Robert Proctor: Nazi Science and Ideology | Lex Fridman Podcast #268

1. 0:00 – 4:08

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      What is the heroic action for a scientist in Nazi Germany?

   2. RPRobert Proctor0:04

      Science in many respects actually is a full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion.

   3. LFLex Fridman0:14

      What goes through the mind of a big tobacco executive?

   4. RPRobert Proctor0:18

      Cigarettes have killed more than any other object, than all the world of iron, all the world of gunpowder. Nuclear bombs have only killed a few hundred thousand people. Cigarettes have killed hundreds of millions. There's no contest. Cigarettes have killed far more and are far more preventable.

   5. LFLex Fridman0:39

      What is the nature of human ignorance? The following is a conversation with Robert Proctor, historian at Stanford University, specializing in 20th century science, technology and medicine, especially the history of the most controversial aspects of those fields. Please allow me to say a few words about science and the nature of truth. The word science is often used as an ideal for a methodology that can help us escape the limitation of any one human mind in the pursuit of truth. The underlying idea here is that individual humans are too easily corrupted by bias, emotion, personal experience, and the usual human craving for meaning, money, power and fame. And the hope is that the tools of science can help us overcome these limitations in striving for deeper and deeper understanding of objective reality, from physics to chemistry, biology, genetics, and even psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. But history shows that these tools of science are not devoid of human flaws, of influence from human institutions, of manipulation from people in power. As we talk about in this conversation with Robert Proctor, in the 1930s and '40s, there was the Nazi science and there was communist science, and each had fundamentally different ideas about, for example, genetics and biology of disease. This history also shows that scientists can be corrupted, slowly or quickly, by fear, fame, money, or just the ideological narratives of a charismatic leader that convinces each scientist and the scientific community that their work matters for the greater cause of humanity, even if that cause involves the genetic purification of a people, the extermination of a cancer, and the unrestricted experimentation on the bodies of living beings who do not have a voice, whose suffering will never be heard. All of this for the greater good. In some periods of human history, science was deeply influenced by the ideology of governments and individuals. In some, less so. The hard truth is that we can't know for sure about which of the two periods we're living through today. So let us not too quickly dismiss the voices of experts and non-experts alike that ask the simple question of, "Wait, are we doing the right thing here? Are we helping or hurting? Are we adding suffering to the world, or are we alleviating it?" Most such voices are nothing more than martyrs seeking fame, not truth, and they will be proven wrong. But some may help prevent future atrocities and suffering at a global scale. Let us then move forward with humility so that history will remember this period as one of human flourishing and where science lived up to its highest ideal. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robert Proctor.

2. 4:08 – 15:43

   Ideology and science

   1. LFLex Fridman4:09

      What is the story of science and scientists during the rise, rule, and fall of the Third Reich?

   2. RPRobert Proctor4:16

      Well, we tend to think of science as always on the side of liberty, as always on the side of enlightenment, as always on the side of enlarging human possibility, and here we have this phenomenon in the 1930s of really the world's leading scientific power, the Third Reich, uh, which collectively had won a big chunk of all the Nobel Prizes. Suddenly they go fascist, they go Nazi with Hitler. And instead of being primarily a source of resistance, science in many respects actually is a full collaborator in the most horrific forms of Nazi genocide, Nazi exclusion. And, uh, that's kind of a, a, a relatively untold story in, in the sense that, uh, when we think of science in the Third Reich, we think of Josef Mengele injecting dye into the eyes of, of twins, or we think of horrific human experiments, and those are real. But it's also the story of a huge scientific apparatus, a bureaucracy you could almost say, participating in every phase of the, uh, campaigns of Nazi destruction. And what I looked at in particular in, in actually my first book was how physicians in particular, but also biomedical science, um, was collaborating with the regime, and that it's wrong to think of the Nazi regime as anti-science. It's anti a particular type of science In particular, it was radically against what they called Jewish science, communist science. Um, certain types of science they did not like. Uh, there's a whole nature-nurture, uh, dispute in that period, and they're firmly on the side of nature, um, which interestingly gives vies to, rise to a very different type of science in the Soviet Union, by the way.

   3. LFLex Fridman6:29

      The Soviet Union is more on the nurture side?

   4. RPRobert Proctor6:31

      The Soviet Union is on the side of the nurture side in the dimension of genetics, and this is sort of an untold story. I was g- actually gonna write a book about it until I was barred from access to the Soviet Union. Uh, uh, there've been different times in my life where I was a Russianist.

   5. LFLex Fridman6:50

      A Russianist. [laughs] Okay, we're gonna have to talk about that, but-

   6. RPRobert Proctor6:53

      I got excluded from, uh, fulfilling that dream. But one of the things I was gonna look at, uh, when I got a Fulbright, um, in the 1980s, was to, uh, go over and look at the anti-Nazi genetics and anthropology of the Soviets, and how a lot of their Lysenkoist Lamarckism was actually anti-Nazi, anti-genetics on the nurture side of nature, and that's really an untold story. It's an uncomfortable story, 'cause it sounds like someone, uh, we might wanna make heroes out of some- out of the twisting of science in the Soviet Union. But nonetheless, there are these interesting complexities, and what's amazing about Nazi science is, is how there was this collaboration. And you're talking about a culture where they're inventing things like electron microscopy, they're doing all kinds of, uh, studies in anthropology. So a lot of that's an untold story.

   7. LFLex Fridman7:59

      So what was the connection between the ideology and the science? I- i- if you can just linger on it longer.

   8. RPRobert Proctor8:05

      Well, we tend to think of science and ideology as completely separate, when I think the reality is they're, is they're not. If you look at why the Mayans in the seventh and eighth century AD had the m- world's most accurate calendar, accurate to within 17 seconds per year, that was all part of a ritual practice to celebrate the rise of Kukulkan, the rise of the, of Venus, with what's called the heliacal rise, rising, namely the rising of Venus before the rising of the sun, in which, which, a- at which moment Venus is destroyed by the light of the sun. Well, they developed this elaborate calendrical astronomy, which required detailed observation, detailed chronicling of movement of the heavens, in particular the planets, for the purpose of celebrating this cycle of renewal that they thought was sacred and, and, uh, holy and, and magical. So where's the ideology? Where's the science? There's the, the sort of instrumentation, the calendrics, the measu- the measurement, all in the service of this magical moment. And I think that's true of a lot of science. I had a friend years ago who was Mennonite and wanted to study solar cells, and to improve silicon chips to make more efficient solar energy. There was no money for that. Uh, when Ronald Reagan took office, the budgets for solar and alternative energy were essentially zeroed out, and Reagan takes off the solar panels off of the roof of the White House. So my friend end up, ends up working on hardening silicon chips against nuclear war. So he becomes part of the nuclear war protection defense apparatus, even though he wanted to work on alternative energy, doing very similar work with silicon chips, but in a different framework. And so, uh, the practices o- of science often gets pushed into and is, is woven into ideological practices, in, sort of in the same way that you get beautiful, um, medieval cathedrals built, uh, in service of, of Catholicism.

   9. LFLex Fridman10:29

      Well, what's in the mind of an in- individual scientist? So this, this process of, uh, ideology polluting science, or is it science empowering ideology? So, uh, almost like, uh, if we can zoom in and zoom out effortlessly into the individual mind of a scientist, then back to the whole scientific community. Like, do scientists think about nuclear war, about the atrocities committed by the Nazis, as they're helping on the minute details of the scientific process?

   10. RPRobert Proctor11:01

       I think sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't, right? You think of the chemists working to develop the cyanide that will be used to kill, uh, Jews at, uh, in, in a concentration camp. What are they thinking? You can imagine a whole ra- range of thoughts. Maybe they don't know what they're doing. Maybe they do. Maybe they know a little bit, but not a lot. Maybe they don't wanna know. Uh, maybe they have ways of, of lying to themselves. Um, maybe they are the one person who agreed to do it, and 99 refused. So, you know, it's hard, if not impossible, to know what's in the soul of anyone. But when you have enormous power directing the motion and the currents or the ocean, it's not hard to find people willing to fill that in, especially if they're narrow technocrats, you know, if they're just doing their job, if they're just building the widget. And I think a lot of scientific training is in widget, widget building, and that leads to the possibility that they can become ins- easily instrumentalized in a particular, uh, in a particular a- action, which is maybe horrific or, or, or glorious. The other thing to keep in mind is that science is, as we say, what scientists do. Uh, and that can include a lot of things. It can exclude a lot of things. The word science itself is interesting because it's cognate... It, it actually comes originally from the Proto-Indo-European, uh, uh, skein, meaning to cut or divide, and so it's cognate with scissors, schism, skin. Skin is that which divides you from the world.

   11. LFLex Fridman13:01

       Mm-hmm.

   12. RPRobert Proctor13:02

       Shit or scat is that which has been divided from you-

   13. LFLex Fridman13:04

       Mm-hmm

   14. RPRobert Proctor13:05

       ... uh, into the world. And so there's this cognate, uh, between science and shit or science and cutting-

   15. LFLex Fridman13:11

       Mm-hmm

   16. RPRobert Proctor13:11

       ... with the whole n- idea being that you're dividing into parts, classifying. It's the taxonomic impulse. And to know is to know where something belongs, to divide it into its parts and put it in its, in its proper place, and that taxonomic impulse can be very static. It's actually one of the things that Darwin had to overcome in recognizing evolution, that, that-

   17. LFLex Fridman13:36

       Mm-hmm

   18. RPRobert Proctor13:36

       ... taxonomies are in motion.

   19. LFLex Fridman13:38

       Yeah.

   20. RPRobert Proctor13:39

       Um, but it also can lead to a kind of myopia that my job is done when I've classified something. Uh, is, is, is this bird an X, a Y, or a Z? And that again can be, it can be ideological or it can not be, but scientists are humans, humans, and they're fitting in with a world, with a world practice, and that's, that's, that's limiting. It, it's kind of inev- inevitable. It, it's unavoidable. It, it's hard to be, if, if not impossible, out of the world that we're, that we're walking in.

   21. LFLex Fridman14:13

       Yeah, and it's fascinating 'cause I think ideologies also have an impulse towards forming taxonomies. And there is, um... So just, uh, so, uh, being at MIT, I've gotten to learn about this character named Jeffrey Epstein. I didn't know wh- who this was until all the news broke out and so on. And I started to wonder, how did all these people at MIT that I admire would hang out with this person, just lightly, just have conversations? I don't mean any of the bigger things, but even just basic conversations. And I think this has to do... You said scientists are widget builders and taxonomizers. I think there's power in somebody like the Nazi regime or like a Jeffrey Epstein just being excited about your widgets and making you feel like the widget serves a greater purpose in the world. And so it's not like you're, um... You know, some- sometimes people say scientists wanna make money and, uh, or they have a big kind of ideological drive behind it. I think there's just nice when the widgets you like building anyway, somehow somebody convinces you, some charismatic person, that this widget is actually has a grander purpose. And you don't almost feel, think about the, uh, negative or p- whether it's positive, just the fact that it's grand is already super exciting.

   22. RPRobert Proctor15:42

       Yeah.

3. 15:43 – 22:49

   Wernher von Braun

   1. RPRobert Proctor15:43

      Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's the story of Wernher von Braun, you know, and the fascination with rockets, and this will, you know, enlarge something in the world. And h- here he is, he's an SS officer, he's working around slave labor. Uh, and then, but his rocket then gets compressed into the, the Western world or the, the American world and basically launches us to the moon, and we forget about the sau- how the sausage was made, uh, originally.

   2. LFLex Fridman16:15

      Well, can you talk about him a little bit more 'cause he's such a fascinating, uh, character? 'Cause he, so he's, he was a Nazi, but he was also an American, and it had such a g- grand impact on, on both. And, like, is it, there's this uncomfortable fact that he's, you know, [chuckles] one of the central figures that gave birth to the American space exploration efforts.

   3. RPRobert Proctor16:39

      Yeah, he's an interesting figure, fascinated in a kind of a tunnel vision way with spaceflight. He makes these beautiful rockets already beginning in the '20s, early '30s. Ends up for a while at Peenemünde using slave labor to build, uh, V2 engines and, and so forth like that. I, I remember going to Peenemünde, where people have actually tracked the flights of aborted V2 rockets and found some of these beautiful, beautiful old engines, just the most, like, works of art, these, these, these engines used to reign terror, uh, on, on the British. It's interesting because in that same spot, uh, I was hunting for amber, Baltic amber, 'cause I'm a, I'm a stone collector, and among the amber collectors there, there's a famous story of the, the Peenemünde burn it's called because they find yellow phosphorus they think is amber. They put it in their pocket, and then it dries out, and then explodes and creates this big burn, uh, burn on their legs. But the whole Nazi regime is, is full of things like that. It's full of these scholars who get twisted into a mindset. And, uh, it's also important to realize that people didn't often see what was coming.

   4. LFLex Fridman18:04

      Mm-hmm.

   5. RPRobert Proctor18:05

      And we look back and we say, "How could you X, Y, or Z?" But before the Holocaust, there's not the Holocaust. Uh, there are versions of it, but Things get on a new meaning, gain a new meaning in light of subsequent events

   6. LFLex Fridman18:21

      And there's a, a entire propaganda machine that makes it easier for you to, to, to hold the narrative in your head. Even if you kind of intuitively know there's something really wrong here, because of the propaganda, you can kinda convince yourself to be able to sleep at night.

   7. RPRobert Proctor18:38

      That's right. And we have to remember that Goebbels' office was not the office of propaganda, it was the office of enlightenment, uh, of, of popular enlightenment and propaganda. So enlightenment-

   8. LFLex Fridman18:55

      Enlightenment

   9. RPRobert Proctor18:55

      ... was part of his-

   10. LFLex Fridman18:57

       Just the new era of-

   11. RPRobert Proctor18:58

       ... his vision

   12. LFLex Fridman18:58

       ... enlightenment from his perspective.

   13. RPRobert Proctor19:00

       It was supposed to be the new age, a new era of enlightenment. It's a little bit like the, the kind of myth of Hitler as failed artist. Uh, you know, his art is not that bad. You know, there are a lot of artists who are, who are worse. And I had a very interesting conversation once with my, my college roommate, who became a librarian at Harvard, and at Harvard he met an old, old librarian, a German woman, who had met Hitler as a kid [laughs]

   14. LFLex Fridman19:27

       Oh, wow

   15. RPRobert Proctor19:28

       ... when she was, like, eight years old. Her dad was, like, a Gauleiter for the Nuremberg area, and she said that for 15 minutes Hitler goes out onto the balcony with her and has this conversation alone with this-

   16. LFLex Fridman19:42

       Mm-hmm

   17. RPRobert Proctor19:42

       ... you know, eight-year-old girl, and she said he was charming and funny, and then he said he loved kids, and she, she said he was the most, you know, charming sort of person. And that's part of the history, too, that we tend to forget when we make a scarecrow image of this rabid, raging fanatic. You know, that's, there's more to it than that.

   18. LFLex Fridman20:05

       That's really, really, really important to think about when we make a scarecrow, because that gives you actionable, like, it, it forces you to introspect about people in your own life or leaders in your life today, ones you admire. They're charismatic, they're friendly, they love kids, they, they talk about enlightenment. You have to kinda think, "All right. Am I being duped on certain things?" You have to kinda have a... I mean, that's the problem with Jeffrey Ep- Epstein that people don't seem to talk about. I don't, I, I never met the guy, but just given the people he talked to, whom I know, it feels like he must have been charismatic.

