The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty: Stuart Firestein on Science in the Age of Tony Fauci

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, August 4, 2026. [ed.: recording date is August 1, 2026; August 4 is the publication date of Firestein's book] Over the last few days, one of America's most controversial and in some ways respected and perhaps disrespected scientists, Anthony Fauci, has been in the news, in and out of the news, it seems, over the last few years. But certainly over the last few days, his diary has been revealed. The Atlantic, which tends to be a left of center magazine, is slightly critical of what Anthony Fauci's diary tells us about Washington DC and the intimacy between science and media, science and politics. Even The New Yorker, another left of center publication, talks about the failures of the Fauci hearing. They're no great friend of Rand Paul, of course, who's running the hearing, but they're also, I think, in some ways, rather disappointed with the performance of Anthony Fauci. He was once a saint. Now many people see him as a kind of devil. It raises the question of not just science, but scientists, whether we should be respecting them, whether we should be skeptical of them, and whether indeed they should be themselves more skeptical, which is the subject of our conversation today. Stuart Firestein is another highly respected American scientist. He's a neurobiologist at Columbia University and the author of an intriguing new book. It's out today, called It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty, and he's joining us from Connecticut. Stuart, congratulations on the new book. Have you been following this Fauci thing? It's hard to miss, isn't it?

00:02:15 Stuart Firestein: It is. I've followed it a bit, but I was as I've been abroad actually for the last three weeks, I've just returned. And it's not as big news over there, of course, as it turned out to be here. So I'm still catching up a bit on it. But, I mean, I've known about Fauci for years even long before the pandemic, because of his role at NIH and his earlier role in HIV and the AIDS, all the, research on AIDS and so forth and so on. So he's been around for quite a long time, and he's been controversial for quite a long time.

00:02:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The as you say, you haven't been following it that close. You don't wanna turn this just into a conversation about being what's happening with Fauci. But I think the critique of him, certainly from the right, is he was a little too certain in his pronouncements. Sometimes those pronouncements weren't accurate. Sometimes they were rather political. Does it suggest to us, Stuart, that scientists need to be a little bit more careful about what they do and don't say about science in our age of uncertainty?

00:03:21 Stuart Firestein: Of course, one could always be more careful about what one says, especially not only in this age of uncertainty, but in this age of, everything you say is instantly broadcast around the world and sometimes out of context. Or even when it's in context, it might not be exactly what you intended to say or how it would come off. So we could all be more careful. On the other hand, if all we are is careful and just stay inside the lines, the world isn't gonna be that interesting. So I think the trick is to find that blend. I like to point out that, I mean, I'm not defending Fauci in this particular case, but I think scientists science and scientists, require a kind of a blend of hubris and humility, and you have to balance those. If you don't have a certain amount of hubris, you're just not even gonna try science because it's mostly failures. You spend most of your time in the dark. You spend a lot of time in the unknown, the mysterious. You fail quite a bit. And, and so, I mean, you know, would Isaac Newton have really thought you could figure out the mind of the creator with a few equations if he didn't have a bit of hubris? On the other hand, one has to have the humility to know that we really don't know very much of all that's out there and that a lot of what we do know has a high degree of uncertainty and the uncertainty is kind of critical. I mean, uncertainty is what tells you that science is reliable. It's the people that are certain, that are absolutely certain that have an answer, a solution. They're the ones you have to watch out for, in my opinion. And Fauci was occasionally guilty of just that. I agree.

00:04:57 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, he came to prominence during COVID where everyone was looking for certainty. We were suddenly engulfed in this massive crisis. You were in New York. People were dying all over the place. Yeah. It's one of the problems, Stuart, not just with Fauci, but with our contemporary attitude to science, that we nonscientists, and I will certainly include myself there, we look to science for certainty. And as you note, the defining thing about science is its uncertainty. So part of the problem is that in a way, science has replaced theology or it's become the theology of the twenty-first century.

