Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Is There A WAR On Science? Lawrence Krauss

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

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

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Someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop where taste recognizes taste. There is no systemic racism in universities. Universities used to be the most tolerant varmints and the most enlightened environments for that reason and to pretend that they're not and to point out every single problem and suggest that its basis must be in racism or sexism without presenting evidence. It's not what you should be doing. Some ideas are heretical and should not be talked about, but nothing is heretical in science. Things are heretical in religion.

If you say that ideas are too dangerous, then we're back at Galileo. it's too dangerous to say the earth orbits the sun. 80% of them wrote under pseudonyms because they were afraid. That sounds like the Stasi in East Germany or the KGB in Russia. One of his colleagues said, you should stop talking about EDI. You've got a family. He said, think about your kids. That sounds like the mafia, sound like sopranos, not a university.

Someone who was academically unqualified to be president, who was hired for identity reasons. We analyzed using ChatGPT, all National Science Foundation grants from 2023 and looked at the words like diversity, equity, inclusion, and et cetera, et cetera, and looked at them. And we got about $800 million, was going towards these things that weren't science. Lawrence Krause, what is the single most dangerous idea that's threatening science today? I think it's the idea that some ideas are heretical and should not be talked about

and the people who talk about them should be dispensed with. I think that's probably the biggest obstacle to science, because science is based on not only open inquiry, but it's a social kind of. It's based on being able to speak and have your ideas attacked and then defend them. But nothing is heretical in science. Things are heretical in religion. Things are not heretical in science than they shouldn't be. Yeah. I mean, there's so much in this book that I quite frankly felt depressed. I felt this is a book, Lawrence, correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been on the podcast five times now. I feel like this is the book that you wished you

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

it's really important that others do. And you're right. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, I certainly wish I didn't have to deal with this. I, you know, there are two things I often wish I didn't have to deal with. One was this and the other is science versus religion. Well, you're in luck. We'll talk about all those. Yeah, come on with you. We're going to get both. So we're going to talk about Donald Trump and all the wonderful reforms that he's been making. But first, I want to get to something really important. Before we get to the five point rescue plan that you outline in this book, and I should say that, you know, half the book is written by, you know, of mine, past guests on the podcast, and so forth. So I couldn't be more delighted to see this lineup.

But again, it's depressing. It was depressing to read it. I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's a wonderful read because of the diversity of true intellectual firepower that comes from all genders, all sexualities, you know, as if that's important, all races in this book, all continents, except for Antarctica. I don't know why you discriminate against my former continent, Lawrence. Well, you know, if I could get someone who was in that doctor to write, I would. Well, you lay out this five-point plan, but I think that, you know, I want to start with the universities, which I've always thought of as a bastion, as a safe space in the truest sense, not a flower kind of sense, but in a true safe space for intellectuals until 2023, which really opened my mind after October 7th, it became a hostile place, a place of hatred, vilification, of outright exclusion of me and my Jewish colleagues and friends here, excluded from parts of campus, so much so that I had to testify in Congress about my experience. But I'm going to ask you, when did you come to realize this? Because you were probably a canary in the coal mine, and we'll get to your personal experience later. But when did you realize that it was a hostile workspace for intellectuals that didn't tow the sort of woke line, so to speak? It began as long ago as 1993 when I became chair of the department that you were a student in. And I learned then that as chairman of apartment, I could not hire just anyone, or not just me, the search committee, could not.

not hire anyone, that if we did not hire or put on the short list a woman, we always had to write an extremely long letter explaining why that wasn't the case. And now, I was happy, in fact, I was the, when I was chair, we hired the first two female members of the faculty, which was nice. But the recognition that we were, that we had to moderate our search and make an argument for why we weren't hiring us on the basis of gender or race, it rubbed me the wrong way even then. And then later, actually, I had another experience at case, which I don't talk about in the book, and actually I didn't talk about this in the book either, probably, but the arbitrariness of it, of this kind of identity politics, there was a physicist, exceptional physicist from a well-known

Midwestern university. And he was, he's really first-rate physicist. His wife was a scholar in some other field, and the university wanted to hire her, and he wanted to come as basically a target opportunity and he's black. Oh, and it was a great opportunity for our department to be able to snag this person. And then when we went through all the details, it turned out we couldn't hire him as a target of opportunity as minority hire because he was from the Bahamas. So he wasn't the right kind of black. And, you know, again, that kind of nonsense began to weigh on me. But then it was more, certainly for me, it's been in the last eight years. I wasn't the first to begin to think about it. I started to look at it earlier. But when I started to look at what scientific

organizations my own American Physical Society was doing and also seeing the kind of things that were going on and hiring in my own university. And it became clear and clearer because I had really good students that my white male students who were exceptional had very little likelihood of getting a job, even getting to the point of being interviewed for a job. Issues like this are free speech issues have been a big issue for me. During the Bush administration I spoke out, I had a big debate. I remember having a big debate at an American Physical Society meeting with the president's science advisor about the war on science at that time, free speech and being able to talk about things like climate change and other things. So I guess I've been attuned to that.

And then because of my public profile, I heard more and more about things and traveling around the world. And I had people come and basically write me for help. That was probably another big factor. And once I started to write about it, the fact that the problem was much worse than I imagined became clear. In fact, I was going to say, when you find the book depressing, there's hope we obviously, we try and give arguments for what should be done. But it's depressing because some of these things you wouldn't believe if they weren't real. You couldn't believe this. And one of the things that really, when I realized how bad it was, I wrote a piece, I think it was in 2020 or 2021 for the Wall Street Journal on the ideological corruption of science.

