Banned In The USA

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Speaker 3 I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream.

Speaker 3 Today, you'll hear a familiar voice, that of an experimental particle physicist, who joined us in season two when we were talking about whether magnets and frequencies had anything to do with wellness and our health.

Speaker 4 My name is Dr. Lien Bolman-Dudd.

Speaker 4 I am a former academic who used to work at the CECOI in Paris and at CERN in Geneva as an experimental particle physicist. I finished my PhD sometime between 2018 and 2019.

Speaker 4 And since then, I transitioned into the world of data science. Previously, I was working as a data scientist for an automotive reselling company.

Speaker 4 And currently, I am a senior market research analyst for a tech market research company.

Speaker 3 He's back to discuss how our current administration here in the US is super anti-science, but dressing it up as racism,

Speaker 3 classism, and sexism, and sciences.

Speaker 3 Is sciences a word?

Speaker 3 And you've been on the dream before.

Speaker 3 I have.

Speaker 4 I wrote a very angry email about your aunt's bogus science pamphlet, and as a result, you decided to invite me on for some reason.

Speaker 3 We spoke on the dream about frequencies. We did.

Speaker 4 And magnetism.

Speaker 3 And magnetism and all of those nonsense ideas as it pertains to the medical world.

Speaker 3 Today I wanted to talk to you because

Speaker 3 I saw you had written something about the banned words list

Speaker 3 that Trump put out. And there's a really nice kind of summary of it on the New York Times website.

Speaker 3 Backing up a little bit, the banned words list is about public-facing government websites here here in the U.S.

Speaker 3 and other, not just websites, but publications and public-facing communications from the U.S. federal government.
They all seem to apply to,

Speaker 3 for lack of a better word, like woke concepts.

Speaker 3 But tell me how you understand it.

Speaker 4 So I will add the caveat that I am aware that the creation of the list is effectively like a kind of fascist thought crime against various aspects like sociology, psychology, geography, like biology.

Speaker 4 I'm aware the list is designed explicitly to like eradicate the study of like what they consider woke, what I consider like, you know, science. So

Speaker 4 when I say this in the caveat, like it's because I think this idea is as stupid as it is hateful, it just immediately smashes into the hard sciences, like the physical sciences, which they all claim to like adore.

Speaker 4 Like every billionaire and rich person and lunatic tear person says, I could have been a physicist or I could have done physics. I don't know.
I don't care. They could have done physics.

Speaker 3 They didn't do physics. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 The, the, the, the, because, like, and as we've seen, like, we've seen examples how, like, how the word bandless is so stupid, like, it catches like Enola gay as like too woke.

Speaker 4 Like, yes, the, the, the, the plane used to drop atomic bombs is woke.

Speaker 3 Because it has the word gay in it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 It's, it's a, it's a badly designed because all these things are are badly designed.

Speaker 4 There's no way to do these that aren't badly designed, but like if you just apply those words, like you do catch a lot of like like physical sciences, like I think that just based on like discrimination.

Speaker 4 Like, if you're looking at results and you want to understand, like, interpret the data, but you know, there's loads of things that are going to impact that.

Speaker 4 So, like, if you're measuring the magnetic field, you know that the building, the electronics, um, passing planes can impact the electron, the magnetic fields.

Speaker 4 So, you might write a paper like talking about how you discriminate or the discrimination of two signals. Like, it's a basic thing that I've written things about.

Speaker 4 Like diversity, like if things are different, you might have to explain why they're different. So you might talk about the diversity of something.
Like I know I have friends who studied galactic dust.

Speaker 3 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's galactic dust? What are you talking about?

Speaker 4 So basically, obviously most of the stuff in our galaxy is clumped together into stars and planets and asteroids. And

Speaker 4 that's how most things look.

Speaker 3 But then there's like little bits of dust all over the place.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so obviously you have like nebula things, which is where stars form, which are like just big collections of quite dense amounts of dust.

Speaker 4 Like they're just like bits that will eventually coalesce together into like a new star. But you also just have dust everywhere.

Speaker 4 And like, why you think like, oh, if I look across like to another star, like to my human eye, there's not much dust.

Speaker 4 But when you look across like the entire like multiple galaxies, you're looking like a billion years into the past. The dust is just annoying.
Like, it's just things that block and bounce light.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so you have to be able to understand and study them and like know how to deal with them. Also, the kind of interesting, like, why, why is the dust here?

Speaker 3 Is it similar to when you get a ray of light into your bedroom and you're laying in bed and you see all this stuff in the air, and you're like, oh,

Speaker 3 I can only see the stuff in the air because of exactly the angle of the light right now.

Speaker 4 That is the perfect analogy. Like, galactic dust is like seeing cat hair floating in your room.
It's, it's, it's exactly that.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So, so, like, if you like, for example, like if you're you have multiple things that are interesting or multiple like, say let's say look at early stars, for example, because it's a thing people, I sort of found a direct example of like someone talking about this.

Speaker 4 But like you might say, like, well, you might talk about the diversity of like star-forming conditions. So like, what is the diversity of star form conditions? So like you have

Speaker 4 you have nebula, you have like the like uh the kind of offshoot shoot of a net supernova and stuff. Like there's loads of things that are like do a thing.

Speaker 4 So you might talk about the diversity of methods or the diversity of causes or diversity of like thoughts involved.

Speaker 4 And if you just apply a very stupid filter, you're just going to catch a bunch of these people who are just talking about like stars. Like, it's not a thing that they care about.

Speaker 4 Like, Musk himself obviously claims to love space. He doesn't love space, but he claims to love space.
And, like, he's just going to catch a bunch of these people doing these things.

Speaker 3 I'm looking at the list right now, and I'm so, I haven't looked this critically until speaking to you right now because I didn't know that this would be a problem until you said something about it.

Speaker 3 It's so stupid. But there's like one other word: there's a barrier.
Yeah. Like, that's every type of physical science would talk about barrier.
Like, a cell has a barrier.

Speaker 4 And barriers are like really interesting in science.

Speaker 4 Like, if you think about the barriers are like the point between two different situations, like the barrier of a cell is fascinating because obviously inside the cell, you have the cell, and outside the cell, you don't have the cell.

Speaker 4 So, like, that barrier is fascinating. Like,

Speaker 4 the like in physics, barriers are very cool because they're like good ways of like modeling systems. It's like considering, like,

Speaker 4 normally we talk about systems as being infinite because it makes the mass easier.

Speaker 4 But when you don't have an infinite system, you have a barrier, and therefore, the barrier becomes the interesting thing.

Speaker 4 So, typically, if you read any, if you happen to decide to read like university-level physics books,

Speaker 4 they're thrilling reads, I promise. Like, you'll notice that we model most systems as infinite, like

Speaker 4 a rod of infinite length, a sheet of infinite like size,

Speaker 4 a ball of infinite volume. The reason we do this is because

Speaker 4 the physics is way easier. We don't have to consider edge effects.

Speaker 3 And what do you mean by system?

