Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keyes, and in this episode of call it like I see it, we're going to continue our streaming between the Lines series and discuss the trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the documentary directed by David Grubbin, which originally aired on PBS back in 2009.
We also both saw the 2023 blockbuster entitled blockbuster film entitled Oppenheimer. So we'll draw from that as well in this discussion.
Joining me today is a man who, when it comes to first person shooters, is also a destroyer of worlds. Tunde Ogun, Lana Tunde. You ready to unload some insight here for us today?
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Yeah, man. I was never referred to as the Death Star before, but I'm the destroyer of worlds. So be it.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Maybe thanos. That could be another one.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah, we're Oppenheimer.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: All right.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: We're recording this on January 9, 2024. And looking at both the documentary and the film, we get a look into the life of Robert Oppenheimer, J. Robin Oppenheimer, which was highlighted, you know, the broad and broad strokes by his leading of the team which developed the first atomic bomb in the Manhattan project in the 1940s. And, you know, which is something that made him a celebrated, you know, american. And then also his subsequent fall from grace due to alleged ties with left wing groups or communism during what, you know, is often called the second Red Scare period in America. And, you know, both the documentary and the film went about telling these stories and in slightly different ways, you know, just, and that's understandable, you know, with the different formats, you know, one being a documentary, one being a blockbuster film. But in both and the film, you know, being by Christopher Nolan, you know, the one, the big one, you know, this, this past summer. But in both, you know, what really comes through are the super high triumphs, you know, that were a part of the man's life and also the, the disappointments or the things that, where things didn't happen the way he wanted to and how difficult for him or troubling those were. So, you know, just to get us started, tunde, you know, what stood out to you first about Oppenheimer, the man, you know, OppenhEIMeR himself and, you know, like, who he was.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Yes. I thought that this, this guy's arc and his story, both in the documentary and the film, like you said, christopher Nolan's film, it's very interesting to learn, I think, in a lot of these biographies, we learn about the human side of someone. And that's kind of what I walked away from with both the film and the documentary, which obviously it's about the same person's life. So they married each other pretty well.
Just that this guy.
Yeah, right. It's just that, you know, this was a very human story that to me was the biggest thing that stuck out. Obviously, I, I knew who he was in terms of, I'd heard his name. Obviously I know what an atomic bomb is, all that kind of stuff. So when I went to see the film last year, I'm going in knowing that stuff about his kind of overall situation and his impact on our history with his influence in the making of the atomic weapon. However, I was ignorant to his life story. And I think that's, to me, what was very interesting, his whole arc from his childhood, his time at university, and then through the rest of his life. You know, like you mentioned the whole thing with the red scare and all that. So I found it to be a very human story where he had a lot of complexities that I know we'll get into.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: No, I mean, and I would say with that is, you know, like, the interesting thing about that, like they, they made it a point, you know, to show, or in both formats that are to discuss that he wasn't amazing in everything, you know, like when they talked about his time in the lab, you know, and went during his educational time, he was a theoretical, he's known as a theoretical physicist, but when he spent time in the lab, he was, he struggled with that, you know. And so, but this brilliant man, you know, like a lot of times will then project someone with so much intelligence as being all, well, they must have just, you know, glided through with whatever. But a lot of times you can see how things built resiliency, built character and so forth. Another thing I thought that was very interesting about him as a man is that in many respects they painted him as a person who kind of discovered the world as he, as he, as he grew up, he discovered the world. And so his ties, quote, unquote, to communism or, you know, to leftist ties a lot of times seemed to evolve out of, you know, human connections he had made, you know, whether it be his brother was a member of the, the Communist Party, and so he, he wasn't a member of the Communist Party, but he had close personal, either friends or whatever that were. And so he, while he was able, it appears, you know, to be able to compartmentalize that and say, okay, well, yeah, this is something that's around me and so forth, close people. But, you know, as you get into and just kind of seeing the story once you get to a certain part of american history that wasn't cool anymore, like even having, even knowing people, you know, that had certain political leanings, even if they had those leanings 1520 years in the past, it was like, oh, you know, like we're all worked in a tizzy. But the way that he became exposed to these things or that he kind of, it was something of compassion even. You know, it was like, okay, well, you know, I care about people, so to speak. And I thought that was really interesting, you know, because again, we, we see the guy as the guy who's, you know, among the most famous people in the history of the world for being the developing of, you know, the atomic bomb, the first atomic bomb, you wouldn't think of that person and think compassion. You know, it's like, yeah, this is the person that, you know, created the web, first weapon of mass destruction like that. And so, you know, just see, though, again, those more human sides of it. And I think this is illustrated later on through his evolution in terms of once the, once the nuclear weapons were created, how he wanted to treat them, which I'm sure we'll get into in this discussion. But I think that part of him came through in which we'll talk about with the nuclear weapons, but also in other parts of his life. So. Yeah, like, well, but go ahead.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: No, I mean, that, I agree. That's, to me, that was the complex part.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: And this is the part to me, and we'll get to this later on discussion. But it's a pattern we've seen even in modern times, meaning our lifetime in recent, you know, last couple decades. And I think this is probably something that's happened in all societies at all times, which is there's different factions and different kind of subcultures within a larger group, and people have different ideas. And to your point, people associate in different ways. And to finish this part about the human part of him, he was, what I found interesting is he was so focused on his scientific work pretty much till his probably early mid thirties. So his whole twenties into his early thirties that, I mean, the documentary cited this, that he didn't know about the Wall street crash of 1929 until six months later when he was just taking a walk with one of his friends and they happened to talk about it. That's how driven and focused he was on his science. So to your point, as I just expanding on it a bit, when he started seeing some of his students when he was teaching at Berkeley, suffering during the Great Depression, just from, you know, they couldn't eat. They were having a tough time making ends meet, to your point. That's where he began to have compassion and started looking at what we would consider today more left leaning ideas of the culture, like helping the labor movement and things like that. And that's where he was. He got into being around people who, you know, were members of the Communist.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: Party, but it was always pragmatic, and that was kind of the thing. It wasn't. He didn't seem to be an ideological person, which allowed him to be kind of open to different ideas and evaluate them for himself. And the kind of independent thinker is a theme that keeps coming back up. And, I mean, just what that really does is a lot of times we like to be very reductive in our evaluation of people and just make them two dimensional. And this person was blank. This person was blank. And then that's it. And so, but the story of OppenheiMer, really, if you, if you take it for what it is, it forces you to go beyond that because it wasn't just, oh, it's just in this box. Like the developer of nuclear, you know, or the first atomic bomb, which is the weapon of mass destruction to the biggest and the baddest, you know, at its time of, you know, the start of that race, you know, also was this person who, you know, cared about, you know, economic well being and stuff and, you know, those kind of things. So it's just, you know, it's difficult to just put that all in one box.