And I got letters from a number of people I didn't know from around the country, academics, who said that, who thanked me for writing it. agreed with me. But every single one wrote under a personal email and 80% of them wrote under pseudonyms because they were afraid that their colleagues or their administration would find out that they agreed with me. Now that sounds like the Stasi in East Germany or the KGB in Russia. It doesn't say, I mean, that's the antithesis of academia where when I was growing up and what I loved about academia was being able to speak your mind, provoke people and have discussions. and be controversial. I like, I think provoking people is a good thing because it gets them to think.

And I certainly do in my teaching too, or have done in my teaching. And the fact that people are afraid for their positions to even agree with someone or to have people know they agree with someone, there's a great quote from one of the pieces in the book, this is a biochemist. I have to read this to you because it shocked me when he said he was questioning. He's a biochemist in his department. This is in Canada in Wilford-Lorea University. And he was asking about the process of hiring a faculty member and the requirements of, he called it EDI.

We call it DEI or some people call DIE, diversity, equity, inclusion. And he quoted, one of his colleagues said, you should stop talking about EDI. My colleague suggested me over lunch. You've got a family. He said, think about your kids. Right. That sounds like the mafia. It sounds like sopranos, not a university.

Anyway, so it was one of these great. growing things that I came at this. As you know, my politics generally have been left of thinner. I'm now called a right-wing pundit, which is amusing to me. I didn't even know what the term woke was until I wrote a piece once because I was concerned with the ridiculous fixation about Islamic terrorism in the States at the time. This was years ago. And I wrote a point saying, you know, if you look at the number of people who died in the States, your likelihood of being killed by a, well, you know, in this case, killed by a right-wing gunman is greater than being killed by an Islamic terrorist in the United States.

But I actually pointed out if you actually did the numbers, it was actually more likely that a refrigerator would fall on you. And I heard, I was a woke snowflake. I never heard of those terms before, and it's kind of amusing to me. And that's the point. I mean, we often talk about, I try not to use the word wokeness, because I say woke fundamentalism, just like when I talk about Islam, I talk about Islamic fundamentalism.

Woke originated as a good term. It was people being concerned about inequalities and a society and trying to make it better. And so it had good intentions. But as you know, the road, good intentions, you know, take you off and down bad roads. And that's exactly what happened. This thing has become extreme to the point where, and when you see in the book, universities are places where people are afraid to speak out, where sound science is often stifled, where people are fired for speaking out, and where merit, which would be the central part of universities, the central thing in universities. universities.

Universities should not be democracy. I've never felt that way. They should always be a meritocracy. And that's the basis of creating great institutions of learning and scholarship, where merit is being thrown out the win. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Yeah, I wanted to just sort of take a step back because when we think about the university,

I think a lot of people look at us as, you know, fighting these incredibly petty, you know, minimalistic, you know, kind of solipsistic, narcissistic, whatever istics you want to use, battles that aren't really that important that don't really affect the common man or woman or disease or whatever they want to call themselves. That's fine. But they're kind of confined because, as the joke goes, you know, the battles are intense because the stakes are so low. But actually, I think things have bled over into the highest stakes of all, which is the public's perception of science. and their funding of science, as we're now seeing in the U.S., is being radically slashed and cut to the bone. And that's inevitably predictable it was from these other effects, which is the superstructure, the exoskeleton, whatever you want to call it, the publishers, the primary school education, social media, not mainstream media, all these different things that cause this skeleton to kind of feed and eat itself from the outside. So what about this kind of complex, this scientific industrial complex, educational complex? What was most predictable and what was most surprising? In other words, tenure, let's just start with tenure, which is something that people vaguely know about.

Is it necessary for you or I or scientists to have tenure in doing science versus someone who studies gender critical theory? Is it more or less necessary for a scientist to have it? And if so, why do we have them at the same university fed from the same funds that get IDC and fringe benefits paid from science grants to non-science granting institutions? So walk us through the role that tenure plays. Okay, we can start with tenure. I mean, but your key point about the public's concern about science, obviously, somebody spent much as life, we're trying to help the public understand science. You're right, that's a problem. And we'll get to it.

But the current reaction, which is horrendous. and in fact, in my mind, more dangerous than the internal war that's coming from the Trump administration right now because of the future science is understandable. It's a reaction to this. So they distrust scientists because of the things we talk about in the book. And their reaction is extreme in the other direction. But let's talk about tenure. I happen to think tenure is important because it should be, it isn't anymore, but it should be a guarantee that people can say what they want and think what they want without being subject to punishments. and say things that are unpopular.

The only thing they'll have to do is defend their arguments on the basis of reason. That is ultimately important. And the purpose of tenure is to basically ensure that. Now, as I say, it's a fake assurance, and many people with tenure have learned it's a fake assurance in the modern world. Universities can get rid of people

and will get rid of people. And there's a number of stories in the book about this where they'll turn on a dime. They will, universities are not interested, especially university. The real culprits here are academic administrators and academic leaders who are not interested in free speech or scientific integrity or any of those things. They're basically salesmen. They have to raise money. And they're more interested in perceptions. And they are so willing to think of what is the best thing for the university in terms of,

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

Eric Pryor, a world-famous, renowned young economist who basically got punished indirectly because his research showed that claimed evidence of racism was not evidence of racism. Carol Hoeven, one of the people who did write in the book, who was a biologist, spoke out about the scientifically correct fact that sex is binary and eventually had to resign. She didn't get fired. but the point is the university, which had valued her, did not defend her when she was being attacked. In fact, quite the opposite. Reprimanded her.

