Welcome to Brave New Planet. My name is Eric Lander. I'm your host for this new podcast, in the upcoming episodes, we'll explore frontiers of science and technology that are both exciting and challenging, artificial intelligence that's unleashing artistic creativity, but also enabling deep fakes that undermine truth. Democracy, a plan to modify the Earth's atmosphere to hold off climate change that might buy time or might keep us from solving the real problem. A new genetic technology for engineering nature that might prevent malaria but might get out of hand.

Computer algorithms that can diagnose diseases tell companies who to hire and judges how to sentence but might also automate or human biases. And we'll ask whether it's time to turn war over to robots. We'll look at the amazing upsides and also ask what could possibly go wrong. But for the short first episode, I thought I'd better explain who I am and why I'm here. I'm a scientist.

I grew up in New York City, a product of the public schools where I fell in love with math. Not long after I did my Ph.D. in mathematics, I became captivated by genetics, by luck.

That was just a few years before biologists began dreaming about reading out the complete human genetic code, all three billion letters of DNA. I got involved in this crazy idea called the Human Genome Project and became one of the leaders of that international collaboration as the work neared its end. I helped launch a research institute, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, that I still lead today to apply that same collaborative spirit to help a new generation of remarkable scientists propel the understanding and treatment of human diseases outside the laboratory.

I've always cared a lot about how science affects the world for eight years. I also cochaired the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for the Obama White House.

We got a chance to wrestle with some of the nation's biggest opportunities and problems, from energy to influenza, cybersecurity to aging.

And through it all, I've continued to teach intro biology to MIT students who every year restore my faith in the future.

But that future is on the line today in ways it's never been before, the decisions we make or don't make will affect us all for generations to come.

So to kick off a brave new planet, I wanted to talk with someone who has boundless curiosity and might help us think about what's at stake. I reached out to Malcolm Gladwell. He's the author of books like Talking to Strangers and Outliers and the host of the podcast Revisionist History. To my delight, he agreed to join us. Malcolm Gladwell, welcome to Brave New Planet. Thank you, Eric.

I am delighted to be here and fascinated to learn more about your new podcast. But before we get into it, I wanted to talk a little bit about you. I'm very curious about how your initial ideas about science were formed and why. What led you into this world in the first place?

You know, looking back, growing up in New York as a kid in the 1960s, it was pretty amazing. I was raised by my mom and we don't have a lot of money. But she figured out everything free and everything cheap that you could do, dragging us to museums. She let us stay home and watch all the space launches.

And then 1964, 65 was the world's fair, the New York City World's Fair. And that was amazing. There was this the Eunice Sphere, the big globe that was the symbol of the world's fair. It's it's the thing that gets destroyed in men in black at the end of the movie.

And there was a guy in a jetpack who flew over the Younus sphere and they told us all we would be going to work in jetpacks.

I still am waiting for my jetpack. But there were all these other things.

There was like the G.E. Carousel of Progress where they were singing. There's a great big, beautiful tomorrow. And there was Bell Labs premiering the picture phone and Dupont with its wonderful world of chemistry, which I think became the better slogan, better living through chemistry.

And they had this time capsule that they were going to dig up in 5000 years.

And it was also the era of Star Trek where everybody, all races and genders were going to go out together and boldly go. And so it was a period of like infinite possibility, amazing optimism about what you could do in the world. There are obviously lots of tensions bubbling under the surface. But as a seven, eight year old kid, I wasn't aware any of that yet. And so I think I was formed in this world that thought science was going to be incredibly important to progress.

And and the world was going to it was just going to become a better and better place.

I amazed, like your description of that, how frictionless your access to knowledge as a kid was seems to have been. I mean, all this stuff's on your doorstep like the New York's is. I mean, I don't know what subway you're taking or maybe a couple of buses, but but I mean, the point is, like, you don't have to have a lot of money. You're going to cost a dollar for kids to get in.

Yeah. Now, a dollar was worth more then. But still, you know, my mom dragged us 14 times to the World's Fair and it was twosomes 14 times.

I love you. Remember how many times? Oh, yeah. So you have this coming out of your childhood. You inherit this sense of infinite possibility. What happens to that sense as you get older? Is it still there? Well, it's interesting.

I mean, where does that sense come from of infinite possibility? It's no accident that the 1960s are like that.

