 So welcome to our third Google Hangout for the science journals and class. Today we have another prominent science journalist who also is a science journals and teacher, John Morgan from New Jersey. I will let him introduce a little bit about himself and how he got into science writing. And John, I think our format is very loose, but generally what we've done is kicked it to our guest speaker, our virtual guest for 10, 15, 20 minutes, however long you'd like to kind of talk about your career as a science writer, how you got into it, what you do now. And then we'll just open up your Q&A for 30 minutes or so. Okay, that sounds good. Well, I definitely don't recommend that any of you follow the career path I took because it took me forever. I'm a real oddball in science journalism. So my problem was that when I was a kid, I was very nerdy, I love science, I love doing math puzzles for fun, I collected bugs, butterflies, rocks, fossils, things like that. So part of me thought that I would become a scientist, I was really interested in science, but then another part of me was interested in writing. I started writing when I was a little kid, I wrote a lot of short stories, and then when I became a teenager, I was writing poetry. And so I thought I had to choose between being a writer, and I was really leaning toward writing fiction, that's what I thought a serious writer did. So I thought I had to choose between that and science. And then also, I was born in 1953, so I was in high school in the late 60s, early 60s for a lot of young people in my generation, also represented a lot of things that were wrong with the world. And so I was this kind of hippie-ish kid and I turned against science for a lot of the same reasons that people in my generation did. And then I was more of this kind of poetic type hippie figure. Also, I didn't go to college right away, and I only got serious about finishing college in my late 20s, and only in my junior or senior year, this was, we're talking about the early 80s now, did I realize that I could be a science writer? There was this thing, science writing, where I could indulge both of these passions of mine. And so I got my undergraduate degree at Columbia. I went on to Columbia Journalism School, it turned out that they had a guy who taught science writing there, who had a big influence on me. And I graduated just shy of my 30th birthday, and I got my first job writing about technology, pretty much engineering at a magazine called IEEE Spectrum, which probably none of you have heard of, unless you're an engineering major. I mean, first. Okay, right. And so I was writing about biomedical engineering. I wrote about security issues, which was pretty cool. And I was really interested in that. I'd always been worried about nuclear weapons since I was a kid as well. And it was a great job because I got a lot of responsibility very quickly. And also I had this experience that had a huge impact on how I wrote about science. So I started out as the kind of science journalist who wanted just to celebrate the achievements of science and talking about the great discoveries and inventions and explaining them to the public and saying why they were so important and interesting. And then, and this must have been 84, 85, I wrote about this very prominent electrical engineer. His name was Gerald Petrovsky, who was wiring up people who were paralyzed and helping them walk again, pouring their function with these complicated systems of electrodes and computers. And I first wrote a piece about how great he was and he was helping people walk again who had been paralyzed. This was a guy who was featured on 60 Minutes Twice. There was a TV movie about him. He got tremendous positive press. And then I found out that actually he was a fraud. He was a bad person. He was lying about a lot of his results. He was hurting some of his research subjects. And so I did this big investigative piece about him that was published in this crappy little engineering newsletter. And the organization I worked for, this engineering organization, ended up starting an investigation, not of this guy Petrovsky, but of me, garing to have questioned the reputation of this big shot engineer. And so that really set me back on my heels. The investigation eventually confirmed everything that I've reported about this guy. But the effect it had on me was that I became more of a critical science journalist from that point on. I decided that what it was important for me to do was not to serve as, to put it a little bit harshly, a public relations agent for science. Because science already has plenty of public relations and people who are marketing the institution of science. I thought that what science needed was a tough informed critic who respects science. I mean, and I became a science journalist because I think that science is the most impressive achievement of humans. It's an enormous source of knowledge and power that has benefited us in many ways. But there's also a downside to science also. And there is a tremendous amount of hype and misinformation about science. And so over the past 30 plus years since then I've actually become more and more critical of a science journalist. And every now and then I questioned myself, I