an easier ride for solicited articles. Usually you really ought to,

even if you don't want to action the reviewer comments, you really should explain why point by point. Doesn't sound like he did that. Yeah, sometimes the editors just go, just think, well, you know, it's okay. Wave it through. Let it go. Yeah. Yes. wave it through let it go yeah yes so the i i and i want to take stock here because what's happened

right if we think back about this process now brett submitted to the most prestigious scientific journal in the world was thus rejected then received uh invited submission at uh so this is the second journal he submitted to, refused to do revisions when requested by a negative reviewer, and the paper was accepted and thereafter published. So this tale, which has, you know, online being presented as the, like one of the greatest suppression stories never told in science, is getting accepted in the second journal via solicited submission. It's actually a tale of an extraordinarily easy ride to publication. Yes.

Let me just give one example. I'm a random early career academic. I have been involved in a paper that went through no less than, I think, six journals over the space of two to three years for publication. And the first journal almost published it with minor revisions. And we received conflicting reviews, positive reviews, negative reviews, the whole gamut. And that's not unusual. The experience I just described is not unusual every academic yeah look in fact chris just today i've got another example from today as it happens um

i'm a co-author on a paper that was just uh accepted uh yeah it was rejected um by by three journals beforehand you know um the the lead author admittedly aimed high and sort of progressively revised their expectations. It's a minor paper. You know, none of us gave any of those rejections much thought. It's entirely normal. And it happened to have been accepted today. So, yeah, this is nothing. This is nothing.

Matt, I also don't blame people who are not academics who haven't experienced this, because the way that the brothers frame it, as if this is a great scientific misjustice. Also, Chris, also, I think in some ways, I can understand why Brett has got the wrong end of the stick here. Is that an international expression? It's an Australian one anyway.

I think, yeah, got the wrong end of the stick. Did you say the old stick? No, no, the end of the stick. Okay, okay, good. Yeah, like it's because he isn't at this point, you know, he's not an experienced researcher. I got the impression that he was kind of alienated from his supervisor or not in close contact with his supervisor or something.

I don't know. Maybe he was not. So I guess to him it all felt entirely exceptional, you know, it felt mystifying. Why didn't Nature accept my amazing paper? you know, felt mystifying. Why didn't Nature accept my amazing paper? You know, why did this reviewer have all these unfair revisions?

Like, unless you've got a bit of experience under your belt or unless you're being advised by someone who is experienced, you might well think that, you know, and you've got a very high opinion of your... We all do. We have a high opinion of our own work, you know and you've got a very high opinion of your and we all do we we have a high opinion of our own work you know um i i have to follow on for one point that you meet there because i think there's a clip that's extremely related to this so like we all do have you know relatively we like our own work i mean in in some respect that you know i hate my own work because

i'm extremely critical of it. And after I read a couple of months later, I hate whatever I said. But at the same time, you generally tend to like things that you're doing or I don't know. I don't know. But I want to just play a clip about what I think this is back when Brett was rejected from nature and what he did as a step. And then maybe we can talk about like what this suggests about freedom of mind or kind of self-belief. But yeah, have a listen to this. Now, the irony is I sent a letter to Dawkins when this was going on asking for his help. And he sent back a letter saying, this is very interesting.

It's not my area of specialty. You should talk to Bill Hamilton. All right. So I think this is when the nature rejection had just came in. But the point I want to note there is he emailed Rich Dawkins, right? Who's a well-known, famous evolutionary theorist at that stage. And as a PhD student, I'm pretty sure that would be like, you know,

being in astrophysics and thinking like, maybe I should reach out to Neil deGrasse Tyson to like help me get my paper published. Yeah. I was just thinking of the parallel in psychology my area and thinking well that would be i guess me getting rejected from a journal and writing a letter to steven pinker saying please could you um you know kick in here um i'm amazed that he got a response from dawkins at all actually that's that's yeah maybe he's good at writing you know letters mean, him and Eric

are certainly good at selling controversies, so who knows the way it was framed. And may have been Dawkins who kind of put him in touch with Bill Hamilton, who was one of the figures that he reported being positive

about the paper. But in any case, another point we kind of glided past was that Brett was sure, and Eric and Brett spent some time on this, that very, very likely that Carol was the reviewer. But there's no actual evidence that this is the case, right? Because the reviewer was anonymous and their assumption is because they received the critical feedback. Like again, they received a negative review and the only other negative review that they'd received was Carol's. But the point I want to make here is that the positive reviews they had received were all from people in their network, like Dick Alexander, who was friends with Hamilton. These people like the paper, like Dick Alexander, who was friends with Hamilton.

These people like the paper, give positive remarks, but these are all people that have some degree of interpersonal relationship. Carol Greeter is outside, an expert in this area, gives a negative review. This external anonymous reviewer, who could be Carol Greeter, or could be someone completely different, gives an also very harsh negative review. So if it's me, maybe I would think, is this Carol? But my other thought would be, is there a problem with the paper that I don't see or that this is two negative, very negative reviews I've received? Is there a point and we're all defensive about our papers but that possibility seems to be like alien the breath that the flaw could be with his paper that's that's not possible so the question becomes who are these alien reviewers or or like what's their agenda yeah who are the hostile? Yeah, who are the hostile forces?

Yeah, because it's kind of the only possible explanation when you feel like your paper or your work is without flaw. Yeah, I mean, look, it's worth, you can only repeat it, but negative reviews, even when your paper is good, even when the paper is good. You get very harsh reviews, usually. You get very harsh reviews, you get very harsh reviews usually yeah that's just normal and it doesn't mean that anyone has anything against you um yeah i don't know how

better but the so one part that this relates to is that while all this is going on there's a separate paper that this is with carol's group which basically is looking at the telomere length in lab mice and making this point that the telomeres are elongated in this species that you know brett has looked at so this is the work of one of carol's grad students and carol and and the grad student mike herman Herman, I think is his name, have done that research and found out this discovery. And Brett reports that when he asks her about when she's going to publish the paper, that she basically says it's not a priority. They're keeping the information in-house.

And we can hear what he thinks about that. Okay, so this is Brett talking about the decision for them not to prioritize like making this information public. I could publish this result. And then everyone would have it. Huge. But then I'm on a level playing field with everybody else. If I don't publish this result. I have a stream of papers I can get at.

Then I can start predicting other results. Nobody will know how I am doing that thing. I will look like a super genius. And so holding it in house is a mechanism for a whole slew of papers to be, to be 100. You can afford to bend over backwards and not make inferences. Let's say the following holding it inhouse is a seemingly inexplicable decision in science, but for the fact that it fits at least one story of this kind, which is that it is consistent with wishing to publish a stream rather than the source of the information that

would allow you. So you can either do one discovery or you can do a stream of predictions. Okay. So did that make sense, what they're suggesting? That they're keeping the information in their lab in order to produce more publications and that people without this information are missing key knowledge so they'll be able to predict tons of interesting things and people will think they're super geniuses right so this is sorry just to clarify this is this is them referring to carol

graders and her laboratory her grad student and her uh paper uh which which is on the mouse telomeres and i'm a little i'm a little bit confused about one thing which is this making predictions you know um so keeping not not publishing immediately which by the way well we can talk about that um but where where and how are these predictions made and how are they appearing super geniuses i'm not sure are they writing papers that are just predictions i kind of that doesn't look that point about like that this insight is like super important and crucial to a whole range of things that will allow you to look like a genius as far as i can see that's mostly in brett's imagination because the paper when it does