So the other thing, though, I mean, and this is, we just got to get straight to it. You know, a big part of the story is the technological achievement. You know, that was the development of the, the first atomic bomb and how, you know, it fed, split between those who wanted to keep building more powerful weapons. You know, like, they'd say, hey, like, we, we started here, and we have to maintain this dominance, whether it be as a deterrence or any other justification.
And those who wanted to go in the direction of more so saying, immediately saying, oh, my gosh, we have now the power to destroy the world. We should, we shouldn't be looking at war anymore at all. Like, we need to get with people and try to figure out ways to control this.
What do you think about that, in terms of that, that immediate split that happened, it seemingly after, like, just to illustrate, you know, it talks about it in the film and the documentary. Like, once they completed the bomb, as they were almost finished with the bomb, Germany surrendered, and there were scientists at that point said, all right, we need to stop building this. You know, there's no, there's no need to build this anymore. And so as the, as they're getting closer and closer to the bomb being completed and then at once they run the first test, there are people that are immediately saying, hey, what we've done here, we need to put the brakes on it. You know, so, you know, just kind of, you know, tell me what you think about how this unfolds and, you know, Oppenheimer's role in it.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: Yeah. It's, it's, you know, again, it's all curious because this guy was so driven on creating the atomic bomb. And I think to your point, you said it earlier that he wasn't ideological.
And I think that's an important point. He didn't appear to be ideological in.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: In his, and any over any, like, crazy. Like very, very, very, like.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: That's what we're getting at.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Like with his associations with people who are members of the Communist Party, he seemed to just genuinely think that, you know, workers needed more rights and all that. He didn't seem to get into the whole thing like, you know, one of the allies with the Soviets and all. He wasn't into some greater cause about it. He just kind of aligned himself with some of their views. And it seems like there's refugees.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: Let's give some money to some refugees, you know.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So, and, you know, we'll get into that during the part about the kind of red scare. But then there's also, I see it the same way with his scientific work. He was really genuinely passionate about quantum physics and about solving problems. And I think just being a regular, you know, curious person that found in the way he developed in his mind science and equation solving was what he enjoyed tackling.
He clearly loved what he did. But I don't think, but that's what I mean. He was passionate about that.
Part of that was creating, you know, nuclear fission, or not creating, but, but, but continuing the work on nuclear fission and then creating the atom bottom. So again, he wasn't an ideologue like mass murderer that said, oh, I'm, I'm gonna build something so I can just kill hundreds of thousands of people at once. That's not, but.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Or he wasn't an ideologue pacifist either, saying, oh, well, you know, like it. Like he seemed to kind of be the ultimate pragmatist at any point, which would make enemies, though, because a lot of people are ideological. So if you're dumping it from camp to camp because you're pragmatic. That could be a problem.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's. He's a much milder version, let's put it this way. Then. I guess his counterpart at the time would have been a gentleman named Wernher von Braun in Germany, the developer of the v two rockets, who are the same thing. I mean, he was a member of the nazi party and all that stuff. I mean, was he really, you know, a crazy Nazi and all that? Or was he just a guy that loved to build rockets and happened to be german and decide, like you're saying, let me be pragmatic and keep building what I love to do. And, you know, they drop them all over London and all that. You know, that's how they're going to use them. I don't know what's in people's head. Right. But I think that Oppenheimer is a great example of that. As someone who was brilliant in inveting something, and then it was taken and used in a certain way. And then once he saw how it was being used and the proposals going forward after the atomic bombs were dropped, you know, the fact that we went into the cold war with the Soviets and we started making all these additional nuclear weapons, he then had an ethical issue with it. Right. And he said, you know, I don't think this is. This may not have been the right move. So, again, this shows the complexity of him as a person, which.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Cause that appears inconsistent. You know, like that, just from the surface, it's like, well, hold on. You were.
Yeah, you were the head of the Manhattan project, which, you know, was the project that created the first atomic weapon. And so now he was opposed to developing the first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, which came a couple of years after. And he was opposed to that. And then he's opposed to a lot of these plans that were, that were being made as far as, okay, well, here's our nuclear deterrent strategy. If Russia fires, we're going to do this. Or if this happens, we're going to do this. And it's like, well, but you played a major role in starting us down this path. And so, like, why couldn't you foresee that this is where it was gonna go once you started down the path anyway? And it, in my, in my view, there were a couple things, couple of, like, emotions or, you know, like, kind of human aspects that I saw in this. One was guilt. You know, just, I think that he felt. And this comes through, and, I mean, I think this was intentionally, that it came through in the films. And, you know, to the extent this was the accurate portrayal, I don't know, or whether it's revisionist, but it looked like he felt a lot of guilt in terms of his role in this. And, you know, the quote, the famous quote, I've become death, destroyer worlds, you know, which is quoted from, you know, a hindu text that he, you know, then made famous. I mean, that doesn't sound like that. He wasn't saying that in a way to brag, you know, there's a gravity that I like, oh, my gosh, you know, what have I done? So to speak?
