The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Hakeem Oluseyi: An unexpected life in Science, and unpopular truths

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

I confess that Hakeem Oluseyi had not really risen on my radar screen until the last year or two. I was aware of the National Society of Black Physicists, having sometimes gotten notices about is meetings, but, being generally unsupportive of current efforts to compartmentalize scientists by their identity, I hadn’t really paid much notice to it. Then, in one of those ironies that periodically makes one feel better about the vicissitudes of fortune, I learned more about him only after people had attempted to cancel him. When I read about Hakeem’s brave and impressive campaign to uncover the truth about James Webb after a small but unduly loud group of physicists, whose actions seem to be centered about their mutually celebrated victimhood, argued that the James Webb Space Telescope should be renamed, my interest in him, along with my respect for him, rose considerably. Prompted by this newfound interest, I read a book he had co-authored, entitled, A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars, and I was fascinated by the remarkable transformation of a hillbilly turned drug dealer into an academic. Here was someone who could have reveled in begin a victim by lashing out in hate, but instead was inspired to improve himself and those around him. I decided I wanted to delve deeper into the man, his life, his science, and his recent unfortunate experiences while holding firm to the search for truth in a podcast. It was a fun, and fascinating few hours. Hakeem and I both like to joke as well as tell stories, and we are both serious about the effort to understand nature, and to share our enthusiasm about that effort. I hope the combination of our mutual enjoyment about life and science, along with learning about his own story will inspire, entertain and inform. I certainly enjoyed our discussion and I hope you will as well.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.And a reminder that The Origins Project Foundation is programming some live upcoming events, including a live podcast with Richard Dawkins in Birmingham Sept 25th, and two live events in Southern California museums. Oct 15th, at the Bowers Museum, I will be giving a presentation on my new book, and Oct 17th Brian Keating and I will be recording a joint podcast at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. Go to originsproject.org for more info and the opportunity to purchase tickets. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, this is Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast. For this podcast, I have my guest, Dr. Akeem O'Shehihi, who is an astronomer and physicist and also president of the Black Society of Physicists in the U.S. His story is a remarkable one. If you had to pick someone who you would imagine would never get to college, much less post-college experience and then becoming a faculty member at university in physics and astronomy, you would have picked Hakeem. He's written about it in a book that he produced a while ago.

And we talked about his origins and not only the things that got him interested first in science, but the many, many challenges he had to overcome to become a scientist. It's inspiring and enjoyable. And actually also, he's a... remarkably pleasant and jovial fellow to talk to about this and other things. We also talked about a more recent experience of his that another challenge you had to face in a remarkable piece of work following the claims made by some people that James Webb was a homophobic and racist who while director, well, administrator of NASA, had excluded those people

from positions and also spoken out against them. Hakeem did a remarkable piece, I would almost call investigative journalism or historical journalism. He was at NASA and he went through all of the materials to see if this was corroborated because he was quite concerned when he heard it. And what he discovered was that, of course,

the claims were untrue. For that, he should have been celebrated, What happened immediately afterwards was he was vilified by the same people who've been promoting this notion that the James Webb Space Telescope name should be changed, who acted in an anti-scientific manner in the sense that they assumed the answer before they had the evidence. And he provided the evidence. And he didn't have a position on this. He just wanted to find out what the truth was, exactly as a good scientist or scholars should do. And he was vilified for it in ways we talked about. And undoing. And so I think the lessons we learned from this are that you keep focused on the truth, keep working hard, and that you can overcome a lot of difficulties. And also, once again, to be willing to change your mind in the presence of evidence. It's a great discussion. I really enjoyed talking with Hakeem, and I hope you enjoy the discussion as well. You can watch it without advertisements on our critical mass, or you can watch it after that on the

YouTube channel for the Origins Podcast. Either way, I hope you enjoy it. You can also, of course, listen to it on any podcast site. And by the way, if you happen to be in Southern California, on October 15th or 17th, the Origins Project will be having two events. One in Santa Ana on the 15th and another in San Diego. In San Diego, I'll be joined by Brian Keating. And we'll be filming actually this podcast and his podcast at the Air and Space Museum there

on the 15th at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. And I'll also, by the way, be lecturing two days earlier in Vancouver for those of you up north. So I hope I get a chance to meet some of you in person as well. With no further ado, our podcast with Hakeem Oliushahi. Okay, Hakeem Olu Sheaey, which I think I got right. Pretty close. Pretty close. It's really good to have you on. I wanted to have you on, talk to you for a while. As you know, we've been going back and forth.

And I have to say, in all honesty, what originally I wanted to talk to you about, and we'll get to it, is James Webb, and the James Web, say, SELscope, and the supposed controversy regarding the naming of it, which you played a key role in. And I also wanted to talk to you, and I will talk to you because you're president

in the National Society of Black Physicist. And I want to have a frank conversation about that as well. Yeah. But this is the Origins podcast, and I don't know if you've ever seen any of it, but what I try and do is going to people's origins at the beginning to try and. and find out what got them turned on to what they're doing.

And I was going to do that, and I have done that, but you, you helped me in a way because what happened is, you said, by the way, I got this book called a Quantum Life, my unlikely journey from the streets to the stars. And I asked for PDF, and I spent the last four days reading it. And so I now know about your origins, which are even more fascinating than I had assumed. So I want to, before we get to those things, and I also want to talk about your work as well, I want to talk about what sort of ultimately led you to become the man and the scientist and writer that you are. And so the first thing I knew was that before age 13, you'd been to, lived in a whole bunch of places,

the ninth ward of New Orleans, Watts, South Park, Houston, third ward of, is that the third ward of New Orleans or Houston? Houston, and all awful places to be. And then rural Mississippi. Yeah. And you, your book begins with when you were four years old, when your family got busted apart for the first time.

Yeah. And, and you, you had this experience of growing up in both what one might call urban ghettos and the roll backwoods of New Orleans and then, or Mississippi in particular, And I found it obviously fascinating.

Your unlikely journey is indeed an unlikely journey and a remarkable one, a truly remarkable one. I found the read fascinating. I also found it interesting. I was wondering whether I had noticed specifically when in your writing, when you quote yourself, when you're younger, you're quoting yourself and the way you speak is very different than when you quote yourself when you're older. I assume that was with malice and forethought. Are you, the way you.

Right. So I wanted to be true to my voice, right? And so my voice evolved. Like, I showed up in graduate school. So I was in Mississippi from the age of 13 to 24. Yeah. Before that, I was in inner cities, okay? Yeah.

And, you know, all of these places have their unique accents. New Orleans does, right? So, man, I show up to Stanford University at the age of 24 for graduate school. And no one can understand a word I see. say. Okay. So I, you know, I basically have to change the way I speak in order for people to understand me. And I'll tell you what's funny is that, you know, I love, you know, I love the diversity of human cultures. And, you know, America has so many subcultures. And my deep woods location, I just love to take people there, right? And when I do, they all react about the same way.

Around day two or three, they'll put me to the side and they'll go, Hakein, do you really understand what these people are saying, are you faking it? You know, my ear is trained, you know. Yeah, no, and it's funny, you know, people change the way they speak. And a lot of people think it's sort of a feat. And it really is not, it's not the case. I remember my wife lived in Australia and her accent. She grew up in America, but her accent was very difficult to place.

And what, and she worked for the governor of Australia. And what she said was at some point, it wasn't a matter of wanting to suddenly have an Australian accident. It was a matter of being understood by the people you work with. Right. That was basically that's exactly. That's exactly it is. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm still cursed on occasion, you know, but there's so many different features of your upbringing that want to hit on. But one, I want to talk right away, which is before we get to the, I mean, and you know, there's so many obstacles. There's parents who break up. There's poverty. Little access to good education. Drug dealing. So many. And potential violence all around you. All of those things that you might

imagine for a poor black man, young man in many places and a poor person in many places. But one of the things I ask people who become scientists is to what extent reading impacted on their becoming scientists. And in your case, you know, the first thing that comes out is how reading saved you. And you want to tell the story of the Book of the Month Club because I kind of found that kind of an interesting one. Yeah. So, you know, I discovered I fall in love with books. And I have this older friend, Darren Brown, who is pretty successful in his own right. He grew to be the highest ranking African American in the U.S. Navy submarine fleet. And his last post was to run the Navy base there in Ames in San Jose. But, you know, Darren was a couple of years

older than me. He was a smart kid. And he was like giving me advice. And so one of the things he told me was that as a minor, I can't be held accountable to a contract. So I signed up for time life books, you know, and I received these books on, you know, the weird stuff. Yeah. And, you know, the irony of it is I grow up to write a book with time life books. Yeah. And I confess to them. They're like, okay, we forgive you. By the way, I had a subscription to time life books when I was younger. First, you're a book of the month. But then I had all the timeline books. In fact, it's not behind me, but there's a bookcase where you can see all that's, I have the 20s. four volumes or whatever it was.

It took me many years to get them. And they were one of the first, I spent my entire allowance on them. But before that, you had Book of the Month, but I think it's a great idea that you, yeah. Now, but I forget what, how you knew you wanted, you loved books because there was the Bible in your house. But was there something else that you saw before, before the Book of the Month Club? I know that Roots eventually played a role, but yeah.

Yeah. So long before that, I was a seven-year-old in elementary school. and my sister was in middle school, and she brought home Edith Hamilton's mythology. And, man, I just ate that up. You know, I loved everything superhero, right? Yeah, yeah. And so a year later, you know, I'm living in New Orleans,

and there I am with Darren Brown. And, you know, Darren is teaching me everything. You teach me how to play chess. He's teaching me how to play football. And, you know, and we're in the woods. But the next year I get to Mississippi, and I'm introduced to comics, Marvel and DC comics. My cousins.

I was going to say comics. That's right. Yeah, they have crates and crates of comics, right? So up until this time, I'm not really, you know, Edith Hamilton is as close as I've gotten to reading an adult book. Yeah. But, you know, again, there were the time life books that had, you know, ghosts, you know, Oak Island, Lock Nest Monster,

all this weird stuff. I loved it, right? Yeah. And at the same time, you know, once I moved to the country, once I moved to rural Mississippi, man, when winter hits, you know, it's a lot more boring, right? I live in Canada. I don't think rural Mississippi,

the winter is exactly the same. But anyway. It's all relative, man. It's all relative. You know, it gets down to 60. You're free, you know, we had a fire. You know.

60 and we got our, our t-shirts on anyway. It would be 80. My aunt Minnie, who I live with, she'd be like, build a fire, right? Yeah, yeah. But, man,

I was so bored this, you know, at this time period. And everybody was talking about this book, and lo and behold, there it is in the house. And this is the first time I really read a novel,

an adult book. And it really just blew my mind and how vivid the pictures in my mind were, how emotionally invested I was in the story. And so, you know, coming out of it, it was like awakening and being like, you know, whoa, that's awesome. Let's do it again. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think, well, you know, I want to come back to that in a second, but you mentioned comic books and I'd forgotten about that part. And, you know, I, again, used to spend my weekly allowance. My brother, My brother would get me to spend my weekly allowance on comic books that we both read. But that's a great way of young kids beginning to learn to read. And I encourage that.

Who cares what the subject matter is. It's a way of getting gripping with stories. And then the root story, yeah, as far as I can tell, it was the first book that really grabbed you. And to go way ahead, I was going to talk by the end, but it might as well. in some ways in the circularity of where we're going to go on the story of your life, it had an impact because ultimately you change your name. And to some extent, it's because of, of course, the hero of roots being forced to change his name.

You know what, man, I did not have that thought until I was writing this book. You know, as I'm thinking about my life and, you know, I took a year to really like think, you know, Josh, the guy I wrote the book with, you know, we spent a year just talking about these stories to try to narrow it down because I had like a little. a billion, not literally, anecdotes, but how do you create a weave a narrative of it? What are the important stories? And, you know, I started to see things that I had never seen before.

And once I, you know, I talked about how big that story of Kuntikinti and being forced to change its name, the big emotional impact that had on me. Yeah. And as I was thinking, I'm like, wait a minute. Could that have influenced me when I decided to change my name? I can't say that it did not. I can't say that it did. Well, let me ask you, what do you think?

Well, what? Whether an influence you're not, yeah, jumping ahead, we might as well since we brought up. You did change your name rather late, right? At last years of graduate school, just before you getting your PhD. Yeah. It's nice to have a new, I mean, having your PhD automatically sort of creates a new life. So if you're going to, in some sense, reinvent yourself, that's a good time.

But what was it more than that? What caused it at that instant and nowhere before or after? You know, man, a big part of it was that I felt like I was a new person. Like, that's the reality. yet. But, you know, when I showed up, you know, I had been in, and this is relevant for this time, right? Because when I get to Stanford and I discover their libraries, talk about books. Yeah. Yeah. Green Library became my second home, if not my primary home, right? And so, you know, we're born into this world and we're given all these narratives. Yeah. And, you know, I would hear all these narratives about, you know, so there's like what school is telling me. but there's what the older brothers in the hood are telling me, right? You know, they pull me to the side and they say things like, well, you know, black men created civilization, a black man, you know,

and I'm like, what the hell? And I felt like, you know what, let me find out for myself. Let me get into this library and unwind human history. I want to, I wanted to, you know, I used to play this game with people. You know, tell me a year, tell me a century. And I'll tell you who the dominant powers war in the world, what was happening at, you know, pretty much Eurasia in Africa at that time. the rest of the world I really didn't have a good view on.

And I wanted to understand human religions, right? I wanted to understand not just the Western traditions from the fertile, from the Levant, right? Judaism and Islam and Christianity or the Eastern philosophies of

Hinduism and Buddhism, but also, you know, what was going on around Africa, what were the Native American beliefs. And so I did all of this studying, and at the same time, I'm learning everything that humanity knows about the natural world for the most part as a physicist. Right? So there's history, this physical world. And man, let me tell you, it was as if I took my head, poured out a lot, everything I was born with, right? Refilled it.

And I'm like, okay, now I'm this new dude. And, you know, I want to claim, because I also did have that idea of self-determination. And I'll tell you what's funny is funny, not funny. But, you know, I always saw myself, I'm African-American. Clearly, I'm descended from slavery. Well, it turns out that there's not that much in my ancestry, right? Once we did our family history, it turns out my mother's paternal, or both my paternal lineages, my father's paternal lineage and my mother's paternal lineage, there was no slavery. But in maternal lineages, there was, right? So it's a, but even then, you know, my father's mother is, you know, half chock tall Native American, right?

Yeah. So I'll tell you, you know, so as I'm doing this studying and I find out my father's lineage was really crazy about it is that both of his grandfathers were Irishmen, white Irishman. Interesting. Yeah. Now, you want to hear something that goes against the narrative? Get this. His paternal grandfather, his father's father, had two families.

He had his white family and he had his black family with which he had four kids. One of whom was my grandfather, Charlie Plummer, right? But here's the crazy thing. My dad was born in 1933. I don't know what year his dad was born. But this white guy clearly is born some point in the mid-19th century. Yeah. When he died, he left us, his black family, a ton of land in Mississippi.

That's the land I grew up on. Wow. The plumberland in Clark County, Mississippi. Wow. That does go against the narrative, doesn't it? You're supposed to have been forgotten when he dies. Yeah, he's supposed to be like, oh, I don't claim you, right? Yeah, sure.

He provides the land that I grew up on. Well, but, you know, this is good. There are a number of times I want to talk to you and sort of challenge. the traditional narratives, or at least ask questions. Right. The big thing, I mean... You got the right guy. Well, and I hope...

Yeah, I do. I think I do. And you got the right guy for me in the sense that nothing is sacred for me. So I'm going to ask questions. And some people say, how dare you ask that question? I'd say, nothing's sacred, buddy. Every question is... Yeah, we got two nerds that, you know, feel like we're from another planet and look at the...

Okay, good. Objectively. Not like we're members of the human species. Before we leave the books, which we and we've sort of... circled around them for a while, but this is great. I have no agenda in that sense. You went from the novels, though, the one thing that really I was intrigued by, and it was clear to me that that was your desire to have an encyclopedic knowledge

came from the fact that the first books you really had access to were encyclopedias, and you ate them up. You got this world book encyclopedia, and you started to read it from A to Z. Absolutely. And as far as I can tell, been obnoxious to everyone around you by telling them. Absolutely. Yeah. My mom had to pull me to the side and, you know, inform me, you know, how to interact with the humans.