Speaker 4 So if you want to understand, if you want to try and model how electricity works at the kind of actual particle base level, you want to think about individual electrons moving through a wire, for example, and then you want to think about how they affect.

Speaker 4 electrons in a wire that's like a centimeter away. If you have an end to the wire, you've suddenly got a bunch of problems.

Speaker 4 Because, like, oh, well, like, does like, where do the electrons go at the end of the wire? Like, do we have to consider like the

Speaker 4 kind of resistance from like the end of a wire or the like the resistance of the thickness of the wire being different in different places and so on and so forth?

Speaker 4 So, you just kind of treat them as like these simplified systems because you make them infinite. You don't have to deal with these problems because there is no problem on this front.

Speaker 4 So, you can then just model it like a very, very pure mathematical sense rather than as like an actual engineering problem. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And so, the barrier word would come up when you're trying to create a more closed observation.

Speaker 4 When you try to make a more realistic observation, like a more, more, and a more accurate one. Like engineers will use them all the time.
But like, for example, in

Speaker 4 my thesis,

Speaker 4 there's a kind of concept of why does matter, why is there more matter than antimatter?

Speaker 4 And like one of the issues, the suspicions is like, well, if you have um certain certain arrangements of barriers and boundaries, you can have physical physics physics reactions that defy the laws of physics as we understand them right now.

Speaker 4 It's hypothetical, it's like a mathematical approach. But that's discussion of barriers and boundaries.
Boundaries are also a word they probably don't like because you know, breaking boundaries.

Speaker 4 Like, it's the there's just loads of like physics-y things that just like, and then physics, engineering, like mathematics, like they all just run into these words because the word list is stupid.

Speaker 4 Like, it's just fundamentally stupid.

Speaker 3 I just saw one on the list that says biologically female.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, oh, so we can't do any,

Speaker 3 as always, no science on women.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so like when I did, like, when I did that caveat at the beginning to talk about like how this is like fascist fault crime, like the point of that was basically like, this is like explicitly the eradication of like women and LGBT people and racial minorities.

Speaker 4 Like the purpose of this is like, is to like deny their existence. Like,

Speaker 3 and I think we all understand that. Like, they don't like women or people of color or

Speaker 3 gay people or transgender people or, you know, there's definitely that side of the fascist coin.

Speaker 3 But the thing I found interesting is that you're also just erasing all scholarship.

Speaker 4 You can't do scholarship when you're like dancing around these

Speaker 4 words.

Speaker 3 I have the list pulled up on my phone.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's so many words. It's like crazy how long this list is.

Speaker 3 But let's go through the words that would, if they were erased from scholarship, really create a problem in how scientists communicate

Speaker 3 or historians or anyone who's thinking about the world.

Speaker 4 So for experimental scientists, status is a fundamental word. You can't exist without the word status in some things.

Speaker 4 Like it's so core to like understanding like, just like you can't frame, like as an experimental physicist, it's like all of my citations are papers that begin the word status because it's like status of the G-bar experiment or status of the proton pipeline.

Speaker 4 Like, it's all status because, like, that's how a lot of

Speaker 4 experimental physics is done. It's like these boring reports that no one really reads, but they exist because they're like a record of how experiments were done.

Speaker 4 So, the people who can replicate them or understand where they came from. Like, I would have no citations, basically, which would be a great record of my participation.

Speaker 3 Well, you don't live here, so you're all you're safe.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 4 we gave up on that idea uh at least for the next four years so

Speaker 3 but yeah i'm looking through oh my god i i this is my first time really taking a good look at this female females feminism

Speaker 3 yeah so no biology no biology we can't study biology anymore okay or it or we can study it but we can't communicate it to other people

Speaker 3 I'm sorry, I keep laughing, but it's...

Speaker 4 Yeah, we can't talk about, you know, agriculture because like, you know, one of the departments that got like eradicated on like day one of like Musk and his little fashion troops like going in and destroying everything was like a bunch of like soybean institutes or like corn institutes, which sound boring as hell.

Speaker 3 No, say more about that. My, I grew up on a soybean farm.

Speaker 4 So there was like on like, no, day one, day two, whatever, when they were like slashing and burning everything they could.

Speaker 4 Like I have a bunch of scientists on LinkedIn and like a guy came across my feed saying like after 45 years of work at like the soybean institute or like some equivalent name, like I've been let go by the like the funding cuts.

Speaker 4 And like because like for 45 years, we've worked on like making sure that like every year there is a guaranteed seeds that are like known to be resistant, that we can then have high yields so we can export to the world, like we can make sure that soybean growth in the Americas is good, that globally it's good, that like it is a like baseline crop because it's so important to so many people's like basic diets.

Speaker 4 Like this is what he did for 45 years. And I mean a bunch of these papers talk about like female and male because they have to talk about like the concept of breeding plants.

Speaker 4 Like it's it's so basic things that you just like slash and kick your way through without realizing what the hell you're doing. Corn is basically, America basically runs on corn.

Speaker 4 Like, after oil, corn is like the second fuel of America. So, you had you had both of them.
You could see, like,

Speaker 4 I have a few friends that have done the road trip across America as a foreigner. And they say, like, when you hit certain parts of America, it's just like corn for like as far as you can see, for like

Speaker 4 a day, yeah, a day of driving, and you see nothing but corn. Um, because like your government, for whatever reason, you can debate that afterwards,

Speaker 4 has decided to subsidize corn growth,

Speaker 4 which is great for having a basic level of calories and fuel in the country. But the people who make sure that exists are nationally funded

Speaker 4 government scientists just to keep things going. And their papers have the word status and diversity and female and male, because they have to.
Because that's how you talk about goddamn agriculture.

Speaker 4 It's so basic stuff.

Speaker 4 I can't get my head around like just the anti-like science rhetoric of these people who claim to be scientists. And it's just, it's maddening.
I don't know how they can like function.

Speaker 3 You know, I'm looking at a word orientation. Do you have any examples of that?

Speaker 4 Do you remember your delightful and actually much better explanation of how an MRI machine works in our episode from season two? Sure.

Speaker 4 That's all about the orientation of magnetic poles and fields. Like it's like physics, again, like it's magnetic, magnets, electricity, orientation.
Like it's just comes to that.

Speaker 4 Also, just like, I think like I was looking at like papers, like my wife did a degree in urban planning. So like I saw a lot of this stuff she was reading.

Speaker 4 And like, I'm pretty sure orientation catches a whole bunch of like urban planning stuff, which I think they also think is woke. So I think it's fine.
But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's madness.

Speaker 4 It's madness across the.

Speaker 3 This is fun and I just want to keep going. I'm just going to keep throwing out words that are on this banned word list.

Speaker 3 Okay. How about diverse? We're not supposed to use the word diverse if we're government employees that do any sort of publication and publish anything on any government website.

Speaker 3 It can't have the word diverse. And when it does, it gets removed.

Speaker 4 As I said, it's like the office, like the office cause of it is like, is clear. Like, we've talked about that, but like, it's just that it catches everything.

