Peter Theil: Video cued to 1-minute excerpt.

Robert Laughlin (2010)

Transcript @39:37 — His advisor at Stanford, Bob Laughlin, got a Nobel Prize in physics in late ’90s. And he [Bob] suffered from the supreme delusion that once he had a Nobel prize in physics, he would have academic freedom, and he could do whatever he wanted to. And so what he decided to do is — he was going to sort of investigate all of the other scientists at Stanford who, he was convinced, were sort of stealing money from the government — and sort of engaged in mostly fraudulent research: just a lot of input of money, but not much output. The two grad students — he’d sort of come into their office once a week and it would be, “I’m very proud of you. We’re on the front lines; we’re doing battle for science against the whole universe in this office.” And you can sort of imagine how this movie ended. It sort of was quite catastrophic. The grad students couldn’t get PhDs. He got defunded. And my hermeneutic suspicion is always when there’s speech that is completely forbidden and questions that are not allowed to be asked, normally, you should assume that those things are simply true. (@40:40)