have doubts, I think maybe I'm becoming a little bit too harsh and critical. But then when I go back and I did this recently because I was moving and I wrote a little piece about it. I was moving from upstate New York down to Hoboken, New Jersey, where I am now. Now I'm going through all my old files and trying to decide what to keep and what to throw out and rediscovering a lot of these old stories. And I just realized that so many of the claims of science over the last 30 years have been just bullshit. And this is just total hype. And that if anything, I haven't been critical enough. I'm usually criticized for being much too harsh and for being too much of a debunker and seeing only the dark side of science. And I don't think I've been critical enough. And so when I talk to young science journalists, I mean, you can have a great career doing what I would call pure G with science journalism. Just again, celebrating science, explaining it, talking about what extraordinary people many scientists are, there's some journalists who do that really well. I have done it at some points in my career. But I think there's more of a need for tough critical informed science journalism today. So I guess that's, is that a good enough introduction to get things going? I think so. Yeah. Sure, let's throw it out to the floor for questions. I've got something that maybe plays off of the last part of what you just said. Unfortunately, I have not read The End of Science, but reading about it has made me very interested in it. And I'm looking forward to reading your book from 1996. And I was looking at a review of it in the New York Times from the same year. And so I'd like to ask a two-part question if I could. The review says, John Horgan meets the powerful case that the best and most exciting scientific discoveries are behind us. He doubts that there will be many new discoveries able to match in sweet potency and sheer shock down you, a theory like relativity, which set the universal speed limit at the pace of light and reveal the elasticity of space. And so my two questions are, what is your response to that characterization of your position in the book, The End of Science? And then second part, now that we're 20 years later, has that position changed, and if so, how? No, I've got really profound confirmation bias on this issue. Everything that has happened since my book was published almost exactly 20 years ago, has reinforced my feeling that the really big discoveries that we're capable of making have been made, and that in the future we're going to elaborate and apply that knowledge, but we're not going to have any really profound insights into nature comparable to the greatest hits, evolutionary theory, the double helix, relativity, quantum mechanics, and so forth. You're reading from a review by Natalie Anjir, who's one of the great science journalists of my generation. And by the way, when I was talking about really good G-Wiz science journalism, Natalie Anjir is the person I have in mind. She is an extraordinary writer. She is the only science journalism I know of who can make chemistry exciting. She makes chemistry actually sexy. She's written these, I never could write about chemistry because I just couldn't figure out a way to make it interesting. And Natalie Anjir, she figured out how to do that. Now, as for where things stand today, I was picking on particle physics, I was talking about the complexity theory. I focused a lot on the attempt to understand ourselves, understand consciousness. And one of the predictions I made in the end of science was that you would see an increase in hype as scientists got more desperate at trying to come up with really exciting novel results. And I think that's been confirmed. I think you see that embodied by the replication crisis, which you guys have probably talked about in this class. Are you familiar with that phrase, the replication crisis? You know, just that. Oh, I can't talk about it obliquely, but unpack that for us. Sure, it's come from a bunch of different sources, but especially this one guy, an epidemiologist named John Ioanitis published a blockbuster paper back in 2005, he did an analysis of a lot of peer reviewed articles and showed that a majority of them turned out to be making false or exaggerated claims. And that unleashed this wave of scrutiny of the scientific literature. We're not talking about the media and its misrepresentations. We're talking about the supposed gold standard of science and how a lot of the peer reviewed claims are false for various reasons that Ioanitis goes into. One of the biggest and most obvious is just the increased competition for funding, tenure, attention, all those sorts of things that has led to either unconscious confirmation bias or just outright fraud. So that's a big problem. But I also look for areas of science where there are really smart, well-informed people grasping at what seemed to me self evidently silly theories. So a spectacular example of that is the realm of neuroscience and the attempt to understand human consciousness. I'm working on a book on the mind-body problem now. So I'm attending a lot of meetings on mind science, artificial intelligence and things like this. One really popular theory now is