19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC: Difference between revisions

'''Eric:''' If it’s a small field.

'''Bret:''' I'm just saying, at the time, if you mentioned her name, people would say, “Oh yeah, her Nobel Prize is one of these years.” Right? So my point was, I was in the awkward position—I didn't understand what I was supposed to do. I didn't want to send back a review that said, “I don't know who the person is who reviewed this, but they don't understand the material, and all of their critiques suck”, because I didn't want to accuse somebody who was that powerful of not getting it.

'''Eric:''' Because peer review is what happens— real peer review is what happens after you've passed the bullshit thing called peer review.  

'''Eric:''' The original submission was called “Life’s Slow Fuse”.  

'''Bret:''' The Reserve Capacity Hypothesis, which is a much less catchy title, but, nonetheless, the paper, I'm very proud of how it's written. People read it who were not expert, could understand it. The abstract is extremely clear, and it ends with the clear point that, because we have unearthed, we have predicted, and Carol Greider has shown, that wild mice telomeres are short, and the telomeres had been elongated by captivity, that there is a clear danger that the mice we are using for drug safety testing are biased in an egregious way. And the bias would look like this: a mouse that has very long telomeres has an indefinitely large capacity to replace damaged tissue, and, it has a vulnerability to cancer that is preternaturally high. So, we may be overrating—if we use these mice, we may be overrating the danger of causing cancer, and vastly underrating the danger of toxicity. And, in fact, one of the things—so, the point was you give a mouse who's got an effectively infinite capacity to replace its tissues, a toxin, and either the toxin is so deadly that it dies right away, but if it doesn't die right away, it just eats up the insult. So those animals would lead us to release drugs—  

'''Bret:''' Not only large N, but it's the one place that you can make the following move. You can imagine that in many circumstances the accelerated lifespan, the accelerated life cycle of mice allows you to see long term damage as it would accrue in humans on a very short timescale. That doesn't work with monkeys. It doesn't work with human patients. It works with mice, maybe, but in the case of mice with ultra long telomeres, those insults will be invisible.  

'''Eric:''' Let's just, I want to back up because I think this is a really important part of the story. What you're saying is if you take an organism that has an expected, let's say, 40 year lifetime, it's very expensive timewise to say, “We ran this experiment and found that there was no immediate damage that was visible, but towards the very end of their lives we saw a marked increase in morbidity” or—

'''Eric:''' K, so now you've got a paper that's out. You've got a real world application. You've got a theory coming out of evolutionary theory. It's making a molecular prediction.  

'''Bret:''' God, well, let's see. The paper came out  

'''Eric:''' And my recollection—and, just to be horrible about this—is that your fucking department at the university of Michigan, which has some great people, is also holding you back and enervating you year after year by not allowing—because this is groundbreaking stuff. This is Nobel quality work, at least one or two times over, in my opinion. I could be wrong. I'm biased because I'm your brother, but what concerns me here is that you are not comfortable with what this story really might be.  

'''Bret:''' No I— Look, it's not mine to judge. I'm very proud of this work and the work—  

'''Bret:''' You know, the irony is, I sent a letter to Dawkins when this was going on, asking for his help, and he sent back a letter saying, “This is very interesting. It's not my area of specialty. You should talk to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton Bill Hamilton].” And I was in the process of writing a letter to Bill Hamilton on Dawkin’s suggestion, at the point that Bill Hamilton came back from Africa having—he was pursuing a remote hypothesis about humans having accidentally unleashed AIDS into the world with a polio vaccine. But anyway, so—

'''Bret:''' Well, as long as we're doing this, years after this story had cooled—

'''Eric:''' Uh-huh

'''Bret:''' Right? And John Maynard Smith was dead. I couldn't contact him. I really wanted to say, “Oh my God, you nailed it.” Right. But anyway, so I was in the process of writing to Bill Hamilton to get his help. You know, he was sort of on a par with George Williams, and he went into a coma on his trip back from Africa having contracted malaria. And then there was, I think complication with the aspirin that he took or something. And he never woke from his coma and he died, tragically. So he never got the letter, and who knows what he would've done.  

