Eric and Bret Weinstein: A Dark Horse Gallops through the Portal
Matt and Chris introduce themselves and the overall concept for the podcast then take a deep dive into an infamous episode of Eric Weinstein's podcast 'The Portal', featuring his brother Bret Weinstein (Episode 19). They cast a critical eye over Eric and Bret's claims that they are fighting back against the 'Distributed Idea Suppression Complex' and alerting the world to one of the greatest untold scientific scandals of the modern era.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where two academics listen to content or read content from the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what on earth they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, I'm a psychologist from Australia and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh.
He's a cognitive anthropologist from some obscure place.
In the British Isles.
And as we're both fully credentialed gatekeepers of the institutional narrative, we are ready to get to the bottom of whatever shit is going down in our interconnected online world culture.
Does that sound about right, Chris?
That sounds very good.
So the world of conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists and secular gurus is expanding in the internet era.
And we...
Have found a kind of corner that's interesting and potentially untapped to look at from a critical perspective.
So hopefully we have some interesting things to say and can connect it to the pre-existing well-trodden paths of conspiracy theorists and various types of gurus.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting connections there.
A lot of good stuff to unpack.
So we'll see how we go.
Hopefully interesting.
I'm sure it'll be hit and miss sometimes, especially at the beginning.
But we'll have some fun.
So I guess the first thing we should do is introduce ourselves.
So do you want to go first, Chris?
Sure.
So like you said, I'm in academia.
I'm a cognitive anthropologist.
But I actually teach in a psychology department, so I kind of moonlight as a psychologist on the board of anthropology.
All very academic and uninteresting, but the relevance for this podcast is that basically I've had a long-standing interest, not just academically, but personal interest, in conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience communities,
alternative health communities.
And like I said, the internet has led the blossoming of these spaces with a whole spectrum of people from your Alex Joneses to Jordan Peterson to even mainstream figures.
And as the president, it's become ever more...
I think that our background could contribute to saying something interesting about this phenomenon.
Maybe not in the elegant way that I've just done it now, but hopefully some better expressed things as we get more used to it.
Absolutely.
I think you're right.
A lot of things are coming together right now with the internet and the various sources of media.
The traditional religions and traditional belief systems, I guess, sources of authority are kind of breaking down a little bit and you have these alternative things arising.
So it's a rich environment, maybe a target-rich environment as well.
So we should have some fun.
So about me, I'm a psychologist from Australia.
I mainly do research now.
So my background sort of interconnects with yours in some ways as well.
My main area is in addiction.
And public health and behaviours that contribute to that.
I've had a long-standing interest in paranormal beliefs, religious beliefs, and also conspiracy ideation.
So it sort of all goes back to the fundamental goal of psychology, which is to understand why people are so crazy.
And, you know, one of the reasons people can be a bit crazy is that they believe all kinds of interesting things, and we're social animals, and we develop those beliefs in cooperation with other people.
So it's really interesting to focus on, it's not so much the psychology, but the sort of sociology of it, I suppose, which is the way these ideas spread and what ideas are appealing and whether or not they're connected to reality.
Yeah, and I also, following on from your introduction, Matt, I should probably mention that I...
Have a slight accent.
No, no, no, Chris.
No, that's not...
Yeah, I'm sure nobody had picked up on it till now, but I might have mentioned that I'm also from Northern Ireland.
I have lived outside for a while and now living in Japan, so my accent is a little bit strange, but it's mostly Belfast-influenced in Northern Ireland.
So what you're saying is, although we're two white guys, we're very diverse.
That's right.
There's an untapped market for white academics talking about niche topics in podcasts.
This is a rich vein that nobody has fought to exploit.
So it's good that we got there first.
Well, I'm sure the Australian Northern Ireland connection is an untapped vein.
Of course.
Well, yeah, maybe with the possible exception of like Aussie rules football and Gillick football crossovers, but that is not what this podcast is about.
Well, they don't have a podcast.
That's the thing.
They don't.
Maybe we'll end up getting into that when we exhaust topics.
But the other point that I realized I probably should mention in an introduction is that my main field is the cognitive science of religion.
So, in my actual research, I focus heavily on religion and particular ritual psychology.
So, the conspiracy theorist area is a side interest in my research, but actually, you know, in many ways relates in with religious belief and this kind of thing.
So, yeah, I may have mentioned what my main academic speciality is.
So, there we go.
Yeah, that's right.
And you reminded me also another sort of thing which we have in common, which is related directly to...
The topic of this podcast, which is that cognitive aspect, you know, the various heuristics and biases and cognitive fallacies and so on.
Basically, those mechanisms of reasoning that, you know, us human beings try to do.
But, of course, we're not computers and we're very, very fallible, all of us.
So it's just endlessly fascinating, all of the little quirks and mistakes or errors that we all make, but also in communication and language and how people, especially gurus, how they convey ideas.
There are various tricks, of course, that can convey a sense of truthiness, sometimes called deepities, which we'll hopefully get into as well.
Yeah, and I think both of us, we've talked off the podcast about this, that we...
We don't think that this is the kind of things that we're going to be talking about require you to be an academic to know this or to pick up.
But rather, academia does put an emphasis on critically evaluating and stuff, but there's plenty of academics who don't, and there's plenty of non-academics who are very critical when they're assessing things.
The techniques that people use in order to make themselves sound more convincing and affordable, we know a thing or two about them from our research and academic backgrounds.
But the things that we're talking about are not stuff that you need to be an academic to find out about or to consider.
And everybody has their biases.
Nobody's immune to them, including us.
So this isn't an attempt to say what everyone else gets wrong except us.
Except, of course, that we are.
Perfectly correct and everyone else is wrong.
That's the only point to make there.
Yes, yes.
So we should get into the podcast itself, I guess, to talk about what we're doing.
So it's called Decoding the Gurus, unless we change our minds and change the name, but for the time being, Decoding the Gurus.
So, yes, we're talking about gurus.
We're not talking about all kinds of gurus, right?
We're not talking about...
Maybe we will end up doing this, but at least at the start, we're interested in not the religious gurus or alternative medicine, the more spiritual side of the spectrum when it comes to gurus.
Our interest has been piqued.
By the people that operate in this kind of hinterland that we've discussed as kind of secular gurus where they might invoke religion or various traditions, existing traditions, but they're very much offering wisdom and meaning systems for people that don't fall into those traditional...
Categories of people like religious believers or spiritual seekers, but maybe they otherwise would.
So yeah, figures like...
Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein, like we'll talk today.
Yeah, yeah.
Stefan Molnier.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
How do you say his last name?
No, you've got to write this right.
Stefan Molnier.
Oh, good.
Good, good.
Yeah, so these people, as you said, they're not religious.
They're not sort of spiritual people like Deepak Chopra.
And I guess the only reason we're avoiding those guys in the first instance is they're almost...
It's almost like shooting ducks in a barrel to talk about what's going on with Deepak Chopra, I suppose.
Yeah, and I think another thing is that the kind of skeptical community in general tends to not have an issue with pointing out the problems with figures like Deepak Chopra or like Food Babe or whatever.
These kind of people do attract critical attention.
But when it veers more into...
Politics or social commentary.
There's political-based critiques, usually from the farther left side, which can be very critical of many of the people that we're talking about.
But aside from that, there doesn't tend to be that much engagement from groups like the skeptical community or atheists or that.
In actual fact, they're often argued to be the kind of pipeline that feeds.
The majority of the people that we're interested in.
Although, one point to make is that we're not only focusing on figures that lean more to the right or within the intellectual dark web.
We're interested basically in anybody, including people from the left wing side that are offering these kind of grand narratives and presenting themselves as kind of guru figures.
So maybe in later weeks, we'll address people from across the political spectrum.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think the other thing to say too is that we're not really interested in...
Taking people on in any terms of some sort of political disagreement or say, oh, you know, this type of talk violates our personal political opinions or something like that.
Are you saying you're not going to cancel anybody, Matt?
No.
No, we're not going to call people out for various things.
Well, we might call people out, but I don't think we're going to call for them to be cancelled or, like, de-platformed or...
No, no.
Well, look, where I was going with that is that I guess our intent, I think, with this is not to take shots at people just for the sake of it.
Although that's obviously a lot of fun.
What we hope to do, I think, is break down some of this content.
And hopefully use it as a bit of an illustrative example to kind of understand the kinds of things you have to watch out for if you want to be a critical consumer of this kind of content.
And, you know, there's lots of great content out there.
A lot of the people will cover a lot of interesting topics, but I think their audiences are attracted to them because they do dig deep on...
Topics that are of interest to people and often stuff that might get neglected by the more mainstream media.
So the attraction is real and understandable.
So I suppose we could humbly offer people a few tips and tricks for critical evaluation of this material.
So you can just be a smart and informed consumer of content, basically.
I'm sorry, Matt.
This is not what I signed up for.
Destroy people, ruin their careers, and financially bankrupt them.
That's my motivation.
It's pure vendetta that motivates everything I do.
No, I am.
Well, you're a headacus.
I know that.
Yeah, so people seem to think.
But actually, just to be clear, that's sarcasm.
I know that sometimes that doesn't...
I don't think that's the issue.
It's fine to disagree.
I hope and I think we plan to deal with people that we might overall agree with as well.
So it isn't necessarily a case that this is just a teardown of people that we don't like, hopefully.
There's more to it than that.
So maybe we should get into it and see what happens.
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's give it a whirl.
I will say one final thing about why you and I are...
I'm eminently qualified to do this job, which is that a lot of these people get criticised a lot from certain sources, basically from people who are diametrically opposed to them, just fundamentally in terms of their politics and so on,
and they get criticised in the most overblown way a lot of the time too.
And, you know, I'm generally not too impressed by the kinds of criticisms that, for instance, have been levelled at.
Jordan Peterson, for instance, I think a lot of them missed the mark.
So I think, you know, knowing you reasonably well now, Chris, I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we're basically politically very moderate, like, you know, in the liberal progressive left of centre.
But speaking for myself anyway, I'm very milquetoast.
I don't have any extremely strong...
Fanatical political opinions.
I think I inhabit the hinterland where, depending on who is speaking to me, Aymila presented as the champion of wokeness or a hidden conservative pretending to be left-wing.
But I feel no need to self-identify as a classical liberal.
So I think that at least we aren't there.
Not that there aren't reasonable classical liberals out there.
I'm sure there are a handful.
Many fun people, Chris.
Many fun people on both sides.
So basically, Matt, the point that it's important to mention before is that we should annoy the far left.
I should annoy the classical liberals.
And maybe we intrinsically just alienate the far right because, like, yeah, to make clear we're not so far right.
Just that disclaimer is probably useful to the kids.
Okay, hopefully no one's going to be writing letters to our employers to try to say this.
I'm sure we've carved out the biggest possible audience of just cancelling out all these segments that are usually the ones interested in this topic.
Good, so if you're still listening, we can get started.
So, what's on the menu for today, Chris?
I see we've decided to start with...
Brett Weinstein and his brother, Eric Weinstein, in a particular episode of theirs.
Yes.
So, no surprise to people, anybody that follows me online, our first topic released Brett and Eric Weinstein, actually, I think, and is, I would say, one of their masterpieces of the past year or so.
So, this is episode 19 of The Portal, which is Eric Weinstein podcast, and it's...
So just to interrupt, before we get into it and them, I guess just a note on the format we're going to follow for this episode and for all of them, I guess.
You know, every one of the people we'll cover and talk about, they produce just massive amounts of content, just reams and reams of content.
And it's really not possible to kind of...
Attempt to summarize it all and cover it all in any kind of way.
So I think what we decided is, look, we're just going to take one bit.
It could be a chapter of a book.
It could be an episode of a podcast, some manageable bit of content.
And we're going to work through it and see what they're saying in it and, yeah, take a critical look and, yeah, give it a critical analysis.
So I guess I think this is a good way to approach.
These figures and these ideas because even though you're taking a limited amount of content, it's often pretty representative of the kind of stuff that's going on in many other episodes.
And we can always come back and return to particular people that we cover for a second round if they produce something interesting we want to go through.
So we have to start somewhere.
So we're starting off with we had to pick someone.
So Brett and Eric are lucky first off the lot.
And we'll cover this episode.
Yeah, and so just to add to that point, there's podcasts that I listen to which are, for example, Knowledge Fight is a podcast that focuses on Alex Jones' content week in and week out, and they dive very deep on,
and he's pushing our content in the manner that you talk about every day.
And I think both of us feel that...
If we were to do that for some of these people that we might go mad if it became our sole focus just to consume the content.
So a kind of pick and mix approach is both mentally more healthy and also I think we can illustrate that there are these parallels across these diverse range of people with different goals, different philosophies,
but in many respects a lot of overlaps in the techniques and Yeah, and rhetorical tricks, if you want, that they use to make their point.
So for anybody who doesn't know already, Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist who came to fame because of being involved with protests at a lesser-known...
Previously lesser known college called Evergreen in America, where he was a biology teacher.
We don't need to get into them in detail, but just to say he ended up having some conflicts with students who were protesting, I think fair to say, from the social justice end of the spectrum.
And eventually he was kind of left this position and got a settlement from the college.
And since then, he's taken up a position within the intellectual dark web, arguing for Freedom of speech and against the excesses of social justice, the common things in that sphere.
And Eric Weinstein is his brother, who is a mathematician of sorts.
His day job is working as a managing director for one of Peter Thiel's investment firms.
And then he also rose to prominence recently for the rise of the intellectual dark web, and he gave the term.
He came up with the moniker.
As we'll see, he quite likes coming up with various new terminology and acronyms.
But he, previous to that, about eight years before that, had rose to a little bit of attention by claiming to have produced a unified theory of physics, so a grand theory of everything.
And he got some coverage as, is this the next Einstein?
Or is this like a cook?
So yes, that's the two characters.
And Eric has this podcast, The Portal, where he seeks to promote voices that he considers outside or silenced by the mainstream institutions, be they academic, political, economic,
whatever.
So The Portal is to introduce people to these new viewpoints and new...
The outside-the-box thinkers.
And this episode with Brett was presented as the kind of phase two of the portal.
First phase was him introducing various revolutionary thinkers, but the second one was where he began to attack the institutional suppressive constructs that he sees.
So this was the kind of opening for phase two of the disk.
So an interesting episode to look at.
Yeah, so this suppressive phenomena, he calls it the DISC, which stands for the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.
Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.
Suppression Complex at the DISC.
Yeah, so that's interesting, isn't it?
So Brett's background is in evolutionary biology, mainly.
Involved in teaching at Evergreen.
As we will see, yes, it ended unfortunately, I understand.
That was something I did know beforehand about that Evergreen crisis, which is a whole story in itself, isn't it?
Eric's background is theoretical physics in the sense of his PhD in it.
He proposed this idea of geometric unity, a potential unified theory of physics, which is definitely shooting...
Literally.
Yes, yes.
He believes the fury might allow us to travel beyond the speed of light.
So, yeah, that's colonized the distant world.
So, yes, that's great.
Although, just because I am aware of how fanatical some of the fans can be, his thesis was not on geometric unity.
That was kind of burbling along the background, being developed.
His thesis was on some obscure part of mathematics related to, I believe, related to theoretical
I see.