Especially, you know, in a deep South man, a kid correcting an adult, if they say something incorrect, you know, that's not going to fly. You know, that could. Especially if you correct a teacher, and which I know you did, and I remember I had that experience, but for you. And especially I don't, and there may have been a different amics with correcting a white teacher. And we'll talk about that. I don't know if, I think most, many teachers were offended either way, if it can. kid would correct them independent. Right, right. But there may have been even more if it wasn't a white kid. Only at this one school, man. At this one school, there's one teacher in Quitman, Mississippi.

And, you know, that's the other thing about the narrative that is, you know, that is interesting is that, you know, whatever group of people you interact with, they're going to be people that are going to be great to you and they're going to be awful to you. Right. Most people are going to be a spectrum. Indifferent. Right. There's going to be a spectrum, right. So yeah, I ran into that person that was awful to me in that way that happened to sit in a teacher's desk. Now, if I had the judge teachers as a whole, love them. We're going to get to it because as far as I can see, teachers were incredibly important. I want to challenge the narrative because one of the things I want to, look, I want to talk later

about many claims of systemic racism, which I don't buy, and I want to talk to you about them because I'm happy to learn. But, but yeah, so the World Book Encyclopedia, you correct people, you always, you know, you correct people around. and that was great. That was, I love kids to do that myself. And,

and I, you know, because I, because even in my new book, I point out that the one thing that parents and teachers don't say enough is, I don't know,

which is, you always got to seem to know when you're a teacher, and that's not the way. It should be, it should be, you know what? I don't know.

Let's discover that together. Let's, let's, because that's discovery. But so, so the World Blent Secreclopedia, but the other thing the secretopedia introduced you to,

when you finally got to E, and I think it was under E and not A, it was Albert Einstein. Einstein. Absolutely. And that was a huge profound moment in your life. Am I right? Oh, absolutely, man.

It was, you know, love at first read, love at first sight, whatever have you. You know, because think about it this way, right? I was so in love with the natural world. You know, I was watching Jacques Cousteau, Wild America. I just lived in the woods in Mississippi. I was just fascinated by everything. Fire. I was a huge pyromaniac.

Oh, man. In the country, you know, I had. gunpowder, kerosene, gasoline, burnt our trash, had a fireplace. We were doing it all, right? The natural world and weird stuff that I talked about earlier, I get from the time life books. You know, that's relativity, man. That's, you know, you bring those two things together, weirdness and the natural world.

And not only that, I now have this esoteric knowledge that nobody around me knows. Yeah, which gives you that superpower, which you've been craving in the comic books to some extent. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So it all came together, man. But the thing for me, though, is that it was almost like a puzzle and a challenge at the same time because I wanted to really, really get it and understand it. Yeah, yeah.

And I became obsessed with just reading, reading, reading, and quickly realized, hey, man, I'm going to have to learn some math here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, eventually you have to learn some math. And you have a bunch of times where people, you were really good at certain parts of math. And your mother encouraged you to do that. Yeah. She was very excited when you could count well and solve problems. You know, to think about one of my big discoveries as an adult scientist who also interacts with the education world, because I've come to understand that you get well educated in math by the time you graduate high school in one of two ways.

Either it's in your house or you're lucky. Yeah. Right? I was neither, okay? Most Americans are neither. But if you go to school and learn math well, oh, you got lucky, homie, let me tell you. But because the mathematics of special relativity is so simple. Yeah, really is, it's high school.

It's even, well, depending on where you go. In Europe, it's middle junior. It's public school. In the U.S., it's high school or university. But, you know, I was able to reason my way through it. And so by the time, I'm like 14, I'm getting it, right? I understand it. And, you know, computers come out.

Yeah, and I'm 16. I'm like, hey, I can code this up. Yeah, we'll get to the science first. Because I'm trying to think, I mean, for, you know, in many cases, I want to see what the key elements are. that makes people sign us. But in your case, it's even, for the same reason you wrote the book, it's even more interesting because it's such an unlikely journey.

Yeah. These things is a factor that when we think of the kind of things we can do to help more kids climb out of a future that's unfortunately determined for them when they're born otherwise, think of what are the things that can help? Well, obviously books, one thing. The other, I'm going to, they're two. Darren Brown, man. You're having a friend.

One peer is all it takes. All it takes one peer. I remember even when I was a kid was a son of a neighbor who was an engineer who had a model of an atom. My mother wanted me to be a doctor, so I thought doctors were scientists. But when I saw the model of the atom, I remember that. And then it was a book on Galileo for me. But the other thing, I'm trying to think of the other things that, you know, some people might have think of our disadvantages from having come where we are,

but there were advantages because everything could be, you know, everything cuts two ways. And in this world of everyone suddenly being a victim, people realize that sometimes what you think of as a victim, it can be an advantage to you, building a strength. I'll give you one example. I'll give you one example. I arrive at Stanford University. And I spent the summer before at Berkeley, working in Bernard Soutel-A's research group. Yeah, yeah. On the experiment that would come to EMS. Oh, nice. I wrote some of the papers you were working on later. But anyway, it doesn't matter. That was my very first physics research in my life. So I knew that I was vast.

undereducated compared to everybody else for my Berkeley experience, right? I ran to Saul Pearl Mother, who's a buddy, but, you know, Saul as a postdoc at the time, was not pulling punches. Let me tell you. It was being pretty frank, but anyway. Okay. But I appreciate that, right? I appreciate. I appreciate knowing where I need to shore things up.

So anyway, I show up at Stanford, and I'm looking at different things about the people around me. I'm looking at their intelligence, and I'm looking at their intelligence. and I'm looking at their education. And I'm like, oh, what I see is that you guys are, I would not consider you to be intrinsically more intelligent than the people I knew that were uneducated. Yeah, sure. But you're way better educated, for sure.

But then I said, but you know what? Can anyone in here outwork me? Because, you know, I was forced to do hard manual labor, like this moment you hit double digits. And, you know, when you learn that resilience of, I'm going to, you know, the pain doesn't exist. I must drive forward and get this done. We both went to the same place.

I was thinking I was reading, I'm looking at my notes your book, and you said that your rural backwards, rural backwards Mississippi was a training ground for life as a research scientist. Heck yeah. You learn to work hard. You learn to work hard and you learn to solve problems, man. You weren't, you know, when you didn't have money, you weren't calling somebody to fix anything.

Yeah, yeah, you had to fix it. You were doing everything, no matter how complicated it was. And your father was, you know, the interesting thing is, again, one might think, okay, your father was, was ultimately an addict. Your mother was, you know, anything. Anyway, never. Yeah, but interesting, they were both, you know, so they were both negative influences in one way, but they're both incredibly positive influences in another way.

Your mom, well, let's go to your dad first. Your dad was knew how to do everything, okay, and he, and he taught you. Yeah, I think it's really a great thing. And often, you know, you can see that influence in you. And your mom, for all of her other, you know, pluses and minuses, was excited for you by, because of your intelligence and encouraged it.

I mean, there was a chemistry set at some point she bought. Oh, yeah. A computer. You know, these are amazing things. Yeah, the books you would get me. Yeah. It could go the other way. I remember, just to give you an example,

I remember when I was a chair of a physics department in Cleveland, I tried to get, and my university, we donated old scientific equipment to some of the inner city schools that would, because they needed it. Cleveland, there's nothing. But there was a really neat school there called the Cleveland School for the Arts, which was right next to the university. And I used to go there and I was a, I think I was, I was involved with it because we donated old physics equipment to their science labs. And I remember going to a play. I mean, these were kids that were gifted

artistically. And I saw this girl, young woman, perform and she was great. And afterwards, I saw her come out and I just saw her mother yell at her, why did you spend there? Why didn't you come home and I thought, you know, that's the difference between a parent who, you know, when your kid does excel to someone who just puts them down for excelling. And that's a, and, you know, it's a really big difference. And so I was really pleased to see how tickled your mother was at a variety of times in your life. And how for your father, in spite of introducing you a drug dealing and ultimately, and ultimately becoming, you know, an unfortunate addict. Nevertheless, taught you how to work hard, learn things, soft,

problems and those are there was another aspect that I thought of that of being in rural Mississippi you know I'm gonna interrupt you here man because I'll interrupt you you interrupt me that's why you know you say being a drug dealer there's being an honest drug dealer he taught me how to be straight square professional honest in that world oh absolutely important things like not go out in the street and sell you know all sorts of things he no he gave you wise street wisdom exactly and exactly and don't cheat people because you're going to it's going to come back and get you in the end. Exactly.

No, no, it was, it was really, he taught you to be, in that sense, he was an entrepreneur. He was, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, and he was an entrepreneur. He was in a prize. He had, he brought money into the house that were essential for living, which was, you know, and buying that club, the, I would have called the night club, I guess, and getting everyone working in it was, I mean, I was fascinated by that. But the other thing that, it seemed to me that you got out of that rural that one,

some people might think it was a negative. was the night sky. I meant the fact when you came from a city to suddenly the first time when you saw the night sky when you were in the country, again, a pivotal moment. I don't know if it determined why you wanted to be an astronomer or an astrophysicist,

but tell me about it. Man, listen, look, you know, I was amazed and I had no references to know, okay, here's what, you know, all I knew was the big dipper. And of course, just like everyone else thought the Pleiades was a little dipper. Yeah, right? But I'd see the planet

And I knew that there was something different and amiss with them. Yeah. Right? I didn't figure it out until Tugelah. Those were planets. Yeah. But, you know. Meanwhile, too, so it's okay.

In cities where the air is so bad, you really can't see the fact that they don't twinkle. I mean, you get, well, I didn't know this. You know, like, like basically in the country, we had two channels, Channel 7, Channel 11. Only Channel 7 came in for the most part until people got to the point where you can get that antenna outside your house where you go outside, turn the antenna. Yeah.

Yeah. Like we literally do, lived in a trailer in the woods, you know? Yeah. And so having information to tell me, here's what I'm seeing in the sky, I did not have that. But as far as like being there and just being fascinated by it, right? Yeah. But here's the funny thing is that, again, as I started to learn once I went to Tugulu, you know, I'd come home because, you know, they had a library.

They had people that knew things about astronomy. I took an astronomy club. And just for people, just for people are listeners, Tugulu was the first university you went to. Some of them may have not heard of the Blue. Okay, but we'll get there. To go to go to college. I like to say it's so exclusive, we don't even tell people to exist, right?

Okay, perfect. Perfect. But it's funny because one of my good high school friends is a guy named Jackie Pue. He passed in 2022. But he was hilarious, man, because once I started learning, you know, I wanted to tell everybody, you know, being annoyed again. Yeah. And Jackie, he would always say, you know, if I see somebody, you know, I'm like, hey, you see that right there? And Jackie would always go, oh, he'd go with that shit again.

They would tease me about it, but they loved me for it, you know. Well, you know, I never, the interesting thing is, it really hit me because it was a long, I lived, I grew up in a city and, you know, I liked that sky. I even had a telescope. And I remember once doing a little show with a friend of mine and we had, it just telescopes. But I, I never really knew what the sky looked like for years and years and years because I never went to the country. And, you know, and where I live now, it's just, it's, I've, I've, I've almost 360. degree. It's like living in a planetarium. It's just dark. But the first time you go out

and see the night sky, without being in a city, it's just a different experience. It's totally. Because it's not just out there. It's, it's all around you. It is almost, it's, if I believed in the word spiritual, I'd say it's a spiritual. Yeah, man. I mean, you know, you feel connected. Yeah, you feel connected. I was just

thing. Southern Hemisphere for the first time. Yeah. I was just saying to someone, you know, I wrote in one of my books in South America, you understand why, you know, they used to view the Milky Way as a river continuation of the Amazon and the reason is why because it's it's around you it's not just out there and it's a kind of feeling you can't understand until you've seen it yourself anyway oh man yeah okay so let me let's go to the next thing i'm trying to think of the things that i from reading your

your history um yeah that that that we're important to developing you the encouragement to do math and your mom's encouragement to at least be good accounting and right right and accounting you know i'm from a world with nobody knows really knows what math is. As a matter of fact, you know, at Tugulu College, you know, when I got there. So first thing was, I went to the Navy after high school. Yeah, yeah. And there, you know, I was in this program

that was designed to take enlisted people and turn them into officers, right? And so the way it worked is they gave you a year of academic and really hardcore military training run by the Marines. Right. And there were two math classes. The regular math class and the remedial math class. In the remedial math class, we were taken from arithmetic through calculus in one year. I have atopic dermatitis, which you're not allowed to be in the Navy with.

Yeah, that's the reason you had to leave. The reason I had to leave. Yeah. But luckily, I learned algebra right before I got kicked out. That's what you said. The Navy gave you algebra and also exposure to systemic racism, but maybe we'll get there. Yeah, yeah. But it was great.

I mean, it gave you, and a kind of a new kind of discipline, although we'll get to the, I love the definition, Mr. Cross. Ross's version of this. Oh, yeah. Man, I was a hard about a billion times. Yeah, well, it's a, it's a wonderful phrase, and I think we'll repeat it right now, because the other thing I want to talk about is the other thing that was really important, and I've met, and I've talked a lot of scientists and other people, you know, about the

importance of teachers. And I've been amazed for some people, like a friend Neil de Rast Seitz, and he said, teachers didn't matter to him. He had no good teachers. But for the rest of us, we did. And for you, you were the beneficiary of a few key good teachers. And the other thing was interesting was a number of them are white teachers, right?

Oh, absolutely. And I remember later on, you were surprised when you went to the science, it's a music camp and you got these prizes that people weren't, that people respected you, you know, they weren't, they were white, yet they gave you all the prizes. And you thought, wow, should they be prejudiced against me? But you didn't expect it in the scientists, which I thought was interesting. So early on, you'd been, you had this experience of these,

and you're probably right. A bunch of these guys came down in the Freedom March and decided to stay. Yeah, yeah, that's right. But Mr. Cross, well, Dr. Teal, McGinnis, Bruno. Yeah. Throughout the book, I'm impressed by all of these teachers who really not only put their faith in you, but went out to bat for you and really took you

under the wing and said, I see something in you and I'm going to help. And so, and I think, man, you know, that's the, you know, that I hate where our country is. So Lawrence, I've been to 44 countries at this point in my life. I didn't leave until I was 32. Wow. Now I'm 27. You're still a baby compared to me. I want you to know that.

That's all right. So I see that every country has these identity hierarchies. And so the thing that was interesting to me, you know, when you live in a single locale, you buy into the one of your location. And you buy into the one that's recent. Right? The ideas that are recent, you know? And so it gets painted with this brush. And sometimes in your cultural narrative,

you're still living the fight of three, four generations ago. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, I'll be honest with you. You know, when you talk about narratives, when I left, so we talk about the Navy and systemic racism, I'll give you an example of what it is. Yeah. What it really has to do with, man,

I think in large part is character. Yeah. Yeah. And here's what I mean by that. If you're a bully, if you're somebody that's going to pick on somebody, and they're around us, right? Most people are concerned with themselves. There are a few people that are really good.

There's a few jerks out there. Yeah, yeah, okay. They're looking for the vulnerable. Yeah. Or those who are perceived to be vulnerable. So let me give you an example of myself. Before I left Mississippi, man, I was pulled over by the cops. I left at the age of 24.

Okay. dozens of times, you know, between 15 and 24. Like, it was routine. Routine. You know, by the time I at Tuglu was like, lie down, search your pockets, all right? I go to Stanford. I start speaking differently. Yeah, okay.

I dress differently. Yeah. Now I get pulled over by the police. Uh-huh. It plays out completely different. Yeah. The second I start speaking, they're like, oh, yeah, I noticed that you swerved a little bit. You know, because I'm no longer perceived as vulnerable.

as like a late teenage kid who dresses like he's from the hood and talks like he's from the hood. Right? You know, so the and you know, these people can be anybody. Like, man, I've been enforcing people's perceptions in advance and people, people, you know, we all, whether we like or not, make quick assessment. Exactly. And one of the first ways where they dress and the way they speak. I mean, it just can't help it.