   19. RPRobert Proctor20:46

       Yeah.

   20. LFLex Fridman20:46

       Like, people think about, like, oh, it's because of the women, it's because of the money. Eh. I don't, the people I know, I don't think they're going to be influenced. Ultimately it has to be how you are in the room and make... It's, it's, it's exactly like you said, the enlightenment. I think that excites the, the scientist. Of course, as a charismatic person, you have to know what to pick [laughs] in terms of what excites you, but that, that is also the fascinating thing to me about Hitler, is all of these meetings, even like with Chamberlain, in, inside rooms, whether he was screaming or whatever he was saying, it seems like he was very convincing. There must have been passion in his eyes. There must have been charisma that one-on-one in a quiet conversation he was convincing.

   21. RPRobert Proctor21:34

       Yes. There's a famous story about Goebbels, who would do a party trick where for 15 minutes, for 15 minutes he would rouse the crowd to communism.

   22. LFLex Fridman21:44

       [laughs]

   23. RPRobert Proctor21:45

       Workers of the world unite and-

   24. LFLex Fridman21:47

       Yeah

   25. RPRobert Proctor21:48

       ... then for 15 minutes he would rouse the world to capitalism-

   26. LFLex Fridman21:52

       Yeah

   27. RPRobert Proctor21:52

       ... and individualism. And then for 15 minutes he would rouse the world to Nazism, and apparently he was quite convincing [laughs]

   28. LFLex Fridman21:59

       [laughs]

   29. RPRobert Proctor21:59

       uh, in each of those performances.

   30. LFLex Fridman22:01

       Well, all those ideologies are pretty powerful. The, I mean, th- they, and I think it's not even the, the reason that matters as much as the power of the dream, of the vision, of the enlightenment. I mean, the vision of communism is fascinatingly powerful.
4. 22:49 – 32:52

   The scientific process

   1. LFLex Fridman22:49

      what have you learned from this period of the 1930s about the scientific process? So one of the labels you can put on your work, on you as a scholar, is a philosopher of science, and you also talk about Nazi Germany as a singular moment in time or, like, a, a, a rebirth of the integration between ideology and science. So the, like, um, in terms of valueless science, I think is the term.

   2. RPRobert Proctor23:22

      Value-free science.

   3. LFLex Fridman23:22

      Value f- free science, uh, that you use. I mean, it seems like Nazi Germany is a important moment in history. I mean, it probably goes up and down. So what, what, um, difficult truths have you learned about the scientific process, and what hopeful things have you learned about the scientific process?

   4. RPRobert Proctor23:44

      Well, I guess the saddening thing is how easily people can become part of a machine. Uh, if there's power, people can be found to follow it. You know, one of the things I work on is, is Big Tobacco, and we'll probably come to that, but, uh, it's amazing to me how easily people w- are willing to work for Big Tobacco. It's amazing to me how many scientists and physicians were willing to work for the Nazi regime for multiple reasons. Partly because a lot of them really thought they were, you know, doing the Lord's work. They thought they were cleaning the world of filth, you know. I mean, if you really thought, you know, Jews are a parasitic race, you know, why wouldn't you, you know, get rid of them? Uh, so there's an ontology. There's a, there's a theory of the world that they're building on, and interestingly, one that was, um, also present in the United States. And one of the things I did find out in my earliest research was that the Nazis had looked lovingly and enviously over at the United States in terms of racial segregation, racial separation, and saw themselves in a kind of competition to become the world's racial leader-

   5. LFLex Fridman25:06

      [laughs]

   6. RPRobert Proctor25:07

      ... as the, as the most purified racial form, and that this required this kind of cleansing process. And the cleansing meant getting rid of the physically handicapped. It meaning, it meant getting rid of racial inferiors as they imagined them. It meant, uh, getting rid of cancer-causing chemicals in the air and in our food and our water. These were all of a piece. Uh, there's a famous, uh, illustration that, uh, um, Richard Doll talks about, the great, the great cancer theorist of, of, of studying in Nazi Germany in the, in the 1930s, and he's shown a lecture where cancer cells are shown as Jews and X-rays are shown as, as Stormtroopers, and these Stormtroopers are killing the, the cancer cells, who are also Jews. And so there's this metaphorical work of, of cleaning, extermination, sanitation.

   7. LFLex Fridman26:08

      Purification of a sort.

   8. RPRobert Proctor26:10

      Purification. There's definitely a kind of purity quest, and you see that at, at, at multiple levels. Uh, and so you see how easy it is for people to fall into that given a particular theory. And again, coming back to that earlier sort of point about the scarecrow, which I think is very important, uh, if we imagine that nothing like this went on here in the United States, that would be a big mistake. The, the Nazis are looking to the Save the Redwoods League, to their, uh, you know, to the, the Aryan supremacists, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the, to the, uh, uh, separation of Blacks and whites. Blacks were not allowed to join the American Medical Association until after World War II, so you have racial segregation. You have massive sterilization in the United States way before the Nazis. One of the first things the Nazis do from a racial hygiene point of view is start sterilizing what they called the mentally ill and the physically handicapped. Well, that had been going on since around World War I in the United States, and even earlier in certain states in the form of castration of, of, uh, prisoners, uh, in order to prevent their demon seed from being propagated further into the race. So there's a kind of a racial internationale, uh, that's going on, and that part of the story also needs to be told.

   9. LFLex Fridman27:41

      And scientists were able to carry those ideas in their mind from, from your work.

   10. RPRobert Proctor27:45

       Of course. Of course. I mean, that's one of the things going on with all the renaming of buildings now, uh, is scientists who were eugenicists are now getting their names pulled off of buildings. My personal view is that, uh, it has to be done on a case-by-case basis, but in general, I think it's, it's usually better to add on rather than subtract. In other words, to add history rather than erase history or pretend as if history had never existed. Let me, let me give you a specific example of that. Uh, one of the most powerful and diabolical university presidents in the Nazi period was a guy named Karl Astel, A-S-T-E-L, and he was a rabid Nazi high up in the leadership. And in his portrait at the University of Vienna, there he is in full SS uniform. That painting was taken down. Now, what I would have done is left the painting and put a [laughs] you know, add a plaque.

   11. LFLex Fridman28:57

       Yeah.

   12. RPRobert Proctor28:57

       But to pretend as if that never happened or to erase history in that way I think is, is a big, big mistake.

   13. LFLex Fridman29:04

       Can I linger on that point? So I, I haven't gotten through it yet, but I've been trying to get through Mein Kampf, and, you know, throughout its history, it's been taken down and up. It actually was taken down from Amazon for a while recently. What can you say about [laughs] keeping that stuff up? So the reason Am- it, it was taken down from Amazon, I mean, there's, there's a large number of people that will read that, and, um, the hate in their heart will grow. So they're not using it for educational purposes. You can't put a plaque on the Mein Kampf. You're ruining Mein Kampf then. [laughs] Like you can't, I mean, this is, you know, Amazon can't do a warning-

   14. RPRobert Proctor29:50

       Right

   15. LFLex Fridman29:50

       ... saying like, um, [laughs] this-

   16. RPRobert Proctor29:52

       Or an expurgated, you get an expurgated version of Mein Kampf.

   17. LFLex Fridman29:55

       Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

   18. RPRobert Proctor29:55

       You take out the word Jew, you know?

   19. LFLex Fridman29:57

       Exactly.

   20. RPRobert Proctor29:57

       As if that would solve anything.

   21. LFLex Fridman29:59

       Exactly. So it still just stands on its own.

   22. RPRobert Proctor30:01

       Yeah.

   23. LFLex Fridman30:01

       The, I mean, it's, uh, not well written, so you can maybe convince yourself that it's okay because it's not well written. [laughs] So it's not, it's not like this inspiring book of ideology that could easily convince. But, uh- Can you steel man the argument that Mein Kampf should be banned?

   24. RPRobert Proctor30:23

       I-

   25. LFLex Fridman30:23

       And can you steel man the argument that it should be not banned?

   26. RPRobert Proctor30:27

       Well, I wouldn't say it should be banned. I think if anything, that might make it forbidden fruit.

   27. LFLex Fridman30:33

       Yeah.

   28. RPRobert Proctor30:33

       Now, this might be different when we come to statues on the public square. After World War II, the statues of Hitler, there must have been thousands of them-

   29. LFLex Fridman30:42

       Yes

   30. RPRobert Proctor30:42

       ... were taken down. Now, I think even the most rabid, um, opponents of cancel culture-
5. 32:52 – 42:05

   Censorship

   1. LFLex Fridman32:52

      let me take a small tangent and ask you about censorship and, um, this particular period we're living through. So my friend Joe Rogan has a podcast. He hosts a few folks on there, and they- they're folks of differing opinions. And as we speak, there's kind of a battle going on over whether Joe Rogan should be on Spotify and allowed to spread scientific misinformation. In particular, there's a guy named Robert Malone that's talking about, uh, that- that's making a case against, uh, at least against the COVID vaccine and so on. So outside of the specifics of this person, in this battle of scientific ideas wh- that are sometimes tied up with ideology, in our modern world, what do you think is the role? Like, who gets to censor, decide what is misinformation or information? Should we let ideas fly in the scientific realm, so scientific ideas, or should we [laughs] try to get it under control? Like, what- which way... Ob- obviously, all, uh, approaches will go wrong in some ways. Which is more likely [laughs] to go wrong? Uh, one where you try to get a hold of, like, all right, this is a viral thing, and it doesn't fit with scientific consensus, so we should probably, like, try to, like, quiet it down a little bit, or do you let it all just fly and let the ideas battle? Do you think about this kind of stuff in the context of, of, uh, history?

   2. RPRobert Proctor34:36

      Well, that used to be a million-dollar question. Of course, now it's a multibillion-dollar question.

   3. LFLex Fridman34:42

      Yeah. Not trillion, yeah.

   4. RPRobert Proctor34:43

      Um, we're talking about powerful internet platforms becoming essentially publishers, and publishers can't say whatever they want. There are limits. Uh, there's, you know, they can't yell, "Fire" in a, in [laughs] in a crowded theater. But there are, uh, there's a, a kind of social responsibility that is there, and I know some of these li- I don't know a lot about this topic, but I know there are large, some of the large platforms do have dedicated offices to trying to rein in misinformation, as you would expect any publisher to do. You can't just let anything fly in Time Magazine or, or The New York Times either. They ha- there are all kinds of codes of, of ethics and legal obligations. So I, uh, I'm a fan of the efforts, or I think some of the large internet platforms should be congratulated at least for trying to make an effort to rein in misinformation. It's gonna be difficult, and there, there, mistakes are gonna be made, but it can't be a let everything fly kind of situation.

   5. LFLex Fridman35:53

      But when I watch, unfortunately, the pressure these platforms feel to identify and to censor misinformation, that pressure is, uh, ideological in nature currently. So if you just objectively look, there's a certain political lean to people that are pressing on the censorship and the misinformation, which makes me very uncomfortable because now there's an ideology to labeling something as misinformation, as opposed to kind of, uh, um, having a You know, value-less evaluation of what is true and not. And, and, and you also have to acknowledge that it says something, that there's a very large number of people that, um, for example, follow Robert Malone or follow people-- I mean, what does that say about society?

   6. RPRobert Proctor36:49

      Yeah.

   7. LFLex Fridman36:50

      And th- th- there's a deeper lesson in there that's not just about blocking misinformation. It's, uh, distrust in science and institutions, distrust in leaders. Like I-- it feels like you have to fix that.

   8. RPRobert Proctor37:05

      Yeah.

   9. LFLex Fridman37:05

      And then censorship of misinformation is not going to be fixing that. It's only going to, like, uh, throw gasoline on the fire. [laughs] You gotta put out the fire. [laughs]

   10. RPRobert Proctor37:16

       Well, that's, that's cr- certainly possible. Yeah. I mean, the, uh... I think people are distrustful of certain institutions and not others, right? And, uh, I think a lot of distrust is, is good. Uh, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do know there have been a lot of conspiracies, and that, you know, people work behind scenes to do powerful, bad things, and that's what needs to be exposed. Uh, the other thing I worry about, which is relevant to your question, again, it's a billion or trillion dollar question, is, uh, we're ki- I think, in a world of kind of flattening, where all news or all information or all data is kind of equal in some way, and so you get the Twitterverse going, and doesn't matter if it's peer-reviewed or it doesn't matter if it's been supported by evidence. It's just, you know, a kind of outburst. It- it- it's interesting to contrast it with, say, a hundred years ago. I mean, what would a crazy person or a, uh, a flat Earther or anything, what venue would they have? I mean, maybe they could go to a church or someplace. I mean, uh, so now we have this em- these empowering engines, then that's what's new historically, is that basically anyone can have a blog or a, a, a Twitter feed, and that is new, and so that is-- you can think of it also as a kind of clutter. So it's a kind of a radical democracy in a way, and the, kind of the, one of the weaknesses of democracy is if everyone has an equal voice, and if everyone has equal power.

   11. LFLex Fridman39:02

       So there's, of course, a flip side to that, where everyone has equal power. It forces the s- the people who are, quote-unquote, "experts" to be better at communication. I think people, uh, like scientists, are just, like, upset that they have to do, like, better work at communicating now. They used to be lazy, and you could just, like, say, "I have a PhD, therefore everyone listen to me." Now they have to actually convince people. Like, you have to convince people that the Earth is round. You can't just say, "The Earth is round," and that's it.

   12. RPRobert Proctor39:27

       Right.

   13. LFLex Fridman39:27

       You have to, like, show, you have to, uh, make, like-- I mean, not the Earth is round part, but-

   14. RPRobert Proctor39:32

       Yeah

   15. LFLex Fridman39:33

       ... things like that. You have to actually be a great communicator, great, do great lectures, do documentaries, and so on-

   16. RPRobert Proctor39:40

       Yeah

   17. LFLex Fridman39:40

       ... and to battle those ideas. It-- and then also to defend the sort of, uh, the people labeled as crazy. You know, in Nazi Germany, if you were protesting against, uh, some of the uses of science, of medicine, to commit atrocities, you'd also be labeled crazy.

   18. RPRobert Proctor40:01

       Yeah. Well, on your-

   19. LFLex Fridman40:02

       And so those voices are important. [laughs]

   20. RPRobert Proctor40:03

       Yeah, there's so many good points there. The, on the scientists becoming good communicators, the history of scientists becoming bad communicators has a history, and the last original contribution to science written entirely in the form of a poem is, uh, Buffon's Loves of the Plants. And following that, in the 18th century, you get the uglification of science, the deliberate uglification of science, with the idea being that if you are clear and if you speak beautifully, if you write beautifully, you're hiding something.