It's after World War Two, where science played a big role in winning the war. You know, radar, early computers, penicillin and, of course, atomic bombs.

And the U.S. makes this decision after the war that science is going to be a cornerstone of society going forward, that we're going to fund science at universities and we're going to train people and we'll have this virtuous cycle of public knowledge producing technologies and cures and companies.

And then, of course, nine months after I'm born, Sputnik goes up.

I don't remember it, but I know it was exactly nine months after I was born. And like everything goes into overdrive. Science is central to the survival of the country. We pass was for science education. We start the space race to get a man on the moon first.

So, you know, this is the world that shaped that New York City of the 1960s was the sense that science was going to discover what's true, technology was going to figure out what's possible, and society reaps the benefits.

And that assumption, that idea that the scientific method, you know, you figure out what's true by evidence, not authority.

It's all about honesty, not advocacy.

There was a set of assumptions that. Underlay that world where this country really bought into the ideas of science and it paid off amazing dividends, you know, through the rest of the 20th century, you think about all the things that happened from what had to have been a bit of a crazy bet.

The U.S. didn't invest in science a lot before the war. But afterwards, you look at the things that started happening.

You get polio vaccines, measles and smallpox vaccines.

You eradicate smallpox and you get computer technology and the Internet and GPS systems.

And like Google searches come out of a National Science Foundation grant and then molecular biology and gene cloning and this human genome project I got very involved in and onward and onward and onward.

And you get these industries that grow up around all these things.

So I think it paid off in huge ways.

And what's interesting is it's only accelerated since then in terms of the science, even though there are a lot of tensions.

You know, from the point of view of the science, you look at the last two decades or so and you start seeing, you know, artificial intelligence. We can translate languages by computers and spot lung cancers by computers.

And people are making self-driving cars and quantum computers and and in biology, you have, you know, new therapies for cancer immunotherapies and and this human genome project where we spent three billion dollars to read one genome, it now costs a couple hundred bucks to read a genome. There are technologies that let you edit genomes like CRISPR and just keeps going and going.

And I think if anything, it's accelerating in terms of the science and the impact on society.

I'm just curious, Eric, you've chosen to do this now. Is there a reason why now? I mean, you could have done this five years ago. You could have done this five years from now. So something compelling you at this moment in time?

Yeah, absolutely. It is so glaringly obvious that we are going to need science to solve a lot of the problems ahead.

You know, climate change, it's in our face right now. It was theoretical to people, but the last three or four years, it's so obvious we're going to have to solve that. The pandemic that we're living through right now, it's clear there's no way to solve pandemics without a lot more science than we've brought to bear on it so far.

And then I think about things like Alzheimer's. It's going to be costing us a trillion dollars a year as the U.S. ages. And we really don't know how to do anything other than support people. So we've got to come up with solutions and those solutions have got to come from science. I could go on and on.

And so it seemed like a moment when we just had to decide, are we going to rally the world together around science? It's Matt Damon's famous line from the movie The Martian when he's stranded on Mars and he knows nobody's coming back from soon. And he says, I guess there's only one option. I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.

We're going to have to do that right now.

And I think the last several years have made that so apparent.

We really have to reconnect between science and society because that connection is going to be so important going forward.

Do you think if you were an eight year old today, you would have to describe what your eight year old self today would think if it was in the same sense of infinite possibility?

I think there's a frustration right now, a sense that that we're not doing all we can with this.

And there's a lot of reasons for it.

The bright shininess of science would discover the truth and technologies would show us what's possible and and society would reap the benefits.

That simple social compact is getting frayed in some ways, and there's a lot of different ways it's getting frayed.

It's not surprising that after sixty years, things would would begin to get a little tattered.

But, you know, if you think about it, science sometimes conflicts with economic interests. We began to see that companies might start attacking science because they really don't like the answers. I think the first case was when it became clear that cigarettes cause cancer and tobacco companies decided to pay people to put up smoke screens and question the evidence. And then, of course, climate change is where we see it most today, where despite massive amounts of evidence, the solutions just deny it.

You know, we've got massive wildfires in California and we've got wildfires. A couple of years ago above the Arctic Circle, we got glaciers retreating. Powerful hurricanes, you know, the last six years, the hottest years in history, and people just say, well, you know, nothing to see here, that's all just a fluke.

