Bob Murphy Show - Pushing Back Against Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science Funding

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1:00The Common Tree in interviews conducted by a Christian and a commonist. Now here's your host, Bob Murphy. Hey everybody welcome back to the Bob Murphy Show. Other crossover this time is a fun one. Sheldon Richmond had sent Adam and me a clip or an episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson lamenting the U.S.'s loss of leadership and science innovation. So we address ourselves to that. One thing an excellent example of the private sector funding research that I meant to mention or I should have mentioned I should say was Benoit Mantelbrot. So the discoverer of the Mantelbrot set. If you're back in the day, if you went to consulting by rpm.com, which was my website where the free advice blog lived, I had as my banner the Mantelbrot set.

2:02So anyway that guy in 1958 he began a 35 year career at IBM where he became an IBM fellow and periodically took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets in relation to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences. Alright so Mantelbrot's deal is fractals like he coined that term and that's what he is the father of fractal geometry. It has impacts on what is called chaos theory and stuff like that. And the application to economics and financial and mathematical finance is that among other things it's like if you look at stock price movements over the 20th century, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head but like a surprising amount of the total moves happened on like the 50 most volatile days over the century, stuff like that. And so the point being that in, well here I'll read from this abstract of this paper

3:07that I'm familiar with that talks about this stuff. In both theoretical and applied context, neoclassical economics typically assumes that residual economic relationships are mean zero, finite variance, normally distributed random variables. However many have challenges view from various perspectives. The Austrian economist specifically in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard reject outright the effort to mathematically model human choices. This Austrian view is often derided as unscientific however, some of the most mathematically sophisticated work in financial economics also rejects the orthodox bell curve. In this paper we test Benoit Mantelbrot's stable parition hypothesis on 10 major macroeconomic data sets and reject the normal distribution in nine of them. We further argue the stable parition hypothesis in more generally the field of quote chaos theory is far more compatible with the Austrian position than one might initially suspect. The author there was a Thomas Bunt, but he had a co author named Robert Murphy. This was in the review of Austrian economics back in 2008 back when I was a sharp as a tack.

4:07So anyway, my point is just this guy, man, I'll brought it was just a giant certainly in geometry, but also as well as respected in financial economics and whatnot. His deal is he worked for 35 years at IBM and that wasn't just a coincidence, but part of how fractals really captured the imagination of everyone is that he used computers to plot them out and to illustrate that. So no coincidence there at all because man IBM was just gave him some money and said, there go to go think smart things. It wasn't because they needed him to do something that they were going to report to their shareholders next quarter in contrast to Neil deGrasse Tyson's assumption that private business can't fund anything important. You got to have it all coming from the government. Okay. Well, that was a very long intro to this conversation I'm going to have with Adam Heyman. Here we go. And I've up. Hey, Mr. Heyman. You know, as good libertarians. Heck. That's good people.

5:08We're we're we're trained encouraged to not be collectivist in group certain people certain groups of people altogether and ascribe poor characteristics to them that might not be fair. We're not supposed to do that. But I got to admit there is a group in society that I have negative feelings for just out of the gate. You tell me this is this kind of a person and I just don't like them. Is it people who take a long time to make a point? No, I love them. Those are right people. No, it's well, Neil deGrasse Tyson is one. Does that give you a hint? Scientists. It's public intellectuals. Men? Public intellectuals. I don't I just don't like him. Yeah, that guy. I don't know what well. I think I do know what it is. Yeah, like you said, it's the way he just talks on behalf of science.

6:11Father's the heck out of me. Yeah. I said it. He is remarkably condescending and he's not a stupid person, but his level of talking down to people and condescension is not warranted for whatever his IQ or depth of knowledge is. He's very insulting and it does not. It wrinkles me. There's actually a cute story of my oldest son when he was younger was watching. Is it cosmos? Is that the show that he was? Yeah, he like took over from took over from Carl Sagan. And so my son was yeah, my son was like I'm maybe like around 10 like just ballpark. And so he was telling me he has been watching that show and was telling me stuff about it. And he was going on about like the history and how like the famous church versus science kind of stuff. And he was saying, and you know, we were like shopping or something. I was just going through and I was like, well, you know, that's a convenient thing, but it's actually way more nuance.

7:12And I was going, I wasn't just saying it gets a church to nothing wrong. You know, but I was just pointing out that yeah, we all learn that story. And then you get older and you read about it and you realize, no, they're kind of just like quite so much. So anyway, so then during that same grocery trip, like we're getting to the check out and he started talking about how it was something like how the earth was eight light minutes away from the sun. And then he went, oh, wait a minute. I heard that from, I don't know if that's right. Like because he he no longer trusted Neil deGrasse Tyson. They came out of the cell and I went, no, he's all right on that. He's going to get that stuff right. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I've done ranting. I think I made my point in a reasonable amount of time. You ranted. I told an anecdote that was only loosely related to the topic at hand. And so people are housing. Maybe I should start giving us a minute. Yeah, we're three minutes in. Why don't you tell the good people what the heck we're talking about? Sheldon Richmond sent us this as possible fodder this episode. I guess you'd call it. And it's Neil deGrasse Tyson going through his concern over the fact that America is losing

8:14its edge. Used to dominate the world and science and technology. And we're furthering it away. And he just wants to make sure we're aware of this because gosh darn it. This country is amazing. Yep. That's true. We have some clips. We have some points. I guess I'll just ask you first, Bob. Do you want to just launch into what Neil has to say? Or do you want to make a few points in preparation? I guess the only thing I'll say in terms of context is I know Eric Weinstein has been making similar, giving similar warnings and talking about, like he even linked into the Epstein stuff and was saying how, like what Epstein was doing because he was offering bounces. He was going around to top thinkers in various fields and kind of like, you know, recruiting them and like making them feel like they were really cool. And, you know, so anyway, and he was saying, you know, part of the backdrop to that is that yeah, you know, in the 50s and the 60s, America was just boom, the place to be.

