The Blindboy Podcast - Science, Art, Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

For Science Week, I chat with Dr Ruth Freeman, and Dr Aaron Golden who has just embarked on a project that uses AI to help communities in the global south track the impact of Climate Change on their agriculture and water supply. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mess up the Jesuits haircut you putrefied owners. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Thank you for the lovely feedback for last week's podcast, which was... Last week's podcast was a bit of a wild ride. It was about plants having feelings, and the CIA engaging in torture on plants, and Victorian fern fetishisation. And I really enjoyed making it, thank you for the lovely feedback. on plants and Victorian fern fetishisation.

And I really enjoyed making it. Thank you for the lovely feedback. I'm doing something different with my life this week. So the past two years of this pandemic and lockdown, it hasn't been great for my mental health in general. Two years of pretty intense isolation and not seeing a lot of other human beings has left me a little bit socially anxious and a bit reluctant to want to be around other people. And I've got a history of social anxiety, so that's not healthy for me. So I want to challenge this directly.

I want to jump into the deep end. So I've started renting an office. Right? I've started renting an office. I haven't gone in yet. And my intention is I'm going to have an office that I have to go to

nine to five, five days a week. And that's where I go and write and research for this podcast and do all my work. And that's where I go and write. And research for this podcast. And do all my work. And that's my new plan. And I'm starting that tomorrow. And the reason I'm doing it is.

Empathy. I need to. I need to interact with humans. I want to go to my office. Which is a shared building. And. Open a door for someone, or say hello to somebody in the morning. Say hello to a stranger. Ask a person how their day was. Notice another person's emotional state. All these basic human interaction, basic human interaction, which I could not engage in for the past two years.

I want to re-engage the social part of my brain. I feel as if the social part of my brain is like a muscle that hasn't gotten any exercise. Do you get me? And that's having an adverse impact on how I feel about myself, how I feel about other people, and how I feel about the world. So I don't want to be thinking about it. I'm straight into the fucking deep end, getting an office. It'll also help my creativity. Two podcasts ago, I spoke about the practice of moving something from your head to your heart,

which is basically proactively making new neural pathways in my brain through actions, through actions and behaviours. Not necessarily thinking about it but doing. So I know that by doing that, putting myself into a situation where I must empathically socialize with multiple people every day, in about two weeks my brain's going to repattern and I'm going to feel whole again. Also I really need to do it for my creativity. I'm writing a new book at the moment and in order to write a book, you cannot do that in isolation.

You just can't. Writing a book means creating multiple characters, and these characters need to feel like real human beings with lives outside of the page, and the best way to do that is when you meet and speak to other people, different people's speech patterns, how they view the world how they carry themselves all these things unconsciously then inform characters that I write it's like a widening my palette it's like going out and buying a lot of new paints rather than painting with the same two colors if you get me so that's what i'm gonna do that's what my office is gonna be for nine to five writing doing this podcast and i'm really

really looking forward to it not only looking forward to the social aspect of it but getting up in the morning and like it's pissing rain but I say to myself I have to go into work so I get up on my bicycle and I cycle through the rain which means my morning begins with conflict and a challenge and the challenge to tolerate the frustration of having to cycle in the rain and put on the right clothes and do all of this stuff. I know this might sound absolutely bizarre. And in a way it is kind of bizarre. It sounds bizarre that I'm making a big deal out of just trying to have a normal existence where I interact with humans. But like the past two years were bizarre. For interact with humans. But like.

The past two years. Were bizarre. Lockdown was bizarre. Like doing a lockdown. To keep. Ourselves. And other people safe. That's not bizarre.

But the practice. Of a lockdown. What a lockdown was. That was bizarre. That wasn't natural. So I'm going to be proactive about it it's going to go straight into the fucking deep end i'm really looking forward to doing it and i'm really excited about the opportunity for spontaneity and surprise that i will now have

by simply going into an office and working rather than working from home and if you're happy still working from home fair play to you that's what works for you but for me that's dangerous i'm someone with a history of social anxiety i can't do that isolation shit i fall back into old toxic patterns that don't work for me so i do need to actually act upon that and make sure that I'm socializing also I need to enforce a sense of discipline and routine one of the issues I faced over lockdown is time time becomes kind of meaningless you know the way the days used to blend into each other because you weren't leaving the gaff? So what I found myself doing a lot was working really, really late into the night.

Like sometimes I'd record this podcast and mightn't be finished until like 8am because I've gone all night doing it. And then I'd be pissed off because then the next day I'm sleeping in the daytime. So by engaging in a routine 9 to 5 approach. In a sterile solemn environment like an office. Those type of restrictions.

I know I'll benefit from that. My creativity will benefit from that. So I got myself a little office. Yeah, it's a small little room with a desk. That's all I need. Luckily, because of the pandemic, there's a fuckload of office space in Limerick at the moment for renting and it was quite cheap. And I'll still be able to be safe as well. Yes, I'll be interacting with people but I'll still be maintaining social distance

still be wearing my mask I'm double vaxxed I do regular antigen tests so I'm feeling very comfortable about that too I actually got the idea

for it of the singer the singer and writer Nick Cave when Nick Cave. When Nick Cave was coming off heroin, he got himself an office and just went,

he went so far as to wear a suit. He was coming off heroin, and he was like, fuck it, I need to sort this out, I need routine. So he got himself an office and literally went there every morning wearing a suit like a businessman

and went there to write his songs and his lyrics and his books and I remember reading that years ago and it was always

something I wanted to try so I'm starting tomorrow that'll be my first day hopefully next week I'll have an update to tell you

how well it went and I'm really I welcome it. I welcome it so much. I'll tell you what I'm looking forward to. Look at all the opportunities for spontaneity that I will now have in my day. I might have an interesting conversation with a stranger or a crow might do a shit on my head. All these, the wonderful chaos of the universe that I tend not to experience when it's just the same shit every day in my studio, in my gaff. So this week's podcast is about science because it's Science Week

and I've been supporting Science Week now for fucking years, going back to 2011. The theme of this year supporting Science Week now for fucking years going back to 2011 the theme of this year's Science Week is creating conversations between the general public research community, policy makers democratising science really

that's what the theme of this year's Science Week is there's loads of events happening Science Week events happening. Online and in real life. If you want to find out. What is going on. Go to sfi.ie.

Which is Science Foundation Ireland. And you'll find out some of the lovely things. That are happening as part of Science Week. Science Week is for everybody. Don't just think it's something. That's directed at kids to try and get them to go into science subjects

it's for everyone young and old I'm fascinated by science I always have been I love physics I love biology but I was not academically inclined

in school I failed my leaving cert so unfortunately science as a third level subject or a career option just wasn't available to me. You know, it wasn't available to me. And I get disappointed about that sometimes because the older I get and the more I learn, I realize that science can be incredibly accommodating to people who are creative thinkers. You know, people who think laterally

or people who can see patterns where the patterns aren't immediately apparent. And those are both ways of thinking that are within my comfort zone. So what I did this week is I spoke to two scientists who were associated with Science Week. And we spoke about a number of things. One of the themes was the parallels

between art and science. One of the scientists I'm going to speak to is Dr. Aaron Golden from NUIG up in Galway and he was involved in this incredibly fascinating project, right, where him and his team developed artificial intelligence that helped countries that are really being impacted by climate change parts of Africa for instance there's communities there that are they're impacted by how their food is being grown water shortages

all the real negative impacts of climate change Dr. Aaron Golden and his team developed artificial intelligence that allows these communities to track the impacts of climate change and what it's doing to their communities so that they can proactively interact and work against it

so that they're not suffering from drought or that they're working around flooding or that their farming isn't impacted and their food sources aren't impacted and i love hearing about projects like that because you tend not to hear a lot of good news when it comes to climate change when it comes to how climate change is reported it it is very catastrophic and it's very alarmist and i love hearing about what's being done to tackle it and what's being done to confront it and a project like this does that also i speak to dr ruth freeman and she is the director of science for Society within Science Foundation