   21. LFLex Fridman40:38

       [laughs]

   22. RPRobert Proctor40:39

       You're covering over-

   23. LFLex Fridman40:40

       Yes

   24. RPRobert Proctor40:41

       ... the truth with flowers and decorations and, and, and scents and, and pleasant odors. And so, uh, you get this scientific paper format, you know, introduction, discussion, methods, conclu-- you know, results, conclusions, and it's, it's kind of policed in this, uh, inhumane, non-humanistic kind of-

   25. LFLex Fridman41:05

       Yeah

   26. RPRobert Proctor41:05

       ... rhetorical way, and that's a big problem. And so you get that combined with just the rise of the research lab and the ever narrower, uh, widget builders, the cogs in the machine. Uh, it's not surprising that people might not trust certain aspects of that. That combined with the dirty laundry history of a lot of science, uh, that you did have, you know, the requirement at, uh, at Auschwitz that people be, you know, that, that physicians supervise the killings. Uh, you know, the, the horrors of, you know, Tuskegee and, and, and all kinds of other things, or even something like the atom bomb, which is arguably more neutral, at least, but nonetheless horrific. And so it's not surprising that, uh, a lot of people don't trust science, and a lot of science shouldn't be trusted, right? There's science and then there's science. So there's a long history of dirty, bad science that you don't solve just by saying we should have trusted

6. 42:05 – 47:16

   Anthony Fauci

   1. RPRobert Proctor42:05

      it.

   2. LFLex Fridman42:05

      Let, let's just stay on COVID for a brief moment and talk about a part- particular leader that I think about is Anthony Fauci. I've thought about whether to talk to him or not. I have my own feelings about Anthony Fauci. By the way, I'm, you know, I admire basically everybody, and I admire scientists a lot, and there's something about him that bothers me. Um- I think because I'm always bothered by ego and lack of humility, and I sense that. Maybe, maybe I'm very wrong on this, but so he has said that he represents science. If you've taken in full context, I understand the point he's making, which is, you know, when people attack, um, attack him, they think of him as representing science, th- things like that, but there's ego in that. And, um, what do you think motivates and informs his decisions? Is it politics or science? And the broader question I have, what does it take to be a great scientific leader in difficult times, um, li- like these, and maybe you could say Nazi Germany was similar, when there's obviously... Like, you, like Anthony Fauci, just like scientific leaders during Nazi Germany, could have made a difference, it feels like, uh, positive and negative. And so it's like there's a lot at stake, um, there's a lot at stake in terms of scientific leadership. If, if I've, I've asked about 17 questions [laughs]

   3. RPRobert Proctor43:51

      [laughs]

   4. LFLex Fridman43:51

      ... if there's something worthwhile answering in that.

   5. RPRobert Proctor43:55

      Well, Fauci, I think, is doing as, as, as good a job as he can. I mean, he's a... You can't turn on the television without seeing him. Um-

   6. LFLex Fridman44:06

      But no, that's, the, what's the goal of the job? That means he appears a lot, but there's, uh, he does not come off as somebody who, with authenticity. Like, I admire so many science communicators about 10X, 100X more than him, um, including his boss, Francis Collins, who I've, uh, recently lost respect for, given some of the emails that leaked. There's ego in those emails.

   7. RPRobert Proctor44:30

      Yeah.

   8. LFLex Fridman44:31

      And it upsets me because, like, I, I hope all that stuff comes out and wakes young scientists up to don't be a douchebag. Don't, don't... Be humble. Be honest. Be authentic. Be real. Put yourself out there. Don't play the PR game. Don't play politics. Just get excited about the widget building that you love, communicate that, and think about the difficult ethical questions there, and communicate them. Be transparent. Don't think like the public. Don't talk down to the public. Don't think the public is too dumb to understand the complexities involved. Because the moment you start to think that when you're, like, 30, what do you think happens when you're 40 and 50? The slippery slope of that, the ego builds. The dis- like, dis- uh, the distaste for the public opinion builds. And then, then you get into the leadership position at the time you're 60 and 70, and then you're just a dick.

   9. RPRobert Proctor45:30

      [laughs]

   10. LFLex Fridman45:32

       And you're a bad communicator to the very public. So I think, I think this is something that just builds over time, is the skill to communicate, to be honest, to be real, to constantly humble yourself, to surround yourself with people that, that humble you. Anyway, I, it, it, I'm, I'm bothered by it because I feel like science is under attack. Uh, people distrust science more and more and more.

   11. RPRobert Proctor45:56

       Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman45:56

       And, uh, it's, it is perhaps unfair to put, place, like, Anthony Fauci to blame for that, but you know what? Leaders take, should care the responsibility. So when you're saying that he's, um, doing the best job he can, I would say he's doing a reasonable job, but not the best job he can.

   13. RPRobert Proctor46:15

       Yeah. Well, I don't know what his capabilities are on that-

   14. LFLex Fridman46:18

       No, I mean, like, that position

   15. RPRobert Proctor46:19

       ... one way or the other. Right. Right.

   16. LFLex Fridman46:20

       Like, what the, like you can imagine how history sees great leaders that unite on which history turns. That's not a great leader because there's a huge division. The, there's a lot of peop- there's a lot of people in leadership position that can heal the division. You can, you could think of, um, tech leaders. They can heal the division 'cause they have the platform. They can speak out with eloquence. You could think of political leaders, presidents, that can speak out and heal the division. You could think of scientific leaders, like Anthony Fauci, that can heal the division. None of these are doing a good job right now, and w- which is, you know, leadership is hard, which is why when great leaders come along, history remembers them. So I just w- wanna point out the emperor has no clothes when the leaders are like, "Eh," they're kind of mediocre.

   17. RPRobert Proctor47:12

       Yeah. Yeah.

   18. LFLex Fridman47:13

       'Cause, like, it feels like a Na- I, I guess

7. 47:16 – 54:35

   Courage in science

   1. LFLex Fridman47:16

      I'll take it to a question about Nazi Germany. What is the heroic action for a scientist in Nazi Germany? Like, to stand, to see what's right when, um, you're under this cloud of ideology.

   2. RPRobert Proctor47:35

      Yeah. Well, it's an almost impossible task in Nazi Germany. Uh, maybe the heroic task would've been before, uh, Hitler was essentially elected, uh, and the Reichstag is, is burned.

   3. LFLex Fridman47:52

      So in the '30s, like, 'cause it's building.

   4. RPRobert Proctor47:55

      When it's building, uh, what the other alternatives are, um, maybe it's events in, in World War I that, that could've made Nazism less inevitable. Um, you know, maybe it's, uh, going back, uh, to the British Empire, which had a giant empire and, and Germany wanted a big empire, too, right? And that part of the history of World War I is, is often, often forgotten. So, you know, the heroic act is, is to stand up and tell the truth and fight against evil. And-

   5. LFLex Fridman48:33

      Well, of course you get... Oh, sorry to interrupt, but of course you get-

   6. RPRobert Proctor48:35

      Well, just to have some courage, you know?

   7. LFLex Fridman48:38

      But I also, so I, I personally don't always- Have complete respect of people who stand up and have courage, 'cause it's not often effective. I, what I [laughs] , what I have the most respect for is, um, long-term courage, like that's effective. 'Cause like, you know, if you're just an activist and you speak out, "This is wrong", that's not gonna be effective because everybody around you is, uh, saying, "Nah, it's, like we like our widgets." [laughs]

   8. RPRobert Proctor49:06

      Yeah. Yeah.

   9. LFLex Fridman49:07

      So you have to somehow like steer this Titanic ship.

   10. RPRobert Proctor49:10

       Yeah.

   11. LFLex Fridman49:11

       Uh, and I guess you're right, the easiest way to steer is to do it earlier.

   12. RPRobert Proctor49:15

       Well, everyone has different skills. Um, you know, Musk is building electric cars and, uh, uh, other people are trying to, you know, build solar and, and wind, and there are all kinds of problems that we're gonna solve, right? People are, are building better vaccines, you know. Um, there's a thousand ways to do good in the world, and a thousand ways to do bad in the world. I mean, part of the problem in science is that we don't look enough at what I call the causes of causes. So cigarettes cause cancer, but what causes cigarettes?

   13. LFLex Fridman49:52

       [laughs] Yeah, so the deeper, yeah, yeah, so-

   14. RPRobert Proctor49:56

       Obesity causes heart disease, but what causes obesity? And it's not just gluttony and sloth, it's, it's the decision to pump up the sugar industry-

   15. LFLex Fridman50:07

       Yeah

   16. RPRobert Proctor50:08

       ... and to allow soda in school. And I'm a big fan of loop, what I call loop closing. Um, we're all worried about, uh, climate change and reducing our carbon footprint, but what about the hidden causes, the unprobed causes? I'm doing a project now with Londa Schiebinger on looking at how voluntary family planning could actually have a big role in reducing carbon footprint-

   17. LFLex Fridman50:38

       Mm-hmm

   18. RPRobert Proctor50:38

       ... throughout the world. And these literatures are never joined, or rarely joined, that we have this huge, um, carbon emissions problem, but we also, uh, have, you know, too many people on the planet, and the cause of that is because too few women and men have access to birth control. And if you join those realms open, y- y- there's gonna be new possibilities. Uh, and that's, it's kind of like looking at, uh, uh, the flip side of fascism and the kind of things, discoveries they made that have been ignored. That's one of the things I'm interested in, is finding some of the gaping holes, the ideological gaps that have been ignored because of ideology, left or right, by the way.

   19. LFLex Fridman51:31

       Mm-hmm.

   20. RPRobert Proctor51:32

       Um, all, both of which are, involve blinders. And so there's all kinds of blinders that we live in, and that, that's part of ideology, is what, what don't we even see?

   21. LFLex Fridman51:42

       And is, that would, uh, prevent us from seeing some deep objective scientific truth.

   22. RPRobert Proctor51:48

       Right, some truth.

   23. LFLex Fridman51:49

       And there's actually so- ju- just to mention, there's some people including Elon who are saying, um, "There's not too many people. There's not enough people." Right? That if you just look at the birth rates, and s- and so it's like some of this is actually very difficult to figure out, 'cause the, there's, there's these narratives, you mentioned tobacco, obesity with sugar. There's been narratives throughout the history, and it's very, um, there are certain topics on which it's, um, easy to almost become apathetic w- because like you just see in history how narratives take hold and fade away. You know, people were really sure what, that tobacco is, is not at all a problem, and then it fades, and then they figure it out, and then other things come along. What other things came along now?

   24. RPRobert Proctor52:43

       Yeah.

   25. LFLex Fridman52:44

       You know?

   26. RPRobert Proctor52:44

       Well, you asked about ideology, and one of the things I always ask students before class, whether I'm teaching agnotology or world history of science, is, "What makes fish move?"

   27. LFLex Fridman52:57

       [laughs]

   28. RPRobert Proctor52:59

       And 90% of Americans will say some version of muscles, fins, you know, neurons, when the reality is, at least in saltwater, fish don't swim places, they're moved by currents. Fish are moved by currents. That's what makes fish move. This is not even counting the rotation of the Earth on its axis, or the rotation of the Earth around the sun, or the rotation of the solar system around the galaxy. You know, ignore all that. Even on Earth, fish arrive up in Alaska. They didn't s- they don't swim there, they come by currents, and this is known to people who understand the ecology of, of, of fish. But we as sort of individualistic Americans think that-

   29. LFLex Fridman53:45

       The fish pull, pulled itself up by its bootstraps [laughs]

   30. RPRobert Proctor53:47

       ... pulled itself up by its bootstraps, right? And whatever, you know, gumption and, and, uh, courage, you know, made his own world. Instead of thinking of something like, uh, cigarettes, for example, hitting a village like an epidemic, hitting the village like cholera or pneumonia or something like that. So there's a big ideology we have of personal choice. A great example of that is in, in the tobacco world where people always, there's a whole field called cessation. That always means cessation of consumption, never cessation of production. All blame is put on the individual smoker instead of looking at how they get smoked. And looking at that bigger picture, I think, is, is, is, is part of the story.

8. 54:35 – 1:18:21

   Tobacco industry

   1. LFLex Fridman54:36

      So a few years ago, you wrote that, "The cigarette is the deadliest object in the history of human civilization. Cigarettes kill about six million people every year, a number that will grow before it shrinks." Smoking in the 20th century killed 100 million people, and a billion could perish in our century unless we reverse the course. Can you explain this idea that it's the deadliest object in the history of human civilization? Maybe just also talk about big tobacco and your efforts there.

   2. RPRobert Proctor55:14

      Well, cigarettes have killed more than any other object, than all the world of iron, all the world of gunpowder. Nuclear bombs have only killed a few hundred thousand people. Cigarettes have killed hundreds of millions, and every year kill about as many as COVID. They're, they're sort of neck and neck. But if you took the last five years, there's no contest. Cigarettes have killed far more and are far more preventable. So what we're in a world, this bizarro world, where every night there's a COVID report, and cigarettes would never be mentioned. Cigarettes would no more likely to be mentioned than if we were talking about chewing gum on a sidewalk.

   3. LFLex Fridman55:59

      Yeah.

   4. RPRobert Proctor55:59

      They'd be no more likely to be in a presidential debate than, you know, uh, sneezing in the wrong place. So we live in this world where most things are invisible. You know, we, we are-- The eyes are in the front of the head. We don't see what's behind us. We have a fovea, which means not only do we only see what's in front of us, we see in a very narrow tunnel, and that's because we're predators. We don't have the eternal watchfulness of prey. We have a zeroed, targeted focus, and that leads to a kind of myopia or a tunnel vision on all kinds of things. Then when you get something like a very powerful tobacco industry, which is a multi, multi-billion dollar industry, which still spends many billions of dollars advertising every year, but nonetheless manages to make themselves invisible, you have this powerful agent that is produging-- producing this engine of death that, uh, is invisible. It's been reduced to the fish that move themselves. In other words, there's not really a tobacco industry. There's just people who smoke, and that's a personal choice, like what food we're gonna have for dinner tonight. And so it's erased from the policy world. It's as if it doesn't exist. And creating that sense of invisibility to failure to understand the causes of causes is what allows the epidemic to continue, but also not even to be acknowledged.

   5. LFLex Fridman57:37

      How is the invisibility created? Is it natural? Is it just human nature that ideas just fade from our attention, or is it malevolent, still going on kind of, um, action by the tobacco companies to keep this invisible?

   6. RPRobert Proctor57:59

      It's, it's still going on. Even when you see an ad against cigarettes on television, that's dramatically curtailed because the law that made those even possible required that there be-- there's an anti-villainy clause. The industry can't be made in, uh, even visible in those ads. In some, they get away with it. But the, uh, industry operates through very powerful agents, you know, powerful senators. Um, they used to count, uh, three-quarters of the members of, of Congress as, you know, grade A contacts. They had most of the senators in their pocket, a lot of the senators. Sometimes they'll play both sides of the aisle. Basically, tobacco is Democratic, Democratic Party until basically the '70s and, and Ronald Reagan, then it shifts over to becoming, um, Republican. They create bodies like the Tea Party. They merge with big oil, the Koch brothers in the 1980s and '90s to form the Tea Party and a whole series of, of fronts which fight against all regulation and all taxation in order to prevent gas taxes and cigarette taxes, which are bonded in the convenience store and Walmart. Most cigarettes are actually sold in places like Walmart and, uh, pharmacies and, and 7-Elevens, things like that. And through that locus, then you have gasoline and tobacco sort of in this microarchitectural collaboration. Uh, so there's multiple, multiple means that they use. Plus, a lot of their targeting is, is, is hyper-specific. They use the internet very effectively. They use email and, and thing, uh, that are customer, customer targeting.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:00:00

      What goes through the mind of a big tobacco executive? This is connecting to our previous conversations of scientists and so on. I always wonder about that. I, um, talked to a Pfizer CEO, for example, and there's a deep question with the Pfizer CEO, with, with I, I guess any CEO, but big pharma. Would you-- It's like if you can come up with a cure that gets rid of a- the problem, and that's in the big pharma, would you want to? Because you're going to lose a lot of money once the cure fixes the problem. It's nice that... Like, there's so many incentives to make money. Can you think clearly and make the right decisions? I'd like to believe most people are good and- Um, it's almost like this, uh, Steve Jobs idea, just like do the right thing and you'll make money in the end. It's like long term, you'll make a lot of money if you do the right action, 'cause there's always going to be problems you can fix. You can always pivot the company to focus on other things. As long as you're doing the best innovation, the best science, the best development, and the, the production and the deployment and stuff, you're going to win. But, uh, there's another view where you might, um, that kind of idea of making money pollutes you. It's the widget building. It is, it's exciting when you can release a product that makes a lot of money, and you start enjoying the charts that say the money's going up, and you stop thinking about maybe there's the, this, that's the wrong choice for human civilization.