called Integrated Information Theory. And this is championed by Christoph Koch, who's maybe the leading neuroscientist in the United States. David Chalmers, who's maybe the leading philosopher, certainly philosopher of mind in the United States. The theory suggests that consciousness isn't just a byproduct of brains, it's a byproduct of all matter. So it's basically panpsychism, which means that consciousness is spread out through the entire universe. It's a crazy idea. To me, it's self evidently wrong and at least untestable, which makes it not really a serious scientific theory. And it just shows that people are getting desperate. And so they are, they're grasping at straws. The fact that string theory is still the leading contender for a unified theory of physics, even though it also is untestable, unconfirmable as extraordinary to me. The problems of string theory have become more self evident over time. And yet it's still kicking around out there. Serious people are talking about the existence of other universes in the realm of physics. And this used to be treated as kind of an embarrassment 20, 30 years ago. Now we're supposed to take the idea of multiverses seriously. So I'd like to, in my writing, sort of point to what I think are almost pathologies of science that reveal some of these underlying problems. And what I'm identifying as the chief problem is that science is bumping up against limits. Interesting. Of course, I think you had a question. Yeah, you were saying that during the 60s and 70s, a lot of people were kind of anti-scientists just because it represented a lot of things that are wrong with the world. When you broke into science writing or at least learned about it, was it kind of like a hard industry you get into because of that, or did that air kind of pass? So I think people weren't welcoming to science. Oh, I'm not sure if the hostility of hippies to science ever had a serious impact on the profession of science journalism. I happened to be getting into science journalism at a time of enormous growth. And looking back, I hate when people talk about the golden era, but I was actually part of the golden era of science journalism, which lasted, I'd say, from the mid-80s to the late 90s when a lot of newspapers were starting science sections. The New York Times had the Science Times, which was extraordinarily successful, mainly because it made money for the New York Times. They had a lot of advertising in it. It began around the time of the personal computer revolution. So they got a lot of those ads. And a lot of new magazines springing up, devoted to science, general interest magazines, also covering science more and more. And freelance rates were decent. You can actually make a living as a science journalist now, back then. Today, I don't know how much Jeff is getting into these issues, but it's pretty tough out there. I got a job at academia 11 years ago, in part because it was getting too hard for me to make a living as a science, as a pure freelance science journalist. I actually had been a staff writer at Scientific American for 11 years, which was like a dream job. But then I got fired because of the end of science, because it was so controversial. And I was fine with that. In fact, I sort of brought the firing on by being even more obnoxious than I usually am. I started getting really good book advances. I was well paid as a freelancer. That lasted for about eight years. And then media are just in trouble now. It's harder and harder for media companies to make a profit. And science journalism is a particularly troubled, little subnich of media that's trouble started even before the 2008 recession. So on the other hand, the upside is that anybody can be a science journalist now. You can just start blogging and try to find an audience and anything can happen. So in some ways, it's a very difficult period for people who are interested in science journalism. And in other ways, it's better than it ever was. I mean, I blog for Scientific American. I try to write a piece about once a week. I don't have an editor. I just get some dumb idea in my head. And then within hours, people are telling me online what a dumb idea it is. It's really fantastic. I'm not going through editors. I find that I've actually never had more fun writing than I'm having right now. But I'm also really glad that I have a job in academia. Charles, what do you tell your students? Well, do you teach students who are aspiring science writers? No. No, I teach science writing, but not all of them are majoring in computer science or engineering or financial engineering. And every now and then, one of them timidly expresses interested in science journalism. And I say, no, get your degree in that other thing. And if you're interested in writing, go ahead and write because maybe you'll become famous. Maybe you'll make some money, but chances are that's gonna be really tough. So have another source of income. I hope this isn't too disillusioning for members of this class. I don't think so. I think that people are pretty realistic about the state of the media. And this course is a hybrid in lots of different ways, but one way is maybe half of the students, not even that, maybe a third of the students in the class are