Speaker 4 Like, let's say you have a paper about like, even an evil paper. Like, let's have a say, how do we like increase like police effectiveness? Because that's papers people write.

Speaker 4 You can't mention that you have a diverse approach to this.

Speaker 4 Like, you can't mention that, like, and we're going to try, try to try like three different ways to like commit like human rights violations because that's not allowed to be said because it has diverse in the title.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 3 It's even on that, even on the stuff that's bad, like it catches it because it's just the diverse list here is so long and it has like diversified, which I think is probably very important to science.

Speaker 4 And finance and economics, and all those, all those tech bros can't diversify their stock portfolio

Speaker 4 because it's not allowed. It's a woke word.

Speaker 3 Let's see. Hang on.
I'm just going to keep going here. Identity

Speaker 3 is on here?

Speaker 4 Like, I think it's a whole bunch of mathematics, which is like the field of identity. Like, it means something obviously very different,

Speaker 4 how we'd imagine it.

Speaker 4 But, like, also a whole bunch of programming and computer vision is based on identity, like recognition, identity, so on and so forth.

Speaker 4 Like, a whole stuff that these people even would claim to like is being called by this because

Speaker 4 words have value and meaning, and they don't like that because they're not good at words.

Speaker 3 What about the word excluded?

Speaker 4 So, so I had well, the famous like Pauli exclusion principle, which is like the like a kind of um core part of physics, which I'm going to get wrong.

Speaker 4 So, you have to, I'll come back to explain what it is in a second because my brain is refusing to remember which one is which.

Speaker 3 Um, no one but you would be able to tell, Liam. I just want you to know.
Like, literally, you're the only person in the room that would know the difference.

Speaker 4 i think pali exclusion principle is that like uh at quantum states that you can't have two items in the same two objects in the same state so therefore you get inherent um energy levels forming because like you can only have two electrons in this state and then two electrons in the other state and so on so forth um but like you I also had to look through like how this list applied.

Speaker 4 Like they mentioned that the title and the abstract are like the two areas they look for these words.

Speaker 4 So the as far my reading could be was that they would look in the title, the abstract and the grant occasionally for these words. So the title is like the main title of the of the paper.

Speaker 4 Mostly they're really boring titles, but often in the case you get a funny one. But the abstract is effectively like a very good summary of what the paper says.

Speaker 4 To the point where like it'll often introduce the topic, give a little bit of context of like what they did, and then often just give the results

Speaker 4 in the abstracts. If you're trying to read papers fast, to find the ring you're looking for, abstracts are like fundamentally key to being able able to go and do it there.

Speaker 4 Which the big question that actually comes from it, which I meant for the exclusion thing, was that if people have to start being incredibly careful about how their abstracts are written, so they're engaged as like blocks, you make it impossible to use these papers for the actual value.

Speaker 4 If you can't say excluded, so you can't like point out, like, oh, we excluded X, Y, and Z,

Speaker 4 which also comes up with a bias. Like, we excluded, we excluded X, Y, and Z biases from like the statistical methods.
Can't write any of those words.

Speaker 4 You can't make a paper that's actually usable to someone

Speaker 4 to just like looking for what they're looking for.

Speaker 4 And then obviously the funding grant stuff, like you have to be like really, really clear in your grants when you're asking for money, like what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, like how you're going to make sure the results are usable.

Speaker 4 Like if you are doing like a survey, because I do loads of surveys now, it's a wonderful part of my job. You have to say, like, how do we like remove bias?

Speaker 4 Like, how do you make sure the survey isn't biased? And that's not saying, oh, how do you make sure that like it's like right or left wing?

Speaker 4 It's how do you make sure the survey vaguely looks like the people you're trying to survey? Like it's really simple stuff like that.

Speaker 3 Or it looks like science.

Speaker 4 Like, yeah, like even even market research, like we have to, we have to weight our data to make sure it kind of looks like reality because like it's really easy to recruit people to do surveys who are college students, for example, because they need money and they're desperate.

Speaker 4 But a college student bears no resemblance to like the general population of America.

Speaker 4 So you then have to kind of weight it. Like you find like you might have a few,

Speaker 4 everyone who's like BIPOC in that survey might get weighted slightly higher. Um, white men might get weighted slightly lower.

Speaker 4 Like, you kind of mix and match, and that's how you account for bias to like try and make your results more like universal or applicable.

Speaker 4 Um, and if you can't talk about doing that, you can't do science, right?

Speaker 3 So, let's say you can't use the word excluded in a paper,

Speaker 3 and also let's reference this list. What's another way you could possibly say that that would be useful?

Speaker 3 Uh, oh, it probably would be left out and then you have the word left in there.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, and you can't have a left or like you may maybe ignored, like maybe they like ignored or cancelled. We cancelled this.

Speaker 3 Status. Status is on here?

Speaker 4 I found it on one list. Maybe the list was wrong.

Speaker 3 I see it right here. Yeah.
Oh, you say status. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 4 But my act has also been bastardized by living out on the continent for so long that I've lost all sorts of sense of what's right or wrong.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 as I said earlier, most of my citations are on papers that begin with the word status.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the thing that's really damaging about this list is that

Speaker 4 I think I talked about this before when we had our discussion about scientists, but science is written in this kind of slightly odd academic language.

Speaker 4 But the reason we do it is because it's really efficient.

Speaker 4 Rather than saying that, oh,

Speaker 4 we balanced like for blah, blah, blah, blah, like we balanced our responses so that they better reflected like the basis of reality. Like Scientists will just say we excluded fraudulent responses and

Speaker 4 we removed bias, we removed sampling bias. They'll just use those words very quickly.

Speaker 4 Basically, just saying that we removed responses that don't look like they're realistic.

Speaker 4 And then we applied some weighting or some statistical methods to try and account for the fact that sampling is really difficult.

Speaker 4 You can say all those words, or you can just say excluded, fraudulent response.

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 like and de-biased data.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 4 Excluded has the same, has the same principle. You'll say excluded so people know exactly what you're referring to.
Like excluded means like this thing has been removed from the problem.

Speaker 4 Like we have made sure that we guarantee that it can be excluded from our results. You can disagree with us, but we think it's going to be the case.

Speaker 4 And once you take away excluded, like what other words, does it have the same power? Like does left out have the same word as excluded?

Speaker 3 Like just removed or ignored? No.

Speaker 4 They don't have the same meaning.

Speaker 4 When you start smashing our words to pieces, like this is the problem.

Speaker 3 No one knows what the hell they can say anymore because it's just like stupid words right i mean yeah i'm looking also at like polarization um but yeah yeah in institutional key groups or populations

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Speaker 3 Will this affect the way that scientists communicate or just the or with each other or just how they can disseminate information to the rest of the population?

Speaker 4 If they are able to actually force this new like banned word list onto scientists in America, I think we are looking at a generational level damage to science in America.