'''Bret:''' —and it very directly alleges the danger with these drugs being released when they're not safe, and the drugs have started emerging and turning out not to be safe, and the government is now really interested in what's going on, the government puts together a FDA commission to study the question of—the book that they put out, literally a book that they put out, at the end of their study is called The Future of Drug Safety

'''Bret:'''It's not exactly clear what it was. What is clear is that you can search the manuscript of this book. Nowhere does it mention “mouse”—

'''Bret:''' It doesn't mention antagonistic pleiotropy. It doesn't mention the genus “mus”. It doesn't mention “telomeres”. It's not in there. It's alleged in the literature in broad daylight that this is what is causing the problem, and—

'''Eric:''' Now you're—see, this is the Vampire Effect, where you don't exist if nobody reacts.  

'''Bret:''' Right. And, so I start going to members of the press, I think, “This is a huge goddamn story. Somebody is going to make—

'''Bret:''' —career on it”, and I call up members of the press, and it's always the same, right?  

'''Bret:''' They talk to someone, and then either they stop returning your calls, or they say, “I'm sorry, the story doesn't hang together”. It's again and again and again.

'''Eric:''' Remember what I said about the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex

'''Bret:''' Yeah. And the people who man it don't even know what they are. For most of them, they don't know what role they're playing.  

'''Eric:''' Look, you see the same thing with like string theory because none of the reporters are actually string theorists, so they're dependent upon this. You saw this with this woman alleging that she had the Epstein story three years earlier, but that the editors said, well, we might lose access to the baby pictures of the Royal grandchildren like, you know, you're seeing this with catch and kill. There's this, I mean, I want you to take this seriously. You're just showing a part of what I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. We have 50 years of such stories, and it happens that in our family, three out of four of us created such a story trying to get a PhD. And the idea for me is that every time you have to go into some closed system, like, there's a committee meeting or there's a blue ribbon commission or there's a peer review process, or there's a, what do they call them, the panels—study groups, for grants. That's where the DISC lives. We know that it's localized to the things that protect the integrity of science. It's an autoimmune disease, where what we have is an ability to stop highly disruptive ideas from getting a hearing in the general population of experts, by virtue of the fact that a carefully chosen group of experts can stop publication. Because look, if you're wrong about this stuff, there's a cost.  It's not, it's not cheap.  

'''Bret:''' No, I mean, in fact, it would have been career ending. I'm pretty sure, had I been—  

'''Eric:''' I don't know that it would be career ending if it was done in good faith, but you know, this is my, my problem with this is that you're sitting on one of the great scientific stories—I would say that I've ever heard. But you know, I'm sort of, kind of saying, “Well, Bret, what happens next?” You know, obviously I know a lot of this stuff. I've forgotten it, but I lived this with you and this is, I can vouch that this is more or less the order of events as it was taking place, as we didn't understand what was happening.  

'''Bret:''' So I have to go through the final Carol Greider chapter. In order for this story to fully make sense,

'''Bret:''' Okay. So at the point that my relationship with Carol is changing its tenor and she is becoming hostile and I'm not clear on what's going on, I contact her and I discover through talking to her that she and Mike are about to publish their paper on the long telomeres of laboratory mice.  

'''Eric:''' So this is the Delta between a wild type and laboratory mice.  

'''Bret:''' Yeah. And I'm shocked because she's told me they're keeping it in house and instead they've got a paper that there, she says in final revisions there that day submitting their final revisions to nucleic acid research with their paper. And I say, Carol, can I see the paper? And she says yes. And she sends me a manuscript, not the pre-print of the paper. She sends me a manuscript of the paper, no acknowledgements, no figures. And I contact her and I say, can I see the acknowledgements and the figures? She sends them to me, and I contact her and I say, “Carol, I'm disturbed. This was my hypothesis that you were testing. I should probably be an author on this paper, but at the very least I need to be an acknowledgement in this paper so that I can go back and point to it and say that was”—

'''Eric:''' It changes everything. That it was a prediction. It wasn't just something that was stumbled upon.  

'''Eric:''' You had called her.

'''Bret:''' I had called her.

'''Bret:''' One of the great stories of all time, maybe, and human life hangs in the balance on this one.  

'''Bret:''' Right. Okay. So Carol does get awarded the Nobel prize, Carol Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn and Szostak. Szostak, who mentions at the point that the Nobel Prize is awarded that he was shocked as all hell to get a Nobel Prize because his work was so deep in the history of telomeres that he just didn't expect it. And suddenly—

'''Eric:''' No, I should say, I want to be very clear, right. All of these people have made fantastic Nobel-worthy discoveries.  