mass con majors and the other two thirds are from other disciplines. So yeah, that's a good thing. By the way, I just have to, if I can make a pitch for science journalism again, I feel like I've been, it's the coolest career in the world. I feel so lucky to have stumbled into it. I have done so many really, I mean, not to brag, but really amazing things. I've been to the South Pole, not just the Antarctic, I've been to the South Pole itself. This is about 25 years ago. I have, I reported on a story on psychedelic drugs for Discover Magazine when it was still owned by Disney Corporation. So Disney Corporation paid for me to go to Navajo Reservation and take peyote with about 20 Navajo Indians and a teepee. It was fantastic. This was a tax deductible trip. I have the best part of the job is that I have met many of the smartest people who ever lived. I mean, if you go out with, in the end of science, it's filled with these interviews I've had with legendary people, you know, philosophers, Thomas Kuhn, I spent a whole afternoon with Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, Stephen Hawking. I once held Stephen Hawking in my arms at a conference back in the early night, not in a romantic way, but because he actually, his wheelchair broke down and I had to carry him to this picnic area at this conference I was at. Talking about the meaning of life with Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, people like that, so if you can find a way to get into it, it is just so much fun. It really keeps you forever young. So when you say there aren't gonna be any more exciting major discoveries, do you think there have been exceptions in the past 20 years, for example, like the discovery of gravitational waves? Yeah, gravitational waves. I wrote about that because, you know, whenever one of these things comes up, I hear from, you know, people say, oh, look, I wonder what that idiot end of science guy is gonna say about this. So, you know, then I have to have a response. And so, gravitational waves were actually predicted about it almost exactly 100 years ago by Einstein. And so the LIGO confirmed that prediction of Einstein. And so that is quite consistent with what I said in the end of science about how science is going to be filling in details, refining our current understanding, applying that knowledge, and so forth. The Higgs boson was another example that had been predicted in the early 60s. And I see the Higgs boson as like a nail in the coffin of modern particle physics. What they did in the early 60s was, in particle physics, what they desperately need is something totally novel. And the physicists will freely admit this, that they are victims of their own success. They need something really exciting, an anomaly equivalent to what you had with the Michelson-Morley experiments around the turn of the last century, the discovery of x-rays, radioactivity, things that were these little trouble spots in classical physics that turned out to believe these doors into a radically new way of understanding the physical world. That might happen, but I don't see anything, I don't see anything even on the horizon now that looks like those anomalies from more than 100 years ago. Yeah, probably. So if we are in that kind of era of the major discoveries of past, kind of filling in the details, what should science journalists kind of look for, for stories to write? Yeah, good question. I mean, having said this, there is so much to write about. So my big issue over the past 10 years or so has been violence, warfare and other forms of violent conflict. My last book was called The End of War, and I wrote it because I discovered by doing surveys that the vast majority of people, probably most of you in this room, think that war is a permanent part of the human condition. And I think that this belief has been encouraged in certain ways by bad scientific theories, one of which says that war is very deeply rooted in human evolution. It's something that we have in common with chimpanzees. There's some very prominent scientists, Edward Wilson and Steven Pinker who have been propagating that claim. And so I spend a lot of time writing about that. I talk about how global warming might affect violent conflicts in the future. I've actually turned away more over the last decade or so from the sort of classic pure science questions, where did the universe come from? Where, what is it made of? Stuff like that to practical issues because I'm just worried about where the world is going right now. And I see war as an issue that gets far less attention for example, than climate change. But to my mind is at least as important. Having said that, I just told you, I'm writing a book about the mind body problem because I've written about that throughout my career. I just can't let it go. It's one of those mysteries that gets deeper and more complicated the more I look at it and the more that I learn about it. The mind body problem by the way is just, it's one of the oldest puzzles in philosophy. The basic idea is all of you are and I, we're all made of meat. We're all just stuff. We're made of matter. And yet we're conscious, we have these minds. That's the level at which we are engaging with each other. And you might think that