But he was also a proud man. And so, like, you have to, again, this is that thing where you can't make it a two dimensional kind of thing. Like, you have to just look at it as three dimensional. Like, he viewed it as important. Now, I think a lot of times, with a lot of the scientists, it was easier to work on the Manhattan project and to be behind the development this nuclear weapon when it was Germany was the big bad, when it was Nazis and so forth. And we're fighting against fascism and what they're doing in terms of just murdering people everywhere and trying to take over the world, you know, statedly. And I think the first sign of those cracks where it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do we need to do this anymore? Is once Germany was. Was once Germany surrendered. And so I think when you take away that big bad. But there were strategic reasons why they wanted to drop it on Japan as well. Some of that being even to demonstrate to the world the power of this thing. And in the hopes that, hey, well, once people see how powerful this is, maybe people will stop going, you know, going to war, basically. But the division that ended up becoming or that came out of this, I think, and this is the. I kind of touched on this before, but I just want to make it clear, is what was one of ideal ideology. It was one of, okay, we need to do have peace through strength, so to speak, and we got to be the biggest guy on the block so that we can make sure there's peace. And then there was other people saying, hey, that's not the way to do it. If we keep building, everybody else is going to keep building. We'll just stockpile the weapons. So I think we saw the beginnings of that within Oppenheimer's mind. You know, like, just how he evolved over the. Over, like a five year period from, you know, the work on the Manhattan project to his opposition to the development of the thermonuclear, the hydro hydrogen bomb. So to me, I think that we basically got to see the 1950s, sixties, seventies kind of that battle and that ideological battle in America play out in Oppenheimer's head in over a couple of year period, which is just pretty interesting to me.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, those ethical questions to me are genuine, and I think we can all appreciate them. I mean, think about what the nuclear bomb itself did once it was used. First of all, it changed the world, right? We've never had a weapon that strong that could kill, you know, hundreds of thousands of people instantly. The second, and then the radioactive fallout and people dying for months afterwards and all that. And that raises very ethical questions. Right? Because is that ethical to do to anybody? Then we can go peel that off and say, well, at this point, is war ethical? Because if you kill a million people like we did over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, in terms of civilians, that's the estimated number that Americans that we're responsible of killing as a nation.
Is that more ethical than if we just dropped nuclear bombs on Afghanistan and Iraq and just took care of it within a week? I'm not saying that there's a right or wrong. I'm just saying this is, to me why we should probably have more care in terms of humanity before we go into wars. I know that's easy to say. And I know that we have several wars going on right now around the world, and everybody's passionate on each side. If someone heard me saying this from Ukraine or Russia or from the Gaza Strip or from Israel, they probably say, man, you got no idea what you're talking about. That side, they did this to me and we got to go get them and all that. So again, this is about humanity, which is complex and it's not always rational.
And so going back to the second world war, though, just on that ethical front, if one looks at the history of the time and the Pacific theater, there was estimates that if we were going to go in and finalize Japan and try and beat them in a conventional way, just regular military stuff, we would have needed around 1 million troops to go on and invade Japan on the land.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: Well, the intelligence was that Japan would not surrender because of a military, like a strategic defeat. Like you have to actually conquer them.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: Take over the land. Just like we know that they trained our pilots, kamikaze pilots, to just become their own bombs themselves, just drive the plane into a ship and kill themselves in the process.
Like you're saying the intelligence was telling the american leadership that they were training their civilians to do the same thing so that if we landed troops on their shores, their actual civilians will come and just try and kill us, too. So we could have had, you know, out of a million troops, hypothetically, half of them dead, and then we could have had 10 million Japanese dead. So what is more ethical, drop the bomb in the war and have less fatalities, probably in total, or don't use a nuclear weapon and then spend a few more years trying to kill Japan, and maybe you have another 10 million deaths. I don't know the answer. But this is why, again, humanity is complex. And again, we should probably do a better job thinking before we get into these kind of conflicts.
And that's why I'm a fan of things like NATO, because these strategic alliances around the world help us from having these huge wars on a perpetual basis.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Well, it creates a higher deterrence because, like, for example, like the Ukraine thing is an example of that, that Ukraine wasn't a member of NATO, made them susceptible to getting invaded. Because if you invade one NATO country, then all the NATO countries are supposed to jump in. And that raises the stakes and make, creates quite a deterrent to invade a NATO country. So you got all these countries in one block. So now if one gets invaded, it creates a bigger war than otherwise would have been there. But the point being is that that will, that acts just to say, okay, well, you don't want that kind of heat, basically similar to nuclear bombs, a deterrent. It does. It operates similar to nuclear bombs in that sense, as, I mean, and that's, I mean, honestly, if you look at the history of the world, the 20th, the second half of the 20th century was pretty good in terms of deterring large scale military, you know, and so you can look at, you know, large alliances and you can look at the, the stakes being raised in terms of nuclear powers as a part of both of those, a part of that, you know, both being a part of that. So, but I want to look at this from a little bit more of a philosophical way because it struck me, I said there were two things. One was guilt, but the other was naivete, that I think gripped a lot of the scientists, Oppenheimer included, that we could just stop the development of technology. Once you start down the road and it's like, can you unring the bell? Once you start down a path of a new and of a new and exciting tech that's also potentially dangerous, can you stop that unilaterally? Can you say, okay, we're going to stop this. And so therefore we're going to control the development of this technology. And I don't know that you can. I mean I look at, even on a modern times we have people kind of doing the same kind of thought process and approach with AI and they're like, oh, we gotta, we gotta stop. And it's like, I don't know that that's possible because you may stop, but that doesn't, how are you gonna stop everybody else from stopping? You know, like, and so we talked about this a couple years ago when we were talking about the testing that was being done with viruses and stuff like that. Like people, once you go, start going down these roads, what's, it's really not even what you start going down these roads. It's like once somebody has the idea to go down the road, I don't know that you're going to be able to stop the development of stuff like this. Now you may be able to put controls on the deployment of it which we've seen with arms treaties and so forth, arms treaties that, you know, chemical weapons and stuff. We've been able to, we as societies around the world have been able to kind of take those out of rotation in large part, but we weren't able to just stop them from developing, stop people from developing this stuff. It was more like, okay, well yeah, you know how to do it, let's, you know, I won't do it if you don't do it type of thing. But I don't know, I just wonder what was that even what they were asking for in terms of, okay, yeah, let's tell everybody. Let's, for example, let's share this. Technology is, and everybody agree not to, not to develop it further when there was clear steps that could be taken within short order to get there. I don't even know if that's possible. And so like I, and I asked a philosophical question like is that something that is even, is that an evidence of someone being naive or idealistic? Or do you think in that scenario, for example, in the late forties, early fifties, it would even been possible to put the brakes on the further development of technology like this?