'''Bret:''' Weren't deserving. No,

'''Eric:''' Absolutely.  

'''Bret:''' No. And they, you know, Carol and Elizabeth got their Nobel prize for the discovery of telomerase, which is a huge, huge progress. So anyway, I don't deny that they were worthy of this prize. What Carol Greider does with her Nobel lecture, right. Nobel lecture being the biggest lecture a scientist will ever give, the lecture that—

'''Eric:''' And filmed.

'''Bret:''' And filmed—is she delivers a paper in which she very oddly has now embraced my entire set of hypotheses about the effect. She has come over from the comparison between the paper of mine that she panned and said didn't make any sense. She is now a total convert to the idea that senescence across the body is being caused by Hayflick limits that are telomere based.  

'''Eric:''' Okay, and this is the first public incident that we know of in which the delta between the negative comments on your paper, which is not an anonymous peer review.

'''Bret:''' We have it in an envelope from her.

'''Eric:''' Got it. And it's immediately after the Nobel prize that the wisdom of that line of thinking is embraced.

'''Bret:''' Right. But there's more to the Nobel lecture. So she spends her Nobel lecture on what is admittedly a very beautiful presentation of the connection between telomeres and senescence. She goes through tissue after tissue, says cirrhosis of the liver is what happens when you have short telomeres and your liver, etc. She goes through tissue after tissue. She projects the data, the blot actually from the paper with Mike Hemann, the paper that I should have been a coauthor on, she projects it on the screen, but she does some weird freaking dance, where she, instead of describing the long telomeres of laboratory mice as a major bug in the system, she describes it as a happy accident, effectively, because it allows us to test certain things like, “Oh, isn't it delightful that they have long telomeres?” And it's like, what the hell are you doing? There is so much riding on correcting this and you're presenting it like it’s just a bonus. And she, in her presentation, she's got several experiments that I did not know she had run that I had suggested to her and I said, you know, things like, “Carol, do you have any idea if a cell has many different telomere lengths, is it the shortest telomere that controls how many reproductions a cell can do?” She's run that experiment. Interesting. Low and behold, it's the shortest telomere. It's a good guess. But anyway, so, she goes through this. There's no mention of me, there's no mention of the actual implications of the the long telomeres for things like science and safety testing and all of that. And I can't seem to raise the issue of the safety question with anybody. Right? At best, I get journalists who are interested until they call somebody, and the somebodies on the other end, I know what they say. They say “everybody that mice aren't great models”. In fact, there's a paper out there that says something like the mice lie. It's not about this issue. It's just about the fact that mice aren't a perfect match. The issue in question could be solved. It could be addressed thoroughly. And, for all I know, once the JAX Lab figured out what they were doing—

'''Eric:''' They could change the protocols.

'''Eric:''' You see something like this in statistics, everybody knows that most distributions that are bell-shaped are not normal. Right?  

'''Bret:''' Yup.

'''Eric:''' But don't percolate down to the important layers in which we test things. And I don't know where, like you and I have never been able to fully put together, cause we're not molecular researchers and I'm not even a biologist. How important are these results? How robust are they? Has there been a change? This is a quiet world at some level.  

'''Bret:''' It's a quiet world. But I think what I have concluded, yeah, working backwards from the phenomenology of the field and how it reacts to this problem, is that there's a tremendous amount resting on failing to acknowledge the error. Even though the error was obviously an honest error to begin with, they would rather sweep it under the rug. I mean, imagine you've got all these knockout mice, right? These knockout mice, there's a major investment in them. It takes a lot of work to knock out a particular gene.  

'''Bret:''' Right.  

'''Eric:''' Whose projections are tendrils into everything.  

'''Bret:''' Right? And you've got how many careers built on papers that are now suspect.  

'''Eric:''' This is like an era. This is like a centralized irreproducibility crisis.

'''Eric:''' Okay.  

'''Bret:''' And, and you know what happens if, let's say somebody hears this podcast and they check into it and they find out, lo and behold, this story is true.  