science has a grasp on how consciousness emerges from a brain but it doesn't, it doesn't have a clue. And that's why people are grasping at straws like this theory I mentioned earlier, integrated information theory. Now there are practical consequences to this research as well because if we can really understand the brain, understand for example, the, I don't know, the programs, the algorithms that our brains employ to turn physiological processes, interactions between neurons into cognition, into memories and perceptions and decisions and so forth. Then there are all sorts of science fiction possibilities that come into play. This is the realm of neuro prosthetics. That to me is tremendously exciting. I follow that a lot. That's putting stuff in your brain that allows you to control a computer or receive messages from the outside world. And you should also know this is a very fast moving field and it's also I think very significant that the Pentagon is the largest supporter of this kind of research for reasons that are probably obvious to you. There are military applications of brain machine interfaces. Another really important area of research is healthcare, medicine. Why are the costs of US healthcare so astronomical and are the outcomes are really lousy? It has to do with technology sometimes being counterproductive. I write a lot about tests for cancer. I hope you know that mammograms, for example, that closer that we look at them the less useful they appear to be. The same with tests for prostate cancer. That's a huge story with tremendous health and economic consequences. So there's actually a lot of stuff to write about. And it sounds like a lot of that stuff, John, is political. Is it science writing political? Or should it be political? Could it be political? And certainly it is in the, when I try to like trace your writings from end of science to end of war it's certainly the way you frame sciences is that it's not just about the science it's about lots of other things including politics. Yeah, I think my writing has gotten more of overtly political over the years. I wrote a piece, I don't know, within the last couple of years called something like, my advice to young science journalists think like Noam Chomsky. And the basic idea of it was that I thought that science journalists should be aware of the political, social, economic context of scientific claims and inventions. This is something that's so-called post-modernist or I don't know, science studies scholars do as well. Ask yourself when you're examining a claim who benefits from this claim? Who benefits from this new invention? When you're talking about mammograms, for example, there's a whole industry of people who are benefiting financially from the promotion of mammograms. The National Football League, I think relentlessly promotes them and it shows which if any of you watch football you've probably seen these public service announcements because it's worried about football players beating the hell out of women and it wants to promote itself as having at least some interest in women's issues. And so it tells women that they should get mammograms. I think that science journalism needs to have that kind of thinking. I see it as similar to the realm of political reporting. So no political reporter or at least no good one would simply report without scrutinizing and questioning the things that politicians say or the legislation that is proposed or that has already been enacted. They follow the money, right? And science journalism, sometimes following the money is a little bit of a crude way of getting at an issue but looking at who benefits is definitely appropriate. Great question. Yeah. Others? Sarah? Well, I have so many questions, John. And I think I'm gonna ask a boring one though. Getting back to the idea of replication studies and I'm not sure I've covered this very well and the replication problem, which my understanding is that there aren't enough replication studies and we need to do that. But that's at the opposite end of the spectrum of what you're describing as being interesting and multidisciplinary and having a pragmatic effect. We're really seeing also from scientists tell us that they want more coverage of what they're calling everyday science or this kind of incremental one researcher, one result kind of story. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, you know, it's tough for young scientists to deal with this replication problem because the way that they get hired, the way that they attract attention is by publishing novel results. So I think what scientists are trying to figure out now dealing with a replication, excuse me, a problem is how to reward people for undertaking replications. It's enormously important that who's going to do that kind of a drudge work. I think they often admit that it's important but no one wants to do it. I want that there may be a bigger role for undergraduates in replication study. Yeah, yeah, make the undergraduates do the boring stuff. I totally agree with that. Yeah, you know, there are actually lots of different schemes and I think this is going to be one of those kind of glacial issues where I think first it's important that all this attention was drawn to the