   8. RPRobert Proctor1:01:43

      Well, one of the reasons I was made a, a courtesy appointment in pulmonary medicine at Stanford was they recognized I was doing more to save lives by trying to stop big tobacco than they were by yanking out this lung, that lung, you know, on a daily basis.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:01:59

      Cause of causes.

   10. RPRobert Proctor1:02:01

       The cause of causes, which I, which we can keep returning to. Your question about how do people live with themselves is a crucial one, and it's one I've thought about a lot. It's one you think about with, in, in, in any context of horror. Um, how do people live with themselves? How do they get up, uh, in the morning? I think there's a lot of incentives. It-- One thing that you have to keep in mind is that whoever becomes CEO of a big tobacco company, they have already made decisions along the way, and they are the remnant of a whole series of aspiring people who wanna climb the ladder of success, who maybe would refuse-

   11. LFLex Fridman1:02:45

       Yeah

   12. RPRobert Proctor1:02:46

       ... something like this.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:02:47

       But those don't survive the journey.

   14. RPRobert Proctor1:02:49

       Those survive the journey who bec- who can make it through and, and I think they have a mixture of ideologies. One, they'll say, "Well, if I didn't do it, someone else would."

   15. LFLex Fridman1:02:58

       Mm.

   16. RPRobert Proctor1:02:58

       This is kind of the pour the Zyklon B down the chimney into Auschwitz. "Well, if I didn't do it, someone else would, so what's really the difference between me doing it and someone else?" So that's one view. Another one is the tobacco industry, I think, really doesn't like their customers, except for the fact that they like their, their money. When you look at their documents, they talk about targ- targeting against young adults or against women or against, uh, uh, homosexuals. There, there's a whole project Reynolds has called Project SCUM, which is Project Subculture Urban Markets, where they're targeting homeless and homosexuals in, in San Francisco. So what kind of business model regards their customers as, as scum or talks about them, uh, as, as, as one famous Reynolds executive, you know, "We don't smoke this stuff. We reserve that for the poor, the Black, and the stupid." That's a direct quote, uh, from one of the Winston models.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:04:01

       So it's a company culture that sees the customers almost like as the enemy or like, uh, [laughs] or worthless.

   18. RPRobert Proctor1:04:10

       Losers.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:04:11

       Losers.

   20. RPRobert Proctor1:04:11

       You know, so you have these executives, you know, "If we don't do it, someone else will. If people are dumb enough to buy our product-

   21. LFLex Fridman1:04:20

       Right

   22. RPRobert Proctor1:04:21

       ... let them buy it." Maybe it's a personal choice. Maybe they're libertarians. Maybe they're just, uh, as you said, seduced by the money, and the money is enormous. The money is enormous, and these, these, the, you know, tobacco executives make tens of millions of dollars per year just in their salaries. Um, I, so I think there's a, a whole series of, of logics. Some-- At some point, some of the companies have become food producers. In the 1980s and '90s, Philip Morris, which, uh, makes Marlboro, was the largest food producer in the United States. And so they could say, "Well, we're producing many products, you know, many addictive, desirable, desirable products." I think, uh, one project I'm working on now actually is looking at how the industry maintains morale in their own workforce, and they create a kind of parallel world of prizes and rewards and, uh, you know, tobacco queens and tobacco princesses and tobacco sports teams and tobacco-- It's this whole separate world, a world within a world, and we all live in bubbles of a sort.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:05:31

       Mm.

   24. RPRobert Proctor1:05:31

       And so there is this kind of tobacco world where you're with us or you're against us, and I even found evidence that the tobacco industry lies to its own employees. So they censored their own employee information so that everyone would be on board that, "Well, maybe it doesn't really cause cancer. The evidence is all statistics. Can't trust mice experiments 'cause mice are not men." They hire the guy, uh, Daryl Huff, who wrote How to Lie with Statistics, the best-selling statistics book in the history of the world.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:06:08

       Mm-hmm.

   26. RPRobert Proctor1:06:08

       They paid him to write a book called How to Lie About Smoking with Statistics, uh, that was never published, uh, when, when sort of word of some other dirty tricks got out. So one way they're able to gain legitimacy, gain normalcy, gain, you know, th- these are supporters of the arts. You know, there are universities named for tobacco executives. You know, we have Duke University, and we have the George Weissman School, I, I think is, of Arts and Sciences at, at CUNY.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:06:40

       Mm-hmm.

   28. RPRobert Proctor1:06:41

       And there are, uh, prizes. You know, Philip Morris essentially created women's tennis as a spectator sport. Billie Jean King joins the board of directors of Philip Morris. Uh, she signs coupons, two to one coupons for buying Virginia Slims cigarettes. So the industry is able to acquire this talent, and then through a kind of a, an application of causality purely into the individual smoker. If you smoke, you did it to yourself.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:07:12

       Mm-hmm.

   30. RPRobert Proctor1:07:13

       And so w- in a sense, we have nothing to do with it. It's sort of the same argument Exxon is making now with, uh, carbon. It's like, "Well, we just make the gas. We don't burn the gas."
9. 1:18:21 – 1:28:30

   Nazi medicine

   1. LFLex Fridman1:18:21

      Let's come back to Nazi Germany for a time. You, uh, also wrote the book titled The Nazi War on Cancer.

   2. RPRobert Proctor1:18:27

      Right.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:18:28

      What is the main storyline and thesis of this book?

   4. RPRobert Proctor1:18:32

      Well, I'd been researching Nazi medicine. I went over to Germany. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I got a Fulbright. I originally wanted to go to Russia. Went to Germany partly 'cause my girlfriend was going there, Lana Schiebinger, and I was quick with l- the language. And, uh, my old landlady was born in 1900, and I was renting a room, a tiny room in, in Berlin. And she told me she'd been a nurse in World War I, and told me how sad it was that all the mentally ill, uh, had died, uh, in, in that war, and that how the same thing happened in World War II. And she told me about how sad it was that she'd never gotten married because there were no German men around after World War I. But I also started taking classes, uh, in, in Germany, and at that time, there were still a few old Nazi professors just about to retire, you know, very, very old. And I remember there was one guy who would talk about the impact on ovaries of women exposed to stress and how this would damage their ovaries, and that this was like people who had, uh, uh, you know, been told they were about to be executed, and they would do a before and an after on these ovaries, one of these horrific experiments. This was a physician in, in, in Berlin. And so I got involved in it with a group of people, and really as a kind of intellectual garlic for living in, uh, Berlin in-- This is in, in, in 1980, uh, '81. I started reading medical journals from the Nazi period, and even the librarians didn't like that. I remember the Preußischer Staatsbibliothek in downtown Berlin. They're like, "Well, why do you wanna, you know-- You're not supposed to be reading these [chuckles] old Nazi journals." These are just medical journals, hundreds and hundreds of journals. And I just read them and read them and read them and read them and looking for details. And I'd find like a, a veterinary medicine journal that would have a joking section where they'd say, "Oh, we found a cow with a swastika on its forehead, a natural black swastika on it. Isn't that funny?" You know? Or I'd find stories about tobacco. I'd find stories about, uh, abortion. I'd just find stories about excluding Jewish medicine or Jews from medicine or who's been promoted, who's been demoted, who's been Nazified. I st- discovered there was an entire Nazi physicians league that was just the top Nazi, the most Nazi of the physicians. I discovered that physicians joined the Nazi Party in a higher proportion than any other profession, that they joined the SS in a higher proportion than any other profession.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:21:30

      Why is that, do you think? Do you have a sense?

   6. RPRobert Proctor1:21:32

      Because the Nazi regime is a kind of sanitary utopia.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:21:36

      Right.

   8. RPRobert Proctor1:21:36

      It was to create this purified world of-- that would control the mind and the, and fertility. So gynecologists, physia-- and psychiatrists were the top. They were the most Nazified of the various medical professions. Control the body through sterilization, abortion, control the mind through psychiatry. They killed a lot of the mentally ill. And you can read their professional journals, and I'm not sure these had ever been read since. I also went to East Germany, because remember, this is way before the wall fell, and they had a very special collection of taboo literature. It's kind of your point about should Mein Kampf be read. Well, of course, in East Germany, nowhere close, right? And so, but not only that, Time Magazine couldn't be read, and, and Newsweek couldn't be read. And this file, this, this, like, chamber that the foreign scholars were allowed to look through had all of the old Nazi literature and Nazi scientific literature and Time Magazine and Newsweek and a whole pornography section as well. So all of the taboo topics.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:22:45

      [chuckles] Yeah. Yes.

   10. RPRobert Proctor1:22:46

       So here I'm researching-- In the West, I'm researching these topics the librarians didn't even want me to look at. In the East, I was sort of going over there. You know, I would hitchhike over there-

   11. LFLex Fridman1:22:57

       [chuckles]

   12. RPRobert Proctor1:22:57

       ... and overstay my welcome and things like that. But in any event, um, I, I noticed that there was this kind of taboo of talking about the big eugenics. I'd already been, a-as a kind of a radical graduate student at Harvard working with all the, the Marxist biologists there. We'd already had a critique of eugenics and, and, uh, women being excluded from science, and South African apartheid was a big deal, and, uh, Arthur Jensen's, you know, blacks have lower IQs. And so there was a whole nest of controversial hot topics-

   13. LFLex Fridman1:23:36

       Mm-hmm

   14. RPRobert Proctor1:23:36

       ... you know, around sociobiology, around race and IQ, around women and scholarship, and so forth. But we weren't looking at Nazi medicine, so I thought I'll look at the big eugenics, not just this smaller stuff. Only fifty thousand people are sterilized in, in, in, in California, but there were, you know, huge numbers sterilized in, in Nazi Germany. So the more I, I looked into that, I realized there was a book there, but I had also started noticing this other weird stuff. Why were they anti-tobacco? Why did they recognize, uh-- Why were the Nazis the first to recognize asbestos as, as causing mesothelioma? Why did they try to ban food dyes? Why did they-- Why are they the first culture in the world to encourage women to do breast self-exams? Uh, I told my mom this, and she, she told me that in the '50s, women weren't even supposed to touch their breasts in Texas.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:24:37

       Mm. Mm-hmm.

   16. RPRobert Proctor1:24:38

       And here in Nazi Germany, you've got these mandatory breast self-exams way before this was done in the United States. You had the first laws banning the X-raying of pregnant women. Already in the early 1930s, it was standard medical practice. They recognized that this could harm the fetus-

   17. LFLex Fridman1:24:59

       Mm

   18. RPRobert Proctor1:24:59

       ... harm the race way before radiation was recognized as a hazard in England or, or America. I had n-- started noticing these things, and I have an eye for, uh- ... oddities. I like the weird, the contradictory, that which doesn't fit.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:25:16

       Mm-hmm.

   20. RPRobert Proctor1:25:16

       And I remember finding a, uh, a German magazine, uh, a newspaper actually from 1919 that talked about a Holocaust of six million Jews, using that language.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:25:27

       Mm-hmm.

   22. RPRobert Proctor1:25:28

       How could this be, you know? And I researched it. It was re- I thought it wasn't even real, and so I went and actually got the original newspaper, and there it was.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:25:35

       Wow.

   24. RPRobert Proctor1:25:35

       It's just one of those oddities of life that just happens. Just w- weird stuff happens, right?

   25. LFLex Fridman1:25:44

       That's the source of conspiracy theories, right? Uh-

   26. RPRobert Proctor1:25:46

       Exactly.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:25:47

       Uh, so weird stuff happens, but, you know, there's a inkling, you know, that that couldn't have been written in, in another time in history, or much less likely that little coincidence to have happened in another... So it has, uh, some kind of resonance with something-

   28. RPRobert Proctor1:26:03

       Yeah

   29. LFLex Fridman1:26:03

       ... that captures something deep to the culture.

   30. RPRobert Proctor1:26:06

       Yeah. That's why I'm interested in probing. I mean, history is about seeing the universal through the particular in a way, and-
10. 1:28:30 – 1:33:43

    The Nazi War on Cancer

    1. RPRobert Proctor1:28:30

       Holocaust. And so I ended up writing this, this book on, uh, The Nazi War on Cancer, which talks about how right before Hitler's about to invade Poland, he's talking late into the night about, uh, how to cure cancer.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:28:44

       So for Nazis, racial hygiene encompasses, like, way more than we might think. So it's, like, purifying in all ways. And one of the-

    3. RPRobert Proctor1:28:54

       Purifying, and it's also much more normal and more familiar, you know?

    4. LFLex Fridman1:28:59

       It's like regular, in regular discussion.

    5. RPRobert Proctor1:29:02

       It's like the famous line that if Nazism ever comes to Britain, it'll be wearing a bowler hat.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:29:06

       [laughs]

    7. RPRobert Proctor1:29:08

       And, you know, we, we, we create an image of Nazism, which is this fantasy image.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:29:14

       Yeah.

    9. RPRobert Proctor1:29:14

       And, you know, they're human beings making these decisions.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:29:20

        And when it's tied to things like removing cancer... So you're saying they kind of, the, the effort of purification walks alongside with this effort of re- fighting cancer, and then the final, the difficult truth here is that there's a lot of innovation, you know, leading scientific innovation on fighting cancer.

    11. RPRobert Proctor1:29:44

        It's not a bunch of blind robots following orders. It's a period of massive innovation. I mean, they declared the s- soybeans to be the official bean of the Third Reich because they realized how a, you know, how useful soy could be in, in, in protein for, for the people. They built a whole car out of, out of soybeans. They pushed for a whole grain bread, calling white bread a French revolutionary capitalist product. And, and they're, they're right about whole grain bread. It's better than, you know. So-

    12. LFLex Fridman1:30:23

        Allegedly.

    13. RPRobert Proctor1:30:24

        [laughs]

    14. LFLex Fridman1:30:24

        So far. So far, that's what we think. We'll discover eventually that bread is the thing that's killing us. Uh, well, by the way, I'm eating mostly, uh, meat, so mostly carnivore, and that's been a discovery for me. I don't care what, like... Uh, I'm not making a general statement about the population, but me personally, how I feel, I, I like, I've discovered fasting, so I often, uh, like on days like this, when it's pretty stressful, uh, I'll eat once a day and only meat or mostly meat, and that's, that's amazing to me from a scientific discovery perspective, that that makes me feel way better. You know, there's not scientific support why it might make you feel be- I don't care. The point is I've done the experiments on the N of one- And it just makes me feel better.