00:05:43 Stuart Firestein: Yes. So, this is a big problem for science and scientists, and I blame us to some extent. I mean, I blame the scientists to some extent because we give in easily when the newspaper calls and says, what about this or that? And you answer as if you kinda know what you're talking about because you don't wanna sound like a goof. And so, you often say things a little bit more certainly than they should be. And then, of course, we will all of us are, you know, go through an educational system that asks you to have the right answer on the exam. Doesn't give you two or three possibilities and ask you to rate them, which would be much more sensible in the real world. Instead, there's, you know, there's a multiple choice question. There's five choices and only one of them gets the correct mark. And so, of course, people learn that's what science is about and that's they expect a certain answer from scientists, who don't have that certain answer. I think the way you know who somebody is an expert is that the they're the most uncertain person in the room. The greater expertise you have in a particular area, the more uncertain you are about that particular area. You see all the holes, you see the bits of data that are missing, the things we've tried and didn't work, you see the failures. And as you move away from that sort of center of expertise, you become more and more sure, more and more certain because you don't see that granular sort of, view of it.

00:07:14 Andrew Keen: So, Stuart, if you were putting together, as you say, a multiple choice question for an exam for your undergraduates at Columbia, and the question was, what drives science? Would the answer be ignorance? You wrote a book back in 2012, another successful book called Ignorance: How It Drives Science. Is ignorance the foundations of science? It seems counterintuitive or just illogical, but is that really the truth? And even the word truth, I'm not sure whether we should be using that word, the T word in this kind of conversation.

00:07:46 Stuart Firestein: Well, we shouldn't be using the T word with a capital T. We can use it with a small t, and we can, we can put some, modifiers in front of it. We could call it provisional truth. We would call it true enough. We could as that true enough is actually the title of a book by a philosopher of science named Catherine Elgin at Harvard in which she talks about the fact that science basically goes from one provisional truth to the next, getting better and better as it goes along, but never actually having truth with a capital T. And that should be recognized as a legitimate sort of source of knowledge. That's what knowledge is, is an increasingly closer approximation to what we would call something that's more or less true. Doesn't sound very certain, does it?

00:08:35 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But it's a nice way of putting it, which maybe introduces the artist to the scientific conversation. The subtitle of your book, Stuart, is Science in the Age of Uncertainty, which I think is an excellent subtitle. Usually, these subtitles of books aren't very good. It is our age of uncertainty is this age of uncertainty compounded by there being too much or not enough science?

00:09:07 Stuart Firestein: Well, I don't think there's anything as anything like not enough science. I mean, my feeling is science is still one of the most remarkable ways human beings have ever come up with to figure things out, to learn about the world, to get some understanding of it, some kind of explanation about how things occur. We don't have a complete view. I don't think we ever will. I think the difference now is that many of us, not all scientists, I will say, but I think much of science is moving towards a recognition that uncertainty is a crucial part of it that yeah. I hate to use these terms a little bit because they sound kinda highfalutin, but I don't know a better one. So I'll unpack it.

00:09:50 Andrew Keen: It is a very highfalutin show, Stuart, so you're allowed to do it on this issue. Don't worry about that.

00:09:57 Stuart Firestein: I think there's there are two kinds of uncertainty. There's epistemic uncertainty and ontological uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty, which means knowledge essentially, is uncertainty because we just don't know some stuff. We maybe could know it eventually, but we don't know it yet. But one day, we'll be certain about this particular thing or that thing, as long as we figure it all out. And then there, I think, is an ontological uncertainty, which is the basic fundamental fabric of the universe is uncertain. It's maybe even random. It's hard to know that for sure, but it's irreducibly complex, I'd like to say, in the sense that it's so complicated that making predictions or having certainty, absolute certainty is virtually impossible. So it might just as well be random for all intents and purposes. So that's the kind of uncertainty that I'm most interested in is this sort of what I call ontological or fundamental uncertainty that I think is what runs the universe. This always dries me out, this particular talk.

00:11:06 Andrew Keen: Yeah. For people just listening, Stuart just took a big gulp of water. So he's talked about two kinds of uncertainty, epistemic and ontological. Coming back to this subtitle then, Stuart, would it be fair to say that the more, shall we say, epistemic certainty we have in our age of science or certainly in our age of more science than has ever existed in human history, the more an ontological uncertainty there is. And in other words, the more we know, the less we know, or the more we know, the more uncertain we become.