come out and by the way the paper comes out uh like i i don't have the years in front of me but i believe brett's paper comes out in 2001 uh or maybe it's 2000 i'll check these in a minute to be clear but but in any case this sounds like they're going to keep this in house and pump out paper after paper after years but the actual paper comes out within a year i can't remember it's a year before a year after brett's paper i think it's a year before which means that like given this time frame you're talking about one or two years to publication from the discovery which is actually nothing and also no time to produce things so what it sounds like is that brett has reinterpreted this conversation for them to say like that they're going to keep the information in-house and they're not going to share it. But it more

sounds like they didn't consider it a priority, but they still produced a paper within one to two years, which is actually a fast turnaround. And let me play the kind of clip where he talks about this, because it seems like a complete contradiction to, on the one hand, be like, they're keeping this behind closed doors so they can benefit from it. And then to say this. My relationship with Carol is changing its tenor, and she is becoming hostile, and I'm not clear on what's going on i contact her and i discover through talking to her that she and mike are about to publish their paper on the long telomeres of laboratory mice so this is the delta between uh wild type and laboratory mice yeah and i'm shocked because she's told me they're keeping it in-house and instead they've

got a paper that they're she says in final revisions they are that day submitting their final revisions to nucleic acid research with their paper so the like the point here which brett also highlights is that she apparently was keeping it in-house, but now they're publishing a paper, so I don't see how you can complain simultaneously about both things. And it seems that your inference that they were keeping it behind closed doors to produce all these slew of publications is wrong because the paper is coming out maybe ahead of Brett's paper. Yeah, yeah, I don't get it. It seems contradictory.

And the other thing I can't get past is the motivation for keeping it secret or in-house, it's not secret, it's just delaying publication, which happens all the time for any number of reasons, of course. Not least reviews. Oh, God, yeah, or rejections and resubmissions. Like that process of getting rejected can take six months, you know. But anyway, I don't get the supposed cachet for keeping it in-house, which, as you said, they didn't anyway. But the supposed cachet is from making predictions

and appearing like super geniuses i don't understand where those predictions are occurring or why that matters i don't know anyway i don't get it yeah so this story about repression and suppression of knowledge the the kind of important point to note here is we have two papers coming out by brett's own admission within a couple of years one to to two years of this laboratory discovery. We have Brett's theory paper and we have Carol and Mike's empirical paper. So rather than this knowledge being jealously guarded and locked behind closed doors, actually the papers are published. They're in the literature. And if we check them now, Brett's paper ends up 20 years later with

60-odd citations, and Mike and Carol's has I think a lot more, like 200 and something. So that's a well-cited paper, but it's not like a paper that lit the world on fire, right? No, it is not. No, that's respectable, but it's indicative of an influential result, but not something, as you said,

hasn't lit the world on fire. So yeah, nothing's, it's been published. I don't see what the fuss is, is what I'm saying. Yeah, and the thing is, the way it's presented, I mean, all papers kind of oversell their findings, right? They have to say they're very insightful and that kind of thing. So the paper, I read it with Carol and Mike. Their paper presents the result as an interesting thing

that's important for researchers to know and may have implications. But they're very much, it's not this fantastic finding that upends everything. And like Brett often points out that like the general response to this thing about mouse models being imperfect is researchers saying they know, they already know that. And that there were many papers that, you know, made this point already.

And that, and I think that's important because Brett still says, yeah, but that doesn't matter because this is a very specific problem. But my impression is that it's only really him that is so sure of that, whereas most other people are like, yes, we're aware of these issues. And also things like mice model are not the only models that are used to examine drugs reactions. Like lab rats is a term for a reason. And this is only one species.

So Brett is like quite clear that this is the main species and this strain is the one that is used in all of the labs. Maybe. But when I watched Carol Greider's Nobel presentation, she had papers with multiple strains, like 10 or 12 different kinds of strains looking at multiple generations. And it didn't seem that it was all based around this one mouse model from this one lab. And on top of that is the fact that like before drugs are ever used with humans, they need to go through three stages of clinical trials.

So like Brett sidesteps that by saying, well, but this is about like over the lifespan and, you know, clinical trials don't follow people for generations. And so the, the, the issues might not show up,

but it's all very tenuous and relies on like basically being correct about it. And it's not like there isn't massive amount of researchers invested in finding out things about, you know, drugs and their effects on the body and so on. And there's plenty of nefarious stuff that goes on in pharmaceutical industry. But that's the kind of issue for me is like, there's real things to be considered about in pharmaceutical trials. But this is more like... It seems like a storm in a teacup that's mainly reflecting an overblown sense of one's own importance. Yes.

That sounds mean to say, and so I want to also say that, you know, I guess, you know, I get it. It's understandable for a relatively inexperienced researcher who's a PhD student who's been deep into it. It's a kind of natural thing to take one's own specific topic overly seriously. So I want to say that, but I think largely it reflects, yeah, just an overblown sense of the importance of all of this. Yeah. And I agree that it's perfectly normal to get caught up in your own theory. And maybe there's even the possibility that Brett is right about something, that he's seen something

that people are overlooking, but it's the lack of consideration that maybe he isn't right. he isn't right. That is the issue. Okay, so a certain strain of lab mice had longer telomeres, which was something that Brett expected from his intuitions about the theory. But that doesn't mean from there all his other intuitions apply. And when people are saying, this is not that surprising, it's not that big of a deal, it's not necessarily a suppression or a bad fear of reaction to defend the status quo. It could legitimately be that the researchers don't think it is. Because in my conversations

around this episode with researchers that are involved with cancer research or doing lab studies with mice and other models, which I'm not. Their general reaction has been, yeah, this isn't news. There's papers before Brett's that are talking about similar issues. And I think someone sent one to me. When I read it from my eyes, it seemed to be saying almost the exact same insight that Brett was saying nobody had. And even if it's not the case, it would be very unlikely that it's this linchpin

that Eric and Brett believe for everything, the pharmaceutical industry, that this is the single linchpin. Yeah, I think that's an important point. I mean, this is not just a personal story of, oh, this is some stuff that happened to me some years ago. This is like a key incident which illustrates the operation of the distributed idea suppression complex yeah and

I guess that's why that's why we need to examine it critically because if it's going to function and this as you said this linchpin role of demonstrating incontrovertibly the operation of the disk which is you know that's it that's a big claim and big claims require a lot of evidence behind them. And, you know, as we've talked about, this is very tenuous. So you have another clip for us? I do where that connection is made explicitly for us. So let me just tee it up. I mean, I want you to take this seriously.

You're just showing a part of what I'm calling the disc, the distributed idea suppression complex. We have 50 years of such stories. And it happens that in our family, three out of four of us created such a story trying to get a PhD. And the idea for me is that every time you have to go into some closed system, like there's a committee meeting, or there's a blue ribbon commission,

or there's a peer review process, or there's a, what do they call them, the panels, study groups for grants. That's where the disc lives. We know that it's localized to the things that protect the integrity of science it's an autoimmune disease where what we have is an ability to stop highly disruptive ideas from getting a hearing in the general population of experts by virtue of the fact that a carefully chosen group of experts can stop publication.