Ireland, but she's also a most magnificent science communicator. She's somebody who actively democratizes science in her actions and in how she speaks about science. She has an ability to make science seem fun and accessible and not in any way exclusive something that is for everybody so if you're interested in science uh you're in for a treat i'll play for you now the chat that i had with dr root freeman and dr aaron golden all right i'm here with dr root freeman and dr aaron And Ruth, you're the Director of the Science for Society Foundation Ireland. And Aaron, you're an astronomer and a lecturer in the School of Mathematics in Ui Galway. So first off, Ruth, tell us about the work that the

Science for Society at Science Foundation Ireland is doing and how does that relate to Science Week? Sure, lovely to be here. Yes, it's Science Week, it's the 26th Science Week this week which is amazing and I suppose at Science Foundation Ireland we do lots of things but the thing we do most is actually give public money to researchers to do research, mostly in the universities and the institutes of technology. So that's what we spend a lot of our time doing getting proposals in from researchers getting international experts to look at them and then giving funding to those projects and hopefully supporting the projects to to deliver really good new knowledge and exciting innovations so so we spend a lot of our time doing that that so that to me Ruth it sounds so my my uh sector

is the art world obviously and it doesn't actually sound a million miles away from the art yeah i think there's parallels do you think because this is what i'd like to know about so one thing i always say with with art when people say to me why should we fund the arts why can't that be private why should we fund the arts and i always say to people because you need to fund things so that artists have the freedom to fail because consistent failure over and over again is how you achieve excellence and if you don't have the time and capacity to fail then you have to kind of aim for mediocrity so that you can get a return and i admire that about science science as i see, is you're funding someone to try and fail as much as possible.

Yeah, I agree. And I think you're right. You have to have that appetite for risk. I mean, no one would go into science if they knew where they were going. It's all about curiosity and new knowledge. And yeah, it's very like the arts. In fact, I think there's a lot more in common

with the two areas than sometimes is presented and you know we need people to take risks if they're going to come up with new ideas and we need to tap into creativity in science I mean all of the scientists working around the country are incredibly creative people. Aaron so you recently were involved in the enabling developing countries to track climate change adaption in their agri-food sectors using artificial intelligence. And when I was going through the SFI website and I was looking at the challenges section, the things that have been invested in, your project jumped out immediately. I was just like, what the fuck is this this sounds amazing i don't know what this is but i know that it's i really want to ask questions about this so you were using artificial intelligence to help developing countries to

check climate change like what's that what's that yeah well first of all can i just add one thing that just to follow on to what you were just saying there and you know the the arts and sciences thing uh i i spent a little while living in in france and in france they see no difference between the two they are basically the same kind of cultural mission um that uh that you know french researchers and french artists do you know they're all seen as the same common good, you know. Yeah, as regards to our project, it's not your average bear. What is it, Aaron? What is it? What is it basically? What involves is the following. We know climate change is happening. Nobody knows really how to measure that. Nobody really knows how to get a sense of what's happening to families and communities in the developing world. How can we quantify what's actually

happening to them? How can we measure, for example, how their crop failures are happening over time? I'll put it to you another way. If you're in the business of trying to help these people, sometimes you can be just overwhelmed with the problems that confront you. And you have to prioritize and you have to come up with the a solution a working solution that you know is going to have an impact you you you know we're dealing with something that you can't run control experiments in a box over it's happening right now and it's affecting people's lives right so the idea that we had was that well listen what we'll do is that we'll we'll sidestep a lot of we'll say the

traditional ways of doing business and we'll we'll use earth observation data in other words we'll use this honest broker that are these earth observation satellites that pass overhead every day and take images and what we'll do is we'll analyze what is that is that like google maps no well it's just like it you know the weather forecast at the end of the day where they show you the weather forecast and this is what ireland's looking like this afternoon it's the same kind of technology except you you you basically stick telephoto lenses on it and you you change if you like the the the the sunglass the filters i like to think about this kind of different types of color filters that you use so you bring up the greens if you like you

bring up the chlorophyll signal that you get in the trees that I can see outside my window at the moment, right? So you take these pictures in basically green light that correspond to this chlorophyll signature. And what I can do, I was thinking about this before we started this conversation. Like everybody kind of knows where Orison Huth is in the Phoenix Park, beautiful big park in Dublin.

There's some lovely forests around there, big deciduous forests you can see right now i imagine there must be those beautiful colors because we're we're in the autumn at the moment from space if you like if you could take a picked bunch of pictures over the year you'd see the trees if you like you'd see that part of the park go from a kind of a brown color to a light green color to a rich green color to the beautiful autumn colors that we see now back to brown so that would be a cycle that you'd see over the year of you know the sort of the seasons as we would see it here in Ireland we can use exactly the same kind of technique and except instead of looking at a mini forest we'll say in our near our cenotron we can look at a community a a village in Senegal, we'll say, next to the

Senegal River, and we can actually study and track the crop cycles associated with the planting of rice. Because, you know, people in this particular part of the world, they live, they subsist, and their entire communities are based around ensuring that they have a good harvest of food to tie them throughout the year. And what we can actually do is we can look at this data from space and, for instance, A, we can track over time how that sort of ebb and flow in crop cycles has been changing over time. And that could be a consequence of the kind of stresses that climate change is actually having on these people and their lives and their community. Not only can we do that, but we but we can also say well let's look at an area we'll say that irish

aid have made an investment in we'll say um uh irrigation works yeah we can actually see we can see what happened before the irrigation works went went in and we can see what happens after the irrigation works so we can actually measure the increase in productivity directly from space. Here's the thing that threads the needle, if you like. People, other folks have managed to do a lot of work and have been able to show that, for want of a better word of putting it, the strength of the green signal can be directly correlated to bushels, bushels of crops so we have a way of not

only finding out those areas where things are happening it's also possible for us to put a sort of a sticker price if you like on what the actual impact is going to be and if you're in a business where you want to be able to say we need to invest something and and know it's going to have an impact the kind of thing that we're working on with the sport of SF an impact the kind of thing that we're working on with the sport of sfi is the kind of thing that a lot of people will find incredibly useful and one question aaron like so in terms of a community in the likes of senegal as you mentioned what on the ground impact is climate change having to these people's lives and what do you know what it's like it's it's it's it here's a good analogy that'll maybe work for pretty much everyone here um you know the whole property

crisis in this country yeah it's didn't it's not something that happened overnight last weekend it's a slow kind of we're like frogs in the pot do you know the temperature is slowly going up and then suddenly we realize it's happening to him it's happening to her did you hear about this and all of a sudden it becomes like everybody realizes it's a crisis. What's happening in the developing world is that it's been, over the last 20, 30 years, there's been slowly but surely, there's been incremental change. Slowly but surely you see the crops would start to fail.

Slowly you would see that people would, society would start to fragment, that people would have to leave and go to the urban environments to get jobs and so on and so forth. It's a slow, gradual thing. OK, this is what happened with the in Syria around 2011. One of the things that caused the Syrian civil war was communities in the more rural areas were having drought after drought after drought until there was huge amounts of rural immigration into the cities in Syria. And this is what laid the grounds for the destabilization that led to the civil war.

