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- [00:00]
Unknown Speaker 1
I don't know about you, but the number one thing I look forward to when I return from traveling is a good night's sleep in my own bed. That has never been more true than it is now that I have a Sleep number Smart bed. I get so sore after traveling on planes, but after literally one night in my Sleep number smart bed, my body feels restored, rested and relaxed. The fact that my bed actually listens to my body and adjusts to my needs to keep me sleeping soundly all the way through the night is worth it alone. Not to mention, my husband and I never need to argue over firmness because we can each dial in our own sleep number setting. Why choose a Sleep number Smart bed? So you can choose your ideal comfort on either side. And now for a limited time, Sleep number Smart beds start at $849. Price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Exclusively at a Sleep number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
- [00:51]
Naomi Ekparigan
Hey, this is Naomi Ekparigan, co host of the podcast Couples Therapy. I wanted to talk to you about Boost Mobile, the newest 5G network in the country. Boost Mobile' new network delivers customers the speed and service they'd expect from the Big three, plus groundbreaking benefits you'd only get from a true challenger in the industry, like letting people try the network risk free for 30 days and offering a $25 per month unlimited plan that's guaranteed to never go up in price. So visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or find them online@boostmobile.com.
- [01:29]
Jane Marie
I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream. Today you'll hear a familiar voice, that of an experimental particle physicist who joined us in season two when we were talking about whether magnets and frequencies had anything to do with wellness and our health.
- [01:47]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
My name is Dr. Leon Balman Dud. I am a former academic who used to work at the CC in Paris and at CERN in Geneva as an experimental particle physicist. I finished my PhD sometime in between 2018 and 2019 and since then I transitioned into the world of data science. Previously I was working as a data scientist for an automotive reselling company and currently I am a senior market research analyst for a tech market research company.
- [02:23]
Jane Marie
He's back to discuss how our current administration here in the US is super anti science but dressing it up as racism and classism and sexism and scienceism Is that? Is scienceism a word? You've been on the Dream before I have.
- [02:59]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I wrote a very angry email about your aunt's bogus science pamphlet and as a result you decided to invite me on for some reason.
- [03:07]
Jane Marie
We spoke on the dream about frequencies.
- [03:10]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
We did. And magnetism.
- [03:11]
Jane Marie
And magnetism and all of those nonsense ideas as it pertains to the medical world today. I wanted to talk to you because I saw you had written something about the banned words list that Trump put out and there's a really nice kind of summary of it on the New York Times website, but backing up a little bit. The banned words list is about public facing government websites here in the US and other not just websites, but publications and public facing communications from the US Federal government. They all seem to apply to, for lack of a better word, like woke concepts. But tell me how you understand it.
- [04:04]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
So I will add the caveat that I am aware that the creation of the list is effectively like a kind of fascist thought crime against various aspects like sociology, psychology, geography, biology. I'm aware the list is designed explicitly to eradicate the study of what they consider woke, what I consider science. When I say this in the caveat, it's because I think this idea is as stupid as it is hateful. It just immediately smashes into the hard sciences, like the physical sciences, which they all claim to like adore. Like every billionaire and rich person and, and lunatic type person says I should. I could have been a physicist or I could have done physics. I don't know. I don't care if they could have done physics. They didn't do physics. Doesn't matter.
- [04:49]
Jane Marie
Yeah, exactly.
- [04:52]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
The because like and as we've seen, like we've seen examples how like how the word band list is so stupid like it catches like Enola Gay as like too woke. Like yes, the plane used to drop atomic bombs is woke because it has.
- [05:06]
Jane Marie
The word gay in it.
- [05:08]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, it's a badly designed. Because all these things are badly designed. There's no way to do these that aren't badly designed. But if you just apply those words, you do catch a lot of physical sciences I think just based on discrimination. If you're looking at results and you want to understand, interpret the data but you know there's loads of things that are going to impact that. So if you're measuring the magnetic field, you know that the building, the electronics passing planes can impact the magnetic fields. So you might write a paper talking about how you discriminate or the discrimination of two signals. It's a basic thing that I've written things about diversity. If things are different, you might have to explain why they're different. So you might talk about the diversity of something. I know I have Friends who study galactic dust.
- [05:56]
Jane Marie
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's galactic dust? What are you talking about?
- [06:01]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
So basically, obviously most of the stuff in our galaxy is clumped together into stars and planets and asteroids, and that's how most things look.
- [06:12]
Jane Marie
But then there's little bits of dust all over the place.
- [06:17]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah. So obviously you have nebular things, which is where stars form, which are just big collections of quite dense amounts of dust. They're just bits that will eventually coalesce together into like a new star. But you also just have dust everywhere. And why you think like, oh, if I look across like to another star, like to my human eye there's not much dust, but when you look across like the entire like multiple galaxies, you're looking like a billion years into the past. The dust is just annoying. Like it's just things that block and bounce light. So you have to be able to understand and study them and like know how to deal with them. Also the kind of interesting, like why, why is the dust here?
- [06:50]
Jane Marie
Is it similar to when you get a ray of light into your bedroom and you're laying in bed and you see all this stuff in the air and you're like, oh, I can only see the stuff in the air because of exactly the angle of the light? Right.
- [07:01]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Now that is the perfect analogy. Collected dust is like seeing cat hair floating in your room. It's exactly that.
- [07:08]
Jane Marie
Okay.
- [07:09]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah. So for example, if you have multiple things that are interesting or multiple, let's say look at early stars, for example, because it's a thing people. I found a direct example of someone talking about this. But you might talk about the diversity of star forming conditions. So like, what is the diversity of self implications? So like you have, you have nebula, you have like the like the kind of offshoot of a supernova and stuff. Like there's loads of things that are like do a thing. So you might talk about the diversity of methods or the diversity of causes or diversity of like thoughts involved. And if you just apply a very stupid filter, you're just going to catch a bunch of these people who are just talking about like stars like it's not a thing that they care about. Like Musk himself obviously claims to love space. He doesn't love space, but he claims to love space and he just gonna catch a bunch of these people doing these things.
- [07:59]
Jane Marie
I'm looking at the list right now and I haven't looked this critically until speaking to you right now because I didn't know that this would be a problem until you said something about it. It's so stupid. But there's like one of the words is a barrier. That's every type of physical science would talk about barrier. Like a cell has a barrier.