So they're much more willing to side with the mob than with their faculty. I remember being told my father was a professor at Cornell, my late father in the 60s. In the late 60s, there was huge uprisings, black student union, black panthers took over the president's office. And they would just let them have free run, according to my mom. And that was one of the reasons that they agreed to move down to Stony Brook to start the math department with Jim Simon at Stony Brook. So this is not new. I mean, that's 50 plus years ago, right? Yeah, it's not new.

But in fact, if you look at the level and depth with which it's happening, with which departments are being sanctioned, individuals are being sanctioned, I mean, I think the foundation for individual rights and education, I think it's called that now. It may have a different name, Fire. It's its acronym. It's recorded, if you take the present time compared to the McCarthy era, which is the time we all think of, the calm is scare, where, faculty and everyone else was afraid to talk about, the number of faculty who've been removed

or sanctioned severely for more or less free speech reasons is about a factor 20 times larger now. It is much deeper and much more prevalent, I think, and academics are humans, most of them, and one is always going to be subject to rivalries. But the system's supposed to try and protect you against that. It's always been difficult for people to speak out about politically incorrect things. but what shouldn't be happening is that the institution itself should not support those sanctions against free speech. And that's what's happening. And that's part of what's happening. That and the fact that the real problem, and as a scientist, and this is why I wrote about the ideological

corruption of science that we talked about in the book, science is based, look, you know I'm a theorist, and we've had this discussion before. As a theorist, I'm the first one to say that science is an empirical discipline. What matters in science is experiment. Theory is okay. And it's useful from time to time, and I try and be useful as a theorist. But empirical evidence is what determines what makes science work. And then empirical evidence is how you test your ideas, and you base your ideas on empirical evidence. And what has happened instead is you see scientific organizations making blanket statements about racism or sexism being endemic in physics without providing one iota of evidence or medical organizations talking about

gender affirming care for minors as being the right tool to use without any empirical evidence and claiming empirical evidence wasn't there. So all that I've said actually most of my career is that sound public policy should be based on evidence. The universities create knowledge there also should be disseminating it for the good of society. And one of the reasons that it should disseminate it is it could be the basis of rational sound decision making by the public. Yeah. What role do you think that tuition plays in all of this? I mean, let's take a giant step back before I get to tuition, which is out of control. Yeah, it is out of control. I mean, I grew up in Canada where, you know, I remember my tuition was $500 a year and they were raising it by $50. And we marched on Parliament Hill because we said no one would be able to afford $550. I remember that.

It's a far cry from that now. But certainly in the U.S. where, you know, even an out-of-state student pays $70 grand the same as they pay it for its their heart. My daughter and I've had to pay a hundred over, yeah, a lot each time. Yeah. So I want to ask about that. But before we get there, let's walk through for the non-EDU, you know, customer that's watching the podcast right now. When I do research, I apply for a grant, I get money from the federal government or from private foundation.

And the university for the support that they are providing for me, laboratory, electricity, vacuum, hot air flowing through, which I generate enough of chilled water. Let me say that, which you have... Yeah, I was going to say not hot air. It's not a good example. You have chilled water in abundance up there in the north. So they have all this infrastructure, which is obviously necessary. In the medical school, it's much more so because you have human subjects, you have trials,

you have animals and so forth, illegal requirements and ethics boards. But just in the natural sciences, which is our purview, you and I, what we practice, although there are medical doctors in this book, obviously. When we go through it, we get a grant, and we might, at a private institution, pay upwards of 65 cents on every dollar in what's called fringe or IDC, which supports, you know, the health insurance, rather, for me or for my students and tuition, and then there's IDC on top of the tuition, all these different things. But a lot of that, because of the fungibility of money since the time of the Phoenicians inventing the material that we use, that fungibility allows them then to

support institutions that get zero dollars from any federal government entity or even private entity. It's not like there's massive, you know, market forces that are pushing to decolonialize, you know, STEM and so forth outside of STEM and doing it in the Ethnic Studies Department here, which is rampant, as you might know. Let me just interrupt you, because I love interrupting you. The sad thing, you know, we're used to ethnic studies departments and gender studies departments making, you know, talking about decolonizing and oppression and victims. What is really the scary part is we're seeing it happen within the science departments. I mean, I think I began the book talking about.

I was at Yale before I became chairman of the department you were a student in. And we were up on Science Hill. And when I was there, Yale was a center of something called deconstructionism, which was emerged in the literature department. So basically said all knowledge is contextual. You have to look at the, you have to deconstruct every sentence and decide what issues of power and oppression and society affect that statement, blah, blah, blah.

And we used to just laugh. we'd say never here. And then what you see is that the scary thing is that's permeated the scientific disciplines. I mean, even, you know, you have the physical review, which you and I know is a preeminent journal in our country. The physical review, you know, publishes this article on observing whiteness in the physics classroom or white boards are an example of white supremacy. And so you're seeing the same kind of postmodernist nonsense coming in science. So I just want to say that. But if you're asking about indirect costs, which maybe you're asking about, you know, it's interesting to me because I remember before, maybe not.