00:11:43 Stuart Firestein: So the I can't think of a possibly better way to put that than the way you just did that. Yes. I think that's exactly the case that as we become more and more, epistemically certain, as we learn more and more I mean, every piece of data you get in the lab answers a question and raises 10 new ones. That was sort of what ignorance was really about. The notion that there are all sorts of levels of ignorance and what science is based on is trying to find more and more sophisticated, if you will, ignorance, better questions. And we do that by answering one question and finding out that just opens up 10 brand new ones. And usually 10 that are more sophisticated and often more complex and lead us further into a kind of a level of uncertainty where we can— I should point out, we can do quite well with uncertainty. I think one of the magic yeah. Part of the magic of current science is that we do so well with uncertainty. I mean, things like lasers, GPS system, the phone we're all, addicted to, drug trials, quote, randomized controlled trials are all based to a large extent on randomness and high levels of uncertainty, and they work. We can make that work for us. You don't have to know everything to make things work. Alright. If I can go on for a minute, I like to use an example of blood pressure. Many of us take blood pressure medicines. There are nine kinds of medicines that treat blood pressure using different pathways and different mechanisms in the body. The fact is we do not know we do not know how blood pressure is regulated. We do not understand exactly how it's regulated. 90% of the diagnoses of hypertension are what are called idiopathic, which means there's no clear root cause, but we can treat it. We have nine kinds of medicines we figured out that interfere or, lower it, raise it if we need to, but mostly lower it, in nine different ways. So that's remarkable. I mean, we have a tremendous level of uncertainty. And in a way, the more drugs we find, the more uncertain we become because now we find this whole new pathway that nobody thought had anything to do with blood pressure and yet regulates it.

00:13:58 Andrew Keen: Stuart, you're a neurobiologist. We've done lots of shows on neurology and the brain. It's become quite fashionable these days as you know. And, the cliche, which I always repeat anyway, that new neuroscience or neuroscientists sometimes suggest, is that there's nothing more complex in the universe than the human brain and that we understand almost nothing about it. It is, I'm guessing it's not a coincidence that you're such a skeptic, if that's the right word. Certainly, a skeptic about, ontological uncertainty, because you're a neuroscientist and you've been confronted with the complexity, maybe even the unknowability of the brain, perhaps unknowability in terms of us since we it's our brains that are supposed to be used to understand the brain.

00:14:55 Stuart Firestein: Mhmm. So the there's no question it's complicated. I agree with that. I don't think it's unknowable. I think we know actually quite a bit about the brain, quite a bit about many of the mechanisms that sort of make it do what it does. We don't have a complete understanding. The most difficult thing I think about the brain or one of the most difficult things about the brain is that we know it works on many different levels. And so we know a lot of things on each of these sort of levels. We know a lot about the genetics of the brain. We know a lot about cellular mechanisms in the brain. We know a lot about, circuits in the brain and things like this. And even all the way up through psychology and behavior, we know a great deal about behavior, which is a I assume really a neuroscientific, endeavor. What we don't have is a very much vertical knowledge. We can't get from the all the knowledge we have about how cells, brain cells work and how they become electrical and how they move ions around and all this other stuff. We know a great deal about that, but we can't figure out how that leads to consciousness or how that leads to thinking or how that even leads exactly to memory and learning even though we know a great deal about each one of those sorts of things. So it's this vertical quality that we don't have much in and that's that I think is the most complex because you're looking at all sorts of feedback and feedforward loops and things that, so any one of these things can be described on its own. But when you start hooking them all together and the result of one loop feeds back into another one and then this one to that one, then you get this kind of irreducible complexity, which is extremely hard to pull apart in a simple explanation. And I don't think there is a simple explanation. We may have to live with the fact that there are going to be multiple explanations for the brain. That we shouldn't think, oh, yeah. One day we'll have some formula that will just tell us how the brain works and that'll be it. I think that's the wrong sort of, ideal, the wrong target.