    15. RPRobert Proctor1:31:13

        Well, I think fasting is way undervalued. I mean, where do we get the idea you need three meals a day? I have a, a, a friend at Harvard, and he, he'll go seven or eight days periodically without food. He drinks water. But he considers it a kind of purification. And, you know, we're in a world where it's too easy to get food.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:31:37

        Yeah.

    17. RPRobert Proctor1:31:37

        Right? We're in a world-- I mean, most animals are living in a sense that they're on the brink of starvation. But we have technologies and social conditions that allow it, it- it's way too easy to, to find a piece of cake or a donut, and that's not something we evolved with.

    18. LFLex Fridman1:31:56

        We've been talking about purification in ne- negative context, but, you know, there's appealing ways of, of re- of minimalism, of removing things from your life, of, of seeking, uh, especially for me being, like, OCD and, and a scientist, I, I do like this simplification of things-

    19. RPRobert Proctor1:32:13

        Yeah

    20. LFLex Fridman1:32:14

        ... of the, this, this taxonomy of things. I just recently, um, storage got, uh, hacked by ransomware, uh, for... It's these storage devices called QNAP NAS, and, you know, 50 terabytes of data locked up, and you-- I can't-- So it's lost. But, you know, it was, at first it was a gut punch, and it really hurts, and a bunch of stuff is gone. Um, but it's also, uh, freeing.

    21. RPRobert Proctor1:32:40

        Yeah. Well, there's a, uh, my favorite New Yorker cartoon is where the guy's about to die. Let's say he's 90 years old. He's got tubes in his nose. His very last words are, "I wish I'd bought more crap."

    22. LFLex Fridman1:32:52

        [laughs] Uh, yep, and that's now in this amazing world applies to digital world too. Like, you don't need to store everything. You just live in the moment-

    23. RPRobert Proctor1:33:02

        Yeah

    24. LFLex Fridman1:33:03

        ... and, and live for the people that you love.

    25. RPRobert Proctor1:33:04

        Well, that's one of my fears of, of Bitcoin, is losing your password. I know, I know a, a friend, his son, you know, mined I don't know how many dozens of Bitcoins and, and lost his password, you know? And so what can he do? And there's a whole, I think, Silicon Valley episode about something like that, where the three, Three Comma Club, you know, asshole billionaire is trying to find his old [laughs] laptop with the password on it.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:33:29

        Yeah, that's the kind of dread people feel in the modern a- age, losing your Bitcoin password. Or for, for me, it'd be like LastPass password. [laughs] It's hilarious. We're, we're, we're funny, funny creatures. What, um,

11. 1:33:43 – 1:44:37

    Science funding

    1. LFLex Fridman1:33:43

       what else can we say outside of cancer about medicine, about engineering? Uh, lessons about medicine, lessons about engineering, and lessons about sort of applied science in Nazi Germany. Sort of before we leave the subject, is there some truths that resonate with you still that's applicable for today?

    2. RPRobert Proctor1:34:06

       Well, you know, historians celebrate contingency or, or at least recognize contingency, and we always say things didn't have to turn out the way they did. There were, uh, you can't always, you know, foresee what's going to happen. Um, and there were definitely missteps, and, uh, the potency of that ideology was such that it, it, it, it trapped a lot of people. And I guess by the time it becomes essentially a wartime operation, that becomes very, very dangerous. When it's blend-- Whatever the ideology is, once it's blended with, uh, warfare, that's, that's catastrophic. One of the things that's ignored, I'm very interested in things that are ignored, and one of the things that we ignore now on, on something even like the climate catastrophe is the role of the military. I mean, there's a huge amount of carbon emissions from military operations. Again, just part of the loop we're not, we're not closing.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:35:13

       Well, military is really interesting because, you know, I'm a AI person, robots, and, uh, most of my work when I was a, a PhD student was, uh, DARPA and DoD funded. And I think that's probably true for a lot of science is funded, uh, especially engineering is funded by the military. And, you know, again, I don't re- I really wanna be careful drawing parallels between Nazi Germany and any- anything else, actually. [laughs]

    4. RPRobert Proctor1:35:45

       [laughs]

    5. LFLex Fridman1:35:45

       But, you know, there, there is a sense in which... I remember when I was a-- It hit me when one, one of the people close to me when I was a PhD, one of the faculty, um, she refused to take funding from, from DoD, from DARPA, and that was interesting to me. I thought, "But what's the..." I mean, it's not... Like, you're not, you're not taking a stand against the war. You just don't wanna take money from tangentially associated military kind of efforts. And that little stand, I mean, that had an impact on me, you know?

    6. RPRobert Proctor1:36:20

       Mm-hmm.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:36:21

       The, the, the, uh, a lot. At least it woke me up to the-- Like, this is something we should be very, very careful with. For me, artificial intelligence is, um, you know, much of the DARPA research on autonomous vehicles and all kinds of robotics, drones, I mean, that's pure research.

    8. RPRobert Proctor1:36:41

       Mm-hmm.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:36:41

       Some of the biggest discoveries, like I didn't think of it as military. I thought of it as engineering and science. But then when the drums of war start beating, like say in some future time, all of that machine is already there to turn it into, into now Lex is walking around and working on autonomous drones that are going to, um, you know, swarm China or swarms whoever, some terrorist, um- Part of the world, and then all of a sudden, um, all my widgets are being used for that. That's why I've been waking up more and more to, uh-- There's been something released called, like, The AI Report. Eric Schmidt was one of the, uh, co-authors of it, which is essentially saying that because China's developing autonomous weapons systems, the US should not ban autonomous weapons systems and should also be doing it. So basically, put AI into our weapons of war.

    10. RPRobert Proctor1:37:42

        Mm-hmm.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:37:42

        And that, th-that escalation, that race is terrifying, uh, j-just like all the things you mentioned. But that particular-

    12. RPRobert Proctor1:37:48

        Mm

    13. LFLex Fridman1:37:48

        ... one for me is close because now too closely are the ideas of AI and war-

    14. RPRobert Proctor1:37:56

        Mm-hmm

    15. LFLex Fridman1:37:56

        ... are being linked.

    16. RPRobert Proctor1:37:58

        Very much, yeah. I mean, th-one of the things I think that is rarely taught in universities is what would you not do for money?

    17. LFLex Fridman1:38:07

        Right.

    18. RPRobert Proctor1:38:08

        I mean, in a basic class on machine learning or even statistics or history, what would you not do for money? What should you not do for money? Uh, I have a lot of my own colleagues who work for big tobacco, you know, carrying water for them in court. A huge-- Essentially a mercenary army of historians, a vast, undiagnosed, you know, essentially an hidden invisible army. They don't put it on their CVs, and it's going on. The same thing with a lot of the technical fields. What wouldn't you do for, for money? At Stanford, there used to be secret PhDs, secret research projects. That was, that was kicked off campus in nineteen seventy-one with the whole sixties radicalism. But nonetheless, uh, individual professors still work for, uh, all kinds of military operations. We're setting up a new school of sustainability at Stanford, and it's gonna be pretty much in bed with big oil as well. Big oil is gonna be funding a lot of that. Um, you know, what kind of influence? If they have a seat at the table, if they're giving money, if they're gifts, if their names are on certain projects, what influence is that gonna have?

    19. LFLex Fridman1:39:25

        This is what really bothered me. People don't often have-- They don't have integrity, uh, in the way that I hoped they would. This is one of the things I learned in academia. Of-- I think a lot of people for money, you know, if I give you a million dollars to murder somebody, I think most people would not.

    20. RPRobert Proctor1:39:46

        Right.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:39:46

        A billion dollars, that number starts d-uh, decreasing, but it's still pretty-- Like it w-- I think we would be happy with direct murder not being done for money. But like subtle stuff, just pressures, and it could be with like, "Let me buy you a drink," and just, you know, laugh about stuff, become friends. That's a subtle pressure. I'm very upset with how many people would just, uh, unknowingly, like, tell themselves a story, "Ah, what's the harm?" And I see that with, uh, for example, me personally at MIT, uh, a lot of people I admire, but a lot of people I still admire and f-friends of mine. I mean, for example, in doing autonomous vehicle research, there's car companies that fund that research, and the car companies say, "No, of course, we're not going to influence anything. No, that's like you do-- It's wide open. Do whatever you want." But the fact is, you know, they give millions of dollars, and I'm disappointed that actually a lot of s-scientists in that context are still afraid, even though legally it says they cannot-- the c- the car company cannot at all influence your research, they still le- start leaning slowly towards the ideas that that company espouses. And that's a harmless, perhaps, topic-

    22. RPRobert Proctor1:41:10

        Yeah

    23. LFLex Fridman1:41:10

        ... versus big tobacco, but I, I would argue it has harm on innovation.

    24. RPRobert Proctor1:41:15

        Yeah. Well, it skews innovation. The-

    25. LFLex Fridman1:41:17

        Skews, yeah.

    26. RPRobert Proctor1:41:18

        What happened at Stanford was Philip Morris and the other big tobacco companies, they had a massive denial campaign to deny that exposure to someone else's smoke could kill you, when in fact, it can. It, it kills tens of thousands of Americans every year still. They set up an entire conspiracy body called the Center for Indoor Air Research and funded hundreds of scientists to basically say, you know, "It's all genetic. If you get cancer, well, you had it coming-"

    27. LFLex Fridman1:41:49

        Right

    28. RPRobert Proctor1:41:49

        "... because of your genes, your ancestry, your hormones, whatever." Well, that was disbar-- That, that, that was broken apart through what was called the Master Settlement Agreement, but it, it was rejuvenated and, and reinvigorated by something called the Philip Morris External Research Program, which continued with the same fax lines and executives funding universities like Stanford millions and millions of dollars. And when I came to Stanford, there were millions and millions of dollars being given to medical professors by Philip Morris as part of the Philip Morris External Research Program. Well, what were they researching? They're researching genetics. They're researching, uh, diet, anything but cigarettes causing cancer and giving the non-- giving the friendly researchers, as Philip Morris often called it, a bigger voice. They got money. They got jo- You know, it, it, it amplified that as a research tradition. Remember, there's nothing natural in a university about how many professors there are of human origins versus, uh, AI. This is all a political decision at a very non-democratic institution. Uh, universities are less democratic than the Vatican. You know, the Va-- At least the Pope is elected. [chuckles] Who elects, uh, you know, a president of a university or a dean for that matter? And so what happened was, uh, I helped launch a campaign to get Philip Morris off campus, and People started coming out of the woodwork like, "Well, does this mean I shouldn't be working for the CIA? Does this mean I shouldn't be working for Big Oil?" Does-- It's like, "What? You work for Big Oil?" And our faculty voted against pushing Philip Morris off campus. But Philip Morris got bad press from it, and so they voluntarily withdrew the entire program. So we sort of-- It, it was kind of a, a lesson in that you can lose a battle but win a war-

    29. LFLex Fridman1:43:46

        Mm

    30. RPRobert Proctor1:43:46

        ... if you're doing the right thing. And so by standing up, even though our own faculty wouldn't, you know, back us in kicking Philip Morris out of the medical school, Philip Morris did a cost-benefit analysis, found, "Well, probably really not worth the kudos we get for, you know, embracing Stanford." So it can have an influence, and in this case, the influence was simply by rewarding, giving voice to the people who were blaming cholesterol rather than cigarettes. And of course, we know that historically, the tobacco industry created a lot of these theories, these alternative theories of what causes heart disease, that, that stress causes heart disease, that salt or that, uh, anything but cigarettes. They funded that, that research to, to basically skew the, the whole research in their direction.

12. 1:44:37 – 1:52:17

    Ignorance

    1. LFLex Fridman1:44:37

       You, uh, edited a book titled Agnotology. This is an interesting term, so you mentioned it earlier, The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, where you explore the topic of ignorance, or the authors explore the topic of ignorance in different applications and different contexts. Oh, let me ask the ridiculous big philosophical question. What is the nature of human ignorance?

    2. RPRobert Proctor1:45:03

       Well, the first thing to say is that it's infinite.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:45:06

       [laughing] It's not an Einstein quote or stupidity or something. I forget what it is. Yeah.

    4. RPRobert Proctor1:45:11

       Well-

    5. LFLex Fridman1:45:12

       Attributed

    6. RPRobert Proctor1:45:12

       ... the, the point is that-

    7. LFLex Fridman1:45:13

       [laughing]

    8. RPRobert Proctor1:45:14

       ... you know, there's, there's probably trillions of planets in the universe, and we know one. We know a tiny piece of one. But not only that, who are the we? I mean, we're all born as... You know, we, we start as single-celled organisms, right? As some sperm and some egg get together. That's certainly ignorant, and then we're ignorant, and we're ignorant. We're-- Each one of us, there's an ontogeny of, of knowledge, you say, but an ontogeny of ignorance as well. We grow up, we have to learn, but almost everything that has been known has been forgotten. If you think about the names of ordinary people and names of the Neanderthal, did they even have names? Most of the history of the world has been forgotten. The few-- W- we have a few shreds, a few traces that we try. H- history is a kind of resurrection project, it's a kind of archeological project and a genealogical project where we look back and, and we find traces and, and, and it's very biased. Uh, I, I'm interested in, in empires that we don't even know anything about, you know, and there, there are whole empires that are, that are gone. If things don't leave a, a written trace, you know, we know something about Mayan cosmology because we've got some of their stelae and a few of their codices, four codices. But we know that dozens of-- were burned by Diego de Landa, the, you know, inquisitorial Spanish friar who thought these were just, uh, heresies and so burned. So that knowledge is all lost.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:46:40

       Do you think there's a lot of, like, deep wisdom about reality that is lost forever?

    10. RPRobert Proctor1:46:46

        Of course. Of course.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:46:48

        That's so sad.

    12. RPRobert Proctor1:46:49

        Well, it is sad, but the human condition is sad. I mean-

    13. LFLex Fridman1:46:52

        [laughing]

    14. RPRobert Proctor1:46:53

        ... but, but then the, if we can study ignorance, that's also a positive thing. Agnotology, the study of ignorance, the study of the cultural production of ignorance, is really-

    15. LFLex Fridman1:47:02

        Cultural production, sorry to interrupt. Cultural production of ignorance?

    16. RPRobert Proctor1:47:05

        Yes. Yes, you can-

    17. LFLex Fridman1:47:07

        So, so ignorance is not just a manifestation of what it means to be human, it's also forced back onto you through the culture?

    18. RPRobert Proctor1:47:16

        That's, that's the missing piece that people don't pay enough attention to. It's not a natural vacuum we explore, like some empty cave. It's, it's, there are factories of ignorance. The tobacco industry, when they built their propaganda engines to deny that cigarettes cause cancer, they measured exactly how much ignorance could be created by watching one of their-

    19. LFLex Fridman1:47:40

        Wow

    20. RPRobert Proctor1:47:40

        ... videos. They would show that, uh, watching one of their propaganda videos in the 1970s produced a seventeen percent increase in the people not willing to say that cigarettes cause cancer. So this is, this is, I call it agnometrics. They actually measured the success of their propaganda, and I'm sure this has been done in, in, in, in marketing and, and other fields as well.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:48:05

        But the, the pr- that framing of it somehow is, um, terrifying because it, it seems like a very effective way to be scientific about how to sort of, um, create doubt in the mind.