Exactly. Exactly. And, and, you know, that's what I say about, too, about going to Stanford. One of the greatest lessons I learned was class camouflage, right? People would see me like five miles away. Oops, it's one of them. But now they're like, oh, Dr. Oloushaye, come on in. Speak to the president of the country, the CEO.

You know, it's like, hi there. They're like, oh, I'm you're a big fan. Like, oh, tea, crumpets. But, you know, the, the, but I, how you interpret things is based on your narrative. So when I left the South, where I did experience, you know, because think about it this way, I'm having conflicts with black guys and white guys. Yeah, sure, exactly. I'm having black guys who love me and white guys who love me. Yeah.

Right. But what are they going to pick on you about when they come at you if they're trying to hurt you, right? So the black dude might say something about my crooked teeth, my nappy hair and my big lips, right? The white dude, he's going there, nine times out of 10 in Mississippi, right? That's where he's going to go with it. Yeah. So what you do to self-survive, to manage your own mind, you don't want to encounter those sort of statements, right? Because it hits you a certain way. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like somebody

being, like I guess you say you're Jewish, which I didn't know, but if somebody says something anti-Semitic to you, it hits differently than someone just saying something jerky. Yeah, you know, for me, I guess it's just upbringing. That's why I've said this before. It may be a character flaw. All it did was make me think they were stupid. Yeah. Well, Well, I grew into that, right? I grew into that, right? Because what I'm trying to do is, oh, if I hear this certain word, I'm supposed to lose my mind, get really angry and be violent, right?

Yeah. And then after a certain point, I'm like, why? That's your problem. That's a you problem. Yeah, exactly. You own how you react to things like that. You own how you react to it. Whether you feel like a victim or whether you don't in some sense.

Right, right. But when you're young, man, when that's the narrative that you're in. So I leave Stanford University. I mean, I leave Mississippi head to Stanford University at the age of of 24 and I'm like, oh, every white person is a racist. Though I had ample evidence to the contract, like I said, I had these white news that love me. Yeah, yeah. And the science fairs and the music camp and all of the... And I had plenty of black dudes that punched me in the face,

you know, so... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Punch each other in the face. So anyway, what I learned, though, you know, because you have this racist radar to avoid these people. And one of the things that trigger it is when people talk to you like they're superior to you. Okay. Well, guess how academics talk to people quite often. Yes how business in particular. Yeah. Yeah.

So I had to learn, oh, you're not a racist. You're an asshole, right? And it impacts me different. But, you know, now as I mature and as I age, right, I get to cultivate the humans with whom I interact. Sure, exactly. And, you know, they run the gamut. And what I see is, if we look at our narrative publicly, you know, you think we're a country where everybody's at each other's throats over partisan politics and race. But in my everyday, man, that is not what I experience and see at all.

You know, I interact with people of, you know, that are extremely liberal, extremely conservative and everything in between, you know, people of all races and, you know, we're all getting along. And, you know, big reasons we're all well fed and housed, right? You put us under some stress things may change, but, you know, again, I'll jump ahead. But, you know, obviously what your second father figure was your PhDs was, Art Walker. And he said it, you know, he said something which, which I think was really important. When you're talking, when, when, when, when you talk about, you know, you, you, you, the, the experience of having, you know, the failure in the, in the, in the graduate qualifying exams and what appears to be people taking it out on you.

And I'll, I'll talk about that later. Because having been a professor, I'm going to put on the other head and say, why one might have assumed that you were ready to fail. But anyway, what he said was an organization is like a bell curve, but it's not just, organization, society. In the center of the vast majority, they're indifferent. They're apathetic. They're self-centered. So you just said, a small minority will help, and there's a small minority that'll

be hostile. Don't let that small group of doubters derail you. And I think that's the key point. If we always look, in any organization, we're going to find people who are assholes. And if we label them and nothing else, we're going to say that there's a systemic something in that thing, where in fact, it's just a spectrum. And part of being whether you're African American, whether you're Jewish,

whether you have red hair, whether you're a woman, whether you're gay or whatever, is to recognize that if you assume that everyone is reacting because of a certain trait rather than just because of who they are and learn how to do it, then the world just becomes this view of power

and racism that just distorts it and ruins it for you and everyone else, it seems to me. No, I see what you mean there, and I agree with it in large measure. You do control how you react. You do need a resiliency to say, I'm not so fragile that you being unkind to me

is not going to stop me. Yeah, it's not going to be. You are never going to be all well-behaved, right? Yeah. But I'll tell you what the systemic part comes into, and I think I said it earlier. Yeah. It's what is the default, right?

So just like people buy into narratives, yeah. There's a lot of narratives that are bought into. So if you look at African Americans in physics, right, if there is a criticism, they seem to fall into typical categories, right? That seem to be reminiscent of how African Americans or how black folks were represented, you know, prior to us being a more enlightened society. And that is, you know, not as good mathematically, not as creative and not as hard working, right? I mean, you say that. Yeah, I remember you say that later on. And it's interesting to say that narrative.

I mean, I guess I just... Like, for example, I think about that experience. I mean, I think of my friend Jim Gates, who I knew it when I was at MIT and then Harvard. I just saw him at MIT a few weeks ago. Okay, and so Jim Gates is pretty good in math. And so I never, I guess I never, and everyone knew that. What was that?

Let me tell you what Jim Gates said to me. Okay. So I left, academia and went to industry. Yeah. And then I decided this stuff is boring. I want to come back. I want to do some cosmology. All right. So in 2004, I was at the University of Chicago. And I had been seeing Jim Gates since the 80s when I was a undergraduate too, 88. Yeah. And he made a big point. Jim was really good at trying to mentor. Oh, yeah. Well, let me tell you what he did. He walked up to

me and my poster there on a supernova acceleration probe satellite. If you remember that, like he had never met me in his life and grilled me on the hardware, the theory, you know, the systematics. And then after I answered all of his questions, he goes, good to see you, right? Good to see you, right? So I say to him, I was like, hey, man, remember Cobley Institute was new at Stanford at the time. They were hiring people, Roger Blanford, you know, others. And I was like, hey, man, you think they're going to hire you? And Jim pauses. And he goes, if you think these people will, can believe that a person descended from Africa is capable. of a creative thought, you have a few things to learn. Jim said that?

Yeah, he said, no, I do not expect that. I do not expect that invitation. That's what Jim said. So, man, you know, there are people in our field that don't even talk to people that don't have a PhD. Yeah, no, I know. I mean, I know what academia is like. Yeah.

But the thing is that you can't wipe it with a broad brush, right? You have to say it's this individual, that individual, this individual, right? And the other thing that happens is, I'll give you another example. I sat on the NSF, you know, postdoc panel for many, many years. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, at this time when I was doing it, it was a lot of planetary exoplanet science, right? And so I see these same letters from these same professors at these same top universities. And they make comparisons, right?

It's like kind of the same every year. Yeah. Oh, this person is my top. Yeah, yeah. I use write those letters myself. So I know. Yeah. But then they make comparison to other people in the field.

And I noticed that one person who they were comparing went like, oh, sure, they're way better than this person was the one African-American guy. You know what I'm just like? Why is he always the foil? You know, I'm just, you know, but I didn't do a systematic study of all the letters. It was a small sample and maybe I just happened to get a biased sample. But in three consecutive years, this guy was the, you know, and this guy has top positions. They've had top positions at multiple institutions, right?

Yeah. Multiple top institutions. So, you know, in some people's minds, man, just like there are people that are anti-Semitic, there are people that are misogynist, there are people that are, you know, James Webb, right? Dead white man. You know, there are people that, Hakeem, you're wearing a blue shirt, I hate blue shirts. Think of this. How often do you see a scientist on television that gets prominence like you and me that has a strong southern accent?

Right? I mean, there's all these little biases that people have. And I think that's the real story. It's not that none of them exist, is that they do exist, but they exist more on, you know, you have to look at things. You have to judge people individually. You don't paint people with groups. And so that group ideas that we have, because let me tell you, man, you know,

I don't know if you ever done interracial dating and got to live with people of other cultures and see what, you know, who they talk about. Yeah. You know, but people have wild ideas. And even, you know, in my youth, I would think about people in groups. not as individuals, you know. So, you know, when people say they're colorblind, I hope that's what they're saying,

is that I judge people on an individual basis because I see, you know, I love the culture, the diversity, you know, I love to go to another country, eat their food, hear their music, do their thing and be them with them. I love that richness, right? And so I love that, right? But we can't let that, you know,

especially here in America, man, because as a pluralistic society, you know, and again, here's another narrative, right, how America's so torn apart, dude. Yeah. The way our country is constructed is a recipe for nonstop conflict, but yet we are peaceful as hell, right? Well, I'm not sure I agree with the last part, but you're right. I think the recipe for nonstop conflict is built into the country.

We don't have militias running around. We're not taking up arms against each other in a systematic way. Not yet. It happened once, right? And, you know, I'll remind people, that was white people versus white people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you think about it, it sounds like it was a race war, right? But it's not because if you look at modern society in America, if you listen to, you know,

if you listen to different groups talk about their politics, it seems like it's a different reality that each group is living in. Yeah, yeah, I guess, and you're absolutely right. And there's, and people, as I said, people pick up, people are used to certain things. People have stereotypes, not necessarily racist stereotypes, but we all have preconceptions of things. And the great thing about being a scientist that scientists should train you do is ultimately be suspicious of your preconceptions as we'll talk about at the end. That's one of them you learn over and over again. And it'd be great if more people just more generally learn to be suspicious of their preconceptions.

And, but I do worry about labeling as Bob Broth. brush. I mean, not just when I look at, and you're, you know, I, you're pretty frank about your history at Stanford. And I know all the people, because a lot of them are colleagues and I've known them for, I mean, your professors, I've known them for a long time in one way or another. And you, and there were people who, who were hard on you and maybe unfair to you. That happens to everyone. But on the whole, the community you were in, ultimately, and it wasn't just our I don't think. Ultimately, you know, treated you with respect,

ultimately treat you with respect as a scientist that you have ultimately gained. And, and, and so I don't, I guess it's not, I don't, the question is, in what sense is there, where there's systemic barriers or are there systemic barriers? When I read your history, I think of it as a, I mean, it's a heartwarming and such a, uplifting story. It really is.

There's no doubt about it. I mean, throughout, you know, I would constantly smile. You were crying. You were crying. Well, you know, I don't want to crying, but I was, but I was, I was, I was smiling anyway. It's my more usual case than crying. Although it's, but anyway, so there were a lot of people, you know, you were sporting in high school. And then, you know, the faculty, let's go, you know, why not?

We're jumping all over the place. You know, you're absolutely right, man. There was one person who was over the line. Yeah, over the line. And you talk about that one person, I think. Yeah, exactly. But here's the other thing, right? The other thing is, is that, you know, as a mentor, as a leader myself, I have people that we oversee, not oversee, that's a bad word. But we, you know, we mentor, we look out for them, we manage them. And one thing that I had to figure out and it's hard to figure out is for this particular individual, what is the best thing forward for them? Encouragement? or a kick in the pants. Yeah.

Right. So for me, I'm the type of guy that if you tell me, oh, I don't think you can do it or you're not good enough. Yeah, I'm like, I'll show you, right? But that's not how the average person in my experience reacts. Yeah, that's right. But I was reading your story and I was looking at both ways

because, you know, when I was a student, I experienced some things that were not too dissimilar in one or two cases. Wait, well, let me. As a faculty member, I just remember when I taught at Yale, just remember there were some students that we all and I hate to have to do it. I'll always say, you know what, it's really appropriate you leave the program. And ultimately you really felt like you were doing them a favor earlier rather than later. The earlier that they learned that they weren't really, it wasn't the right road for them.

It wasn't, shouldn't be the end of their life. It just wasn't the right direction. And it was hard to do. And on paper, you know, after having to take undergraduate, courses when you're a graduate student and then and then not doing well in the exam first time after four years. I could see how independent of color or anything else. I would be willing to say, you know what? Maybe this isn't the right. I'm going to go to the premise of this topic here. Because it's almost sounds to me like somehow you read, if you read my book, I never level

an accusation of racism. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely. No, no, you don't. And it's, and you, you never do, in fact. And I think you take that attitude of arts that some people are going to be. I tell the story of here's what happened. And I don't go to their motivations of why things happen. And some people in there, you know, and so I'll give you. And you're great, by the way. Let me just interrupt by saying, the person who was probably in charge of the, or the qualifying exams was the one who said to you, hey, you're going to fail it again. You should be prepared. You should get a master's. He was trying to do the right thing.

when you got a PhD, I know him well. He's a man. I know him well too. I'm Blackner. And he said, he was the first one to say, hey, congratulations. You know, the normally longer PhDs are worse, but yours wasn't. It was great. And so he said, he also went to say, but you know, the publishing and like it. He goes, this is very significant work. But no, listen to this. Art made it clear to me at the time that he was not speaking for himself. He was speaking for the committee. When he gave me that talk about the three, you know, that wasn't his words. That was the words of the committee. And what was happening, the dynamic at the time was that there were two groups of faculty. There were the younger faculty who were not in favor of this thing that they had been doing of, you know,

because, you know, for people who don't know between 79 and 89, Stanford graduated 30 black PhDs in physics, not doing it through affirmative action, but basically recruiting the top physics undergraduates who were after America come to Stanford. And they were motivated to do so because William Shockley was an outspoken. He was a racist. Racist guy, right, who, you know, made him look bad. So that's what they were doing to repair. But, you know, by the time I show up, right, things are now changing. The attitude is changing the department.

And here is the thing, right? And it has to do with gatekeepers and how they draw judgments on who is worthy to come through the gate and who isn't. So here's something that I've struggled with as an educator. So there was this one young lady in my class. And I first started teaching my very first, I was working in Silicon Valley. teaching at a junior college. And this young lady, her first name was Teresa, Latino young lady, man, she worked her butt off.

Sat on the front row to class, asked me all kind of questions, did not get it at all. Okay. She earned a seat and I gave her a seat. Okay. And I regretted it from that moment until today. Right.

I should have, you know, I have that, after that I put in a bonus like, you know, this sort of class participation thing, points so I could swing. Yeah, I know, but would it have been a favor? No, I don't know.

I mean, I've taught a lot. Look, you know, ultimately, is it growth? Is it growth? I'm not saying coddle. She worked hard. Yeah, but I mean, it's good to encourage them.

She grew. Yeah. So if you grow from, you know, it's like American Idol to show American Idol. Yeah. One of the worst things

that can happen to you is just killing it on the first day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Nobody, you know, they want to see you grow. Yeah, yeah. So I was not taking people's growth into account. Yeah, sure. I can understand that. So when you're a, when you're a gatekeeper, you should be looking at, I think, resilience and growth. It's like if you have a child, right, you're concerned about their, you know, is there something wrong neurologically? Well, do they actually learn? Are they improving? You know, that's the question. And so in my case, you know, my reputation was being super hardworking. But I was coming from so deep a hole. Sure. Right.

That, you know, that, that, that, if you saw my relentless, I don't think it's a situation where you can't get there. Your mind, Hakeem, your mind is in came. Because here's what Art Walker. Here's the other thing. There are the people that work closely with you and what they think of you and some people on a committee who never worked closely with you and see how you think. Yeah.

Right. So if all the people who work closely with you see you one way, but then other people say, oh, look at this number. I don't like, man, I got to. students working in the community right now that were terrible on paper. And I, and I, you know, like, a couple that work at the National Radio

Astronomy Observatories, one here in Charlottesville, one in New Mexico. And, you know, the people called me up like, hey, and I'm like, dude, forget about their grades. This person is amazing. And they, and they've kicked butt, you know, in their work, life, right? Yeah. So I was prejudged, man,

by certain people. Sure, sure. I didn't blame it on race. Yeah, that's not to be judged people. It's just, Look at numbers as one way. And the point is that everyone, you know, stereotypes are just that and they're meant to be changed. And you're absolutely right. I've known, you know, we, it's not, it's not, you're not an awful person for having, having prejudgment.