- [08:23]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
And barriers are really interesting in science. If you think about the barriers are the point between two different situations. The barrier of a cell is fascinating because obviously inside the cell you have the cell and outside the cell you don't have the cell. So that barrier is fascinating. In physics, barriers are very cool because they're good ways of modeling systems. Is like considering normally we talk about systems as being infinite because it makes the maths easier. But when you don't have an infinite system, you have a barrier and therefore the barrier becomes the interesting thing. So typically, if you happen to decide to read university level physics books, they're thrilling reads. I promise you'll notice that we model most systems as infinite, like a rod of infinite length, a sheet of infinite size, a ball of infinite volume. The reason we do this is because the physics is way easy. We don't have to consider edge effects.
- [09:18]
Jane Marie
And what do you mean by system?
- [09:21]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
So if you want to understand, if you want to try and model how electricity works at a kind of actual particle based level, you want to think about individual electrons moving through a wire, for example, and you want to think about how they affect electrons in a wire that's a centimeter away. If you have an end to the wire, you've suddenly got a bunch of problems because, oh, where do electrons go at the end of the wire? Do we have to consider the kind of resistance from the end of a wire or the resistance of the thickness of the wire being different in different places and so on and so forth. So you just kind of treat them as these simplified systems because you make them infinite. You don't have to deal with these problems because there is no problem on this front. So you can then just model it like a very, very pure mathematical sense rather than as an actual engineering problem.
- [10:08]
Jane Marie
Yeah, and so the barrier word would come up when you're trying to create a more closed observation, when you're trying.
- [10:17]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
To make a more realistic observation and a more accurate one. Engineers will use them all the time. But for example, in my thesis there's a kind of concept of why is there more matter than antimatter? And one of the issues suspicions is like, well, if you have certain arrangements of barriers and boundaries, you can have physics reactions that defy the laws of physics as we understand them. Right now it's hypothetical, it's like mathematical approach. But that's discussion of barriers and boundaries. Boundaries also a word they probably don't like because, you know, breaking boundaries. There's just loads of, like, physicsy things that just, like. And then physics, engineering, like, mathematics, like, they all just run into these words because the word list is stupid. It's just fundamentally stupid.
- [11:09]
Jane Marie
I just saw one on the list that says biologically female, and I'm like, oh, so we can't do any? As always, no science on women.
- [11:23]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah. So when I did that caveat at the beginning to talk about how this is fascist for crime, the point of that was this is. This is explicitly eradication of women and LGBT people and racial minorities. The purpose of this is to deny their existence.
- [11:37]
Jane Marie
And I think we all understand that. Like, they don't like women or people of color or gay people or transgendered people or, you know, there's definitely that side of the fascist coin. But the thing I found interesting is that you're also just erasing all scholarship.
- [11:58]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
You can't do scholarship when you're, like, dancing around these. These words.
- [12:04]
Jane Marie
I have the list pulled up on my phone. I mean, there's so many words. It's, like, crazy how long this list is. But let's go through the words that would, if they were erased from scholarship, really create a problem in how scientists communicate or historians or anyone who's thinking about the world.
- [12:27]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
So for experimental scientists, status is a fundamental word. You can't exist without the word status. In some things, it's so core to understanding. Just you can't frame as an experiment of physicist. All of my citations are papers that begin the word status, because it's status of the G bar experiment or status of the proton pipeline. It's all status because that's how a lot of experimental physics is done. It's these boring reports that no one really reads, but they exist because they're a record of how experiments were done so that people who can replicate them or understand where they came from, I would have no citations, basically, which would be a great record of my participation.
- [13:06]
Jane Marie
Well, you don't live here, so you're safe.
- [13:10]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, we gave up on that idea, at least for the next four years.
- [13:16]
Jane Marie
But, yeah, I'm looking through. Oh, my God. This is my first time really taking a good look at this female. Female's feminism.
- [13:25]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah. So no biology.
- [13:27]
Jane Marie
No biology. We can't study biology anymore. Okay. Or we can study it, but we can't communicate it to other people. I'm sorry. I keep laughing, but it's.
- [13:37]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, we can't talk about. You Know agriculture because, like, you know, one of the departments that got, like, eradicated on like, day one of like, Musk and his little fasci troops, like, going in and destroying everything was like a bunch of like, soybean institutes or like corn institutes, which sound boring as hell.
- [13:53]
Jane Marie
No. Say more about that. I grew up on a soybean farm.
- [13:57]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
So there was day one, day two, whatever, when they were slashing and burning everything they could. I have a bunch of scientists on LinkedIn and a guy came across my feed saying after 45 years of work at the Soybean Institute or some equivalent name, I've been let go by the funding cuts. And for 45 years we've worked on making sure that every year there is guaranteed seeds that are known to be resistant, that we can have high yield so we can export to the world. Like, we can make sure that soybean, like, growth in the Americas is good. That globally it's good, that like, there's a, like, baseline crop because it's so important to so many people's, like, basic diets. Like, this is what he did for 45 years. And I mean, a bunch of these papers talk about, like, female and male because they have to talk about, like, the concept of breeding plants. Like, it's so basic things that you just like, slash and kick your way through without realizing what the hell you're doing. Corn is basic. America basically runs on corn, like, after oil. Corn is like the second fuel of America. So you had, you had both of them. You could see, like, I have a few friends have done the road trip across America as like a foreigner. And they say, like, when you hit to certain parts of America, it's just like corn for, like, as far as you can see for like, Iowa. Yeah. A day of driving and you see nothing but corn because. Because, like, your government, for whatever reason, you can debate that afterwards. It's like, has like, decided to like, subsidize corn growth, which is, which is great for, you know, having a basic level of like, of calories and like, fuel in the country. But, like, the people who make sure that exists, like, are like, nationally funded. Like government scientists just to keep things going. And their papers have the word like, status and diversity and female and male, like, because they have to. Because that's how you talk about goddamn agriculture. Like, it's so basic stuff. Like, I can't get my head around, like, just the anti, like, science rhetoric of these people who claim to be scientists. And it's just, it's maddening. I don't know how they can function.
- [15:50]
Jane Marie
Yeah, no, I'm looking at a word orientation. Do you have any examples of that?
- [15:55]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Do you remember your delightful and actually much better explanation of how an MRI machine works in our episode from season two?
- [16:02]
Jane Marie
Sure.
- [16:03]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
That's all about the orientation of magnetic poles and fields. It's like physics again. It's magnetic magnets, electricity, orientation. It just comes to the. Also just like, I think like I was looking at like papers like my wife did a degree in urban planning, so like I saw a lot of the stuff she was reading and I'm pretty sure orientation captures a whole bunch of like urban planning stuff, which I think they also think is woke. So I think it's fine. But yeah, no, it's madness. It's madness across the board.
- [16:29]
Jane Marie
This is fun. And I just want to keep going. I'm just going to keep throwing out words that are on this banned word list.