'''Eric:''' What would, wait, wait a second. I don't want to get too far out over our skis. We have enough listeners that people will get a chance to hear an unbelievable story. And if there are things in the story that are not true or misremembered or unkind or there've been changes or maybe we don't really fully understand how the drug testing works. I'm open and I, and I want to be very clear, and I want this in the podcast, I'm open to the idea that the most straightforward implications of the story are subject to adjustment. However, having lived the story, I can say that this was an egregious story at multiple points, with conflicts between the evolutionary community, the biomedical community, the professional publishing community. This is a terrible story, and it's also an amazing and beautiful and wonderful story. And you know, I felt really lousy at the beginning of this podcast goading you and prodding you. But I am so bored of you, no offense, as the guy who stood up to the funny kids at Evergreen, and you know, we know what's in the heads of these people. If you're at Evergreen, you're not that good.  

'''Eric:''' Right. And that was like, this is the, I just want to be open about it.

'''Bret:''' No, I look, I appreciate it, and I'm glad to have this story out. The story has many different layers of meanings. I know, I remember where I was when I finally sat down to watch Carol Greider's Nobel lecture and I had one of the oddest experiences of my life. I was actually in a hammock watching her lecture, watching her present my hypothesis without my name anywhere on it, and then she projects this image from her paper with Mike Hemann, and I was flooded with two simultaneous emotions that are just completely incompatible. Right? I've never felt anything like it. I was absolutely elated to see my work projected on a Nobel stage, right? That changed me.  

'''Eric:''' You know I called the horse and rider problem?

'''Bret:''' Well, this was it. I was elated and livid simultaneously, and I can still almost feel what it was almost like my body was trying to figure out one half supposed to feel one thing and the other feels the other? But, this story has many levels of importance. Personally, it gave me the ability—I was already, as you are, very good at not being persuaded by the fact that everybody else disagrees with you, that that has an implication. Every great idea starts with a minority of one and you have to be able to endure being alone with a great idea in order to advance the ball significantly. This story was so extreme and so clear in the end that it just left no doubt. And I must say, I don't know how young students can arrange to confront materials so that if they're really good, they get a clear demonstration like this, that they're really good. So they know to keep going.

'''Eric:''' Bret, look, I think you're selfish, and I don't mean to be horrible about it. I think that the story is an inspiration. I've lived the story with you. I have my own version of the story where instead of it being the slide from the paper of Grider and Hemann, it's equations that are known as the Sieberg-Witten equations. And you see what you did, with somebody else putting, you know, putting it up on a board, it starts to change the field, and you suddenly say, you mean I'm not an idiot? Right? And what I'm claiming is that the next layer of this is, “Well, why don't you just submit a paper? If you have ideas, submit a paper, submit a paper, submit a paper.” Who is this fucking suppose to fool?  

'''Bret:''' Well, right, and this, this—  

'''Eric:''' I mean, I just, I think the idea is that if you have a seat on the exchange, you know that by submitting a paper, your paper will get reviewed because you have, you present a credible threat. It doesn't occur to you that what you're saying is effectively like “let them eat cake”, to somebody whose paper is going to be reviewed by the person who's, like, holding them back.  

'''Bret:''' No, this is exactly—when Jerry Coyne came at me with, you know, “Bret doesn't understand his, his explorer mode stuff is, is nonsense”. And then Richard Dawkins echoed it “Bret doesn't understand natural selection. And, you know, if he did, he'd submit a paper.” My feeling is, I lived this story, and you're going to pretend that there is even a mechanism to get a proper hearing?  

'''Eric:''' Look, here's my proposal proposal. All right?  

'''Eric:''' I think that you, Pia. and myself are indicative of an entire layer of GenX academicians, and now probably millennial academicians, whose work was suppressed, and we don't feel comfortable saying these words, which is that the purpose of the university system, in the time that we were there, was in large measure to make sure that big disruptive new ideas did not upset the apple cart because there was the ability to deny, I mean, this is what you guys call interference competition, which is that you keep people from sitting down in the chairs in a game of musical chairs.  And then the idea is we have lovely parting gifts for our contestants. Doug Prasher, who did green fluorescent protein, ends up driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama, features in the, you know, I don't know, was it the front page of the Science Times? A year later he's still driving a fucking shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama. Meanwhile, we're being told that Americans don't care about STEM. We're not really good at science, but thank God, thank God our friends in Asia are amazing at science, because, as bad as our children are thinking for themselves, we've got huge numbers of people who want to come from China, South Korea, India, and Taiwan in order to do the study in the labs, which is actually work, and I'm the guy who found the secret study in 1986 which says, “Hey, we're going to have to pay these American academicians over six figures very soon because of the supply demand relationships.” And then they took away the demand curves and they only showed the supply curves. They said this was a demographic rather than an economic analysis, so price and wage certainly didn't enter into it. Like, our problem is that the American scientific enterprise, headquartered in the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, and our university systems is fraudulent, and it serves to suppress radical new ideas. And I'm not saying that everything is guaranteed to be right about your story, but this is a story that you and Carol should have warred out, in public, without your submitting into a system where you don't know who reviewed this, you don't know how to respond to the comments. You can't measure the delta where somebody in one year says, “this is crap” and the next year they say, “this is my theory”. Right? And what I want. I would love to invite Carol Greider onto this program, because I think she deserves the right to rebut what you're saying.