There we have it, Matt, the distributed idea suppression complex in a nutshell. So what's your reaction to this distributed suppression complex? Yeah, yeah. Look, I mean, I think we almost need to break that down don't we to kind of almost just figure out exactly what is being said there like it works so let's before commenting let's let's just try to delineate it just in clear language exactly what Eric is saying there so I can try i could uh i guess he's saying that um the entire scientific system the system that involves um um you know um peer review um panels or uh that that uh decide on

grants what else what what what are the components What other components of the disk would he say are operating there? Well, probably the media and stuff come in as well. But in this example, he's kind of firmly focused on the institutes of science. Yeah. So I guess anything that's institutional gatekeeping of some kind yeah journals peer reviews grant bodies hiring maybe yeah hiring hiring but three people in the family have uh have had experience with this suppression that's right and as we heard earlier

suppression that robbed them of potential nobel prizes so it's a serious issue it is yeah so so it's a corrupt system that deliberate is deliberately suppressing disruptive ideas which are also groundbreaking and innovative and stuff like that which is if i understand correct causal right Okay. So, yeah, so he describes it as an autoimmune disease. Like, it's a big claim. I think, look, if you take it in a positive way, like, it's obviously the case that, you know, science doesn't move exactly with empirical evidence.

There's resistance. There's gatekeepers. There's enough scientific controversies to fill books about people having ideas suppressed and that kind of thing. So you can completely agree that these kinds of things can and do happen, but it's the degree to which Eric assumes that that's why his idea and Brett's ideas haven't made it. Or it seems to be a default that this process is keeping out the best ideas and the revolutionary ideas instead of that it may very well be functioning as a quality control. And while there are individual cases which show limitations of the system,

that it's incredibly self-serving to assume that the reason you cannot succeed within the system or the reason you haven't got recognition or your Nobel Prize is just because it's all biased and people don't recognize it. the other possible explanation is that your idea is not that revolutionary or is not as amazing as you judge it to be yeah yeah so in a similar vein to try to still man this i'd be the first one to admit you know the academic system and the systems of gatekeeping which have to to exist, obviously. I mean, if you're into if you want to hire someone, you have to have a recruitment panel. Yeah.

If you want to have a journal and want to be at least somewhat selective about what you publish, you have to have some mechanism by which to implement some sort of quality control. So obviously there has to be these structures there if you want to have quality control, which is a pretty important part of the whole system. It certainly wouldn't call it perfect. There's heaps of instances of it working sub optimally.

But yeah, as you say, it's a huge misrepresentation to say that it is primarily or mainly or that there's some, you know, there's just no evidence to support this claim that it is deliberately suppressing innovative, disruptive ideas. In general, you know, in most fields, you know, like, first of all, this idea is not new, I guess. Like, was it Thomas Kuhn with his, you know, talked about the sort of sociological aspects with scientific revolutions,

you know what I mean? You almost, in other words, for a field to really change tack, you almost have to wait for the old guard to kind of die, you know what I mean? Or, you know, it doesn't sort of, you know. So in other words, you know, researchers, scientists are not these perfectly rational creatures with no ego, which I'm sure Eric would be the first person

to sympathize with you know where yes he should yeah i i think he would he would certainly note that researchers are like that but i i agree that it would be worth applying that insight closer to home yes exactly um so you know it's it's just a it's made up of fallible human beings but the idea that it's like a systematic institutional thing like a conspiracy institutional thing, like a conspiracy. Conspiracy theory is a good analogy here. No, not only a good analogy, I think it's a perfect description. Let me just play another short clip where Eric describes American science.

I think this illustrates further his view view of like how deep the corruption is our problem is that the american scientific enterprise headquartered in the national science foundation national academy of sciences and our university systems is fraudulent and it serves to suppress radical new ideas. And there are other clips that I could play from this single episode where Eric describes the university system as a suppression system for big ideas and so on. Like you said, there's a whole lot that's wrong with that. But I think part of it is you're tempted to get tied up and saying, well, of course, universities do end up having theoretical grooves that people people are into or associated with specific schools.

But I think in some sense, that's been too generous because in the modern era, there's this movement that you may have heard of, Matt, called open science, where the focus on it is to increase the transparency of research and to make research freely available and the data open to people. And those efforts, the open science movements, are kind of not discussed by Eric and Brett. But in large part, they take care of a lot of the things that they're concerned about. For example, this concern about gatekeepers closing things out behind articles behind closed doors. Now it's possible to publish a preprint on preprint servers before they've been reviewed and people in the field can then see the article and access it. So the notion that the system is completely closed, it's actually changing. And there are efforts underway to make it so that there is less reliance on, you know,

who you know and the traditional systems of peer review. My kind of argument is just that the problems that Eric and Brett raise, to a certain extent, they're real, but their solutions are just unrealistic and typically extremely personal about their grievances about some paper they had that was rejected. And they try to link it to broader processes, but in so doing, they misportray science as an idea suppression complex or as universities as like things to throttle innovation and it just it rings hollow yeah yeah i think that's it i mean it's a big claim but what it boils down to is that there's just no evidence really presented to support this claim apart from a personal feeling of grievance that they have been unrecognized by the system, like that doesn't really cut it in terms of supporting such a huge claim.

You know, there's all kinds. I mean, you know, it just doesn't gel with any kind of experience that I've had. Like I've published a lot of research. A lot of it's been kind of mediocre, to be honest, Chris. And I've managed to find some way to publish it. You know, if anything, I think the bar is too low. Probably more of my papers should have been rejected. Eric has argued that the reason he won't use preprint servers

is because you have to supply an academic email address. And if you don't have an academic email address, you have to get a recommendation that's not the right word, but from some other researcher. And on principle, he refuses to do that. But even accepting that logic, it wouldn't make sense that you couldn't just publish, you can just publish PDFs online now, you just get a website, put it up. You could post it on Twitter. Yeah. So if you, I mean, in the case of Brett and Eric,

these are both people with like over 100,000 followers now because of cultural war involvement. And so they don't have insubstantial outreach, you know, for their ideas or that kind of thing. So like I realized that this is them going back in time to complain, you to complain about Brett's treatment within the system. But the kind of insurmountable obstacles that they're talking about, even if they did exist 20 years ago, the situation has changed a lot since then. And so they're stuck on this model that doesn't really apply and that there's obvious

solutions to it, and yet they don't take them. And yeah, it leaves the critique feeling unconvincing because you can find much better people criticizing things about academia, criticizing the conservatism, the changes, and building new journals, building like peer review, open peer review system where you can see who the reviewers' identities are, or you can see the reviews publicly. Like all these systems,

but I never hear them discuss them. So, yeah. It's just kind of out of touch, I suppose. You know, like, as you say, there are genuine problems like there are with any system, you know. Like, for instance, the funding system in Australia, the research funding system is extremely conservative. The sort of running joke is that you kind of do the research and, you know, establish this amazing track record, which gives the funding agency this huge confidence in that the research is sound. agency this huge confidence in that the research is sound um and then you get the grants which can fund your justification for the next grade if you like to do something sort of different which is

silly you know but so yeah you know there's things like that like conservatism if um in funding they're very risk averse uh a lot of the time so there's there's all kinds of complaints one could make but when you start talking about it being an orchestrated system that is intended to stifle innovation and stop ideas that are disruptive i mean that's just getting into conspiracy territory and in fact reminds me of other groups that like to criticize academia because they just have some beef with it and you know it made me think of you know well it made me think of, you know, well, Chris, the sort of anti-evolution Christian faction there. And they have a few talking points when it comes to discrediting the scientific literature on evolution. Likewise, the people who don't like climate change, don't want to believe the evidence on climate change have a few talking points about why there is so much scientific literature showing that climate change is is real

and the what they basically say is that oh the system's corrupt all of these researchers know what side their bread is buttered on and that they are falling into line and preaching from from from the hymn book because they know that they'll get rewarded for publishing stuff that supports climate change or evolution or whatever. Yeah, that's stuff you would have heard before. So, I mean, that's conspiratorial nonsense, right? That's not true. Now, I'm not saying that's the motivation of Eric or Brett or anyone,

but their motivation is really kind of, it's got nothing to do with evolution or climate change, obviously, but it's got to do with, I guess, bolstering their own credibility and necessity in relation to the institutions. I honestly think that it's hard to overstate the case. The more that you pay attention to Brett and Eric's output, how much of their worldview revolves around their personal grievances or their feelings of being treated unfairly during their PhDs or by the academic system.