- [16:34]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Go for it.
- [16:35]
Jane Marie
Okay, how about diverse? We're not supposed to use the word diverse. If we're government employees that do any sort of publication and publish anything on any government website, it can't have the word diverse. And when it does, it gets removed.
- [16:51]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
As I said, the obvious cause of it is clear. We've talked about that, but it's just that it catches everything. Let's say you have a paper about even an evil paper. Let's have a say how do we increase police effectiveness? Because that's papers people write. You can't mention that you have a diverse approach to this. Like, you can't mention that. Like we can try like three different ways to like commit like human rights violations. Because that's not allowed to be said. Because it has diverse in the ties.
- [17:18]
Jane Marie
Right?
- [17:18]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
It's even on the, even on the stuff that's bad. Like it catches it because it's, it's just.
- [17:23]
Jane Marie
Well, the diverse list here is so long and it has like diversified, which I think is probably very important to.
- [17:29]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Science and finance and economics and all those, all those tech Bros. Can't diversify their stock portfolio.
- [17:35]
Jane Marie
Right.
- [17:36]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Because it's not allowed. It's a woke word.
- [17:43]
Jane Marie
Let's see. Hang on, I'm just going to keep going here. Identity is on here.
- [17:50]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I think it's a whole bunch of mathematics, which is the field of identity. It means something obviously very different how we'd imagine it. But also a whole bunch of programming and computer vision is based on identity recognition, identity, so on, so forth. Like a whole like stuff that like these people even would claim to like is being called by this because words have value and meaning and they don't like that because they're not good at words.
- [18:16]
Jane Marie
What about the word excluded?
- [18:19]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
So I had the famous, like Pauli Exclusion principle, which is like a kind of core part of physics, which I'm going to get wrong. So I'll come back to explain what it is in a second because my brain is refusing to remember which one is which.
- [18:34]
Jane Marie
No one but you would be able to tell Liam. I just want you to know, literally, you're the only person in the room that would know the difference.
- [18:42]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I think Pauli Exclusion principle is that at quantum states, you can't have two items in the same two objects in the same state. So therefore you get inherent energy levels forming because you can only have two electrons in this state and then two electrons in the other state, and so on and so forth. But I also had to look through how this list applied. They mentioned that the title and the Abstract are the two areas they look for these words. So as far my reading could be was that they would look in the title, the Abstract and the grant occasionally for these words. So the title is like the main title of the paper. Mostly they're really boring titles, but often, occasionally you get a funny one. But the Abstract is effectively like a very good summary of what the paper says to the point where it'll often introduce the topic, give a little bit of context of what they did, and then often just give the results in the abstracts. If you're trying to read papers fast to find the ring you're looking for, abstracts are fundamentally key to being able to go and do that. Which the big question that actually comes from it, which I mentioned with the exclusion thing, was that if people have to start being incredibly careful about how their abstracts are written so they don't get just like blocks, you make it impossible to use these papers for the actual value. If you can't say excluded, so you can't point out, oh, we excluded X, Y and Z, which also comes with a bias. We excluded X, Y and Z biases from the statistical methods. Can't write any of those words. You can't make a paper that's actually usable to someone to just looking for what they're looking for. And then obviously the funding grant stuff, you have to be really, really clear in your grants when you're asking for money, like what you're going to do, how are you going to do it? How are you going to make sure the results are usable if you are doing a survey? Because I do loads of surveys now, it's a wonderful part of my job. You have to say, how do you remove bias? How do you make sure the survey isn't biased? And that's not saying, oh, how do you make sure that it's right or left wing? It's how do you make sure the survey vaguely looks like the people are trying to survey? It's really simple stuff like that. But you.
- [20:46]
Jane Marie
Or looks like science.
- [20:48]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Like, yeah, like even, even like market research. Like we have to, we have to weight our data to make sure it kind of looks like reality. Because like it's really easy to recruit people to do surveys who are college students, for example, because they need money and they're desperate. But a college student bears no resemblance to like the general population of America. So you then have to kind of weight it. Like you find, like you might have a few. Everyone who's like bipart in that survey might get weighted slightly higher. White men might get weighted slightly lower. Like you kind of mix and match and that's how you account for bias, to like try and make your results more like universal or applicable. And if you can't talk about doing that, you can't do science.
- [21:25]
Jane Marie
Right. So let's say you can't use the word excluded in a paper and also let's reference this list. What's another way you could possibly say that that would be useful? Oh, it probably would be left out and then you have the word left in there.
- [21:47]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, yeah. And you can't have left or like maybe ignored. Like maybe they like ignored or cancelled.
- [21:54]
Jane Marie
We cancelled this status. Status is on here.
- [21:58]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I found it on one list. Maybe the list was wrong.
- [22:01]
Jane Marie
I see it right here. Yeah, or you say status. I'm so sorry, but my act has.
- [22:06]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Also been bastardized by living out on the continent for so long that I've lost all sorts of sense of what's right and wrong. But as I said earlier, most of my citations are on papers that begin with word status. And the thing that's really damaging about this list is that I think I talked about this before when we had our discussion about scientists, but science is written in this kind of slightly odd academic language. But the reason we do it is because it's really efficient. Rather than saying that, oh, we balanced for blah, blah, blah, blah, we balanced our responses so that they better reflected the basis of reality. Scientists will just say we excluded fraudulent responses and we remove bias, we remove sampling bias. They'll just use those words very quickly, basically just saying that we removed responses that don't look like they're realistic. And then we applied some weighting or some statistical methods to try and account for the fact that sampling is really difficult. You can say all those words or you can just say excluded, fraudulent response and Debias data.
- [23:09]
Jane Marie
Right?
- [23:10]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Excluded has the same principle. You'll say excluded so people know exactly what you're referring to. Excluded means this thing has been removed from the problem. We have made sure that we guarantee this can be excluded from our results. You can disagree with us, but we think it can be the case. And once you take excluded like, what other words have the same power? Like, does left out have the same word as excluded? Like just removed or ignored? No, they don't have the same meaning. And when you start smashing our words to pieces, like this is the problem. No one knows what the hell they can say anymore because it's just like stupid words, right?
- [23:43]
Jane Marie
I mean, yeah, I'm looking also like polarization. But yeah, institutional, key groups or populations. You know what time it is, guys? It's time for spring break. Which as an adult means really nice luggage, nice suitcases, tote bags. I get mine from Quint's. I also get my travel outfits from Quints. Linen twin sets and such and a nice cable knit sweater that I use for a blanket when I'm cold on the airplane. For your next trip, treat yourself to luxe upgrades you deserve from quince. Go to quince.com the dream which helps this show stay alive. We're independent now. Go to quince.com the dream for 365 day returns. That's a whole year that you get to send something back but you're not going to. Plus free shipping on your order. That's quince.com thedream to get free shipping and a full year of returns. Quint.comthedream.