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Um, that's a lot, but yeah, I.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Mean like look at it from AI. Do we think it's even?
[00:23:30] Speaker B: No, but, but let me go right now. Well no, I mean they, like you pointed out some good similarities and, and I think it's, it's the last party said is important, which is back then the forties and fifties compared to now. So yeah, I'm sure there's, first of all, as time has progressed, that's why I think it was important that last part. You said, technology has become smaller. We can do more with much smaller microchips, processors, and all that.
One person can do a lot more with technology at their hands today than they could have back in the forties and fifties.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: They had to build a whole town to build the first nuclear.
They literally went and built a whole town in New Mexico. You don't have to do that now to develop the kind of technology cutting edge.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Correct? And that's what I'm getting at, is had someone put the brakes on all that back then, like, let's say, in the middle of them hammering the nails in the wood to build that town in Los Alamos, if President Roosevelt at the time just said, you know what? We're putting a kibosh on this, I'm done. And for some reason, let's say, the Russians couldn't steal our secrets because we stopped it, maybe it would have taken another decade or two for physicists to figure this out. I think at some point, you know, we would have had nuclear technology and nuclear bomb. Now, though, and think about it, just in case there was any question, I got to announce here that I'm not an astrophysicist or quantum physicist, just in case. I was wondering. So the idea of one of us or a couple of us getting together in a room and creating, you know, going to mine uranium out of the ground and figure out how to deal with all that, enrich it, you know, just all that stuff. Right? That's. That's difficult for the average person. But today we have access, all of us, to artificial intelligence that can actually write code and help us maybe create a virus or some kind of worm or a malware or something like that, and someone like me, who's a layman at all this stuff, if I really took my time and energy, I could probably learn how to be effective and disruptive in that way. So I do think that even though we have the similar risks, the way that technology has continued to progress, it is allowing more of us in our society to have access to tools that can be disruptive. Let me just put it that way. If one looks at the nuclear bomb as an example of a disruptive tool in human history, that's an interesting point.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Because what you're saying basically is that, and I would agree with this, like, they wouldn't have been able to stop the technology from going in that direction like it was going to happen. Like. But if. If they would have, for example, like, they wouldn't, Roosevelt wouldn't have put the stop on it because they were concerned at the time that Germany was doing it. So it was going to happen. But let's say after Germany surrendered, if they said, okay, we're not going to put, take the last steps to do this, they may have delayed it, you know, is really what is, they would have been five or ten more years, but it would have happened because, you know, there's physicists all over the world and there are countries.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: They would have put some resources into it may, just may not. The real, the most amazing thing probably about the Manhattan project is how quickly it all happened. You know, and then they had labs working in different parts of the world. These people over here are rich enriching uranium. These people over here are enriching plutonium. Like, they got all this stuff going on. And so that's probably the most amazing part is, you know, in a similar way to the Apollo program is how the most amazing part probably is the level of focus and pooling of resources to make something happen quickly. So they probably could have delayed it. But I agree with you in the sense that right now, when you're looking at the challenges and the developments, once we go along these paths of innovative and new and potentially dangerous technologies, because of the decentralized nature of the way things are developed right now and the less resource intensive way that things can be developed, you'd lessen the ability to even delay, you know, open AI or somebody gets up and says, hey, we're going to put the, put the brakes on this. This is getting too dangerous. That's not going to really slow down much because, you know, the scientists even that are working there could be like, all right, well, I'm just going to leave here and go somewhere else who, you know, may not be as fun, well funded, but they're close enough and, you know, like, they got computers over there, too, so to speak. So that's interesting in the sense that it's maybe we're in a sit, we're going into situations now where even that kind of, you know, mindset won't even make much of a difference, whereas before it wouldn't have made it a fundamental difference, but it could have held things back a little bit. But I don't even know if that's worth it, though, at that point. You know, like you're, has, well, let me say the person who has the misgivings is probably the person who you would rather have develop on the front on the cutting edge, you know, like, I don't know that you want the guys on the cutting edge that are like, yeah, boy, we bout to do this, and those guys might deploy it in a way that is a little bit more reckless, you know? So I don't know, but I think it's an interesting thought, you know, like, to kind of look at like that.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: Yeah. The nuclear experiments are very interesting to me because you have everything we've talked about with it, with the negative side, right, which is very negative. The destruction, the killing of people, all that. But if you look, there's some positive that comes out of it, too. I mean, I know that I'm going to be very. This is going to be a sensitive discussion, but nuclear is considered a clean energy, even though it has radioactive waste. I know that comes out of it. And the idea is that there's aircraft carriers and submarines right now that are running on nuclear power, and they literally can go for 50 or 60 years without ever needing to refuel. And so there is a benefit to nuclear fission and the ability for us to harness energy that can kind of, is recurring now.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: Further development of technology, basically. That's right. I mean, and I'm not one, I'm not a fan of nuclear fission because of the waste issue, but at minimum, the nuclear fission would pave the way for us to get to nuclear fusion technology, which, you know, could potentially present the benefits of, you know, the fission without the necessity, the radioactive waste that we have nothing to do with. So, I mean, I think that the progress of technology, sometimes you got to get through, you know, you got to break the egg, so to speak, in order to get to the omelet, you know, so, I mean, like, it's, again, it's not something that you can say is all or nothing, so to speak. So. But I do want to keep us moving. The, um, the. The other, you know, you have the technological, you know, the innovation is a big part of the. Big part of the OppenHeimer story, but also, so is the. The subsequent taking down of Oppenheimer, which involved basically, uh, later on the. He was outspoken, you know, in terms of trying to control nuclear arms and to not continue to escalate and so forth and stockpile. And eventually people who, from an ideological standpoint, disagreed with him, it appears that they worked to get him out of the position of influence, because as the father of the atomic bomb, he had influence. And so this involved essentially using his contacts and his friends or things that he had done in the past or people he, you know, more so people he had been in contact with in the past to cast doubt on whether he was patriotic enough and so, or whether he was a communist or, you know, tied to the communist. And this is in the time period in America like, known as McCarthyism or the second red scare, where everybody is terrified, running around all the time with their hair on fire about communists in our mix that are going to take, not take the country down and so forth. So what do you think about the. How communism and the fear of it amongst Americans played such a role in this kind of second part, this other part of the Oppenheimer story where he falls from grace, and essentially what happens is his security clearance is revoked, and basically he no longer considered trustworthy as an American.