'''Bret:''' Yup. That'd be cool.  

'''Bret:''' Yup.  

'''Bret:''' None

'''Eric:''' Okay. What the fuck is that? I mean, let's, let's just say the word “fuck” a lot, cause I had Andrew Yang in that chair. I don't say fuck a lot.  

'''Eric:''' Okay. So the idea is you have a Maoist insurgency against a student of Dick Alexander, who is supported by George Williams, with support from Leonard Hayflick. He's predicting something from evolutionary theory, registers in molecular biology. It may have drug testing implications, and, like, nothing, silence. And you're terrified to talk about this.  

'''Eric:''' Where is the story written up? Where is the story lodged? You and I have the ability to lodge it. I'm forcing you to do this on my podcast. I haven't heard you do a podcast about this. I hear you talking about free speech. I hear you doing things with the Heterodox Academy. I hear you doing things in the Intellectual Dark Web, something with Andy Ngo, something with Antifa. Okay. The whole purpose of the Intellectual Dark Web is to keep the channel open based on merit, because if we do something like the diversity of ideas, you know, for all I know, the people who are suppressing you are more diverse than you are, you know? Okay. These are ideas that needed to come out. There are health implications potentially of these ideas. This is not ethical to suppress. In effect, it's not ethical for you not to talk about, not to be rude.  

'''Eric:''' It's not a question of this. Look, there is a Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn and everybody else in like senescence land, Judith Campisi, who knows. Everybody's got a problem, which is there's way too much transparency, and there's too little funding, and there's not enough autonomy, and there's too much peer review, and for whatever reason, a new game has cropped up where everybody says we need more transparency, more diversity. We need to make sure that we're not wasting taxpayer dollars. We have, you know, ever more oversight. All of this is denaturing our society. We have to compete with China now. We are going to have issues with Iran and Russia, and we are losing our minds because we are serving a baby boom group. Almost, like, you pick a leading university. It is headed currently by a Baby Boomer. That's almost true without even telling—if I ask you, “Hey Bret, pick a university. Don't tell me which one it is.” I will tell you that the number of administrators that that university has soared above the levels of admissions, the tuition has soared above medical inflation, which is above regular inflation. If I ask you about the grant structure, older professors that are winning more grants and younger people are winning fewer grants. This is a giant complex. I am going to have somebody from Sugar Baby University, which is a subset of Seeking Arrangement, because the Baby Boomers made student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. And now this group is offering older men the ability to date younger women with an allowance, right? So we're starting to get into gray area sex work, where the Baby Boomers to keep this lifestyle to which they've become accustomed are effectively enslaving—

'''Eric:''' Okay. Bret, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Come back anytime. I want to say that anybody who is misportrayed by this podcast is welcome. We are not claiming to have absolute and universal knowledge. You are more than welcome to correct the story if you have knowledge about this that checks out. But the problem is that this is a story that needs to be told. It's like the story of Margot O'Toole and David Baltimore that played out at MIT, when, I believe that she found that she couldn't reproduce the work of Dr. Imanishi-Kari. And of course the system turned on the person who was trying to say, “Hey, I'm seeing irregularities. I'm seeing problems.”  

'''Eric:''' Thanks for coming. You've been through The Portal with Dr. Bret Weinstein, professor in exile from the Evergreen State College. Please subscribe on Apple or on Stitcher or on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, navigate over to our YouTube channel and not only subscribe, but remember to click the bell icon to be notified with our next episode drops. And hope to see you back on the next episode of The Portal.