9:17And there's all this defense department money getting thrown around and stuff like that. And how the American universities were like part of our national prestige and like a really important for the military industrial complex and all that kind of stuff. And he was just pointing out, hey, you know, we're losing that because of, you know, budget cuts and just the lack of prestige now that's afforded to the top scientists in various departments and things. So anyway, I would say that Neil deGrasse Tyson is not talking in a vacuum. Also by the way, I think Eric's. I would take his point of view much more seriously than Neil deGrasse Tyson, but just partly because Neil deGrasse Tyson really greats on me. Yeah, of the two, I think the, I mean, I disagree with both, but the points made probably come better from Eric. And what they both think is that in order to have a vibrant country, both military defense and just everything else, production of things and enjoyment of the populace, you should have government funding basic science research because that is the font of all technological

10:21process. And anybody who thinks anything different is just trying to sell you something, which is ironical in my opinion. I think we should just launch right in all the, all the points I have to say are going to come on the heels of each of these clips if you're okay with that. This first one, Neil deGrasse Tyson is just talking about the, the interplay between completely private college universities, scientific labs and the government. And I just thought the way framed it was pretty funny. I don't know if you knew, but from academia, the government has had visiting scientists annually come in from academia to serve the country. These are scientists that come in and advise the Justice Department, the, the Senate, the House, the White House. These rotating positions would not only good for the government, they're also good for

11:26scientists themselves to get a taste of how the sausage is made in governance, especially when governance needs and relies upon the advice of scientists. So here's what has happened. Many of those positions that rotate in and out no longer exists. These rotating positions included, for example, the National Science Foundation. You have scientists from academia doing tours of duty in and out of the National Science Foundation to bring their expertise into a government agency that doesn't always have access to the moving frontier of that expertise. Not only that, what does the NIH do, the National Institutes for Health, they have grant money that goes to research that's not conducted within the government, is conducted by scientists in universities. This is one of the fundamental roles American universities have played in the strengthening of the United States in the 20th century.

12:27So there are a couple of things that I thought was just hilarious. If you replace scientists with like any other group that lobbies the government, pharmaceutical lobbyists, what they do is they come to Washington, you see, and they move around and they advise all these people. And then they go home with boatloads of money. It's the craziest thing. And that's what makes the world go around. And then he said something even goofier, when the NIH pays money to scientists in universities directs the money, what grants get funded and what grants don't, that's not government research, you see. That's something totally private. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, I mean, I get what you're saying. I guess there he was just trying to distinguish and just show how big it is that like, oh, I'm not even just talking about like studies conducted by the Department of Energy Internally, I'm talking what you think of as happening out there at MIT and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's funded by the government, don't you know? I think maybe that's what he was trying to say there.

13:29But yeah, it's funny because he's just taking a so matter of faculty, but yeah, if you just kind of step back and look at what he's saying and like you're saying, Adam, change it to something else. It's like, I mean, there was this revolve, like in the 1940s, you know how much steel went, you know, into fields, not necessarily like a government agency per se, but like they would subsidize heavily like other private companies that would then take that steel and turn it into, you know, battleships and things like so I mean, what would we do without that huge government funding, you know, and it's obviously, well, this steel would go to other use. Like we have all these smart people. I can't think of a worse thing I would want them to do than to go help the government do more government things, you know, like that's and also and he was saying, and not only did it help the government, but it helped them too by how like giving them nightmares, like showing them how corrupt you know, you know what I mean? Like he didn't really spell out except just in the sense of, you know, like, hey, you want to go see how this torture chamber works? Come on, check it out, you know, so it's so anyway that I thought all that was interesting.

14:32And also his, you know, the NIH, I just went to double check to make sure I wasn't inventing stuff, but I guess they, that was the whole thing like with Rand Pauliner, everybody like without government funding, who would create COVID outbreak? Right. Exactly. And the way framed it was just so weird, like the scientists just because they're good Americans, they come here to Washington, you see, and they help out as if they weren't being paid to do so. I mean, that could even be a condition of the grant acceptance, right? Yeah. Even if it worked the other way and it wasn't just lobbying, it would even have worked the other way. Well, yeah, they're getting paid to come here and do that. What are you talking about, Neil? Yeah. So folks, I mean, we could just have played that clip and then it's rift for a bit, but other clips, he's going to get more specific. So yeah, in case you're saying like, guys, come on, there's a lot of slurling fruit that you're missing. Hang on. We're going to, we've been doing this show for a bit. I just, it was the first thing you said. It was three minutes in and I just laughed out loud. So I had to clip it. You know how that works, Bob? I'm sure there's a scientific principle at play.