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, this is a great part of the kind of arc of his story, both in the film and the documentary, because this whole thing about communism and the culture that was developed in the fifties during the second red scare, I think it still permeates our discussions today, both culturally and politically. So I want to go back and forth here. So I'm not talking too long, because I want to start at. No, because it's important for us to start with some things we've talked about in other discussions, which is our whole way of organizing societies is relatively new to humanity since the industrial age. So this form of capitalism and the way we organize ourselves has had, like you said, we've had to break some eggs to make this omelette that we look at now, which is our good economy and our first world that we live in today. Part of breaking those eggs was the Gilded Age, late 18 hundreds to the early 20th century, which, without getting into that conversation, one could say, culminated in the Great Depression, the crisis of 1929.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: We did a show like the building age documentary not too long ago.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: These are concepts. That's why I want to start there without spending too much time, but just lead up now to say, okay, communism. The idea of that was formed by Karl Marx in the late 18 hundreds as an alternative to the excesses of what people saw as industrialism and all that, these gilded age people that were so wealthy that everyone else in the country was a peasant. Now fast forward to the 1920s, the first red scare, and into the, you know, through the depression, the second world War. And now you go into the late forties and the 1950s. You have now the two dominant powers of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union, that have come out of the ashes of World War two. We are the west. We are capitalist, democratic. The Soviet Union is proud communist. So this is where all this stuff begins to really scare the american leadership, that we were being infiltrated by russian spies and by people that wanted to disrupt the United States because they felt that Stalin didn't want to stop at World War Two, that he wanted to continue and take over the entire continent of Europe. So that's where this stuff kind of began. So I want to pass it back to you for what you're seeing in that.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I think that lays a good groundwork for kind of why you had this angst. There was a concern there were two superpowers at the time, and there was a concern that one of the superpowers was trying to undermine the other. And there was, I would say the other superpower had shared that same concern, that the other was trying to undermine them. And so they're constant jockeying for power. And the interesting thing about it, you know, and then the cold war is, it's called that because the United States and Russia and the Soviet Union weren't in a hot war against each other, you know, but it was more of an ideological struggle, and it played out in proxy battles around the world. But it was. So if it's a battle of ideas, then, yes, you can infiltrate another country and start spreading your ideas and try to weaken them, so to speak, that your ideology is better than theirs. And in a open society, well, a society that calls itself an open society, like the United States, that may be easier than in an authoritarian society, which the Soviet Union became, you know, with. With Stalin and so forth. So, you know, it, there was, I would say, a legitimate understanding that that's something that we could be at risk at, is manipulation and so forth through channels, you know, whether it be political or otherwise, media information like we could be manipulated because we have a quote, unquote open society. What to me was very interesting about it is that when Oppenheimer was attacked, he wasn't attacked for. Well, he was attacked because of the things he was saying at the current time. But the avenues to attack him were about who he was or what he thought or people he interacted with, primarily when he was a younger man. And when he was a younger man. This was a time period not too long after the great financial crash that led us into the great depression. And so we're in this great depression. And I think open minded people in that time and young people in that time could look around reasonably and say, well, hold on. Is capitalism really the way that things are going to create a legitimate just and workable society. Because personally, I look at it and say, like, the new deal is what really was the proof of concept that capitalism doesn't have to be so exploitative constantly. Like, the capitalism can create society where it can work for a large number of people in the society, where the economics can work for a large number of people in society. So this was pre the new deal proof of concept that you can build the biggest middle class in the history of the world using a capitalist framework. So, yeah, like, there were a lot of questions being asked, you know, amongst people who weren't necessarily agents of the Soviet Union, but I think that was exploited by agents of the Soviet Union. And so it created this situation where. And this is something that Oppenheimer talked about or even his wife talked about, like, yeah, we didn't know in the thirties that all of these communist parties were infiltrated and, you know, operated basically by the. The Soviet Union. By Russia.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: And so that, to me, was very fascinating in that, you know, like, they didn't know. And it reminded me almost of kind of what we saw with social media in the past, you know, ten years or whatever, where a lot of the. We know that, like, Russia was using, you know, the social media to put messages out there and to kind of manipulate Americans to think certain things.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: And the spies that were in the NRA, remember?
[00:37:13] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, Maria.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: Everyone can look them up. Anna Chapman and Maria Butina.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: Good old russian spies over the last decade.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: And so, yeah. Taking, you know, like, people, things that Americans were legitimately concerned about or places that Americans get their information and kind of influencing him in a certain way. So, to me, that's what it reminded me of. So it was to kind of keep moving. My point being is that at the time when Oppenheimen, again, the story is that he never joined the Communist Party, but he had friends that were part of it and interacted in circles that were close to it. But again, from his standpoint, it was one of compassion, but it was, at that time, questioning from an open minded standpoint. Okay, well, hold on. What is a better system, or how can we make the system work better? Seemed to be not. That didn't seem to be an act of treason at that time, basically, but that was seen as an act of treason 20 years later, in the fifties, because at that point, there was zero tolerance for communism. And, in fact, we knew that those at the end of the thirties, the Soviet Union was using those organizations for manipulation and so forth.