- [25:06]
Unknown Speaker 2
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- [25:35]
Unknown Speaker 1
I don't know about you, but the number one thing I look forward to when I return from traveling is a good night's sleep in my own bed. That has never been more true than it is now that I have a sleep number. Smart bed. I get so sore after traveling on planes, but after literally one night in my Sleep Number Smart bed, my body feels restored, rested and relaxed. The fact that my bed actually listens to my body and adjusts to my needs to keep me sleeping soundly all the way through the night is worth it alone. Not to mention, my husband and I never need to argue over firmness because we can each dial in our own Sleep number setting. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart bed? So you can choose your ideal comfort on either side. And now for a limited time, Sleep number Smart beds start at $849. Price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Exclusively at a Sleep number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
- [26:26]
Paige
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- [27:05]
Jane Marie
Will the stone affect the way that scientists communicate or just the with each other? Or just how they can disseminate information to the rest of the population.
- [27:20]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
If they are able to actually force this new like banned word list onto scientists in America? I think we are looking at a generational level damage to science in America with decades of damage to medical physics and climate research.
- [27:42]
Jane Marie
Let's talk about the levers there if you don't mind for just a second. I imagine when I'm thinking about that that students in universities or high school would not be able to find scholarly articles or paper or previous research for them to build their research on.
- [28:03]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Correct. Okay, from my imagination is at every level you destroy the ability for America to build science and scientific innovation. You terrify professors from being able to do research. You strangle the ability for academics and researchers to get money to do research, which means there's just less research happening.
- [28:28]
Jane Marie
Meaning how would that happen? Like you couldn't write your grant request correctly or yeah, okay, yeah, they're already killing all the grants separately. That's a different initiative.
- [28:39]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, like they killing the grants separately. But also I think people often like, I think as movies like if you have a movie physicist, they're a particle physicist and an astronomer and a material physicist and like, I don't know, thermodynamicist as well in Reality, academics are really, really specialized. Like, you do one thing really, really well. So if you spent your entire academic career doing epidemiology of black communities in Michigan and the impacts of like disproportionate impacts of health on these people, you cannot really transition to doing something that they will consider acceptable because your whole education system is in this, like really, really, really detailed level of knowledge. So you can't get money to do this. You can't teach people to do this because you're not allowed to. Like, you don't have money to be your professors, you have no money to teach. You can't train new scholars on this skill because there's just no way to get funding for research to do this. People who are interested in studying these sorts of things can't come to America or can't come to your colleges to study this thing. So therefore you lose a whole new generation of scientists that want to do this thing. Foreign students don't want to come to America outside of the lack of funding because they're going to get black bagged if they disagree with America and disappeared to Louisiana in the middle of the night. And the more stressful thing that I think I try to be patient with Americans in general when I talk about this is that if America cuts its science budget by a huge swathe, the rest of the world is not picking up the bag. We just don't have the money worldwide to do the level of research that America does. France is upping its research spending. I think the UK and Germany, they're all upping their research spending. They're. But the scale of the American economy is just so large that your rounding errors are like entire budgets in some of these countries. Yeah, I think the HHS layoffs were happening today, I think, or yesterday, and they were talking about how it's like a one to $2 billion saving, maybe even less than that. But the budget of HSS is like nearly $2 trillion. Like this is not, these are not consequential numbers.
- [30:50]
Jane Marie
Like you're saving a trillion is 1,000 billion. So if you're cutting 1 billion, that's not, that's negligible.
- [30:58]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
0.1% of the budget. Yeah, there are lots of people, scientists, if you talk to scientists before this all began, they'd all have issues and complaints about how America funds its science because we just dislike how things are done in general. The nature of the kind of rolling budgets, the very, very prescriptive nature of how they're spent, how some budgets can have years to them and others have much shorter ones. People have complaints, but there's normal complaints. They're complaints about if you're working in a company and you don't like your boss, you don't want to burn the whole company down. You just want to have better working conditions. But they're just destroying funding to science. There is no one to replace this. Well, actually there is one country to replace this, but that's China. And like, that is this. That is the other option. And China doesn't fund a lot of this. Yeah, it's kind of impressive. Like, we have. There is also a thing in general when we talk about, like, America and China is that obviously I'm in Europe, I'm in the eu. We can feel the influence of the two, like, like large economies on how our world works. Like, effectively, Europe treats America as like a service economy that we use for services, and we treat China and its periphery nations as like our manufacturing arm. Like, that's kind of how it feels. I mean, so do we feel these giant economies around us and like, Europe is like one of the bigger economies. The EU as a cumulative, is one of the larger economies. And we have a big amount of science funding that goes on, but it just doesn't match. Like, it just doesn't match. And also our priority is slightly different. Like, we do a lot of fundamental physics that America has deprioritized to Europe because it makes more sense.
- [32:39]
Jane Marie
Sure. Well, I mean, yeah, you want to go where the experts are with your questions, but we're not going to have any experts anymore for a little while, at least.
- [32:50]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
And also the French scientist that was denied entry to America because TSA searched his phone or social media and found that he'd been negative towards Trump. That also kills science. Science is a global community and people go to conferences to, like, share knowledge. If no one's coming to America, then there's no, there's no value in being a scientist. Like, in America. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't, doesn't add up. Like the one we, we were. I said we were looking. We. We entered the green card lottery. Like, that's how like, much we were like, looking into moving to America. Yeah, yeah. And the reason was, like, I work adjacent to tech. Like, America is like a very center of tech. My wife at the time, well, she still is. She's a research assistant remotely for Harvard, working for the psychology department.
- [33:39]
Jane Marie
Of course she is. She repeats, you guys, you guys are overachievers. But go on.
- [33:45]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
And like her, the person she's working with was like, you should really consider grad school. And I was like, you probably would like American grad school more than you like European grad school, because, like, a US grad school takes longer. It's more about developing yourself across seven years rather than like European grad school is like, you have three years to write a thesis. Like, good luck. Which is just a very different thing. And we were looking into it and we were like, we put the effort and steps in. And so now it's like, no, I do not want to get snatched off the street in the middle of the night or in broad daylight.