I was before or just around the time, no, it was after the election. I for some reason or other, because of people I know, actually had dinner with some people who were going to be significant in the Trump administration, which was a new experience for me. And one of the who's involved in ultimately deciding indirect costs for the biggest government science agency, the National Institutes of Health, basically said we want to do a way. with that. We want to do away with that. And I said to him, that's a huge mistake. I mean, one might want to moderate it adeatically over time, but universities depend on this to be able to recruit the best faculty and provide them the services they need to be able to do the research they're doing. And it may be excessive, and I'm sure it's being abused, and I'm sure the University of California took some of that and used it to support the over 1,000 DEI administrators of average salary of

$200,000 that's happening in the University of California system of which you're a part. And so that's that, those are the kind of things one has to look at, but you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think you say, okay, look, there are abuses of the system. Let's investigate them. But let's try and make sure that the purpose of indirect costs, which is to provide an infrastructure so the university can recruit the best possible researchers and provide them the necessary infrastructure that they can do the work they need to do, let's ensure that has happened.

And just cutting it blankly from 65 to 15% in one day, well, that destroys research, whole research enterprises because as you know, someone who is involved in large experiments, the first thing you have to do is you have to make a grant proposal for the next three or five years and you base it on what you need with that indirect cost level. You know it's going to go to support your postdocs and some of the staff that you have in your laboratories. And then if that gets cut, and you, then, and the university says, well, you know, we can't, you know, we offered you, you know, this many TAs for your students, but we don't, we can't, we don't have it anymore. Sorry, you can't have these students.

Your whole research program goes out. So you can't do it in a year. If there's a concern, you have to moderate it, but slowly. And I'm, while I recognize, and of course, as a scientist, while I used to curse indirect costs, because you're right, in my case, it was like 50 cents and every dollar would go to the university. I also recognize. I also recognize. it as necessary in general. And these kind of things can't be taken with a sledgehammer. They have to be done with a scalpel. That's why I've just written a piece that's actually going to come out, I think today, called Trump's War on Science, which is saying that this reaction to what I'm talking about is in many ways worse than the problem. You can't attack intolerance with intolerance.

You can't attack and say some, you know, scientists are woke and therefore all scientists are woke, and therefore all scientists don't do good science. So we're going to penalize the best scientists in the world to make a point. But aren't we are, isn't that because of our good old friend Van Everbush and his endless frontier, Lawrence, that we are throwing the baby out, the orange baby out with the orange bathwater, thanks to the orange man? But isn't that sort of a mistake? I mean, sometimes Lawrence, the enemy of your enemy is your friend, right?

I mean, there's good stuff that you point out in the book because it's up to days. It's surprisingly, you know, it's, you have stuff in here from like a couple weeks ago. I don't know how you snuck that past the publishers, but all my books, they require It would be frozen a year and a half. One of the things where I insisted on a few little editions. But yeah. Well, you did a great job with it. So you're the redactor, the compiler.

I'm the editor, and I also wrote the introduction. And I framed the context of I chose the people and framed the issues. Yeah. Although I gave you with this. Because I believe in academic freedom, once I chose people, I said, you write about whatever you want to write about. Yeah, exactly. And we'll have some questions from some of your co-authors in the book or people that you edited. We'll have those later.

Stay tuned. That's a breadcrumb for later. But Lawrence, come on. I'm going to give you a little bit of pushback here with love and respect. Really? You? Okay. As I do with my friend, people like Eric Weinstein or even people like that I've met like Peter Thiel. Are you going to quote scientists or not? Anyway, go on. Sorry. He claims to be a Democrat like you. He's Jewish from birth. He's a devout atheist.

Maybe not a militant atheist. I think you coined that term. Well, I get called a Milton atheist and I don't know what that means. Does that mean you throw pamphlets at people? I don't really know what a military. I don't know. Maybe you throw stones back or you have a shield when the middle. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe you throw stones back or you have a shield when the stone's history. No, I don't know. It's a wonderful word, Milton atheist. I have no idea what it means. I think that was a, I think that was a neologism or a, what does Stephen, our friend Stephen Pinker call these things a portmanteau, right? A portmanteau. He loves that word, right? He loves dumping. Let's get to the facts here. Okay. So Trump, since he came into office, is radically cut back on a variety of different things, including, you know, funding to institutions that openly tolerated, if not had some affiliation with anti-Semitism, with exclusions. Let's take it. Let's take it there. It's a great example. Let's go for it. Yeah. So isn't, why do you have, you know, is there at some level, again, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Fighting back against this idea and putting people in that were persecuted, like Jay Batachario is a personal friend, director of the NIH. He was persecuted by the Academy, by Stanford, by Fauci, by Collins. Isn't he doing some good? Can you give Trump a little bit of credit? Well, Trump first came in. I wrote a piece, and I think it was the Wall Street Journal, or maybe it was somewhere else, within a week when he put an executive. order about diversity, equity, inclusion regulations, which were polluting the universities. And I wrote a piece saying how good it is. Of course, that was important. But Trump is like, to me, is like a stop a broken clock. So every now and then it's right, but it's, you know, best twice a day. And in case case, not that often. Look, this is my point. Harvard is not only allowed rampant empathy sympathy, while under the guise of free speech, well, at the same time, you know, fighting free speech.

And the National Science Foundation, I wrote a piece showing the National Science Foundation. This was before Trump was elected. We analyzed using ChatGPT, all National Science Foundation grants from 2023 and looked at the words like diversity, equity, inclusion, and et cetera, et cetera, and looked at them to see what fraction of the money coming from the NSF, its budget of $8 million or so or $7 million at the time. And we got about $800 million was going towards these things that weren't science. So the solution of this is to get the university to really respect free speech, to really protect the rights of the students and their safety. And if you think the National Science Foundation is wasting 15% of the money, you cut them 15%. You don't, what you don't do is say the whole university is bad because some administrators have a ridiculous notion of what free speech is and the university isn't acting correctly among administration. So we're going to penalize 1,000 researchers at Harvard and the best physicists, I know some of them,

who've been funded for 35 years nonstop, just got their National Science Foundation grant cut. And you don't think with the National Science Foundation, you don't cut the National Science Foundation by 60% because they're wasting 15%. Many of you are watching this on a television. And I know that if you love the cosmos as much as I do, you'll want to subscribe now. It's a little more tricky on TV, but it's well worth your time. Click down below. and don't forget to leave a thumbs up.