[00:38:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, that's a great point, James. Cause I think it's something we've seen, you know, since then. I'm not gonna say all human history. Cause I don't have a lens that goes that far back, but I can talk about the last few decades. No, but my point is saying that there's a little bit of truth in all of it. I think that's the thing that is sometimes even hard to really acknowledge for our brains. Cause we wanna have an absolute answer. So you're right. Is it true that there were genuine people who were genuinely concerned about just the case for the american worker and people needed a fair shake and all that? Yeah. Is it true that the Russians, as a nation, as an adversary of America, were infiltrating communist organizations here in the United States to try and influence and cause disruption here? Yeah, that's true, too. So there's all. And is it true that there's probably some Americans that were aligned with the Russians and were going against their country? Yeah. And is it true there are probably a lot of Americans that were in these groups and had no idea that that little stuff was going on? That's probably true, too. And that's why I make the point of. Of the recent russian influence campaign of the last decade or so that has been well documented, and I'm not even going to get into what some may consider more controversial conversation about the 2016 election. So forget that I'm going to say this stuff. That's why I say Maria Butina. Anna Chapman. They're well documented. They were russian spies that were caught, and it was a very well known story, and probably around 2015, 2016, that we did a spice swap with Russia. So Russia acknowledged they were spies, too, by doing a spice swap with us. And so. And so the idea was that Maria Butina really infiltrated the NRA and certain american conservative political circles. Now, does that mean that all the Americans that were part of those groups knew that she was a russian spy and all that? No, of course not. Did some.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Maybe.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: No, maybe some new.
But that's the game of espionage, and I'm pretty sure we've done that in Russia, you know, as Americans with american spies. So, to me, that's all interesting. Right. And that's all stuff that really happened.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: But the similarity would be, is if now, or if in ten years, we look back and said, okay, anybody who was in the NRA at the time, Maria Butina, had infiltrated it, is we're gonna go after them for treason. And it's like, well, a lot of those people might not have known that Maria Butina was a russian spy who had infiltrated the NRA. And so that's how that red scare thing played out in some cases. In other cases, yeah, there might have been people that were legitimately, you know, on board with the Russia thing. But it seems like it was a situation that was right to kind of entrap a lot of people who fought. They were. They were just trying to help people out. But because of what the Russians actually had done and because, you know, like, the setup, they were like, oh, wow, you actually didn't. You might not have known it, but you were part of this group, or you were sending money somewhere that was a front that the Russia had set up, and you thought you were just being nice to some workers, so to speak.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: No, we saw that. You know what? This is why history is important, right? To learn, because we've already seen this in our lifetimes, in the last 20 years. I'm thinking about the war on terror. Remember after 911, that first few years? I mean, we were on edge as a nation and remembered, I remember on the news, there was these stories of people getting investigated by the feds or even arrested because they sent money to some nonprofit that they thought was just some Middle Eastern nonprofit to help kids over there. And all of a sudden, our intelligence services found that that nonprofit, maybe some money was funneled to some terrorism. Right? And, you know, I'm sure maybe some people knew that that was going on, but I'm sure a lot of people donating money there didn't. And that's just unfortunate. Right.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: That's why. That's why it's set up as a front.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: But one of the things I wanted to get, so I went and did a little bit of background on the red scare stuff back then, just, I wanted a little more foundation for this conversation. And I learned that in 1947, President Harry Truman signed an executive order to screen federal employees for possible association with organizations deemed totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive. And that reminded me of, again, there's some people freaking out about, the Heritage foundation has written something, what they call the project 2025. And that is that, you know, in their mind, if there is a Republican that wins the presidential election this year, that they were. Their plan is to go and screen up to 50,000 federal employees for, like, a loyalty test to see where their loyalties lie and all that. And a lot of people I've seen have taken that as, oh, my God, this can't do this. This is America. And it was. I'm not going to say it was nice to read that Harry Truman did this, but it was a reminder that a lot of things that we freak out on in today's world, there's precedents already for it just in general. And this is one where the fear of communism, you know, again, maybe it was a genuine fear, but again, it was used to then suppress, like, regular dissent and used to attack what was seen as, at the time, kind of aggressive parts of the culture. So this is why. One reason why Hollywood and certain what I would say, I'm not gonna say left wing for this, I'm gonna say more liberal. And maybe progressive institutions traditionally get attacked is because they're generally the ones that usually, like the arts, usually open up to others. Right. And others who might be on the fringe of society at the time. So what was Hollywood doing back. Back in the forties and fifties was allowing African Americans to act in movies. Right. And do certain things. And the music industry was bringing up people like Chuck Berry and Ray Charles and Little Richard. And at the time, the african american community was on the fringe of american culture, and that was seen to be an attack on the established order way of life. Correct. If you're bringing in these outsiders to come in and now congregate with the rest of us. And so you fast forward to today. That conversation is being had about maybe the LGBTQ community, maybe it's about immigrants coming from the southern border. Whoever the fringe is in our society today, people who maybe are being sympathetic to those groups and their causes, we hear today they're being called communists. Right. And they're being called leftists. And all this stuff that throw back.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Which mirrors all of that, you know, and I think it's fascinating. The key point to bring this back in is that a lot of times, these, while people may not recognize it and some do, though, some use it opportunistically. And that's what we saw with. With straws.