- [34:14]
Jane Marie
Well, and the grad student, Rumesa Ozturk, she was at Tufts and disappeared. So it looks like this woman came from Turkey, Ozturk, and I'm hoping I'm pronouncing that correctly, but she was also a psychology major at Tufts university, getting her PhD in psychology. She wrote a paper in support of Palestine and the Palestinian genocide that's happening, and that's why they arrested her. Like, if that is on the banned word list, oh my. The number of people that will be disappeared. It's so scary.
- [34:52]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I do, like, I have a lot of despair for America at the moment, and I have a lot of irritation when people say, well, it's not constitutional, it's not protected by the Constitution. But I do think that people being staring in the face of how explicitly and against the Constitution, the actions of these people that always claim to be originalists is and always claim that they're just doing what the founders intended, but have no respect for the First Amendment. It's not like it's the 15th or 18th. It's the first one. You have free speech. Like, it's pretty goddamn clear. And like, the, like, the Red Scare was. Was bad and scary and ruined lives. But, like, I think this is more like the kind of like the anarchist scare in the 20s where they just disappear people. Yeah, like, they just disappear people. And. And that's it. Like, that is the consequence of, like, daring to speak out against the Dear Leader. Like, it's.
- [35:45]
Jane Marie
Was it.
- [35:45]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
It's. It's. It's terrifying.
- [35:48]
Jane Marie
Yeah. So in Chile, people were disappeared like crazy. Like 30 years ago, I think 30, 40 years ago. It feels like that's what's happening here now. Just like a lot of things feel like the Holocaust. A lot of things feel like these are Nazis or Stalin or, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, South African apartheid proponents like Elon Musk. It's scary. You referenced climate change briefly. Can we talk about that for a minute.
- [36:25]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
So when we talked at the beginning about how by banning these words you can effectively ban reality. You can pretend reality doesn't exist because there's no way to measure it. When you have the same attack on climate research and climate change research, you can effectively distort reality to say it doesn't exist because there's just no evidence for it anymore, or no new evidence for it, or only evidence that agrees with the oil companies that it's fine. You can just pretend it's not real if you can affect the science reporting that significantly. And the insane thing is that it's only going to hurt. It's going to hurt everyone, basically. Climate change is going to hurt everyone. Let's not dance around that point. But the massive companies are already doing their own research and reading the stuff and they're prepared for, I think JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or something. They're Preparing for a 3 degrees Celsius world which is a terrifying dystopia scenario. But they've got to keep making their money, they've got to get their bag. So they're going to deal with the world ending that way. But you just can't prepare for. How is a coastal city anywhere in Florida, how is it able to prepare for anything if you're not allowed to do research into climate change? It's going to be ravaged by climate change and they're just not allowed to talk about it. It is complete denial of reality. That's only going to hurt the people who can't really do anything about it. If you're a normal person in Florida, you do not have the ability to fundamentally redirect, single handedly redirect funding to protect yourself and your city. But the billionaires can, and they can just deny this exists as a problem because it's not going to affect them.
- [38:04]
Jane Marie
Well, I also see on the list here climate science, which, I mean the climate crisis is on the banned words list, but so is climate science, which let's pretend that those idiots are. Let's give them, throw them a bone for one second. Okay, there's no climate crisis, but climate science is a completely different thing.
- [38:26]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Who needs tornado warning? Like that's not a thing. Also, you know how the signal leak, one of the things signal leak chat. One of the things that J.D. vance was posturing about was how Europe is rubbish and the shipping channels are only impacting Europe. Let's acknowledge that that's also just not true. Vance doesn't know anything, but that's because he doesn't need to know anything. He's. What do you call, he's an affirmative action hire. So he doesn't have to know anything. But the whole shipping industry is built upon understanding in incredible detail what the shipping forecasts look like. It is not a joke that shipping is still quite a dangerous profession. And also ships routinely lose cargo Atlantic or cross Pacific journeys because the sea is a cruel mistress, as they say. If you.
- [39:23]
Jane Marie
Wait, can you go back to real quick, J.D. vance being a DEI hire?
- [39:28]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Oh, oh, yeah. So DEI, like that whole principle system, the number one greatest benefactors of it are white women. And I think the second greatest benefactor, I think it might be the general black population, but after that it's like white people from rural and deprived population because they're an underrepresented group. J.D. vance. I think I haven't read Hillbilly Elegy. I know it's mostly nonsense. Like, I'm not gonna read it. I had what you call it, Michael Hobbs read it to me for that podcast. That counted enough in my mind. But like he like enemy overinflates the fact that he comes from like a really deprived area. I think like family wise he does, but like his personal thing slightly different. But like, yeah, he got boosted up because he came from like a deprived background and got given advantages that wouldn't have been given to someone from a more middle class background. Like, like obviously the cost of things and such. And then when he was picked up, he became Peter Thiel's little rat bastard that would do his bidding for him. And then now he's second in charge. He's one heart attack away from being technically the most important human being on planet, which is really terrifying.
- [40:32]
Jane Marie
I know. Can you talk a little bit about the pullback on funding for scientific research in the eu? You've lived all over Europe. If the US stops investing in scientific research or anything, actually if the US just pulls all their money out of Europe, have you and your colleagues discussed what might happen as a result?
- [40:59]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah. So it depends. In Europe it's going to be very highly dependent about what you do, basically. So I think, for example, particle physics, I think it's going to be kind of fine. It's going to suffer a little bit. Well, I think a lot of the smaller labs will suffer a bit because they won't get that extra American bit of funding to come in and do something. But cern, for example, is a pet project of the EU at this point. CERN will be protected at basically all costs.
- [41:23]
Jane Marie
Okay. The Large Hadron collider place certainly.
- [41:26]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, the Large Hadron Collider and the next collider most likely will be protected because it's a big vanity project. But a whole bunch of other sectors are really going to struggle. I know that like pharmaceuticals, like obviously because of the American health care market being genuinely like a human rights violation. Like a lot of money in pharmaceuticals comes from America and once America like stops funding it, like the pharmaceutical companies lose their base research which they use to like build it up. And the challenge in Europe then has, is that developing economies, especially India, like have got a lot of very good pharmaceutical students and pharmaceutical researchers. We don't have the kind of cost edge and we don't have the capital, the accumulation of capital edge that America does. We're kind of stuck in the middle. And if the money in pharmaceutical research and medical research starts drying up in America, it's going to knock on to the rest of the world. Even though we do lots of innovative research here, a lot of it comes also from a regional NIH pilot projects like around the road for me is the, I think the Netherlands like best proton beam therapy unit for which is a method of curing cancer. It's a way, it's a really, really impressive way. I don't know the full details of it, but I know I've seen the results.
- [42:46]
Jane Marie
Like statistically it's radio, it's radiation adjacent.