More minds, more mysteries, more multiverse awaits you. But Lawrence, do you have an IQ north of 170, according to GROC? When you were trying to communicate this to, you know, someone with a 130 or below IQ, let's say you're talking to David Sachs, who's the president's special advisor on science, technology, and crypto, et cetera, et cetera, who's almost got an open disdain for science. Yeah. Let's say you're talking to him, Lawrence. How do you do it?

How do you instantiate? This is a wonderful idea. go through with the scalpel, blah, blah, blah. But how do you teach them that, yeah, studying string theory, which I think that you've written quite a good deal about before I was born, as you used to say, how do you convince them that, you know, people studying, you know, wormholes in ADS, CFT is not valuable, perhaps, because we don't know that we live in 11-dimensional antedicitter space,

but studying, you know, the CMB polarization is a good thing to study. I mean, how do you actually instantiate that in reality? I wouldn't try and convince them of that. What I try, I think the argument, and it was one I was involved, years ago when you were a baby. Probably again, I think under the Bush administration, there was National Academy of Sciences had a publication called Rising Above the Gathering Storm, I think.

And ahead of that was the head of general dynamics or something like that, and I spent time with him. And the idea was to show, and they documented that a half of the, well, part of the idea, that probably half of the gross national product of the United States today, or at that time, came from curiosity-driven research supported a generation of two earlier. What I would say is that if you're interested in an economy that functions

and how the United States can compete in a world of technology in the 21st century, what you need to do is recruit the best and brightest and have that's determined by, obviously, by experts in the field or to the extent they can, and give them the resources they need to look at, at the interesting problems. And some of them will be doing string theory in 11 dimensions. And that's okay, because who knows, you know, but some will be inventing, you know, some of them will be Stanford graduate students and creating Google. Or maybe some of them will be engineering students who start on Canada, but then come to Penn and, you know, create Tesla and SpaceX. And I don't know

if they were, if they entered illegally or not. But anyway, so that's what you've got to do. You've got to realize that you can't, the government should not be saying, we wholesale don't like, I don't like, I think most of gender studies research, and you can call it research, if you look at the quality of the work is very bad, okay? But I don't think the government can come in and say, you cannot study this, or you cannot discuss diversity, equity, inclusion, because I'd like a discuss and shown how those buzzwords mean exactly the opposite of what they actually mean. But again, Lauren, since they're not effective in changing anything. Since cash is fungible, and necessarily you're going to get a science.

I look at it differently. You spent time in MIT, right? You were there for your PhD, correct? And you advise students there, including a black, I think one of your first PhD students was African American, right? My supervisor was African American. Oh, you're super. That's right. Even more demonstrative of your long-term commitment.

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

The problem is. Only partially. The problem is that universities are not free enterprise in that sense. In free enterprise, what works. I was going to say what the best succeeds, but it's not always the way. It's what works, you know, gets rewarded. And, you know, eight tracks versus, you know, there were all sorts of arguments that was better, but something wins out.

But the risk of that, I think, is that you start valuing departments by the money they bring in. And I don't think that, and obviously that's not right. I think for a university to value scholarship. Because English literature and history are a vital part of understanding ourselves as human beings and what makes people educated. But why not read Lawrence? Why not read the story of Adam?

Or how about this? Read a universe from nothing. It's incredibly you're a gifted writer. Read Quantum Man. Read losing the Nobel Prize. Read all these other books. Why do we have to have separate departments? Again, why not reimagine the university?

We're still using the same model that Gallo taught in 400 years ago that the University of Bologna adopted in the year 1080. Why is that still relevant in some guy or gal scraping on a piece of rock with another piece of rock? Why not in the age of AI completely read it? invent everything and have the literature outsourced as important. I'm not saying that. I love writing. My kids, I teach, you know, the importance of reading every single day and not just nonfiction as I'm addicted to. But Lawrence, you can learn a lot. You know, as Galileo didn't take

many, you know, literature classes. I mean, Galileo would have learned, look, I've learned as a professor that the illusion of teaching is often illusion, that the very best students don't need me. That's right. You can do fine without me. Okay. And I can guide them. I can help them make it easier the process, but they're going to do it without me. But you're not just having those students. I think, I mean, Galileo would have done fine, no matter what without, you know, and did do fine, but he was Galileo. I think what you really need to realize is that you have to ask yourself, is it important

for people to understand not just how to write, but how to read critically. And also what the canon of literature and history is so they can understand the culture in which they grew up. These are all, I think, important parts of a liberal education. I think they add wisdom. I did degrees in mathematics and physics, but before that, I would do history. And I think it was vitally important for my ability now as a writer, among other things, and a communicator. I have no problems with there being just technical schools and people choosing to go to them.