Speaker 4 with decades of damage to medical, physics, and

Speaker 4 climate research.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about the levers there, if you don't mind, for just a second. Like, I imagine when I'm thinking about that, that students in universities or high school

Speaker 3 would not be able to find

Speaker 3 scholarly articles or paper or previous research for them to build their research on.

Speaker 4 Correct.

Speaker 3 Okay. Yeah.
So

Speaker 4 from my imagination is

Speaker 4 at every level, you destroy the ability for America to build science and scientific innovation. You terrify professors from being able to do research.

Speaker 4 You strangle the ability for academics and researchers to get money to do research, which means there's just less research happening.

Speaker 3 Meaning,

Speaker 3 how would that happen? Like you couldn't write your grant request correctly or? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So they're already killing all the grants separately. That's a different initiative.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Like killing the grants separately, but also like I think like, i think people often like me i think because movies like if you have a movie physicist they're they're a particle physicist and an astronomer and a material physicist and a like i know a thermodynamicist as well in reality academics are really really specialized like you do one thing really really really well so if you spent your entire like academic career doing epidemiology of black communities in Michigan and the impacts of like disproportionate impacts of health on these people, you cannot really transition to doing something that they will consider acceptable because your whole education system is in this like really, really, really detailed level of knowledge.

Speaker 4 So you can't get money to do this. You can't teach people to do this because you're not allowed to like, you don't have money to be a professor.
Therefore, you have no money to teach.

Speaker 4 You can't train new scholars on this skill because there's just no way to get funding for research to do this.

Speaker 4 People who are interested in studying these sorts of things can't come to America or can't come to your colleges to study this thing.

Speaker 4 So therefore, you lose a whole new generation of scientists that want to do this thing.

Speaker 4 Foreign students don't want to come to America outside of the lack of funding because they're going to get blackbagged if they disagree with America and disappear to Louisiana in the middle of the night.

Speaker 4 And the more stressful thing that I think

Speaker 4 I try to be patient with America as a general when I talk about this is that if America cuts its science budget by like a huge swathe, the rest of the world is not picking up the bag.

Speaker 4 Like we just don't have the money worldwide to do the level of research that America does. Like, France is upping its research spending.

Speaker 4 I think the UK and Germany, they're all upping their research spending. But the scale of the American economy is just so large that your rounding errors are like entire budgets.

Speaker 4 Some of these countries.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Like, I think, I think the HHS layoffs happened today, I think, or yesterday, and they were talking about how it's like a one to two billion dollar saving,

Speaker 4 or maybe less than that. But the budget of HSS is like nearly $2 trillion.

Speaker 4 Like this is not, these are not consequential numbers. Like you're saving.

Speaker 3 A trillion is $1,000 billion. So if you're cutting $1

Speaker 3 billion,

Speaker 3 that's negligible.

Speaker 4 0.1%

Speaker 4 of the budget. Yeah.

Speaker 4 There are lots of people, if you talk to scientists before this all began, they'd all have issues and complaints about how America funds its science.

Speaker 4 Like, cause we just dislike how things are done in general, like the nature of like the kind of rolling budgets, the very, very prescriptive nature of how they're spent,

Speaker 4 how some budgets can have like years to them, and others have like much shorter ones. Like, people have complaints, but there's like normal complaints.

Speaker 4 They're like complaints about if you're working in a company and you don't like your boss, like you don't want to burn the whole company down. You just want to have better working conditions.

Speaker 4 But they're just destroying funding to science. There is no one to replace this.
Well, there is one country to replace this, but that's China.

Speaker 4 And like, that is, this, that is the other option. And China doesn't fund a lot of this.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's kind of impressive.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 4 we have, like, there is also a thing in general when we talk about like America and China is that obviously I'm in Europe, I'm in the EU. Like we can feel the influence of the two like...

Speaker 4 um like large economies on how our world works like effectively europe treats america as like a service economy that we use for services and we treat China and its periphery nations as like our manufacturing arm.

Speaker 4 Like that's kind of how it feels about. I mean, so do we.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we feel the difference of these giant economies around us. And like Europe is like one of the bigger economies.
The EU is a cumulative

Speaker 4 is one of the larger economies. And we have a big amount of like science funding that goes on, but it just doesn't match.
Like it just doesn't match. And also our priority is slightly different.

Speaker 4 Like we do a lot of fundamental physics that America has deprioritized to Europe because it makes more sense. Sure.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, yeah, you want to go where the experts are with your questions, but we're going to, we're not going to have any experts anymore

Speaker 3 for a little while at least.

Speaker 4 And also like the

Speaker 4 French scientist that was

Speaker 4 denied entry to America because TSA searched his phone or social media and found that he'd been negative towards Trump. Like that also kills science.

Speaker 4 Science is a global community and people go to conferences to share knowledge. If no one's coming to America, then there's no value in being a scientist like in America.

Speaker 4 Like it doesn't, it doesn't doesn't add up.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 4 when we were, I said, we were looking, we entered the green card lottery. Like that's how like much we were like looking into

Speaker 4 moving to America.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And the reason was like, I work adjacent to tech. Like America is like a very center of tech.

Speaker 4 My wife at the time, well, she still is, she's a research assistant remotely for Harvard working for the psychology department. Of course she is.

Speaker 3 She beats you guys. You guys are overachievers, but go on.

Speaker 4 And like her, like the person she's working with was like, you should really consider grad school.

Speaker 4 And I was like, you probably would like American grad school more than you like European grad school because like a U.S. grad school takes longer.

Speaker 4 Like it's more about developing yourself across like seven years rather than like European grad school was like, you have three years to write a thesis. Like good luck,

Speaker 4 which is just a very different thing. And we were looking into it and like we were like, we put the effort and steps in.

Speaker 4 And just like, now it's like, no, like, I do not want to get snatched off the street in the middle of the night or in broad daylight.

Speaker 3 Well, and the grad student, Rumesa Oz Turk, she was at Tufts and disappeared. So it looks like this woman came from Turkey, Oz Turk.

Speaker 3 And I'm hoping I'm pronouncing that correctly, but she was also a psychology major at Tufts University, getting her PhD in psychology. She wrote a paper

Speaker 3 in support of Palestine and the Palestinian genocide that's happening. And that's why they arrested her.

Speaker 3 Like, if that is on the banned word list, oh my god, the number of people that will be disappeared,

Speaker 3 it's so scary.

Speaker 4 I do like I

Speaker 4 have a lot of despair for America at the moment.

Speaker 4 And I have a lot of irritation when people say, well, that's it's not constitutional, it's not protected by the constitution.

Speaker 4 But like, I do think that people being like staring in the face of how like explicitly and against the constitution, the actions of these people that always claim to be originalists is and always claim that they're just doing what the founders intended but have no respect for like the first amendment like it's not like it's the 15th or 18th it's the first one like you have free speech like it's made pretty goddamn clear and like the like the red scare was was bad and scary and ruined lives but like I think this is more like the kind of like the anarchist scare in the 20s where like they just disappear people.