Well, I think that's a case in point. You've actually touched on, like in terms of how does this affect us? This is where I feel like I couldn't think of a better example about how everything is interconnected here. Do you know what I mean? Like, I mean, we of all people in Ireland

know the impact of a failed harvest. Do you know? Of course. Do you know what I mean? And I think actually in a strange way, I think like when we were testing out this idea

with like Science Foundation Ireland were really, really good in encouraging us to go out and try to meet people who would be interested to talk to us you know um we went to through uh some colleagues uh connections we went to the food agricultural organization in rome and we gave an impromptu presentation we had no idea who would turn up or how many people were there turned out the place was crammed because it sort of hit a raw nerve. First of all, the kind of thing that we were proposing to do and I think the

second thing was where we were coming from and how we were articulating it, you know. We were coming from this very strong agricultural society. It has a very unique kind of history. It's well connected in terms of doing the right thing by the United Nations and all the rest of us.

You contextualised this thing in terms of Ireland's history, Ireland's culture, Ireland's relationship with famines. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Sure, listen, I mean, everybody knows about the troker of boxes. I mean, you know, like we have, I think Irish people are unbelievably well sort of sensitized, if you like, we'll say, to what happens elsewhere. You know, that sort of sensitized if you like we'll say to what happens elsewhere you know that sort of way and i think um that sort of that was a very sort of interesting kind of backstory i think that i think really i think it made a huge impact in terms of we were trying to

reach out to people and connect to people you know that we had some kind there was something there was a real deep motivation behind this project do you know what i mean it's hard for me to articulate i'll tell you what aaron because there's one thing i've been uh so often i i speak i'm concerned about climate change and it's something i speak about on my podcast a lot just just as a civilian and i often get asked the question sure we're ireland what the fuck can we can do can we do we're tiny who like what's the point and what I always remind people is Ireland has a small carbon footprint but we have a massive cultural footprint and one thing I proposed was like if you look at the scale of St. Patrick's Day here's we're a tiny country and here's this holiday called St. Patrick's Day that's celebrated all around the world, like everywhere.

Why don't we recontextualize the greenness of St. Patrick's Day to become about saving the climate? So now you have this huge, our cultural footprint is massive and we can take it back to the famine because famine was, that's like, that's what these communities are facing now.

And you recontextualize st patrick's day and say it's green now but it's green in a different way and we have this this pre-existing cultural infrastructure to communicate things and that's how ireland becomes important so it doesn't matter anymore that we're a tiny country with a tiny amount of people when people say what about china what about india what about America? We have a cultural footprint. But I think as well, we have to remember that on a per capita basis, we actually have high carbon footprints. So, you know, as well, we have to be careful

that we don't let that narrative that it's not just us. And can you describe that to me? Well, I think if you look at the amount that we consume as individuals in this country, and if you look, if you imagine, there's actually a really nice book called Donut Economics. I heard a really good talk about it, which basically says, if you look at all

the people on earth and, you know, they're kind of fulfilling their basic requirements like shelter, food, you know, education. And then you think about going beyond that into what you might call luxuries or, you know, things that just make life more comfortable. I mean, it's quite clear that there's whole sections of the population who are living without those basic necessities on the globe. And then there's swathes of people kind of in the developed north who are living beyond the planetary boundaries. So like we have to have a conversation about how we collectively live within the planetary boundaries in terms of resources. I mean, look, maybe one day we'll be able to go and get resources from meteorites and other planets.

But for the moment, kind of this is where we are. And, you know, I think two things for people in Ireland, because I think that argument about China and America, what can we do? It's actually a really dangerous route to go down in terms of abdicating responsibility. I mean, we, not everyone, I mean, there's obviously variation in society here, but in general and on average, we are in the top consumers globally. We are taking more than our share, each of us. So we need to think about that. And I think the other thing is, as well as the climate crisis, we have a biodiversity crisis.

And if you look at all of the recent reports about how Ireland is doing in terms of protecting our native species, our bees, our waterways, our ocean, we are not doing well. And in fact, we're doing a lot worse than many, many other people. So even if you sort of take the carbon discussion out of it although you can't because it's all interlinked it's all about the way we're living i think everyone could agree we at least have a responsibility to look after our little bit of the globe and i think if we could be better all of us collectively you know then wouldn't it be great i think it's a brilliant idea about using the greening idea

of St. Patrick's Day. But we have to be able to live up to it ourselves, I think, if we're going to go out with that message. And one thing, just on a point you made there, I was doing,

I made a documentary about two years ago with the BBC about modern slavery that we don't see, which impacts our lives here in in the in the global north of the developed north right and I had a team of journalists who looked at the data and the data is is that people who live in the glue in the global north just to go about our day we have 70 slaves each there's 70 people and then i started to think because this

is something that i wonder about i started to think right let's just say david attenborough was from mars so he's an alien and he's been told from mars can you make a documentary about the earth and i think what he'd come away with, his assessment of human beings, is that you have like this 1% of the population and we're effectively parasites to another 70 people that live in developed countries who have to make all these things that we just take for granted. Yeah, well, I think we have to reframe consumption. We have to reframe, I mean, economic growth as a way of measuring how well we're doing. You know, we have to reframe i mean economic growth as as a way of measuring how well we're doing you know we have to rethink all of those things in the light of what we now know and that's what the science is telling us you know that we can't just keep going taking and taking and taking i mean i think it's it i mean i think one of the things that that makes this such a

it's such an unbelievably complicated it's it's the ultimate problem right absolutely everything seems to be connected to everything else and everybody's looking for kind of easy solutions and there are no easy solutions and i think as rude says it sort of involves a a real sort of paradigm shift in thinking but i mean even doing that i think expecting everybody to just write this is the way it's going to be that's not how people are wired up so i to be honest i think it's it's it's more about having a positive conversation instead of the sort of uh i don't know about you you both but sometimes it can be you can feel a bit overwhelmed when you hear the climate situation

i think if we if there was a sense of we were doing the right thing that there was a sense of we'll say personal empowerment that i sort of a almost a sense of pride in that this is something that this small little country can do well hearing good news always helps but i think you want to feel something that you feel you want to get a you want to get a bit of a buzz off do you know that sort of way yeah instead of that feeling that oh my god you know hopelessness is what people don't want to hear when you hear hopelessness you give up but when like i love like this is what excited me about your project aaron is i love seeing scientists tackling climate change and going okay we're not giving up we're coming up

with new solutions yeah and ruth uh what was it about aaron's project and and his nuig team what was it about that that made you lads so um happy with it what did you choose it i'm looking forward to this yeah yeah well i i mean i think the scale of the ambition was probably what excited us the most when we saw it. Because, you know, this wasn't something that was just about fixing something local. It was about this ambition to say we can take an Irish solution that might actually help us on a global level to tackle climate change. Because actually, as Aaron said, if we can see what's happening, if we can see the difference that, you know, putting in an irrigation system or some kind of aid intervention is having, that'll help us to make better decisions in terms of the right outcome that we want. So, you know, for me, a lot of science is about, you know, how do we get better information so we can make better decisions? And so that really excited us. And I think the other thing that really excited us, and I

would say our international, very, very tough review panels that put them through their paces was the team. Because, you know, people can sort of almost think scientists are automatons sometimes, you know, they're just getting on with going through the logical steps. But I think, I mean, it's easy to pick up when you're talking to Aaron how passionate he is about this area and you know the same is true of the rest of the people on the team with him and you know I think you know a small group of dedicated people who really believe in something and want to make a difference is where change comes from and so I think we were excited about them as a group and we felt look we think they're going to do this. Let's just take a tiny little break right now so we can do the ocarina pause.