Yes, that was that talk that he gave.
You might have got confused by the gated institutional narrative, the GIN, which is another acronym that...
Eric talks about.
So all these talks of disks and gins and geometric unities and this is very much a feature of the man.
A lot of acronyms.
Yes, and a lot of acronyms and a lot of complex terminology.
Yeah, yeah.
So, good.
Okay, so that's the characters.
They've both got their own podcasts.
Brett's got his own podcast, hasn't he, Chris?
Yes, Dark Horse.
The Dark Horse, yep.
Dark Horse and the Portal.
The Portal.
Yeah, it's got a certain feel to it, hasn't it?
It's got a vibe.
Yeah, like Retrowave.
Synth Band, Dark Horse on the Portal.
You know, I'd listen to it, I think.
I would, I'd listen to it too.
Okay, so good.
All right, so let's, yeah, so this sounds like a watershed type episode.
So it's a good one to start with.
I've listened to it at your bidding, Chris.
Yeah, it was a wild ride.
It was interesting.
And we've taken some notes and we've got some clips as well.
So I guess what we're going to do is we'll work through some of the themes that they sort of cover, not necessarily in strict chronological order, but sort of thematically.
So maybe one thing that would be helpful to do at the start is if I give a kind of steel man synopsis of what this episode was about from their perspective.
We'll hear it in their own words in the various clips anyway, so I won't spend that long.
But just to make clear what their fans and what they would probably frame what this episode was about is that Brett as a young PhD student through his Insight into Evolutionary Theory,
made a prediction about the nature of telomeres, kind of the ends of genes and the relationship with aging and cancer growth and various things that will probably come up later.
But anyway, he made some deep theoretical...
and then sought to introduce it to the academic world, publish a paper about it and he contacted some of the leading figures in the field only to have his revolutionary insight squashed by The distributed idea suppression complex,
which was protecting the gated institutional narratives.
His insight was kind of too revolutionary, and as a result, it was suppressed by the various powers that be, including an eventual Nobel laureate.
And this episode is the older brother, Eric, convincing Brett that he hasn't taken up his place in the history of science, and that it's time to rectify that.
Smash through the disk and let everyone know about his important discovery and maybe start to set things to right.
Hmm, right.
Good.
So is that...
Anything else or just that?
I mean, is that not enough?
If I wanted to, I might add that they are...
At various points in this podcast, claiming that it's Nobel Prize winning insight that was suppressed and that it has implications for health, cancer, drug testing, the entire scientific enterprise.
So if that's not enough for you, Matt, I don't know what's wrong with you.
Maybe you needed to listen twice.
No, no, that's enough for me.
Yeah, just reminding myself here.
I think most of it is dedicated to setting out the story of the suppression and I guess not just suppression, it was also idea theft also took place and they go into detail about how these ideas were stolen or taken,
used without credit and essentially Brett has been Unfairly dealt with, it would be fair to say.
Yes, yes.
So maybe starting with a clip would be useful because I think one of the things that I did like about this, some people really didn't like this, but I find the dynamic between the two brellers.
Some people find it very great in where Eric is kind of pushing Brett and berating him about not living up to his potential.
But I actually find the dynamic between them quite endearing because in many respects, Eric seems to regard his brother as an unacknowledged genius, maybe only surpassed by him.
And to see him as very much advocating for his younger...
Yeah, which is very understandable.
Yeah, and their interactions are like someone comedic in that respect.
I have a brother as well, and I can imagine him trying to lecture me about how to live my life.
So that dynamic was quite interesting.
And the first thing I can play this clip for us, this is Eric.
I always resented the fact that you really excelled at and enjoyed teaching as much as you did.
And you saw this in terms of a place to play with ideas, to teach students, to have a pleasant and enjoyable life, healthy as it was in the great outdoors, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.
And I still see these characteristics in you and it drives me nuts because you're your own worst enemy in some ways to me.
What you really are, to me, is an unbelievable thinker and researcher.
And beneath this kind of very nice, friendly pedagogue is a thinker that the world doesn't know.
And I watched recently your interactions with Richard Dawkins.
And it was absolutely infuriating.
So this topic of how Dawkins treated Brett in their onstage interactions comes up again later.
And the general view is that he failed to appreciate Brett's genius adequately.
But that's a good clip to start off with too because it kind of sets out.
You know, it's really quite clear in the motivation for the theme of the podcast, which is that, yeah, Eric feels that Brett has been, you know, sort of his genius, to use his words, has been unrecognised,
whereas, you know, Eric, who knows him very well, sees him as a genius, broader society, a broader world, hasn't really recognised this.
He was working at Evergreen, which ended unhappily, but while he was there, it was mainly focused on teaching.
And, you know, from what I've heard of Evergreen, even though it certainly seems to have its faults, it did seem to have, you know, if you could afford to send your kids there, it certainly seemed to provide a very enriching experience.
But, you know, even though I think Brett enjoyed his time teaching there, like, you know, really loved interacting with students and teaching and so on, I think, I think there's obviously this issue there where it's almost like a research career has been thwarted or nipped in the bud without him getting a chance to grow in that direction.
Yeah, so on that, I'll play a second clip about Dawkins' feeling to appreciate who Brett really is.
I mean, he's very clear.
He's like, well, Brett is a real hero so far as free speech and standing up for free inquiry goes, but he's very confused.
Well, no, I don't think that that's right.
I think that you guys had a really substantive interaction about biology, which I wish he would spend more time on because he's phenomenal at it when he's focused on it.
Yes, so this is...
Tolkien's feeling to properly grasp, along with everyone else, that Brett is not just this figure who stood up for free speech, but is a revolutionary researcher.
Now, one issue with this narrative concerns the fact that Brett hasn't published much of anything in the 20-odd years in his career.
Now, this podcast is, in many respects, trying to explain, to account for that.
However, if you are wanting to claim the status of being an influential theoretical thinker, it is a very odd situation to be in to not be publishing or not conducting field research or experiments.
I mean, maybe Brett is taking trips with students or these kind of things, but yeah, it's hard to see how anyone would have perceived Brett to be a major Evolutionary thinker, because there's little evidence that that's the case.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I guess I agree with that assessment.
I mean, it does feel like the intent of this episode is, to some degree, to present Brett as an important thinker at the forefront of evolutionary biology, which is obviously very nice.
His brother would be keen to do that.
But, you know, as you know, Being a career academic like myself, I mean, one doesn't get that recognition just by announcing it to people.
You really need a track record and the recognition needs to happen in the field.
Both you and I have published quite a lot of papers and yet I don't think either of us would think of ourselves.
I'm not sure who the analogous person to Richard Dawkins is in psychology but I don't know if I'd be able to present myself.
So confidently to be self-proclaimed as someone who needs to be taken extremely seriously.
Yes, and I think part of this is that the people who are recognized, as Brett kind of acknowledges, you know, Richard Dawkins is understood as...
A good popularizer of evolutionary theory and previously an influential theorist for the Gene's Eye View and some of his earlier work with like the B.B. Byrd's pecking and that kind of thing.
But most of the people they're talking about are really more popularizers or people who are well known because of popularizers like Jerry Coyne or when they're talking about the failure to recognize them.
Now these people do have research careers as well.
But the point is that I think the people that have expressed doubt about Brett's understanding of evolutionary theory, I think that part of that is that they have a point, not that they have kind of deeply misunderstood things,
because there's been some criticisms, for example, about Brett has put some lectures on YouTube where he discusses...
Various aspects of evolutionary theory and has some of its own ideas.
And people like Jerry Coyne have criticized them on traditional grounds or on evolutionary theory.
And Brett has at various times courted controversy by expressing criticism of traditional Darwinian theory.
Now, he's often doing so in a way that It isn't entirely clear what he's arguing for, right?
It's generally pointing out there are some problems with neo-Darwinian theory and that this is causing problems or making the field to advance.
When pressed for details, they often, you know, kind of retreat to vagaries or, oh, epigenetics is doing interesting things or people are failing to appreciate groups election.
And I have a nice illustration of this about Brett noticing that the field is stuck where others don't.
I've been very clear and very public about the fact that I think my entire field is spinning its wheels, that they've gotten caught by a few bad assumptions, and that they are spending decades in the weeds for no good reason, that there is a way out, that I didn't know what it was for a long time,
I did figure out what it was, and getting their attention on the question of what they're doing wrong is a Herculean task.
I've made that clear.
I might jump in with my gut response here, which is this doesn't really make sense.
If you're wanting to point out fundamental problems with the main framework in a whole discipline like evolutionary biology, then I think you can't just say that to people,
tell them that they've got problems, and say it to some popularisers or famous figures.
That is not going to happen.
One needs to have a track record and actually have built up.
It usually takes decades.
It takes a huge amount of work.
I think your problem is that you're coming from a disk.
You're just trying to suppress the revolutionary insights.
So the issue, that's certainly the way that Brett would see that, or Eric would see that, right?
That focusing on publications, focusing on track records is like a red herring.
Now, I agree with you that if you want the claim to have made revolutionary insight, you need a significant amount of evidence.
So when Darwin...
Introduce natural selection.
The way he convinced people wasn't just because he, you know, tell people I have a revolutionary theory.
He brought mountains of evidence.
And even then, it took time to convince people.
So it's worth bearing in mind from the context of this that Brett has been post-PhD from 2009.
So only 10 years.
But if you count like the time to PhD, it seems, you know, he was on PhD track for 10. Years before that or so.
So you have maybe 20 years of being involved in this kind of research academic world.
In that time, he published two papers and a thesis, which if you focus on teaching, there's nothing wrong with that as a career choice.
There's plenty of people that are good teachers, also good theorists.
But if you're looking to make significant impacts on your field and theoretically, and you're not...
Publishing papers or you're not publishing books or producing these challenging things, then a lot of it just feels like being an armchair academic that you're saying, well, everybody in the field is doing it wrong.
I would do it right.
I could have been a contender, springs to mind, as an analogy.
Yeah.
I mean, look, what it boils down to is that if one wants people to accept A fundamental change in thinking, to really change the course of an entire discipline, then you have to come to the table with some pretty substantial stuff.
And it's not that having a publication track record or having an appointment at a prestigious university is like some sort of imprimatur of authority.
It's more just that you have to do the work.
You have to gather, as you said, mountains of evidence in order to...
Change people's minds.
And at the very least, you have to articulate what it is you're suggesting clearly.
You have to write it down.
You have to distribute it in some way, shape or form in order for it to be properly considered.
And if people reject it because there is no evidence for your proposal, then you have to understand that what you're doing is no different from sending a letter to...
An angry letter to The Guardian or writing an email to an academic telling them that you've got your own new theory of physics that you really think they should look into.
I think we should say at this point that this is Brett talking about his potential contribution to evolutionary...
Theory or evolutionary biology.
So this is not really his focus on the telomeres part, which was what the podcast is about.
But these kind of asides come up in the discussion where Eric is framing Barrett as a revolutionary figure.
So there's kind of like two separate points.
One is like, and I think the reason I mention it is because I suspect he would say, well, I did bring...
Problem with lab mice and telomeres that we'll get into.
But I made a theoretical prediction and it turned out to be right.
And that's the evidence.
But even if that was true, so you find some interesting finding that is unexpected and it's predicted by theory and that's very good.
That gives you an influential paper.
It doesn't revolutionize a field.
What would revolutionize a field is a research program that...
Constantly demonstrated how these insights apply and how they could be expanded on.
And Brett certainly has the hope that he could have that.
But there's no evidence that he has that.
And I want to just play one clip, which maybe will serve as a contrast to the way that we are presenting how science is advanced and done.
So I think this is Brett speaking towards the end.
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.
Yeah.
You know, relating this to other content, this rings to me of the Galileo gambit, where people present that the only reason...
They are being unrecognized because the other people are trapped in a paradigm that makes them feel to recognize the inside, just like Galileo or just like Einstein or, you know, various figures are invoked.
But the reason it's called the Galileo Gambit is because the amount of people who invoke themselves as these misunderstood Galileos.
Is exponentially greater than the amount of people who actually are, you know, the lurking geniuses who can revolutionize a field.
Those people do exist, but they're very, very rare.
And also, in almost all cases, some revolutionary insight only becomes strongly persuasive once people do the work to back up that the insight is valid.
And the initial observation is often, or the initial theoretical insight is often important.
But the actual work has to be done.
Otherwise, it's fantasizing.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, what I really have to do with this podcast is to sort of go from the specific and actually draw some general lessons from it.
And I think one of the lessons here is that just because somebody claims something is true or claims to be, you know, you cannot...
That's not enough.
As you said, for every Isaac Newton, there's an awful lot of cranks.
I'm not saying these guys are cranks, but I am saying there are a lot of people who think that they...
Have done what Isaac Newton did.
Yeah.
For every Isaac Newton, there's a Burt Newton who was like burning his dog's poop to transmute cold the dirt or cold the gold.
That's the usual way that goes.
Exactly.
And it's nothing, it's not even uncommon.
Like it's normal.
All of us feel a little bit special and we all get, I guess, entranced with our own ideas.
Our own ideas always seem really good to us.
So, you know, it's not an unusual thing.
And I guess the other parallel I'll draw, it's a bit more of a stretch than yours, but the sort of parallel to the Galileo Gambit in the realm of conspiracy theories, and again, I'm not calling these guys conspiracy theories or whatever,
but, you know, all in good time.
It's an extraordinarily common feature of conspiracy theories, which is that the broader community, whether it's experts, scientists, the public or whatever, cannot accept this revolutionary, groundbreaking idea that the conspiracy group holds because it is too threatening,
because it is too challenging to their worldview.
For instance, flat earthers cannot accept the fact of the flat earth because it would just...
Let's say idiosyncratic belief systems have a similar problem to solve, which is that they need an explanation for why everyone else can't see the obvious thing that they feel is right in front of their nose.
So, and, you know, I see a slight different, a slight thing here too, which is that, you
There has to be a reason why, say, Brett's obviously fantastic ideas have been unrecognised and, you know, there's usually an explanation.
An explanation is required for why that isn't forthcoming.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And I also think, as you say, there's always an explanation for why the person is unrecognized.
And also, there is usually a nefarious entity that is responsible for that.
And in traditional conspiracy theorist frameworks, it's the system or the Illuminati or the Greys or whoever.
It may be various fantastical people, the fourth dimensional reptiles that people laugh at.
In this case, It's the distributed idea suppression complex.
So that's like a wordier neum.
But when I think about what that means, it comes very close to the system or the man.
Institutions and academia or governments, these kind of things.
And this is not to say that they are always correct, but that having this kind of looming boogeyman gives you a reason.
It even gives you a reason why we made this podcast, right?
We are part of the disc.
So we don't get the, at least not yet, we haven't got the checks from the disc for our work in suppressing.
The counter-narratives, but maybe they'll be forthcoming.
We're doing this idea suppression pro bono, man.
Our problem is in a marketing framework, we've already got our false consciousness and now we're defending the high priests.
So we're doomed, Matt.
I think the thing is that we are doomed.
And related to that, I have a clip that will express this very clearly.
This is one of my favorite I have to say from this episode, which I think is perhaps one of the best illustrations of Eric and Brett and how they see themselves.