issue. There are some people who are saying that it's gone too far and that science is not nearly as sort of unstable and rotten as has been implied by some of the reporting. I'm sure that's true, but there's definitely something going on there that is significant. By the way, this is a significant issue in terms of the publications, the way that science is communicated, not just by mass media, but by the journals themselves which are also, they're competing for readers. They also want good financial returns and some of the analyses of the replication crisis have pointed out the ways that journalists journals in spite of the peer review process have a strong bias toward exciting novel results even if those results are not poorly they're not well supported by the actual data. So I just think it's one of those things that journalists need to be aware of. I encountered this just recently. We had, we were hiring a new psychology professor at my school and several of the candidates had been involved in work that was coming into question. So the replication crisis is particularly severe in certain fields and psychology is one of them. So it's really affecting, it's affecting lots of researchers and I think it's something that the young people especially are gonna have to figure out. But I don't have any brilliant ideas for solving it. You know, I remember seeing a story or maybe hearing about an NPR. This was recently, I think, gosh, I'm sure it was this year about the crisis, the replication crisis, crisis especially I think was in psychology talking about how in that particular discipline it may have been more than half but I remember it was some very high proportion of official research studies had not been worn out in subsequent attempts. Does that ring a bell with you by any chance? Well, I actually wrote a piece for, I blogged about it and then Scientific American Mind asked me to turn it into a feature article. So that came out maybe last June but there's been a tremendous amount of attention to that. There's a guy named Dan Engber who writes, he's a really good science journalist. He wrote, he writes for Slate and he had a terrific piece that came out on the crisis in psychology last spring. So, yeah, there's, and again, this is one of those sort of systemic problems that I think science journalists, even if they don't write about it directly, need to be aware of just to sort of heighten their overall level of skepticism toward really exciting new claims because it's basically just reinforcing the old cliche that the more cool and dramatic a claim is, the more likely it is to be wrong. Yeah, perfect. You've obviously been in the whole journalistic game for a long time, especially in science journalism. As you know that, and you have stated this is a field that's a little harder to get into with not as many newspapers, science sections any more but also you have a very active engagement in social media, you have a very active Twitter account in the blog, you have sort of adapted very well to this new set of circumstances. I was just wondering what your position on the emerging role of social media in science journals is. You know, it's funny, I refuse to do social media, Twitter or Facebook on principle and then the Scientific American blog editor, maybe I forget, maybe four or five years ago, he said, no John, you've gotta go on Facebook and Twitter because we all have to be promoting each other's stuff because it boosts more traffic to the Scientific American site. And so I thought, okay, I'll do it for that very cynical reason and so I do it now, I don't know how effectively I do it. I've become addicted to it, I started out doing it reluctantly now I do it compulsively and that worries me. Pardon me? We have some whisks in the hallway that's probably carrying over. Oh, I'm sorry. So anyway, I don't know what the value of that stuff is. How many of you, are you all on social media? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you have the same ambivalence about it that I do, right? I've had friendships end, I went through this one period where there's some bad things happening in my personal life and I just had to develop this hair trigger on Twitter and I ended up flaming some friends for really mild criticism of some things that I was saying and I got really angry and then I had to go back by tail between my legs a few weeks later and apologize and try to make up so I don't know. I kind of worry about all that social media and I certainly don't feel like an expert in it. It can certainly be a fun slow. Yeah. Sarah. Well, I have a question that I'd like it, but I wanna think back to your initial remarks about your very wide curiosity as a child and then also your list of the really exciting things that you've been able to do as a science journalist that looks to me like you consistently picked big, interesting, multidisciplinary, complicated topics and you convinced all of these smart scientists to talk with you and interact with you. So is this big curiosity the same thing as a nose for news or is there something a little bit more honed about your ability to pick good stories and write about it? Yeah, from the inside, I've had other people tell me I did this event at the NYU graduate program