00:16:57 Andrew Keen: Stuart, would it be fair to say that the scientists who deal best or most profoundly with uncertainty are those with an artistic bent. Oliver Sacks comes to mind. For science to thrive in the age of uncertainty, should scientists be reading more novels, more poetry? Do they need to use poetry or storytelling in explaining why it could be otherwise?

00:17:33 Stuart Firestein: I think, yes, I would go so far as to I would expand it beyond just artistic, and I would say just the humanities in general, a more, humanities oriented yes. I think so. I think history is extremely important. I think philosophy is extremely important in science, and we don't do enough of it. We don't teach enough of it. The way an idea has sort of developed over centuries or at least decades, the way it goes from one mind to another and changes itself, this is very important. This is, I think, critical to a deeper understanding of the way things are. In the book, one of my projects, if you will, in the book is to bring in the ideas of a philosopher of the twentieth century named Isaiah Berlin, who's a very famous philosopher.

00:18:20 Andrew Keen: I'm very I'm familiar with him, Latvian, Latvian, Anglo-Latvian political philosophy.

00:18:27 Stuart Firestein: Yes. Yes. I mean, it's interesting that you are familiar with him because I'm a little shocked at how many people are not familiar with him, twenty-five years or so after his death, when I think he made some important contributions. His idea I mean, his main philosophical idea, and you're right. He was more of a historian of ideas. He had no real interest in science, I think, because he was a pluralist. He was one of the original people you could call a pluralist by which he meant that there's more than one solution, more than one good idea about any question. And you don't have to have a final solution if you will, a bad phrase we all know. You don't have to have a single answer to a good question. And that even if those answers are, he would say, incommensurable, that is incompatible in some way, we shouldn't see that as a problem. We should see that as a kind of a flourishing that we actually have answers more answers than we can use perhaps or answers that we can use in different ways and at different times to the same problem. He never felt science would do that, that science did traffic in single solutions and answers, but that was the science of the twentieth century when he lived. Now I think we have a science that is much more Isaiah Berlin like, that is much more pluralist than ever before. I would say I'm not I may not be in the majority of scientists who think that way at the moment, but I think I will be one day.

00:19:57 Andrew Keen: Berlin, of course, is very famous for his essay—

00:20:00 Stuart Firestein: Yes.

00:20:00 Andrew Keen: The Hedgehog and the Fox, suggesting that the hedgehog knows one thing and the fox knows many things. Is the problem with contemporary science, Stuart, that too many scientists are hedgehogs and that they need to learn to become foxes?

00:20:18 Stuart Firestein: So that's I mean, I think science sorry. Let me start this over again in my mic [as spoken] for a moment. I think we should be careful about using the word scientist as if it described a whole class of people. The scientists in my experience are quite idiosyncratic. They have very different ways of doing things. Some of them are hedgehogs and some of them are foxes and some of them are maybe a combination of both, which by the way is what Berlin finally decided on with Tolstoy. That was originally, that essay was supposed to be aimed at a an essay on Tolstoy trying to figure out whether he was a hedgehog or a fox. He came to the conclusion that sometimes he was a hedgehog and sometimes a fox. So it was just really a way of thinking of two different ways. It reminds me a little bit of Dan Kahneman's idea of thinking fast and thinking slow. It's just a way of thinking about two different ways of coming at problems. So I think you could use a little of both, and it doesn't make any difference as what you're comfortable with. I wouldn't say one is superior to the other. For some scientists, they have a problem and they're just that's it. They have a kind of blinders on, but they're gonna go deep and deep into that problem. And other scientists kind of like to mess about a little bit and see what's along the side and the shadows, outside the lines, and play with those things. And I think we have room for both. That's the point, I guess. And I think that was Berlin's point is not the one should choose between being a hedgehog and a fox or the one was better than the other, but that we have room for both of those things. Why not? Why should we choose?

00:21:54 Andrew Keen: Stuart, speaking of ontological uncertainty, did— we did a show recently, with a New York Times literary, reviewer, who's written a book about the influence of French poststructuralism on American intellectual life over the last twenty-five years. Where does your argument stop when it, you know, you're a scientist. You're not Derrida. You're not Lacan. You're not Foucault.