I'll play it and then we can discuss it.
I think you and I share a certain delight when we do our homework and we discover something interesting and absolutely nobody else gets it.
That would feel bad to most people because they would feel like, what am I doing wrong?
Why does nobody else understand this point?
To you and me, that feels good.
It is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody else can even recognize.
It gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be.
Yes, so I very much want to get your reaction to that, but I just want to say that for me, This is an encapsulation of Brett and Eric's tendency towards what I would call science hipsterism,
where what's important is that you find something outside that other people couldn't recognize and that you're so far ahead of the curve that you're talking about things that other people don't even know are on the horizon.
Displays some insight when he's like, most people might cause the fact that everyone disagrees with him to look again at maybe I'm wrong.
But in his case, it just cements that obviously that means him and Eric are right.
And both of them clearly, as he expresses, get the light in the sensation that they are so far.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that.
I guess none of them are short of self-confidence.
Self-confidence there.
Actually, one point to make there is that the reaction to this episode, I mean, so we were listening to the isolated clips now, but the general reaction to this episode was, well, Eric is, you know, pushing things too much and he's making like kind of grandiose claims.
Poor Brett didn't want to, you know...
Speak out and he was kind of forced by Eric.
But when you listen to the clips where this is Brett speaking, right?
I really don't think Brett is lacking for confidence in his abilities or insight.
I wouldn't say his issue is like an excess of modesty.
No, no.
Yeah, look, I guess...
How can I put this?
I think it returns to my point before, which is that if you have a really big claim, a really big claim that you've got this grand new insight, you understand things so much better than people who have been extremely influential and really driven a field forward for decades.
You've got this amazing insight.
I think if no one else agrees with you and you haven't convinced anyone else and you haven't brought...
Evidence to the table that actually convinces them.
Then you have to keep in mind that you may be delusional.
We all have a natural fondness for our own ideas.
We all find our own ideas very convincing.
That's kind of normal.
But when you kind of combine that with a real massive level of self-regard and self-confidence, then I think it can lead you down a certain path.
And, yeah, so I guess, look, I guess my recommendation for people who are listening to anything or reading anything from someone, from Deepak Chopra to Eric Weinstein or Stefan Molnir or anybody,
I mean, if they're simply proclaiming to you that they have a unique insight, then my suggestion is to take that with a grain of salt.
Sure, sure.
And I also think the thing is that what they're expressing is genuine and heartfelt.
People often...
I think there's various things that people do that justify that critique.
When it comes to Eric and Brett, my impression is that they're expressing their true belief about how they see themselves, how they see the theory and the field.
It isn't just a matter that it's all based on opportunism or these kind of things.
I get the impression that these are And I think because of that, they end up with these very weird conclusions.
So I've got an example here.
This is after Eric has introduced what happened to Brett at Evergreen.
And he's talking about how the American biology establishment responded.
When Brett found himself as professor in exile, along with his wife, Heather Hying, I had thought that the American biology establishment would realize that one of their own had been thrown overboard as Jetsam, and that he would have been invited to many universities to give seminars in biology.
Right.
And this repeats, but I remember when I originally heard that, my reaction was, why?
Even if he was...
Unjustly fired.
Was he giving seminars before in prestigious universities about his theory?
And the answer is no.
Then, okay, so even if he was legitimately the subject of this unfair weight challenge by students or whatever way the evergreen events are seen, it doesn't mean that he suddenly has...
Revolutionary insight that would mean that he should be invited to present at departments, especially if he's not talking about that event.
Yeah, I mean, I could give you a personal example here, a very recent one, which is just this week.
Several colleagues of mine at my university have sadly lost their positions as a result of the massive drop in international students due to coronavirus.
Australian academic establishment ponied up to start inviting them?
No, no.
No, they haven't yet, Chris, and I don't think they will.
And, you know, I should say that some of these academics I'm thinking of have a much longer and more substantial academic research track record than Brett.
So, of course not.
Like, as you said, why?
There is no system or there is no board of academics who are monitoring this thing and they don't have a kind of program to take.
Care of disenfranchised academics with a seminar schedule or something like that.
No.
Why would they?
Unless you were famous and, you know, perhaps if you were a legitimately famous person with a massive track record who was just really held in...
Even then, I understand that in this case, Eric is saying that Brett is a victim.
Of course.
But there's an inherent paradox that he's saying...
My brother should not be known for this event.
And then he's saying because of this event, he should have been invited to give lectures and talks.
And I think that he's on the one hand saying it's not because of that, but then immediately kind of contradicting that.
Yeah, the contradiction is clear.
And likewise, I think Eric acknowledges at the beginning that for various reasons, Brett hasn't been well known.
You know, it doesn't have a strong research profile.
And, you know, as we said, there's nothing wrong with that at all.
There's nothing wrong with focusing on teaching.
But you can't sort of have your cake and eat it too.
If you're not well-known and recognised for your research profile, then there's no reason for people to...
Offer you a seminar series and things like that when they see that you're out of a job, unfair though it may have been.
So look, I mean, my main takeaway from this, Chris, is that, I mean, more than anything, this illustrates like a disconnect with reality, frankly.
I need to help illustrate this disconnect in a way that will be palpable.
I think to everyone.
So as you mentioned, you know, this already, there's just this like random example of, you know, seminars and being invited.
It's already suggesting a screwed perspective.
But I'm going to play a clip from a previous episode.
So this is from episode 18 of The Portal, where Eric is talking about the distributed idea, suppression complex, and how it applies to his family.
And following on from what you said about, you know, detachment.
From reality, let's see how he presents his family.
It is time to do battle with the oppressive structures that have been used to silence new ideas.
If in my family I assert that there might be as many as three revolutionary Nobel-quality ideas in one clutch, how many ideas might there be suppressed if that is actually true?
No.
You heard Nobel level, right?
So even granting that that is not directly claiming that Nobels are warranted, it is that the insight is at the level deserving of other Nobel prizes.
And remarkably, Eric, his wife, Pia, her Nobel idea is in economics, this is in theoretical physics, and Brett's is in evolutionary biology.
Three Nobel Prize-level ideas in one family.
Can you believe it?
Yeah.
No, I can't believe it.
I mean, it'd be interesting to try to estimate the probability of that.
I'm not a mathematician, but I suspect it's not high.
It's not high, no.
I would say it's not high.
So, I don't know if it's obvious.
I mean, what's obvious to you and me, being career...
Research may not be obvious to every listener, but I'm beginning to think it might be, which is that what they're suggesting isn't just unlikely or implausible.
It's really, really implausible.
It's an indicator that perhaps someone's view of the world is a bit distorted.
Not in touch with reality.
Or really, maybe just not really having any idea of how the system actually works.
But I think most people could figure that out.
You say that.
But I genuinely think that when you hear these clips in isolation, it sounds...
Wow, they said that.
But when it's in a stream of consciousness and it's going through and there's many different claims and disclaimers issued around it, it's often very hard to truly appreciate that somebody just claimed that their family has three Nobel Prize level people who could have won Nobel Prize in it.
So I think very often the audience just doesn't know this.
These points.
And when people point them out, they say, well, look, you're just focusing on this one point.
It's not really representative of the arguments they're making.
And you can forget about the whole Nobel issue and the arguments still stand.
But the point that you make that, you know, it's illustrative of the way that they see the world and also their inability to kind of critically evaluate things.
That makes it important.
Another illustration of this, Is Eric encouraging Brett to break his silence about this event?
So let's just see how he frames it.
Because you're going to do this thing where you downplay your gift, and I'm sick of it.
I'm tired of it.
I just have had it.
And part of what happened is that you are now distorting the history of science.
You have a place in the history of science that you are not taking up.
You are not advocating for.
There's something that you don't like about this.
No, no, I don't think this is true.
I just think I'm pursuing it.
Maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it doesn't work out in the end, or maybe I'm pursuing it in a way that it would.
So, yeah.
I would say that viewing yourself as having a place in the history of science is a pretty grandiose claim, right?
And you don't hear Brett say, no, no, hold on.
My theory, you know, is important, but I'm not claiming to be like a grand figure in the history of science.
Instead, you hear, like, yeah, I agree, but, you know, maybe I'm not going to go about it the same way as you.
And, yeah, like, I've met many kind of very influential theorists, you know, at conferences and stuff, you meet kind of big names in the field, or my PhD supervisor is like a big name in my field and these kind of things.
And those...
People, by and large, with some exceptions, there are egos in academia and people attached to their degrees.
But I've never heard anyone frame themselves in those grandiose terms, that their place in the history of science is waiting.
And these are people who could claim, in some respect, to have influenced grand theories or scientific research paradigms.
So the level of...
Self aggrandizing and delusion, it's pretty hard to overstate.
Yeah, it is hard to overstate.
I think we've probably stated it well enough.
I think an unfortunate thing that we might have just noticed or both realized is that the clips that I'm playing are not supposed to be about this kind of same theme.
But they just have a habit of kind of slipping these self-aggrandizing things into a lot of their statements.
I've forgotten what our theme is.
What theme are we covering?
Look, I think in this case, the point that there is perceived to be a Nobel Prize insight here.
Yeah, yeah.
This is one of the greatest moments in evolutionary theory, perhaps in the history of science, and the potential impact is being ignored.
Even before getting to the evidence and the whole controversy that this is actually about, these are such big claims.
When I was hearing this, I remember thinking, okay, so what is it?
And I'm sure the audience has a similar sense the first time they hear it.
What is this?
Grime-breaking breakthrough.
Yeah, but it had a big, I guess what you're saying is it had a big build-up.
It had a big build-up.
I guess, look, here's the thing.
I mean, I do agree with you, actually, that I think these guys are in good faith.
You know, they do actually feel this way and they do have this healthy self-regard.
And in some ways, as you said at the beginning, it's kind of endearing, really, to feel that way about your brother and want to hold them up high for the world to admire.
There's an aspect of that which is kind of sweet.
But the other side of the coin, even though I think that's true, it's in good faith, the other side of the coin is you getting back to the theme of our podcast is you don't get to be a guru by being modest and self-effacing.
Yeah.
Humble.
You do.
No, you really don't.
I mean, this is a common thing for all would-be gurus.
You really have to go all in in terms of building yourself up.
It doesn't matter what the context is.
You could have a small kind of interesting sort of fringe.
Religion of some kind.
Or you could be building just a bit of a weird kind of cult-like professional group or something like that where everyone does what you say and nods their head when you say things and do your bidding.
And, you know, again, I'm not accusing these guys of this, but it is a thing that gurus do, which is self-aggrandizement.
It's a pretty simple point, but I felt like it had to be pointed out.
Yeah, I think it helps.
And now that we hammered it into the ground...
We certainly have.
We've made that clear.
We can move on to perhaps another point.
And I think a nice one...
So for anyone listening who hasn't listened to the original podcast, the insight that Brett had is basically as a graduate student, he basically posited this...
trade-off between the length of telomeres that if they're very long you can live immortally and your cells can continue to divide and
But that increases your risk of cancer.
More cell divisions lead to more cancer.
Shorter telomeres place limits on how much the cells can divide for these things called Hayflick limits.
And so there's a kind of balancing act between processes that allow cells to divide and grow.
And the potential for the formation of cancer.
And so this telomere length is a crucial seesaw element in nature that relates to senescence, aging, and cancer formation.
And he found some issue where particularly laboratory mice, they have very long telomeres, but they're short-lived.
And also prone to cancer.
Well, long telomeres would make them prone to cancer, but their lives are short, and so this seemed to be an issue.
But the point that you made, that they have particularly long telomeres, is something which was not known, or at least was not experimentally validated, and Brett thought that they should have long telomeres.
Because of their proneness to cancer.
And he saw that mice being known to have short telomeres and yet to produce mass amounts of cancer was a contradiction.
And so he hypothesized that maybe this isn't true and that mice actually do have Short telomeres, and this is why the short lived, and when he contacted researchers who worked on telomeres and this kind of area,
and they looked into, and this is through Brett's telling, and they looked into his idea, they find that, lo and behold, the most commonly used Laboratory mouse species, the model animal, actually did have very long telomeres and that this was a surprising result and that it was the result of kind of breeding protocols which selected for individuals younger in life so they could kind of the
later life genetics were distorted, right?
Because the negative effects that Did not emerge before they bred, right?
So they could kind of stack up.
So they have these very long telomeres, which makes them very good at cell repair, but cancer-prone as well.
And that this makes them a terrible model organism for humans because it means that when we test treatments on them, that we might see not detect...
Damaging effects which would emerge if you are a human without these massively elongated telomeres which allow cell repair.
So yeah, this insight he theoretically predicted and it was confirmed by some other researchers who were looking at the same topic and he thinks that this is This could undermine the drug safety of all drugs in most of the drugs,
at least across America, and that it has implications for just everything, like senescence research, cancer, so on and so forth.
So yeah, in that framing, perhaps it's more clear why the audience would agree that this is a...
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Yes.
That was a pretty good overview of a reasonably technical topic.
Actually, it's a quick question.
I mean, when I listened to this, I got the impression that it was rather technical.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it seemed important.
It seemed useful.
But, you know, as you know, in any field, there are, Sort of technical results.
And then there's the kind of the grand theoretical type, really big stuff.
And, you know, the small stuff is still important.
You know, you need to get all of those little things right.
And if there's a problem, for instance, with your model animal or whatever, that needs to be identified and so on.
It can lead to problems.
But it seems the general scope of the whole thing seems reasonably, yeah, technical and limited.
Well, yes.
I ask that because maybe I'm missing something.
Maybe there's an implication here which kind of would change our entire view of how evolutionary biology works, how aging works.
I mean, I think that in their framing it does because it relates to...
Drug treatments, and it relates to aging, and it relates to cancer, and it's a fundamental element of life.
But your point that, okay, but all of this comes from the telomeres of mice is reasonable, and more reasonable by the fact that if you introduce this point about laboratory mice not being perfect analogues for humans,
it's already a well-known fact.
In the field.
And there are other papers talking about the limitations of, like, mice models.
And there are many other species of mice.
And, like, it is also true that we don't just talk about laboratory mice, right?
We talk about laboratory rats.
And all drug studies are conducted in, like, with humans, require three-phase trials with humans.
You know, tolerance studies and the dosage response and so on, right up to, like, clinical trials.
Yeah, studies with sick patients and study with healthy volunteers.
So there's a whole infrastructure around that and masses of researchers working on these questions.
There's a whole research field focusing on telomeres and what they do.
So given that it's 20 years since this issue, it would seem that even if it was what they're saying, What's happened since then?
The fields have progressed.
I think basically what I'm saying is the chance of overstating the significance is great.
What makes that more likely is that as we'll get to, a lot of this podcast revolves around what was published or what wasn't acknowledged about this.
But this discovery that we're talking about, this revolutionary discovery, is mentioned in at least two papers.
One by Brett in 2001, I believe, and one by Nobel laureate Carol Greeter and her student in 2000.
So the insight...
The finding that Brett is talking about is in the literature.
Yeah, it found its way into the literature.
Yeah, sure.
Yes, and Brett's paper is cited, sorry, 2003, is cited 64 times.