And to some extent, MIT or Caltech are that, but they're not completely that. And but it's really important, I think, to have liberal arts colleges as well. I think for most, because remember, most students are not going to be. academics. No, no, that's right. What their experience in university should be how to think. And there should be many examples of that. And physics, of course, is the best example of learning how to think. But learning how to think critically as a philosopher, even, or as a, or think critically in trying to understand literature, if that, you know, for certain people. And in particular, and this is really relevant when it comes to this issue of disparities, demographic disparities in

Sam. Some people prefer certain things to other things. And so, some people are not going to learn how to think critically better in physics because they hate it or they hate math or they find they're not they don't feel comfortable with math but they love biology or they love Renaissance literature and if you can take what people what they love and use that as a source to help them expand as to be lifelong learners then that's what's important and we have to realize that people have different preferences and as and you know one of the things it's one of the ridiculous things that's argued here by governments and by universities is that demographic disparities in STEM, there being more males in certain fields and others, are due to racism or sexism is ridiculous when there's tons of evidence that people choose to do different things. The countries that are most egalitarian, like the Nordic countries, have the biggest disparities in, say, in terms of the number of women in STEM, for example, where those are countries where there are the fewest obstacles to women. So there clearly are biological and other and cultural determiners of why people choose to do what they do.

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

the Earth orbits the sun. Let's go into a work of great literature. Let's judge your book by its cover. We've added a new feature on the podcast since last time we've added a jingle. Hey, book lovers. We're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it, but it's into the impossible. There's nothing to win. Let's take a look and judge some books. Okay, Lawrence, take us through the cover art and the title and subtitle of The War on Science. Haven't I seen that book before? Well, yeah, in fact, it's kind of funny because I often forget things I write. When we came up with the War on Sites title, I forgot that I'd actually written the introduction for a book eight or nine years ago, written by a friend of mine, written called The War on Science. It was at that time a different war.

maybe a decade ago, it was more like the Republican War on Science. And we thought of changing it. And we talked about a lot of different ideas, but it is a war. And it's not just a war on science. To be clear, there are people in here, there's a great article by Joshua Katz and Sauveig Gold, his partner, about, well, about the classics at Princeton, where Princeton, for example, has decided that it's, in order to be more equitable and so that everyone can do classics. you don't have to learn either Latin or Greek to get a degree in classics, which of course is from an intellectual perspective, ridiculous, it's also patronizing and racist because the argument is that some people and some

groups are not going to be able to learn Latin or Greek, and therefore we shouldn't force them to do that. The reason I included that is because the classics are really the basis of many ways of science. And then there's a long subtitle. 39 renowned scientists and scholars speak out about current threats to free speech, each open inquiry and the scientific process. And that tells what's really happening. But anyway, I thought of calling you the war on science and scholarship, the war on reason. Yeah, well, there were a variety of reasons. And as you probably know, from having written books yourself,

including the nature of the cover, the nature of title isn't always entirely up to you either. Let's go back to a very dark period of the summer of 2020. And we witnessed great upheaval. We had COVID and running rampant and at least upheaving, if that's a word, the society here. the States, and I'm sure there too. But then there was a more pernicious, insidious, invidious sort of indoctrination campaign that made us all out to be racist, you know, homophobic, stem-hating individuals. And that then permeated to other areas. It bled through the blood-brain barrier to get to publishers, to get through books, to get through cancellation and the rampant cancellation culture. But what sorts of, you know, publications that did make it through the very

you know, tendacious gold posts of that time. What most kind of thought that, what most caused you to think that Sokol was writing under a pseudonym again? What most egregiously exhibited this kind of insanity that Sokol first brought to our attention in the 1990s when, what was it? I mean, I actually use that analogy. It's not so much of the COVID era with the distortion of science. And again, I'm going to taking a slight detour because I remember when COVID first came out, I thought this is going to be a great example, a learning experience for people to learn how science works. Because it, you know, one of the big, I wrote a book, as you know, the physics is Star Trek. And I said, one of the biggest mistakes or one of the big misconceptions that Star Trek gives is that every major problem can be

solved in an hour by Scotty or someone else, that every technological, and when in fact it takes a long time. And COVID is this unknown thing. And I was going to say, and science, and science, works by tentative steps. It turned to be wrong and then you learn the right thing and you move around and the experiments tell you this. And I thought, what a great way for science, for people to see how we learn about vaccines and how we learn about what the disease is. And it was such a missed opportunity. Instead of people saying, I think this may be the case, but we have to test it to people saying, I know this is the case. You know, I thought it would be a great chance for people to see how science is done by baby steps. And often ideas are wrong and we learn from them and we move beyond them.

And instead we heard because in politics and on TV, people are afraid to say, you know, I might be wrong. And this must be the case. And you see these dogmatic statements that were made, follow the science when we didn't quite know what the science was. I think that was a lost opportunity. And by the way, I'm not part of the camp that thinks that it was a vast conspiracy. I do think vaccines were good. I'm glad the COVID vaccines were created. And I do think they saved millions of lives.

And it's a great example in retrospect. in history of the fastest development of vaccines and just looking at the way the way the pandemic proceeded when those vaccines were created. It's clear evidence that vaccines work. So I'm not part of that. I was against, however, having heterodox people be silenced, of course, should you close down schools, should you not? Those are interesting issues. But to argue that you can't have that discussion is what I'm talking about, where heresy becomes heresy. But when so-called, more for me, the examples that I talk about them, I think in the introduction of the book, Sokol, and for the people who don't know what happened, in 1996, I think Alan Sokol,

who's a mathematical physicist, wrote a spoof paper for the journal, I think it was called Social Choice, in which he used the postmodernist language of oppression and heteronormitivity and patriarchy and applied it to ideas from string theory and wrote this article with a ridiculous title, which I could look up if I had to. And the point of the hermeneutics of string theory. Yeah, the hermeneutics of this. I didn't even know what hermeneutics was until he wrote that piece. And then he submitted it.