And a good illustration of this is like, this episode is specifically about Brett's PhD. So of course they cover it. But even before this story, on all their episodes, I had much more knowledge about Eric's PhD and his circumstances than I think I have of colleagues that I've worked for years. Because people don't spend that much time talking up their past achievements and how revolutionary and everything they are. Because if they are, you don't need to talk them up. They speak for themselves. up they you know they speak for themselves and yeah so lest we get stuck in the Weinstein wormhole um let's let's like at least finish the narrative of where the story goes with Carol and

and so we've covered Brett's repression by nature and and this external reviewer who may have been Carol and he's upset with the paper by Carol and her grad student. And one point that Brett is very upset about is either not being a fair to offer on that paper by Carol's grad student because he sees the whole paper as being based on his idea, or he also mentions not being in the acknowledgements and how it's kind of like swept over, but he suggests that, you know, had he have been in there, he'd have been able to point to it to show that it was related to his idea. And that just struck me as like insane because when I think about a situation where say you're at a job interview and you're talking to people and say, look, if you check the acknowledgements on this paper, you'll note that

this is, I am mentioned in there. So this was my idea. And it's very important. Brett seems convinced that this would make a tangible difference to his career or life. But even having a third offer paper that, you know, is reasonably successful would do very little. I would, I would see and an acknowledgement would do nothing because, you know, nobody, basically nobody reads acknowledgements. And if somebody brought it up you would consider

them somewhat odd to like you know to mention that yeah yeah i think that's a good example of the kind of points that are made that yeah as you say kind of illustrate um i don't know what it illustrates it's kind of out of touch or something like but i suppose that the people who listen might think that that's a important point or or something that matters when when when yeah you and i know that having your name mentioned in the acknowledgement saying oh we we acknowledge uh chris kavanagh for helpful discussions about something i mean big shrug you know that doesn't mean yeah this is not important. I don't know why they think it's important. I read acknowledgements, but I realize that that's a weird thing that I do,

that most people don't do that. You are. Yeah, I am weird. And I have this, I also read prefaces in books, prefaces. So these are things that usually people ignore as incidental information and for good reason. But yeah, so anyway, stepping away from those papers, what we get to next is that Carol is eventually awarded the Nobel Prize, ostensibly for her 20 or 30-year research career focusing on telomerase and just a whole career of research on the topic of telomeres and telomerase

and the discovery of the connection between the two. And brett watches her nobel speech which i've also watched and i would say is a very good nobel speech but he his reaction is quite impressive so let let me let brett uh speak for himself what carol grider does with her Nobel lecture, right? Nobel lecture being the biggest lecture a scientist will ever give the lecture and filmed and filmed is she delivers a paper in which she very oddly has now embraced my entire set of hypotheses about the effect. She has come over from the comparison between the paper of mine that she panned and said didn't make any sense. She is now a total convert to the idea that senescence across the body is being caused by Hayflick limits that are telomere-based. So, the point here is that Carol gives a speech, and from Brett's perspective, it completely demonstrates that, you demonstrates that any criticism she previously had were bad faith because now she's embracing all of his ideas, all his theoretical model,

and she's claiming it as her own insight. The crucial point for Brett is that there's no mention of him as we will hear here and then uh i'll let you respond but okay in her presentation she's got several experiments that i did not know she had run that i had suggested to her i said you know things like um carol do you have any idea if a cell has many different telomere lengths is it the shortest telomere that controls how many reproductions a cell can do she's run that experiment interesting lo and behold it's the shortest telomere it's a good guess but anyway so she goes through this there's no mention of me there's no mention of the actual implications of the uh the long telomeres for things like science and safety

testing and all of that there we we go. Yeah, okay. So she's mentioning ideas that he had purportedly and also not mentioning stuff that he thinks she should mention. Yes. So there's a rather key, there seems to be a bit of a contradiction here that Brett says she's now accepted all his ideas, she's stolen them, she ideas she's stolen them she's

repackaged them yet she doesn't seem to agree with his interpretation or what he considers the key point so it would seem that she doesn't actually agree with his interpretation according to his own description yeah now correct me if i'm wrong but i think okay so she's look i mean the first thing i gotta say at the outset is that we only have brett's view on this right i mean it's just just him saying that these were his ideas that he said to her and then she she had never had those ideas before. No one else had had these ideas before and so on, which is unsupported, right? And I have to keep in mind that a lot of people,

particularly people with healthy egos, shall we say, tend to be a little bit expansive, I suppose, in the credit one takes, you know? You know, so you have to keep that in mind, I guess. And it's just, it's not a great look, I suppose. It doesn't sound really good to me. But the other point I'll make is that, I mean, she's getting this award for her career.

Yeah, like the potential overlap, even given the most charitable interpretation here with Brett's work is a relatively small proportion of her career output, would I be right in saying Chris? Yes definitely so I like I said I watched the talk and two things that struck me about it were one that it's very clearly you know a narrative building on her early work during her PhD, and then from her research lab right up to the present. And so the notion that she's repackaging Brett's idea is ludicrous, basically, because you have decades of work being represented, which predates Brett even being,

you know, in academia. So like you say, that doesn't fit. But even if we give credit for the ideas that he's claiming credit for, when she's presenting all of the individual studies, like most academics, she tries hard to give credit to the other researchers and recognize that there's a team and that there's collaborators and that this is research done by you know not just her but a broad group of people and they've done these studies that involve you know multiple generations of different species of or different strains of mice models and and it's it's a very impressive presentation of like a vast research endeavor and the the paper that like brett was very concerned about features on like one or two slides and and as he says yeah she doesn't emphasize this point about you know the the lab mice having

unusual telomeres as being this very important distinction. It's a kind of side note. And part of that is because they're talking about, I can't remember, it's eight or more different strains that are not just that one type. And yeah, so the counter to their presentation that she doesn't want to give credit. I got the distinct impression she does want to give credit to many other people. I don't think that Brett's lying, that he perceives it, that he gave her all these ideas and that she ran the experiments. I genuinely don't think that's a bad faith argument. I think that's entirely his perception.

And if you're not him, you're not duty bound to accept that framing. And I think that like anybody with, you know, an appropriate degree of skepticism should be very skeptical of that claim because of the relative difference between the two. Yeah. I mean, cause I guess if you take the, if you, if you accept what Brett's saying here then, or, and the narrative of the disc, right. This is part of the idea suppression that was, sorry, what does the C stand for again? The distributed idea suppression complex.