And I don't have the other one in front of me, but I think it's significantly more, maybe like 200 or 300, which is like a significant, very good citation rate, but not...
It's not, you know...
Yeah, it's not the kind of...
Like, there are, as you know, there's this really long tail when it comes to citations, and papers that are massively influential get this just huge number of citations, and the rest of us poor suckers who are writing normal papers that get normally cited are part of that long tail.
So, yeah, if the citations are for this finding, which, as you said, has been published...
It's not nothing.
It's good.
It's a good, respectable impact.
Obviously, people paid attention and cited it, but it's not...
Yeah, it's not...
I think it's, you know, as academics, some of this is intuitive, but a paper that's cited 64 times over 20 years is not a revolutionary paper.
Even a paper that's cited 300 times or whatever, there are papers that are cited 6,000 times or these kind of...
Those are revolutionary papers.
A good example is Claude Shannon's paper on information theory.
It's when he published the Mathematical Theory of Communication, cited 50,459 times, right?
So that's a groundbreaking paper.
Okay, so we're back.
So I think because of the magic of audio technology, we're going to stitch this together, but we're reconvening after a little break in time, and we're going to get to the meat of the episode now, I think.
We're going to look at what Brett talks about in terms of his experience in submitting his paper to Nature and just take a look at that, I think, Chris.
So do you want to give us a bit of a backstory of what's going on here?
Yeah.
So after maybe over an hour, we have decided to actually talk about the main point of there.
The Repression by the Disc of one Brett Weinstein.
It's a saga for the ages, but the way that they tell it, it revolves around this paper that Brett...
has written to alert the world to this discovery about telomeres and the potential problems with the mice models and this trade-off between the length of telomeres and propensity for cancer.
So the saga is mostly about what happens with this paper and as academics of sorts we have experience with papers and peer review.
So I think we can maybe put into context how surprising some of the things are that Eric and Brett present about what happened and just how much suppression is involved.
Yeah, yeah.
So I remember from listening to this, there were a lot of things presented as, I guess, a little bit outrageous and just exceptional or mysterious or concerning about the process.
Which didn't quite ring true to me from memory.
But yeah, we can work through them and see what we think, I guess.
Yes, and it's hard to know where to start, but I think a good place is that the Nature submission is at the heart of the whole episode.
And Nature, for anyone who doesn't know, is one of the premier journals for science.
Getting published in Nature is a very big deal, career-making for some people.
So it's kind of the goal for everyone in hard sciences, social sciences.
It's a big deal to get a paper in nature.
It's a very big deal.
Like, you know, as a point of comparison, I haven't done too badly in academia.
I'm a full professor, which is as high as they get.
I'd be delighted if a paper of mine was accepted in a journal half or a quarter even as difficult to get into as nature.
It doesn't happen to everybody by any means.
It certainly doesn't happen to many PhD students.
Chris, so yeah, it's a moonshot, you know what I mean?
It's a big thing.
Yeah, so to submit it to Nature's suggestion that you think this paper is an important discovery, which Brett obviously did.
And he elicited some help with the submission from big names or within relevant fields.
So he...
He mentions contacting a kind of well-regarded evolutionary biologist called George Williams to help with the submission.
So, let me just play a short clip of...
We send it to George Williams, the...
Maybe the number one guy in the world.
The number one senescence guy at the evolutionary level in the world.
And he writes a beautiful recommendation letter for this piece.
We're going to send it to Nature.
George Williams tells Nature, you need to take this piece very seriously.
Okay, so Matt, let me ask you just one question.
This is even before we've got to how Nature responds to this, but have you ever in your career asked someone who is not an offer on the paper to write you a letter to the journal that you're submitting to say,
You need to take this paper seriously.
Yeah, no, I think you know my answer to this one, Chris.
No, no, I've not done that.
I've never heard of anybody doing that.
No.
Yes, so to peek behind the scenes, when we discussed this originally, I didn't even realize that was what he was suggesting.
For some reason, I had the notion that...
He was talking about a co-author writing a cover letter, which is a normal thing.
But when you pointed out to me that actually, isn't that not somebody on the paper?
It suddenly came home.
How unusual and bizarre that would be.
It's also incoherent, I guess, because I think one of Weinstein's perennial gripes is the I guess, hidden system of influence, underlying academia, which is purportedly kind of acting as gatekeeping and controlling who gets to publish what and what gets out there.
Yet to play up the prestige of the person who's recommending your paper is exactly the kind of thing that...
First of all, academics don't do and journals don't usually take into account anyway.
But they're doing, at least to the limits of my experience, they're almost unique in being the only ones who are actually doing the thing which they are very upset about.
Am I being unfair there, Chris?
No, you're not, I think, Matt, because one of the big pillars of Weinstein's complaint is how much of science is an old boys network and that it's all people dealing behind the scenes and who you know and what kind of influential institution you're related to.
So you would imagine that that would make them opponents of kind of getting big names to design.
Letters saying you need to take this paper seriously.
And I have another clip which kind of shows that far from being opponents, they are strong advocates of this approach when it comes to Brett's work.
So let me illustrate.
But the problem, Brett, is that Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins did not know that Dick Alexander, Leonard Hayflick, and George Williams were all on this thing because that community had broken down.
Oh, sorry.
That's the wrong clip.
Although it's illustrating the same point that Dawkins and Jerry Coyne being unaware of the prestigious people who had endorsed.
But the correct clip, I think, was maybe this one?
Let's see.
Hopefully.
Very professional.
Heflick was positive towards you.
Williams was positive towards you.
And Dick Alexander.
Those were the three that blew me away.
That's a huge amount of firepower.
That's a lot of firepower, and it wasn't enough.
So, all of these examples, and out of context, it might be a little unclear what they're referring to, but I think the message which comes through is that Brett and Eric are certainly not averse to mentioning influential people and to using their prestige to argue that for that reason,
people should heed what is being said.
And that Nature, this extraordinarily competitive journal, should publish the paper.
Yeah.
I mean, that's just not how things are done.
It's not how things ought to be done.
You know, peer review is a very systematised process, even though I haven't submitted to Nature personally.
Virtually certain the process there is the same as with every other journal, which is that the editor takes a cover letter, the manuscript itself, And takes it on its merits and then evaluates it with respect,
with reference to reviewers.
That it's just not done through amassing firepower of prestigious people telling the editor that they should accept this paper.
On that note, though, that when it works, that is true.
All of the points that you made about, you know, what should happen, that is the way when it's working.
But it is the case that, you know, influential people can know people on editorial boards and can exert influence or some big name can, you know, the editor could treat their submission differently than they might do for like a junior academic they don't know.
So like these objections are...
Not entirely unreasonable, but it's more in line with what you described is the ideal.
And it is also, I would say it's probably most of the time what happens, that there is a fair process.
But the bizarre bit is they're kind of simultaneously complaining about the informal networks and seeking to utilize them to get published.
So also, I guess it's a little bit frustrating because I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the paper was ultimately not accepted by nature.
Despite all of the influential people that had been brought to bear.
It wasn't.
And so I think all of this stuff is cited as evidence for the mysterious nature of the rejection.
I do have that clip, and this is not the wrong one, about nature's response, which I think is important to hear.
I think anyone listening should note in this context that I looked into the statistics about...
So like a paper, when it goes to a journal, it can either be rejected by the editor.
In that case, we talk about it being desk rejected.
Or it can be assigned to reviewers who the editor sends out and they may then review it and recommend rejection or...
Ask for revisions or yeah, so you can kind of get rejected at a second stage after reviews or you can get asked for revise and resubmit.
So there's like various stages, but the desk rejection stage is the first one and it's the first hurdle.
And the nature, when I look back at those statistics around about the time Brett was submitting, desk rejection rate was around 60 to 70% of papers.
So I mean 60 to 70% of papers submitted to nature.
Get desk rejected, which would mean that, you know, if you're submitting to Nature, you should basically, your default assumption should be that you'll be desk rejected, even if you have a good paper.
I mean, generally people only submit really good papers to Nature because they know it's a waste of time otherwise, yeah.
Yes, I've been on papers submitted to Nature, including papers that went out for review, you know, that didn't get desk rejected.
But even when they were going out for review, all of the people in the research group acknowledged it was a long shot.
Right. And we're not surprised when eventually we ended up rejected.
So let's hear how Brett and Eric respond to this very predictable outcome.
And they send it back with one of their absurd form letters that says that The nature of the article is such that it's probably not an interest to their readers.
And we're, you know, I mean, we had a good laugh about that.
You know, it's cancer, it's senescence.
It's so bad.
Like, this is a response that indicates...
Either malfeasance or an ELISA program, or the janitor ended up responding who didn't know any biology.
It's the craziest thing.
And, you know, the cherry on top is that they're turning down George Williams' recommendation?
Like, how crazy?
Do they know who he is?
On what planet?
On what planet do you turn down his recommendation to look at something about senescence?
Look, I just have to say, it would be impossible to parody somebody, you know, more relying on prestige that actually states Do they know who he is?
That's a meme for somebody relying on prestige and having too much self-importance.
Yeah, I'm trying to choose my words carefully here, Chris, because my instinctive reaction to this is...
Not good.
You know, it doesn't...
I mean, and I don't want to be that guy.
But, you know, there's nothing about that sentiment which is good.
Firstly, of course, they send out form letters.
Yeah, of course they write something polite, which is, unfortunately, this topic of this article may not be of interest to readers.
We all have seen those letters a hundred times in our career.
That's not something you should be offended or insulted by, but it feels like they're just...
Anyway, so their reaction is just completely weird to me.
It's super hyperbolic, and it just speaks to a massive lack of perspective about how peer review works.
Not getting published in nature is not a big deal.
For people, it's an expected outcome.
And when that happens, your next step would be, okay, so got rejected at nature.
Let's go to the next journal.
That's usually how people respond.
But here, it's presented as, this is a noteworthy event.
And I'm wondering why it cries out for explanation.
Yeah, that's right.
It's represented as being absolutely mind-boggling and mystifying and crying out for some kind of explanation.
And I guess they feel that it's especially mystifying because it was rejected despite having been endorsed by these very prestigious figures, which shouldn't.
be a factor in their decision at all.
And I'm actually glad to see that it wasn't because that's how things ought to
Yeah, and so if we move on from there, what happens next is that after getting this negative response, Brett decides to send the paper to Carol Greeter, the eventual Nobel Prize winner and sort of eventual villain of the piece,
but who at this stage was seen as somebody who, you know, Who had provided the empirical data that proved Brett's prediction correct and who would be an ally for this paper.
So Brett asks, can he send it to her and maybe she can give some advice about it or see what she thinks about it or what went wrong.
And he reports back that she sends him this detailed response to the paper.
And I think if she FedExes it over, and this is a crucial piece of information that they have her handwriting on the paper, because she slams it.
And Brett takes it as coming out of nowhere.
He describes there's tons of notes, and it's like she hates the paper, and she's extremely critical of it.
So Brett's reaction to that is to assume that that is indicative of ulterior motives, or something has changed.
Or there's something else at play because as he sees it, her criticisms are incoherent and completely contradictory.
But there's no actual reason to accept that that's true because what it sounds like to me as somebody who has worked on or has sent papers to other people or received papers from...
People that you often do get back very critical comments, especially from external reviewers who aren't on the paper.
Yeah.
In fact, actually, Chris, sorry to interrupt.
No, go ahead.
As my colleague and friend often says, he says that academia is like this long experience of being kicked in the nuts and then kicked in the nuts again and again and then saying, okay, thanks, can I please be kicked in the nuts again?
It's a culture of criticism, just incessant.
Constant critique.
And it's a good thing.
You don't have to take the criticism on board.
You can reject the criticism and not make the changes.
But in my experience, there's almost always a lot of good, even in criticism that's overly harsh or misplaced in some respects, there's usually a lot of gold in there.
When someone is actually taking the time to read your work and critique your work, a smart academic pretty much always...
Takes that information on board and uses it to make the paper or the exposition of the paper better.
And in fact, in having supervised a number of PhD students now, I've found that, yeah, one of the big predictors of success is the ability to take on critical feedback and not be precious about it,
but to actually...
Take that on and there's a particular kind of student that I've supervised, I have to say, a colleague that I've worked with or colleagues that I've worked with who can't do that and it's not a good sign, is it?
No, and I 100% agree with that sentiment that the ability to accept very harsh criticism, especially when you're sending Because you have to remember that the original way Brett contacted Carol was as a kind of PhD student with some ideas and asking her opinion,
right?
And at that point, you might be friendly, supportive, like if you're a good mentor, a kind person, you generally are encouraging PhD students.
But what changes is when somebody wants to publish something in the literature, then it becomes a matter that you should give a professional...
So it could easily be that Carol was, you know, supportive, friendly, encouraging.
And then she sees the paper and she feels he's completely wrong.
He doesn't really get it.
It isn't the case that her reaction means that she was kind of lying at any point.
It's entirely possible that she's now just giving feedback to the paper, which she doesn't like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, it's...
Yeah, I've been in exactly the same boat myself.
Yeah, it's entirely normal, as you say.
It's a different standard.
Like when you're evaluating a paper, you're evaluating it from the point of view of what does this paper...
It's not about being encouraging or supportive or nice.
It's about looking at the work and going, what does that need in order to get into the literature and be well-received?
And that's a high bar and it doesn't feel supportive.
It feels highly critical.
It's like getting reviewer feedback when you submit a journal.
It's never pats on the back and aren't you clever.
It's always just, yeah, harsh criticism.
It does feel to me that that is something that maybe Brett is not good at or at least wasn't at that time good at.
Receiving.
But I'm just guessing here.
I don't know all the circumstances, but one can't help but suspect.
Yeah.
So if we move to the next part, after the negative review from Carol, then Brett receives what we would know as a solicited submission.
So there's a nuller journal.
The editor contacts Brett.
And after some time, I think Brett got disheartened by the response or something.
But in any case, he's contacted by the journal who says, oh, we heard about this paper.
We'd be interested if you would submit it.
And I think he speculates that it's likely to be through the connections of Bill Hamilton that he got this offer.
Gerontology or something like that, which he points out is a significantly less prestigious journal than Nature, but nevertheless, they're a peer-reviewed journal.
So he gets this request from that journal to submit and sends it in.
Now, before we go into what happens at that journal, I just want to note that, again, getting a solicited submission...
Because of a famous person contacting an editor or a big name in the field leveraging their influence, in most cases, it sounds exactly like the thing Brett and Eric are reeling against again.
But in this case, it goes unremarked or kind of as a footnote.
But solicited submissions for journals are...
I think relatively rare unless you're a prestigious person and their status is somewhat ambiguous about, you know, not whether it's okay or not, but like the way that they might get an easier ride than unsolicited submission.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Actually, just by the by, I happen to have been, I happen to receive a solicited invitation today.
That's a huge prestige.
That's because I'm kind of a big deal.
Look, I've also, I've also, I will, I also have had a solicited submission.
In my case, it's usually for commentary on someone bigger's article or it's because one of my co-workers who is a bigger name.
Asked me to do it with them.
Maybe they don't feel like writing the paper.
I think I have a couple of chapters in books coming out this year.
Obviously, they're all requested by the editors of the book.
It happens.
I'm not looking down on people who receive requests.
