Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders?

Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great scientists?

Do we still have room for scientific cowboys?

And what is the relationship between national security and modern

science? Are scientists participants in a larger game that they barely see? What if the most

important ideas are the ones you're not allowed to hear about? From universities to public health,

to Watson and Crick,

and nuclear bombs and AI,

today we're going to cover it all with physicist and mathematician

and iconoclast Eric Weinstein.

So get ready for a great brain stretch.

Welcome to Intercosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand how we see the world.

And as we'll discuss today, we don't always see what we believe we're seeing.

We usually think of science as a calm enterprise that's cumulative.

You have thousands of people testing hypotheses. You have vast amounts of data getting gathered, and knowledge slowly accretes. But underneath that veneer,

sometimes things can be a little more turbulent because what happens sometimes is that

scientific discoveries can quickly reshape economies

and alter what nations can do to each other and redraw political boundaries

and redirect the future long before most of us even notice.

...