Complex. Yep. According to that she's not acknowledging Brett's contribution, acknowledging lots of other people's contributions, even though Brett's contribution was the most innovative and groundbreaking and so important and so on, because I guess it was too innovative, too disruptive, and that kind of the disc represented by her or whatever had kind of decided that he needs to be suppressed

and not given due credit. So that's one interpretation. You know, there's another simpler interpretation, which is just that maybe Brett is overestimating the quantum of credit that is deserved. I mean, and I say that because it's a very common thing. It's kind of an occupational hazard for academics to overestimate our own importance. And so he wouldn't be alone in that at all.

Yeah, so it's just a bit sad. It's a bit sad really too. It is. I'm just looking at Carol Greeter's Google Scholar page, right? And her top publication is from 1990, telomeres shortened during aging of human fibroblasts, cited by 6254. You go down about 1992, telomere length predicts replicative capacity of human fibroblasts,

telomere shortening and tumor formation by mouse cells lacking telomerase, 1997. Longativity, stress response in cancer and aging telomerase deficient mice, 1999. These are all publications pre-dating any phone call from brett right and they're they're related to the topic and maybe they don't have the specific point that like brett thinks is crucial but again that relies on his judgment to say what's the critical thing and like i watched that that speech and i it it all made sense as a coherent research agenda right that she had been following for 30 years it didn't seem like it just came from this one discovery that they made about the the length of telomeres and mice and indeed that was that was just one minor part of the whole presentation. But in Brett's

presentation, it's the key point. And maybe his argument is that like, no, no, that's just the example of the broader point. But I think there's a big issue with his claim that he is the person who has made these connections. Because what little I've looked into the literature, I can find papers from a couple of years previously, which are discussing similar relationships after Brett's paper has came out and I've followed through some of the reference. I've found papers in recent years, which respond to the points raised in the paper, and some are supportive, some are critical, but they don't treat it as if it was this major theoretical breakthrough. Just, you know, several people have made this point,

including that, that, that, that, and Brett's paper is there. So it just feels like instead of this discovery that's been suppressed and kept out of the literature, it just has its place in the research literature as an interesting point, but not one that revolutionizes everything. And that's why Carol has the Nobel and not Brad. Yeah, yeah, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it. Hey, yeah, you know, it's funny. I feel uncomfortable about this because it does, I do feel mean, like having to point this stuff out. But, you know, I feel like we do have to point this stuff out because Eric and Brett have cast

serious aspersions on Carol's character here and made really big claims. So yeah, we should, I feel like we need to push back, even though it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable. But I think you've probably got some clips there that probably... Yeah, I think I can alleviate some of your guilt, Matt. So let me start by kind of making you feel more guilty by playing Eric pointing out that they aren't meaning anything negative by their things. This is at the start of the episode when they're introducing what they're going to discuss, and they make a very important point, which is...

The one thing I would say is that if anyone else in the story wants to tell their version of events, it would be an honor to have you on the portal. There are no bad people in this story, in my opinion. There are a lot of bad incentives. And if we're going to actually fix this system, we're going to have to look past the interpersonal. Okay, so that's a very worthy sentiment and nice, right? No bad people. This is all about structural incentives and the way the scientific system is distorted. Now let me play a clip which is more closer to the period that we are discussing

where they're talking about i believe this is the decision to to keep things in house when they were talking about this but anyway let's let's have a listen if it's still true that there are no bad people and we don't know exactly what happened but there is no world that I know of in which you're allowed to hold back that kind of information because in part of what's on the line. Right. So, I mean, this is not just a question of academic interest. No. Because these mice are used for medical testing purpose. Not even that.

It's medical testing, but it's also all of the science relative at least to cancer, senescence, wound healing, all of the science that is stacked on these mice that is contingent on their function relative to their healing is all compromised. You're letting year after year of this stuff accumulate. It's malpractice at an incredible level. So malpractice at an incredible level. This is discussing holding publication and keeping things in house.

So I don't know in your case, Matt, but like being accused of academic malpractice, which is not only relevant for like academic interest and careers, but like being accused of academic malpractice, which is not only relevant for like academic interest and careers, but which could be related to cancer treatments, aging, and the safety of drugs. It's hard to gel those two points together that like, we're not saying anybody did anything bad, except extreme malpractice that may have massive implications for drug safety yeah and look i mean that tone is pretty much in keeping with the with the theme that we've just covered with terms of the the way that carol has purportedly you know sidelined and stolen ideas

from brett like the implicit or explicit throughout the narrative is the idea that she has acted very, very badly. Yeah. So yeah, you know. And since this episode has come out, so although they invite Carol on, although I have no idea why she would want to do that. And just to be clear, because she's a researcher and they are alleging a whole suite of offenses

about a very specific incident. And it seems like going on to defend herself on Brett or Eric's podcast would actually be a mistake on her point because she would just get dragged into these things more. But in any case, since that event has happened on several occasions, Eric has quote, retreated Carol when she's made like some statement about black lives matter, for example, recently, or,

or about support for that movement and trying to do better in science or whatever, um, about inclusivity. He's quote, retreated or, you know, saying,

well, that's an admirable sentiment, but when you want to discuss holding back young researchers, maybe you should come on the portal. And then predictably all of the followers from a large, sentiment, but when you want to discuss holding back young researchers, maybe you should come on the portal. And then predictably, all of the followers from a large account will pile on and fill up her mentions. So that isn't the kind of thing that you do when you think that there's no malice and

it's not somebody doing something intentionally. In this podcast, when you read the Reddits or you read the Twitter threads, it's clear that their followers see her as a villain who stole Brett's world revolutionary idea. And so I guess a point I want to make here, Matt, is that there's this tendency, and it applies across a whole lot of contexts, not just an Eric, where when people are going to attack someone or when they're going to make a controversial point that they frame it at the beginning by saying, no, I'm not saying this is definitely true, or I'm not alleging that everyone here is engaged in this, is often referred to as jacking off, right?

Just asking questions. And in this case, and in a lot of other cases, it feels like a strategic disclaimer, whereby your fans or you can point to, look, we never said anybody was doing anything intentionally bad. But then for the rest of the podcast, you can go on and explain just how bad the people are. But you can always point back to that one minute at the start where you said, nobody here is necessarily bad. Yeah. Well, yeah, it does remind me of some more recent episodes of this podcast, I think it does remind me of some more recent episodes

of this podcast, I think it was, where they say at the beginning that they're not indulging in conspiracy theorising here, they're doing conspiracy hypothesising. Hypothesising. Yeah, so, you know, we're just exploring hypotheses here, possibilities, and then go on for the rest of the podcast talking about these assertions as if they're cast on facts yeah uh and yeah you can't it's not like you can issue this card this

disclaimer and then and then that just absolves you because the people who are listening are taking it as just like just like you said with um that the followers basically reading reading this story in terms of carol they're reading it like they're saying it, which is they're not paying attention to the disclaimer right at the beginning of the episode. They're reading it as, what a terrible person. She stole his ideas. She got the Nobel Prize when it really should belong to Brett.