I'm saying that is an example of the way that Brett tells it about prestige being leveraged in his favor.
Eric and Brad should be opposed to.
Yeah, and so one, it's a little bit exceptional for a PhD student to have that.
Sorry, was Brett still a PhD student at this stage?
Yes, at that stage.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So that is exceptional and a real, you know, lucky break.
You know, I don't know whether, you know, somebody spoke to someone, someone must have spoke to someone for them to be aware, I guess, of.
Of Brett.
Had he published before at this point?
The timeline's a bit messy in my head.
No, he hadn't.
I believe this is his first article.
Or if there was, it was one before, but I'm pretty sure it's his first article.
Unless you're a well-known name, which of course he wasn't at this point.
But Bill Hamilton was.
Oh, Bill.
Yeah, yes, that's right.
So, yeah, like he had friends in high places and that definitely contributed to an easy ride.
And as you said, it's a little bit ambiguous even if you're, you know, well-established when you get a solicited invitation.
It's kind of compromising the review process a little bit.
You know what I mean?
Because even though it does go to review and stuff like that, it's kind of...
It's a little bit implicit that it might have an easier ride.
But, yeah, I mean, yeah, as you said, it goes unremarked.
But, yeah, it should be like that's not something that a PhD student would usually get.
No.
So I guess the disc has been, in this respect, has been kind.
It's enlisted.
The disc is flying towards a publication, but there's a hurdle coming.
My metaphor is breaking apart here, but there's a big hurdle coming in the shape of an anonymous reviewer.
So the solicited paper is sent out to anonymous review, which is good.
That's the process.
And it returns.
With an extremely negative review, basically slamming the paper.
Now, at this point, Brett assumes that that is a review from Carol because he suspects it's in her field, obviously, and in her interest.
And maybe he recognizes some parallels in the criticism.
And he considers them all to be low-quality...
Not actionable and almost incoherent.
So his response to receiving that very harsh review is to sit on the paper and he kind of reports that he didn't do anything for a long time.
And then eventually he writes back to the editor and says he's not going to make any...
Because he doesn't consider the reviews high quality, unless the editor specifically wants him to change something.
So if the editor points out which ones are good, that he'll take a look at it.
And as soon as he submits that, he reports within minutes, he gets word back that the paper is accepted.
And he takes this as vindication that the review was not high quality and that the editor recognized that the comments and suggestions were all invalid.
What do you think?
That's a little bit unusual.
So in terms of the editor's response, that's unusual to the extreme because editors have the ability to overwrite reviewers, but they usually only do so if they have mixed reviews or whatever.
They might decide over the objections of one reviewer to...
To publish the paper.
But if they get only negative reviews, it's rare for an editor to accept the paper on their own grounds.
So Brett's inference from that, though, seems unwarranted because the explanation, which seems more parsimonious to me, is that it's a solicited article and that he's now refusing to do revisions or respond to very negatively revisions.
And it sounds like the editor just said, well, okay then, and accepted it.
Yeah.
I mean, there are, you know, as you said, as we said, it's a bit of an easier ride for solicited articles.
Usually you really ought to, even if you don't want to action the reviewer comments, you really should explain why point by point.
It doesn't sound like he did that.
Yeah, sometimes the editors just go, just think, well, you know, it's okay.
Wave it through.
Let it go.
Yeah.
Yes.
And I want to take stock here because what's happened, right, if we think back about this process now, Brad submitted to the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, was thus rejected, then received invited submission.
So this is the second journal he submitted to.
Refused to do revisions when requested by a negative reviewer, and the paper was accepted and thereafter published.
So this tale, which has online been presented as one of the greatest suppression stories never told in science, is getting accepted in the second journal via solicited submission.
It's actually a tale of an extraordinarily easy ride to publication.
Yes, let me just give one example.
I'm a random early career academic, right?
I have been involved in a paper that went through no less than, I think, six journals over the space of two to three years for publication.
And the first journal almost published it with minor revisions.
And we received conflicting reviews, positive reviews, negative reviews, the whole gamut.
That's not unusual.
Like, the experience I just described is not unusual.
Every academic has experience.
Yeah, look, in fact, Chris, just today, I've got another example from today, as it happens.
I'm a co-author on a paper that was just accepted.
Yeah, it was rejected by three journals beforehand, you know.
The lead author admittedly aimed high and sort of progressively revised their expectations.
It's a minor paper, you know.
None of us gave any of those rejections much thought.
It's entirely normal and it happened to have been accepted today.
So, yeah, this is nothing.
And I also don't blame people who are not academics, who haven't experienced this, because the way that the brothers frame it, as if this is a great, you know, scientific misjustice.
Also, Chris, also, I think, in some ways, I can understand why Brett has got...
The wrong end of the stick here.
Is that an international expression?
It's an Australian one anyway.
I think, yeah, got the wrong end of the stick.
Did you say the old stick?
No, no, the end of the stick.
Okay, good.
Because he isn't at this point, he's not an experienced researcher.
I got the impression that he was kind of...
Alienated from his supervisor or not in close contact with his supervisor or something.
I don't know.
Maybe it was not.
So I guess to him, it all felt entirely exceptional.
It felt mystifying.
Why didn't Nature accept my amazing paper?
Why did this reviewer have all these unfair...
Like, unless you've got a bit of experience under your belt, or unless you're being advised by someone who is experienced, you might well think that, you know, and you've got a very high opinion of your, and we all do, we have a high opinion of our own work,
you know.
Matt, I have to follow on one point that you meet there, because I think there's a clip that's extremely related to this.
So, like, we all do have, you know, relatively, We like our own work.
I mean, in some respect, I hate my own work because I'm extremely critical of it.
And after I read a couple of months later, I hate whatever I said.
But at the same time, you generally tend to like things that you're doing.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I want to just play a clip about what...
I think this is back when Brett was rejected from nature and what he did as a step.
And then...
Maybe we can talk about what this suggests about freedom of mind or self-belief.
But yeah, have a listen to this.
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 Bill Hamilton.
All right.
So this, I think this is when the, uh, nature rejection had just,
But the point I want to note there is he emailed Richard Dawkins, who's a well-known, famous evolutionary theorist at that stage.
And as a PhD student...
I'm pretty sure that would be like, you know, being in astrophysics and thinking, like, maybe I should reach out to Neil deGrasse Tyson to, like, help me get my paper published.
Yeah, I was just thinking of the parallel in psychology, my area, and thinking, well, that would be, I guess, me getting rejected from a journal and writing a letter to Steven Pinker saying, please, could you...
You know, kick in here.
I'm amazed that he got a response from Dawkins at all, actually.
Yeah, maybe he's good at writing, you know, letters.
I mean, him and Eric are certainly good at selling controversies.
So who knows the way it was framed.
But yeah, and it may have been Dawkins who kind of, you know, put him in touch with Bill Hamilton, who was one of the figures that he reported being positive about the paper.
In any case, another point we kind of glided past was that Brett was sure, and Eric and Brett spent some time on this, that very, very likely that Carol was the reviewer.
But there's no actual evidence that this is the case, right?
Because the reviewer was anonymous, and their assumption is because they received their critical feedback.
Like, again, they received a negative review, and the only...
Other negative review that they'd received was Carol's.
But the point I want to make here is that the positive reviews they had received were all from people in their network, like Dick Alexander, who was friends with Hamilton.
These people like the paper, give positive remarks, but these are all people that have some degree of interpersonal relationship.
Carol Greeter is outside an expert in this area, gives a negative review.
This external anonymous reviewer, who could be Carol Greeter or could be someone completely different, gives an also very harsh negative review.
So if it's me, maybe I would think, is this Carol?
But my other thought would be, is there a problem with the paper?
That I don't see.
Or that, you know, this is two negative, very negative reviews I've received.
Like, is there a point?
And we're all defensive about our papers.
But that possibility seems to be, like, alien to Brett.
That the flaw could be with his paper.
That's not possible.
So the question becomes, who are these alien reviewers?
Or, like, what's their agenda?
Yeah, who are the hostile forces?
Yeah, because it's kind of the only possible explanation when you feel like your paper or your work is without flaw.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's worth, you can only repeat it, but negative reviews, even when your paper is good, even when the paper is good.
You get very harsh reviews, usually.
You get very harsh reviews, usually.
Yeah, that's just normal and it doesn't mean that anyone has anything against you.
Yeah.
It feels like it.
So one part that this relates to is that while all this is going on, there's a separate paper that this is with Carol's group, which basically is looking at the telomere length in lab mice and making this point that the telomeres are elongated in this species that Brett has looked at.
So this is the work of one of Carol's grad students.
And Carol and And the grad student, Mike Herman, I think is his name, have done that research and found out this discovery.
And Brett reports that when he asks her about when she's going to publish the paper, that she basically says, it's not a priority, they're keeping the information in-house.
And we can hear what he thinks about that.
This is Brett talking about the decision for them not to prioritize making this information public.
I could publish this result.
And then everyone would have it.
Huge.
But then I'm on a level playing field with everybody else.
If I don't publish this result, I have a stream of papers I can get at, then I can start predicting other results.
Nobody will know how I am doing that thing.
I will look like a super genius.
And so holding it in-house is a mechanism for a whole slew of papers.
You can afford to bend over backwards and not make inferences.
Let's say the following.
Holding it in-house is a seemingly inexplicable decision in science, but for the fact that it fits at least one story of this kind, which is that it is consistent with wishing to publish a stream rather than the source of the information that would allow you.
So you can either do one discovery or you can do a stream of predictions.
Okay, so did that make sense, what they're suggesting?
That they're keeping the information in their lab in order to produce more publications and that people without this information are missing key knowledge, so they'll be able to predict tons of interesting things and people will think they're super geniuses.
Right, so this is, sorry, just to clarify, this is them referring to Carol Graders and her laboratory.
Her grad student and her paper, which is on the mouse telomeres.
I'm a little bit confused about one thing, which is making predictions.
Not publishing immediately, which, by the way, we can talk about that.
But where and how are these predictions made and how are they appearing?
Super geniuses?
I'm not sure.
Are they writing papers that are just predictions?
That point about this insight is super important and crucial to a whole range of things that will allow you to look like a genius.
As far as I can see, that's mostly in Brett's imagination.
Because the paper, when it does come out, and by the way, the paper comes out I don't have the years in front of me, but I believe Brett's paper comes out in 2001.
Maybe it's 2000.
I'll check these in a minute to be clear.
But in any case, this sounds like they're going to keep this in-house and pump out.
Paper after paper after years.
But the actual paper comes out within a year.
I can't remember if it's a year before or a year after Brett's paper.
I think it's a year before, which means that given this time frame, you're talking about one or two years to publication from the discovery, which is actually nothing and also no time to...
So what it sounds like is that Brett has reinterpreted this conversation for them to say that they're going to keep the information in-house and they're not going to share it.
But it more sounds like they didn't consider it a priority, but they still produced the paper within one to two years, which is actually a fast turnaround.
And let me play the kind of clip where he talks about this because...
It seems like a complete contradiction to, on the one hand, be like, they're keeping this behind closed doors so they can benefit from it.
And then to say this.
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.
So this is the delta between wild type and laboratory mice.
Yeah.
And I'm shocked because she's told me they're keeping it in-house.
And instead they've got a paper that she says in final revisions they are that day submitting their final revisions to nucleic acid research with their paper.
So the point here, which Brett also highlights, is that She apparently was keeping it in-house, but now they're publishing a paper.
So I don't see how you can complain simultaneously about both things.
And it seems that your inference that they were keeping it behind closed doors to produce all these slew of publications is wrong, because the paper is coming out maybe ahead of Brett's paper.
Yeah, yeah, I don't get it.
It seems contradictory.
And the other thing I can't get past is, The motivation for keeping it secret or in-house.
It's not secret.
It's just delaying publication, which happens all the time for any number of reasons, of course.
Not least reviews.
Oh, God, yeah.
Or rejections and resubmissions.
Like that process of getting rejected could take six months, you know.
But anyway, I don't get the supposed cachet for keeping it in-house, which...
As you said, they didn't anyway.
The supposed cachet is from making predictions and appearing like super geniuses.
I don't understand where those predictions are occurring or why that matters.
I don't know.
Anyway, I don't get it.
Yeah, so this story about repression and suppression of knowledge, the kind of important point to note here is we have two papers coming out by Brett's own admission within a couple of years, one to two years of like this.
This laboratory discovery.
We have Brett's theory paper, and we have Carol and Mike's empirical paper.
So rather than this knowledge being jealously guarded and locked behind closed doors, actually, the papers are published.
They're in the literature.
And if we check them now, Brett's paper ends up 20 years later with 60-odd citations.
And Mike and Carol's has, I think, a lot more like 200 and something.
So that's a well-sighted paper, but it's not like a paper that lit the world on fire, right?
No, it is not.
No, that's respectable, but it's indicative of an influential result, but not something, as you said, hasn't lit the world on fire.
Yeah, nothing's been published.
I don't see what the fuss is, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, and the thing is, the way it's presented, I mean, all papers kind of oversell their findings, right?
They have to say they're very insightful and that kind of thing.
So, like, the paper, I read it with Carol and Mike, their paper presents the result as, like, an interesting thing that's important for researchers to know and may have implications.
But they're very much, it's not this...
Fantastic finding that upends everything.
And Brett often points out that the general response to this thing about mouse models being imperfect is researchers saying they know, they already know that, and that there were many papers that made this point already.
And I think that's important because Brett still says, yeah, but that doesn't matter because this is a very specific problem.
My impression is that it's only really him that is so sure of that.
Whereas most other people are like, yes, we're aware of these issues.
And also, things like mice model are not the only models that are used to examine drugs reactions.
Like lab rats is a term for a reason.
And this is only one species.
So Brett is quite clear that this is the main species and this strain is the...
The one that is used in all of the labs?
Maybe.
But when I watched Carol Greider's Nobel presentation, she had papers with multiple strains, like 10 or 12 different kinds of strains, looking at multiple generations.
And it didn't seem that it was all based around this one mouse model from this one lab.
And on top of that is the fact that before drugs are ever used with humans, they need to go through three stages of clinical trials.
So, like, Brett sidesteps that by saying, well, but this is about, like, over the lifespan.
And, you know, clinical trials don't follow people for generations.
And so the issues might not show up.
But it's all very tenuous and relies on, like, Brett basically being correct about it.
And it's not like...
There isn't a massive amount of researchers invested in finding out things about drugs and their effects on the body and so on.
And there's plenty of nefarious stuff that goes on in the pharmaceutical industry.
But that's the kind of issue for me.
There's real things to be considered about in pharmaceutical trials.
But this is more like...
It seems like a storm in a teacup that's mainly reflecting an overblown sense of one's own importance.
Yes.
That sounds mean to say, and I want to also say that, you know, I guess, you know, I get it.
It's understandable for a relatively inexperienced researcher, a PSU student who's been deep into it.
It's a kind of natural thing to take one's own specific topic overly seriously.
So I want to say that, but I think largely it reflects, yeah, just an overblown sense of the importance of all of this.
Yeah, and I agree that it's perfectly normal to get caught up in your own theory.
And maybe there's even the possibility that Brett is right about something, that he's seen something that people are overlooking, but it's the lack of consideration that maybe...