15:34If only a smart scientist would tell me what that is. All right. This next one, he's making a pretty strong case. I don't know if it's true or not, but how basic research actually gets to nuts and bolts inventions that save our lives. So this is, this is the strongest part of his case, probably. So let's hear it as to say. I'm not sure how much I clipped off coming in. Maybe he's talking about an old professor of his and what he's famous for. My college physics professor, the name is Ed Purcell. I took quantum physics from him. This was well after he had earned a Nobel Prize for what? For discovering a new physics phenomenon called nuclear magnetic resonance. This is what happens when he take the nucleus of an atom, suggest it to a strong magnetic field and you watch the effect on electromagnetic energy passing by it. Later on, medical technology say, wait a minute. If you can distinguish one atomic nucleus from another in this way, then maybe I can make

16:37images of the soft tissue of the human body in ways that X-rays do not reveal. Thus was invented the magnetic resonance image. The MRI. Its full name would really be the nuclear magnetic resonance image. That nuclear is one of the two end words, you're not supposed to use in polite company. Anyhow, MRI, arguably the most potent machine in the arsenal of the medical community to diagnose the condition of your body without cutting you open first. That came from the work of a physicist doing research on atoms and molecules, who by the way was deeply interested in atoms and molecules in space. That was his calling. That's what got him interested. And here he is doing research of person who has no interest in medicine. The intersections of the frontier, of the moving frontier in ways you cannot predict, is what defines our exponential growth in our science and technology that drives society.

17:42If you think science is some hidden activity done by every tower institutions just for the amusement of scientists to have nothing better to do with their brilliance, so therefore you don't really need them. What you really want are the engineers because they build stuff. And if you're an engineer, hired in a corporation with R&D department, what fraction of their money goes to R&D anywhere between zero and a few percent? All right, you're going to be tasked with making product that will show up in the quarterly report with promise of revenue. Well when you're doing science on the true frontier, there is no obvious pathway to revenue. Certainly not in the quarterly report. Definitely not the annual report. If you had a decade report maybe, maybe. I want you to go first in your substantive response. I just want to really quickly say I picked that to show Neil's strongest case and also

18:46to show an example of just how obnoxious he is in his communication style. And one more thing, if you're watching the video, he hates the private sector so much. He dismissively literally used scare quotes around R&D research. Like that's not even a real thing. And then he said companies use zero to a few percent at most of their budget on R&D. That's scare quotes. Like, you know, it's fake. Yeah. Okay, so I'll just bang out some stuff. So one thing is, yeah, just let me just take the direct one here that he's making it sound like there's no possible thing. So Bell Labs for example, I just googled that. Here's the major historical invention. The transistor 1947 invented by Jan Bardeen William Shockley and Walter Brayton launching the Solid-State Electronics Revolution information theory formulated by Claude Shannon, second

19:48of mathematical base for the digital age, the laser fundamental principles of first publishing patented by Bell Labs researchers, Unix and C developed by Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie and others. Cosmic micro round background discovered accidentally by Arnold Pennzie as Robert Wilson. And then they're not even, they don't even have the one shoot is the, it's in gambling. What is the optimal wager size? What is the, oh, the Kelly criterion? Yeah, I'm pretty sure let me just see right now. Kelly criterion, Bell Labs. Sounds like something they would look into. And now let's take a break for a totally organic conversation about a great company. Hey Adam, you're asking about fundraisers? You gotta check out the swan brothers, their stuff actually moves, hoodies, totes, the works. What makes them different? Frictionless, they spin up a clean, no cost online store that looks legit. Then they handle everything, design, print, embroidery, or engraving, fulfillment, shipping.

20:51You pick, they execute. So it's not just shirts? Way more, a parrow, drinkware, accessories. Premium brands start to finish without babysitting. So like who should be using them? Bans, gyms, events, companies, anyone who wants merch that sells and shows up on time. Fast turns, volume pricing. Check out thusswanbrothers.com slash cross. Okay, organic conversation over. Back to the show. Yeah, the Kelly criterion is a mathematical formula developed by John Kelly Jr. 1956 while working at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. And what's funny on that one is just to go, and he was working on, you know, articles for space. I mean, he didn't even have anything to do with the MR. He didn't care about human soft tissues. The Kelly criterion, which is among other things used by guys like Adam when they want to waste time and ruin their fortunes, that in the paper, it's amazing. If you go look up his original paper where he figured, you know, gets this optimal weight

21:56exercise, the thought experiment he was doing, what he was doing with the paper was he was trying to talk about reducing signal noise in wires. Like so you can see why that would be, you know, useful for AT&T to know that kind of stuff. And the math he was using, if I recall correctly, like just isn't a side that kind of just motivate like, as a thought experiment, let's say that you knew that you were playing this game in a casino and that you know, flipping a coin and you knew that it was a 55% chance that it was going to do this and you had that edge or something like that. And then you want to minimize hitting an upper or lower bound. I can see why that would be useful for signal transmission and gambling. Yeah. And so that's what it was because he was trying to say, imagine, I think, yeah, I'm so it's all coming back to me now. He was doing something like saying, let's say you're betting on horses and you're getting a tip kind of like in the sting, like from some outsider, but it's not a perfect wire. And there's some noise. So you have an edge and then how do you wager or it was something like that? And then he first solved it like just, you know, abstracting away from the physical mechanical

22:59problem and just in general, if you have to, you know, you have an edge against the house, but you're playing, what do you do? You know, about 100% because if you happen to lose your wiped out. So anyway, my point is just, you know, Bell Laboratories is famous for all those things that I just rattled off there such that they didn't even mention the one that I went to look it up for because they had like the transistor in the laser, which they arguably thought, this is probably more important. More people probably care about this than the Kelly criterion. So anyway, I'm just saying it's with all this stuff, it's, it's trade offs. It's, if they give the government funds them, then they go do it there. It's not that even general won't happen. So you know, but private corporations don't spend enough. Well, if you got rid of the IRS, I bet you they'd spend a lot more on R&D. No kidding. Yeah, I'd like to first of all, thank Bell Labs for giving me such a useful tool. And it is cool. The inputs are the size of your edge, the size of your bankroll and the standard deviation, you know, the measure of the variance involved in the particular gamble you're, you're encountering. I'd also like to point people to plus phones are pretty cool.