Speaker 4 Like they just disappear people and that's it. Like that is the consequence of like daring to speak out against the dear leader.
Like it's was it it's it's it's terrifying.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So in Chile, people were disappeared like crazy like 30 years ago, I think, 30, 40 years ago.

Speaker 3 It feels like that's what's happening here now.

Speaker 3 Just like a lot of things feel like the Holocaust. A lot of things feel like these are Nazis

Speaker 3 or

Speaker 3 Stalin or or, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, South African apartheid proponents,

Speaker 3 like Elon Musk,

Speaker 3 it's scary.

Speaker 3 You referenced climate change briefly. Can we talk about that for a minute?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 when we talked at the beginning about how by banning these words, you can effectively like ban reality. You can pretend reality doesn't exist because there's no way to measure it.

Speaker 4 When you have the same attack on like climate research and climate

Speaker 4 change research, you can effectively distort reality to say it doesn't exist because there's just no evidence for it anymore, or no new evidence for it, or only evidence that agrees with the oil companies that it's fine.

Speaker 4 You can just pretend it's not real if you can affect the science reporting that significantly.

Speaker 4 And the insane thing is that it's only going to hurt

Speaker 4 it's going to hurt everyone. Basically, climate change is going to hurt everyone.
That's not a dance around that point.

Speaker 4 But the massive companies are already doing their own research and reading the stuff.

Speaker 4 And they're prepared for like, I think JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or something like they're preparing for like a three degrees Celsius world, which is a like terrifying dystopia scenario.

Speaker 4 But they've got to keep making their money.

Speaker 4 They've got to get their bag. So they're going to deal with the world ending that way.

Speaker 4 But like, you just can't prepare for like, like, how is a coastal city like anywhere in Florida, how is it able to prepare for anything if you're not allowed to do research into climate change?

Speaker 4 Like it's going to be ravaged by climate change and they're just not allowed to talk about it.

Speaker 4 Like, it is complete denial of reality that's only going to hurt the people who like can't really do anything about it.

Speaker 4 Like, if you're a normal person in Florida, you do not have the ability to like fundamentally redirect, um,

Speaker 4 uh, single-handedly redirect funding to protect yourself and your city. But the billionaires can, and they can just deny this exists as a problem because it's not going to affect them.

Speaker 3 Well, I also see on the list here climate science, which I mean,

Speaker 3 there's the climate crisis is on the banned words list, but so is climate science, which let's pretend that those idiots are,

Speaker 3 let's just give them, throw them a bone for one second. Okay, there's no climate crisis, but climate science is a completely different thing.

Speaker 4 Who needs tornado warnings?

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 4 that's not a thing.

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 4 also, you know how the signal leak, one of the like things, signal leak chat, one of the things that JD Vance was posturing about was how like Europe is rubbish and that the shipping channels are like only impacting europe like let's acknowledge that that's well that's also just not true um vance doesn't know anything but that's because he's not doesn't need to know anything um he's like he's a he's a what do you call it uh he's an affirmative action hire so he doesn't have to know anything um but like he the whole shipping industry is built upon understanding in incredible detail what the shipping forecasts look like like it is it is not a joke that like shipping is still a quite a dangerous um uh profession and like also ships routine routinely lose cargo on um on cross like atlantic or cross-pacific journeys because this the sea is is the sea is a cruel mistress as they say um if you wait can you go back to um real quick jd vance being a dei hire

Speaker 4 oh oh yeah um so the dei like the that's whole

Speaker 4 principal system like the the the number one greatest benefactors of it are white women and like this i think the second greatest

Speaker 4 benefactors i think it might be like the general black population but after that that, it's like white people from rural and deprived population.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Because they're an underrepresented group. J.D.
Vance, I think, I haven't read Hillbilly Allergy. I know it's mostly nonsense.

Speaker 4 Like, I'm not going to read it. I had to call it Michael Hobbs read it to me for that podcast, but that counted enough in my mind.

Speaker 4 But like, he like, I know he over-inflates the fact that he comes from like a really deprived area. I think like family-wise, he does, but like his personal thing is slightly different.

Speaker 4 But like, yeah, he got boosted up because he came from like a deprived background and got given advantages that wouldn't have been given to someone from a more middle-class background.

Speaker 4 Like, obviously, you know, the cost of things and such.

Speaker 4 And then when he was picked up, he became like Teal, Peter Thiel's, like, little, like, um, little like rap bastard that would do his bidding for him.

Speaker 4 And then, like, now he's like in the like second in charge. Like, he's one heart attack away from like being

Speaker 4 technically the most important human being on planet, which is really terrifying.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 3 Can you talk a little bit about the pullback on funding for scientific research in the EU? You've lived all over Europe.

Speaker 3 If the US stops investing in scientific research or anything, actually, if the US just like pulls all their money out of Europe, have you and your colleagues like discussed what might happen as a result?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so in

Speaker 4 it depends, but in Europe, it's going to be very highly dependent about what you do, basically.

Speaker 4 So like, I think, like, for example, particle physics, I think it's going to be kind of fine. It's going to suffer a little bit.

Speaker 4 Well, I think a a lot of the smaller labs will suffer a bit because they won't get that like extra like American bit of funding to come in and do something.

Speaker 4 But like CERN, for example, is like a pet project of the EU at this point. CERN will be protected at basically all costs.

Speaker 3 Okay, the Large Hadron Collider place.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 4 the Large Hadron Collider and the next Collider most likely will be protected because like it's a big vanity project.

Speaker 4 But the like

Speaker 4 a whole bunch of other sectors like are really going to struggle. Like,

Speaker 4 I know that like pharmaceuticals, like obviously because of the American healthcare market being genuinely like a human rights violation, like a lot of money in pharmaceuticals comes from America.

Speaker 4 And once America like stops funding it, like the pharmaceutical companies lose their base research, which they use to like build it up.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the challenge in Europe then has is that developing economies, especially India, like have got a lot of very good pharmaceutical students and pharmaceutical researchers.

Speaker 4 Like we don't have the kind of cost edge and we don't have the like capital, like

Speaker 4 the accumulation of capital edge that America does. We're kind of stuck in the middle.

Speaker 4 And if the money in pharmaceutical research and medical research starts drying up in America, like it's going to knock on to the rest of the world.

Speaker 4 Like, even though, like, we do lots of innovative research here,

Speaker 4 a lot of it comes also from a regional NIH like pilot

Speaker 4 projects. Like Round the Road for Me is the, I think, the Netherlands, like, best proton beam therapy unit for, which is a method of curing cancer.

Speaker 4 It's a really, really impressive way. I don't know the full details of it, but I know I've seen the results

Speaker 4 on statistically.

Speaker 3 It's radiation adjacent.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, it's a really, really effective way. Like, it's got much better results than other methods.

Speaker 4 And like, that I think comes from a bunch of like NIH like pilot projects. Like, let's just see what we can do with these sorts of things.

Speaker 4 And then, like, it's been turned into a really, really effective method. NIH still does lots of research funding into it.