    22. RPRobert Proctor1:48:25

        Exactly.

    23. LFLex Fridman1:48:26

        Wow.

    24. RPRobert Proctor1:48:26

        It's, it's diabolical, and, and luckily, we have some of the tobacco industry's own internal documents, the one that, ones that were not destroyed. And we actually know, we have some traces as to which ones were destroyed, and we know that the most sensitive were destroyed. And we know that some of the ones that were sequestered by whistleblowers or by, you know, disgruntled spouses or whatever, that those contain the real gems and the truth. And one of the ones that was leaked already in 1981 was the doubt is our product memo, that we don't just make cigarettes. We make two products. We make doubt, and we make cigarettes. We make cigarettes, but we can only keep selling cigarettes so long as we can keep selling ignorance. And that then becomes a template of sorts for climate denial and for all kinds of other denial engines that are produced by the fifteen hundred trade associations in, in Washington, DC. So this, this is something new in the research enterprise- Of the world. After World War II, you have this enormous trust in science, trust in research. So what could be more effective than big tobacco saying, "Look, we're supporting research. We wanna get at the truth. We're funding hundreds of millions of dollars of research," which is what, exactly what they did. What they didn't say was it was all an effort to distract from the truth that cigarettes cause cancer, and a, and a million other diseases, too, blindness, amputation, all kinds of other diseases. All of that was hidden, covered up through a distraction process. Richard Nixon declares war on cancer in 1971. It's called the War on Cancer. Cigarettes were excluded, even though cigarettes cause a third of all cancers, all cancer deaths. Cigarettes were excluded because the tobacco industry successfully argued that cigarettes cause cancer is not a scientific fact, but a political opinion, much like the argument that guns don't cause death, you know, pulling the trigger causes death, or shooters, or whatever. In other words, it's all about breaking down the chain of causation into pieces that serve your interests. So it's not that cigarettes cause cancer, it's the sm- maybe the smoking them at most, though they're e- even denying that. Uh, it's the fact you have lungs that cause cancer. [laughs] It's, it's blaming the victim, and they had 1,000 ways to blame the victim.

    25. LFLex Fridman1:50:58

        I mean, there's some legitimacy to this line of ar- argument, which is why it sticks, which is figuring out what is the c- causation of things is hard to figure out.

    26. RPRobert Proctor1:51:07

        A lot of the politics of science have to do with which parts of the causal chain do you view as real or not real. When we say that carbon causes climate change, well, what causes carbon? If it's Exxon causing carbon, is it the person driving the car causing it, or is it the Republican Party causing that, or is it the Tea Party causing that, or is it big tobacco and big oil controlling the Republican Party, or is it what? You know.

    27. LFLex Fridman1:51:35

        Is it, is it the Jews controlling the weather, which is where the conspiracy theories come in, or the lizards?

    28. RPRobert Proctor1:51:39

        Exactly.

    29. LFLex Fridman1:51:40

        So, and, and whatever sticks. You try it out, and if you're a tobacco company, you're going to actually literally be scientific about it and try different options.

    30. RPRobert Proctor1:51:49

        The genius of the tobacco conspiracy, the tobacco denial campaign, which is born on December 14, 1953, we know on an hour-by-hour basis how it worked, is to create an alliance between solid research, or as they called it, impassionate, dispassionate research, and to tar all of their opponents as fanatical, emotional, hysterical, political.

13. 1:52:17 – 1:58:37

    Ideology in academia

    1. LFLex Fridman1:52:18

       You mentioned, uh, Marxism in, at Harvard [laughs] a couple decades ago or something like that. So 30 years ago, you wrote the Value-Free Science book, Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge, which is interesting that you kinda, what you were describing then seems to be a concern for people now still. So you were, I think, re- referencing more Nazi Germany and how social scientists would attack or defend Marxism, feminism, and other social movements using science. There's a, you know, depending on who you talk to, I just spent a, a, a day with Jordan Peterson, you know, there's some arguments that science is now being leveraged in some part of the university, which bothers me, because most of the university, at least like MIT, is doing engineering and not-- ideology doesn't seep in yet. But the concern they have is ideology seeps in eventually, if you let it in at all. Anyway, I ask all that, do you th- do you have some modern concerns about the seeping in of ideology into academic research in these social movements, for or against Marxism, for or against, you know, uh, well, nobody's for racism, but, you know, on the topic, [laughs] like anti-racism, all those kinds of, uh, critical race theory things, and then also on the feminism and gender studies and all those kinds of things?

    2. RPRobert Proctor1:53:46

       Yeah. I mean, these have always been in the university. When people have been most adamant in saying that science is a neutral value-free enterprise, it's times like the 1950s when there weren't Blacks and there weren't even women in, in universities. So what I discovered was that value neutrality, or this ideology of that we are value-free, it really arose as a defensive shield to prevent greater inclusion, to prevent, you know, questioning of the priorities of science, the practice of science, the nature of science. Now, we're in a period now, I think, of a kind of inclusive revolution, where people are realizing, well, we can't have, you know, universities that look too much like a certain way. There's probably gonna be, uh, in that omelet making, you know, there's gonna be a few, uh, eggs that get broken. And, uh, I think people may exaggerate the extent to which that's going at. It, it's definitely real.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:54:59

       So like cancel culture and all those kinds of things? Yeah.

    4. RPRobert Proctor1:55:01

       I mean, it's definitely real. Uh, but it's als- there, there, i- in a way, it's also a distraction from looking at big power in a university. If big oil is going to control, or at least influence, the direction of the sustainability school at Stanford, isn't that a bigger issue than, than whether we have-- we can't say certain words on campus? In other words, there's, uh, th- there's some very interesting and complex, plum, complex aspects to this. And, uh, the idea that certain words should not be said or that certain people should not be invited. An invitation to a university is always political. I mean, who do you invite? Who do you not invite? Much as an admissions process is, if a student is admitted to Stanford, what that really means is ninety-six percent of the applicants did not get in. They were rejected. They were canceled [chuckles] from a Stanford body. Four percent are admitted. They call it an admissions committee. They sh- sh- should call it a rejection committee.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:56:08

       Yes.

    6. RPRobert Proctor1:56:09

       When we hire someone in, in my department at, at, at Stanford, we get three hundred applications, and maybe we accept one. It's not a hiring committee. It's a non-hiring committee.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:56:20

       That sounds like toxic cancel culture, all these rejections.

    8. RPRobert Proctor1:56:23

       [laughing]

    9. LFLex Fridman1:56:24

       Everybody should be accepted.

    10. RPRobert Proctor1:56:26

        In that sense, it's the essence of meritocracy, is that selection is involved-

    11. LFLex Fridman1:56:32

        Yeah

    12. RPRobert Proctor1:56:32

        ... in any hiring decision, in any-- Be- because in a way, when you are hired into a university, you are hired to control the means of production, at least part of it. And this part of the politics of it is invisible to the undergraduates because they are consumers, and you're free as a consumer to eat whatever you want. But you're not free to own the means of production of, of-- to, to say what's on the menu.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:56:56

        And that's, that's where the power is. You have to ask the question, where's the power in the university? I think that, uh, like at MIT, the entire administration should get fired regularly and, and more power put in the hands of faculty and students. [chuckles] It j-- there is an overgrowth that happens, that it feels like administrators are more easily influenced by big tobacco than faculty. Maybe it's me being sort of romantic about the idea of faculty, but if you're in the battle doing the research, I feel like-- Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But it feels like the, the administration helps you delude yourself longer, so it prevents you from waking up. It's like, "No, no, it's okay to take this fine. Oh, Jeffrey Epstein? It's okay." And, "Oh, okay, so he got-- he went to prison. Let's just keep it a little bit secret. It's fine. Just keep taking the money." And I feel like that comes from the administration more than the faculty.

    14. RPRobert Proctor1:57:58

        Well, there's certainly a cult of celebrity, a, a cult of money. Donors have the-- Remember in the whole scandal about the side door entrance, uh, in, in universities, there's always been the, you know, the front door and the back door, where the, but the back door is the, the, the rich donors, the kids of the rich donors.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:58:20

        Yeah.

    16. RPRobert Proctor1:58:20

        The legacy kids that you still get. Um, so there are a lot of ways universities get corrupted. They get corrupted through money. They get corrupted through influence, and that should be recognized.

14. 1:58:37 – 2:08:30

    Human origins

    1. LFLex Fridman1:58:38

       We're jumping around a little bit, but you-- I read you also do work on human origins. So we, we, we, we, we mentioned this earlier. Let me ask another big philosophical question. Um, what, what, what's human? What makes us human? What is human? And, uh, where did that humanness come from?

    2. RPRobert Proctor1:58:57

       That's exactly the question we need to problematize because it's what I call the Gandhi question. It's like, uh, you know, Gandhi's asked, "What do you think of Western civilization?" And he says, "It would be a good idea." You know? And so when did humans evolve, you know? Well, n-not yet.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:59:17

       [chuckles]

    4. RPRobert Proctor1:59:18

       So we don't talk about, you know, when did, you know-- H- H- We, we talk about the rise of modern humanity. And what's happened in the last fifty or sixty years or so, which I think is a good thing intellectually, is that we've smeared out humanness to mean many different things. It's not just tool use. It's not just upright posture. Upright posture goes back at least five million years. Tool use goes back at least two and a half million years, stone tool use. But since wasps and chimpanzees use tools, then it's gotta be even older. So that, that's actually one of the things I'm interested, is how have different notions of what is human influenced our theories of human origins. And in particular, there, there's sort of the problem what I-- of what I call like sodomy in the uncanny valley, which is how long ago would you be willing to date someone? Say, someone that existed, say, five million years ago, ten million years ago, three million years ago. In other words, when is it-

    5. LFLex Fridman2:00:24

       Like date or one-night stand? I mean, that's strong. [chuckles]

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:00:26

       Uh, either one.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:00:27

       Okay.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:00:27

       Either one.

    9. LFLex Fridman2:00:27

       All right. [laughs]

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:00:28

        [laughs] Let's say be the, the, the mother of your children. Um-

    11. LFLex Fridman2:00:32

        That's a lot of commitment, but yeah. [laughs]

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:00:36

        But it's an interesting question because after World War II, as a result of Nazism, no one wanted to be the one to say that this particular fossil we've just found was anything less than fully human. So there's a projection of humanness arbitrarily back into the past, so that even these little monkey-like creatures, Ramapithecenes, Ramapithecus, were being declared to have folkways and mores and language, which is ridiculous. No one wanna be-- want to say that Neanderthals were anything less than fully human. So it's a very interesting question. At what point are they us? I mean, human origins is very much an identity quest. It's when did we become us? Which sort of begs the question, what are we? Who are we? Um-

    13. LFLex Fridman2:01:26

        And how much is that is the hardware evolution question versus the software, like what the actual development of society? Like, c-can't you argue that we became human with, uh, with agriculture? I mean, can't you argue that we became human with the Industrial Revolution?

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:01:43

        Well, certainly by then They are us. But agriculture is only 12,000 years ago. That's a blink in the eye, right? That's, that's yesterday. It's interesting, prior to the 19th century, most scholars thought that the pyramids were at the beginning of time. Essentially, they were closer to the beginning of time than they are to us now. It's a blink in the eye. You know, we use the metaphor of a, of a meter. You know, the Earth is five billion, so that's a meter. The natural history of upright humans is five million, so that's, that would be, like, one millimeter. The, it'd be the thickness of the white of your fingernail.

    15. LFLex Fridman2:02:25

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:02:26

        And then the pyramids are 5,000, so that's a thousandth of a millimeter, a micron, which is the amount taken off when you brush your-

    17. LFLex Fridman2:02:37

        Yeah [laughs]

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:02:37

        ... fingers on your, your jacket.

    19. LFLex Fridman2:02:40

        Yeah.

    20. RPRobert Proctor2:02:41

        So the, there's a natural history of humanity, and then there's the history of our constituents. We're all stardust-

    21. LFLex Fridman2:02:49

        Mm-hmm

    22. RPRobert Proctor2:02:50

        ... because all of our complex atoms began in supernovas many billions of years ago. But upright posture, five million. Agriculture, only a few thousand years ago. We cultivate dogs a couple hundred thousand years ago, so those are Paleolithic instruments.

    23. LFLex Fridman2:03:12

        Mm-hmm.

    24. RPRobert Proctor2:03:12

        Cats are Neolithic instruments, 'cause they're used to kill vermin. Dogs are used to, to hunt with us. But there is what you say, this co-evolution, our social aspect-

    25. LFLex Fridman2:03:25

        Yeah

    26. RPRobert Proctor2:03:25

        ... and our physical aspect. Even the fact that we, that we have whites of the eyes. We're the only animal with whites of the eyes, and the whites of the eyes tell intent. They tell direction. They tell interest. They know-

    27. LFLex Fridman2:03:40

        Yeah

    28. RPRobert Proctor2:03:40

        ... if, if you look at something, I can tell what you're looking at, because there's a lateral resolution. I can tell what you're looking at. That's recent, and the people who do reconstruction for museums, they want to create what I call an ethnographic identity with the viewer, and so they fantasize about all these other early hominids, non-human, pre-human hominids, if that's a word, as having eyes like us, but they probably didn't.

    29. LFLex Fridman2:04:10

        Hmm.

    30. RPRobert Proctor2:04:11

        And they were probably not self-aware, at least the early ones can't have been self-aware the way we are, insofar as we are. They m- may not have spoke. So I'm interested in basically when did we become what we think is human. It's clear that when we start burying the dead and making jewel- making jewelry and, and-
15. 2:08:30 – 2:15:48

    Hobbies

    1. LFLex Fridman2:08:30

       a broken heart. Okay, you mentioned, uh, amber and stone collection. I just have to ask, does that connect to human origins or just a personal love? What is it about stone collecting that attracts you?

    2. RPRobert Proctor2:08:41

       Well, scholars tend to be text-oriented. I, I tend to think books are overrated. Uh, we, uh, we evolved without books. Uh, you know, I walk for a couple of hours in the forest every day. I gather mushrooms and all kinds of things, just located pieces of the, uh, 1953 Resolution airplane crash, uh, outside of, um, Half Moon Bay just a couple days ago. I like finding things.

    3. LFLex Fridman2:09:11

       Have you ever found-

    4. RPRobert Proctor2:09:11

       Material things

    5. LFLex Fridman2:09:12

       ... pieces of a crashed UFO?

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:09:14

       Not yet, no.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:09:14

       Not yet, okay.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:09:15

       Not yet, no.

    9. LFLex Fridman2:09:16

       All right. Let me know, please, if you do.

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:09:17

        But of course, we have extraterrestrial other stuff. I mean, we have, I have, I'm, I collect meteorites.

    11. LFLex Fridman2:09:22

        Mm-hmm.