You're an awful person if you don't want to ever change that prejudgment. Exactly. In the face of evidence. And that's, and that's the difference, I think. That's the difference. Yeah. Let, I don't want to harp on that too much. But, but, but I think, you know, and, and I think.

you, you know, I relate to the fact that, you know, you write in the, in the book, whenever you did really poorly, it was useful for you to know you done really poorly because it was a kick in the pants. They, hey, I, this is a reality check. Hey, I thought I was cool. I thought I knew it. I mean, hey, I did, I got A's in high school and. There's level to it.

And, yeah, and then, hey, now I have something to learn. Now other people, when they get a board grade, that's it. They're done. And so, of course, it depends on how. you've got to be realistic with people, but it's still encouraging. And I think, you know, Art was clearly both. When Art was disappointed with you, he told you why, but he encouraged you. I mean, there's that episode where you, with the,

of that, of that rocket. Yeah. When you were, clearly, it mattered a lot to you that he, he was disappointed in you at the time. Oh, absolutely. Big time. But he was one, when I, when you quote him, however, you quote, you quote, he talks like, he dealt with racism much of his academic life. And that was a generation or so before you.

That's right. And I think things have changed. Oh yeah, things absolutely have changed. Things have changed drastically over the course of my life. Yeah, of course, and mine too. Yeah. And I felt badly. Interestingly enough, I was surprised, though, when he said that people still question his intelligence, they never accept that a black man is their intellectual equal or you can make an original contribution. I was surprised when he said that because he was a full professor at Stanford. Yeah. Which usually is, again, it's the prejudgment. When someone comes into a room, if they're a full professor at Stanford, you make some assumptions about them. And I'm surprised that that didn't give him a leg up, or at least he didn't perceive it as giving him a leg up at the time.

Well, you know what? It was really weird because there was two things happening. So it turns out that the very, you know, graduate students talk to each other, right? So there was this one guy. He's now a professor at Northwestern. he comes in and he works with this other professor, but he had started working with art first. And he comes back to the group. He's like, oh, man, you should have heard what this professor said about art.

Now, when I started in this world of physics, right, you get accepted to some university. You go in there and you go and you talk to every professor in the department. You have a meeting with each one of them, right? Then you go to Silicon Valley and you go talk to every manager. Then you go to this other universe for how you talk to everybody.

And you know, at these top tier planes, some percentage of those folks, maybe a quarter or a half, are going to talk trash about their colleagues, about how they're not as smart, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so the thing about that sort of dynamic is, is that certain groups of people feel like,

yeah, it happens to everybody. If you're a white dude, heterosexual, your father, you're a great-grandfather, like Parker of the Parker Solar Probe. People talk trash about Parker in solar physics, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and what he knows, right, the living people. And so my point is,

is that if you're like from certain groups, it almost always finds you. You know what I mean? Like suppose you'll be like, oh, I was at this one institution and somebody came at me with this craziness. Oh, I'm happy. That didn't happen.

But if you find that the craziness happens to you at every institution, but why is that it? Because that person that wants to do a misdeed is looking for the one they perceive as vulnerable. And because you're an outlier, they perceive you as vulnerable, right? Now, when people try that with me,

learn quickly. So I have a rep, I've always had a reputation, right? Because art, just like my dad taught me how to do things properly, art taught me how to do things properly, right? So, so, you know, I've, I've had to confront, you know. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But and you're, and all it did was make you more, you know, more determined. And that's because of the person you were, which, which was from your upbringing, which some people might say, you know, having to do with the dangers and the street and everything else would say was a disadvantage, actually was an advantage. Because academics can't be anywhere near as scary as as a dope dealer on the street. No matter how hard they try. And going back to the beginning, this whole thing about web, the thing that was so crazy

about this to me is that when I released my article in January 2021 on web and my colleagues responded. And then they tried to respond by books. And then they tried to respond by bullying me, you know, like fiber bullying me. I'm like, you got the wrong guy. You got the wrong guy. Well, I want to get the web because I do want to, I want to, I don't want it to be all about what we're talking about now. Although, you know,

you did say when Art presented his first full dis solar images using his new technology, some celebrated while he's challenged the authenticity of the images and doubts among some of his peers. But I think I've seen that every, I mean, that always happened. Let me give you, let me tell you what it was. You're

absolutely right it was. You know what it was. It was one these cases like Einstein with the cosmological constant. Oh, I know what nature is doing. And because the data does not reflect that, there's something wrong with the data. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. Actually, well, anyway,

when I first proposed dark energy in 95, I proposed it, but I was absolutely certain something was wrong with the data. And I proposed it. I said, basically the data only is me and Mike Turner. The data only agrees with things if there's dark energy. I tried to tell us all

Permian, which data was wrong. You know, it was interesting, I had a very similar conversation with All-Striker. He's like, yeah, you know, I predict the dark energy before, you know. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, you know, am I going to write the paper? And I really did, because my point was to say, hey, some of the observers, there must be something wrong because this is so crazy.

It's only consistent with this. And no one was more surprised than me when it turned out to be exactly what we predicted. And in fact, as I say, solid. When I lectured at Berkeley on that, he said, well, prove me wrong. And then didn't. But it was mostly because I assumed the day, The data had to be wrong, and it was shocking to see it right. But anyway.

And by the way, that's the internal story in Berkeley and how Reese published before Saul because. Yeah. I was around during it all. I was trying to convince everyone. I was going around and colloquia saying there's this dark energy at Caltech and Berkeley. And I remember, it spent the summer there at LBL. And everyone would just politely smile. This was between 95 and 97.

And later on, in 98, when they discovered. it was I mean it was satisfying but it was interesting to to see how um but you know I understood myself because I didn't believe it I proposed it but I thought it was really so ridiculous that that it had to be because some of the experiments were wrong now let me I want to get to the science in a second there's one thing I want to ask you I can't help it and I still have to understand this and you can help me um and I know it's maybe it's just I don't know if it's an editor decision and I've seen it in a variety of publications. So black is capitalized everywhere and white isn't.

I know that's a friend and I wonder, I got to ask why. Yeah, you know, we asked the publisher that, right? So it's funny because Josh did that to me. He says he's like, Hakeem, why are you capitalizing black but not the W and white? And I was like, that's how I've always seen it. Yeah, I know. And I've always seen it. I'm wondering what the argument is.

And so it goes to the publisher. And we write a specific little paragraph. like, yeah, you know, what is the story here? Yeah. And the publisher is like, yeah, that's the way it's done. Black is capitalized W is it? So it's sort of one of those things like the story, the lottery. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I know.

I just don't think I, yeah. The way it is, yeah. And I understand what was probably the point of at one point, but I just think. Here's the question. Would you, would you capitalize a word like Caucasian? Is that capitalized? I think, yeah, because it's a label. I think it's a.

So I think that the reason why, is because black, you know, there was no, you know, Negro fell out of favor. Yeah, yeah. Right. You know, African American is a mouthful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so whites don't, you know, your race, and it's really interesting because I think when you say black, you really mean African American.

Generally. You don't, you don't mean. Although, you know, I tried to get a someone, a job in mind when I was chair who was, who was black, but he wasn't African American. and what amazed me was the rules were so ridiculous. He was really good. He's a good physicist from Urbana that I couldn't get him in because he wasn't minority.

And I thought, what the what he? Anyway. Yeah, yeah. He was from. If you're from, like I tell my friends, you know, so I have, like I said, all over the gamut, and, you know, I have friends that are very Afrocentric, you know, and since I've been all over Africa. Yeah, of course.

And they'll pay black. Great jobs working with South. I mean, the end of your book talking, working with the South African kids. is really for me among the most heartwarming part of it. In the last part of your book, where you see them succeed. And I just admire what you did there so much. I just have to.

Thank you. Well, but the point is that I tell my friends, like, look, man, I've been all over Africa. I can't find Blackistan nowhere. Because people have actual identities. They have actual, I'm an Ebo.

I'm a Luo. I'm a Kisie. I'm a Zulu. And you take that from them. You know, if you're French or if you're Irish or if you're German, and then you come to an American and you're white, like, you know, I've been all over Europe. There's no white land in Europe, you know.

You have a, you know, but here's the thing, man. I think that, you know, and I didn't think this in my youth, but we're freaking Americans and that's, you know, we're all in this together. And, you know, we, whatever your recent ingredients are, because, you know, we think of them as our origins, but they're really our ingredients. Nobody's, you know, we're all worms, right? Yeah, yeah.

A worm that became a fish. All of that, yeah. And we're also probably at some very basic level all black and all white. But anyway. Right. Exactly. Well, especially a mixed up person like myself. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. But the thing is, man, is that, you know, I think that give, you know, having this, I have a representative sample of the planet. Yeah. You know, having been all over the damn plate. Yeah. And I think that what's going on in the U.S. is really special and it's somewhat miraculous.

And it needs to be preserved. and it needs to be protected, this pluralistic, peaceful society that is prosperous, you know, it's not to be taken for granted. And, you know, we think our infrastructure.

It's as exceptional as you think it as most Americans do. I mean, I grew up in Canada. Having lived in a few different countries, you know, I just... Have you been to the developing world? I mean, I've been in the developing world. No, I know. It's, look, I'm lucky. I'm accident.

Every day, the accident of my genes is lucky. I mean, the accident of my circumstances, yeah, I could have been born, you know, in so many places in the world where I wouldn't have had a chance. Maybe you can appreciate it. I tell my friends, I'm like, listen, man, America is so, and the same of Canada, it's so prosperous. Our houses just sit out in the open. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right? Because in most places, right, you're either in the slums or behind a wall that has razor wire and spikes, right?

You know. No, I know. Not most, but a lot of them. Yeah, I mean, we just have to be thankful. And that's the other thing. I mean, I think a lot of this sense, I hadn't planned to go here, but I'll tell it. A lot of this ridiculous sense of victimization

that we're seeing people, this identity, politics, is people not having enough to complain about. I mean, it's, you know, if they were, if they, yeah, all I've been excited because of this one little thing. But you go to most countries, my God, you'd be killed or what, you know. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's tough. Well, you know, I think the other reason why there's a lot of

victimization that takes the character that it does. There was a book I was reading several years ago. I forget which one it was, but it gave the statistic. When you have concentrated, um, tough living situations, so minorities,

you know, it was something like if you are of this particular race and you're below this particular income level, what's the probability of your neighbors. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know,

uh, demographic vote. And so for minorities, it was much higher than for a white person. So when you concentrate, the sort of, you know, the school issues, the issues earning money, the issues with violence and crime. Because, you know, it's not, when you live in the hood, it's also a Gaussian. Yeah, sure.

Yeah, yeah. And those people are just, you know, you go to any hood in the morning and you're going to see a train of people going to do their minimum wage jobs, right? Yeah, yeah. But the cats that you see publicly out of the street are the ones that are the really ends of the Gaussian are the ones that people Yeah, just like on social media. You see the noisy jackasses and they're the ones. And that's the unfortunate thing that you're right right now. And really good people are virtually busy.

Before they know, they didn't have a, you know, you wouldn't, you can ignore them. And now we still should ignore them, but they end up getting a voice that they didn't have before. Yeah, man. Twitter is that. Let me ask you two other things. Yeah. In this regard. And then I want to, as I say, I promise I want to move first to science and then to

the web. The, well, let me ask, it's, yeah, just because of the timing of this, I don't know when this will appear. But it's, it's honest to say that yesterday affirmative action was what the Supreme Court, you know, ended up in principle. And I think it practiced it won't. In academia. Yeah, well, yeah, but I think my own feeling is the university is to get around it one way or another.

But, but, and I have to say I have mixed feelings about affirmative action. And, and namely in the sense that I think if I think of your case, and I want to present it to you, frankly and honestly, because I think we can do that. And some people may be shocked that I'm saying some of these things, but I don't really care. So you, you went to Tuguloo. Yeah. And it was a great, it was a great place for you. because you were able to excel there. Yeah.

And if you had, let's say, if you had somehow been aware, and this is the big problem, you didn't even know, your point is, you said it somewhere when you went to the Navy, you didn't even know about college

or how to get in. And I think that's part of the problem. I used to go into inner city schools in Cleveland. My wife at the time volunteered in them, and I talked to these kids about the world. You know, I tell them that Lake Erie was right. They didn't even know they were two miles from the lake, much less than anything else.

But I talk about being a scientist. They had no idea. I mean, it was just a different universe. And they didn't see there was any way to go from here to there. They just didn't know how. And you literally didn't know how either. Absolutely. Had no idea it existed.

Yeah, exactly. And you were lucky enough that some people somehow showed those options to you. But had you gone to Stanford as an undergraduate, instead as a graduate student, you would have just crashed and burned. Exactly. Yeah. And so it's, I think, That's me.

Don't extrapolate me to everyone else. There are always tales. People are going to succeed no matter what. There are people who aren't. The question really is one of whether, when it comes to tertiary education, look, there are inequities in our society that I am aware of as much as you and I become more aware of when I read books like yours and others. But are we going to solve it by at that stage in a person?

Shouldn't we not be spending more, if we're interested in a firm of action, should we not be spending more money, making sure young kids get the opportunities and knowledge so that they know what the options are for them in life and some education and have good books in their schools and have teachers and encourage them and environments that encourage them. It seems to me that's the ultimate only way out of the day. I know it's a big ass, but it's the ultimate. How are you going to construct that? I mean, we haven't done it so far. But does affirmative action solve the problem? at universities. I'm not going to, so I have very little, I'm being the devil's advocate here. I'm not scared. I ain't scared, Lawrence. No, I know. And I'm not scared of asking. Let me, let me go there with

because, you know, I look at it like this. Okay. So again, you and I, you know, you know how it is. Good people are hard to find. Yeah, absolutely. And I have had to hire lots of people, you know, my group was typically, you know, 15 students at a time, right, undergrad's, graduate with students. And there were these cats who would come to me, like some of the people I mentioned to you at the NRAO, they're basically see students. Now, if I, the one person, for example, I had met him because he was in nanotechnology lab. Dude came across brilliant as hell. He came across focus. He came across, and that's exactly what he was. But if you look at his transcript, it didn't reflect that at all. It didn't reflect. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So if I am a gatekeeper, and so that's what we're talking about affirmative action. It's about being a gatekeepers.

You're right. And I'm looking at identifying talent. What am I basing it on? Am I basing it solely, solely on grades and test scores? Now, I'll tell you this. I have been around the block enough to know that, you know, I always wondered myself, oh, why is it black? Because when I got to Stanford for the first time of my life, the black folks around me were not other poor black folks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'm like, they're different. Yeah, that's the point. You said it. There's a different from you. You joined the sorority or whatever or fraternity. And you're different from you as anyone else, right? Yeah, exactly.

And so I'm just like, yo, you know, what about us back home in Mississippi? Right. And so I think there's two things. I also think that there's something you want for the health of your society. And that is, for example, here in America, sometimes, you know, you hear conservatives talk about the attacking the safety net, the societal safety net, the free money safety net. Right. Now, what our ancestors in America had to deal with is something that modern Americans have not had to deal with, but we're starting to get there. And that is slums.

Yeah. Right. If you're in Johannesburg, South Africa, just because you live in the upper middle class place, you're not safe when you have slums. Yeah, yeah. Right? You're not going to be able to live without a wall around your house. You're getting carjacked in your own driveway, right? So that's safety net, you might think it's free money, but what it's doing is just protecting you from slums.

At which point, none of us are safe. Yeah. Right? Yeah, sure. And so, man, I forgot the question. What was, oh, it was about affirmative action. I like what you said, but I remember the question. It was about affirmative action.

So here's the point, though, right? So take a guy like me. In my community, in rural Mississippi where I live, going to college, people only did that to be teachers, and it rarely happened. Right. So I have a niece. I'll tell you the story of my niece, Monique. So I'm going to tell you about the impact of, you know, how,

it is that you can make an investment that pays off bigger than you can imagine. So my niece, when she was a sophomore in high school, I started encouraging her to attend college because I saw how my life was transformed by my Stanford education. And she wasn't hearing me, man. She was like, no, I don't like school.