Speaker 4 But, like, if we start losing this kind of like basic funding that the US is really good at giving money for, then like, that all then becomes part of the EU's remit is to fund all the basic stuff, which just means we have less money to go around.

Speaker 4 And the EU is currently trying to rearm itself because we have a goddamn like no more protection from America.

Speaker 4 So we have to massively disinvest ourselves from the American military industrial complex and build our own systems.

Speaker 4 Like money is not going to be floating around for much in the next five to ten years. We're just going to be stretched.

Speaker 3 Here's the argument from the current administration here in the US is why do you guys need our money so bad? Go get your own money.

Speaker 4 yeah. And well, I think that the idea of that would be that the money doesn't go around evenly, and the money when it's given by everyone has a much larger impact than when it's done by small groups.

Speaker 4 So, like, if the US was the only one that did base research, um, like I would understand that, like, basically, everyone else is mooching off the U.S.'s work.

Speaker 3 That's all they say every single day, all day long, right now, is that everyone's mooching and everyone's dipping into our piggy bank. So, like,

Speaker 3 are they, and why, and should we be concerned about that? Or is that like just a talking point?

Speaker 3 Like,

Speaker 4 it is accurate if you don't think about anything beyond literally the paper that is published. Right.
Um, like, yeah, Musk went through and the

Speaker 4 his merry band of like fascist pipers like went through and found a bunch of papers that were like a waste of money.

Speaker 4 And I wanted them something to do with some obscure kind of worm thing, like, and like, what a waste of money. Like, we gave coffee to worm, like, what a stupid idea.

Speaker 4 And it's like, no, this is an animal model we're testing to develop. Like, can we use this kind of worm to model like biological reactions?

Speaker 4 And we use caffeine because it's like a well-understood and well-like, like, knowledge. Like, we know what caffeine does to the body and to the neurology of creatures.
So, we tested it.

Speaker 4 And therefore, now we can use this worm as like a model for like future drug testing or future like investigations of like biological systems.

Speaker 4 If you only read the paper, then obviously this is a waste of money. But if you read the fact that it has the impact on it, then you see why this magnifies.

Speaker 4 And because the US like has so much research going on, it

Speaker 4 it basically gets to double dip in the fact that it will do the research, it'll pay for some research.

Speaker 4 And if it's interesting, which obviously they're finding the interesting stuff, like European, Chinese,

Speaker 4 Indian, African, like people around the world will go, oh, this is interesting. We're going to try it out ourselves and we'll do some research of our own.

Speaker 4 And then America has to look at what everyone else does. Now they have like, they played with a bit that works, find the one that works on that stage and pull it back.

Speaker 4 And it basically goes back and forth around the world over and over and over again. You get to just keep learning and building from each other.

Speaker 4 And when America turns off the like the the faucet for its base research funding, all that happens is there's just less money.

Speaker 4 There's less best, there's less basic research going on, which means there's less steps to do more research like get harder and more difficult to fund.

Speaker 4 And also

Speaker 4 the specialization that comes from it, like there's loads of like really, really good labs in America that just do really, really good base like biological research.

Speaker 4 That's what they've done for decades at this point. And they're the best in the world.
So people don't really compete with them.

Speaker 4 Like, what's the point of like me going to like switzerland spending like a few like few tens of millions to set up a lab that will eventually be able to compete with america what america is doing or i can just like work with them and like we can like collaborate and like we'll we'll work on we'll help them with their stuff and we'll like build a small version that can do like a little bit of testing of stuff and therefore they can get our research when we do that thing like the the specialization of like the global science community like it's the reason why america has no super colliders because they just don't bother they just come to europe and use ours yeah It's the same reason our fusion labs are all like one type of fusion labs.

Speaker 4 Like the magnetic fusion labs.

Speaker 3 And then we have Fermi over here.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Like it's when that's big expensive research, which costs a lot of money.
So you just make, you just do it globally, you distribute it. Right.

Speaker 3 But the

Speaker 4 with other kinds of research, like it's just this kind of ticky tack back and forth, like everyone shares everything.

Speaker 4 Like when I, when I was a teenager, I went, I wanted to be a doctor, a doctor doctor, not a, not a physics doctor.

Speaker 4 And I like did some internship stuff to try and like pad out the cv and i worked at a immunology clinic so it was a clinic about immunology from like medical doctors and like the conference was in the uk mostly attended by british like um doctors but had a whole cohort of like american researchers who came in to talk about their latest research and like they were the center of attention at these like dinners because like they were coming in with all their new research and you could talk to them in person you could like share research ideas and like so many collaborations emerged out of that because of the research going on but at the same time they were taking a lot of like European, British doctors, like who tried these things in practice.

Speaker 4 Like the big talk, the headline talk was about how to minimize the risk of peanut allergy in children. That was the big central.

Speaker 3 Peanut allergies?

Speaker 4 Yeah, peanut allergies in children. And they had a whole British doctor team who had been testing these new methods of doing it in wide-scale research across the UK.

Speaker 4 And the American scientists were obviously deeply interested. How did it go? What were the results? What did you see? Because they've been doing the other end of the research.

Speaker 4 They've been doing the really, really basic stuff, like the core central part.

Speaker 4 And now they they get to see in practice like this relationship is like so many tendrils and connections that pulling it apart just is just going to collapse things like it's it's hard to explain like we've lost the plot and i want to i i definitely want to ask that next i have like a little tiny anecdote to share about the transgender mice um did you hear about that yeah yeah they're transling our mice um

Speaker 3 the labs where they do that i have a friend who works at one of those labs and it's the same lab where they grow um ears human ears on the back of mice. They grow noses.

Speaker 3 They grow body parts on the back of mice to replace people who have been amputated in some way or another or have

Speaker 3 disfigurement. And it really has been like cutting-edge science for 15 years now.
They're continuing to do that.

Speaker 3 And the transgender part is like mixing X and Y chromosomes to see what the neurological differences are in the sexes.

Speaker 3 That's the whole

Speaker 3 that's it. It's not

Speaker 3 making transgender mice to see which bathroom they're going to use.

Speaker 3 But I worry about my friend that works at one of these labs in New Jersey. And I love mice.
Okay, they're cute, whatever. But if they have a human ear growing on their back, they don't care.

Speaker 3 Like they're a mouse. But it's really helpful for humans.
And they're going to lose their funding because a couple of their mice are trans.

Speaker 4 I thought also he, because Donald Trump can't, Donald Trump can't read, which is a bit of an issue.

Speaker 4 but but I thought it was because like he couldn't read the word transgenic which is means genetic material from outside of that animal added to the animal yeah he can't read like it's it's genuinely like you can see like like if you work with kids who can't read he has the same like habits which is like troubling um there was two things about the the mice which is like i saw like it was on tick tock probably some like southern woman going like i don't care how many mice they have to trans if it cures cancer which i thought was a pretty good like good summary of like like, the situation in general.

Speaker 4 But the second one is that, like, I remember reading about, like, the violence and like threats of death faced by scientists who worked on fetuses or embryos, embryos mostly, like in the early 2000s.