That's what's being said. That's what's being heard. I want to make clear that I think it's a conscious technique that people do because there's a couple of occasions during the episode where Brett goes a bit harsher or harder, and then Eric steps in to add a disclaimer. So let me give you an example of that. I think this one is close to the end of the podcast. I want to say that anybody who is misportrayed by this podcast is welcome. We are not claiming to have absolute and universal knowledge. You are more than welcome to correct the story if

you have knowledge about this that checks out. Right. So like, in in isolation those that sounds extremely reasonable yes yeah but in the context of a 2r40 podcast where you know you include that towards the end after like 30 minutes the message that people get when they when they take it away is that these people are very fair and that the people that they're criticizing are villains who are unable to defend themselves. And if they don't defend themselves, that just demonstrates that they are indeed what they claim. Yeah. I think the other dynamic here, which is a little bit familiar, is this tendency of either online figures or people who are looking to build an online following to kind of pick, wanting to stir up controversy. As well as, look, I have to say there's be, you know, we've seen that before in terms of even people like Alex Jones, you know, really trying to pick a fight or have a fight and then have a very public kind of make up kind of situation. That sort of stuff gets people engaged, doesn't it?

Yes, like Alex Jones picking the fight with Joe Rogan. This is a kind of tried and tested way to drive engagement is to get into a controversy or an argument with somebody and to kind of drive eyeballs to the ensuing car crash as it happens. And there's a part of that which is just the dynamic of human interest to watch conflict or the same way cringe comedy is kind of enjoyable to watch. But the

other side of it is that if a Nobel Prize winner comes on a podcast to defend themselves against someone's accusations that they stole their ideas, of course that will become a massive story. It also adds a lot of legitimacy, of course, too. Yes, no matter what they said. I think Richard Dawkins has kind of made this point

with debating creationists or whatever, that it looks much better on their CV than it does on yours. And, yeah, I just think that the it doesn't an unwillingness to engage and kind of get into tit for tat kind of responses over email sent or who said

it implies that there's merit to things or that this discussion needs to be had. And it's not clear that it does. Because even in the maximal charity version of Brett's story, where let's say that Carol didn't give him adequate recognition for his contribution to a paper,

kind of recognition for his contribution to a paper and where she did, uh, get, you know, the kernel of ideas for experiments from his conversation specifically. Yeah. Then the people who did the experiments, the people who, you know,

spent like years kind of writing up papers, hanging around with mice and breeding them. And like, you know, it's other researchers and it's the people that are on those papers. I think we kind of covered it earlier, but just having an idea and not having any means to test it or not kind of doing empirical work. Because it's been 20 years since these events that we're talking about and surely in that time even if Brett didn't have access to his own lab he could

have collaborated with people who have labs or he could have you know done any number of things Carol went on with her research career has continued on since then and and Brett went into teaching which is there's absolutely nothing wrong with, but it does suggest that like, you know, maybe his destiny was not to be the next Darwin. It was just to be, you know, like a teacher at a university and there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with that. No, no, no. I mean, just on the balance of probabilities, when you have someone like Carol who had this illustrious career long before Brett or any PhD student arrived on the scene

and then continued doing a huge amount of work, collaborating with a large number of people, all of whom were involved, and which ultimately resulted in a Nobel Prize. I mean, in the big picture, the contribution of some conversations or believing that you had an idea that was subsequently used, it just doesn't hold water, unfortunately. No, so where this leads to is like, you know, ends up talking about how he tried to get

this story out and he has contacted journalists, but always they do fact checking. They're interested in this controversy. Could all the drug trials not be safe? Then they do some fact checking and they inevitably pull back, right? And Eric and Brett see this as evidence that this is the suppression complex in action. But the other possibility is just that journalists are doing due diligence. They're checking out. They don't have the expertise to assess what somebody claims is true about a complex research topic. And when they reach out to other experts, they tell them their legitimate opinion, which is this isn't this big deal. And no, we know about the problems

with mice models and the people who are left convinced that it is this massive deal is Brett, right? So like it isn't a suppression complex. It's just a disagreement between himself and the vast majority of other researchers. Yeah, yeah. It's just a difference of perception, as you say, like his perception. And as you say, I believe it's in good faith. I think he honestly believes it. And it's, as I've said a few times, it's not entirely uncommon for people to have those kinds of perceptions.

But it's not a perception seemingly held by anyone else who is either associated with the area or someone, like you say, journalists who have investigated it. And, you know, this is the problem with ideas like a distributed idea suppression complex, which is that they are conspiratorial in the sense that they are self-justifying, you know. So you propose

this astounding new perspective on things is being suppressed it could be the moon landing it could be you know vaccines or whatever and then there's no real evidence for it there's no take-up and you can point to the the system the um it could be the the new world order or the disc or or whatever which is suppressing it and preventing this knowledge from coming out, from the evidence from coming out. So what you're left with is just the unsupported assertions of the people who are proposing the theory. But if you listen to it and if you believe what's being said,

then you endorse this entire... So in the same way that believing that NASA faked the moon landing, that if you want to believe that, then you have to also believe in a huge idea suppression complex, that you have to believe also in the cover-up. This huge cover-up is necessary to support this opinion you have about a specific thing which is otherwise unsupported and i feel like we have the same dynamic here you know in terms of relationship

to the disc and yeah i think i have a clip which illustrates that thinking in action one of the last ones so let let hear it from the master they would rather sweep it under the rug i mean imagine you've got all these knockout mice right these knockout mice there's a major investment in them it takes a lot of work to knock out a particular you've got a central you've got a single point of failure right whose um projections are tendrils into everything right and you've got how many careers built on papers that are now suspect this is like an error this is like a centralized irreproducibility crisis yes it's it's that bad or worse okay and and you know what happens if let's say somebody hears this podcast and they

check into it and they find out lo and behold this story is true yeah well now the fda has a problem what were we saying yeah that by the way that was eric getting to the point to say oh hold on we're not saying that the fda then issues like a disclaimer but you you've got that point is right like you move from oh there's a study and the it didn't get published easily enough about the telomeres, to suddenly all drug trials are undermined. And as they said, the tendrils get into everything. It isn't just a small problem. It's everything. It's the whole American scientific complex, the biomedical complex. It's everything.

And they are very good, both Brett and Eric, are very good at presenting this in a way to their audience. That kind of connects the dots for them. That makes it all sound ominous. That makes it all sound unreasonable and unfair. And if I wasn't in academia, lots of the descriptions of what happens would sound very odd to me and would sound like somebody is up to something behind the scenes trying to stop this come out. But it's really

only because of familiarity with peer review and because of experiences with how academia functions that a lot of the nefarious intent that they ascribe just sounds like mundane things. Your paper gets rejected, you get a harsh review. It's not unusual. It happens whether or not you have this groundbreaking discovery or just like a mundane paper. Yeah, there's this trend to see this huge ominous significance in mundane events. Again, a pretty standard feature of conspiratorial reasoning yeah and

as you say it's probably more obvious to us because we've just been living it we know just how commonplace all these little things are like little tips little tips over over credit right um so someone having an inflated idea of their own contribution. It's as common as anything, you know. So all of these things that are kind of pointed to as very suspicious indications of something very big, you know, just don't seem that way to us. But I can appreciate that if you're not into it in the area, it might seem to make sense.