- [42:50]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, yeah. It's a really, really effective way. Like it's got much better results than other methods. And that I think comes from like a bunch of like NIH pilot projects. Like let's just see what we can do with these sorts of things. And then it's been turned into a really, really effective method. NIH still does lots of research funding into it, but if we start losing this kind of basic funding that the US is really good at giving money for, then that all then becomes part of the EU's remit is to fund all the basic stuff, which just means we have less money to go around. And the EU is currently trying to rearm itself because we have a goddamn no more protection from America. So we have to massively disinvest ourselves from the American military industrial complex and build our own systems. Money is not going to be floating around for much in the next like five to 10 years. We're just going to be stretched.
- [43:34]
Jane Marie
Here's the argument from the current administration here in the US is why do you guys need our money so bad? Go get your own money.
- [43:43]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah. And well, I think the idea of that would be that the money doesn't go around evenly and the money when it's given by everyone has a much larger impact than when it's done by small groups. So if the US was the only one that did base research, I would understand that basically everyone else is mooching off the US's work.
- [44:04]
Jane Marie
That's all they say every single day, all day long right now is that everyone's mooching and everyone's dipping into our piggy bank. So are they and should we be concerned about that or is that just a talking point?
- [44:18]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
It is accurate if you don't think about anything beyond literally the paper that is published.
- [44:23]
Jane Marie
Right?
- [44:25]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Like, yeah, Musk went through and his merry band of like fascist pipers like went through and found a bunch of papers that were like a waste of money. And then one of them was something to do, some obscure kind of worm thing, like, and like what a waste of money. Like we gave coffee to worm. Like, what a stupid idea. And it's like, no, this is an animal model we're testing to develop like, can we use this kind of worm to model like biological reactions? And we use caffeine because it's like a well understood and well like, like knowledge. Like we know what caffeine does to the body and to the neurology of creatures. So we tested it and therefore now we can use this worm as like a model for like future drug testing or future like investigations of like biosystems. If you only read the paper, then obviously this is a waste of money. But if you read the fact that it has the impact on it, then you see why this magnifies. And because the US has so much research going on, it gets basically, it basically gets to like double dip in the fact that like it will do the research, like it'll pay for some research. And if it's interesting, which obviously they're finding the interesting stuff, like European, Chinese, Indian, African, like people around the world will go, oh, this is interesting, we're going to try that ourselves and we'll do some research of our own. And then America has to look at what everyone else does. Now they have, they played with a bit that works. Find the one that works on that stage and pull it back. And it basically goes back and forth around the world over and over and over again. You get to just like keep learning and building from each other. And when America turns off the faucet for its base research funding, all that happens is there's just less money, there's less basic research going on, which means there's less steps to do more research, get harder and more difficult to fund and also the specialization that comes from it. There's loads of really, really good labs in America that just do really, really good based biological research. That's what they've done for decades at this point. And they're the best in the world. So people don't really compete with them. What's the point of me going to Switzerland, spending like a few, like few tens of millions to set up a lab that will eventually be able to compete with America, what America's doing, or I can just like work with them and like we can like collaborate and like, we'll, we'll work on, we'll help them with their stuff and we'll like build a small version that can do like a little bit of testing of stuff and therefore they can get our research when we do that thing. Like the specialization of like the global science community, like is the reason why America has no super colliders. Because they just don't bother, they just come to Europe and use hours. Yeah, it's the same reason our fusion labs are all like one type of fusion labs, like the magnetic fusion labs.
- [46:49]
Jane Marie
And then we have Fermi over here.
- [46:51]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, yeah. Like it's when that's big expensive research which costs a lot of money. So you just make, you just do it globally, you distribute it, but with other kinds of research. Like it's just this kind of ticky tack back and forth. Like everyone shares everything. Like when I was a teenager, I wanted to be a doctor, a doctor doctor, not a physics doctor. And I did some internship stuff to try and pad out the cv. And I worked at an immunology clinic. So it was a clinic about immunology from medical doctors. And their conference was in the uk, mostly attended by British doctors, but had a whole cohort of American researchers who came in to talk about their latest research. And they were the center of attention at these dinners because they were coming in with all their new research and you could talk to them in person, you could share research ideas. And so many collaborations emerged out of that because of the research going on. But at the same time they were taking a lot of European, British doctors who tried these things in practice. The big talk of the headline talk was about how to minimize the risk of peanut allergy in children. That was the big central Peanut allergies. Yeah, peanut allergies in children. And they had a British doctor team who had been testing these new methods of doing it in wide scale research across the UK and the American scientists are obviously deeply interested. How did it go? What were the results? What did you see? Because they've been doing the other end of the research. They've been doing the really basic stuff, the core central part. And now they get to see, in practice, this relationship is so many tendrils and connections that pulling it apart is just going to collapse things. It's hard to explain.
- [48:22]
Jane Marie
We've lost the plot. And I definitely want to ask that next. I have a little tiny anecdote to share about the transgender mice. Did you hear about that?
- [48:32]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, yeah. They're transiting on mice.
- [48:35]
Jane Marie
The labs where they do that. I have a friend who works at one of those labs, and it's the same lab where they grow ears, human ears on the back of mice. They grow noses, they grow body parts on the back of mice to replace people who have been amputated in some way or another or have disfigurement. And it really has been, like, cutting edge science for 15 years now. They're. They're continuing to do that. And the transgender part is like mixing X and Y chromosomes to see what the neurological differences are in the sexes. That's the whole. That's it. It's not making transgender mice to see which bathroom they're gonna use. But I worry about my friend that works at one of these labs in New Jersey. And I love mice. Okay, they're cute, whatever. But if they have a human ear growing on their back, they don't care. Like, they're a mouse. But it's really helpful for humans. And they're gonna lose their funding because a couple of their mice are trans.
- [49:37]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I thought also he. Because Donald Trump can't read, which is a bit of an issue. But I thought it was because, like, he couldn't read the word transgenic, which means genetic material from outside of that animal. Yeah, he can't read. Like, it's genuinely, like, you can see, like. Like, if you work with kids who can't read. He has the same, like, habits, which is, like, troubling. There was two things about the. The mice, which is. I saw, like, it was on TikTok, probably some, like, Southern woman going, like, I don't care how many mice they have to trans if it cures cancer. Which I thought was a pretty good, like, good summary of, like. Like, the situation in general. But the second one is that, like, I remember reading about, like, the violence and threats of death faced by scientists who worked on fetuses or embryos. Embryos mostly in the early 2000s, the genuine I think scientists died because they were working on embryonic stem cells. There is a very violent, very angry group of people who can be pushed over the edge by telling them that they're making the mice trans. That is a genuine threat to these people's livelihoods and lives.