24:01Like in the 60s and 70s, I think people used to use those. Or the 60s even real. I don't know. Yeah, Neil deGrasse Tyson's argument that, you know, pure research funded by government is just the only way you're ever going to get anything. I'd like to point people to Matt Ridley's 2015 Wall Street Journal essay, the myth of basic science. That's also covered in a chapter on the evolution of everything. It just shows example after example of that not being true. Like the steam engine got invented. And then we started really focusing on, you know, thermodynamics. Another example I just jotted down industrial X-rays being used to really get a good look at fibers and the textile industry. That came before using the thing on DNA. We first started really looking into that. Over and over again, it's just what you would expect from human nature.

25:03People doing things in the real world trying to exact a real outcome produces really surprising results. The tell us things about the natural world. And then we spend time and money trying to figure out what the heck that was. Also just on that, sorry, you don't want your channel. No, yeah, yeah, I'm taking a pause. Just on that too, there was something he said, I forget his exact wording. But he almost like said, really what drives the exponential growth is when we have discoveries that were unplanned. You know, I mean, like the serendipity that the, and how could you possibly quantify something like that? You know what I mean? Like you're saying, like in general, would you say how much progress was from people deliberately doing things versus just, you know, serendipity and like, oh, wow. Who knew Panasillan would do that or who knew Viagra would have that effect? I think it was like originally for male pattern baldness or something and then they realized, geez.

26:05Who could focus on my hair at a time like this? So, you know, those things are true, but then there's also this irony. Panasillan was, what they trying to find something would reduce strokes or something. So blood vessel thing. I might be totally conflating things, but I thought it was originally for male pattern baldness and then I'm worried. Why would be just so obsessed with that topic, Bob? Well, certainly that more than the other, but so anyway, when you're talking next, I'll be looking that up. So the, but notice it's almost a contradiction. It's almost like he's saying what we have to do is fund things that we don't think are going to produce anything useful because then we're going to, you know, every once in a while. You know what I mean? It's almost like he's trying to have his cake and eat it too. And it's like, well, it sounds like you kind of do think you know what's going to be used or I know Neil. How about instead of you spending the budget, yes, steering it where you think, you know, how about we'll let Nick Fuentes do it? How's that? You know, or we're let Donald Trump pick like we, he has to spend $50 billion on science research, but he gets to pick what's gets funded.

27:12What do you think me and I bet you Neil wouldn't like that. Well, but I thought you just told us that no, we got to spend it where we have no idea. For all you know, when Donald Trump, you know, spends it on using bleach to cure COVID, that's going to do something and let us populate Mars, you know? I hope you can't say how we could say Neil. Yeah, I was going to hit that exponential growth. Okay, I'm done. I was going to hit that exact point. He said two things just so assertively, he gets them both backwards. The first one is what you just said, it's impossible to know where these great breakers are going to come from. That's why we have to have the government do it. But wait, if it's impossible to realize which research will lead anywhere, is the political process really the right methodology to decide where those funds go? And then he says just as if it's an axiom that all businesses, even the most successful and profitable and most intelligently run, run ones, well, they only think about quarterly statements, right? So it's impossible for a government or for a private company to be forward facing, you know, not like politicians are.

28:16And that just flies in the face of everything we know about well-run businesses before the United States government started crapping all over car production, automobile production with the cafe standards. Toyota used to spend 10 years tinkering with the design of new engines to get them right so that when they finally rolled them out, they'd last 300,000 miles. And it's the government that comes in and ruins R&D being forward looking like that because they're going to change the regulations every three years. And so I can't be forward looking because the government's just going to make my planning worthless. And he just politely says, you know, you know about private enterprise boy, they can't think past three months in a row. They're so myopic, not like us genius politicians. It's kind of nuts. Yeah, so good, good point there. And while you're doing it, I'm also going to acknowledge you were right. I was wrong. But it's interesting. You can see why I conflated things.

29:18So yes, it says Viagra was originally developed to treat cardiovascular problems like high blood pressure in angina. But I think what I got mixed up was sort of the opposite way that apparently Rogane was originally developed as an oral pill for high blood pressure. But then they found that oh, was causing unexpected hair growth. That's funny. And so that's what it was. So I think my made up story was better usually interesting. But yes, so shake a rattling proved it before we move on. I just want to you already said it, but I want to underscore it. The government takes all this tax money and throws it at the kinds of science it wants funded for political reasons. And it crowds out. I mean, we already get an incredibly large amount of private money spent on research and science. But think about how much it's being crowded out because the government's involved. That's it. Crouting effect. Just wanted to throw that in there.

30:20Yeah, here, let me on that point then. So in a, the, the Matt Ridley point you made or you know that I say was was good. And the specific point he made there about how the, you know, the cause of the other way around. And like you kind of have to know there's going to be some application first. And that really makes people flood into the pure theory of it. Another great name in this. If people want to see more than just, you know, abstract abstract points being swored from libertarian perspective, which nothing wrong with that. But to have specifics from history, Terence Keelings, his great, his last name is K E A L E Y. So I'm just reading here from he's got a, a Kato piece, a Kato on bound piece called the case against public science. It's really good. And let's see here. D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D. I'm just read a couple paragraphs here. It's a very long essay. He says the contemporary, by the way, when I was at Texas Tech, he came and gave a talk and it was one of the, you know, the most memorable ones.