00:22:27 Stuart Firestein: Definitely not.

00:22:27 Andrew Keen: At what point does your argument, it could be otherwise, stop and suggest that some things simply are impossible and that the ontological uncertainty that some of the less sophisticated poststructuralists articulate is simply absurd.

00:22:45 Stuart Firestein: Yes. So I think that's why I like Isaiah Berlin's idea of pluralism, which he called value pluralism, which is that there's no reason why, it's not relativism, which I guess is the easiest term to kind of talk about the poststructural ideas that, you know, just sort of anything goes. So for Berlin, it was not anything goes, but many things could go. Not only one thing has to go. Why does there have to be a single champion? Why does there have to be only one possible solution? So and our responsibility then is to choose, is to make thoughtful, critical thinking kinds of choices about what does seem reasonable and what doesn't. And use those things that do and discard those things that are not. Now that puts a lot of responsibility on us, but, you know, we're smart. We have a big brain. It's what we should be doing. So I would say when I say it could be otherwise, I really mean we are able to entertain that idea that it could be otherwise, which I have to say is something that I think only the last few generations of human beings on this planet have been able to say about something. I mean, people with brains exactly like this one here, you and I, have been on this planet for two hundred and fifty thousand years. And it's only in the last couple of hundred that we could utter something sense that we could actually sensibly say something like, well, that actually could be otherwise. Up until then, I think for the most part, people the closest thing that could come to an optimistic idea would be resignation. You know, we live in the best of all possible worlds sort of thing. This is the way it is. You might as well be happy with it, but this is how it is, and it's not gonna change. And I think that was a common idea for a long time.

00:24:35 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, it explains religion in some ways, although religion doesn't seem to have gone away. Speaking of big brains, perhaps the biggest—

00:24:43 Stuart Firestein: Were you expecting it to?

00:24:45 Andrew Keen: Well, and, again, that comes back to our age of uncertainty. It seems the more science we have, the more religion seems to be back in fashion. One of my favorite guests over the years on the show is, Alan Lightman, of course, who wrote a wonderful book on Einstein called Einstein's Dreams in which he sort of crosses a— Lightman is, a poet, a writer, a fictional writer at MIT, very much crosses over science and the arts. And it's always intrigued me. I don't really understand Einstein's science, but it seems as if Einstein's brain, so big, so profound, so shaping the science of the twentieth century, changed the nature of science, made it much less intuitive. How important is Einstein and Einsteinian physics in terms of making sense of the of science in the age of uncertainty? A lot of it isn't intuitive. It's more like science fiction, it seems to me.

00:25:47 Stuart Firestein: Yes. It is— I mean, I don't understand that either. I'm a biologist. You know? And I know physicists who probably don't entirely get it, to tell you the truth. I like to think actually that Darwin has had more effect on the way society thinks and the way we think or the way we could think and the way science works than Einstein did. I know that's probably not a common or popular view because somehow or another physics and I don't know. Physicists are always much better at philosophy than biologists are. But I think Darwin was actually before Einstein. Now Darwin is 1859, the publication of The Origin of Species. And I think Darwin was the first person to suggest that you could get tremendous levels of, organization and complexity with essentially random events which would be mutation and natural selection, both of which are very random sorts of, systems. So mutations we know are very random, in the genome and natural selection for that matter is fairly random too. I mean, you know, sixty-five million years ago, if the Earth had been seven minutes further along in its orbit, that asteroid that hit us would have missed, and we might still have dinosaurs roaming around here. So for seven minutes of travel time, around our orbit, things would change quite a bit. So that's—

00:27:13 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's lucky that, yeah, it's lucky that the airlines weren't running a schedule because—

00:27:18 Stuart Firestein: Yes.

00:27:19 Andrew Keen: —we'd, we wouldn't be here.