- [50:45]
Jane Marie
I don't think that's a mistake.
- [50:46]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
No, no, I don't either. I think it's deliberate. I think they believe in stochastic terrorism. I think the Republican party is a party of stochastic terrorism to get its wills.
- [50:53]
Jane Marie
What's stochastic terrorism?
- [50:56]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Terrorism that doesn't have a specific leader. So like, you know how all these right wing anti immigrant people have been like going on shooting sprees around the world and none of them belong to a terrorist cell. They all kind of claim affinity to like Anders Breivik and like kind of right wing great replacement theories. Like they all claim the same ideology but there's no like group.
- [51:16]
Jane Marie
Like the guy who ran over all those people in New Orleans.
- [51:19]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, but yeah, all these like these people who make manifesto saying like the, the Mexicans are replacing us or black people are replacing us or choose replacing us. And then my response, I'm gonna like murder a bunch of people. Like they all have the same ideology, they all believe the same things, but they're not part of a group. There's no organization, no structure to it. Like comparative to like the base which I think was. I think they've collapsed now and atomwaffen, who are like these far right like actual terrorist groups who like had an identity, a group identity. They shared discord logs. They like planned attacks together. Like that's, that's terrorism. But stochastic terrorism. Just like people are driven to cause terrorism by what you like, the cultural and like system, systemic like milieu leads them to commit terror acts that are in favor of what you believe foreign.
- [52:10]
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- [54:40]
Jane Marie
Dan has a scientific experiment for you and I to try. Liam.
- [54:44]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Okay.
- [54:45]
Jane Marie
He would like you to turn the interview around on me and ask me as a journalist, feminist, etc. Author, podcast creator, person who talks about abortion for a living and pyramid schemes and wellness and life coaches and stuff. If there's any words on this list that you want to ask me about and how it would impact the kind of work I do and my colleagues.
- [55:13]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I think there's a few words. I'm very curious how this would I can see imagine, but how this would impact your ability to report things effectively. I think there's four that I think cover it well, which is advocacy, affirming, care at risk, and privilege.
- [55:34]
Jane Marie
Okay, what were they again?
- [55:35]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Advocacy, Advocacy, affirming, care at risk and privilege.
- [55:43]
Jane Marie
So advocacy covers way too many things. Way too many. I mean honestly, like it's political movements here in the US and advocating for underrepresented groups like teen pregnancy. I wouldn't be able to talk about teen pregnancy right. At all. At risk talks about teenagers. Like my foster daughter. She's not a teenager anymore, she's an adult. But, you know, she was an at risk youth. And at risk meaning at risk of being trafficked and drugged and going to prison and et cetera. So that would be, in my personal life, really fucked up. If no one can look into how that works and why and how to fix it, or at least they have to do it behind closed doors. Privilege. I would not be able to do anything without that word. In that I talk very often about not growing up with privilege, not having the privilege that my colleagues had at npr, that sort of thing. And I write a lot about that. About privilege. Yeah, it would. I can't even. I saw the word sex was on the list. That's like half of what I talk about.
- [57:11]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, they don't like fun, but I.
- [57:14]
Jane Marie
Mean, even teen pregnancy and stuff. Like, we made an entire show about abortion called Outlawed. We did an episode about abortion on this show. If you can't use the word sex, I can't talk about how my birth experience with my daughter destroyed my vagina and I had to get it rebuilt. Like, I wouldn't be able to write that essay, which has been very helpful to a lot of people. Or even the colposcopy I had to get because of hpv. All of these things that are like public services in the medical field. I wouldn't be able to talk about any of that. And by wouldn't, I mean probably shouldn't and can't now.
- [57:52]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Like, the word list denies your ability to actually discuss and contextualize who you are as a lived being. Like, you're just denied that reality. You can't understand yourself. You can't understand how you exist in the world. You can't understand the world around you. You can't explain to others how you are the way you are. Because these words are just so fundamental to. We live in a society. I hate that phrase. But we live in a society and therefore things interact with each other. And if you can't talk about your. Both your lack of privilege and also the ways maybe you do have privilege. Like, if you can't discuss that and especially like the NPR stuff, like, then you can't explain anything about yourself, basically. Like, it just loses all connection to reality.
- [58:34]
Jane Marie
And I can't ask others about it. Like, the other. Another word I'M seeing is socioeconomic. I talk about socioeconomics literally every day. Just the way same economics are impacting our society. That's what it means, guys. It means how the economy impacts different groups, different regions in the United States, different industries, jobs, not just how it impacts black people versus white people, which I think is why they want to erase this, because they don't want us talking about black people at all. But beyond that, socioeconomics is very important to understand how a country's economy works or a global economy works. And we're not allowed to talk about that, according to this list.
- [59:24]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
It feels like it's building. I think this is generally the Republican position on things, but it feels like it's building a situation in which your ability as an average person to understand the world around you is deliberately exterminated so that you don't understand the world around you. And I think that allows it makes it even easier to build up toxic myths about who is at fault for the way you are. And like, I think that like. Like, I personally have this position in which much disagree with that. I think, like, the emphasis on meritocracy does in. Does extreme damage to people who fail to achieve, because they don't, for whatever reason they do. And you're basically like, if you come from an area which is very deprived and very economically struggling, and you're told by media and politicians and like, rich people that, like, you put in hard work and you succeed, and then you try that and you fail. So firstly, you take on your own personal, like, I'm a failure. I'm a weak person. I haven't succeeded. But then you look around your community, which has got a whole bunch of people who have, like, failed to escape the poverty trap, and you turn it into, like, my entire community is a bunch of people who are, like, undeserving of, like, success. And we are a group of people that is, like, unable to achieve success and we're all the fault. And therefore you basically end up hating your own community, which means it's impossible to build up community, support community, like.
- [60:46]
Jane Marie
Collaboration, because that's that, man.
- [60:48]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, because you hate your community. You hate your community for existing. And, like, then it makes it very easy for then all these, like, nasty little grifters to, like, start screwing with people and then putting in very evil things. Like, it's very understandable, like, why people lean on things where, like, there is actually direct success, like video games. People like it because you do a thing, you succeed.
- [61:06]
Jane Marie
Like, it's not like you accomplish something yeah, yeah. I mean, I understand that. Wanting that sense of accomplishment, for sure. I bake a cake.
- [61:13]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, I love it. Love a cake. When you take away the concept of being able to succeed because of. You can't understand that the world is challenging. You just build hatred. It's what you do. So.