I don't have the ocarina this week. Instead, I have a shaker, which is a lovely relaxing instrument. So we'll do the shaker pause. And while I'm doing this, you might hear a little advert. I don't know what it's going to be. Algorithmically generated to target you, based on your searches.

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comparing science to art recently or earlier on in the conversation and the role of creativity in science like one thing for me i was always very creative in school in that i was very good at lateral thinking very very good at coming up with solutions. However, I was not academically strong. So I feel that I would have actually, I'd have enjoyed doing a science subject in school. I'd have loved to have done it. I reckon I'd have been good at it

because of my ability to think laterally, but then my capacity to, like I'm barely able to count, like I'm severely bad with mathematics and this kept me from um i wouldn't have gotten into any science course you know i had to pursue art and is this something that science is interested in ruth i mean taking like when i used to i used to read about einstein when i was younger i hadn't a clue about any of the data that einstein was going on about or any of the numbers but i

used to love thinking about the theory of relativity i used to love thinking about time not being this fixed thing about it being something that's flexible and bendable i used to be able to visualize that and it would give me the same feeling i guess if i was admiring a wonderful piece of art or if i was listening to a song that's impacting me emotionally and i used to adore that about science but then i felt myself i didn't have access to those things because i wasn't academically sound all right well i just want to jump in and say you sound yeah you sound like a scientist to me well i was gonna say what what you yeah what you've just described there is exactly the the rush of

imagination and the buzz flow i called it what i call it flow that's yeah well this is it i mean it's it's it's hard for me to sort of describe but i mean i can totally relate to what you were saying there um and you know what all i'll say speaking from my perspective as an astronomer in a maths department is that it takes all sorts and you know i wouldn't have regarded myself as the absolute top of the class either but i think there was a certain element of sheer bloody mindedness in my own case and uh but you must be handy at maths you're handy at math i can't do long division well i'm having problems helping my 14 year old daughter with their maths homework way out of it are you serious i'm dead serious I can't do long division. Well, I'm having problems helping my 14-year-old daughter

with her maths homework. Go way out of it. Are you serious? I'm dead serious. I'm dead serious. But listen, the bottom line is when I need to know stuff, I need to know stuff. I'm probably not doing my career any favors here,

but the bottom line is that when I need to know stuff, I need to know what I need to know. And the thing that motivates me is the big picture and all of the things that you articulated there, all of the thing that motivates me is the big picture and all of the things that you articulated there all of the things that you articulated there and furthermore based on my interactions that i'm talking to people whether about this project or other projects everybody gets it so i think everybody has that innate ability to think like a scientist to have that creativity as i don't think the public at large when the word scientist comes into their head

they think of a scientist as someone who thinks creatively or thinks like an artist we tend to think of scientists the way we think about accountants, these are data driven, cold, logical people and they're not at all

you know, artists then are the free, creative thinkers. And this is what I'm saying. When Einstein's work used to impact me as a teenager, I was going, this is art. The scale of imagination to think about time. There was the thought experiment where Einstein was imagining time as like a pool table,

like a sheet of a bed. And he's saying that's space and time. And then if you get like a basketball and you put it in the middle, that's the sun. But when the sun creates a depression or when the basketball creates a depression in the bed sheet, that's the sun pulling on gravity and time at the same time. And I used to get so excited by that.

And I used to say, that's art. That's art there as Aaron said like I think this is a relatively new way of thinking because exactly if you think about Leonardo da Vinci I mean there was no division between his creative arts and his science and you know in a way it's one of the things that we have to get away from because as Aaron said it takes all types. And in science particularly, and it's something I'm really, really passionate about, we are not going to come up with all the answers and the solutions if we only have one way of thinking in the room.

And I think it's a real question. I mean, who understands relativity better? You know, you with your ability to actually visualize what's going on with that space-time continuum in your mind, or someone who can add the numbers on the page. And I think that's an open question. If you showed me the numbers, I'd run out of the room. Exactly. But still, I think it's just a different perspective. And again, it was kind of interesting, the whole with COVID and the leaving cert and this idea that we had to get away from, you know, just written exams, that we could look at students and learning in a different way and say, well, the people are different and they learn in different ways.

And look, if we use one method of assessment, we're only going to kind of get one thing and we're probably going to limit an awful lot of people. So, like, we just have to get away from this idea that there's one type of person that does anything. And particularly in science, because, I mean, if you think about the different ways that science impacts on us all, I mean, my favorite example of this is kind of digital technologies and the Internet and all of the born online companies. So it was 1994 when commercial traffic was allowed on the Web. And obviously the first, I don't know, some people remember like AltaVista, that was the first search engines. And then there was probably the early, the precursors of things like Facebook,

you know, the early social media stuff. And really when that technology started and people started sharing stuff online, one of the big controversies at the time, and people might remember, was around Napster, which was an app that allowed people to share music for free yeah and that's what people were getting really upset about they were like geez this is terrible you know musicians aren't getting paid and people are just sharing stuff for free but but at the time and i think it was bill gates he was interviewed someone asked him about well okay now we were all connected and we can just share stuff with no filter what if people start putting stuff on the internet that's not true and he said yeah he said why would anyone do that we shouldn't worry about that at all

and interestingly then it was David Bowie kind of one of the people you know clearly a creative force and David Bowie looked at the internet and I think he probably had a way of visualizing things like you because that's how he described them He saw the Internet almost like a sort of beast. And it had all this power and potential, but it had this potential to be a dark side. And I think one of the thought experiments that I do in my own head is imagine we went back to like the late 90s and we had a discussion about the potential of that technology. All of us, not just, you know, the boffins in the room, but people like David Bowie, people like you. I mean, because I think, you know, if those broader voices have been in the room, I think we would have we would have thought about some of the downsides quicker.

And maybe we could have avoided the situation we find ourselves in now where like the genie is out of the box. You know, regulating, you know, online misinformation, disinformation is impossible. It's incredibly damaging in cases. But I think, you know, we need to learn the lessons from that. And that means we need more people in the room when we're talking about where technology and science are going. when we're talking about where technology and science are going. And one little thing. So just on the subject of that, about,

let's just call it democratizing science, okay? Making it something that, because again, this is something as well in the art world. Like I did my master's degree a couple of years ago in literally in democratizing art. Like galleries, you think of the average art gallery, sometimes that can be a very intimidating space, especially something like a modern art gallery. And people can walk in there

and they will treat it as if it's a church. They're very solemn, they're very quiet, and they are terrified that someone might think that they don't know what the art on the wall means. And when that happens, you've got a problem. That means art has become a little bit elitist and a bit gatekeeping. And you kind of go well

i don't know what that art is because i don't have a qualification in it and i don't like that because i'm an artist i believe art is for absolutely everybody and science i think has gotten to a point where when you have you know you've got people who are anti-vax you've got people who are climate change deniers people who even when presented with science don't trust it anyway right they believe that scientists are lying that's a problem that's obviously true democratizing needs to be solved but if you think back to the enlightenment when like is it fair to say the enlightenment is where we'd say for modern science as we know it today came kind of mainstream is that fair enough i say 17th century so like in the enlightenment

you look at the earlier earliest figures of it they were just really really rich people they were really really rich posh people who had creative inquisitive minds and they didn't have laboratories they had living rooms and you might it would have been perfectly okay for somebody to be both a painter and also to be interested in in the something like optics you know and what i'm trying to get at is when did it start when did the elitism start one thing i was looking at recently in a podcast i was doing i was looking at the there was a victorian frenzy around ferns you know those plants ferns so what happened was around 1830 when uh that would have been the end of the industrial revolution and you had an emerging middle class so you had people in like

london and birmingham and they're living in townhouses and one thing they found was the smog in london was so thick that people couldn't grow houseplants. It was so bad they couldn't grow houseplants. So one person, can't remember his name, he basically invented the terrarium. He was like, if I grow ferns in a glass jar, the smog doesn't impact their ability to grow. And now I've got this lovely terrarium, like a a mini jungle in a tiny little greenhouse in my living room and it created this frenzy of fern collecting but the first proponents of it were women.