31:21Like I'm all the talks I saw. I heard him speak. He's amazing. Yeah. Yes. Really stuck out both. Yeah, but he was a good presenter. But also the content was, you know, very interesting. But so here's from his K-O piece. The contemporary economic evidence moreover confirms that the government funding of R&D has no economic benefit. Thus in 2003, the OECD published its sources of economic growth in OECD countries, like it's an italics, that's a publication, which reviewed all the major measurable factors that might explain the different rates of growth of the 21 leading world economies between 1971 and 1998. And it found that whereas privately funded R&D stimulated economic growth publicly funded R&D had no impact. The authors of the report were disconcerted by their own findings. Quote, the negative results for public R&D are surprising. They wrote they speculated that publicly funded R&D might crowd out privately funded R&D, which if true, suggests the public funded R&D might actually damage economic growth. Okay. And so that he just goes on to that. But the point being that this isn't just us, you know, saying, oh, I don't like the government.

32:24And for all we know this could happen. Like, no, there's actually had been attempts from people who were in favor of government R&D spending. They were surprised by the results. And you know, went ahead and published it anyway. Whereas again, it shows privately funded R&D did tend to promote economic growth, which I said, you know, I guess Neil deGrasse Tyson would suit. Wouldn't be surprised by that letter finding it. Oh, yeah, you can trust private companies to fund research that is in their narrow interest. And so you, you know, you wouldn't be surprised other things equal. But I don't know how he would explain the finding that the public one, you know, arguably crowds it out. And in that sense, you know, retard's economic growth that that shouldn't be the case. He would say, well, maybe it wasn't a long enough time span. But I mean, it was what I say, 71 to 98. That's pretty long to be able to work. I would probably just yell at you for saying a retard. Oh, I was like, did I say that? But I said it differently. Yeah, you hit on this already, but I want to hit it again.

33:26It is condescending voice that you just heard us play. Tyson makes it sound like government funding of basic research is just this angelic truth seeking activity. But we know that's not true. Politics poisons everything. An ideology gets funded and perverted through the climate change scare lies about fossil fuels and energy. You know, how you how much energy can you get from all these things? How economic are they? The whole sex slash gender confusion. You know, all those tons of that stuff was funded by the government. You just mentioned the big one recently, COVID and epidemiology. What the science around pandemics and public policy are. All that stuff gets tons of government money thrown at it. And do you think that it's a truth seeking exercise when that happens? Or do you think it's normal politics doing the poisonous thing that politics does? Exactly.

34:26And then also even related to that, just like for example, if I can draw an analogy of how you could say, Hey, would it be a good idea for Stalin to be in charge of agriculture? And one approachable. Well, that's going to be inefficient because really if you think about it, decentralized ownership of farms and you have people trying different seed crops and blood, blood, different irrigation techniques that I bet you. That's all true. But then there's also, you know, the other elephant in the room. As to why that would be a bad idea. And so likewise here, and I don't just mean like they could make weapons that go, they go melt a bunch of kids with which they did do, by the way. That's not hypothetical. But beyond that, just what I mean is they can do all kinds of stuff like, you know, have speech codes on college campuses and say you can't criticize Israel. And how do they get away with it? It's not because they're going to throw you in prison. They can't do that. They would violate the First Amendment. It's because they have these huge, you know, grants and whatever that they can dull out and they can just say, Oh, if you don't play ball with us, we're going to cut your funding.

35:28And so for all these other reasons, you know, that's just one more reason why you don't want to give this kind of money and funding power to the government because they are going to abuse it. Yep. Very good points. This next clip we have of Mr Tyson is the longest one. And it probably is his core argument. He thinks not only are things going to be worse a little bit if we don't let the government fund science, but you know, our very nation is in jeopardy. And we're not going to be top dog anymore. If we don't, it's like the mob in a nice country you got there. You better give me a whole bunch of money and pay these scientists or something horrible is going to happen to it. He says it way more eloquently than I just did though. Within the last two years, we've lost more than 15,000 scientists from the ranks of the federal government. Not only that grant money from major funding agencies of the government has been reduced

36:29so that we have fewer scientists doing research on government funding. You look at the titles of some of the papers or the titles of the grant proposals. They have a research paper that may be 100 people in the world at most understand the title. And it's like, I don't see why that's relevant to anything. Therefore, I don't want to fund it. Let's cut it. And then you cut it and you look like you're saving money. When what you're doing is you're cutting out at the kneecaps, the future competitiveness of this nation in the three things that we care most about, our health, our wealth and our security. Because the history of that exercise tells us exactly that. The government loses 15,000 scientists. And if you think all the science we search you need to do is on the R&D ledger of a corporation, you are sadly mistaken. So what is happening?

37:30Our labs here in the United States. The funding is dropping. We can't sustain the lab. We can't sustain graduate students, postdocs. What's a postdoc? A person who gets a PhD and still has some energy and some creativity to do some research. They don't want to be a professor yet. So they get to spend three years, four years, six years doing just research in a lab. You don't have money for that as the person who runs the lab, the lab evaporates. Do you realize I have colleagues who've gotten a phone call from Germany, from France, from Spain saying, we've got a fully funded lab here. I know your expertise and I know you're running out of funding. Why don't you bring your whole operation to us? We're now getting cherry picked by other countries. Yeah, that's what we kind of did. For the second half of the 20th century, but now the tables are reversed. We're losing our scientific base. Europe understands what's going on. No else understands what's going on?