- [61:24]
Jane Marie
Yeah, yeah. And self hatred, for sure. What do you think went wrong with us? We used to be really proud of our science and our forward thinking, like, starting, I guess, like 70 years ago, maybe. We used to love making scientists. And what do you think as an outsider? What happened to us?
- [61:49]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I think America in the 1980s decided that it would reorientate itself around financial extraction at all costs as the. As greed is good, pulling money from everything you can is good. And the way to succeed is to get status through money. But like the. The pivot from, like, the status of being an astronaut or a scientist and like, the glory of that to, like, it's just money, Just whatever makes money. Like, money is king. That did an insane amount of damage to what people value in society. The average person on the street who knows nothing and barely reads the newspaper could look at America and go, america is the king of science. You put men on the moon. You did so much cool things. It drives me nuts when American politicians talk about how we can't do X or Y. I was like, you put a goddamn man on the moon with less power than a phone. You can do this thing. You just choose not to. And America has chosen for 50 years to not do the things that it could do because it's easier to extract money and build billionaires to do other things instead. And it has been quite sad to watch because I think, despite all the problems of America, I think it's a very cool place. I think it does have really cool people. I think your mixture of cultural backgrounds and the kind of immigrant populations mixing across geography and space and time has led to a really, really interesting and vibrant culture. And these people fucking hate it. They hate it so much. And I just wish they didn't because they'd have such better, like, hairlines. They weren't stressed all the time about. Great replacement. It's irritating.
- [63:28]
Jane Marie
I just watched an interview with the Doge panel or whatever. Like, the Doge team. One person of color, all white guys. Otherwise, all men. All men. No women on that team? No. And one person of color out of 10 of them.
- [63:42]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Would you feel safe as a woman around them, though?
- [63:45]
Jane Marie
No, I don't feel safe. Like, no, not at all. Ugh.
- [63:50]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
No.
- [63:51]
Jane Marie
Oh, my God. Okay, Dan has one last word. So you were a particle physicist? Yes, yes. Okay.
- [63:58]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I was an experimental particle physicist.
- [64:00]
Jane Marie
Experimental particle physicist. Here's a word that's on the list and I just want your immediate reaction. We're gonna do like a word association. First thing that comes to mind. This is the word. Ready?
- [64:11]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Black star. But you have black holes. Yeah, like, I know it's about. I know it's about black people, but I'm just looking at the space.
- [64:19]
Jane Marie
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [64:21]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Oh, for God's sake. Oh my God. It's a color. Like there are birds that have the name black in them. There are beetles that have to wear black in them. Like, oh my God, there are cities that have to wear black in it. We can have the scunfort problem, but people just like existing in like towns called Blackpool.
- [64:36]
Jane Marie
Like, oh my God, clean energy is on this list.
- [64:40]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Okay.
- [64:40]
Jane Marie
Anyways, we can just keep going. But yeah, there are colors. There's a color on the list that's fucked up on its own. And that's plenty of reason to be furious at these people that are making this banned word list. But yeah, to add on top of that that you can't talk about black holes.
- [65:01]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah.
- [65:02]
Jane Marie
On a government website.
- [65:03]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
It's so cringe, like the whole thing. Like I knew I'd be. I knew eventually the oligarchic fascists would take over, but I wish they wouldn't be such dorks is like such a true statement. They're just embarrassing.
- [65:16]
Jane Marie
Exactly.
- [65:17]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
You talked about it before when you talk about rfk, but there's a goddamn measles outbreak that's killing kids and no one's doing shit about it. Like, it's insane, it's terrifying.
- [65:26]
Jane Marie
Well, you know who lives in Texas, right? Andrew Wakefield.
- [65:30]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Oh, course he does, doesn't he? He does. We're only sending our best.
- [65:40]
Jane Marie
So he's a Texan now. Ish. After he was disgraced and his research, quote, unquote research, his pretend research about how the measles vaccine causes autism. Yeah, he actually didn't say that. He said the MMR measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. But he also, the year before he said that he took out a patent on a one shot measles vaccine. So he had financial incentive to create this story around the MMR vaccine causing autism, but not the measles one. But I believe the community that he's in, in Texas, they, you know, he has a bit of a cult following. A bit. Millions of people like what this guy says about autism because it's Comforting.
- [66:29]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Well, as you're probably aware, if you say something in a British accent, it also sounds like much more fancy. Yeah.
- [66:37]
Jane Marie
Yeah, it sounds way better. Sorry. Texas. I'm just kidding, you guys. You guys sound weird. But fine. And I have an accent. I get it. Okay. Anyways, I do think that the Wakefield influence on Texas and the measles, I think that that's somehow correlated, but I haven't seen anyone talking about it.
- [66:55]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
I wouldn't be surprised because with most of these outbreaks, you'll find it's like it's one pocket of low vaccination. It hits that pocket, gets rampant through the pocket, and then it starts exploding outwards because it's allowed to just fester in this group of unvaccinated people that it then starts hitting people who were vaccinated because maybe their immunity wasn't high enough and so on, so forth. So you just need these pockets of anti vaccine strongholds and you just do so much damage to the rest of the country.
- [67:19]
Jane Marie
I spent three days in the hospital a couple years back in 2019, right before the pandemic, because I had this reaction to a medication. Reaction's called Stevens Johnson syndrome. And it looks just like measles, at least at the beginning. And there was a small measles outbreak here in la and they kept me in like, a negative pressure room. Negative pressure rooms, yes. And for three days because they needed to make sure that I didn't have measles. And what I found out during that experience is that your measles vaccine wears off. You need to get it, like, every 10 years if you really feel like there's a threat. But you don't have to get it every 10 years if everyone got it at the same time when they're born and everyone has the same immunity. But if people around you are deciding that their children should have measles, you should probably get a new vaccine. That's my public service announcement to America. Go get your measles vaccine before they outlaw them, before RFK gets rid of vaccines altogether.
- [68:23]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Yeah, please do.
- [68:30]
Jane Marie
Liam. Always a pleasure. Seriously, it's like such a delight. And I feel smarter every time we talk. And enjoy not living in America for.
- [68:38]
Dr. Leon Balman Dud
Now, I will do. And try your best to enjoy living in America right now.
- [68:44]
Jane Marie
Will do. Okay. Thanks again. The dream is a production of little everywhere. We do other productions, like a show called Finally a Show About Women that isn't just a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare. And that show was just nominated for a Webby Award. But in order to get that award, you need to vote. Please go vote. Go to webbyawards.com and then navigate to Vote the vote button. Then navigate to podcasts, then navigate to shows, then lifestyle. Then you'll see finally a show about women that isn't just a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare. And then you click vote. Thank you.
- [69:45]
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- [71:04]
Paige
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