It was clear gobbledy book and he submitted social choice. It was published. And then he pointed out it was just complete nonsense. It was a big deal and embarrassed a lot of people and allowed the scientists to make fun of the social scientist. Humanities people. That's what I'm talking about. The kind of thing when I, 1996, you know, we could make fun of that. But then almost exactly the same kind of articles start appearing.

in physics journals. I talked about the journal Chemical Education, published an article, A Special Topics, Class in Chemistry, on Feminism and Science as a tool to disrupt the discontious racism in STEM. This physical review article,

called Observing Whiteness in District of Physics, a math meeting, the biggest math meeting in the world. One of the papers was on undergraduate mathematics education as a white cis-heteropatriarchical space and opportunities for structural disruption to advance queer of color justice.

I mean, these things are straight out of Sokol, and something that's even closer to Sokol and which is even more discouraging is an article published by a physicist called Making Black Women's Scientists under White Empiricism, the racialization of epistemology and physics. You know, black women must, according to Einstein's principle, of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression. Well, that's silly enough on its own, but the National Academy of Sciences ended up awarding

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

All right. Well, you know what I'm going to do. And now I'm going to be a steelman for the other side of the case. Okay. So, Lawrence, we know that our ancestors, not us, but our great grand advisors enjoyed a a surplus of opportunities that we don't enjoy. Certainly they would have been canceled. Your former teacher, Richard Feynman, you know, for example, was known for his. Oh, he would have been canceled. He would have been canceled. We don't have to get into it. But the point is,

are we not paying the sins for our academic grandfathers, white grandfathers, you know, most likely? And how else can we, you know, how else can we sort of write the ship and rectify it for people to then thrive in an environment, which was the seeds of which may have been poisonous, rottenness and so far, here at UCSD, for example. We took in Maria Mayer, won the Nobel Prize. We had Vera Rubin here. The reason that we got them, Lawrence, was because places like Argonne and Johns Hopkins and New Chicago rejected women, and many of them rejected Jews.

You know, Feynman was rejected. Yeah, well, almost getting a prison. Well, look, the point is to not deny that these things existed, but, you know, you weren't even born at the time. when mayor wasn't allowed as a woman or Emmy Nother wasn't allowed in the math department in Guttend, you know, one of the great mathematicians of the late 19th and early 20th century. And as a Jew, you weren't subject to the same problems that Richard Feynman had in 1942 when he almost didn't get into Princeton Graduate School because he was Jewish.

These things exist. But to argue that because of the inequities of the past, we have to impose inequities in the present, that somehow I either have to pay or, you know, Well, I mean, you know, the ridiculous thing is that I as a quote, white, although since I'm now Jewish, I'm not viewed as white by everybody, but white male, but as a white person have to somehow pay for the sins of the disgusting, horrible slave trade. When in fact, at the time, my ancestors were impogroms in Russia, I mean, you know,

nothing to do with that. And the point is we have to realize those things were happening. We have to realize there are inequities in our society, and some of them are residual. And we have to work to try and resolve those in real ways, not in fake virtue signaling ways, but to argue that somehow we have to, the only, that two wrongs make a right, which is essentially what's happening, is it somehow you have to make up for the supposed privilege. You know, look, I had some privileges as a person, but I, you know, there are a lot of people who had, you know, other privileges.

You know, my near my parents went to college and I know what I had to go through to get to where I was. But the ridiculousness of somehow saying that we have to counteract. we have to make up for that and that fact that Richard Feynman may have been a libertine in some way or another times were different but that's the whole point

if we want to have a more equitable and more open society that takes into account people's needs and is generous and kind and let's work towards that but the past is the past we should not ignore it which is part of the reason we shouldn't take down

in Canada I think there was just a I just saw there was 7,000 articles removed from the archives and historical archives because they talked about, the RCMP, they talked about them at the time in terms which were far too glowing for what they were actually doing. But this is history. This is archives. You don't change the present by ignoring the past. In fact, you do the opposite. You try and understand the press and you try and understand the present. And let me give the example, we, in response to the fact that Vera Rubin and others were, you know, and Vera was a friend of mine,

were, you know, experienced hardships because they were women. There were things instituted. And as I say, 1993 is, you know, 30 years ago. Over 30 years ago, I had to, even over 30 years ago, I had to write a letter if we didn't hire a woman. So it's not as if things that's persisted. Those issues were solved a long time ago. There is no systemic sexism in universities.

There is no systemic racism in universities. universities are or have been in many cases the most used to be the most tolerant environments and the most enlightened environments for that reason and to pretend that they're not and to point out every single problem and suggest that its basis must be in racism or sexism without presenting evidence it's not what you should be doing as my other late friend christopher hitchins would say arguments that are made on the absence of evidence can be dismissed with the absence of evidence. Now, the last thing before we move on to more lighthearted topics, like actual science that you've been working on, you have a paper out that I want to discuss. Well, you were born in the

U.S. So when you become president in the United States, and I was born in the U.S. so I can become president. Yeah, exactly. And you had the power to issue an executive order to NSF, NAH, NAH, DEOE, NASA. What would it mandate? What would be the Krauss mandate and why? I'd be very careful about executive orders, of course, unlike some people. But I would try and mandate guarantees for the, you know, I'll give you an example of an executive order that was actually, in the first Trump administration, was a great executive order, at least in verbiage, which was, it was in December 2020. It was executive order 13950 called combating race and sex stereotyping. Okay. It basically, it quoted Martin Luther King, stating that a government supported scientific

institutions, people should not be judged by the color of their skin by the content of their character. What could be more motherhood and apple pie than that? Well, the American Physical Society came out against it and said that that order was in direct opposition to the core values of the American Physical Society. The order further argued that materials from places like Argonne National Laboratory that equate colorblindness and meritocracy with actions of bias or from Sandia that said an emphasis on rationality over emotionality is characteristic of white males were inappropriate materials. So now, where I would not have the order is I would not, I don't think an executive order should say what people can or cannot say. But I think what we should say, what the argument should be is that things that violate basic human rights that violate equality of the race and gender and sex that tend to do that should be examined and sanctioned at universities. But what happened was the opposite. In 2020, scientific societies came out against that because it was Donald Trump, among other things.