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:09:23

        So I'm, I'm into that. Uh, and so I, I'm interested in stone, stone quality. I grew up in southern Texas, and grew up surrounding, surrounded by people who, who would hunt for stone and gather stone, and cut stone. I cut stone as well. I, I'm a lapidary. And so I have this interest in the physical qualities of objects.

    13. LFLex Fridman2:09:46

        Mm-hmm.

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:09:46

        Uh, the, sometimes it's called material culture, but it's just stuff. And I'm interested to know how different cultures have manipulated stuff, worked stuff, stone, wood, things like that. Um, and also the fantasies pr- people project into it. So I'm doing a, a, a book on all the different ways different cultures have found different images in stone, like Rorschach tests. Uh, and so in, in India, they love agates with Hindu temples in them, and, and altars. And, uh, in America, they like, you know, three crosses on the mount. And, uh, if you can find a stone with the word Allah in it, that's beloved in, in Yemen or, or Saudi Arabia. So there's a long history of people projecting fantasy into stone, and I'm using that as a kind of a, a metaphor. They also, I'm also looking at the rise of hobbies and, uh, and amateur stonework, and how a lot of our gem- gemologic techniques were actually invented by amateurs, which means just lovers as opposed to professionals. The amateur is the lover. And hobbies, I don't know if you know, but the word hobby comes from a hobbled horse. And so you would hobble a horse me- to keep it from running. That's hobbling it with a, with a, a stick or a, um, a string. And then kids would ride a hobbled horse for play, like a horse on a stick, and riding a hobbled horse becomes riding a hobby horse, and then that becomes a hobby. And so hobbies become this so-called job you can't lose in the Great Depression-

    15. LFLex Fridman2:11:26

        Mm-hmm

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:11:26

        ... in the 1930s, and then they explode. Um, and so when I was a kid, people would collect coins or stamps or fossils or this or that. So I'm interested in that collecting passion.

    17. LFLex Fridman2:11:38

        So it's interesting, um, the development of hobbies, 'cause it feels like the future of human civilization will be very hobby-driven. Like, um, some of the, like I, I often now, because of this particular little thing I'm doing with the podcast, I get to interact with photographers and videographers, and I'm disappointed to find how many professionals are not very good, and how many hobbyists are very good.

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:12:04

        Yeah.

    19. LFLex Fridman2:12:05

        It's, [laughs] so it's almost-

    20. RPRobert Proctor2:12:07

        Well, if they're amateurs, they're the lovers. I mean, you can think of it-

    21. LFLex Fridman2:12:10

        The lovers, yes

    22. RPRobert Proctor2:12:10

        ... that's what that means, from a- amour. You're an amateur if you're a lover of the thing, and it, you're not in it for the money.

    23. LFLex Fridman2:12:16

        Yeah.

    24. RPRobert Proctor2:12:17

        You're in it 'cause you, you're obsessed.

    25. LFLex Fridman2:12:19

        But the sort of, as the, uh, GDP, as the, um, as our freedom grows to sort of financially to be able to have a hobby, um, it feels like there'll be more lovers, more amateurs in the world. And not just for the artistic pursuits, but like science, uh, technology development, building, you know, uh, building all kinds of technologies almost like as a, as a hobby.

    26. RPRobert Proctor2:12:44

        Yeah.

    27. LFLex Fridman2:12:45

        Um, you have much more freedom to figure out what is the thing you love doing, and actually over time, that just, you won't even notice, but it'll start making money. [laughs] And yeah, that's really fascinating. And yeah, it does kind of, uh... I mean, when did that originate, just the collection?

    28. RPRobert Proctor2:13:09

        Well, the-

    29. LFLex Fridman2:13:10

        The widespread-

    30. RPRobert Proctor2:13:10

        It goes through different stages. People have always gathered the odd thing to make something else. But you also get this tradition of what's called curiosity cabinets.
16. 2:15:48 – 2:19:23

    Diversity in the universe

    1. LFLex Fridman2:15:48

       it's, it's sad because there's a, a, just like you said, singular events or rare events are somehow really inspiring to us. And so you kind of have to balance that. Yeah, there's the scientific process, but you also have to, like, uh, the, it's the thing you, you find with the weird-

    2. RPRobert Proctor2:16:07

       Yeah

    3. LFLex Fridman2:16:07

       ... the, the peculiar. It's like, huh.

    4. RPRobert Proctor2:16:10

       Yeah.

    5. LFLex Fridman2:16:10

       What is that?

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:16:11

       Well, even, even the universe itself, it could be that the universe begins and then will end, say, in a cold death, and that's it.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:16:23

       Mm-hmm.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:16:24

       I mean, it could be a one-off thing, or it could be one o- of an infinite-

    9. LFLex Fridman2:16:27

       Oh, who knows?

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:16:27

        ... many cycles.

    11. LFLex Fridman2:16:28

        Yeah.

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:16:29

        Or a- and maybe all of the laws of nature are recreated anew with each cycle.

    13. LFLex Fridman2:16:33

        Yeah, and they could be different or the same.

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:16:34

        Or maybe what, what we're s- what we're assuming about the Big Bang, there's some element of falsity. Maybe the speed of light is not constant but changes over time. That would throw into question all kinds of theories about dark matter and dark energy-

    15. LFLex Fridman2:16:49

        Yeah, and there-

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:16:49

        ... a- and even the age of the universe.

    17. LFLex Fridman2:16:51

        And I, to me, there's very likely trillions of, uh, conversations going on like this on other planets-

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:16:59

        Yeah

    19. LFLex Fridman2:16:59

        ... in different [laughs]

    20. RPRobert Proctor2:17:00

        Yeah, no doubt. It's, I mean, it's a-

    21. LFLex Fridman2:17:02

        There were different kinds of drugs, different communication styles, different timescales at which life form is, or what life looks like, or how life behaves, or what life is, and all those things, i- it kinda-

    22. RPRobert Proctor2:17:15

        Yeah

    23. LFLex Fridman2:17:15

        ... every time you think about this, it's more and more humbling. [laughs] It's the, just this whole fog of ignorance.

    24. RPRobert Proctor2:17:23

        Yeah.

    25. LFLex Fridman2:17:23

        I mean, it's don- anything-

    26. RPRobert Proctor2:17:24

        I mean, I'm, I, what drives me crazy is wondering about the beautiful gemstones on other planets. I call them exoagates, you know? They must be-

    27. LFLex Fridman2:17:32

        Yeah

    28. RPRobert Proctor2:17:32

        ... unbelievable features and forms-

    29. LFLex Fridman2:17:34

        I'll imagine

    30. RPRobert Proctor2:17:35

        ... which are unimaginable-
17. 2:19:23 – 2:28:18

    Stones

    1. LFLex Fridman2:19:23

       What's the coolest stone you've ever seen?

    2. RPRobert Proctor2:19:26

       Oh my God, there's so many. Uh-

    3. LFLex Fridman2:19:29

       And what, what, what defines, is it rarity? Is it just raw beauty? What, what captivates your-

    4. RPRobert Proctor2:19:36

       I like-

    5. LFLex Fridman2:19:36

       ... excitement?

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:19:37

       ... a storied stone.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:19:39

       Mm.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:19:40

       I have a very beautiful Fairburn agate, which has multiple layers, and there's something I call agate paralysis because to polish it, you have to go through the layers, which means you're destroying the layers. And maybe what should be done is it should be like a movie where you, you film the entire process of cutting and polishing so that- It's not dead. In other words, what was the diamond when it started rough? The, the, the rough diamond is gone, but if you could sort of do a filmic version-

    9. LFLex Fridman2:20:13

       Yeah. A view

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:20:13

        ... of a cutting pro- so that the, the stone would exist in a, from a pre-polished to a polished state, all as a kind of-

    11. LFLex Fridman2:20:22

        Mm

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:20:22

        ... NFT or something. [laughs] In other-

    13. LFLex Fridman2:20:24

        That, that should be an NFT. That's right. [laughs]

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:20:27

        So the other thing I fantasize about is how pattern recognition technology will probably in the future allow us to discover all kinds of amazing stones, including, for example, fossil skulls, fossil skulls of humans.

    15. LFLex Fridman2:20:41

        Mm.

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:20:42

        Now it's kind of a chance process that you discover a skull in East Africa, but why not have a drone moving constantly, scanning for pattern recognition of human skull, human teeth, very slowly, and then-

    17. LFLex Fridman2:20:57

        Just on the surface, you mean?

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:20:58

        Just above the surface. Just 10 feet above the surface, 20 feet above the surface.

    19. LFLex Fridman2:21:02

        No, no, no, sorry. You, you think you'll be able to find skulls on the surface?

    20. RPRobert Proctor2:21:05

        Yes. Yes. In the middle of a place that no one has looked, which, and th- these areas are vast, right? So it could be found on the surface, then move to the next layer, then, then find it under the surface as well. There's LiDAR. There's all kinds of ways. We're finding jungles and jungle cities in, in under the Amazon that people didn't know about. So-

    21. LFLex Fridman2:21:26

        Do you think there's something out there that would just blow your mind?

    22. RPRobert Proctor2:21:30

        Oh, for sure. For sure. [laughs] Yeah, no doubt.

    23. LFLex Fridman2:21:35

        Oh, man. And, uh, how much of it is a little bit underground, right? Or how much of it is in the ocean?

    24. RPRobert Proctor2:21:41

        Yeah. I mean, here, right here, we are in the Bay Area. We know that much of the Native American civilization here was under the bay because, uh, 6,000 years ago, the bay was dry. It was a river, not a bay.

    25. LFLex Fridman2:21:55

        Mm-hmm.

    26. RPRobert Proctor2:21:56

        And so all of those, whatever material culture, archaeological traces existed there are now at least preserved under the water. So I think we're just beginning to, to touch the-

    27. LFLex Fridman2:22:09

        Could be treasure, too. I mean, like, literally, like you said, we lose the wisdom or we lose the, lose the knowledge, but, I, I mean, um, w- I mean, if the, if there's the pyramids, right? It's the great wonders of the world. There might be other wonders that are completely lost.

    28. RPRobert Proctor2:22:25

        Yeah.

    29. LFLex Fridman2:22:26

        Just some, some-

    30. RPRobert Proctor2:22:26

        I mean, one of the stones, you asked about stones I like, I, I like stones, for example, every now and then dinosaurs would eat rocks as gizzard stones, and then you find them in their, in their guts, in their bones. Well, every now and then they would eat a piece of petrified wood. So the idea that something was a tree and then stone and then swallowed by a dinosaur and ground up in the gizzard and polished and then left in a b- you know.
18. 2:28:18 – 2:32:28

    Conspiracy theories

    1. LFLex Fridman2:28:18

       so I'm always suspicious of, um... And w- as we should all be when you can kind of intuit a financial and otherwise motivation. I mean, that's actually often in the modern age why I'm suspicious of conspiracy theories. It's not that the logic doesn't make sense or something like that. I personally actually just enjoy conspiracy theories. I've been listening to, um, flat Earthers discuss stuff recently. It's kind of exciting for some reason.

    2. RPRobert Proctor2:28:44

       It's fascinating, yeah.

    3. LFLex Fridman2:28:44

       Be- it, it's like ... 'Cause, 'cause I consider, like, what if it's true? It's exciting to discover together, like, think through first principles, like, what does the world look like? It's exciting. I mean, it's, it's the childlike discovery of a new idea. Uh, but the, the reason I'm skeptical of a lot of conspiracy theories is when I see how popular you can get pr- propagating those conspiracy theories, how quickly you can form a large movement. And it's like, hmm. Like, uh-

    4. RPRobert Proctor2:29:13

       Well, on such thin evidence. It's like if Loch Ness exists, there's just one? I mean, how does the reproduction work on that?

    5. LFLex Fridman2:29:21

       See, but-

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:29:21

       How do you talk about an animal that has only one in a population? It just doesn't... Some of the things don't make sense.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:29:27

       No, but see, this is the logic side. I don't even go that far. I, I, I... The fact is, if you say there's a Loch Ness monster, I just see how quickly the idea spreads in popularity. It's, the people are hungry to discover something new, just like you mentioned, uh, with the, with the hominids. And I'm very suspicious of where there's, like, a strange hunger for ideas, 'cause then they're, they're less likely to be objective and rigorous in considering the validity of that idea. I'm not going to the logic, 'cause actually flat Earth is pretty logical.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:30:02

       Yeah.

    9. LFLex Fridman2:30:02

       [laughs]

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:30:02

        Very logical.

    11. LFLex Fridman2:30:04

        If you're-

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:30:04

        Logic is not the problem.

    13. LFLex Fridman2:30:05

        [laughs] Right. So it's, but it, it spreads really quickly and I, and I, once again, with conspiracy theories, I think it represents... It's, you have to think about the cause of causes, or cause of cause of causes like you talked about, which is like it represents some deeper, uh, fragmenting of the, the common humanity. We have the, the, the trust in the, in the, in the big community that is science and the big community that is government and all that kind of stuff.

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:30:35

        Yeah. Well, that's why things like ball lightning are cool because it's like-

    15. LFLex Fridman2:30:39

        [laughs]

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:30:40

        ... the scientists denied it, but here it is, you know?

    17. LFLex Fridman2:30:43

        Exactly, exactly. And that's ultimately ends up being-

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:30:45

        Everyone said I was insane, but, uh...

    19. LFLex Fridman2:30:48

        And but it's still ex- You said there's some breakthroughs? I need to look it up.

    20. RPRobert Proctor2:30:52

        Yeah.

    21. LFLex Fridman2:30:52

        It's really cool.

    22. RPRobert Proctor2:30:53

        Yeah, check it out. It's pretty exciting. Yeah, there's some new theories of how it actually might, might work.

    23. LFLex Fridman2:30:57

        Because I think, I mean, there's obviously several ways to prove that. Like, one of them is to, to recreate it in a lab, which is probably-

    24. RPRobert Proctor2:31:03

        That's the gold standard

    25. LFLex Fridman2:31:03

        ... that's probably very, very difficult. Um, just 'cause we're on the topic of rocks, it, uh, I don't know if you've heard about this interstellar rock that flew through our, uh, called the 'Oumuamua from-

    26. RPRobert Proctor2:31:14

        Yes, yes

    27. LFLex Fridman2:31:14

        ... that, uh-

    28. RPRobert Proctor2:31:15

        The cigar-shaped one.

    29. LFLex Fridman2:31:16

        The cigar-shaped. As a fan of rocks, what do you think about that one? So-

    30. RPRobert Proctor2:31:19

        Well, I think that generally, I mean, when the people were speculating it might be a spaceship, I thought, "Come on, rocks do all kinds of crazy things." They do a lot more than you realize. They can do unbelievable, unbelievably cool things. There are parts of the desert there in, in Utah where rocks move and create these long tracks, and it's, now we know it's from liquefaction and, and, and, and wind and various other things, but they're still unbelievably cool. Rocks can do almost anything. And so just the fact that one comes from outside the solar system doesn't mean it has to be a spaceship.
19. 2:32:28 – 2:37:43

    Nazi impact on Soviet science

    1. LFLex Fridman2:32:28

       You mentioned this interesting term, Russianist. Uh, The Things We Do For Love, for some reason, you went to Germany.

    2. RPRobert Proctor2:32:33

       Yes.