In the same way, people who are talking about 9-11 will point to, oh, you know, why did they collapse in that exact particular way? That seems very strange, doesn't it? And if you're a structural engineer or whatever, it's like, no, that's not actually a big deal. But if you're not a structural engineer, like I'm not, you'd be like, well, that's... It looks like a controlled explosion or that kind of thing. So I think this connects in and we should probably get to wrapping up

given I have no idea how long this episode is. But the whole idea of the portal and to another extent, the Dark Horse podcast is that they're kind of peeling back the curtain from academia to give their audience that are interested in these scientific ideas a kind of insight into that world that they've been denied by the system or you know that if they're not in university or maybe they're not studying those subjects and I want to say that that's like a very appealing notion that you're you're being granted insight into like a very appealing notion that you're being granted

insight into high level conversations and that you're being brought along. There's a little clip that shows both Brett and Eric are saying like, if the audience can keep up with us, this is good. Otherwise, you know, we're just going to talk in the way that we are because we trust our audience to do the research. And that sounds like this. I want to talk about the subjects that you're most associated with starting with your thesis. And I want to get into the science of it using

the portal podcast. If people get left behind, they get left behind. That's just like one illustration, but there's this constant bringing in of people, you know, to discuss high level physics or something. And Eric is, Eric often frames as, well, this is how real science happens. But a lot of it feels like it's also a way that makes people feel that they should get it. And that if they, if they kind of can keep up that they're, they're part of, you know, intellectual elite club that gets it. And the university people aren't any better than that. And I think both you and me have the view, Matt, people who go to university,

they aren't granted any miraculous knowledge or that makes them superior to other people. That's not what it's about. But there is a thing where if you spend years studying a topic that you inevitably know better than amateurs like there's tons of subjects that i'm completely amateur and and i've got a good grasp of them but i'm i'm not someone who's dedicated like a career to understanding like physics um and yeah it's kind of that sort of ted talk feature you know where ted you know ted talks have become they started off like a kind of a nice thing, but became more of giving that sort of feeling of truthiness, that feeling of insight.

Like a sales pitch. Yeah, in a very easily digestible format that sort of gives you that aha feeling, which is very appealing, you know. And, you know, i think people have started to cotton on to that and realize that it's it's an ersatz kind of understanding um you know i listen to a lot of science podcasts just for fun you know in topics i know nothing you know i have no training in like i love space podcasts i just just love hearing about quantum mechanics and black holes and neutron stars and and uh tachyon which is not actually a real thing but anyway it's fun to talk about and i love how they do it because because

they um like you can tell a really good science podcaster because they give someone like me who's i may have i may be a professor in my area but i'm an idiot when it comes to physics um they they have this knack for giving a really good basic understanding of what's going on and highlighting the interesting parts. They obviously don't go into, you know, aspects which require the technical training, but you can often give a lot of very good information to a layperson without getting into that really just, you know know mind-bending technical mumbo-jumbo which every field kind of has but it feel it feels to me that there are other people that kind of do the opposite you know what i mean they don't they actually obscure they talk in a very obscure way

they they use a lot of big words and make allusions to to technical phrases and stuff without explaining them. And the idea is to convince or to kind of, you know, either convince the audience that the audience is smart and to give them the feeling but not the reality of being privy to some sort of inside information or perhaps the intent is more to convince the audience that they are smart, they are you know just this yeah there's this oracle or whatever so it's a very different tone i the science podcasts i really enjoy they're self-deprecating they don't use technical mumbo jumbo they they're very casual

and it's hard to explain just go you know anyone listening to this, go listen to those podcasts and hear the difference is probably what I would say. Yeah. Well, I think that, like, this episode is perhaps not as bad as some of the other ones in terms of the, like, techno bubble because maybe partly because of Brett. Like, they spend some time to try and break down ideas. But in all instances, there always feels,

and it comes through in this episode, but it comes through in other episodes as well, that there's a performative aspect to both of the Weinsteins, which is that if they have a way to get across an idea that illustrates how smart they are that can make references to obscure theorists or that can invoke technical terms they will choose that over you know a simple version that doesn't require referencing obscure 19th century german poets or or so on um and and eric's much worse for this than Brett.

But I think once you recognize that, you start to understand a lot more of the context because I've seen people who have watched episodes where Brett is discussing something with a theoretical physicist and there's a lot of technical discussion. And I showed this to a physicist and they were like, well, who's this for? Because it's not like general audience, but it's also not technical enough for physicists.

But it feels more like, yes, in some sense, it's a performance then. And I would also counter in general that that's the way that science is done, especially grand scale physics or experimental biology because all of those things now although there's individual insight they require these massive teams and labs and stuff so like the norm is collaboration yeah yeah like the advances are not made in a random conversation in a podcast or whatever um yeah there's exceptions well i mean maybe not podcast like exceptions but i mean there are like random geniuses who overturn uh or provide a proof for like a mathematical equation that was unsolved for decades but but they're famous for a reason

but as you're saying the the question your friend asked is, who's the audience for this? This is the key one. Like it's for lay people it's purely performative because it's just technical mumbo-jumbo and every field has it. You know, I could start rattling off about statistics mumbo-jumbo, but there's no point in me doing that except to another specialist statistician who's literally researching, actively researching the area that I'm working in. To do it to an undergraduate or a layperson would be purely performative.

There'd be no reason for it. And as your physics friend indicated, it's not really the kind of discussion that's an actual working research discussion either. So what is it other than performative? I'm just going to make an out a left field comparison here but but you know like one of my other the other one the other things I don't really like is is you know a certain brand of academic writing which you often see in critical theory and stuff like and these sorts of fields which are you, if you're on Twitter and in the culture boards, you're probably aware of this.

And when I read an abstract and read these papers and I see just the elaborate language and the unnecessarily flowery kind of technical terms, and it's almost indecipherable. And it gives me the same feeling, which is what it feels like being deliberately obscure. So as to give that truthy feeling of academia, but without really having any substantial ideas behind it. Rigor. Or substantial ideas behind it.

Yeah. So it feels performative to me as well. So that's just a left field. Well, I think like everybody, even if you're not in academia, when you have a specialist thing, you know, say your specialist thing is like long haul transport or whatever.

And like when you meet people who work in your field or who know it, you get that sense, right? Like you can talk away and you can talk about like the ins and outs, inside or baseball, right? Kind kind of thing most people are familiar with when they meet someone who knows something about the topic enough to appear knowledgeable but after speaking to them for a while it's kind of clear oh you're somebody who can talk about the topic, but you're not actually, you're saying things which are wrong or extremely exaggerated or that kind of thing. And poser might be a harsh

word for it, but it's certainly the case that there's academics where people performatively display skills or opinions on topics and other people go along with it when they're in the room with them. But then as soon as they leave the room, they're like, what the hell are we talking about? Actually, Chris, I've got a funny example there, which is just before I joined my university, there was a statistician.

It's a relatively small place. They had one specialist statistician who they hired who was going to be their statistics guru and do all that stuff for them. And there was very few other people in the institution who really had much, you know, background in statistics. And after a while they started to sense that just something was wrong because this guy would always talk very quickly and using a whole bunch of technical jargon and people would kind of just get baffled with and go oh okay and and then he'd go off and do something and give it to them and after a while

they'd be even though they didn't have a great deal of statistical knowledge they kind of realized that a lot of the stuff he was producing just didn't add up and when I arrived that they asked me to sort of have a chat with him and check out some things that he did and I had to tell them that it turns out this guy's just a complete fraud he had no I don't know where I got his qualifications from some some obscure place they I think they a good statistician is hard to hire basically I think they they were having trouble and hide this guy. And he was a complete fraud.

And he got by for two or three years, essentially just baffling people with bullshit. It was hilarious. Right, yeah. And academics are not immune to it in any way, shape, or form, unless it's in their area of expertise. That's just a point I would make is that Eric and Brett are also saying that people should be skeptical of things. And I agree with them. I just think that they should extend that to the claims that they make as well as the institutions and the academics that they vilify.

So I was thinking that to finish off, there's a very short clip which sort of illustrates this point. It's a bit different, but I think it's maybe a nice note to kind of wrap up on. So when people use analogies, they usually use them to make a complex idea simpler.