I want to go to work. And because we're in rural America, the job that she could get was working at the chicken plant. Right? So after three years of working at the chicken plant, she announces to me that she's now, are going to go to college. So I go home for the holidays.

This other family comes over, and they bring up the topic of how they're trying to encourage their younger family member to go to college. So to poke fun at Monique, I said, hey, just get them a job at the chicken plant. That chicken plant got Monique to go to college. And Monique, with her little attitude, goes, that ain't why I'm going.

And I'm like, really, why are you going? And she goes, you. I see your life, and that's what I want. Now Monique has a master's degree in education. She's an assistant principal. She's a leader in education. And people started going to college from that community because no one had ever seen anyone do it and knew what was on the other side of that. And even though you see other people do it, you feel like you're so different from them.

Like when I started college thinking about becoming a medical doctor, seem to me like becoming president. Now that I've been through the education system, I'm like, oh, it's super easy to become a medical doctor. way easier to get the PhD in physics. But the average person doesn't see it that way. You just don't know. And just like, for example, as a super educated PhD scientist, and I looked at the mathematics I do every day that involves numbers. And I'm like, wait a minute.

All I ever do is add, subtract, and multiply to single digit numbers. That's, you know, what is all this other stuff? You know, it's, you know. Well, you know, but I think your point is right that it's nice. Look, I get the point. I think it's important for people. to see the possibility in themselves and therefore giving some people a leg up, especially those who can succeed, is great, is a good example for others. But one could also say, and again,

I'm to some extent taking the devil's advocate position here, not entirely, because I have issues. I think what you said earlier actually really resonates with my thinking, which is, hey, what we really got to do is treat people as individuals and try and look beyond the transcripts, but that doesn't mean labeling them by race or by whatever else is to see what is to really look at them enough to say, what have they overcome, what are they really good in and what are the options? And so in that sense, I kind of agree with the Supreme Court that having one box that somehow gives you a leg up, isn't the same because exactly what you said, the black kids who were at Stanford already had 10 legs up,

before they got to Stanford, most of them. And they didn't, you know, so what you want to do is give kids like you who may not, well, actually you look good on paper because you did well at Tugalu, but, but I mean, kids, or like the kids you were talking about, who were really intelligent and hardworking, but it may not be reflected in a transcript or other things. You want to look at those other characteristics.

and schools are going to end up doing that, which is they're going to start giving more emphasis to trying to see the life story. And for me, the affirmative action should be to find people who, for one reason or another, have had to overcome adversity. You know, and race isn't the only, for everyone, not for everyone is race and adversity.

There are other adversities, and for some people, race is an adversity, but take it on an individual level. It would be great. It would be great if we could, but, you know, there are so many biases everywhere within human minds. That it's hard, you know, even though we come up with these ideals,

it's hard to really implement them in real life. So I guess what people were saying with affirmative action is, it's like, okay, even though we're trying to be objective about it, we still like, like, you know, I'll give you another example. At the end of graduate school, you know, I had a NASA GSRP fellowship. It ended and I was still in graduate school. So I started teaching Kaplan to MCAT. Okay.

All right? Okay. And man, it was so eye-opening. And I was like, damn, back in it. at Tugalu, we all just went and took these tests. Right? Yeah, yeah. There's no way someone could just walking in could compete against my students. I thought MCAT physics. My students were, they were maxing the physics on MCAT, right? Yeah, exactly. Because I remember when I was, I grew up in Canada, I took the graduate entrance exam.

I didn't, I walked in. I never heard of it before. Then I learned that they're, you know, now I realize their kids taking classes in it in advance to do it. Yeah. And so what's going to happen is, is that if you based on test scores, if you're based on grades. Like another example, my son, right? I have a son, you know, I homeschooled a kid until he was 10, but, you know, his sister is in large part responsible for him learning to read, all right? And this kid could read like an adult when he was three and a half, all right? So my mom says to me when he was very young, you know, I think he's smarter than you are. And I was like, no, the hell he ain't. His daddy got a PhD in physics. Neither one of my parents graduated high school. It makes a difference.

Just like you want to send your kids to the best school, having parents who are educated in what schools care about. Like don't get me wrong, right? We're all educated by our parents and what they have to offer. But not many of them have what's going to get you into Harvard to offer. But if they came from Harvard, they definitely do have it to offer. Right. Well, some of them, or some of them's parents gave a lot of money, but you never know. That's true, too.

I get to Stanford. Three guys in my research group, their father. is your PhD physicists. I know he wrote about in the book and I knew and I knew some of their fault. I rented a house from Bill Willis once when I was in I got in contact with Tom Willis again. We talked like back during the pandemic. It made me feel old when I read your book because I knew the, I knew the parents

that you were talking about. Oh man, that is wild. So did you know Max Allen's father? Because he's from, I think he was at McGill. Yeah, you know, Canada's a big country. No, I didn't. No, they ain't. It's a big, geographically. It's a sliver. It's a sliver. It's true. But you like Canadians early on. I read that. I still love Canadians, man.

I work with these Toronto production companies. Yeah. It's a blast up there. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It has, anyway, it has advantage.

I've now sampled both back and forth. And there's advantages and disadvantages. Yeah, I love both. Exactly. And you said something when you're talking about your son and education. And I was going to, I didn't want to interrupt you,

but I lost that train of thought now. But I think, but the bottom line is, oh, yeah. Look, when I was at Yale, when I taught at Yale, I never got involved in undergraduate missions, thank God. But I taught students and I thought,

these Yale students are any different than, I mean, it's a distribution. The difference was the tail of the distribution was really long. But the middle ones I thought, you know, I remember teaching them where we were football players. They struck to me, they could have been football players anywhere. I don't know how they got into Yale. Yale got a football team?

Probably. And what I liked about being in MIT is they didn't. But anyway, the, I always said, when it came to even graduate school, you know, people, I was on some selection committees there. And, you know, there are transcripts and there are these tests. And I always basically said, you know, I think we could just throw all the applications down the stairs and take the ones that fell to the bottom. We'd end up getting, you know, the ability to know in advance who's going to succeed. It wasn't, I'm very dubious about all of these detailed selections.

But nevertheless, I think the whole approach of trying to look at each kid and realizing that adversity isn't, You can't, I'm so much against identity politics. You can't say in advance on the basis of someone's race, their religion, or sometimes even their economic level, or economic level is probably a better determiner. You can't really say whether to what extent they've suffered, they've had to overcome things or benefited from things. But one thing that I want to ask you, and then we're going to leave, I promise, is some people say, look, you chose a black advisor.

and the book, in the way you described it, you chose it because you were really turned on by what he was doing, not because he was black. Is that true? Well, it's hard to disentangling. Of course it is. It's hard to know in advance. Because here's the thing that happened.

And I talked about this in the book as well. After doing my summer research programs, I met a lot of disgruntled, about to graduate graduate students. And they armed me with these questions to ask the people. Now, here's the other thing about this. There is diversity and the diversity. Yeah. I'd never been a black dude like Art Walker before.

Yeah, sure. At that age, he, I would have called him what I have been called, which is whitewash. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he said in the book, you thought he was whitewash. Yeah, yeah, okay. So I wasn't like, oh, he's my man, right? It wasn't like that at all. But when I hit him with those questions, dude, this dude came across so sincere, you know, and he came across like he really did care about, because that's what they were saying. Make sure your advisor that you choose cares about humans and you and human.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great thing to tell students because I met so many advisors who don't and I applied to be an advisor who does. Yeah, and he mailed that man. And then I challenged him. I was like, oh, yeah, well, what are your students doing now? Yeah, yeah. It started with Hal Tompkins and Slack. And then he goes, you may have heard him my other student, Sally Ride. I said the book, too. Yeah, that's all he had to say for you, and then you want you overwrite that.

I'm like, but then, man, he showed those solar photographs and that, that graduate research class, dude. That's, yeah, then you clearly captured you. No, that's, you submit, it was a photo. And I want to get to the solar photographs in a second. Yeah. The reason I'm saying is that some people say

their big problem is, is they don't see people that look like themselves, and therefore they can't, And that's a big impediment to going ahead and doing things. And I can understand it to some extent, except I never saw people that look, to me, I always still felt like an outsider. And to free Frank, so, and my supervisor was a black PhD graduate from Stanford. Okay.

Yeah. Who? Roscoe Giles was named. Yeah, dude. I've been talking to Roscoe all month. Yeah. Okay. Rosco is, and I chose Roscoe, not because, you know, he was.

looked like me because he didn't, but because he was really nice and really smart. Exactly. And he also said, I was the kind of guy who had to work on what I was interested in, what someone else was working. And he did all of that. And he was a wonderful man. And I didn't need. So, see, I guess I'm just a lot different.

And then others, because for me, I could have cared what someone looked like or whether their background was. Let me ask you directly, man. So, so, you know, some people are going to hate me for saying this. But I noticed this when I was at Tuguloo because we would go to the summer research program. Yeah. And I said, you know, the students come back from the summer,

someone be like, oh, I went to this program. I was the only black student there was horrible. And I always jokes. I'd be like, yeah, I was the only student there. It was great, right? Not because I was the only black student there. Like, I'll give me an example. My very first summer research program, I'm going to admit this, man, you know,

it's in the book. I was a big pot head, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I beat these white dudes at University of Georgia, and the next week, they get busted for selling pot. but they're right back the next day. But these guys were like, oh, man, you've never done psychedelics, and I hadn't, did not that summer.

You don't know Pink Floyd. You don't know Led Zeppelin. And they want to teach me, you know, and every day I'm like hanging out with these dudes, right? I'm also hanging out my Fright brothers. I'm also going to play basketball. Yeah. I go to the University of Arizona, right, that summer. Same thing.

White dude takes me, you know, rock climbing in Oak Creek Canyon and, you know, and all this kind of jazz. And so I've always been a very cute. curious person and I always like newness, right? I always like people of different cultures. So when I show up at Berkeley in the summer of 91, you know, I'm very open about, I don't know this,

I don't know that, you know, so I don't know if you know Rebecca Bernstein at Carnegie Observatories. So her and her Princeton classmate and this guy from Haverford were like, oh, man, we're going to show you everything. Never had Thai food? Here's Thai food. Never had an arachotechote. Here's an artichoke. Never had Indian food? Never had Indian food. And I was loving him. And by the way,

all Jewish, how come you didn't know by it based on our names? I'm like, I didn't know. Yeah, but, but you know, I understand, you know, reading about humans that people come in a couple of types. There are those of us that love newness and there are those of us that hate newness. They want everything to be the same and that kind of thing, right? So just like there are people like, I don't understand who are like, oh, this person was not speaking English in public. I'm angry at them. I don't understand that, right? Once I was saying, yeah, but I guess the question I'm asking is how important. And I'm really asking. Well, here's where it is important.

It's not important necessarily for inspiring you into the field. Most of the black astronomers and astrophysicists I know and physicists, they weren't inspired by a black physicist per se. They were inspired by the universe or Einstein or somebody like that, right? But where it does matter is in mentoring, right? That's what I'm wondering. You got mentored. Yeah, I was going to ask about that.

So the way that art taught me how to handle things, like I've had great mentors, like Michael Levy and now. Natalie Roe at Berkeley, right, were mentors. Well, you also great mentors in high school. There were also mentors. And they were a white teacher. They were great mentors. Oh, yeah, Mr. Reeves, right?

Our one white teacher. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, most of my adult, most of my mentors this century have been white women, actually, right? Because a lot of it has been in media. Yeah. But to the extent that I have decided to like, okay, I want to do something in other field, let me go find this Croatian dude. I think he's Croatian.

Joko E. Vesich. Oh, you know, I'm interested in continue this project. Who's the best at it? Oh, Josh Bloom and Joey Richards, you know, let me go work with them. Oh, now I'm interested in this. Oh, yeah, Dave McCamas at Princeton. So I, for me, it's like I'm interested in a topic and I'm looking for a cool person to work with. I'm not looking for a black person to work with. I'm looking for a cool person to work with. But at the same time, because I am a black dude, I'm like, yo, Stefan Alexander, let's write a paper together, homie, right?

You know, right? Just like I deal with my friend David Santiago, just like I deal with my friend Nisha Turner. We're like, friends are like, hey, let's write papers together, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, Lawrence, let's write a paper together, man. But, you know, and so I think, though, for understanding the type of challenges that you're going to have

and how people perceive you, you do have to operate in a certain way, right? And so art taught me, so I'll give an example. At Silicon Valley, after I left Stanford, I got challenged. Here I am. One day this guy, Korean dude,

Namhan Kim, not Namhum Kim, Yoak, Wokyong, whatever, Kim. Yeah. He says, He said, He was terrorizing this dude already.

He was really serious, he was really serious. He said, let me tell you something, man. I've been in this company for many years. I want of two black PhDs in applied materials that had 3,000 PhDs out of 22,000 total employees worldwide, right? One of two black PhDs.

He said, let me tell you something. something he's like here's how he said it i've been at this company for a very long time 15 years i've seen a lot of things and i've heard a lot of things and there are certain things i wish i hadn't seen and heard and i've heard something about you and what i want to let you know is is that if you're a member of certain groups you get to hear certain things and if you and if you're not you don't and he was talking about being a korean guy he said something is about to happen to you and it is about to happen to you because you were black if i were you i would go get an attorney right now Now, let me tell you how I've always operated.

Unless someone stands up in a crowded room and starts yelling racial expletives at me, I'm not bringing it up. Yeah, yeah. Right? Because I don't see it working out in my favor, right? Yeah. So when he says that to me, I'm like, whoa, dude, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't want no parts of it.

And it unfolded exactly as he said it did. It was going to. But because I had Art Walker's training and how to handle certain types of injustices, I was already prepared and I survived that particular event. Another thing that happened, while I was working at applied materials, I get a call from the EEOC, an attorney in Washington, D.C. And he says, listen, we have received strong evidence that you have been discriminated against in hiring.

So here's what happened. I went to the Stanford Career Fair. I gave out my CV to various companies. And one of these Silicon Valley companies north of Stanford, not South, like Applied Materials was, apparently they were evaluating and somebody in the room felt like I was being discriminated against because of my race and they reported it, right? I knew nothing about it. So again, I'm like, dude, I don't know anything about this. I can't say anything about it.

So this is in a way for me, hearsay, right? It's not, you know, I don't know when people have come at me, I don't assume they're motivated by anything other than what I can directly observe they're being motivated by. Attitude. Right? But at the same time, I still have to handle this situation. Yeah. And I get it. White dudes got to handle the situation too.

Women got to, you know, everybody, you know, it's a tough world out here, right? Yeah. And so my attitude has always been, so what? But here's the thing, man. I used to have two ways of dealing with problems, right, before I met on Walker, moping and punching you in the face. I know about two. So I needed that training. Yeah, you needed something in between those two.

That's not going to be in between those things. The question, you know, I'm going to keep pushing. He was a great mentor. But I like to think if I'd been your professor, I might have been able to give you that training too. You know what? It really depends. It really, really depends. Maybe you would have, or maybe you would not even know to approach me and let me know certain things in certain ways.

Right. Like I anticipate you're going to need this. so let me show you how to do it the right way. Yeah, maybe. That's why I'm trying to figure this. I'm trying to, yeah. I found it eye opening to read your story because, you know, I've had perceptions I've, of academia that I've seen.

And I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's competitive and there's assholes and there's cowardice and there's all the rest. But at the same time, it's also more, one of the more welcoming and lightning environments. And that's what, and when I hear it talked about as if it's just like, But here's the thing, no, man, it's that whole vulnerability trigger. Yeah, yeah. When you're the vulnerable, when there's someone looking to make, you know, like a new manager comes and they want to make an example.

They're going right for the vulnerable. Yeah, and I've been at the bun end of that. And I probably, for all I know, I've been at the other end too. And when I was in the heart, I try never to be. But, but, well, look, let's, I'm just going to close the door here one second. I'm like Fat Joe. Y'all talk that stuff. I want that beef.