It was a hugely, women who at the time would have had to have been chaperoned if they were in public because of the misogyny that was present in Victorian society all of a sudden they were permitted to go off into the woods and collect ferns and give ferns names and all of these things and it became associated with women the collection of ferns and then what happened around 1850 is some male scientists didn't like this and they created the field of botany almost as a way to exclude women and it became like oh what you're doing up in the mountains with your ferns and all the girls that's just stupid shit we've got science now and we have a name for it and you're not allowed in and i think that's a really sad

thing do you get what i'm saying what i'm trying to get at what when did this start when did it start whereby science got into these rigid fields where all of a sudden certain people felt excluded from it or even scared to talk about it well maybe i'll just put in here maybe i don't know when exactly it happened but i i don't like it i i'm by definition an interdisciplinary scientist i have a degree in physics originally i'm do astronomy i've been a professor of genetics in the united states i'm now working in climate change and biology essentially i mean you're looking at plants yeah yeah well i mean yeah i've done work on i've done work on and plant organisms

i'm studying the effects of them and all the rest of it the thing is though i don't know whether we're dealing with i don't know if it's a monkey thing. What I mean by that is I don't know if it's a socio tribal thing. I don't know if we're talking about very fundamental things in human nature that people want to form tribes and feel some kind of affiliation with them. I certainly speaking for myself, you know, when I would, for example, present to another group of, we'll say, experts on something that would be you know totally legitimate piece of work and all the rest of it there might be a certain sense of well where who ordered him where did he come from that's what i'm thinking you know it's unfortunate it's unfortunate but but here's the thing here's the thing right finally we have an all-encompassing global problem that there is no one expert or group of experts um there that can solve

it okay there is no avengers masters of the universe scientist type to solve this problem it requires all types of scientists and you know what it also requires all types of people because you know we are embedded in this human experiment for for want of a better word, that's kind of career and a little bit out of control. And I think, as Ruth has said, it really involves not only people educating themselves and understanding what's going on, but also I think it involves the scientists having to talk to each other. And, you know, as Ruth kind of very kindly articulated, we have that in our project. You've got myself. You've got myself, you've got a plant geneticist,

you have a geographer, you have an economist and you have a computer scientist. That's the core team. You know, I mean, it sounds like the start of a bad joke or something, but there is no way you could have imagined a situation where those people would come together.

But how do you collaborate there? At the risk of sounding like I'm sucking up to my sponsors, it took a lot of, I think, guts and vision for SFI to put together this challenge-based program, okay? Because it's a very different way of doing business, but it brings people out of the woods. It brings people with that kind of interdisciplinary flair. It brings them together and gets them to coalesce

around really important projects, the kind of thing that really motivates you to do things properly as a scientist. And I think that's kind of the key is you can't change people's attitude, but by God, you can steer them, you know? And I think this kind of, hopefully, this kind of positive response to COP26 and this positive response to this issue of climate change is something that people can feel empowered with and get behind,

rather than, as I said to you before, this sense of hopelessness. And as you've incredibly articulated so well this this idea of elitists and special groups and i have an idea ruth do you want to comment on the the activities that you and your colleagues have been doing around the country and also the disciplinary interdisciplinary stuff ruth i find that very fascinating well you know it's actually been really just listening to here and aaron it's funny because we we talk about the challenge program as being interdisciplinary or you know we talk about transdisciplinary research where you've, you know, crossed different disciplines. And in many ways, we really I think Linda Doyle actually said this the other day.

You know, she was being interviewed at the Provost of Trinity, the first woman who was elected as the Provost of Trinity. And she said, look, wouldn't it be great when we get to the point where we don't need to say that? You know, it's just perfectly ordinary. And I think it's a bit like that in science. We've sort of started out with this idea that the sciences and the arts and in fact, all the different kinds of sciences were just all about pushing the boundaries of knowledge and curiosity. And then, as you say, kind of probably from the Victorian times, they sort of went into these silos and disciplines. And then there were special societies for each disciplines. And as you said, Aaron, it probably got a bit tribal then and it was just human nature took over. But we probably, you know, it's that, you know, how do we keep the deep expertise, but just move away? So in a way, transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary

research, we shouldn't even have to mention it. It's about what are you trying to discover? What are you trying to work on? And it is about that pushing the boundaries of knowledge so you know that that to me is is really really what it's all about and so here's a little question route right so recently so i was called into the the art college here in limerick to give a talk right and they specifically called me in so that I would speak to students in multiple disciplines so that means film sculpture painting print graphic design all these separate disciplines just like you'd have in science and they brought me in to because because I incorporate um I'm interdisciplinary with my art practice as well I'm a musician and a writer and a video maker loads of

different things and they said to me if you are to get someone who's a musician and a writer and a video maker, loads of different things. And they said to me, if you were to get someone who's a printer and someone who's a painter and someone who's a dancer and someone who's a sculptor all to work together and speak in the same language, what do you do? And what I said to him was, it doesn't matter what your discipline is as an artist,

at the end of the day, creative lateral thinking is the commonality between all disciplines you're still just a child with Lego at play that's what art is when you're a child and you're playing with Lego

which means that you're not self-critical you're not even thinking about a finished piece you're simply involved in the process as adults artists

that's the feeling that we're chasing that's the dragon we're chasing to be two years of age playing with lego so all artistic disciplines have that in common what is it with science why if an astronomer is to sit down and to have a chat with a botanist or a biologist where what's the common thing there that you can speak the same language on yeah well i think there is that scientific method. And that's what we all got trained in as scientists, which was about, you know, often having a hypothesis or an idea and then saying, well, OK, if I want to know whether that's true or not, I have to go out and gather evidence.

And then you need to be, you know, what is the kind of evidence I need to gather? And then you need to analyze that information and say, well, has this proven my hypothesis or not? So, you know, there is that kind of common scientific method, which I think all scientists can work on together. But kind of almost coming back to the creative piece, I think a lot of it is about what is the question you're actually trying to answer. And I think that's particularly, because in many ways, you know, designing an experiment to do something, you know, that's sort of

part of the scientific training. It's what you can do. But I think it's those key inventive steps, those kind of eureka moments that are kind of the magic in science. And actually, so a lot of those come from the creative side

of scientists. And, you know, it's one of the things that we're doing at the moment. We're facilitating a campaign called Creating Our Future. And that campaign is about talking to many, many people about their ideas for science. that struck me and again Aaron I don't know what you think about this a lot of scientists sort of pick their discipline quite early on you know they do their PhD maybe in their early 20s and then they might go on and they kind of tend to stay in roughly the same area because then they become a deep specialist in that area so it's quite hard to move so so someone like Aaron who's moved from sort of astronomy physics math genetics that's quite you're quite unusual i think aaron what i'd like to ask there are my colleagues tell me on a personal level then aaron right do you have you come up against uh what we call gatekeeping like does that make

your job difficult for you look i'll give you an example when i was working in the states um i was working in a medical school in new york and i i i can do this thing called genomics right so i can i can work on the computational analysis of dna information it's just a signal processing problem from from a kind of a physics perspective but it's incredibly interesting but anyway i remember why i would write grants and it was a big thing over there and so you'd write a project proposal to get funding and if i was part of a project proposal with another colleague uh the grant review would say uh and the genomics aspect as embodied by dr golden is extremely solid and has a great chance of success and all the rest of it but when i would put in a project proposal i'm not moaning here i