38:31China. Here's an interesting vignette about China. Initially, Chinese students came to the United States to study graduate subjects in the physical sciences. And they stayed. Me, while China is growing, China's economy is growing. They're putting, getting to act together. Have you seen pictures of Shanghai lately? Any part of it? This is a city of the future, right? So, me, while China is ascending, so what happens? The next generation of Chinese graduate students, because that first generation came and stayed. The second generation got trained and went back to China to build the next generation of graduate programs. The third generation of Chinese graduate students are not here, because they're being chained in China, and they're staying in China. This is a slide. It's not a cliff. If you fell off a cliff or pushed off a cliff, you would notice that. But it's a slide. And as we continue down this slide, an ascientist or cherry-picked,

39:33as labs are evaporating, as scientists are retiring and not replaced, there's an intellectual vacuum, scientific vacuum that is descending upon the United States. And that has consequences. I'm not here to tell people who to vote for, or what to vote for, or who your candidate is, has nothing to do with this. It has to do with an if-then statement. If you're okay with the United States losing its scientific leadership, especially in the physical sciences, if you're okay with that, you will get the country you voted for. That country is one where we will no longer innovate, because our greatest innovations are based on the frontier science that's way beneath them, hidden from the daily news reports, hidden from what you see and hear about as you surf the internet. That goes away. We lose the foundation of our innovations

40:33in the United States fades on the world stage. I don't think, you know, needs to worry. I mean, we're never going to stop funding gender studies in racial grievance scholarship. Yeah, so there, I mean, part of that is, I mean, for example, our MRIs only given to Americans. Exactly. That's what I was going to say. Right. You know, I mean, we could have had, we could have Germany inventing the dam, MRI machine for us. Yeah, so it's interesting that economists, if they're talking about like a public good, and you know, and that's a very specific, you know, technical term folks, it's not just a meaning like something that a lot of people would like or something like that. That like the problem with it is, is shirking that like, oh, the rational thing to do is to not contribute to it, let other people do it, then you get to benefit from it,

41:35right? So what he's, if Neil deGrasse Tyson, we're making the argument that it's immoral, that we're, you know, we represent X percent of the world's wealth. Right. And Donald Trump is just going to cut spending on science where, and so now these other countries around the world had to pick up the slack. And so we Americans are going to ride on the co-tales of all their hard work investment. That's a moral sort of like in the climate change debate, people would make arguments like that. You know, that we would say, well, geez, what's this is kind of crazy? I mean, China and India are cranking out CO2. How about we do it? And they're like, no, no, no, we have to take leadership. If everyone thought like we did, then nobody would do it. You know what I mean? So if that were the argument he's making, we could have that. And that would at least be coherent. But here he's, he's kind of saying that all of this basic research is still going to get done. It's just, I wish it was done by Americans here. Or not even by America. I wish it was done by Chinese people in America, rather than Chinese people in China. Like to figure out, you know, how to solve certain, you know, the Riemann hypothesis or something that we're going to come back to the mass stuff in the menifloeks.

42:35You know, I wish that would be done over there. Or that, you know, to solve quantum gravity. Oh, man, I don't want some Russian to do it in Russia. Oh, that'd be a bummer. I want somebody, I want a Russian to come to MIT and do it here. You know, because go, you know, USA. Like that's basically what he was saying there. Yeah, he's weird. He's half progressive and half nationalist. So it's a weird conflation. We touched on it before. To the extent that the oil de grass Tyson is right and basic science is an important thing and useful. Then I think it is our rich country. If the government would just stop taxing us and throwing our money away, our rich country with interested parties who care about such things would invest in it. And if, quote, unquote, winning, Merika, requires our government to steal the money from us and then politically assigning where the science funding goes in all the horrible directions it puts it as I described earlier.

43:37Well, then I'd rather lose. Fortunately, that isn't the trade-off. He's just this big government chill and he's not thinking very clearly. Just a wikin pace by say, what, how many clips of him do we have left? Him just one. Okay, and then we have the other one from Sabine. Yeah, we started getting so many clips. Just to mock him further, I was going to play that one where he got all discombobulated, talking to Steven A Smith, that trans-genderism in sports. And so he started really getting confused about what a man was and how he's 80% man one day and 20%, 20% the next. Gender is a spectrum, don't you understand? Neil de grass Tyson just comes pre-wired with these weird things. So patriotism is one of them. And another one is just this weird, progressive, he leftist collectivism that's just, it just makes a person look stupid. Sorry, Neil. But I didn't grab that.