Speaker 4 Like, like, the genuine, I think, I think scientists died because they were working on embryonic stem cells.

Speaker 4 Like, there is a very violent, very angry group of people who like, couldn't be pushed over the edge by telling them that they're like they're making the mice trans.

Speaker 4 Like, that is like a genuine threat to these people's livelihoods and lives.

Speaker 3 I don't think that's a mistake.

Speaker 4 No, no, I don't either. I think it's deliberate.
I think they believe in stochastic terrorism. I think the Republican Party is a party of stochastic terrorism to get its wills.

Speaker 3 What's stochastic terrorism?

Speaker 4 Terrorism that doesn't have a specific leader.

Speaker 4 So like, you know how all these right-wing anti-immigrant people have been like going on shooting sprees around the world and none of them belong to a terrorist cell.

Speaker 4 They all kind of claim affinity to like Anders Brevik and like kind of right-wing like great replacement theories.

Speaker 4 like they all claim the same ideology but there's no like group like the guy who ran over all those people in New Orleans yeah but yeah like

Speaker 4 all these like these people who make manifestos saying like the the the the mexicans are replacing us or black people are replacing us or choose replacing us and then Edmond response I'm gonna like murder a bunch of people like they all have the same ideology they all believe the same things but they're not part of a group there's no organization there's no structure to it like comparative to like the base which I think was uh I think they've collapsed now and at of offen who were like these far-right like actual terrorist groups who like had an identity a group identity they shared discord logs they like planned attacks together like that's that's terrorism but stochastic terrorism just like people are driven to cause terrorism by what you like the cultural um and like system systemic like milieu leads them to commit terror acts that are in favor of what you believe

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Speaker 3 Dan has a scientific experiment for you and I to try, Liam.

Speaker 3 Okay. He would like you to turn the interview around on me and ask me as a

Speaker 3 journalist, feminist,

Speaker 3 et cetera, author, podcast creator, person who talks about abortion for a living

Speaker 3 and pyramid schemes and wellness and life coaches and stuff. If there's any words on this list that you want to ask me about and how it would impact the kind of work I do and my colleagues.

Speaker 4 I think there's a few words. I'm very curious how

Speaker 4 this would I can see, imagine, but how this would impact your ability to report things effectively.

Speaker 4 I think there's four that I think cover it well, which is advocacy, affirming care, at risk, and privilege.

Speaker 3 Okay, what were they again? Advocacy?

Speaker 4 Advocacy,

Speaker 4 affirming care,

Speaker 4 at risk, and privilege.

Speaker 3 So advocacy covers way too many things.

Speaker 3 Way too many. I mean, honestly, like it's political movements here in the U.S.
and advocating for underrepresented groups, like, you know, teen pregnancy.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't be able to talk about teen pregnancy, right? At all.

Speaker 3 At-risk talks about

Speaker 3 teenagers, like my foster daughter. She's not a teenager anymore.
She's an adult, but, you know, she was an at-risk youth.

Speaker 3 And at-risk meaning at risk of being trafficked and drugged and going to prison and et cetera.

Speaker 3 So that would be, in my personal life, really fucked up

Speaker 3 if no one can look into how that works and why and how to fix it.

Speaker 3 Or at least they have to do it behind closed doors.

Speaker 3 Privilege, I would not be able to

Speaker 3 do anything without that word

Speaker 3 in that

Speaker 3 I talk very often about not growing up with privilege, not having the privilege that my colleagues had at NPR, that sort of thing. And I write a lot about that, about privilege.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it would,

Speaker 3 I can't even, as I saw the word sex was on the list.

Speaker 3 That's like half of what I talk about.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they're like fun.

Speaker 3 But I mean, even teen pregnancy and stuff, like we made an entire show about abortion called Outlawed. We did an episode about abortion on this show.

Speaker 3 If you can't use the word sex,

Speaker 3 I can't talk about how

Speaker 3 my

Speaker 3 birth experience with my daughter destroyed my vagina and I had to get it rebuilt.

Speaker 3 Like, I wouldn't be able to write that essay, which has been very helpful to a lot of people, or even the colposcopy I had to get because of HPV.

Speaker 3 All of these things that are like public services in the medical field, I wouldn't be able to talk about any of that. And by wouldn't, I mean, probably shouldn't and can't now.

Speaker 4 Like the word list denies your ability to actually discuss and contextualize who you are as a lived being. Like you're just denied that reality.

Speaker 4 You can't understand yourself. You can't understand how you exist in the world.
You can't understand the world around you.

Speaker 4 You can't explain to others like how you are the way you are because these words are just like so fundamental to like we live in a society.

Speaker 4 I hate that phrase, but like we live in a society and therefore things interact with each other. And like if you can't talk about your,

Speaker 4 both your lack of privilege and also like the ways makes you maybe do have privilege, like if you can't discuss discuss that, and especially like the NPR stuff, then you can't explain anything about yourself, basically.

Speaker 4 Like it, it's, it just loses all connection to reality.

Speaker 3 And I can't ask others about it. Like the other, another word I'm seeing is socioeconomic.
I talk about socioeconomics literally every day, just the way economics are impacting our society.

Speaker 3 That's what it means, guys. It means how the economy impacts different groups, different regions in the United States, different industries, jobs,

Speaker 3 not just how it impacts black people versus white people, which I think is why they want to erase this because they don't want us talking about black people at all.

Speaker 3 But beyond that, socioeconomics is very important to understand how a country's economy works or a global economy works. And we're not allowed to talk about that according to this list.

Speaker 4 It feels like it's it's building,

Speaker 4 I think this is like generally the Republican position on things, but like it feels like it's building a situation in which your ability as an average person to understand like the world around you is deliberately like exterminated so that you don't understand the world around you.

Speaker 4 And I think that allows, it makes it even easier to build up toxic myths about who is at fault for the way you are.

Speaker 4 And like I think that like, like I personally have this position in which much disagree with that. I think like the emphasis on meritocracy

Speaker 4 does extreme damage to people who fail to achieve because they don't, for whatever reason, they do.

Speaker 4 And you're basically like, if you come from an area which is very deprived and very economically struggling, and you're told by media and politicians and like rich people that like you put in hard work and you succeed.

Speaker 4 And then you try that and you fail. So firstly, you take on your own personal, like, I'm a failure, I'm a weak person, I haven't succeeded.

Speaker 4 But then you look around you your community Which has got a whole bunch of people who have like failed to escape the poverty trap and you turn it into like my entire community is a bunch of people who are like undeserving of like success and we are a group of people that is like unable to achieve success and we're all the fault and therefore you basically end up hating your own community which means it's impossible to build up community support community like collaboration because that's that man yeah

Speaker 4 because you hate your community yeah you hate your community for existing and like then it makes it very easy for then all these like nasty little grifters to like start screwing with people and then putting in very evil things.

Speaker 4 Like, it's very understandable, like, why people lean on things where, like, there's actually direct success. Like, video games, people like it because you do a thing, you succeed.