He isn't right.
That is the issue.
Okay, so a certain strain of mouse had longer telomeres, which was something that Brett expected from his intuitions about the theory.
But that doesn't mean from there all his other intuitions apply.
And when people are saying this is not that surprising, it's not that big of a deal, It's not necessarily a suppression or a bad faith reaction to defend the status quo.
It could legitimately be that the researchers don't think it is.
Because in my conversations around this episode with researchers that are involved with cancer research or doing lab studies with mice and other models, which I'm not, their general reaction has been,
yeah, this isn't news.
There's papers before Brett that are talking about similar issues, and I think someone sent one to me.
When I read it from my eyes, it seemed to be saying almost the exact same insight that Brett was saying nobody had.
And even if it's not the case, it just doesn't...
It would be very unlikely that it's this linchpin that Eric and Brett believe for everything.
The pharmaceutical industry, medicine, you know...
That this is the single linchpin.
Yeah, I think that's an important point.
I mean, this is not just a personal story of, oh, this is some stuff that happened to me some years ago.
This is like a key incident which illustrates the operation of the distributed idea suppression complex.
And I guess that's why we need to examine it critically, because if it's going to function as this...
As you said, this linchpin role of demonstrating incontrovertibly the operation of the disk, which is, you know, that's a big claim and big claims require a lot of evidence behind them.
And, you know, as we've talked about, this is very tenuous.
So you have another clip for us, eh?
I do, where that connection is made explicitly for us.
So let me just tee it up.
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, There we have it,
Matt.
The distributed idea suppression complex in a nutshell.
So, what's your reaction to this distributed suppression complex?
Yeah, yeah.
Look, I mean, I think we almost need to break that down, don't we?
Just figure out exactly what is being said there.
So before commenting, let's just try to delineate just in clear language exactly what Eric is saying there.
So I can try.
I guess he's saying that the entire scientific system, the system that involves...
You know, peer review panels or that decide on grants.
What else?
What are the components of the disk, would he say, are operating there?
Well, probably the media and stuff come in as well.
But like in this example, he's kind of firmly focused on the...
Institutes of Science.
Yeah, so I guess anything that's institutional gatekeeping of some kind.
Journals, peer reviews, grant bodies.
Hiring?
Yeah, hiring.
But three people in the family have had experience with this suppression.
That's right.
And as we heard earlier, suppression, you rob them of potential Nobel Prizes.
So it's a serious issue.
It is, yeah.
So it's a corrupt system that is deliberately suppressing disruptive ideas, which are also groundbreaking and innovative and stuff like that, which is, if I understand correctly.
Goes with what I'd say.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so he describes it as an autoimmune disease.
It's a big claim.
Look, if you take it in a positive way, it's obviously the case that science doesn't move exactly with empirical evidence.
There's resistance, there's gatekeepers, there's enough scientific controversies to fill books about people having ideas suppressed and that kind of thing.
So you can completely agree that these kind of things can and do happen.
It's the degree to which Eric assumes that that's why his idea and Brett's ideas haven't made it.
Or it seems to be a default that this process is keeping out the best ideas and the revolutionary ideas.
Instead of that, it may very well be functioning as a quality control.
And while there are individual cases which...
Which show limitations of the system.
It's incredibly self-serving to assume that the reason you cannot succeed within the system or the reason you haven't got recognition or your Nobel Prize is just because it's all biased and people don't recognize it.
The other possible explanation is that your idea is not that revolutionary or is not as amazing as you judge it to be.
Yeah, yeah.
So, in a similar vein, to try to still man this, I'd be the first one to admit, you know, the academic system and the systems of gatekeeping, which have to exist, obviously.
I mean, if you want to hire someone, you have to have a recruitment panel, yeah?
If you want to have a journal and want to be at least somewhat selective about what you publish, you have to have some mechanism by which to implement some sort of quality control.
So, obviously, there has to be these structures.
There, if you want to have quality control, which is, yeah, a pretty important part of the whole system.
It certainly wouldn't call it perfect.
There's heaps of instances of it working suboptimally.
But, yeah, as you say, it's a huge misrepresentation to say that it is primarily or mainly or that there's some, you know, there's just no evidence to support this claim that it is deliberately suppressing innovative,
disruptive ideas.
In general, you know, in most fields, you know, like, first of all, this idea is not new, I guess.
Like, was it Thomas Kuhn with his, you know, talked about the sort of sociological aspects with scientific revolutions, you know what I mean?
You almost...
You know what I mean?
So in other words, researchers, scientists are not these perfectly rational creatures with no ego, which I'm sure Eric would be the first person to sympathize with.
Yes, he should.
I think he would certainly note that researchers are like that, but I agree that it would be worth applying that insight closer to home.
Yes, exactly.
So, you know, it's made up of fallible human beings, but the idea that it's like a systematic institutional thing, like a conspiracy, you know, conspiracy theory is a good analogy here because...
No, not only a good analogy, I think it's a perfect description because let me just play another short clip where Eric describes American science.
And I think this illustrates further his view of like how deep the corruption...
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 there are other clips that I could play from this single episode, where Eric describes the university system as a suppression system for big ideas, and so on.
Like you said, there's a whole lot that's wrong with that.
But I think part of it is you're tempted to get tied up and say, well, of course, universities do end up having theoretical grooves that people are into or are associated with specific schools.
But I think in some sense that's been too generous because in the modern era, there's this movement.
You may have heard of, Matt, called Open Science, where the focus on it is to increase the transparency of research and to make research freely available and the data open to people.
And those efforts, the Open Science movements, are kind of not discussed by Eric M. Brett, but in large part...
They take care of a lot of the things that they're concerned about.
For example, this concern about gatekeepers closing things out, articles behind closed doors.
Now it's possible to publish a preprint on preprint servers before they've been reviewed and people in the field can then see the article and access it.
So the notion that the system is completely closed, it's actually...
And there are efforts underway to make it so that there is less reliance on who you know and the traditional systems of peer review.
My kind of argument is just that the problems that Eric and Brett raise, to a certain extent, they're real.
But their solutions are just unrealistic and typically extremely personal about their grievances.
About, you know, some paper they had that was rejected.
And they tried to link it to broader processes.
But in so doing, they misportray like science as an idea suppression complex or as universities as like things to throttle innovation.
And it just, it rings hollow.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's it.
I mean, it's a big claim, but what it boils down to is that there's just no...
Evidence really presented to support this claim, apart from a personal feeling of grievance that they have been unrecognized by the system.
Like, that doesn't really cut it in terms of supporting such a huge claim.
You know, there's all kinds.
I mean, you know, it just doesn't gel with any kind of experience that I've had.
Like, I've published a lot of research.
A lot of it's been kind of mediocre, to be honest, Chris.
I've managed to find some way to publish it.
If anything, I think the bar is too low.
Probably more of my papers should have been rejected.
Eric has argued that the reason he won't use preprint servers is because you have to supply an academic email address.
If you don't have an academic email address, you have to get a recommendation from some other researcher.
On principle, he refuses to do that.
But even accepting that logic, it wouldn't make sense that, you know, you couldn't just publish, you can just publish PDFs online now, you know, you just get a website, put it up.
You could post it on Twitter.
Yeah, so if you, I mean, in the case of Brett and Eric, these are both people with like over 100,000 followers now because of cultural war involvement.
And so they don't have insubstantial...
Outreach, you know, for their ideas or that kind of thing.
So, like, I realize that this is them going back in time to complain, you know, about breadth treatment within the system.
But the kind of insurmountable obstacles that they're talking about, even if they did exist 20 years ago, the situation has changed a lot since then.
And so, they're, like, stuck on this model that doesn't really, And that there's obvious solutions to it, and yet they don't take them.
And yeah, it leaves the critique feeling unconvincing because you can find much better people criticizing things about academia, criticizing the conservatism, the changes, and building new journals, building like peer review,
open peer review system where you can see who the reviewers'identities are, or you can see the reviews publicly.
Like all these systems, but I never hear them discuss them.
It's just kind of out of touch, I suppose.
As you say, there are genuine problems like there are with any system.
For instance, the funding system in Australia, the research funding system is extremely conservative.
The sort of running joke is that you do the research and establish this amazing track record.
Which gives the funding agency this huge confidence in that the research is sound.
And then you get the grants which can fund your justification for the next grant, if you like, to do something sort of different, which is silly, you know.
So, yeah, you know, there's things like that, like conservatism in funding.
They're very risk-averse a lot of the time.
So there's all kinds of complaints one could make.
But when you start talking about it being an orchestrated...
That is intended to stifle innovation and stop ideas that are disruptive.
I mean, that's just getting into conspiracy territory.
And in fact, it reminds me of other groups that like to criticize academia because they just have some beef with it.
And, you know, it made me think of, you know, well, Chris, the sort of anti-evolution Christian faction there.
And they have a few talking points when it comes to discrediting.
The scientific literature on evolution.
Likewise, the people who don't like climate change, don't want to believe the evidence on climate change, have a few talking points about why there is so much scientific literature showing that climate change is real.
And what they basically say is that, oh, the system's corrupt.
All of these researchers know what side their bread is buttered on and that they are falling into line and preaching from the hymn book because they know that they'll get rewarded for publishing stuff that supports climate change or evolution or whatever.
Yeah, that's stuff you would have heard before.
So, I mean, that's...
That's conspiratorial nonsense, right?
That's not true.
Now, I'm not saying that's the motivation of Eric or Brett or anyone, but their motivation is really kind of, it's got nothing to do with evolution or climate change, obviously, but it's got to do with, I guess,
bolstering their own credibility and necessity in relation to the institutions.
I honestly think that It's hard to overstate the case.
The more that you pay attention to Brett and Eric's output, how much of their worldview revolves around their personal grievances or their feelings of being treated unfairly during their PhDs or by the academic system.
A good illustration of this is like, this episode is specifically about Brett's PhD, so of course they cover it.
But even before this story, on all their episodes, I had much more knowledge about Eric's...
PhD and its circumstances than I think I have of colleagues that I've worked for years because people don't spend that much time talking up their past achievements and how revolutionary and everything they are because if they are, you don't need to talk them up.
They speak for themselves.
And yeah, so lest we get stuck in the Weinstein wormhole, let's at least finish the narrative of where the story goes with Carol.
So we've covered Brett's repression by nature and this external reviewer who may have been Carol and his upset with the paper by Carol under her grad student.
And one point that Brett is very upset about is, Ehler not being a third offer on that paper by Carroll's grad student because he sees the whole paper as being based on his idea.
Or he also mentions not being in the acknowledgments and how it's kind of like swept over, but he suggests that, you know, had he been in there, he'd have been able to point to it to show that it was related to his idea.
And that just struck me as like...
It's insane because when I think about, you know, a situation where, say, you're at a job interview and, you know, you're talking to people and say, "Look, if you check the acknowledgements on this paper, you'll note that I am mentioned in there.
So, you know, this was my idea and it's very important."
Brett seems convinced that, you know, this would make a tangible difference to his career or life.
But even having a third-offer paper that, you know, is reasonably successful would do very little, I would see.
And an acknowledgement would do nothing because, you know, nobody, basically nobody reads acknowledgements.
And if somebody brought it up, you would consider them...
It's somewhat odd to mention that.
Yeah, I think that's a good example of the kind of points that are made that, yeah, as you say, kind of illustrate.
I don't know what it illustrates.
It's kind of out of touch or something.
But I suppose that the people who listen might think that that's an important point or something that matters.
Yeah, you and I know that having your name mentioned in the acknowledgement, saying, oh, we acknowledge.
Chris Kavanagh for helpful discussions about something.
I mean, big shrug, you know, that doesn't mean this is not important.
I don't know why they think it's important.
I read acknowledgements, but I...
I realize that that's a weird thing that I do, that most people don't do that.
Yeah, I am weird.
I also read prefaces in books, prefaces.
These are things that usually people ignore as incidental information, and for good reason.
But yeah, so anyway, stepping away from those papers, what we get to next is that Carol is eventually awarded the Nobel Prize ostensibly for her 20-year research or 20 or 30-year research career focusing on telomerase and just a whole career of research on the topic of telomeres and telomerase and the discovery of the connection between the two.
And so Brett, He watches her Nobel speech, which I've also watched, and I would say is a very good Nobel speech.
But his reaction is quite impressive.
So let me let Brett speak for himself.
What Carol Greider does with her Nobel lecture, right?
Nobel lecture being the biggest lecture a scientist will ever give.
And filmed.
And filmed.
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.
So the point here is that Carol gives a speech, and from Brett's perspective, it completely demonstrates that, you know, any criticism she previously had...
We're bad faith because now she's embracing all of his ideas, all his theoretical model, and she's claiming it as her own insight.
The crucial point for Brett is that there's no mention of him, as we will hear here, and then I'll let you respond, Matt, to this.
In her presentation, she's got...
Several experiments that I did not know she had run that I had suggested to her.
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.
Lo 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.
There we go.
Yeah, okay.
So she's mentioning ideas that he had, purportedly, and also not mentioning stuff that he thinks she should mention.
Yes.
So there's a rather key, there seems to be a bit of a contradiction here that Brett says she's now accepted all his ideas, she's stolen them, she's repackaged them, yet...
She doesn't seem to agree with his interpretation or what he considers the key point.
So it would seem that she doesn't actually agree with his interpretation according to his own description.
Yeah.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think...
Okay, so she's...
Look, I mean, the first thing I've got to say at the outset is that we only have Brett's view on this, right?
I mean, it's just him saying that...
These were his ideas that he said to her and then she had never had those ideas before and no one else had had these ideas before and so on, which is unsupported, right?
And I have to keep in mind that a lot of people, particularly people with healthy egos, shall we say, tend to be a little bit expansive, I suppose.
In the credit one takes, you know.
So you have to keep that in mind, I guess.
And it's not a great look, I suppose.
It doesn't sound really good to me.
But the other point I'll make is that, I mean, she's getting this award for her career.
Yeah, like the potential overlap, even given the most charitable interpretation here with Brett's work, is a relatively small proportion of her, Yes,
definitely.
So, like I said, I watched the talk, and two things that struck me about it were, one, that it's very clearly a narrative building on her early work during her PhD.
And then from her research lab right up to the present.
And so the notion that she's repackaging Brett's idea is ludicrous, basically, because you have decades of work being represented, which predates Brett even being in academia.
So like you say, that doesn't fit.
But even if we give credit for the ideas that he's claiming credit for...
When she's presenting all of the individual studies, like most academics, she tries hard to give credit to the other researchers and recognize that there's a team and that there's collaborators and that this is research done by not just her but a broad group of people.
And they've done these studies that involve multiple generations of different species or different strains of mice models.
It's a very impressive presentation of a vast research endeavor.
The paper that Brett was very concerned about features on one or two slides.
And as he says, she doesn't emphasize this point about the lab mice having unusual telomeres as being this very important distinction.
It's a kind of side note.
And part of that is because they're talking about, I can't remember if it's eight or more, different strains that are not just that one type.
And yeah, so the counter to their presentation that she doesn't want to give credit.
I got the distinct impression she does want to give credit to many other people.
I don't think that Brett's lying, that he perceives it.