44:38So we have one more of Neil and then the special one you asked me to grab. Okay. So yeah, well, are you able to play him out of order or is that going to violate your touring machine instructions? Can you play the Sabine one first or are you going to know? Do you know how, do you know how God ordered the universe? Do you think it's up to you to start to fiddle on around with that? And it's like, I was going to ask you to do that. I can, you're right. And he set it up so that I could. Yeah. So just to set the context here, so there's the Clay Mathematics Institute, folks, and it was established in 1998 through an eight-figure initial endowment provided by American businessman and philanthropist, Landon T. Clay and his wife, Levina, and they set up a bunch of prizes. Famous, unsolved math problems. And then you get a million bucks, you know, if you solve it. And so one of them was the Navier Stokes fluided equations. And this is the thing that's raging right now on social media

45:41about anthropic versus open AI and some two like mathematicians said they were on the cusp of solving it that it solved like a simpler version of it and they're, you know, tackling the big boy. And then, you know, Sam Altman just threw $20 million out of her something and now that's anyway, that's what we're talking about. And so Sabine, what's her name? Hoss Fetter. She is talking about, because she's lately been saying how she was going to use A to try to solve that anyway. And so she has a quick reaction. Her take was she, she sure that what they're purporting to be a proof and it's like 100 pages long or something and she's saying, obviously we got to wait for human mathematicians to go through and verify the thing to see if they actually solved, you know, the, the full blown deal to get the, to qualify for the money. But her take was that she's found that AI solutions to math problems a lot of times what it'll do is it will, it won't reach a false conclusion,

46:46but it'll give like a quote theorem that's implicitly assuming the thing it has to prove. But not an obvious way. It's like kind of smuggles it in. So it's not that it did something invalid, but it didn't really give you anything, you know, it didn't give you the result that you thought you were getting from it. And I've noticed that even an economic stuff where I kind of just go around in circles with cloths sometimes that are really hard modeling problem. And, you know, I think I got it and I'm like, wait a minute. Did you, what's that goes, yeah, well, I assume such and such. You can't assume that. That's what you know. So anyway, that's her take that she's concerned that this might not actually be it. But in any event, the opening 48 seconds of how she talked about this just nailed it. And I said this to Adam. I said, you got to, because the point here, of course, is we're saying this is private funding of pure math, right? Some businessmen set aside seven figures to fund this thing and everyone gets a million dollars, you know, in addition to the prestige and stuff. So this isn't, you know, just crazy. Like, oh, yeah, I could write a novel about, you know, libertarian land where people fund pure math

47:48problems. No, that's the world as we know it. That's what's going on. This stuff is famous. Okay, so let's play that clip, please. You got it. Open AI claims to have solved the Navier Stokes Millennium problem. It's not a secret that I've been working on the same problem in the past year without my eyes models. And I'm sure so have many others. So what are we to make of the solution? And is it really as useless as the critics complain? Let me say how that I've been struck by how extremely negative the reaction has been to the open AI proof. Like you think that mathematicians and physicists should be interested in how the proof works, how open AI managed to get it done, whatever can be done with it. Instead, everyone's complaining that open AI didn't leave it to humans. For decades, they've complained that private business has no interest in pure maths. Now their complaining private business does have an interest in pure math. All right. And there you go. So basically,

48:49people like to complain about private business. Yes, it makes it icky. Whether they don't fund it, whether they do fund it, nobody likes it. Yeah, guilty, guilty at step one. All right. This last clip we have of Neil, it's kind of a white bill. He's saying, you know, it's not too late. We can get our act together and start really supercharging funding of government funding of science. We just need a little help from, say, the Japanese or the Soviets. We won another example? December 7th, 1941, we're attacked at Pearl Harbor. Oh my gosh, we gather our resources, our scientists, our corporate infrastructures, our military. Do you realize we isolated the element plutonium in the year 1940? And within five years, it was weaponized. And that was the first atomic bomb ever detonated at Trinity site, New Mexico. Shortly after that,

49:49the duplicate was made, perfected, and dropped in warfare. All that happened within four or five years. Think today, how long construction projects take? You build a road, a bridge, other, they take five, six, seven, sometimes 10 years. When we're motivated, evidence shows we can rise up as a nation, as one nation, to achieve a goal. Provided we understand what that goal is, and we understand what methods, tools, tactic efforts and investments are required to stoke that goal. Yeah, I thought I thought a few seconds later, he talks about we did it again when we saw that the Soviets had put Sputnik in orbit. And if they could launch that and put it over our heads, then we need to get to the moon. And so we, we marshaled government resources and funded science and did an amazing thing. Yeah, so there's something

50:52ironic about like the ultimate trump card is to say, look it, we created the most horrible weapon designed to date and we used it on a bunch of civilians twice. Now you tell me government funding of science is a bad idea. You know, it's like, what? It may be wasteful and evil, but gosh darn it, Bob, it was impressive. Yeah. And then also when he then pivoted to, you know, the like building in contrast, look at building a road or a bridge, but history shown that when we're committed, and we know what the goal is and we know the methods and the tools and the tech, they think kind of glitch the technical resources, whatever to do it to achieve our efforts. Then so I guess when we want to build a road between A and B, we were just we're not sure what the goal is. We don't we don't know how to build a road. He also said that. What methods would you use to build a road or a bridge? So my point is no, it's giving government the prerogative to build things is a bad

51:52idea. And if you say, well, if they really, you know, if it comes to like defeating somebody who just bombed us and say, sure, if the state wants to protect itself, then yeah, it can make things work, but the state doesn't really care about building a bridge for you folks. So you can get to work earlier. They don't care about that. And so maybe giving them boatloads of money so they can spend it on advancing pure science and the interest of humanity when it seems like when it really works, it's when it's to go melt kids. But if it's building roads and bridges, no, that's also the paradigm example of how it doesn't work. So you just I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Notice he didn't say in contrast, go look at like like if Disney World wants to build internally like build a bridge or something so they can have, you know, snow whites train, take you from point A to point B, that takes them like seven years. No, it doesn't. They build it really fast because they're not using the government. That's why. So we're not proving the government funding of stuff works. But any stretch here, yeah, you, you laid out the solution right there and you're compliant. We just have to figure