just want to give this no this is when i when i When I put in a proposal, it would come back with the candidate does not have the qualified background or experience. So, I mean, to me, like, you know, you used the word gatekeeping. I think to some extent, you know, people work within these boundaries, we'll say. boundaries we'll say and i think you know they assess within disciplines they assess themselves by these metrics we'll say and i think sometimes when people move across boundaries that can sort of conflict with the way that people are comfortable with assessing things i think root to reach the phrase of some that deep expertise thing i mean it's it's uh it's a great thing to have but i think to some extent it's sort of it limits creativity i'd say so there was a guy there's a fellow called jared um he wrote this he wrote these he's wrote jared diamond is this jared

diamond yeah he he was he once i read a really interesting um interview with him where basically he was he was an interdisciplinary scientist i think he was like formerly a physiologist or something like this but actually he was interested in ornithology or something um but in order for him to get a full-time permanent job and where he was in the states he was advised you absolutely can't talk about your interdisciplinary interests because people won't take it seriously i think that's that's a jack of all trades and a master of none correct that's exactly it that's exactly it and so which used to be called a polymath well i look at some people as i say some people just think i'm a bit erratic but i have lots of interests and I try to express my scientific interests in the best way

that I can. I don't think we have the same latitude we'll say as you're fortunate to have but when you can express it like for example as we're doing now with this fantastic project that SFI funded for us, I think it's a phenomenal opportunity. It's not something

you pass up on and you seize it with both hands. So I'm guessing there're ruth right uh sfi don't seem to give a shit about these boundaries well as in like what aaron was describing there was you know and it again it's similar in the arts you have certain funds that you can apply to but these funds the boundaries of them can be quite strict so this is a fund for writers so if you come at this as a painter who wants to have a crack at writing then your project you're not getting funded but by the sounds of SFI you looked at Aaron's project and it's all these different disciplines working together and he says yeah we're interested in that we don't care about

those boundaries well Aaron would probably say we have plenty of boundaries but we are trying to do better I mean look as a public funder you're always pushed to put more boundaries in place and i think one of the things that our boss says mark ferguson who's the director general you know have a few important rules but not lots of silly rules and i think that kind of tries to guide us where where you need to have boundaries we have them but but have as few as possible and i think it's getting better i mean aaron's right the way science used to be looked at by you know when when if you wrote a grant and it went to other scientists to look at they'd sort of count well you've only published x amount of papers in that area so you know you

don't have the background and we've actually totally flipped the way we get people to tell us what they've done as a scientist so we ask them, rather than submitting a CV with everything they've done now, we say to them, tell us what you've done. Just tell us. Why is it important? And what have you done about it? And I think that allows a lot more flexibility in how people can respond so that someone who is a polymath or who has bright ideas can actually have a framework to come in and get funding from us so that's what we want what we want is excellent exciting projects that are going to make a difference and the other thing then ruth is so sfi's money comes from the government yeah so i'm guessing then the importance of something like science week is for like

government money is the people's money so it's so that the average person on the street understands this is a valuable thing for your tax money to be going towards this is why this is important so science week is a way to communicate that to everybody exactly and i mean again i mean it's something i feel so strongly about that people have a bit like you talked about the democratization of art they actually have a right to have their voice heard in where new knowledge is going and is taking us because you know in some ways if you think about science and research it's potential because it hasn't happened yet yeah and I think that's why you know what questions we choose to look at and who we get to look at them those things actually matter because we can change the course of of the way

things go and that's why science week for us and again science week used to be a kind of not really a rarefied event but it really you would never have even known it was happening I mean it was if you had kids in school they might have done an activity for Science Week or there might have been something in a university. But when I took over Science Week about, God, seven or eight years ago now, working with, you know, great colleagues, we just said, we have to do this differently. Like the people who don't feel that they have access to science,

exactly like they may feel uncomfortable walking into a quiet gallery, they probably are daunted by the gates of the university so we just said we're not do we're not doing that so we actually thought right we're going out to the local breastfeeding group and we're having an event there we're going to a deprived area where you know there are people who don't feel like they have a voice and access and that's where the event is going to happen uh you know we moved to do much more on broadcast but not a broadcast which said here's a science show a broadcast which was about something else but you know had that information embedded in it so that it would allow people who maybe felt science wasn't for them to actually get access because

you know really gorilla science it is kind of gorilla science yeah but again not even i mean education is part of it but i don't want it to sound like it's kind of us the scientists telling people because i think there's just as much the problem yeah that right there is the problem yeah because there's the person in the white coat with all the information exactly it's very quiet and listen didactic isn't it and like i'm going to tell you and i think you know what we need to accept and i think you know aaron's project kind of exemplifies it that there's other knowledge you know that is also valuable and some of that is context some of it is you know creative so there's all sorts of different knowledge and you know we're actually working with irish aid now and we're we're funding another sort of similar program like

aaron was funded under but we're you know those projects actually bring in partners in you know the global south so as you know it's almost like another layer of information to add in there's actually someone in vietnam or or in you know one of these countries working on the project with the scientists here. So I just think we have to get out of that mindset of one way traffic. I get you. And one thing, too, there, I was really disappointed recently to hear that the science gallery up in Trinity is closing because I always I used to be in Dublin. I'd call in there all the time. Yeah. And I'd see kids in there. And I've done gigs in the science gallery over the years. Everyone in there was so sound. It was one of these things as well, especially during the recession.

It was just lovely to have this little beacon because it felt very Celtic Tiger-ish. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Which was great because I'm like, wow, even during the recession, this thing is open. I'm heartbroken that that's closing. How do you feel about that because that was the that was like the gates of trinity sometimes can feel intimidating but it's like here's the thing outside the gates yeah it's wonderful well i was really glad i saw again

harking back to linda that she she sort of has said they're they're looking at the decision so you know it would be okay good it would be great i think a lot of people would be very happy and if the science gallery was able to stay open and i think the other side of it is you know, it would be great. I think a lot of people would be very happy if the science gallery was able to stay open. And I think the other side of it is, you know, we don't have a science museum in Ireland. I mean, we're one of the very few countries that doesn't have sort of a proper science museum. So I think, you know, we need lots more of this kind of access, not less. and you know what about science museums and this is what i love about science museums because i'll always go to them if i'm in new york or london they actually work because i'm talking about the democratization of art science museums work as like a first step to getting people into going into an art gallery because one thing science museums what they really have nailed is that generally science museums don't feel exclusive yeah they're noisy they're noisy and you will have that's good sign it's yeah of course it's a good sign you get to touch things in a place i think it was called

the imaginarium in san francisco and it was just this huge science gallery and it's completely participatory yeah if you want to get your hands dirty if you want to get an electric shock if you want to do all these things you can do them and it brings all the senses into the learning so you're smelling you're tasting you're seeing you're getting surprised and then you can choose to look at the you can read about it then as well but what i loved about it was the the holistic way that you're educated in a science museum or in a science gallery and art doesn't have that art is scared of that because once you start doing that with art it's like oh no it's not serious anymore

you know what i mean and i always feel that science museums are actually a great way to get people into art galleries or art museums or museums in general which are a little bit stuffier yeah no i agree i think there's something there definitely and have people put in a proposal for a science like what would we because i'm trying to think of like famous scientists i love here's what i want when i'm trying to find out famous scientists in ireland i always try and find the story behind it because in my podcast what i do is if i'm trying to explain something to someone i always feel that storytelling is the best way to do it because we love hearing stories so for me there's a scientist from limerick in like the 1700s called sylvester o'halloran right and sylvester o'halloran was a surgeon but he's

seen as one of the most important surgeons in the world because of his advancements in brain surgery but the reason Sylvester O'Halloran was such a brilliant brain surgeon is because of the amount of faction fighting that was going on in Munster at the time so faction fighting was such a huge problem that he was seeing a level of head injuries that nobody else was seeing and this then is what allowed him the opportunity to advance the science of brain surgery you know what i mean straight those strange connections yes exactly and you hear a story like that and you'll remember it and you'll understand that's true yeah it goes in it goes in it registers yeah i agree ruth was was the fact that

uh aaron's project contained Ruth, was the fact that Aaron's project contained artificial intelligence, was that something that you were excited about? AI is one of these things that I mean, all I know, I don't know much about AI but I know that people who are in the know say that it's going to cause the third industrial revolution, that when