That, you know, he gave her all these ideas and that she ran the experiments.
Like, I genuinely don't think that's a bad faith argument.
I think that's entirely his perception.
And if you're not him, you're not Judy bound to accept that framing.
And I think that, like, anybody with, you know, an appropriate degree of skepticism should be very skeptical of that claim because of the relative difference between the two.
Yeah, I mean, because I guess if you take the...
If you accept what Brett's saying here, then, and the narrative of the DISC, right?
This is part of the idea suppression.
Sorry, what does the C stand for again?
The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.
Complex, yeah.
According to that, she's not acknowledging Brett's contribution, acknowledging lots of other people's contributions, even though Brett's contribution, It was the most innovative and groundbreaking and so important and so on because I guess it was too innovative,
too disruptive and that kind of the disc represented by her or whatever had kind of decided that he needs to be suppressed and not given due credit.
So that's one interpretation.
You know, there's another simpler interpretation which is just that Maybe Brett is overestimating the quantum of credit that is deserved.
And I say that because it's a very common thing.
It's kind of an occupational hazard for academics to overestimate our own importance.
So we wouldn't be alone in that at all.
Yeah, so it's just a bit sad.
It's a bit sad, really.
It is.
I'm just looking at Carol Greeter's Google Scholar page, right?
And her top publication is from 1990.
Telomeres shorten during aging of human fibroblasts, cited by 6,254.
You go down about 1992.
Telomere length predicts replicative capacity of human fibroblasts.
Telomere shortening and tumor formation by mouse cells lacking telomerase, 1997.
Long activity, stress response and cancer in aging telomerase deficient mice, 1999.
These are all publications pre-dating any phone call from Brett, right?
And they're related to the topic.
And maybe they don't have the specific point that Brett thinks is crucial.
But again, that relies on his judgment to say, what's the critical thing?
And I watched that Nobel Prize, that speech, and I...
It all made sense as a coherent research agenda that she had been following for 30 years.
It didn't seem like it just came from this one discovery that they made about the length of telomereas in mice.
And indeed, that was just one minor part of the whole presentation.
But in Brett's presentation, it's the key point.
And maybe his argument is that, no, no, that's just an example.
Of the broader point.
But I think there's a big issue with his claim that he is the person who has made these connections.
Because what little I've looked into the literature.
I can find papers from a couple of years previously which are discussing similar relationships.
After Brett's paper has came out, and I've followed through some of the reference, I've found papers in recent years which...
You know, respond to the points raised in the paper, and some are supportive, some are critical, but they don't treat it as if it was this major theoretical breakthrough.
Just, you know, several people have made this point, including that, that, that, that, and Brett's paper is there.
So it just feels like instead of this discovery that's been suppressed and kept out of the literature, it just has its place in the...
Research literature as an interesting point, but not one that revolutionizes everything.
And that's why Carol has the Nobel and not Brett.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, hey.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I feel uncomfortable about this because I do feel mean, like having to point this stuff out.
But, you know, I feel like we do have to point this stuff out because Eric and Brett have cast serious...
Exposions on Carol's character here and made really big claims.
So, yeah, we should...
I feel like we need to push back, even though it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable.
But I think you've probably got some clips there that probably...
Yeah, I think I can alleviate some of your guilt, Matt.
So let me start by kind of making you feel more guilty by playing Eric, pointing out that they aren't meaning anything negative by their things.
this is at the start of the episode when they're introducing what they're going to discuss and they make a very important point which is the one thing i would say is that if anyone else in the story wants to tell their version of events it would be an
honor to have you on the portal.
There are no bad people in this story, in my opinion.
There are a lot of bad incentives.
And if we're going to actually fix this system, we're going to have to look past the interpersonal.
Okay.
So that's a very worthy sentiment and nice, right?
No bad people.
This is all about structural incentives and the way the scientific system is distorted.
Now let me play a clip which is more closer to the period that we're discussing where they're talking about.
I believe this is the decision.
To keep things in house when they were talking about this.
But anyway, let's have a listen if it's still true that there are no bad people.
And we don't know exactly what happened, but there is no world that I know of in which you're allowed to hold back that kind of information because in part of what's on the line.
Right.
So, I mean, this is not just a question of academic interest because these mice are used for medical testing purposes.
Not even that.
It's medical testing, but it's also all of the science relative at least to cancer.
Senescence, wound healing, all of the science that is stacked on these mice that is contingent on their function relative to their teeth is all compromised.
You're letting year after year of this stuff accumulate.
It's malpractice at an incredible level.
Malpractice at an incredible level.
This is discussing holding.
Publication and keeping things in-house.
So I don't know in your case, Matt, but being accused of academic malpractice, which is not only relevant for academic interest and careers, but which could be related to cancer treatments, aging, and the safety of drugs.
It's hard to gel those two points together.
We're not saying anybody did anything bad, except extreme malpractice that may have massive implications for drug safety.
Yeah, and look, I mean, that tone is pretty much in keeping with the theme that we've just covered in terms of the way that...
Carol has purportedly, you know, sidelined and stolen ideas from Brett.
Like, the implicit or explicit throughout the narrative is the idea that she has acted very, very badly.
Yeah?
So, yeah, you know...
And since this episode has come out, so although they invite Carol on, although I have no idea why she would want to...
Do that.
And just to be clear, because she's a researcher and they are alleging a whole suite of offences about a very specific incident.
And it seems like going on to defend herself on Brett or Eric's podcast would actually be a mistake on her point because she would just get dragged into these things more.
But in any case, since that event has happened on several occasions, Eric has, quote, retreated.
Carol, when she's made some statement about Black Lives Matter, for example, recently, or about support for that movement and trying to do better in science or whatever, about inclusivity, he's quote retweeted her, you know, saying, well, that's an admirable sentiment,
but when you want to discuss holding back young researchers, maybe you should come on the portal.
And then, predictably, all of the followers from a large account will kind of pile on, right, and fill up her mentions.
That isn't the kind of thing that you do when you think that there's no malice and it's not somebody doing something intentionally.
In this podcast, when you read the Reddits or you read the Twitter threads, it's clear that their followers see her as a villain who stole Brett's world revolutionary idea.
And so I guess a point I want to make here, Matt, is that there's this tendency, and it applies across a whole lot of contexts, not just an Eric, where when people are going to attack someone or when they're going to make a controversial point,
that they frame it at the beginning by saying, no, I'm not saying this is definitely true or I'm not alleging that everyone here is engaged in this.
It's often referred to as jacking off, right?
Just asking questions.
And in this case, and in a lot of other cases, it feels like a strategic disclaimer whereby your fans or you can point to, look, we never said anybody was doing anything intentionally bad.
But then for the rest of the podcast, you can go on and explain just how bad the people are.
But you can always point back to that one minute at the start where you said, Nobody here is necessarily bad.
Yeah, well, yeah, it does remind me of some more recent episodes of this podcast, I think it was, where they say at the beginning that they're not indulging in conspiracy theorizing here, they're doing conspiracy hypothesizing.
Hypothesizing.
Yeah, so, you know, we're just exploring hypotheses here, possibilities, and then go on for the rest of the podcast talking about...
These assertions as if they're cast on facts.
It's not like you can issue this card, this disclaimer, and then that just absolves you.
Because the people who are listening are taking it as, just like you said, with the followers basically reading the story in terms of Carol, they're reading it like they're saying it, which is they're not paying attention to the disclaimer right at the beginning of the episode.
They're reading it as, what a terrible person.
She stole his ideas.
She got the Nobel Prize when it really should belong to Brett.
That's what's being said.
That's what's being heard.
And I want to make clear that I think it's a conscious technique that people do because there's a couple of occasions during the episode where Brett goes a bit harsher or harder and then...
Eric steps in to add a disclaimer.
So let me give you an example of that.
I think this one is close to the end of the podcast.
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.
Right.
So, like, in isolation, that sounds extremely reasonable, right?
Yeah, very generous, yes.
Yeah, but in the context of a 2-hour-40 podcast where you include that towards the end after, like, 30 minutes, the message that people get when they take it away is that these people are very fair and...
That the people that they're criticizing are villains, who are unable to defend themselves.
And if they don't defend themselves, that just demonstrates that they are indeed what they claim.
Yeah, I think the other dynamic here, which is a little bit familiar, is this tendency of either online figures or people who are looking to build an online following to kind of pick, to wanting to stir up controversy, as well as,
look, I have to say there's a bit of a...
A large self-aggrandising element here.
But another element with the reaching out, the repeated reaching out to Carol seems to be, you know, we've seen that before in terms of even people like Alex Jones, you know, really trying to pick a fight or have a fight and then have a very public kind of make-up kind of.
That sort of stuff gets people engaged, doesn't it?
Yes, like Alex Jones picking the fight with Joe Rogan.
This is a kind of tried and tested way to drive engagement is to get into a controversy or an argument with somebody and to kind of drive eyeballs to the ensuing...
Kind of car crash as it happens.
And there's a part of that which is just the dynamic of human interest to watch conflict or the same way cringe comedy is kind of enjoyable to watch.
But the other side of it is that...
If a Nobel Prize winner comes on a podcast to defend themselves against someone's accusations that they stole their ideas, of course that will become a massive story.
It also adds a lot of legitimacy, of course, too.
Yes, no matter what they said.
I think Richard Dawkins has kind of made this point with debating creationists or whatever.
It looks much better on their CV than it does on yours.
I just think that an unwillingness to engage and get into tit-for-tat responses over email sent or who said...
It implies that there's merit to things or that this discussion needs to be had.
And it's not clear that it does.
Because even in the maximal charity version of Brett's story, where let's say that Carol didn't give him adequate recognition for his contribution to a paper, and where she did get...
The kernel of ideas for experiments from his conversation specifically.
Yeah.
Then the people who did the experiments, the people who, you know, spent like years kind of writing up papers, hanging around with mice and breeding them and like, you know, it's all the researchers and the people that are on those papers.
Like, I think we kind of covered it earlier, but just having an idea and not having any It's been 20 years since these events that we're talking about.
And surely in that time, even if Brett didn't have access to his own lab, he could have collaborated with people who have labs or he could have done any number of things.
Carol went on with her research career, has continued on since then, and Brett went into teaching, which there's absolutely nothing wrong with.
It does suggest that maybe his destiny was not to be the next Darwin.
It was just to be a teacher at a university.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
No, no.
I mean, just on the balance of probabilities, when you have someone like Carol who had this illustrious career long before.
Brett or any PhD student arrived on the scene and then continued doing a huge amount of work, collaborating with a large number of people, all of whom were involved, and which ultimately resulted in a Nobel Prize.
I mean, in the big picture, the contribution of some conversations or believing that you had an idea that was subsequently used, it just doesn't hold water.
Unfortunately.
No.
So where this leads to is like, you know, ends up talking about how he tried to get this story out and he has contacted journalists, but always they do fact checking.
They're interested in this controversy.
Could all the drug trials not be safe?
Then they do some fact checking and they inevitably pull back, right?
And Eric and Brett see this as evidence that this is the suppression complex in action.
But the other possibility is just that journalists are doing due diligence.
They're checking out.
They don't have the expertise to assess what somebody claims is true about a complex research topic.
And when they reach out to other experts, they tell them their legitimate opinion, which is, this isn't this big deal.
And no, we know about the problems with mice models.
And the people who are left convinced that it is this massive deal is Brett, right?
It's just a disagreement between himself and the vast majority of other researchers in the field.
A difference of perception, as you say, his perception.
And as you say, I believe it's in good faith.
I think he honestly believes it.
And as I've said a few times, it's not entirely uncommon for people to...
Have those kinds of perceptions.
But it's not a perception seemingly held by anyone else who is either associated with the area or someone, like you say, journalists who have investigated it.
And, you know, this is the problem with ideas like a distributed idea suppression complex, which is that they...
A conspiratorial in the sense that they are self-justifying, you know.
So you propose this astounding new perspective on things as being suppressed.
It could be the moon landing.
It could be, you know, vaccines or whatever.
And then there's no real evidence for it.
There's no take-up.
And you can point to the system.
It could be the New World Order or the disk or whatever, which is suppressing it and preventing.
This knowledge from coming out, from the evidence from coming out.
So what you're left with is just the unsupported assertions of the people who are proposing the theory.
But if you listen to it and if you believe what's being said, then you endorse this entire...
So in the same way that believing that NASA faked the moon landing, that if you want to believe that, then you have to also believe in a huge...
Idea suppression complex.
You have to believe also in the cover-up.
This huge cover-up is necessary to support this opinion you have about a specific thing which is otherwise unsupported.
And I feel like we have the same dynamic here in terms of relationship to the disk.
I think I have a clip which illustrates that thinking in action.
One of the last ones.
So let's hear it from the master.
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 team.
You've got a single point of failure whose projections...
Are tendrils into everything.
Right.
And you've got how many careers built on papers that are now suspect?
This is like a centralized irreproducibility crisis.
Yes.
It's that bad or worse.
Okay.
And, you know, what happens?
Let's say somebody hears this podcast and they check into it and they find out, lo and behold, this story is true.
Yeah.
Well, now the FDA has a problem.
Wait a second.
By the way, that was Eric getting to the point to say, oh, hold on, we're not saying that the FDA then issues like a disclaimer, but you've got that point, right?
Like you move from, oh, there's a study and it didn't get published easily enough about the telomeres to suddenly all drug trials are undermined and there's, as they said, the tendrils get into everything.
It isn't just a small problem.
It's everything.
It's the whole American scientific complex, the biomedical complex.
It's everything.
And they are very good.
Both Brett and Eric are very good at presenting this in a way to their audience.
That kind of connects the dots for them.
That makes it all sound ominous.
That makes it all sound unreasonable and unfair.
And if I wasn't in academia...
Lots of the descriptions of what happens would sound very odd to me and would sound like somebody is up to something behind the scenes trying to stop this come out.
But it's really only because of familiarity with peer review and because of experiences with high academia functions that a lot of the nefarious intent that they ascribe just sounds like mundane things.
Your paper gets rejected.
You get a harsh review.
It's not unusual.
It happens whether or not you have this groundbreaking discovery or just a mundane paper.
Yeah, there's this trend to see this huge ominous significance in mundane events.
Again, a pretty standard feature of conspiratorial reasoning.
As you say, it's probably more obvious to us because we've just been living it.
We know just how commonplace all these little things are, like little tips.
Little tips over credit, right?
Someone having an inflated idea of their own contribution.
It's as common as anything, you know.
So all of these things that are kind of pointed to as very suspicious indications of something very big, you know, just don't seem that way to us.
But I can appreciate that if...
You're not into it.
In the area, it might seem to make sense.
In the same way, people who are talking about 9-11 will point to, oh, you know, why did they collapse in that exact particular way?
That seems very strange, doesn't it?
And if you're a structural engineer or whatever, it's like, no, that's not.
It's not actually a big deal.
But if you're not a structural engineer, like I'm not.
You'll be like, well, that's...
It looks like a controlled explosion or that kind of thing.
So I think this connects in and we should probably get to wrapping up, given I have no idea how long this episode is.
The whole idea of the portal and to another extent the Dark Horse podcast is that they're kind of peeling back the curtain.