One of the things I would say is that I would never answer your question immediately because those things, executive orders are very special. But one of the things I really do believe is that government should not mandate what people can say. And all they can do is encourage the rights of people to say what they want, what they believe in. You know, I had a debate actually, well, a mini debate. I was just at a meeting about this whole subject in England. and Christopher Rufo, who in some ways was on the right side of some of this, in my opinion, when he was arguing against quotas and things at universities and what they were doing to get in the way of merit,

argued that public institutions are answerable to legislatures and therefore have to teach the values of the legislatures. And I think that's completely wrong. I think one of the most, one of the best quotes, the reason I put it at the very beginning of the book, is from Larry Summers, who said universities need to have. abandon the concept that they have a central role in moral education. And Heather McDonald said a university has no capacity to eliminate hate, nor should that be its mission. University should teach people how to think.

And hopefully, by teaching people out of think and question critically, they will enhance the morals of the society in which those people later go out and become leaders or active citizens. So part of the notion here is that universities have to be activists on a political front, have to be social justice activists. And the minute you impose political goals on intellectual disciplines, you pervert the institutions, the disciplines themselves. Because whose political goals are you supporting? I mean, you might say, well, I'm all in favor of these political goals because that's my politics. But what if Donald Trump comes in and he's got different political goals?

Are you free to say that you can't do climate change research because Donald Trump doesn't, or whoever, doesn't think climate change is real? Of course not. So, Lawrence, now we're going to take questions from the audience. Lawrence, why did it take you so long to be active in this? What were you doing while people were being accused of this type of BS? Didn't you once take back a remark about something like affirmative action is bad because people will always have an asterisk by their names? Why did you apologize for that from social pressure or did you really believe it? I never took back anything that I know of. I do think that's a big problem. I stand by that. I think part of the problem is, and I know a lot,

and I'm a wonderful, highly talented female scientists, if they're, as the case in the country I now live, Canada, where you're legally allowed to hire only women or only people of minorities for job for computer science or physics or jobs, you can advertise a job and say this is only open to people who self-identify as women. I mean, there are advertisements that say that. The problem is when those, whoever gets that job is always going to have an asterisk next to their name.

Moreover, I have spoken out about free speech and scientific integrity and abuse of science for my entire career. And I was arguing against the Bush administration's anti-science, but I also argued against the Biden administration's anti-science. And in fact, I was, as you probably know, on the Obama advisory team, science advisory team during his election. I was honored to be part of it because what I was impressed me about Obama at the time was that he had 40 advisory teams. and they were all made up of exceptionally good people. So I thought one of the characteristics that seem to me of a good leader is to know that you don't know everything

and to get the bright advisors. When he won, I'm not saying I would have been asked, but I considered whether it would be worthwhile going to that administration. And there's also times when I've considered running for political office at various times of my life, back when I might even a viable candidate. But I realized that the problem with that,

and I also considered becoming university president, I was asked to consider that. And I realized that I could no longer say what I believed, what I feel. I would have to moderate. And I thought I, as someone who's achieved some level of public celebrity or whatever the word you want to use is, I could do more by speaking out and being free to speak my mind as the occasion arose than to work within the academic system or the government system where I would not, for various reasons, because I'm representing more than just myself, I'd have to muzzle myself.

So I'm proud that I've always spoken out and I've gotten in trouble. Some troubles that I've gotten into have been because I've spoken out in a variety of things. Yeah, and that Astros statement may have been one of them, but I've never taken it back as far as I know. Lawrence Krauss, joining us from a Prince of an Island somewhere up north. I want to thank you for your time for this book that took a tremendous amount of courage to write, to redact, compile, to have your fellow authors contribute to. I know that's a thankless job. And I know it was ultimately, what's that? It's like hurting cats.

Yeah. That's an insult to cats. We just got a cat around here at the Keating House. Lawrence, thank you so much for being on. And I wish you great success with the book and with your future essays, papers, writings, archives, and scrivenings. And don't forget to subscribe to Lawrence on Substack, which I am a paying member, Lawrence. You know that for a long time. And others should, as well as donate to the Origins Project as well as their competing podcast.

You know, I don't give out these endorsements cheap, Lawrence, but for other people's podcast, OPP, as the kids say, Thank you so much. And I wish you a great summer up there, as brief as it will be. And it's brief. The spring is briefer. Spring is about three days long. But thank you very much. And it's always been a pleasure to be in your podcast. And I'm happy, I'm also happy we've exchanged podcasts at times. So as you know, you've been able to. So that's great. You're right. It's a book I wish we didn't have to write. But I think it's a, I'm speaking out because I think it's really important. The only way we're going to cure this is if academics speak out, not just these academics. And if the public understands what's happening, then we might

have a whole thing. That's why I wrote it.