AI kicks off, it will be like the last industrial revolution. I can't fathom that. I don't know enough about it to know what that is. I just have to trust. I mean, I think AI, it's still in its early days. But yes, it was. I mean, the competition that Aaron entered,

we wanted to look for AI solutions. We wanted to look at that deployment of that technology. But look, I mean, I think a lot of people would say it is still in its infancy. And it's a bit like it's dependent on the data that we have to train the AI to do things for us. And one of the things, you know, we're thinking about now is quantum computing and the next kind of generation of computers that are going to be so incredibly powerful. And are they going to be able to be trained as machines that use AI to take on board vast amounts of data and actually start to do the analysis themselves. But I think the question is, when will they be able to

come up with the questions themselves? And that is still, I think, very, very far away. So yeah, AI as a tool has so much potential, but it is about how we train the AI. And actually, there was some really interesting work that was done. Actually, I think it was in Limerick, but it was looking at data sets around facial recognition software. And this facial recognition software was using AI, but the data set that had been trained on actually was full of biases. So in fact, there was tags on some of the data sets that were derogatory around people of color, their faces, but that was then brought into the AI. So I mean, that was a technology that actually was, that data set was closed, that technology was closed after that work that was done in Ireland. So I mean, AI has huge potential, but again, it's

potential that we have to talk about and it's potential that we have to decide how do we want to deploy it and are you excited about ai like are you excited about that for the future i think for me the idea that ai i mean might be able to look back at that expanse of human knowledge and maybe help us you know come up with new treatments for diseases you know that might actually help us do better with you know dealing with climate change i am excited about that and i think it's really good that we're having these conversations so we can get all the positive potential out of it and try and mitigate maybe some of the downsides so one question i have for the both is regarding the last two years of the pandemic right i don't think i've i've in my lifetime i've never seen such a distrust an open distrust of science and it's really it's disappointing because what i hate hearing

from scientists is what i hate hearing a scientist say so much of my energy is not taken up proceeding in science it's taken up by having to legitimize and explain my work to a person who doesn't believe it I'm talking about vaccines

I'm talking about climate change as well like vaccine denial is a huge thing climate change denial is massive. And now resources have to be put in to try and just say to someone. It's like the flat earth. It's like having to still explain that the earth is round to a person

who is just, no, no, no, it's flat. And fuck you. And then the energy that has to be wasted for something we already know. How do you feel about what's happened to the public perception and distrust of science over the past two years? I mean, it's funny. I probably have a slightly different perspective because I think you're right about those issues. You're not on Facebook as little as possible. As little as possible. Yeah, well, I guess, you know, I think the last two years have been a really amazing window into people watching how science works.

Because I don't know, it's been really interesting because you hear people phoning into radio shows and they're talking about, I mean, they're using the language that we as kind of academic researchers use, like a preprint, a publication that's almost ready to go, but it's not quite ready. And they'd be saying, I saw an article about a preprint and it says that this drug might be useful against COVID. And then, you know, maybe two weeks later, there might be another bit of information. Oh, we think differently now. So the public had to kind of go on that journey with scientists of literally looking into a big black void where we knew almost nothing and then you know gradually stepping forward and knowing more and turning on the lights as we sort of navigated the maze you know we thought it was a contact-borne virus you know now we know it's an airborne virus so they kind of had to go down the blind alleyways with the washing the hands yeah all of that and and you know the masks i mean remember we weren't going to wear masks but but so in a way the public kind of had to go down those alleys with the scientists and realize that you know it's not always right first time you have to be

you keep looking for evidence you keep learning and then you retreat back and you go on down the road turning on the lights as you go and so for me actually i thought that was a really good thing and that that whole dialogue kind of happened in public view almost with the blind alleyways and all rather than just scientists been off working away on something for years and years behind closed doors and then only coming out with the big reveal when they were very certain about things. But here's the thing then Ruth right so what you're talking about there is that science is fallible. Science makes mistakes and tries to correct and tries to learn at all times. But then some people felt betrayed by that because they're like, hold on a minute.

Last month you said this and now you say this. Now it's completely different. You're wrong. And I think these people, these are the ones who had been kind of, I don't want to say brainwashed. These are the ones who are conditioned to believe that scientists, they're experts and they're right all the time. So if they're wrong once, then you can't trust them. Yeah, and I think exactly that. It's kind of away from that elite dialogue.

You know, science is a method. It is self-correcting and that's the beauty of it. Because once you put something out there, everyone gets to kick the tires. And as Aaron will know, as a very active scientist, they're all too happy to go and kick the tires and make sure that you're doing things right. So it is a self-correcting system, but you are still putting your best foot forward and you're not necessarily always on the right path. You know, you do go explore alleyways that turn out to be not the right way and you come back so you so you're right yeah we do need to get away from this idea if a scientist said it they are a hundred percent sure about it and it's definitely right and again it kind of comes down to the communication because i think sometimes people find scientists frustrating to talk to because they'll say

well we're fairly certain about this and then they'll be well is it or isn't it and you know the answer is we have a high high degree of certainty that that's how it is but we could be wrong and you always have to be open to that potential on some things but but having said that you're right and what's exploited is those areas of uncertainty and as a science community we probably need to be a little bit better so I mean vaccines in Ireland is is a good one I mean we've we've actually ended up with a really high vaccination rate it is a good one. I mean, we've actually ended up with a really high vaccination rate. It's pretty good. It is good.

And we know there are pockets of that disinformation about vaccines on places like Facebook. But if you look at the debate that happened around the scientists on sort of the mainstream airwaves, they did debate the type of vaccine, who should get it,

when they should get it, all of those things. But there was no discussion about whether vaccines were a good thing or not or whether we should roll up our sleeves and get the jab in the arm like it was an overwhelming get it these are great and i think that was really really positive i think that contributed to the high rates of vaccination that we have here um one question i have and i'm going to throw this one at you ruth right um so one concern that some people have around science is when research or scientific projects right when the investment money can come from private interests that have an agenda so what i'm thinking about is

fossil fuel like we we knew about climate change a long time ago and the fossil fuel industry put a lot of money into making sure that the information didn't get out and to also funding um funding scientists to say can you come up with some good data here that makes petrol look class tobacco similarly funding uh medical projects to say can you make cigarettes look brilliant also where else did we see this pharma you know this is this is a big critique that some people have a big pharma that you know you can have mental health stuff funded by a company who essentially are like we've got a new drug here and can you like i was talking to dr pat bracken who was the head of the psychiatrists of ireland and pat bracken is someone who is a psychiatrist but

he's critical of psychiatry itself and he spoke about how a huge pharma company basically they couldn't sell their antidepressants in j because Japan didn't have enough words for sadness in their language. They had a more healthier way of looking at the human condition in how they spoke about themselves. And the pharma company basically said, we can't sell these fucking pills in Japan. This is a problem. So they had a look at it and they introduced marketing to introduce new languages and then all of a sudden these antidepressants started to sell very well in japan and this was pat bracken who's the head of the psychiatry in ireland telling me this so he's he's a

a reliable source and when i heard that that broke my heart you know well i think look i mean the private sector is just as it says on the tin it's private and you know they do you know I mean I mean I'm sure that there's good and bad in the private sector like there is in lots of other areas of life but I mean I think for me what we have to do and again it's the reason kind of I do what I do is we have to have scientists and researchers working for us for you and me so that's why we as taxpayers invest in people like Aaron who work in a public institution where he has to tell us what he's doing and he can't he has to actually publish exactly what he's doing and he can't you know hide his methods or pretend oh I had that control group and actually