From academia to give their audience that are interested in these scientific ideas a kind of insight into that world that they've been denied by the system or, you know, that if they're not in university or maybe they're not studying those subjects.
And I want to say that that's like a very appealing notion that you're being granted insight into high-level conversations and that you're being brought along.
There's a little clip that shows both Brett and Eric are saying, like, if the audience can keep up with us, This is good.
Otherwise, you know, we're just going to talk in the way that we are because we trust our audience to do the research.
And that sounds like this.
I want to talk about the subjects that you're most associated with, starting with your thesis.
And I want to get into the science of it using the Portal podcast.
If people get left behind, they get left behind.
That's just like one illustration.
But there's this constant bringing in of people, you know, that discuss high-level physics or something.
And Eric often says, well, this is how real science happens.
But a lot of it feels like it's also a way that makes people feel that they should get it.
And that if they kind of can keep up, that they're part of, you know, an intellectual elite club that gets it.
And the university people aren't any better than them.
And I think both you and me have the view that people who go to university, they aren't granted any miraculous knowledge or that makes them superior to other people.
That's not what it's about.
But there is a thing where if you spend years studying a topic, that you inevitably know it better.
Than amateurs.
Like, there's tons of subjects that I'm completely amateur in, and I've got a good grasp of them, but I'm not someone who's dedicated, like, a career to understanding, like, physics.
Yeah, it's kind of that sort of TED Talk feature, you know, where TED Talks have become, they started off like a kind of a nice thing, but became more...
Of giving that sort of feeling of truthiness, that feeling of insight.
Like a seals?
Yeah, in a very easily digestible format that sort of gives you that aha feeling, which is very appealing, you know.
And, you know, I think people have started to cotton on to that and realize that it's an ersatz kind of understanding.
You know, I listen to a lot of science podcasts just for fun, you know, in topics I know nothing, you know, I have no training in.
Like, I love space.
I just love hearing about quantum mechanics and black holes and neutron stars and tachyon, which is not actually a real thing.
But anyway, it's fun to talk about.
And I love how they do it because you can tell a really good science podcaster because they give someone like me, I may be a professor in my area, but I'm an idiot when it comes to physics.
They have this knack for giving a really good basic understanding of what's going on and highlighting the interesting parts.
They obviously don't go into aspects which require the technical training, but you can often give a lot of very good information to a layperson without getting into that really just mind-bending, technical mumbo-jumbo,
which every field kind of has.
It feels to me that there are other people that kind of do the opposite.
You know what I mean?
They don't.
They actually obscure.
They talk in a very obscure way.
They use a lot of big words and make allusions to technical phrases and stuff without explaining them.
And the idea is to convince or to kind of, you know, either convince the audience that the audience is smart.
And to give them the feeling but not the reality of being privy to some sort of inside information.
Or perhaps the intent is more to convince the audience that they are smart, that they are, you know, just this, yeah, this oracle or whatever.
So it's a very different tone.
The science podcasts I really enjoy, they're self-deprecating, they don't use technical mumbo-jumbo.
They're very casual, and it's hard to explain.
Anyone listening to this, go listen to those podcasts and hear the difference, is probably what I would say.
Yeah, well, I think that this episode is perhaps not as bad as some of the other ones in terms of the techno babble, maybe partly because of Brett.
They spend some time to try and break down ideas, but in all instances, There always feels, and it comes through in this episode, but it comes through in other episodes as well, that there's a performative aspect to both of the Weinsteins,
which is that if they have a way to get across an idea that illustrates how smart they are, that can make references to obscure theorists or that can invoke technical terms, they will choose that over a simple version that doesn't...
Require referencing obscure 19th century German poets or so on.
And Eric's much worse for this than Brett.
But I think once you recognize that, you start to understand a lot more.
Of the context, because I've seen people who have watched episodes where Brett is discussing something with a theoretical physicist, and there's a lot of technical discussion.
And I showed this to a physicist, and they were like, well, who's this for?
Because it's not general audience, but it's also not.
Technical enough for physicists.
But it feels more like, yes, in some sense it's a performance then.
And I would also counter in general that that's the way that science is done, especially grand scale physics or experimental biology, because all of those things, although there's individual insight, they require these massive teams and labs and stuff.
So the norm is collaboration.
Yeah, like the advances are not made enough.
Random conversation in a podcast or whatever.
Yeah, there's exceptions.
Well, I mean, maybe not podcast exceptions, but I mean, there are random geniuses who overturn or provide a proof for a mathematical equation that was unsolved for decades, but they're famous for a reason.
But as you were saying, the question your friend asked is, who's the audience for this?
This is the key one.
For laypeople, it's purely performative because it's just technical mumbo-jumbo and every field has it.
I could start rattling off about statistics mumbo-jumbo, but there's no point me doing that except to another specialist statistician who's literally researching, actively researching the area that I'm working in.
To do it to an undergraduate or a layperson would be...
Purely performative, there'd be no reason for it.
And as your physics friend indicated, it's not really the kind of discussion that's an actual working research discussion either.
So what is it other than performative?
I'm just going to make an out-of-left-field comparison here, but, you know, like one of my other...
The other things I don't really like is, you know, a certain brand of academic writing, which you often see in critical theory and stuff like in these sorts of fields, which, you know, if you're on Twitter and in the culture, you're probably aware of this.
And when I read an abstract and read these papers and I see just the elaborate language and the unnecessarily flowery kind of technical terms.
And it's almost indecipherable, and it gives me the same feeling, which is what it feels like being deliberately obscure, so as to give that truthy feeling of academia,
but without really having any substantial ideas behind it.
Rigor.
Rigor, or substantial ideas behind it.
Yeah, so it feels performative to me as well.
So that's just a...
Well, I think like everybody, even if you're not in academia, when you have a specialist thing, you know, say your specialist thing is like long haul transport or whatever.
And like when you meet people who work in your field or who know it, you get that sense, right?
Like you can talk away and you can talk about like the ins and outs inside of baseball, right?
Kind of thing.
Most people are familiar with when they meet someone who knows something about...
The topic, enough to appear knowledgeable.
But after speaking to them for a while, it's kind of clear, oh, you're somebody who can talk about the topic, but you're saying things which are wrong or extremely exaggerated or that kind of thing.
And poser might be a harsh word for it, but it's certainly the case that there's academics where people...
You performatively display skills or opinions on topics, and other people go along with it when they're in the room with them, but then as soon as they leave the room, they're like, what the hell am I talking about?
Actually, Chris, I've got a funny example there, which is just before I joined my university, there was a statistician.
It's a relatively small place, and they had one specialist statistician who they hired.
Who was going to be their statistics guru and do all that stuff for them.
And there was very few other people in the institution who really had much, you know, background in statistics.
And after a while they started to sense that just something was wrong because this guy would always talk very quickly and using a whole bunch of technical jargon and people would kind of just get baffled with it and go, oh, okay.
And then he'd go off and do something and give it to them.
And after a while, even though they didn't have a great deal of statistical knowledge, they kind of realised that a lot of the stuff he was producing just didn't add up.
And when I arrived, they asked me to sort of have a chat with him and check out some things that he did.
And I had to tell them that it turns out this guy was just a complete fraud.
He had no...
I don't know where he got his qualifications from, some obscure place.
I think a good statistician is hard to hire, basically.
I think they were having trouble and hired this guy.
And he was a complete fraud, and he got by for two or three years, essentially just baffling people with bullshit.
Right, yeah.
And academics are not immune to it in any way, shape or form, unless it's, you know, in their area of expertise.
That's just a point I would make is that, you know, Eric and Brett are also saying that, you know, people should be skeptical of things.
And I agree with them.
I just think that they should extend that to the claims that they make as well as the institutions and the academics that, you know, they vilify.
So I was thinking that
It's a bit different, but I think it's maybe a nice note to kind of wrap up on.
So when people use analogies, they usually use them to make a complex idea simpler.
And there was a small moment in this episode where Eric attempts to translate a concept.
Brett is describing into computer programming terms, making an analogy between cells and computers.
And people do that all the time.
But in this case, as we'll see, the analogy ends up mixed.
And I couldn't help getting the feeling that a lot of it was just to insert computer jargon rather than to make it more clear.
So let me just play this for you.
This is terrifying.
What you're saying to me is that if I'm...
Comprised of, let's say, 30 trillion cells.
And I view them as each, let's say, subroutines.
Any subroutine that is not denucleated.
So here I have it.
Denucleated subroutines.
And the analogy continues.
It would be like me starting to talk about, well, Matt, the phylogenetic origin for conspiracy theories.
It's related to the Bayesian probabilities that people attach to statements.
And we really should consider multivariate solutions to them as opposed to, you know, like it's easy to do.
Maybe it makes you sound smart if you say it with enough confidence, but it's also completely unnecessary.
Yeah, yeah.
The point of a metaphor is usually to provide a simpler, more easily understandable version.
Of the complicated thing you're referring to, rather than inserting a more complicated thing within the other.
I mean, it does feel performative, yeah.
In this case, it even ends up as a hybrid analogy because we've got denucleated subroutines, which is like a biological...
Computer program.
So, you know, it doesn't seem like it achieved what it was supposed to do.
But it's picking on an example, but I don't think it's non-representative of the general output.
No, I do recall rather similar things at other points.
Yeah.
Well, listen, Matt, so we've spent God knows how many cars.
And I'm sure that people may notice that...
There are moments during this when the tone dramatically shifts, almost as if there was a period of time between different segments.
But hopefully we can get things patched together into a coherent whole.
But to finish off, would it make sense for us just to offer our closing?
Opinions on this big picture or small picture, whatever you like?
Yeah, sure.
I think so.
Look, I guess, okay, so the big picture here is that this podcast was about a, it was a bit unusual because it's about a personal narrative, but it's kind of crucial in a way because this personal narrative of, I don't know how to put it,
grievance or unjust dealing with is, I guess, cited as a key.
Personal example of how the DISC, which is an idea that's really important to Eric, I think, comes up again and again in the future, acts to really compromise and corrupt the entire system of knowledge-making in various research institutes and academic institutions around the world.
So that was the podcast.
I guess my big picture evaluation of this is that, I mean, first of all, that's a huge claim and as we said, it sounds pretty goddamn conspiratorial and doesn't gel at all with any of my experience.
If something like that was really going on, we'd expect to be seeing a huge amount of, we'd expect to see more smoke, essentially, rather than these rather idiosyncratic personal stories.
I think we've tried to be sympathetic and, as we've emphasised, I think we, you know, we want, you know, believe that Brett is narrating the story in good faith and Eric is not surprisingly, you know, batting for his brother, which is nice.
But as I said, my evaluation of it is that it really says more about their perceptions of things more than anything else.
The story doesn't add up in multiple ways.
Yeah, I'm afraid my evaluation is it's kind of a nothing burger in a way.
Yeah, well, in many respects, I feel it's the same.
Storm in a teacup might be the way I choose to describe it.
The thing that I would strongly emphasize alongside your point that there's a lot of parallels between what Eric and Brett are advancing and Standard.
You know, conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and the kind of tendrils spanning through the scientific enterprises and the media to control and keep down, you know, maverick voices.
Like, there's so much of that that parallels things that I listen to, you know, on Alex Jones week in and week out.
But as well as that more conventional stuff, like I said, on denying climate change or religious people denying evolution, they want to believe X, all right?
Basically, all of...
All of academia and science doesn't think the same.
Therefore, they set about with their theories of how the whole institutions are corrupt.
Yeah, and I think the crucial...
Distinction there is that not only the reason that science doesn't think that is because there's a mass of evidence which supports the view that it isn't, right?
Because when you get into critical theory stuff and arts and humanities, of course, there's always debates and there can be various criticisms about the orthodoxies.
But when it's a scientific topic like global warming or that kind of thing, it isn't like there's no debates around data, but it is like...
There's a massive, overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of climate change and global warming that's happening.
And the same thing for evolution is occurring or any number of well-supported scientific theories.
But set aside the connection to conspiracy theories and those parallels.
And the other point that I want to emphasize is that...
This episode, which is presented as one of the defining moments of science that never was and which is a great injustice that needs hours to focus on and which many people listen to and are outraged by, ultimately amounts to somebody doing research,
getting a paper rejected in one journal and then accepted in their next journal for a solicited submission.
Researchers citing it.
Over the next 20 years and the researcher involved not publishing anything else on the theory while the field continues to move on.
And so as like ground suppression goes, it was a paper published by a PhD student that they didn't follow up on.
And that really seems to be it.
So, you know, like I said, in some respect, I feel bad to kind of say that, you know, Brett has clearly focused on this for 20 years.
And it's a linchpin in kind of Eric's model, albeit that Eric's model extends to much wider than the Brett case.
But Brett is an illustrative example of it.
And it just feels like this event isn't that...
Significant for science.
It might be significant for Brett and the path that his career took, but it doesn't seem to have these massive implications that he believes.
And that's tragic in a way.
And it would be very hard to hear, but I think that people too readily assume that the option is he's lying.
So you're saying he's lying or...
That, you know, all the stuff that he's saying is wrong.
No, no, that's not the point.
He's telling it from his perspective where it makes complete sense that he would see things that way.
Albeit, you know, it's self-aggrandizing and that, but it doesn't have to be that he's lying.
He could be telling things completely honestly and it's still not be this grand controversy.
And yeah, that's my takeaways.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess my other takeaway, I agree completely.
And I guess my final comment is that, yeah, it's interesting how, like, if you don't actually stop and think about it and actually tease it apart, how, and you just kind of, I guess, go with the flow, both Eric and Brett speak extraordinarily well,
like far better than you and I, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, they have lovely voices.
They sound extremely erudite.
And they just have an air of gravitas and thoughtfulness in their manner, which, It's very easy and kind of seductive, I guess.
It's easy to sort of go along with that and sort of nod your head because everything connects and all the puzzle pieces fit together if you kind of accept the premises.
So, yeah, I guess my other reflection is that they're extraordinarily good at this.
They are very convincing people, and I understand.
Yeah, in my case, the thing is that I listen to them at...
Times two speed as I listen to all podcasts.
So when I actually hear them speak at normal levels of speed, they sound like they've been drugged up and, you know, like something has gone wrong.
So yeah, I can't listen to people speak normally anymore.
That's like a problem of my podcast consumption.
So yeah, but they're definitely much more, they speak with much more clarity than...
And you're right.
So that's definitely true.
Oh, well, this was fun to deconstruct, decompose, analyze to bits.
So let's say that for anyone that may have struggled to the end of this, let us just say...
Both of you.
Yeah.
Thanks, Mom.
This is our first crack.
Maybe we bit off more than we could chew with choosing this episode to start with.
But we can do better.
We promise.
Please, just give us a chance.
If you like this or like portions of it, probably not all episodes will be this incredibly long.
We'll be covering other people than the Weinsteins.
So yeah, hopefully you enjoyed and we did over the course of many weeks.
Yeah, it was fun.
It was great.
I suggest we both get a beer now, Chris.
That's right, a virtual beer.
Yeah, so I guess maybe here we'll...
We'll draw things closer.
I would say, you know, here's the Twitter and here's the thing, but we don't have any of that.
We don't even have a catchy kind of wrap-up thing.
So let's just say thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
