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

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

'''Eric:''' “Oh my god, you’re self promoting!”

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

'''Eric:''' No, they’re initially, the reporter—

'''Eric:''' Yep

'''Eric:''' Talks to someone.

'''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:''' 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.  

'''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:''' Yeah. And I'm shocked because she's told me they're keeping it in house, and instead they've got a paper that they are- she says-in final revisions. They are 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-“

'''Bret:''' And her response is, “I have been through my email and I see no evidence of the communications you are talking about.” Now, when I said at the beginning that—

'''Eric:''' This is such fucked up. I mean, I don't swear a lot in this program.  

'''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, but what Carol Greider does with her Nobel lecture, right? Nobel lecture being the biggest lecture a scientist will ever give, the lecture that—

'''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:''' 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 knows 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—

'''Bret:''' For all I know they quietly have fixed this and there was a private, you know, I've heard that there was a private meeting in which they decided—

'''Eric:''' -but that 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, 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.  

'''Eric:''' No, dude, you've got a central, you've got a single point of failure—

'''Bret:''' -Right.

'''Bret:''' 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:''' Wait, 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 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.  

'''Bret:''' Well, this was it. I was elated and livid simultaneously, and I can still almost feel-it was almost like my body was trying to figure out- is 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 Greider 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 supposed to fool?  

'''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 explorer mode stuff 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:''' 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 (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 at 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.

'''Eric:''' No, it's not a question of that Bret, there is—you have the right to offer somebody a hand up.  

'''Eric:''' How many biology lectures were you invited to give at top tier AAU universities? American Association of Universities? Or, Association of American Universities.

'''Eric:''' Ok. 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:''' OK. 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:''' Well, I'm sorry. Can you tell me something? Where have you told— you have a podcast?

'''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? OK. 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 it, 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 at 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 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 Portal. 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.”

We have a biomedical complex that needs whistleblowers. It needs iconoclasts. It needs challengers. The food pyramid has been off for years. Our health recommendations are completely off. I think that this is an essential story. You need to move out of Intellectual Dark Web stuff, which was about keeping the pipe open.  Let somebody else do that. And it is time to hire you as a professor at a top tier university. And I'll be happy to talk to you about what happened when you and Richard Dawkins encountered each other on stage in Chicago, because I think in terms of pure evolutionary theory, it is time to boost a young Richard Dawkins who contributed two of the most important ideas in the form of extended phenotype in the mean, which largely dislodges the old Richard Dawkins and his hatred of religion, which has appeared to take over his thinking as regards his own contributions to biology. We got a lot of work to do.  

'''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 when our next episode drops. And hope to see you back on the next episode of The Portal.