Who is kind of the big bad in the Oppenheimer story and in both the movie and in the documentary is that these type of scares can be used to settle scores, or more specifically, using your exact language to go after and suppress regular dissent. Somebody who just doesn't agree with you, then it's like, okay, well, that person, then, if you don't agree with me, you're anti american. And so I'm going to go after you using these other. I'm going to be opportunistic about these, where society is already kind of sensitive. I'm going to use those things to go after you because I just don't like what you're saying. And so that's what we see there. And that's, I mean, that's to kind of touch on something else. That's what the concern about the Heritage foundation thing is like. Well, hold on. Are you saying people are actually allied with other nations, or are you saying they don't agree with you and in terms of how to run this nation, and so therefore you're going to go after them for that? And so I think then that's, that's what we can see is what ends up happening in a lot of these. And this is why we have something like the freedom of speech and or freedom of speech in the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is not about giving people freedom from repercussion on popular speech. You don't need freedom for to say things that are popular. It's to actually have freedom to say things that are unpopular or to criticize people in power. And so it's used with these types of situations are where you can see scares and public panic be used to undermine that. And that's what happened in many tellings of it to OppenhEIMeR, is that OppenhEIMER was not given the line that many who were in power ideologically wanted to hear, which was, we need to keep building nuclear weapons, we need to stockpile, we need to outbuild Russia in terms of nuclear weapons. And Oppenheimer was saying, hey, we don't need to keep, we don't need to keep building. And so because he took that position, because he disagreed with kind of this ideological point of view, then it was decided, we're going to go after this guy, we're going to silence him because we want our ideology to prevail had nothing necessarily to do with sufficiently loyal as an American, you know, so that's a big part of his story. And something that is a warning to us, you know, like. Cause when we're in these frenzies and afraid of everything like that, it's easy to lose some of the values that and to fall victim to people who promise us safety and so forth if we just give up some of our values. So I do want to wrap this up. Just last thing, you know, is there anything else that stands out to you in the Oppenheimer story? You know, like, yeah, it's interesting.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: So I realized we've had this whole conversation without talking about kind of part of his big part of his personal life, which is his wife, the fact he's a father, the fact that he.
[00:47:39] Speaker A: Had all very novel things, by the way.
[00:47:42] Speaker B: Yeah, no, what I'm saying is. I'm saying this with a smile as a joke, because, again, he's a human being, right? When I think of a quantum physicist, like we said at the beginning, I'm thinking of a guy that's all square and he's not there trying to bang chicks, you know, and all this stuff. And here's a guy that, in the film, they said it. He was had. He had an affair. I think he had a couple affairs when he went back to see his old girlfriend at the apartment. We don't know what happened, but we can assume he spent the night. You know, they weren't just having tea and crumpets.
So it's interesting, like, he reminds me in a certain way his personality and don't. Not a total way, but just a little bit like an Elon Musk figure, right. Of a guy that's brilliant in a certain way and created something very unique, whether Tesla or SpaceX or in this case, he was doing a nuclear bomb.
And there's a certain arrogance, naivete about the bigger political and cultural world out there, because maybe in an earlier part of his life, he wasn't really exposed to this kind of discourse and cultural nuances. And then you go down that.
[00:48:49] Speaker A: But just real quick, I'll get you back. But you bring up kind of these human things. But also, that was quite a contrast to what was described as his early life. Remember, they talk about in the documentary how it's believed that during his whole time in undergrad, he never had a date. Yeah.
[00:49:07] Speaker B: That's why I compare him to Elon Musk, because there's been just chatter about. Elon Musk was also one of those kind of kids, they're very smart, but kind of like, stayed in the room and tinkered on computers. Right. He wasn't really out there, you know, going to house parties. And that's what I mean, like, being all out there in his early twenties like that. He was focused on PayPal at the time when he was building that, so. And then that's what I mean, like.
And just like Jay, I mean. Sorry. Oppenheimer didn't really understand the greater cultural game, the politics of the era, the whole thing about communism. And I feel like when we see Elon Musk with his tweets, 1 minute he's tweeting, supporting an anti semitic tweet, and then a week later, I see him meeting with the president of Israel. So it's kind of like he's the same way, like he doesn't kind of get it, and then I'm laughing. And what makes me think the comparison? And Elon Musk has twelve kids, so he's kind of that nerdy brainiac guy that still likes the ladies. So that was just a fun little thing I noticed about the guy. And then the other thing, just to wrap it up here, is I found it fascinating that he really, they didn't talk about this that much in the film. They did allude to it in the documentary a little more. But his love of mysticism, the fact that he learned how to read Sanskrit and became fluent in Sanskrit and became a big fan of the Bhagavad Gita, the hindu religious text, that was a whole thing I just found interesting.
And he was really serious about that. The fact that he went and actually learned the language and learned how to read in the language, that's good stuff.
[00:50:42] Speaker A: That's good stuff for me. This is actually something that you had mentioned, and we kicked around offline. One of the interesting things was that Oppenheimer was the son of an immigrant.
You look at that and you just look at the american history. Look at american history. And just how often we read or see that you have these transformative figures who aren't five, six generations american. Like, they're immigrants who came here. His father came here penniless and couldn't speak the language. And you think about, and we're about 2024, we're about to get into every election year. You know, there's always a lot, a lot, a lot of talking about immigration and there's caravans and all this other stuff. And we got all these people who are trying to come here penniless that don't speak the language. And I'm looking like, man, you know, like, that's Oppenheimer's dad, you know, in a sense, you know, and so he comes here and he works his butt off and, you know, becomes a successful person, marries an American and has a kid, and then that kid is, you know, a brilliant, one of the brilliant men of the 20th century and led the team that developed the first atomic bomb. And again, I always look at that and maybe this is my own ideology or my own kind of just, but it looks just, it looks like my view of what's happening, what happens here is that it seems like immigration consistently gives America such a leg up in terms of just as a nation. You know, it doesn't allow the nation to stagnate. Now, Americans, Native Americans, have always been hostile to immigrants, but it seems like the Constitution.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: Hold on. Be very clear what you say. Do you mean Native Americans that we otherwise call Indians, or are you talking about native white Americans? Native American have come from Europe before a certain period. Okay.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: Yeah, native white Americans. That's a very important.