52:53out a way if we want to use the government to build things quickly and efficiently to hypnotize them to thinking that a tunnel or a bridge will slaughter a bunch of innocent civilians in another country. If we just make them think that and they'll build that bridge, lickety split, right? Yeah. And so he did, we didn't have the clip there because otherwise, like probably would have gotten hit with a copyright infringement or something that the fair use because we would have, his episode was only 30 minutes folks and you know, we're, we've now already spent more than 30 minutes responding to him. And so it's exponential growth. Who could have predicted this? That he quoted, Ronald Reagan and they even played a clip of a speech where Reagan, I think it was like an 87 or something was talking about how, you know, we would, we would end this cold war and we would all get together and, you know, humanity would be united if we really thought there were an alien invasion, you know, that kind of stuff. And so, right, I mean, that's, I guess, that's, that's true. But again, it's, uh, we have to come up with a better way of organizing

53:58ourselves collectively. And what's interesting is one of the best examples that I use when I'm trying to show people you can have order without political coercion is science. Yeah. You know, nobody's in charge of science, even though it looks like Neil kind of wishes there would be. And yet, you know, so anyway, that's, uh, it's, yeah, actual science shows that you don't want the government in charge of it, let competition rain and order will result countless examples of private people funding stuff. Like the old model of, you know, the, the Renaissance painters and things like that, like they were privately funded. Yeah. They did some good work. They did a few memorable things. All right. Um, that's all good stuff. If Neil only took 30 some minutes, well, maybe we'll only take 40 some. Yeah. I don't know if this is a stretch. There was something about what he was just opening argument there about the thing it, it has to be that we don't know

54:59what it's going to produce. But then looking back, we know it reminded me of Dershowitz. And just, you know, like the important thing is we have to spend money going around invading and doing everything. And if you say that seems unnecessary, that just proves how necessary it is. Because I can look backwards. And if we had done it this one time, you know, I mean, there's something to hear about that where at the time, people thought, what you're researching, you know, particles and what are we talking about? That's not going to do anything. But we have an MRI machine 20 years later. You fool. Yeah. Every single waste, every single dollar I want to waste is going to give us the MRI or at least it would have if you stopped me. If it doesn't happen to pan out well. Oh, sorry, one last one too. There was something there too about I kind of made this point implicitly, but just to spell it out, hit us over the head with it, that he's trying to warn Americans, hey, if we don't get our act together, okay, it's better back up. For one thing is he was okay when America was brain draining the rest of the world. That was good. So was that bad for the rest of the

56:00world? Like, is that was that good for us? And we were kind of like, you know, hurting everybody else, or we have said, no, it just makes sense at any given time, one place is going to be, you know, the world's leader, however you rank it, you know, somebody's got to be number one. And that's where, you know, the best universities are going to be. And so, you know, blah, blah. So it like, this seemed like a very, you know, narrowly appealing to Americans argument. Does that mean that everybody else in the world should hope we fail in this? But beyond that, just in general, if we're trying to get Americans worked up for it, it can only be that, oh, because they're going to go do things that are, you know, narrowly beneficial to the people who discover it as opposed to just general, you know, things, you get them saying, because again, if it's just general stuff, like, oh, somebody figured out quantum gravity, we care where that's made or which person makes it, who cares? And so, but if it's something that, oh, no, because this is good, like you kept saying competitiveness. But the more specific you get there and like, try to convince America, no, no, the reason this is even in your narrow economic interest is because GDP

57:01well, there it's more and more, okay, so corporations could capture that and that does seem like something they would want to fund because they can tie, oh, our investment funding is going to translate into more sales down the road. You get what I'm saying? Like, he's trying to have his cake and eat it too there where he's saying, this is going to make you poorer, but on the other hand, but private companies wouldn't fund this stuff because it has no economic payoff. It's just, you know, all they care about is, you know, show me the bottom line here. So which one is it? Gosh darn it, Bob, if you keep talking like this, you're going to convince me that Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Frankensteinian Hodg Podge collection of ideological worldviews is in coherent and contradictory and doesn't make any sense. Is that what you're trying to do? It is, and I was just watching videos on the Navier Stokes equation, picturing Neil's ideas swirling around, are they going to have, you know, infinite kind of sensation and just blow up? They're good. Good stuff, Bob. Thank you as always. Thank you to the great Sheldon Richmond for recommending this topic in this video. Anything you want to say that'll find folks on the way out?

58:03Yeah, so I'll put links at them if you can send me that redly one, and I'll send you the Terrence Keely one, folks if you want to see because it really is besides us just zinging and coming up with, you know, quick one liners or one liners that take 52 minutes to get across. There's really like people who historians of science can go through and show that no this is just fake. This notion that oh it took government funding that historically places where there was like the fastest innovations were where they had relatively limited government stuff like that. Yep, it is a fact. All right, we'll do that and hey folks please visit my YouTube channel, Heyman Nature, spell it out or add Adam or watch a Michael Jackson video and like and subscribe all my videos so that my algorithm hugs me when I get home. Yep and my YouTube is at Bob Murphy and Cap so go check that out. Good stuff. All right, goodbye ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye Bob. We'll see you next time on another one of these here cross-pulled. So I'm going to see you. You've just experienced another episode of

59:05the Bob Murphy Show. The podcast promoting free markets, free minds and grateful souls. For more information and to subscribe to this podcast visit BobMurphyShow.com