And there was a small moment in this episode where Eric attempts to translate a concept that Brett is describing into computer programming terms, making an analogy between cells and computers. And people do that all the time. But in, in this case, as we'll see, the analogy ends up like mixed, and I couldn't help getting the feeling that a lot of it was just to insert computer jargon rather than to make it more clear. So let me just play this for you. This is terrifying. What you're saying to me is, is that if I'm comprised of, let's say, 30 trillion cells, and I view them as each, let's say, subroutines, any subroutine that is not denucleated. So, here I have it. Denucleated subroutines.

And the analogy continues. It would be like me starting to talk about, well, Matt, the phylogenetic origin for conspiracy theories is it's related to the Bayesian probabilities that people attach to statements. And we really should consider multivariate solutions to them as opposed to, you know, like it's easy to do. And maybe it makes you sound smart if you say it with enough confidence, but it's also completely unnecessary.

Yeah, yeah. The point of a metaphor is usually to provide a simpler, more easily understandable version of the complicated thing you're referring to rather than inserting a more complicated thing within the other more complicated i mean it does it does feel performative yeah in this case it even ends up as a hybrid analogy because we've got denucleated subroutines which is like a biological computer program so you know it's it doesn't seem like it achieved what it was supposed to do but um it's picking on an example, but I don't think it's non-representative of the general output.

No, I do recall rather similar things at other points. Yeah. Well, listen, Matt. So we've spent God knows how many hours on this. And I'm sure that people may notice that there are moments during this when the tone dramatically shifts almost as if there was a period of time between different segments but hopefully we can get things you know patched together into a coherent whole but to finish off would it make sense for us just to offer our closing opinions on this big picture or small picture whatever you like yeah sure i think so look i so i guess okay so the big

picture here is that this this podcast was about a it was a bit unusual because it's about a personal narrative but it's kind of crucial in a way because this personal narrative of, I don't know how to put it, grievance or unjust dealing with is, I guess, cited as a key personal example of how the disc, which is an idea that's really important to Eric, I think, comes up again and again in the future, acts to really, you know, compromise and corrupt the entire system of knowledge-making

in various research institutes and academic institutions around the world. So that was the podcast. And so I guess my big picture evaluation of this is that, I mean, first of all, that's a huge claim. And as we said, it sounds pretty goddamn conspiratorial and doesn't gel at all with any of my experience. If something like that was really going on,

we'd expect to be seeing a huge amount of, we'd expect to see more smoke, essentially, rather than these rather idiosyncratic personal stories, which I think we tried to be sympathetic. And as we've emphasised, I think we, you know, we want, you know, believe that Brett is narrating this story in good faith. And Eric is not surprisingly, you know, batting for his brother, which is nice. But as I said, my evaluation of it is that it really says more about their perceptions of things more than anything else. The story doesn't add up in multiple ways.

So, yeah, I'm afraid it's kind of, my evaluation is it's kind of a nothing burger in a way yeah well I like in many respects I feel it's the same storm in a teacup it might be the way I choose to describe it the thing that I would strongly emphasize alongside your point that there's a lot of parallels between what Eric and Brett are advancing and standard you know conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and the kind of tendrils spanning through the scientific enterprises and the media to control and keep down you know maverick voices like there's there's so much of that the parallels things that I listen to

you know on Alex Jones week in and week out But as well as that more conventional stuff, like I said, on denying climate change or religious people denying evolution, they want to believe X, right? Basically all of academia and science doesn't think the same. Therefore, they set about with their theories of how the whole institutions are corrupt, you know? Yeah, and I think the crucial distinction there is that not only the reason that science doesn't think that is because there's a mass of evidence which supports the view that it isn't, right? Because when you get into critical theory stuff and

arts and humanities, of course, there's always debates and there can be various criticisms about the orthodoxies. But when it's a scientific topic like global warming or that kind of thing, it isn't like there's no debates around data, but it is like there's a massive overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of climate change and global warming that's happening. And the same thing for evolution is occurring or any number of well-supported scientific theories. So, yeah. But set aside the connection to conspiracy theories and those parallels. And the other point that I want to emphasize is that this episode, which is presented

as one of the defining moments of science that never was, which is a great injustice that needs hours to focus on, which many people listen to and were outraged by, ultimately amounts to somebody doing research, getting a paper rejected in one journal, and then accepted in their next journal for a solicited submission. Researchers citing it over the next 20 years, and the researcher involved not publishing

anything else on the theory while the field continues to move on. And so as like ground suppression goes, it was a paper published by a PhD student that they didn't follow up on. And that really seems to be it. So, you know, like I said, in some respect, I feel bad to kind of say that, you know, Brett has clearly focused on this for 20 years. And it's a linchpin in kind of Eric's model, albeit that Eric's model extends to like, you know, much wider than the Brett case. But Brett is an illustrative example of it.

Brett is an illustrative example of it. And it just feels like this event isn't that significant for science. It might be significant for Brett and the path that his career took, but it doesn't seem to have these massive implications that he believes. And that's tragic in a way yeah and it would be very hard to hear but i i think that people too readily assume that the option is he's lying so you're saying he's lying or that you know all the stuff they saying is wrong it's no no that's not the point he's telling it from his perspective where it makes complete sense that he would see things that way albeit you know it's self-aggrandizing and that but it doesn't have to be that he's lying he could be telling things completely honestly and it's still not be this grand controversy and and yeah that's that's my takeaways yeah yeah i

guess my other takeaway, I agree completely. And I guess my final comment is that, yeah, it's interesting how like if you don't actually stop and think about it and actually tease it apart, how and you just kind of, I guess, go with the flow. Both Eric and Brett speak extraordinarily well, like far better than you and I, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, they have lovely voices. They sound extremely erudite. And they just have an air of gravitas and thoughtfulness in their manner, which, you know, is very easy and kind of seductive, I guess. It's easy to sort of go along with that and sort of nod to your head because everything connects and all the puzzle pieces fit together if you kind of accept the premises. So, yeah, I guess my other reflection is that they're extraordinarily good at this.

They are very convincing people and I understand. Yeah, in my case, the thing is that I listen to them at times two speed as I listen to all podcasts. So when I actually hear them at times two speed as I listen to all podcasts. So when I actually hear them speak at normal levels of speed, they sound like they've been drugged up and, you know, that like something has gone wrong. So yeah, I can't listen to people speak normally anymore. That's like a problem of my podcast consumption so yeah but but they're definitely much more they speak with much more clarity than than you all right so that's that's

definitely true uh oh well well this was fun to uh deconstruct uh decompose sure add lives to bits so let's say that for anyone that may have struggled to the end of this let us just say both of you thanks mum this is our first crack at this and maybe we bit off more than we could chew with choosing this

episode to start with but we can do better we can do better we promise yeah yeah please just give us a chance but um yeah like if if you like this or like portions of it you know the probably not all episodes will be this incredibly long and we'll we'll be covering other people than the Weinstein so uh so yeah hopefully you enjoyed and we we did over the course of many weeks yep yep it was fun it was great I suggest we both get a beer now Chris we should say that's right a virtual beer a virtual beer Yeah, so I guess maybe here we'll draw things to a close.

I would say, you know, here's the Twitter and here's the thing, but we don't have any of that. We don't have any of that. We don't even have a catchy kind of wrap-up thing. So let's just say thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. All right. all right