in science writing and the guy who interviewed me, Lee Hots is this very distinguished writer for the Wall Street Journal and he presented me as somebody who's like this really slick science journalist who is really good at picking story ideas and again, he talked about social media. From the inside, I feel like I never really know what I'm doing, I tend to follow my obsessions though. I get like with the end of science, I just, it started with a couple of interviews I did in the late 80s and mulling over the claim of Stephen Hawking and some other physicists that there could be an end of physics in sight if they found a unified theory. And I thought, wow, that's such a interesting idea. Could there be an end of biology in the same sense, an end of neuroscience? And then I couldn't stop thinking about that topic. And so I had to write the end of science in a way to get it out of my system. And then you still have to be a professional and try to write something that people are going to want to read. I guess I should say something about style. I feel as though I've only scratched the surface in terms of experimenting with different kinds of science journalism, different forms. And I'm looking for a new way to write about the mind-body problem, for example. I even wrote a novel recently. I wrote a stream of consciousness account of one day in the life of a science journalist. These were failures that didn't work. There were a lot of fun for me to do. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I feel as though there was a lot of room in science journalism for experimentation and style for trying out different stuff. This is one of the things that you can do if you have your own blog, you can just try shit out. And this is something that I do a lot on my blog. I try to have fun with the form in which I write. And Scientific American gives me enormous latitude. Writing is so hard that I always thought it was a mistake to try to figure out what the market wants and then write that thing. I think it's much better to follow your, it's such a cliche, but it's been true for me. It's to follow your passion and your curiosity wherever they take you. And then that passion that you have in the topic should be conveyed through your writing. I think it will come through more than if you're very calculated in your approach to these topics. How did you develop this incredible range that John moved with philosophy and spirituality and anti-war stuff and quantum mechanics? It's like, are you an operations reader or you just, I guess over the course of decades of practicing the craft, do stories that gave you a deep dive into these areas. How did you develop that versatility that, frankly, that I aspire to? And that I'm sure a lot of people would want to know, how do you get to be conversant on so many different subjects? Well, I am, I'm getting up there in years. So I've got a lot of miles under my belt. And so that's part of it. One of the great things about blogging now is that I can just draw on more than 30 years of experiences and interviews and reading to comment on breaking news stories. I was actually very fortunate though. I started working at Scientific American in 1986. And I was the first staff writer hired there. So I was extraordinarily lucky. They had editors, all the editors did a little writing, but mainly were editing articles by scientists. But writing was all I did. And my editor just piled me with assignments and he forced me to do things that I didn't want to do. So for example, he made me write about, he said, I want you to do a future article on mathematics. I said, John and then I was an English major. What do I know about mathematics? And he said, I don't care. Just go out and find something to say. And it ended up being one of the articles that I'm proudest of. It was another one of these limits of knowledge things. I wrote about the death of proof. I found out that there were all these fascinating things going on in mathematics. So that was a case where the topic was forced on me, but then it was great. But other than that, it is again just being curious about things and learning about them. And when I was doing feature articles, for example, on particle physics or experiments in quantum mechanics that raised philosophical issues, these are topics I did back in the early 90s for Scientific American, I would have maybe two months where that's all I had to do. I would be talking to people. I'd be going to conferences. I'd be reading. And so the great thing was that by the end of my research, I often was telling, and I don't know if this happens to reporters anymore if they had the time to do this kind of research, I would tell my sources more than they told me. So I would become temporarily one of the world's experts on a topic like the quest for a unified theory. Because the scientists tend to be talking to people in their little subgroup. I'd be talking to a wider circle of people. And I would end up learning things that some of those people didn't know. So that was really exciting. So I was very fortunate to have that experience at Scientific American. That's cool. Other questions? Kirby? Yep. This, with so many years of experience under your belt and the exploration of so many