    3. LFLex Fridman2:32:34

       Uh, d- so you, and you said you're pretty eloquent with German. Yeah, like, you, you-

    4. RPRobert Proctor2:32:38

       I, I learned German, yeah.

    5. LFLex Fridman2:32:40

       Did you ever learn Russian a little bit?

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:32:42

       I did learn Russian. Yeah, I studied, actually, Russian as an undergraduate at Indiana University for several years, and then I wanted to do a Russ- I wanted to do Russian and Chinese as a graduate student, 'cause I thought, "This is kind of the future." And Harvard said, "Nope, it has to be French and German," and so I essentially gave up on my Russian and Chinese. And, uh, the other part of that story is, nonetheless, I wanted to do something with Russian. I wanted to study how much the Lamarckian ideology and biology in Russia at the time that led to their distrust of genetics under Stalin had to do with the fact that genetics was being pushed by the Nazis.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:33:32

       Mm.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:33:33

       And we tend to see those literatures in isolation. The Nazi- Nazis were racist. The Russians were, you know, environmentalists biased by Lamarckian theories of heredity and re- and rejected that part of Darwin. When they're right next to each other at the very same time, there must be a connection, and so I started reading into this, and I was, uh, I actually got a Fulbright to go write a book on this-

    9. LFLex Fridman2:33:58

       Mm

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:33:58

        ... and, uh, canceled all my classes. I was teaching at The New School for Social Research at the time, and, uh, I was, I couldn't get a visa into the Soviet Union. I was just barred admission.

    11. LFLex Fridman2:34:11

        For, uh-

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:34:12

        For doing this project-

    13. LFLex Fridman2:34:13

        For doing this project

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:34:13

        ... looking at, uh, how Stalinist science had this anti-Na- Nazi aspect which we've overlooked.

    15. LFLex Fridman2:34:20

        Which year was this? This was when the Soviet Union was still together.

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:34:23

        Yes. Yeah, it was in the, uh, late 1980s, but before... It, Gorbachev was in power, but it wasn't before '89.

    17. LFLex Fridman2:34:31

        But still then, there was a careful, um, attention to-

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:34:37

        Well, you never know how careful it was or-

    19. LFLex Fridman2:34:40

        Or if it's just-

    20. RPRobert Proctor2:34:40

        ... fell through the cracks, or you never know when something fails, you, you don't always know why it failed. But I was very disappointed, and it sort of ended that, that project. I didn't have access to the archives on it. I could have obviously done it later, but, uh, you know.

    21. LFLex Fridman2:34:55

        So, like, there, there was that curiosity initially, but and then you focused on Nazi, on the, on the Nazi side of, uh-

    22. RPRobert Proctor2:35:01

        Yeah, I mean, the other thing was-

    23. LFLex Fridman2:35:02

        ... just-

    24. RPRobert Proctor2:35:02

        ... I was trying to figure out where to go for, for a Fulbright on a, on a different year, and I wanted to go to China. And turns out you could only go to Taiwan. I didn't really wanna go to Taiwan, and it was one in 50 odds of going to Taiwan, but it was one in three of going to Germany, and, uh, so I ended up going to Germany. I didn't have any particular interest in Germany at that time, but, uh, that's what I ended up doing is... So I wrote a, you know, so I wrote one book in German, actually.

    25. LFLex Fridman2:35:34

        Oh, wow.

    26. RPRobert Proctor2:35:34

        And I wrote two books on-

    27. LFLex Fridman2:35:35

        Wow

    28. RPRobert Proctor2:35:35

        ... Nazi Germany, and, uh, you know, otherwise, I might have been doing the same thing in Russian or Chinese.

    29. LFLex Fridman2:35:42

        Yeah, those are s-

    30. RPRobert Proctor2:35:42

        But in, in other words, history chooses us as much as we choose history, right?
20. 2:37:43 – 2:41:58

    Nazi tobacco industry's denial campaign

    1. RPRobert Proctor2:37:43

       fascinating little stories. I, I was looking at how the Nazi tobacco industry had their own denial campaign, which was pro-Nazi, but, and pro-tobacco, even though the Nazi regime was anti-tobacco, and- They developed a lot of these rhetorical tricks that were later used by the Americans, like, "Oh, you can't trust that evidence, it's merely statistical. You can't trust the animal experiments, 'cause all it proves is that mice should not smoke." But I notice, just in passing, these remarkable stories, little hints. There's a report from a Japanese military man in one of these tobacco journals, tobacco industry journals in the Nazi period, and they're talking about this brotherhood of all men through cigarettes.

    2. LFLex Fridman2:38:39

       Mm.

    3. RPRobert Proctor2:38:40

       And the tragedy that the Chinese and the Japanese, who were fighting each other, in a way n- wanted nothing more than to smoke together, and the Chinese would sneak up to the Japanese forts to try to find a Japanese cigarette that had been thrown away, and they'd be glowing, and the Japanese knew this, and they would throw their cigarettes out. The Chinese would come, and then the Japanese would kill these Chinese. And then this guy is poetically lamenting the fact that even though the, all they want is a smoke-

    4. LFLex Fridman2:39:13

       Yeah

    5. RPRobert Proctor2:39:13

       ... they nonetheless end up in the crosshairs-

    6. LFLex Fridman2:39:16

       Wow

    7. RPRobert Proctor2:39:16

       ... and in death. And so it's just weird, and I'm reading this translated from the Japanese into German in a Nazi tobacco industry newspaper. I mean, the layers of weirdness are really fascinating and, and touching, but-

    8. LFLex Fridman2:39:32

       And those very kind of brotherhood stories actually resonated later. 'Cause I, I mean, that's how I feel about cigarettes. Some of my favorite moments in early life is about people connecting over a cigarette.

    9. RPRobert Proctor2:39:46

       Of course.

    10. LFLex Fridman2:39:47

        And that, you know, that works. That-

    11. RPRobert Proctor2:39:50

        Yeah

    12. LFLex Fridman2:39:50

        ... that's [laughs] those narratives.

    13. RPRobert Proctor2:39:52

        Yeah.

    14. LFLex Fridman2:39:53

        Oh, boy.

    15. RPRobert Proctor2:39:53

        That's the movies, right? Those are movies.

    16. LFLex Fridman2:39:54

        The movies.

    17. RPRobert Proctor2:39:54

        It's called Meet Cute. They, the tobacco industry, when they put cigarettes into a movie, they put it in right at the moment where boy meets girl.

    18. LFLex Fridman2:40:03

        Let me ask you, just in all the research you've done with, uh, with Nazi Germany, just for me, from a conversational perspective, I, I was, uh, I was listening to a bunch of Ho- Holocaust survivors, uh, recently, just on YouTube and listening to interviews. Um, also listening to Nazi, um, SS soldier- like, they're still alive or were recently. Uh, some of them, especially the ones that deny many aspects of the Holocaust, it's so interesting to watch, 'cause they're still, still... It's so fascinating. Anyway, I, uh, in your research, are there interesting people to talk to that are still alive, or are they mostly that part of history is no longer living, is in the books?

    19. RPRobert Proctor2:40:51

        It is mostly no longer living. That's one reason in the 1980s, when I started working on Nazi science, I really did interview quite a few people, and elderly people, people who had sort of slipped through the cracks, you know, maybe even should've been prosecuted. So few people got prosecuted. Um, but these were people who had racial theories, who published-

    20. LFLex Fridman2:41:15

        Yeah

    21. RPRobert Proctor2:41:16

        ... you know, o-o-on these topics, and they were guarded. But these were the lives they lived, and, you know, uh, mainly they wanted people not to be talking too much about this. So it gets sealed off and walled off, and that's why the, reading the medical literature itself was so much more valuable.

    22. LFLex Fridman2:41:36

        Mm-hmm. 'Cause there's no s- self-censorship. It's just there. That's it.

    23. RPRobert Proctor2:41:41

        I'm sure there's some censorship, but it's what they said is what they said, and it's, it's immense. It's immense and largely unread. The, as I said, there are hundreds and hundreds of Nazi medical journals, and people had not been reading those before I really started looking at them.

21. 2:41:58 – 2:44:32

    Hope for the future

    1. LFLex Fridman2:41:59

       Given that you studied these really difficult parts of human history and human nature with Big Tobacco and just these mechanisms of manipulation, what gives you hope about the future?

    2. RPRobert Proctor2:42:09

       Oh, all kinds of things give me hope. The, the forest gives me hope. The Wikipedia-

    3. LFLex Fridman2:42:14

       Nature. Wikipedia. [laughs]

    4. RPRobert Proctor2:42:15

       Wikipedia gives me hope. Space exploration gives me hope. I, all kinds of things give me hope. The, I had this insight the other day. I walked through all of these giant redwoods, which, which were almost all cut. They're not very far from here, just, you know, half an hour straight west of where we are now, even up in the, in r- in redwood country. And I had this idea that, you know, they're growing back now, and every year they add how many, you know, cubic miles of wood-

    5. LFLex Fridman2:42:46

       Mm-hmm

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:42:46

       ... if you count California as a whole. But not only that, the roots are all old growth, if you think about it.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:42:52

       Mm-hmm.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:42:52

       They're, these are re-sprouting. They're not from seeds. These are re-sprouting. And so they have this tremendous resource underground that even the loggers couldn't kill.

    9. LFLex Fridman2:43:03

       Mm-hmm.

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:43:03

        Right? And so from these stumps, you get what they call fairy rings, which are, you know, like five trees coming in a ring around it, each one competing to be the suc- successor. So they've seen this story before, and they know-

    11. LFLex Fridman2:43:18

        [laughs]

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:43:19

        ... to, to, to re-sprout.

    13. LFLex Fridman2:43:21

        Yeah.

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:43:21

        And that, I think, is a very hopeful thing, is that the roots are old growth, and hopefully in 100, 200, 300 years, it won't peak until around 1,000 years from now that you'll get these restoration of all of this magnificent, uh, old growth. Um, but so many other things, you know, give me hope. Uh, you know, we have to have hope, and I, I think that, uh, if the world is infinite, there's infinitely may w- many ways for it to become fixed. I mean, obviously there, there we have some problems need to be fixed, but they're fixable.

    15. LFLex Fridman2:43:56

        That's really beautifully put. That is a really hopeful idea that nature, that life, even human civilization is resilient to all the mistakes we make. So the roots are there. So it's, uh, it outlives us. It's patient with our adolescent Fuck ups. [laughs]

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:44:14

        I mean, we're a thin layer on the crust.

    17. LFLex Fridman2:44:16

        [laughs]

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:44:17

        And, you know, eventually the Earth will be swallowed by the sun, and humans won't e- will have long gone extinct by then. Um, but yeah, there's all kinds of round- grounds for hope.

    19. LFLex Fridman2:44:27

        [laughs] Uh, so us being a, a th- a thin layer of crust,

22. 2:44:32 – 2:49:32

    Meaning of life

    1. LFLex Fridman2:44:32

       what do you think the, is the meaning of this layer? What's the meaning of human existence? What's the meaning of life?

    2. RPRobert Proctor2:44:37

       Well, I think it depends who you're talking to. If you're talking to a raccoon, it might be one thing. If you're talking to an old growth tree, it's making sure you're straight up, upright, and not, you know, on a slippery slope.

    3. LFLex Fridman2:44:50

       What about fish? [laughs]

    4. RPRobert Proctor2:44:52

       Yeah, fish, I guess they're trying to avoid the hook.

    5. LFLex Fridman2:44:55

       Yeah.

    6. RPRobert Proctor2:44:55

       Right? No fish ever ... When they take the bait, no fish in the world has ever said, "I hope I get hooked." Um, and that's, that's one of the problems with tobacco is that there's all this bait and people get hooked. But, uh, you know, the fish don't have heads. We have heads. One of the great innovations in the history of humanity, going back way prehuman, is the invention of the head, the mobile head that turns and sees, you know? And the fish didn't have that. You know, they didn't have hands. The octopus have cool stuff.

    7. LFLex Fridman2:45:31

       Yeah.

    8. RPRobert Proctor2:45:31

       Um-

    9. LFLex Fridman2:45:32

       It's not all about the head.

    10. RPRobert Proctor2:45:34

        It's not all about the head. Well, in fact, the octopus, basically they've got brains in their fingers.

    11. LFLex Fridman2:45:38

        Yeah. And maybe brains is not even that good of an invention in the long arc of history-

    12. RPRobert Proctor2:45:43

        Well-

    13. LFLex Fridman2:45:43

        ... 'cause the fish maybe got it right.

    14. RPRobert Proctor2:45:45

        [laughs]

    15. LFLex Fridman2:45:47

        Stay in the ocean.

    16. RPRobert Proctor2:45:48

        Well, of course, we evolved from fish, so.

    17. LFLex Fridman2:45:51

        Yeah. But, uh, we moved on. Is there a why to this? Uh, or is it just the way ... It's, it's like the current. It's just, it's just like these pockets of interesting complexity pops up, like, like Allah showing up on a rock.

    18. RPRobert Proctor2:46:09

        [laughs]

    19. LFLex Fridman2:46:10

        This is what human civilization is, this weird little thing that showed up on a rock, and then it'll disappear.

    20. RPRobert Proctor2:46:15

        Well, we are probably the most remarkable creation that nature has ever belched forward. We're probably the only one, if you don't count the K-T meteorite that dis- almost destroyed the Earth, uh, we're the only ones that currently have the capacity to destroy the Earth. Um, I'm fascinated by the meteorite that wiped out everything bigger than four feet long, you know, the, the Mount Everest-sized meteorite that hit the Earth 66 million years ago and destroyed most species in, in the water and on land.

    21. LFLex Fridman2:46:51

        There could've been some smart folks around then too.

    22. RPRobert Proctor2:46:53

        Well, actually, one thing I like to think about is that 232.3 million years ago, and 232.4 million years ago, that's 100,000 years. That tiniest of a sliver, maybe a millimeter in most parts of the Earth, it's enough time for a species of dinosaur to become intelligent, build a civilization, and go extinct with no traces. And, uh, maybe that happened.

    23. LFLex Fridman2:47:23

        Our ignorance can fully engulf the fact that that happened. [laughs] Oh, the, the beautiful self-importance of us, of us humans. Uh, it's easy to forget that m- multiple intelligent civilizations could have lived on Earth.

    24. RPRobert Proctor2:47:41

        It's possible, and gone extinct. Or even life may have evolved more than once. Uh, not only that, but it, proto-life may still exist and we are not even looking for it. You know, some type of clay that became life may still exist, and people w- Uh, one thing I like to think about is, is always what is the before time that is now? I remember lecturing about this right before COVID, and it's sort of like what is the, what is the our world now that we'll say, "What was it like to be then before?"

    25. LFLex Fridman2:48:10

        Yeah, before.

    26. RPRobert Proctor2:48:10

        And that's the world we live in. We live in a before time for something we really can't predict.

    27. LFLex Fridman2:48:15

        Probably physical, uh, you know-

    28. RPRobert Proctor2:48:19

        Appendages and-

    29. LFLex Fridman2:48:20

        You know, and being in person, being able to touch each other or wanting to touch each other, versus being in a d- digital world, right? This whole idea of the metaverse and more and more moving into a digital space. What was it like being born before most of your, your life wasn't on the computer?

    30. RPRobert Proctor2:48:40

        Yeah.

Episode duration: 2:49:41