Speaker 3 Like, it's not like you accomplish something. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, I understand that, wanting that sense of accomplishment for sure. I bake a cake.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I love it.
Love a cake. When you take away the concept of being able to succeed because of you can't understand that that's the world is challenging.
You just build hatred.

Speaker 4 That's all it's what you do.

Speaker 3 So yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And self-hatred for sure.

Speaker 3 What do you think went wrong with us? We used to be really proud of our science and our forward thinking, like

Speaker 3 starting, I guess, like 70 years ago, maybe.

Speaker 3 We used to love making scientists. And what do you think as an outsider, what happened to us?

Speaker 4 I think America in the 1980s decided that it would reorientate itself around financial extraction at all costs.

Speaker 4 As greed is good, pulling money from everything you can is good. And the way to succeed is to get status through money.

Speaker 4 But like the pivot from like the status of being an astronaut or a scientist and like the glory of that to like, it's just money, just whatever makes money, like money is king.

Speaker 4 That did an insane amount of damage to like what people value in society.

Speaker 4 The average person on the street who knows nothing and barely reads the newspaper could look at America and go, America is the king of science. Like you, you put men on the moon.

Speaker 4 You did so much cool things.

Speaker 4 Like it, it drives me nuts when American, like when American politicians talk about how we can't do X or Y, I've like you put a goddamn man on the moon with less power than a phone.

Speaker 4 Like you can do this thing, but you just choose not to.

Speaker 4 And you've, and America has chosen for 50 years to not do the things that it could do because it's easier easier to extract money and build billionaires to do other things instead.

Speaker 4 And it has been quite sad to watch because I think, despite all the problems in America, I think it's a very cool place. I think it does have really cool people.

Speaker 4 I think your mixture of like cultural backgrounds and like the kind of immigrant populations mixing across geography and space and time has led to like a really, really interesting and vibrant culture.

Speaker 4 And these people fucking hate it. They hate it so much.
And I just wish they didn't because they'd have such better like hairlines. They weren't stressed all the time about great replacement.
It's

Speaker 3 I just watched an interview with the Doge panel or whatever, like the Doge team.

Speaker 3 One person of color, all white guys, otherwise, all men, all men, no women on that team. No.

Speaker 3 And one person of color out of 10 of them.

Speaker 4 Would you feel safe as a woman around them, though?

Speaker 3 No, I don't feel safe. Like, no, not at all.

Speaker 3 No. Oh, my God.
Okay. Deion has one last word.
So you were a particle physicist? Yes. Yes.
Okay.

Speaker 4 I was an experimental particle physicist.

Speaker 3 Experimental particle physicist. Here's a word that's on the list, and I just want your immediate reaction.
We're going to do like a word association. First thing that comes to mind.
This is the word.

Speaker 3 Ready?

Speaker 3 Black.

Speaker 4 Star. But you have black holes.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Like, I know it's about, I know it's about black people, but I'm just looking for you in the space.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Oh, for God's sake.
Oh, my God. It's a color.
Like, there are birds that have the name black in them. There are beetles that have to wear black in them.
Like, oh, my God.

Speaker 4 There are cities that have to wear black in it. We have the scunfall problem, but people just, like, existing in like towns called Blackpool.
Like, oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Clean energy is on this list. Okay, anyways, we can just keep going.
Yeah. But yeah, there are colors.
There's a color on the list. That's fucked up on its own.

Speaker 3 And that's plenty of reason to like be furious at these people that are making this banned word list. But yeah, to add on top of that, that you can't talk about black holes

Speaker 3 on a government website.

Speaker 4 It's so cringe. And the whole thing, like, I knew I'd be, I knew eventually the oligarchic fascists would take over, but I wish they wouldn't be such dorks is like such a true statement.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 3 they're just embarrassing. Exactly.

Speaker 4 We talked about it before when you talk about RFK, but like this is goddamn measles outbreak that's killing kits and no one's doing shit about it.

Speaker 3 Like it's

Speaker 4 insane. It's terrifying.

Speaker 3 Well, you know who lives in Texas, right?

Speaker 3 Andrew Wakefield.

Speaker 4 Oh, of course he does, doesn't he?

Speaker 3 He does.

Speaker 4 We're only sending our best.

Speaker 3 So he's a Texan now-ish after he was disgraced. And his research, quote-unquote research, his pretend research about how the measles vaccine causes autism.

Speaker 3 He actually didn't say that. He said the MMR, measles, bumps, and rubella vaccine.
But he also, the year before he said that, he took out a patent on a one-shot measles vaccine.

Speaker 3 So he had financial incentive to create this story around the MMR vaccine causing autism, but not the measles one. But I believe the community that he's in in Texas,

Speaker 3 they, you know, he has a bit of a cult following a bit. Millions of people like what this guy says about autism because it's comforting.

Speaker 4 Well, as you're probably aware, if you say something in a British accent, it also sounds like much more fancy.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it sounds way better. Sorry, Texas.
I'm just kidding. You guys, you guys sound weird, but fine.
And I have an accent. I get it.
Okay. Anyways,

Speaker 3 I do think that the Wakefield influence on Texas and the measles, I think that that's somehow correlated, but I haven't seen anyone talking about it.

Speaker 4 I wouldn't be surprised because with most of these outbreaks, you'll find it's like it's one pocket of low vaccination.

Speaker 4 It hits that pocket, gets rampant through the pocket, and then it starts exploding outwards because it's allowed to like just fester in this group of like unvaccinated people that it then starts hitting people who were vaccinated because like maybe their immunity wasn't high enough and so on and so forth.

Speaker 4 So you just need these pockets of like anti-vaccine like strongholds and you just do so much damage to the rest of the country.

Speaker 3 I spent three days in the hospital a couple of years back in 2019, right before the pandemic, because I had this reaction to a medication and reaction is called Stevens-Johnson syndrome.

Speaker 3 And it looks just like measles, at least at the beginning.

Speaker 3 And there was a small measles outbreak here in LA. And they kept me in like a negative pressure room? Negative pressure rooms, yes.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 for three days, because they needed to make sure

Speaker 3 that I didn't have measles. And what I found out during that experience is that your measles vaccine wears off.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 You need to get it like every 10 years if you really feel like there's a threat.

Speaker 3 But you don't have to get it every 10 years if everyone got it at the same time when they're born and everyone has the same immunity.

Speaker 3 But if people around you are deciding that their children should have measles, you should probably get a new vaccine. That's my public service announcement to America.

Speaker 3 Go get your measles vaccine before they outlaw them, before RFK gets rid of vaccines altogether.

Speaker 4 Yeah, please do.

Speaker 3 Liam, always a pleasure. Seriously, it's like such a delight and I feel smarter every time we talk.
And enjoy not living in America for now.

Speaker 4 I will do and try your best to enjoy living in America right now.

Speaker 3 We'll do. Okay.
Thanks again.

Speaker 3 The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere. We do other productions, like a show called Finally a Show About Women that Isn't Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare.

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