What was that? There's a line in, you know, there's this DJ. college song called We Hicks over with all the rappers, you know, Lil Wayne, and one of is Matt Joe, and he said, y'all talk that ish. I want that beef. Bring me to beef. I'll suit it to sleep. I enjoy the fight, but not, you know. Okay, no, this is, okay. No, this is great. And I'm glad we had this particular, frank conversation about this, because I think it's kind of thing most people would never talk about,

I think. And, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, and, you know, and, and, you know, and, it's just not black or white. And it's interesting for me to have seen my attitude towards the affirmative action decision is different now that it would have been a few years ago as I've watched people. But the key thing that Art told you, and this was a great segue that taught you, as you say near the end of the book, Art taught me the difference between what I believe to be true and what I know as a scientist to be true. Absolutely. That's the final measure of a researcher to be able to challenge one's own beliefs and prejudices, let evidence tell the story. And to me, that's one of the most important

lines in the book, believe or not, because that's certainly what I, I mean, I spend most of my life trying to convince people of is that that's the heart of science. And it's the nature of science. And if he taught you that, that's what really turned you into science. Forget the mentoring and all the rest of the stuff. You know, that's to get along with people. He taught you how to get along with people. And that's okay. And it's a secret, but scientists are actually people. But, but, the really important thing, that's just, that's just winter dressing. The really important thing to be a scientist is that sentence. And that's the nature of science.

So what, so I want to talk to you about the, because I think all of this is also relevant to Webb, we're going to get to it. Right. When I read this, it indicates to me, your approach to James Webb was that of a scientist, which is to say the difference between what I believe to be true and what I know to be true and to be, you know, challenging. I don't go further than that. I don't do believe.

Yeah, exactly. When people say, what do you believe? I say belief isn't the right. No scientists say the word belief. Things are likely or unlikely, and you can hear the reasons why and hear the reasons why. And yeah, we'll get there. But that's all point. When everyone says belief, and by the way, who, I hate when they ask the politician that, what do you believe? Who cares what you believe? Yeah, exactly. And yeah, and people say, do you believe in this? It's just not the right word for science. And although I will say, one of the things I didn't cover, I was really amused by your short career as a preacher. Oh, man. Which I, which I, and, and, and, um, did you ever come out, by the way to the community is not, as not, you know, because I've been with a lot of clergy. There's a, there's a clergy project. I've talked to a lot of clergy people who have their jobs and they don't believe, but they know they're trapped, right? They can't, they can't come out.

And, and when I saw that, you were, you were doing a great job preaching, but there was one problem you didn't believe. It reminded me a lot of the clergy people. Man, it really, especially with, you know, in, in the book where I talk about my wife, you know, I get married. Her dad was a hardcore believer, man. And I would, you know, in your youth, you know, you have these discussions about religions and politics and what's true and what's that. So yeah, I did that back then. So in a way, I did come out, you know, and I did, you never came out to the community that you preach to, I assume, right? Well, in a way,

I would always ask you. But here's the, here's the point. It's how you define coming out to them, Right. So on the one hand, it was a situation where, you know, I knew that I didn't know. And so in high school, I would have more been described as more agnostic. Yeah. Than anything, I'm like, okay, that's, you know, I don't know. I don't know. And so it's not until I really did the deep dive into history and knowledge and everything in graduate school. And I was like, okay, here's now how I understand the world. Here's how I understand the world of spirituality and humans and they're interface with it. Here's how I understand the physical world. You know, And came to a place, though, where, you know, I'm more forgiving of people, you know, and the variation in diversity of belief and ideas and this sort of thing, I just want us to be well-behaved. I don't want us killing each other, right? You know, I also would like us to be able to tell what's real and what's not real. So I've often said, if you've known me, like, one of my biggest fears is going before a jury of 12 of my peers. I know how I, the transformation I went through to learn rigor and what it is to know, you know, and then I'm like,

man, you know, had I not going through that, I was accepting things as true that I did not know to be true. Yeah, yeah. You know, I agree. I mean, when you look at what people, I win this testimony, and I've seen him. Oh, me. And her testimony. Well, I've seen it, and I've seen it.

And I've been at various ends of it. And it's really, it's really scary. But, but, but, but so what turned you? So, so let's talk about the science. Yeah. He taught you to, what did you, in your science, what did you most challenge your prejudice? What was the most surprising result as a solar physicist? Dude, when your damn models matched actual reality.

That's the same way it was with me with dark energy. I couldn't believe it was right. Yeah, man, you know, you get this data that you can barely analyze, right? You build some model that's kind of like a toy model. And you put one next to the other and say, oh, this thing we can't see, it's more than likely this. Yeah. And then somebody makes an actual measurement, and it turns out to be that, right?

So I'll give you two good examples really early on that turned out to be true. So one thing is that if you look at the sun, you know, there's the nascent slow speed solar wind at 400 kilometers per second. There's a high speed solar wind that comes out of coronal holes at 800. And you see these ray-like structures coming out that look like, oh, that must be what's flowing. They call polar plumes out of there. They must be the source of high-speed solar wind. We do our analysis find out, oh, no, actually they're not. We published that in 1997, the sumer spectrograph on a Soho spacecraft that measures the flows of these damn things a few years later, and they match exactly.

But nobody cites that paper, even though we did it first, probably like your dark energy. Then I say, okay, what is the nature of? Because remember, when I told you, people didn't believe arts data. One thing they didn't believe was that, you know, the higher energy x-ray images that existed before that, you only saw this emission of the corona in what are called active regions, right? But now here, he presents this data at 171 Angstrom's, you know, narrow band image, and there's emission covering the entire disk. And the community says, dude, your past band must be way wider than you think, and you're getting some continuum emission contamination coming through. it should only be in the active regions. So a big part of my PhD was like,

oh, let me model this stuff. Oh, what we've done here is we found the nature of the upper transition region structures and all these little tiny loops and loop segments. And you've got to wait all the way. I published that in 98. And you got to wait all the way, no, 99. You have to wait all the way to like 20.

There's this rocket spectrograph called Iris, imaging spectrograph. And finally resolved it and it's exactly the same. And of course, nobody cites that paper either. So, Both of those were pretty cool. But then I go to Silicon Valley, man. I never saw a Silicon Wafer had no idea how chips were being made.

Oh, yeah. I remember the first time I learned that when I was when he first developed ballometry. There you go, right? And so here I am. The first thing I do is I apply the same type of astronomical spectroscopy that I was doing to semiconductor manufacturing. And I develop all these diagnostics, institute spectroscopic process diagnostics, that yields me like three different patents.

And then I go into the experimental lab and I actually developed the techniques for the last generation of planar transistors. I was able to figure out because they were moving from silicon on silicon dioxide to tungsten or some other reactive refractory metal on high K dielectrics or thin dielectrics. And so I worked out those edge processes, right?

So that stuff was crazy. But then the other thing that happened was more recent, my graduate student came to me and said, hey, you know, I told them to look for these scale invariant self-similar processes and make sure you look to see fields that are adjacent to ours to see if you can apply what we know to that field. And my graduate student is like, Dr. O, I see this process called torsional spine reconnection that seems to be scale invariant. It happens in galaxy cores on star services, planetary magnetospheres. If we can do it in the lab, we can harness this and we can have the world's fastest ion propulsion technology. Well, guess what we did? We worked up the theory and simulations for his thesis, and now he founded a company.

And I've just advised them over the last year, but they built a prototype, a working prototype in the lab. So that's also pretty cool. But any damn thing, you know, I do a lot of lab work. So I also did the first four-sided buttable packaging for large detectors. like that's on the dark energy camera and now going on. So when you consider yourself, I mean, you see, my field, the field of, well, which I came in particle physics, but I mean, you're either a terrorist or an experimentalist.

Yeah. But you consider yourself, I'm a personary. I'm a science mercenary, dude. Yeah, it's great if you can do both. I think it's great. I wish I'd been able to do more experiments or any experiments. Man, I love it. I love it.

But, you know, I want to, you know what I want to do, man. My first year, I'm getting older and I'm like, look, I want to do something, fundamental, groundbreaking, cosmological, in theory, right? You're telling me. But you've got to find a good problem. You know, that's the thing.

You've got to find a good problem to sink your teeth in. Yeah, and a problem that's solvable. There are a lot of good problems. Exactly. What's the nature, dark energy? But that ain't could be solved for a long time. Wow. Yeah, you're telling me, man.

I have bets on that, although the people involved, including one with Stephen Hawking, they never admitted they lost their bet. I used to tell you about what? Wait, Stephen Hawking lost a bet to you? Is that what you just told me? Yeah, but actually a few other people of two, one or two noble presidents as well. But they argued at the time that they were sure we'd know the nature of dark energy.

This was in 90, this was in 2004. They said in 10 years, I said, believe you're not going to know it in 10 years. It's not going to know it for. Anyway, it doesn't matter. We got the equation of paper and the cosmological constant. We're good to go. Anyway, well, look, it's this, it's this, you're absolutely right, by the way. I remember once talking to Stephen Weinberg about this.

and I think he's written about it too. People don't realize how intimidating it is. If you're a theorist like we were, we are. Certainly, Steve and I were in this field of particle physics. It's incredibly intimidating to think that something you're working on late at night as any relationship to what's actually out there. Right, yeah. It is so, and it's so shocking when it works out to be,

but it really is intimidating to think that somehow the world is, is obeying some rule that you've argued it should be obeying. And it is really, and the one or two times in my life that's happened where it's really been right, it's really kind of the most amazing thing. And obviously dark energy is the biggest surprise, but I mean the biggest validation in a way. But yeah, it's really kind of,

if you're a scientist, people think that, I mean, you have to have faith, and I don't like to use the word faith, but you do have to have, in order to work on something for a year and some,

my colleagues have worked on something for, 20 years. You have to, in your heart, think that it's probably right. But at the same time, there's a part of you that there's no way it can be right. There's no way. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting dichotomy, the experience of science that way. And it's great. And it's a humility, I think. And people often say scientists are humble. But it's the recognition, because most of the time, you know, I've written a lot of papers. And most of the time, the universe hasn't been smart enough to do what I said. Well, you know, that whole thing, about scientists being humble too, you know, one of the things that I always say is when you look

at the layperson conversation about scientists, I feel like a lot of people think that every 50 years or so, we go in a room, all the world scientist, and it's always the same topic. What's the lie we're all going to agree on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, and the secret handshake. Yeah, climate change. Yeah, where in fact people realize most people are going to work trying to show their colleagues wrong, but that's the... Yeah, we, yeah, you go, you give a talk in your own group, and they,

just attack you non-stop, right? And that's the problem with modern education. People are, you know, if it's that dialectic that keeps science going. And yet some people, how dare you question my belief? I can't believe that. I'm triggered and now I'm intimidated,

now I'm victimized. And that's a real problem with undergraduate education in this country I see now. You can't have an open conversation attacking ideas. And it's not people. Exactly. That's the key point. You got to attack the idea, not the people.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, the things, I think that when you're talking about learners and you're talking about people coming in with cultural, I don't want to use the word baggage, but basically cultural stories, right? And, and, you know, it's so hard to reveal your ignorance. Like, I've always been comfortable revealing my ignorance. You know, like, I will be in a room at a table tomorrow. And you use a word, I don't know. I'm like, I have what? You know, stop the presses. What's that word? Right. And no. Somebody treats me like I'm an idiot for it. Maybe behind my back, they're all saying it. But, you know, to my face, everybody's like you're a smart guy, right? But I, but I, you know, the magnitude of what I don't know compared to the tiny freaking sliver that I know, you know, I feel like an idiot at all times, you know. That's the right attitude.

Yeah. Hey, man, it's the reality, right? If you look at, subtract what you know from all there is to be known. What are you left with? All there is to be known. Like, you know. So I have no ego. That's why I like the new book.

in a sense of the edge of knowledge. It's what we know we don't know. But in fact, what the book I'd like to write is, the unknown unknowns and stuff we don't know, we don't know. But that'd be a very short book. If we knew it, we'd call it known unknowns. Yeah. Anyway, look, it's that training.

I wanted to talk to the science. And what you know, it ain't so. Go ahead. It's a surprise that you're right, the willingness to be wrong. Yeah. That is so central to science and the willingness to change your mind. Yeah.

And now I want to go to what the reason, as I say, the reason I first knew about you, the reason I first asked you to be on this a while ago was this James Webb story. And I'm so happy that it expanded into other things. But it's an example of exactly that, of being, of thinking, you know, this is likely and this is probably the case. But you know what? The evidence doesn't support it. I'm willing to change your end. And then coming up with the reaction of people who are supposedly scientists. supposedly, who demonstrate no characteristics of science.

So let's talk about James. So a lot of people aren't too aware of this controversy, even though, what's his name who I liked a lot, the New York Times wrote about it. Oh, yeah, Michael Powell. He's got a great gig at the times, and I've written him. I want to do a podcast one. So James Webb Space Telescope,

I remember when I first heard James Webb, I wasn't thrilled because he wasn't a scientist, but then I learned why it was named. And then why do you just give us a brief overview of the history, starting with 2015 or whatever? Yeah, yeah. So story, you know, I got to know certain people because of this. The Webb family.

And the fact, I just gave him COVID. And I recovered from COVID. I had lunch, breakfast with them last week, and I gave him COVID. Oh, isn't that nice of you? Well, I gave my wife COVID. She still doesn't get me. Anyway. Yeah.

But also, Sean O'Keefe and I have had some dialogue about his reasoning. for naming the Webb Telescope. And it's very compelling, man. And if you look into, I didn't know anything about Sean O'Keefe, but if you look into Webb who Webb is, Sean O'Keefe is sort of like a baby web in a way in the sense that he's a bureaucrat, nerd, administrative nerd, right?

Okay, yeah. So anyway, in 2015, the first article I read is the one with the title, The Problem Name and Observatories for Biggits. Yeah. By Matthew Francis, who I understand as a physicist and also a journalist. Yeah, he doesn't write like one, but anyway.

That's the only article of his I've ever read. I know. When reading that, I wouldn't want to pick up any others. But anyway, okay. Yeah, I know. It's bad. It wasn't rigorous. Yeah.

But I read it and I was like, oh, this is shocking to me. Why would NASA do that if that's true? So now let me, you know, I'm the type of guy, by the way, who when I hear a result, you know, I'm like, if this holds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not accepting anything. And let's not joke too hard. So the claim was to step back.

Well, here's the claim. Oh, okay. Here's a claim. So the claim was, first off in the title, that the man is a homophore. Yeah. The second thing is, was that he oversaw the purge of gay people from federal service in late 40s, early 50s, and that he personally fired 92 or 91 employees between 47 and early 1950. And then he had given this Senate testimony and that he had made this very homophobic statement about gay people not having the same emotional stability of normal persons or something like that, right?

Very specific, right. So when I read this, I'm like, okay, that sounds pretty damning. Let me Google and see what else I can find. And I found an article that was written five months earlier by Dan Savage where it basically said exactly the same thing. Yeah, I looked at read the other article. Yep, as that article. And then, you know, that article referred to as Wikipedia page. So I went to the Wikipedia page.

The same quote is there. And then I turned to our Facebook group that was called Equity and Inclusion in Science. I see that people have been talking about that. And people are like, oh, someone should confront NASA. Let me clear. That's a group you're a part of, a Facebook. Well, it was a Facebook group. It's not a group that I was a part of.

It was a closed Facebook group that somebody was like, hey, join this, right? So I'm a lurker, right? I don't, you know, I'm not reading emails. I'm not contributing to groups. I'm over here thinking, all right, and handling business. So I would go there from time to time, but I wasn't a big participant, right? I'd go and see what they were talking about. So I thought that was a natural place to go.

Sure, yeah, absolutely. So I go and look and discover it. Yeah, they had been talking about it for half a year. And people were like someone should confront NASA. And everybody seemed to accept it was true, except there's one guy who said something along the lines of, hey, before doing that, you should make sure you have the full story straight. So what happens? A year and a half later, I find myself working at NASA headquarters.