I'm just going to leave them out because it doesn't give me the results I want and actually a lot of funders are doing that now they're're saying, even before you start, you have to tell us exactly what you're going to do and what your experiment is going to look like. So you can't just cherry pick later and leave out the bit that you didn't like. So, like, I think there's probably more work to do at a national level and an international level. We have to get even better at that transparency piece. So transparency is key there. we have to get even better at that transparency piece. But I mean, it's a transparency. And it was one of the key things. Actually, a lot of the digital research and the AI research. I mean, we all know Watson, you know, and IBM and a lot of Google is doing huge amounts in quantum. And that's all great. And I'm sure they will make huge strides.

It's a bit scary. It can be scary because it's like, do Google give a shit about us? But I think that what can you do can you get the benefit of the fact that the private sector are going to put huge muscle and energy into progressing technology so there could be good things out of that they will actually push the boundaries maybe in some areas fast but what you need is a control you need a break and you need a check so you need publicly funded scientists who are deep experts in the areas, who can look at what's going on

in private industry and ask questions about it, who can inform regulation if we need regulation. But I mean, the worst case scenario for me would be governments and, you know, people even listen to this podcast going, yeah, look, research is interesting,

but it's not that important. And you know what? Like the companies will get on with it and it'll be fine. But for me, it won't be fine because we need people who are just as good working for us because then we can get the benefits, hopefully, of some of the progress that will undoubtedly be driven by the private sector. But we can actually keep a set of boundaries around it because actually we've got our own team of researchers that are looking after our interests and that is what they are doing okay i'm gonna i'm gonna wrap

it up now and what i want to ask is is there anything you really wanted to get across today that we haven't covered uh in particular you ruth with sfi or anything i guess i would just say to people if you know you found this conversation interesting or actually if there's areas of research that you you look out at the world, things that are important to you and you're saying, look, why is no one looking at that? I'm actually that's important to me and my life. You know, we're inviting people to go online to creating our future. We want to collect 10,000 ideas from everyone and everyone's idea is important. I mean, I think that's kind of been a theme that's come through today. You know, you might have a better idea about something than any of us here on the podcast. So we'd love people to do that. And all of your ideas will be read. There will

be a whole group of people looking at them and we will be creating a book of inspiration for researchers. And we will also be using that to say to government look these are important things to people wow okay so you're saying the public for the public to engage and don't be thinking this is a silly idea whatever just send it to you and that will be looked at and this then can literally inform the research that happens so that civilians can have a sense of agency on this exactly wow that sounds class um all right so dr ruth freeman and dr aaron golden thank you so much for this that was an absolutely fantastic chat thank you so much thank you you're welcome and best of luck thank you what a lovely rewarding chat that was um so if you're interested in science week write sfi.ie science foundation ireland

and support the fantastic work they're doing it's a magnificent public service so i'm gonna sign off now like i always do recently i sign off and if you want i'm to play one of the songs that I make on my live Twitch musical. I'll play this after the break. But if you're not interested in that, if you don't give a shit about music, if you don't give a shit about my art project, that's absolutely fine. No hassle. You can say goodbye now and I bid you farewell. For everyone else who's interested, you can stick around after the break

and I'll come back. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks

at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City

at torontorock.com So welcome back. This here is a little new segment that i've been doing recently so over the pandemic i started live streaming right live streaming on a website called twitch and basically what i do is i make up i have musical instruments musical recording equipment and on a live stream I make up songs on the spot basically

but I do so to the events of a video game and the video game is Red Dead Redemption 2 it's like a digital recreation of Wild West America and it's this massive map that's open that i can just wander around and i create songs live i make them up on the spot to this digital environment that's what i do so each week i take one of the songs that i would have made on this live stream there's an audience audience watching while it's happening and

sometimes this audience can make suggestions and stuff as well make suggestions for the lyrics so it's participatory art it's not necessarily about the finished piece it's about the process of making the art and it's been a really enjoyable thing i've been doing over the pandemic I fucking love doing it it's great crack it's such a buzz to be making music the thrill of it the thrill of risking failure publicly the buzz of that helps me with my self-esteem my confidence as a creative person and it's just a really enjoyable project so I'm going to play a little song for you now that I would have made on the stream. And this song is called Get to the Top of the Mountain. So this song was written when I was wandering around Red Dead Redemption. And I'd found a little hill that I was trying to climb.

And for some reason I couldn't climb this hill in the game. It took ages to try and climb this hill and then I realised I'd actually reached the end of the digital map. There was no more map beyond it. And in that moment my character in the game realised that their universe was a simulation. So when that happened I'm like

yeah, we've got to write a song about that. So that's what this is. This is a 100% improvised song that was made up, recorded, produced in the moment and then edited afterwards. This is called Top of the Mountain. I'll talk to you next week. Some cool things up here Gonna get to the top of the mountain And I keep falling down on the mountain And da da da da da da da da Gonna get to the top of the mountain But I keep falling down Da da da da da da Gonna get to the top of the mountain

But I keep falling down Da da da da da da da Gonna get to the top of the mountain Keep on Keep falling down Get to the top of the mountain Get to the top of the mountain Gonna get to the top of the mountain But I keep falling down Get to the top of the mountain Get to the top of the mountain Gonna get to the top of the mountain But I keep falling down Get to the top of the mountain

Get to the top of the mountain Gonna get to the top of the mountain Gonna get to the top of the mountain, but I keep falling down Gonna get to the top of the mountain, but I keep falling down Gonna get to the top of the mountain wall, let me climb it. I don't know how to get there, can I go around now? Is it the edge of the map? Is it the edge of the map?

Is it the edge of the map? Oh, it's the edge of the map. Oh, the edge of the map. We've reached the edge of the map, we've reached the edge of the map, we've reached the edge of the map. The edge of the map and we can't go any further. We've reached the edge of the map, reality is an illusion nothing is real the trees, the cabin, and the sky nothing is real because we

gotta get to the top of the mountain but I keep falling down gotta get to the top of the mountain but I keep falling down Get to the top of the universe I've come to tell you boys I've got a secret I've been over to the mountains

The mountains told me Mountains told me a secret about reality Come back, I need to tell you now, at the top of the real, nothing is real around here. Everything is so fake, and the mountains and the sky told me that reality is an illusion. An illusion that they get away, get away I need to get away, get away from this place Because the guards are looking for me They know that I know that nothing is real And now the guards are looking The guards are looking for me

There's only one thing I can do They wanna, they wanna, they wanna take my secret Gonna get to the top of the mountain But I keep falling down They won't get the ship, it's not a loop. Get to the top of the mountain. Gonna get to the top of the mountain, but I keep falling down. Get to the top of the...

What a saga!