00:27:21 Stuart Firestein: That's right. That's exactly right. So I think Darwin is actually more influential in that regard than Einstein. And I also think, of course, because it's biology, which should mean a great deal more to us as people, as living organisms, than this kind of non-intuitive, very difficult abstract to grasp sort of physics of black holes and particles and things like that. And when are you ever gonna run into a particle, a subatomic particle or a black hole? But you do run into biology. We run into it with COVID. We'll run into it again. We run into it every day. We run into it with, you know, genetically modified crops and whether we want them or not. Climate change which may be a geological or a physical system to a large extent is still going to have most of its effect on biological systems. So it's most important there really. And so I think biology gives us a much more interesting and in-depth view of uncertainty and randomness and the possibilities from it. I mean, you know, I don't have to— clearly, I don't have to make a case against intelligent design in this, in this context here on our show here. But, but intelligent design could never have come up with anything as crazy as what we see on the planet. And as much as we've seen, I mean, 99% of all species that have ever existed or so have gone extinct, which means there are even more ways to make life than what we have in right here on the planet right now, which is incredibly complex and incredibly varied. So I think that's a perfect example of how randomness and uncertainty can lead to tremendous diversity as well as complexity. It's not chaos. You don't get chaos from uncertainty and randomness.

00:29:10 Andrew Keen: One of the most uncertain areas when it comes to science or certainly technology these days beyond Anthony Fauci's diary is smart machines and AI. Couple of days ago, Anthropic apparently suspended a new AI tool over security concerns. [ed.: Anthropic paused its cyber-capability evaluations in late July 2026; the suspension of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models on US government security grounds was in June 2026] No one's quite sure whether AI is about to wipe us out or whether all these fears are what the NVIDIA CEO said was science fiction. What does your book, It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty, Stuart? What does it tell us, or how does it help us make sense of this AI debate about, on the one hand, it's just scientific progress, and it's gonna make everyone happier and wealthier. Maybe we won't even have to work in the future. On the other hand, it's about to destroy us, take away our jobs, and even create some sort of new species of smart machines that will enslave us. It will be, in other words, as one author said, our final invention. I know you're not a tech guy or a neurobiologist [as spoken], but in terms of your book, about being otherwise and ignorance driving science, how does this help us make sense of this current debate about AI, which is very divisive and very confusing?

00:30:36 Stuart Firestein: So to be absolutely honest, it doesn't really help us very much at all, I suspect. I'm almost proud of the fact that I only mentioned AI once in the book, because everybody has something to say about it, and I don't think we know very much about it yet. So I think the uncertainty part about it is, at this moment, more of an epistemic uncertainty, if you will, that, we don't know yet. I mean, we just don't know where it could go. I happen to be more or less optimistic about it. I think for the most part, it will become has already become to some extent and will continue to be a very useful tool. Whether we'll control it or not, I mean, this is always the question with progress in science, you know. We, we hate the bomb, but we love anesthesia. So this is always the way it is in science, I'm afraid. And I don't think the thing itself will be the determinant of whether it's good or bad. It's the use that we wind up putting it to, of course, which will be by nefarious players bad and by other people good and one can hope the good win. I mean, like many other technologies, there's always a certain amount of fear that comes with it in the beginning. This one is pretty powerful, I admit. But, you know, Socrates was famously dead against writing. He hated the idea of writing because he thought it would ruin our memories, which it did. It's true. Memories are shit. But we have libraries and that's better than having individual memories. It seems to me that are that can remember Homer, if you will. So, I think this is always going to be the case. I mean, I don't wanna age you or anything, but you're probably sort of old enough to remember when people thought calculators would ruin our mathematical abilities. And they have to a large extent, but who cares? I mean, I don't really I don't need to learn long division anymore or work it out slowly. I can tap it out and get the answer. So I my hope is that AI will be along the same lines, but, of course, it is, you know, quantitatively more powerful and maybe qualitatively more powerful. We'll see. We'll see. I don't, you know, I don't know.

00:32:52 Andrew Keen: Well, we will see, although probably not gonna really see properly for twenty-five, maybe fifty years. Your book deals with education, how we should and shouldn't teach science. In the age of AI, some people suggest— shouldn't be allowed in the classroom. Some people— shouldn't students— maybe some of your Columbia students shouldn't be taking their smartphones, their supercomputers into class or using it for exams. What should or shouldn't AI be used for in terms of science in the age of uncertainty when it comes to education?