And I think that that ability to to not even have to engage is one tension that we're trying to deal with right now. Is is there a shared assumption that we have to deal with the evidence? But then there's other things.

I think on science aside, sometimes science just seems to overpromise and sometimes probably does overpromise. There are people who say, wait, wait, wait a second, I thought you were curing cancer. How come cancer is not cured yet?

I think going overboard on promises and not giving people a sense of the fact that, yes, science is amazing, but it takes a while to deliver, can backfire.

And I think I think there's also people who, you know, just want answers to things and science doesn't have answers for them and they got to go seek them somewhere. Yeah.

Is it is this kind of these kinds of worries? What led you to want to do a podcast? Well, exactly.

You know, I think this compact between science and society is so important, it's getting tattered and we have to do something about it that requires drawing more people into hard problems in science. We can't we can't ignore the fact that the problems are hard. Sometimes these bright, shiny futures that that we talk about, we really get instead dystopian outcomes. Things really can go wrong the better. Living through chemistry can turn into toxic waste.

The Internet that supposed to give us all the world's information can bring us this information.

You know, social media, it's supposed to bring us together, can tear us apart. I know you're you're really interested in these topics yourself.

And I think there are times when when there's just been failures of imagination to think about what could possibly go wrong, whatever the compact was, the 1960s, where you kind of left it to the scientists and the politicians to work it all out, we're now going to need everybody on board.

We're going to need to open this up to more people and recognize that science might have a lot of answers about the science, but we're not going to have all the answers about how it should be applied in the world.

And that was really the heart of the podcast.

If we really are now all the stewards of a brave new planet, then we got to figure out how to draw everybody in on that and open it up.

Would you describe yourself still as an optimist? Oh, I am a tremendous optimist, in spite of lots of evidence to the contrary, because in the end, I really don't see any alternative.

So I am I am a very realistic optimist. I think we're going to need to fight for truth. It's not a gimme like it might have been half a century ago. I think we are going to need to bring everybody in to help make decisions about how we should use this. It's not going to be easy. And, you know, there's nothing about the podcast that's advocating and specific answers to anything.

It's it's really meant to model smart, thoughtful, passionate people struggling with what do we do with our future.

And so it's meant to invite people into that because, you know, in my most optimistic self, that's how we make it through is is we we all work together to struggle through hard problems that have amazing upsides, maybe big downsides.

And together we make it through. And, you know, these are things that they're just too big to fit in a tweet. And I'm really interested.

I know you are in in ideas that are too big to fit in a tweet, but will end up shaping the future in a big way. And so that was the heart of the podcast.

Has there been a moment maybe not doing this podcast, but when you're dealing with other scientists in fields, not your own, is there ever a moment when you're over your head where you say, I have no idea what these guys are talking about?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Frequently there were occasional times I was really deeply an expert in the subject. But, you know, many, many other different things. You know, I'm not an expert. And so I think what I had to learn was the right kind of scientific humility to ask dumb questions and say, what exactly does that mean? Yeah. And you can learn a lot from that.

Yeah. Yeah, I am. I am. That is a lovely place to and I'm in total agreement with you. I think the key to being an effective journalist, explainer, podcast, host, whatever, is the willingness to ask really dumb questions. Indeed. Thank you so much. This I cannot tell you how excited I am to listen to this and how delighted I am that you. You, of all people have decided to to tackle this subject, it's it is greatly needed.

OK, Malcolm, thanks so much for helping us kick off this first episode.

Thank you, Eric. And to all of you listeners, come join us for episode two, where we'll hear President Richard Nixon console a grieving nation about the tragic outcome of America's failed mission to land a man on the moon.

Good evening, my fellow Americans. Fate has ordained that the men went to the moon to explore and peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Overton, know that there is no hope for their recovery. Deep fakes next time on Brave New Planet. Brave New Planet is co-production, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Pushkin Industries and The Boston Globe with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our show is produced by Rebecca Douglas with Merridew theme song composed by Ned Porter, Mastering and Sound Design by James Gava, fact checking by Joseph Fridmann, Anna Stitt and Enchante.

Special thanks to Christine Heenan and Rachel Roberts at Clarendon Communications. Sally McGuire, Kristen Zerilli and Justin live in our hands at the road to Mia Lobell and Heather Fain and Pushkin, and to Eli and Edy Broad, who made the Broad Institute possible. This is Brave New Planet. I'm Eric Lander.