And once I figure out the lay of the land, I go right to the head of strategic communication. I'm like, yo, you know about this? And they're like, no, oh, no, this looks terrible. Let's go talk to the head of, you know, they assumed I knew who Gregor Robinson was. Let's go talk to Gregory Robinson. I'm like, who's that? They're like, oh, you know, the head of the web telescope. So we go talk to Gregory Robinson.

He's a very sober, very deliberate dude. And he's like, hmm, not very reacting. He's like, oh, that's news. Hakeem, send me everything you got. I sent it to him. I send him the two articles sent him a Wikipedia article. And he says to me a week later, he's like, Hakeem, all I see here are accusations, man.

And you look into it and see what actually happened. So I started looking into it. And at first I started by myself. You know, I discovered, you know, there was a Truman library, and there was the web papers and these sort of things. And I'm looking for the specific. quote from Webb. I'm looking for this specific congressional testimony from Web, and I can't find it anywhere. So then I turn back to the head of strategic communication. We have to be my

direct report. I report directly to her. And she goes, well, you know, we got these great historians and archivists and librarians. So I go down there and I get to know this one guy really well. And he turns me on to people at Johnson Space Center, people at, in Huntsville, at Marshall. And there is even a graduate student in history at University of Alabama Huntsville who's doing his PhD dissertation on web. And now what all these people give me is, I have no idea about this stuff, Hakeem. But do you know about this stuff he did at NASA with diversity? And so, you know, what's really funny is when I left NASA in end of August 2019, I left everything behind because I was so like, you know, nervous about government property. Yeah, yeah.

If only you know who was too. But anyway, go on. Now it's so big thing in the news. But you know, what the thing was is graduate student, man. Everybody knows about how Webb took on George Wallace. Yeah. Excuse me, took on Wallace at the governor in Alabama. But what they didn't know that this guy gave me were letters between Webb and these Mississippi congressmen, black congressmen,

when they were systematically taken on segregation in Mississippi as well. So now I'm really confused. I'm like, wait a minute, this dude persecuted gay people. And now he's like helping black people. Like what the kind of personality is this dude, right? So then this archivist and me goes, Hakeem, I think it may be a case of mistaken identity. Because he finds where John Purifoy was the person who had given the congressional testimony. And then right after this, I find this document from the Senate what they talk about with Purifoy's name,

when they talk about how they created the security apparatus. in the Cold War, right, after World War II. And, you know, and I find this book. And now I'm starting to see the story unfold. So I realize, ah, every, every detail that they had given for, Webb did this, web did this, web did this, all of them were actually done by Carlisle-Hubel sign and John Puroford. Yeah.

All right? So I'm like, there's zero evidence. And if you look, one of the main people who were pushing this had an article in physics today in 2019 where they go on to say, know, use the word no, that Webb prevented gay people from working at NASA in the 60s, right? That's very specific. Web did that. Yeah, I know.

They just say it and I know it. And then other people know it because they wrote it. Yeah. And all of it is untrue, right? So I write this and I expect that, you know, not, I don't expect to be big news because I didn't, you know, I expected to be like, oh, a few people are concerned with this. The gay people in the community may be concerned with this. and now everybody will be relieved to know that it turns out it's not true. Yeah.

But that is not what happened. Yeah, I mean, you think that you wrote, I remember in your piece, when you wrote the piece and I read it, it's basically, hey, now finally astronomers don't have to worry, we can move on to other things. It should be a relief. Yeah. But in fact, the reaction is the opposite. Well, I didn't know that there were members of our community who were actually, um,

had some personal connection with this, uh, rumor that somehow was their item, you know, I didn't know that. And if I had known that, I don't know what I would have done differently, but maybe I would have expected the backlash that occurred from those specific people. And the crazy thing about it is, this other astronomer who knew to both of us, who knew all of us, said, hey, Hakeem, I thought you guys had a cordial relationship with one of the two leaders of this thing. One who wrote the article titled, The Straits Are Here to Save Us. And I'm like, yeah, I thought we did too, right?

So I go to that person, he says, why don't you apologize? to them for any hurt feelings you may have caused. And on day one, I'm like, no way, right? But day two, I'm like, oh, I see how you phrase that. Any hurt feelings I may have caused. So I did it. I wrote to them on Twitter in my DMs, which I still keep private. And I said, hey, you know, I understand that this may have caused some hurt feelings.

Listen, that wasn't my intention. And if you want, I will use my voice, since I'm somewhat of a public figure, to bring attention to the lavender scare. And man, they weren't having it. They kind of went in at me. And then they said the phrase of, if you had submitted it to a journal, you'd be retracting it. And at that point, I was done with the conversation, right? Because, you know, I say this, like, you know how I go home and people confront me about being the science and they're like, you know, the Big Bang ain't real. And I'll say, okay, well, tell me what specifically is incorrect.

Yeah. The Hubble expansion data, the nuclear synthesis data or the Cosby microwave background radiation data, right? So just telling me, you'll be retracting it. I'm like, okay, which part of it is incorrect? So what they do then is they start creating these false narratives. Right? So after this blog. Let's make it clear.

They had already created a false narrative. They had already created a false narrative. It was one about web. But the thing that I'm going to parse that more carefully, the thing they refused to do is once that narrative was shown to be false, what a real scientist would do would say, wow, okay. I thought that was the case. But these people demonstrate that they're ideologues and they're not scientists.

Because they say, no, we're doubling down. You can't be right. You can't be right. I believe it's true. So if the evidence says otherwise, the evidence is wrong. Oh, no, no, no. But see, you have to look at their relationship with evidence. Okay.

So one of the things I like to tell people is, you know, I go to these public talks just like you. And people will come after me, come to me after my talk and they'll say, sir, you said that science says this. but, you know, my holy book or some other source says that. And I'm going to, and I correct them, I say, listen, that's not the, you know, I don't talk to him about their faith or whatever. I talk to them about science and understanding how that works.

And the point I make is, science doesn't say anything. Science asks. Science says, universe, tell me, what are you? So what they went about doing is, let me see if I can find some piece of evidence that supports my perspective even tangentially. Yeah. And I will say it does. So what did they do?

They find very quickly, this one astronomer associated with them who wasn't part of their court crew, Adrian Lucy, is like, look, I found this passage in David K. Johnson's book. So David K. Johnson is a historian. He's a gay historian. And he's the person who actually coined the phrase, The Lavender Scare. And in his book, he speaks of this meaning between Truman and Webb. And he uses this phrase saying that Webb had spoken to this senator who was going to oversee the Senate. committee that was going to investigate whether or not, the way they called

it was the problem with homosexuals in federal government, right? And they made it seem like Truman and Webb had this special meeting and that Webb was a planner and leader of it, which was not the case, right? Truman and Webb had met regularly for

years because Webb used to run his own agency, the Bureau of the Budget, right? And one thing that we all have heard that he created at that time is called Economic Indicator. right, Webb created that. So he's this star administrative, you know, nerd. And Truman is looking at what's happening globally. And he tells his secretary of state, yo, I'm going to install Webb as your number two, to which Atchison is like, who? No. And even Webb is like, dude, I don't

have any experience in foreign affairs. He's like, yes, but you have experience with organization. That's what we need, right? So what happens is, Webb is the unconflicted party in a battle that's been going between the senators and the executive branch. So when Senator Hohey runs into Webb, he says, hey, man, can you and I talk about this? Because the Senate was trying to get these personnel papers of the people who had been investigated for disloyalty, right, which include communists, which include gay people, which include people who were gamblers, who saw prostitutes, who were cheaters, right? Anybody who could be, you know, looked at as somebody who could be blackmailed or something like that. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. So Webb has his regular meeting with Truman, and he tells him at the end of the meeting, it has several topics, right? And at the end of me, he goes, oh, by the way, Senator Hohey asked me to attend this meeting on the homosexual problem. Should I do it? He's like, oh, yeah, tell him we'll find a way to work around the challenges with working together, not finding a modus operandi.

Yeah. So here's the crazy thing. when they find this piece, the NARA, the National Archives record reference is given. And Adrian Lucy says, hey, because of the pandemic,

they're shut down. But they know that there is that Johnson has paraphrased a real memo. But instead of waiting to get the real memo, they go out and says, this proves that Leuette was the leader. And it's in their scientific American articles, it's all over the place. Yeah,

that's how I first heard of it from a, Yeah. By the way, let me say, you just remind me, one of my favorite quotes, well, there are a lot of favorite quotes from Richard Feynman of mine. You know, I wrote a book about him. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, called Quantum Man, by the way. Well, well, before quantum life was written, it was called Quantum Man.

Years ago. But it's a scientific biography. Got it, got it. But, you know, he said, what you have to do as a scientist is, if you have an idea, you look, you try and prove it right, but you try to, equally hard to prove it wrong. Prove it wrong. And that's the thing. So you say, okay, I found this bit of evidence, but is there evidence that shows this wrong?

And that's the exact, what they did is the exact thing. We know that he must have been home of him. We're going to find anything that suggests he is. And we're not going to think about anything else. And then we're going to promote it. And I have to say, the first time I heard about even a controversy was this Scientific American article. And Scientific American, unfortunately, I was on the board of it.

It used to be a reputable magazine. I used to love it. Yeah. I wrote six articles for it and I used to have a column and I was on their board for maybe 15 years. And now it's just, it's really deteriorated. But it was a, you know, I recently talked about the dumbest article I've read recently. But up to that point, it was the dumbest article I'd read. I didn't know anything about it.

My first presumption was, well, here's the guy in the 1950s and 60s, and I'm assuming that he's no different than other people in 1950s or 60s. And to impose upon, impose modern sensibilities on a man at that time is already, silly, but I didn't even know that, I didn't even know the details. But then I have to ask you this because I remember writing about this and making fun of it because I thought it was the silliest thing I'd ever heard when they suggested that Tubman, Fittsco. Why? Because in the Underground Railroad, she must have looked at the North Star and I thought, are they serious? Was that the stupidest, was that the dumbest thing? Yeah, that was pretty, well, I'm not going to call all that.

I know. I just couldn't understand. I just thought, it's ridiculous. If you want to make, yourself a caricature of ridiculousness. That's, I mean, it's patronizing. I mean, look, it's clear they wanted a person of color to be. But it's just, it's patronizing to do that. Look how revealing it is, though, right? So after I showed that they, that Webb did not do what he specifically did, they immediately go to literally within 24 hours.

Oh, but he was complicit because he was in management. So in their articles, they say, yes, we're saying that anybody who was in management during this time. Well, guess who was in management at NASA with Nancy Grace Roman? Yeah, Nancy, you made that point. Nancy race Roman is a man, and no one's arguing against that telescope. Yeah, they're not arguing the Nancy Grace Roman and the Webb telescope both must be renamed. They didn't make that argument. And if they were sincere, they would have made that argument. Yeah, and it's these counter arguments. When I said, I guess I discounted the rest of the piece when I read about the suggestion that Harriet Tubman, he named it. Because I figured if there's that level

of seriousness or lack of seriousness, then I've got to, then the rest of the of the history is suspect. So that's how I presume. I mean, and I could have been wrong. I mean, I made a snap judgment and I could have been wrong. But I thought, well, this isn't the article to trust. And then I read, you know, I read about your work. And then the important thing was that, that your work was later validated by an exhaustive NASA. So you wrote this piece and you thought, okay, everyone's going to, hey, stop me on the back and say, you know, thanks for doing the real research to see what the real situation is instead. And we'll talk about it. You got attacked not just for what you were saying,

but who you were, and aspersion were. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So the first I heard of it was literally that week, right? So the same person who wrote the article, the Straits are here to save us. When that other astronomer attempted to mediate, he sent me, he goes, hey, man, this person said,

I should research why you left Florida Tech. So I called him up. And I'm like, what's that about? And he said, oh, something about sexual harassment and a title. I literally laughed because I'm like, Who's going to believe that about me? Dude, I'm the biggest nerd. I don't come on to anybody ever, right?

This is not how I roll. Now, to be honest with you, Lawrence, clearly I must be a very desirable dude because people are coming on to me all the time. And that includes students, man. But that's the reality of it, is that here I am kicking people back, beat it, get off me, back up.

I'm not, you know, and then you're going to be to accuse the guy who behaves that way as the one who's doing. I'm like, give me a break. Anyway, I didn't think anybody would believe it, but then I start hearing it coming from everybody. Oh, Hakeem, I was here and I heard someone say this. But let me tell you, man, there's real consequences. And I would tell you what it is.

So one of the people of the two leaders of it, not the person who wrote the article, The Straits are here to save us. At their university, a professor informed me that there was an internal discussion about inviting me to come there and be a speaker for a major event and a paid speaker. And they didn't say exactly who it is, but it's the exact same person to university. And a young astronomy woman, astronomy woman spoke up and said, oh, we can't invite him because he has these sexual misconduct allegations. Right. The same person, once I got hired at George Mason,

actually tweeted that phrase sexual misconduct with respect to that hiring, right? But then in the aftermath of the New York Times article and everything, they've gaslighted the world and said, oh, I wasn't talking about him when they're writing, yeah, someone should ask this guy why he left his university. The exact same thing your colleague said, the exact same phrase,

you're happening to use that with reference to me, but it's not about, you know, but so it's, you know, they thought they knew something about web. They thought they knew something about me. The similarity, that's the, I mean, the ironic part about this is that making claims about web and then making claims

about you. Yeah. And in either case, the point is that that the scientific thing to do is to see, is to, is to see the evidence. And the similarity between the two is kind of remarkable. It's a, it's a proper, and I don't want to criticize people so much. We have been. But it's a thought process.

It's the ideology that's the antithesis, sorry, antithesis of science, which is instead of being upset when you're wrong and refusing to be and then attacking the people, you know, and demanding that your narrative be true under all circumstances and finding reasons to denigrate or reduce the credibility of those people who disagree. The whole point of science is say, hey, this is amazing. I'm wrong. And that's the great thing about science. And, you know, I will say that, that, that,

the, well, let's get to the, let's end this and then, and then end with one other thing. The one I want to ask is, what can we do? I'm seeing this so often, to step back from James Webb, to step back from the attacks on you, is this mentality that we're seeing of the intrusion and I've written about it for the Wall Street Journal and other places, the intrusion of ideology into science. What can we do? You know, it's a debate, right? And it needs to be an open debate.

But the problem is there are so many people that wish to, what's the phrase, performative, virtue signaling. Virtue signaling, yeah. I mean, virtual signaling is at the heart of everything. They think that they're on the right side. So when someone comes to them with grievance, so I'll tell you, there's another, the same person, there's a person who wanted Mick Arthur Prize, who's a famed current black writer, also from Mississippi. And that person agreed to blurt my book. We became buddies after we were both speaking at Trinity College in San Antonio in early 2020.

I've spoken to Trinity in the old days. Before you were born, maybe. I was born in the 60s. But anyway. Late. But anyway, he says to me, you know, a week before he's like, oh, man, I can't blurb the book. And I'm like, why not? He's like, my friend said they'd be very hurt if I did that.

So that friend is the same person, right? Yeah. Now, again, there are these two prominent female professors at two major universities that both used to reach out to me often. They publicly are working with this person, and for the last year and a half, they don't know me anymore. I contact them, no reply. And I'm like, okay, I can't wait to see one of them in person

so I can say, hey, the reason why you suddenly don't know me after this engagement is because, you know, and that's the thing is that if someone says to me rumor about this person, always say to that person, well, you know, I'll, I'll find out for myself about that person. Unless there are probably, not many people are that way. That's, I mean, I just wrote a piece and then I had a guest post in my honorably about this guilt by association that's happening where people. And so that's why I think your friends are acting that way.

And it's the innate cowardice of academics, which is to keep your head low, not. get involved in any any controversies better better your virtue signal and be safer and if we if as long as as long as you get as long as the benefit of virtue signaling outweighs the negatives of inappropriately um uh making claims then it's going to continue and universities are going to virtue signal and and it's always going to be a calculation what let's say so is dropping hakeem as a friend is that going to be more or throw him under the bus, is that going to be a more negative thing for me than to virtue signal and gain within the community some rights? As opposed to being guilt by association, I know him and like him.