00:33:29 Stuart Firestein: So the fact on the ground is that there's just going to be no way to keep it out of the classroom or out of the students' hands. Many of my colleagues are worried because for years, of course, their ba— their basic grading technique has been an essay, especially in the humanities, admittedly, where the, you know, what the students do is produce a 5,000-word essay or a few of them and they're graded on those. And the question is, are they writing these essays, or is Claude writing the essay? And it's very— it's become more and more difficult to figure that out. For a while, you could sort of smell Claude in the essay. Now you really I think you can't. Or—

00:34:06 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, Claude has acquired deodorant, so to speak.

00:34:10 Stuart Firestein: Yes. Yes.

00:34:12 Andrew Keen: It's— can't smell— you can't smell Claude or OpenAI anymore.

00:34:16 Stuart Firestein: No. No. Not at all. So and, of course, you know, I work on the sense of smell, so I'm always suspicious of odor-free things because they shouldn't be. But that is the case with Claude and the other AI tools. And so, I think in some ways, our responsibility in education is to figure out how we include it, how we work with it. What is it that we want students to do now? I mean, just writing an essay may not be even though we've done that for decades. Maybe that maybe it's time to change that idea. In fact, the, I, you know, the book Ignorance that you mentioned earlier came out of a class that I ran for many years, still do, called Ignorance, in which I invite scientists to come in for two hours and talk to students about what they don't know, about what they're working on, what questions they've chosen, and so forth and so on. And the class, everybody always wants to know about the grade, of course, because they're Columbia students. What can I tell you? They're probably students anywhere. But in any case, they wanna know how it'll be graded. And I tell them, look. There's gonna be an essay. Your class participation is important, blah blah blah, and there'll be an essay at the end of the class, which will be 999 words. And I make it 999 words because everybody else assigns a 5,000-word essay, which these Columbia students can do in their sleep. They can write two at a time, I think, with each hand, you know. So I force them to write a shorter essay because I think it takes a little bit more thought. I also tell them, look. You have to think about what you want for a grade because your transcript is going to read Ignorance. Do you want an A, or do you want a fail?

00:35:52 Andrew Keen: [unclear] That's a good point. It's like an A— it's like an interview, Stuart. As I joked before we went live, if—

00:35:57 Stuart Firestein: Yep.

00:35:58 Andrew Keen: —you're any good, it will be forty minutes. And if you're not, it'll be fifty.

00:36:02 Stuart Firestein: Well, how far are we in?

00:36:04 Andrew Keen: What about AI and science and medicine? We've got an upcoming show with, Dr. Anmol Madan has a new book out, The Machines Will See You Now. Is one of the problems with AI that as everything becomes automated, we will demand less uncertainty. We will assume that the machine does indeed know or see everything.

00:36:29 Stuart Firestein: Well, I mean—

00:36:30 Andrew Keen: In the age of AI, do we need to recalibrate ignorance?

00:36:38 Stuart Firestein: I would say that the machines will be valuable to the extent that they are uncertain as well. When AI learns to be uncertain, when it learns to weigh possibilities, when it learns to come up with not just a single solution, then it will be intelligent. It'll be human.

00:36:54 Andrew Keen: On top of it. Right?

00:36:55 Stuart Firestein: Well, or close to it. It'll be the best part of human in any case, the better part of human, because it's the uncertainty that's really the important uncertainty is where the discoveries are made. It's where imagination exists. It's where creativity exists. Certainty, I mean, I understand people are uncomfortable with uncertainty in some ways that they find that anxiety producing, but certainty would be much more boring. I mean, you really wanna live in a world that's just a tick-tock, you know, clock world. I mean, if that's all it is, is that it's going to happen according to the immutable rules and laws of the universe and that's the end of it. It's all fated to be what it is. Well, I mean, where is free agency in that? Where is sense of self or a sense of possibility? Where it couldn't be otherwise in a totally deterministic universe. And so that's the universe that AI inhabits. If that's where it wants to be, where everything is certain, then I don't I think it'll be of less use to us.