issues, I assume that probably at this point you have a pretty thick roll of decks of, I guess, sources to draw back on, people to go back to. It seems that in journalism of any sort of just as true in science journalism as some of the other people we've talked to before, I guess maybe networking would be something that's important to find people you can go to to say, hey, I found somebody who has a position on this new physics thing. Do you know anything about it? And I'm just wondering if you have any advice on, I guess, the networking of science journalism. It's funny. I'm surprised that you even know what a roll of decks is. Do roll of decks still exist? In old closets. Museums. It's like typewriter. Do you guys know what a typewriter is? Yes. It's funny. I used to have a roll of decks. When I started out and my first job is 1983, I had a roll of decks. And I had an IBM's electric typewriter. I had a little bottle. Actually, I ended up getting a jumbo bottle of whiteout. I literally cut and pasted articles because we didn't have computers in my first job until about two years into it. I got one of the first personal computers ever made. It was called a K-Pro. The thing was huge. It must have weighed, I don't know, 25 or 30 pounds. And its total capacity on a floppy disk was the equivalent of about, I don't know, a 20-page story. And so you're bringing back all these memories of how the technology has progressed. All of that, all my networking now is just built into, I'm using Gmail. And I just type in a couple of letters from somebody's name and I get their email address. Finding sources is just so ridiculously easy now. So yeah, but still the biggest challenge is, and this is kind of a fundamental of journalism. And that's why I think journalism can be a really great life skill. Figuring out who are the people you trust? Who are the people are going to give you reliable information? This is true also of certain institutions. And there are some people who have very fancy pedigrees and reputations, you know, tenured professors at Ivy League colleges who are not trustworthy. And there are other people who are much lesser known that I trust more. And so I would think that would be a really interesting part of the job. But there are no rules for figuring that out. A lot of that just comes from experience and knowing lots of people and getting up a kind of intuitive sense of who you can trust and who you can't trust over time. The best thing is to just go in as a default assumption, not trusting anybody. Thank you. You know, my side is just kind of looking at your direction, anybody else? Well, if that one answers the question, I just have a comment, really. John, something you said earlier really resonated with me. And I think it's something I've been thinking about for a long time. I haven't really articulated it even to myself. I wasn't introduced to you this way, but I'm actually not a journalist and I'm not a journalism teacher. I'm a librarian. And one of my roles in this class is to look at ways that the information preparing and information disseminating roles of our two careers is really similar. And I think there are ways that we can assist and help each other. But something you said really made a lot of sense to me. And that was the idea of the journal of becoming the expert because you have the opportunity to talk with all these people who are working in fairly small and discrete areas. And it allows you to have this really large overview. And I'd say probably of all the people that we've talked to, your overview is larger than anyone else's. Your span is just really impressive. So my thought was, as a librarian, one of the things that I try to do is bring together different points of view in the library. In these days, I do it with real people who come and give panel discussions. In the past, libraries have always done this simply by representing all the disciplines in the library. My thought is that journalists have a role, whether you want to accept it or not, of doing this on a larger scale than libraries can do because media is much more pervasive than any library can hope to be. And I guess I'd just like to toss that idea out to you and ask you to respond to it. Yeah, well, I don't know. That sounds, I feel as though you're putting media up on a pedestal a little bit and I'm totally fine with that. I think we should be up on a pedestal. I'm proud to be a journalist. Journalism, that's not to say that I'm not ashamed of my fellow journalists often. There's a lot of herd mentality and journalism in general as well as in science journalism, but there's still a lot of, there's still fantastic journalism being done out there, and in some cases at great personal cost. So, yeah, journalists and libraries working together to improve human knowledge, sure, why not? That's what I say. I think journalists tend to be braver. Well, one of the things we've talked about in this class is that librarians are universally well liked, whereas that's not true for journalists. And we try to unpack that a little bit. And we think maybe by merging these two, we might come up with a hybrid that actually can educate the world about how things are and might be. That librarians could teach the journalists manners.