Well, if you like him, then you too must be. Exactly. And you know who suffered that? Will Kinney. Yeah, yeah. This third party who doesn't know me ever, tweet it right before the New York Times article came out because Will Kenny was like, it's wrong the way you guys are doing this. Hakeem, this woman tweets,

oh, when you see people protecting abusers, that usually means their abuses themselves, watch out for these two. Yeah, yeah, no, that's the kind of, that, but that's the kind of, that's what I'm seeing in academia, that kind of insidious sort of stassy what you expect from the Soviet Union.

Yeah. We can, this person knows that person, and therefore they, they, and we're seeing that. And we need to, we need to overcome that. We need to get away from that. And it is a problem in academia. And at the same time, you know, to, so. Man, I operate in several business communities.

You know, I'm like you. I'm entrepreneurial out here. I deal with the media people. I deal with the writer people. You know, I speak and I'm dealing with particular communities. And, man, there is no place I work in that is as toxic as astronomy is with the virtue signaling. And it's an unfortunate thing. We need to change it.

Because the problem is it's not just people being hurt. It's not just false narrative being propagated. It's that science can't be done. Because when people are afraid, when people are driven by fear, and we saw it in the Soviet Union, when people are driven by fear, they can't do good science because they can't ask questions. They can't be open.

They're afraid of what people are going to say. And for a purpose, science has got to be, and it would be great of society, democracy were too, but science cannot function. effectively if people are afraid to ask questions or afraid to interact with each other. And that's a real problem. Now, I want to hit. Go ahead.

Go ahead. No, I always feel weird because, you know, I'm a, you know, gregarious and affable guy. So I have colleagues going back. You know, everywhere I go, I leave a trail of love behind me, right? And so, man, I will be somewhere and somebody like, oh, Hakeem, the first thing he would give me a big hug, right? And I'm like, wait a minute. And didn't the AAAS pass a law, no more hugging? You know, it's the type of thing you're talking about.

Yeah. You know, it's like we're stripping away humanity. Well, you know, I wrote a piece. I mean, there's a big problem when people are asking, you know, seeing this person's name on a paper triggers me and therefore you have to take their name off the bigger paper. And that's just the antithesis of science because you're saying, I'm taking, you know, I'm not giving, we used to call a plagiarism if you don't put someone's name in the paper before. And so, anyway, it is a problem.

And I think it's important to talk about the problem. because I think more academics have to stand up. Ultimately, it's not going to be solved until the academic community says, we won't put up with this nonsense anymore. You're empowering. We care about the ideas. And it's not, and we don't care about,

we care about the ideas. And that's what matters. And so I do want to segue back to one question I have for you. And then it relates to, interestingly, it covers also the web, because I think, I think, anyway, you'll see what I mean in a second. All right.

I have to ask you, and I understand more having read your book, and looking at the organizations that impacted on you, the black fraternities and the black professional organizations. My attitude has always been skeptical of groups like the National Society of Black Physicists. Yeah. You're not wrong. I hear it. I hear it.

And because, you know, I would never, I mean, obviously I would never become part of a national society of white physicists or for that matter, a national society of Jewish physicists or a national, I mean, I just, you know, I never want to be a member of the club that I have me as a member anyway. But so why the National Society of Black physicists? I think I understand it more having read the book, but I'd like to hear you say. Right. Yeah. Well, if you look at the inception of the organization, it's written on the history of the website, right? And so there was some event that happened, national event. And the black physicists at the time felt like the professional societies and organizations that existed on this racial issue were not being sensitive to their particular concerns and what they needed to felt like needed to be said.

And so they said, okay, for this reason, we might need to start our own organization. But then it morphed, right? It began to morph because what it became was a gathering where they get together annually. You know, you don't see another black physicist for your whole year. And annually, you get a little, hello, fellow black person. And you know what? Again, African Americans are a different type of ethnicity. Like when I live in a community, I love to go to things like, oh, the Greek church, you know, they have their annual thing and they do their traditional Greek dance.

Or, you know, we go to India Week and you see an Indian culture and food. The fact that you gather together culturally in order to celebrate yourselves and in order to look at what may concern challenges to your community specifically and these sort of things, I see that as a good thing no matter what it is. If it's not an exclusionary, oh, we're going to get together and take over the world and hate and kill everybody else, okay, that's bad. But if it's like, oh, you know, we all are the great, great grandchildren of George Washington and we're gathering together every year to celebrate this, right? But what happens is that the African American population is going through a different evolution than the rest of America, right? Because it goes from this evolution of being in a state of race-based shadow slavery,

then reconstruction, then Jim Crow. And there's a relationship with education and access to education. education, right? And the other thing about it is, is that all societies in America, no matter what your race is, nobody's interested in science and certainly nobody's interested in physics. And I like to point out that for a quarter of a century, we've been pushing this STEM thing so hard because it's so important to national health. Yeah. But yet only 18% of our undergraduates today graduate with STEM degrees. And so these black physicists at a certain time started saying, hey, let's use this to mentor each other, the youth,

but also now around the 90s when I started, right, they started in 77. Let's start creating what people call a pipeline. Let's start dealing with students and mentoring students to bring them into it. Because even if you're interested in this stuff, you have no way of knowing how to go about it. It's that pipeline that I mean, I get to appreciate more when I saw your life. And also, Jim Gates. who I saw it at MIT. Jim was rendered by someone and I saw him mentoring a graduate student. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so what happens is now, you know, I, on the one hand is I do see the conflict.

You know, I see things that people don't talk about, right? I say a lot of things that are different. Like I say like, oh, yeah, I was abused by black police and white police. I've had guns put on me by black guys and white guys. So I'm lucky. I see that it's not a race thing. You know, it's not a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, you know, it's a. behaving badly thing. But historically, it is a race thing. Historically, if you don't have somebody in your home who got education, you know, good luck, you know, navigating that process. My life, like, you know, I couldn't compete with my own son, you know.

Him coming out of high school and me coming out of high school, completely different universes of people. But again, I am what you would call with a, you know, legacy heritage African-American. That's different from somebody who's coming from the Caribbean or Africa. America is the land of opportunity, right? They've had a hardcore mathematics English system background versus me in America getting educated in Mississippi, right?

So you see a Stefan Alexander, you see a, what's my man's name at University of Illinois, right? An Nadia Mason, you see Art Walker, right? He's from that Caribbean tradition. You know, you interface differently. And so on the one hand, the NSBP serves as a mentor network to help people navigate making it into this field. But here's the thing. We are not exclusionary. What do I do as an NSBP mentor?

I say, hey, yo, Lawrence, you're an expert on this? I got this great student. They're interested in that come work. So when we have our mentor networks, we're not all connected with black physicists. We're connecting with the top physicists in the field. So who do we have relationships with? The Simon's Foundation, the Heisen Simon's Foundation, our students aren't working with black scientists.

They're working with scientists that are the top in the field at what they do. So I am a big tent guy. I am a not exclusionary. You know, I'm like, let's build bridges. Let's do this. But you have to recognize that just like when they created that welfare state to prevent us from falling into slums and all of that. we still have to go to every community that identifies as a community and get these people engaged.

For one, if I was running a country, right, if I had a nation and I'm like, you know, I'm Hakeem. So if I am running a nation, I'm looking at taking over the world, then the galaxy. What do I want my nation? You just won. There's a hundred billion. And in the universe, right? Give me the, I want the infinity gauntlet. But, and Thanos was wrong.

He shouldn't have killed 50% of everybody. That's one doubling time, right? He should have killed the minimal, viable population. That's what should remain. But anyway, the point is that, you know, if you isolate yourself as a people, that is a recipe for death. For disaster. Diversity shouldn't be exclusionary.

That's not what we're doing. We're making partnerships with all the best. You'll forget what I see it as, and I think I understood it more reading the book is as it saying hey we have an opportunity to to mentor to help and we're going to use that opportunity and if you want to have a group i mean it wouldn't be acceptable but i mean we know but i guess you know there'll be any other group that wants to use a common cultural or ethnic hook as a way to help people um it's great of course from my point of you i'd just rather help everyone without an ethnic hook but but but here's the thing it's like

black colleges, right? Black colleges don't exclude white people from attending. I had black white students at my black college, right? But the thing is that if that black college isn't there, then there's no place for a lot of people to go. That's the point, is to provide an opportunity. Yeah, and I see that. And the reason I'm saying, believe it or not that it connects in the end to the James Webb thing is it's, I think the same people that were arguing about this ideology at Jim Webb produced when it comes to, physics kind of the same kind of hate exclusionary attitude and the one person who wrote I think wrote one of these pieces I wrote a piece you know on on white epistemology which I made fun of in a

different point of view somehow saying that that that the problem with physics is it wasn't it's not objective because they don't value black women and it was somehow it would be and I was shocked and one of the examples it was used was string theory you know they're willing to believe in 11 dimensions but not believe in black women. I felt like saying, well, you know, Jim Gates is a great string theorist. And, you know, it demonstrated an extreme, a willingness to throw out, this was a physics article, to throw out sensible physics to make an ideological point and to be exclusionary. Oh, and when that's that dark matter is somehow racist.

Yeah, yeah. Or whiteboards are somehow racist. There's no articles on it. But somehow these people get academic positions that are willing to throw out physics for the sake of ideology. It shocked me. It shocked me. Before there was woke, there was, you know, this thing called

being africentric. And within the black community of America, they started to make fun of certain types of ways of thinking, right? You know, the guys who would be like, why are the black olives in a can where you can't see them, but the green olives are in a glass, right?

So if you look at like Wayans, brothers, movies, and stuff, they make fun of these guys, right? And this is that exact same type of thinking that people make fun of within the black community. But for some reason, in this modern era, you know, and if you look at that sort of philosophy, you know,

it's sort of like an activist's philosophy. And that is, oh, I must find something to activate about. So you go about looking for evidence. And if there's, you know, I just don't understand coming up with these sort of narratives that are just like so ridiculous. They're ridiculous, but they're being empowered. People are afraid to say it because then...

But they empower them. That's the thing. They're like... And empowers that kind of... Exactly. It empowers people. And you feel if you don't virtue signal, if you don't say, oh, well, these people have something to say, then you're going to be attacked. And we need to point out nonsense word it's nonsense.

regardless of who says it. And yet at the same time, be positive. I mean, I think that I want to end on a positive note, but you can talk about ideas and their validity. And you can attack ideas. Attacking ideas and attacking people are very different. Very different things. And there's no way, well, I won't even go when people say somehow they're vulnerable.

How dare Hakeem attack me? He's a senior. Oh, man, I've been a check. Some people have, those people have, they have their, they're megaphones and they're not vulnerable at all. But I think the whole point is that we need to look forward and to try and overcome, this two shall pass. It is a problem.

We have to speak about it. And I'm glad you and I spoke about it. And I'm sure we're going to raise hackles by having spoken about it. Yeah, absolutely. But one thing I want to say, man, is again, if you look at what's happening in the labs on the everyday level, you know, when I go into, you know, University of Washington lab, right, I go into my University of Berkeley lab. I went in my Princeton lab with the people I work with.

I've selected to work with people like Art Walker said that are, you know, like one joke I used to tell when I talked to students to be provocative was the day I forgot I was black. Yeah. Right. Why did I tell this joke? Because, man, it's on your mind, right? When I'm at Stanford, you know, class is an issue. You know, race is an issue.

I go to Silicon Valley. It's completely different character, but it's an issue, right? because it's more of an immigrant community type thing and more of people, you know, more as, you know, we're going to stick together. It's not I hate you because you're something different, right, just like because you're something different, but, you know, we're going to gather together

and keep our knowledge proprietary because we're the same, right? But then one day I'm at Berkeley and I'm sitting in a colloquium, I'm like, oh my God, I forgot I was black. I was just sitting here looking at the science and listening, right? Because that was the first time that I was among a group of other professionals

where never really came up like that, right? We were, you know, very diverse group of people from all over the world and we would focus on cosmology. And I think that's the important thing to point, also to point out is that for the most part, in science, and in spite of what some of these noisy people are saying about their inability to do this or the presence of racism here. Most of the time you're in a scientific meeting and you're debating.

And happily, science still works, because 95% of the time, that's what it's all about, is the ideas and people don't care. And it's these fringe things where people are claiming that all of these things are happening that are giving you the illusion that this is central to science. Just like I used to say, by the way, you know, I used to call myself an antithist. And my friend Christopher Hitchens used to call himself that. And now I say I'm an apotheist because I don't give a damn because it never comes up. People seem to think that God is central in our discussions.

Besides, we never comes up. It's irrelevant. And we again seem to make it seem like race is so important. And at least in my experience, as a scientist, it's been irrelevant. But here's the thing about it is that it has an, when it does come up, it has a disproportionate impact on people's psyche. Yeah, yeah. So that's the thing is that it, you know, if you're a woman, you're going to run into some dude who's going to want to make you feel bad.

So he's going to say people go for what's easy, right? Yeah. And there are a group, the character has a range, a Gaussian too. So you're going to come across somebody. So somebody might talk about your appearance. Somebody might talk about your height. Somebody might talk, you know, and all these things come up. So people are saying bad things to people.

It's not. And what we have to do is train our kids to say, you know, you are, no matter who you are, where you come from, you're going to come up with bullies and you're going to be, you're going to get people who are going to put you down. They're going to be people who make you upset and you have to learn how to deal with it. It's called growing up. It's called growing up. But it's also called resiliency. And so the thing that I've come under recent, you know, I see people talking about, you know, we talk about the DE and I stuff. Yeah. And people are talking about training people to be nice to each other. I also say, you know, you have to also train people to be resilient.

That's brilliant. Learn how to say, hey, let roll off my track. But people see that as putting the responsibility on a person that's being victimized in the situation. But I'm like, listen, you have to, because listen, I, you know, I'm older. So younger people come to me. And sometimes they say, oh, something's going on, this, that, and the other say that. And the first thing I want to say is, well, don't be so damn soft, right? Don't let somebody be around you. It's like saying worrying is being punished twice. The same thing. But if you don't feel victimized and you probably and then that's a huge way to not

being victimized. I'm not saying don't feel victimized. But if you do feel victimized, use that as fuel for your fire. Yeah, yeah, say it. Respond or just say that guy's an idiot. There's a whole bunch of tools. I'm all about kicking ass, Lawrence. Yeah, well, okay.

So I'm like, you're going back negative. I want to go positive. Oh yeah, that's right. Go positive. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's a that, as I said, this two shall pass and science perceives and I think it's going to continue to proceed because it does teach us to question ourselves and it also teaches us there's so much more to learn and I love the I think the end of I think you

said somewhere the closest thing to infinity I've ever observed this hope I've seen infinity in the hope of hope in the faces and imaginations of my South African students and I think what you and I both hope is that is that we will see what drives both of us I think is the hope that we can get by turning someone on so that they can feel the amazing wonder and awe in the universe that you were lucky enough in spite of a very unusual beginning to be able to experience and I've experienced in many ways also. Neither of my parents finished high school. But the hope is what we, what we, what the message I want to give is that the universe

is too fascinating to get wrapped up in the nonsense and let us let us. And don't focus on the low character people. You know, look at those. I thought the statement of your advice said it resonated with me a lot, there's always going to be a distribution. And if you focus and if we give too much attention to the low character people, it distorts the whole thing. And we don't realize how many people of goodwill there are

and how interesting and wonderful the universe can be. And how lucky we are to be here. I'm lucky to be able to have talked to you. And I'm lucky you spent the time with me. You sure are lucky to talk to me. Anyway, Hey, by the way, I first met you on how the universe works, man,

not in person, but I saw you. That's how I first discovered that you exist. And I was like, who is this guy? He's taking my whole, he explains stuff so well. But then I joined you on season three.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And now, of course, what that does is, of course, make me feel old, but I don't mind. Hey, here's what you got to do, man. You got to invite me to your backyard telescope sometimes.

And pay for me to get there. All right. Okay. Anyway, it's been great. You take care. So I'm really, you know, I'm really happy we got to have this chance to talk. I look forward to doing in person. You take care of.

Amen. And best to you. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit originsprojectfoundation.org