00:37:56 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's a nice way of putting it, actually, and maybe you can write a book about it about the smartest machines will be uncertain. We expect certainty from our machines and our AIs, but the reverse is true. Finally, Stuart, you mentioned before that our ancestors, our species' ancestors lived, maybe not with more uncertainty, but certainly with more ignorance when it came to epistemic uncertainty, if not ontological, but ontological uncertainty was recycled in terms of religion. And when we look back at history, even relatively recent history back to the Middle Ages, we— or many of us— feel superior that medieval man only had Aristotelian science. They didn't understand the universe. They didn't understand the Earth. They didn't understand gravity. Do you think, Stuart, that in five hundred or a thousand years' time, we'll look back at the twenty-first century with the same kind of— not nostalgia, I guess, anti-nostalgia— with the same kind of, some sort of, intellectual self-congratulation, that those people knew nothing. I mean, how profound can science change? I mean, you got these theories, for example, the where we're living in some sort of, you know, other universe, alternative universe, that the universe itself is a universe within a universe within a universe that we're kind of all in an online game. Is it conceivable that in five hundred or a thousand years that everything we know will be wrong or everything we think we know today will be wrong?

00:39:52 Stuart Firestein: I hope so. I think so, and I hope so in a way. I mean, I think that is the nature of science. I like to say in science, revision is a victory. We should be wrong. I mean, it won't be wrong in the sense that, some medieval science was wrong, but some of it was not. I mean, they actually had quite accurate astronomical charts. They used them for astrological purposes, that's because they weren't trying to launch satellites anyway. I mean, you know, if you don't have to launch a satellite, you don't really need to use Newton's laws for too many other things at least today. So I mean, I think their science wasn't totally wrong. It was somewhat wrong. And now we're better. We're more right, but we're still only provisionally right. There's a fellow named John Maddox who's passed away some years ago, but he was one of the longest-serving editors of Nature magazine, the premier science publication. I think he was editor for twenty years or something. And he was once asked by a reporter, so how often— how many papers do you think Nature publishes that turn out to be wrong? And he snapped back immediately and said, oh, that's easy. All of them. And I think that's right. I mean, they're not wrong wrong in the sense that we can't rely on them. The unsettled science is not unsound science. It's reliable, but it will get better, and it should get better. And that's the nature of it. It's a kind of an unending quest, I think. So that's both the hubris and the humility side of science. It— who goes on an unending quest? And yet that's the most fun to have, isn't it?

00:41:26 Andrew Keen: Well, if you want an unending quest, you might, read, pick up Stuart Firestein's new book. It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty. Maybe every age should be uncertain. I think that's Stuart's argument. Congratulations, Stuart, on the new book. And in five hundred or a thousand years' time, we'll have you back on the show. By the way, I'm determined to continue— to extend the conversation. Is it conceivable that you and I might be around in five hundred or a thousand years' time?

00:41:58 Stuart Firestein: I don't think we'll be around in five hundred or a thousand years' time, but I don't think it's impossible that some people, maybe people being born today, will be here in a couple of hundred years at least still. So you and I probably missed this by a generation or two, but I do think we'll extend I mean, the critical thing is to extend healthy life, not just lifespan. One doesn't wanna be a Methuselah and get older and older, but, you know, age. One actually wants to live healthy longer. And even if we only live to be 80 or 85 or whatever the current lifespan is, to live that to a more in a more healthy way would be the real improvement. If we all die healthy, that would be the best way to do it.

00:42:38 Andrew Keen: [unclear] I'm regretful now. I think I'm gonna blame Tony Fauci for that. Stuart Firestein, thank you so much for a really interesting, enlightening conversation, almost hallucinatory in terms of what we might and might not understand about the world, the universe, and ourselves. It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty—it's out today. Thanks so much, Stuart.

00:43:03 Stuart Firestein: Thank you so much, Andrew. Brilliant conversation. I loved it. Thank you.