Well, no, you're right. And it actually shows the ridiculousness of it. What I mean by that is native white Americans who have been here for a generation or two, and they're like, oh, the immigrants. We can't let those immigrants in.
[00:52:40] Speaker B: Be fair. I've called the native white Americans, those who can trace their ancestry to this country prior to the civil war. That'll be my cutoff line.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: But it's not just them, though. When you get to the 1900 or the 19 hundreds, 20th century, there were people who win that were like, two.
[00:52:55] Speaker B: Generations in whose grandparent came in 1950. That'll say they're Native Americans.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: No, in the same way, now that we see the hispanic community, sometimes we'll see some of them saying, no, no, don't let any more immigrants in from the southern border. And it's like, so I just think we should be very careful now. Obviously, we need to have. We need to secure the border. We can't just have an open border where people just have all open and everyone run across the house. Well, no, you have to have to do it in some orderly way. There's no. There's a reason why there was an Ellis island set up at a various point, at a different point in american history, because it's like, all right, we got a product. We got to know who these people are. We got to, you know, like, there has to be some system in place. It can't just be a free for all. But at the same time, it's a. It's a pretty big advantage as far as nation building to have a constant influx of highly motivated people who get up and leave everything that they know and come just for the chance to work, have highly motivated people to just keep wanting to come. That's a downside.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: The downside is it's scary.
[00:53:53] Speaker A: Well, it's scary from insenopathic way.
[00:53:55] Speaker B: Tucker Colby. Tucker Carlson told me that it's going to dirty America. So that. That's scary to me.
[00:54:00] Speaker A: And there were the Tucker Carlsons of 1900 that said, it's a great point.
[00:54:06] Speaker B: Because if you look at the period his dad immigrated in 1888, again, the audience, this is fun stuff. Go look up the history of discrimination against german immigrants in the United States in the late 18 hundreds. So this is, again, how it's just interesting that there was more concern of european immigrants coming here and dirtying the blood of native white Americans at the time than there was of even the southern border or concerns about African Americans. Like, there's a period in american history where eastern Europeans, I know Germany is not necessarily that east, but is more central, but we're considered, like, the biggest risk to soiling the american culture. So we've gone through these waves of this kind of xenophobia and these mindsets.
[00:54:56] Speaker A: And what I find we continually benefit from that. There is a constant stream of immigration coming in less the duality, the irony.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: Of it, that we benefit from it. But at the same time, there's always this faction that is scared of it. And so it's just tension at all times.
[00:55:15] Speaker A: But some of that, I think, and I mean, I want to wrap. But some of that, I think, is. And we just have to, I think, learn to kind of just deal with this and account for it in our society. There are just some people in any society that are just more susceptible to fear based messages. You know, like, they're just susceptible to, like, you can. They're easy to scare. Oh, it's all this. Oh, it's all that. We got to watch out for this. We gotta watch out for that. And they get into a frenzy, and so that's just always gonna be there. And so, like, it one, we have to keep. Be mindful of ourselves. If you're not one of these people, be mindful of yourself and saying, hey, am I just falling into a fear based message? But it seems like a lot of the things that people are told to be afraid of are things that America has and can draw strength. You know, a lot of countries have the problem of, they don't have enough young people. They don't have enough people that are motivated to do stuff. And we get young, motivated people constantly trying to come here and work, you know, I guess seems like that's something you could use to your advantage. The other thing I'll mention just real quick, before we get out, is this is another danger I see here, is that when I look at projects like the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, I'm looking at things. These are things that were enabled by government. And so I'm just, I'm more skeptical every time I see stuff like this of the people who come into government saying the government is the problem, and I don't want, like, I'm fine with that thought and people holding government accountable, but I don't necessarily know if we want the people in the government. To think that the government doesn't have a use, you know, because government has clearly, United States government has clearly been at the forefront of some pretty substantial and major developments over the 20th century and before and after. And I don't know that we want to have people in the government who are saying the government sucks, but we do want to hold the government accountable. So, I mean, I'm not saying that there's no role for that, you know, like, but just be very careful. If your people are leading the government, say the government has no role, because we see the government can play a very big role in advancement of United States.
[00:57:02] Speaker B: It depends what your priority is. If your priority is governing and moving a country forward, then you're right. If your priority is fundraising and being on cable news, then these people are very effective.
[00:57:12] Speaker A: You are honestly not moving the country forward. If you don't want to keep things moving forward, if you want to be regressive, then yeah, I mean, so I.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: Got one last fun thing before we part, because I was thinking, as I was joking about Elon Musk on a serious note, you know what I thought, and this is, again, my distaste for social media, thinking about how complex this guy Oppenheimer was and what he really thought. Think about if he had Twitter and Instagram and all that back then when he was in his twenties and thirties.
[00:57:40] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, imagine all the tweets, how.
[00:57:42] Speaker B: Crazy he would look talking all that with all his. So that's my point of saying that it's just interesting that we're in this world where we're able to see what's going on in real time, because people keep telling us, they keep just putting themselves out there. And I'm kind of glad that a lot of these historical figures didn't have.
[00:57:59] Speaker A: Access to, well, to your point, he was dragged through the mud for kind of associations and thoughts that he might have expressed in his twenties and thirties, and that was just based on, you know, how they were able to piece it together. If it was now, he, they'd have a whole record of everything he was thinking and who he was with.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: Now we got a record of a lot of people, and they seem to escape. Screw me.
[00:58:21] Speaker A: I don't know. I think we can. We can wrap from there, man. That's a good point, though. But we do appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of catch.
[00:58:26] Speaker B: Yes, and hold on. For those that are watching our video, this is the only time I can be proud of a shirt about atoms. So that work in honor of Oppenheimer and the breaking of the atom.
[00:58:36] Speaker A: Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:58:42] Speaker B: I'm tuned to Egalana.
[00:58:43] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
