Brian Lehrer Weekend: Anthropic-Pentagon Standoff; Vaccines; Spring is Coming

0:00In 2024, a truck crashed into Canaw in Moresque, where I work. 146 of our dogs needed homes fast. We asked for help on Facebook. Our story spread through WhatsApp messages and Instagram reposts. Immediately, people stepped up and just six hours later, every dog was fostered. I'll never forget how our community showed up for us. Learn how over 3.5 billion people connect to what matters with Metta at Metta.com slash community. United Health Group is simplifying healthcare by investing in tools to help patients know more and pay less. These tools help patients find providers and compare costs and save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more at unitedhealthgroup.com slash commitment. Few things are as uplifting as the greatest moments in sports. And nothing brings us together quite like Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games. From NBC Universal's iconic storytelling to the innovative technology across Exfinity and Peacock, Comcast brings the Olympic Games home to America, sharing every moment with millions.

1:04When Team USA steps onto the world stage, we're not just watching. We're cheering together. This winter, we're all on the same team. Comcast, proud partner of Team USA. Hi, Brian Lair here. Up next, Brian Lair weekend. Three of our favorite segments from the week packaged together for you to listen to on the weekend. So enjoy, and I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10am on WNYC and WNYC.org. It's the Brian Lair show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. So let's talk about a standoff in the war that's not between the US and Iran. You may have heard this, you may have not heard this. It's between the US and the Artificial Intelligence Company and Thoropik.

2:06Now, and Thoropik has certain ethical guidelines that it tries to abide by, and it's AI product known as Claude. They want to adhere to these ethical standards, even though they are a defense contractor, voluntarily doing business with the Pentagon. This is a war-specific dispute, yes, but it also raises questions for so much of the growing use of Artificial Intelligence in so many parts of society and so many aspects of our lives. But on this specific story, here's where the drama began. Last July, and Thoropik became the first AI company to receive a contract with the Department of War, or still Department of Defense, if you prefer. In this contract, and Thoropik was granted national security clearances, which allowed Claude to be used on the military's classified networks, making it the first AI model ever to operate at that level. But picked into that contract was a catch. And Thoropik's own terms of service, which prohibit Claude from being used in autonomous

3:11weapon systems, we'll explain what that means, or for the mass surveillance of American citizens, you probably know what that means. The clause is now at the center of a standoff that has put the company's entire relationship with the federal government at risk, and is even raising new questions about possible abuse of power by Trump and Secretary Pete Hexeth. Let's discuss. With me now is Stephen Levy, editor at large for Wired. He wrote an article called AI Safety and the War Machine just before the U.S. launched this war. Now it's doubly relevant. Stephen, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNMC. Thanks, my pleasure to be here. And to get us into this story, I think it's worth hearing a couple of sound bites of Hal and Thoropik's CEO, Darryl Modi, has framed what his company is actually fighting for. So here he is speaking with CBS reporter, Jolene Kent, last week. I believe that we have to defend our country. I believe we have to defend our country from autocratic adversaries like China and like

4:15Russia. So that's on the one hand, but at the same time. I have always believed that as we defend ourselves against our autocratic adversaries, we have to do so in ways that defend our democratic values and preserve our democratic values. So Stephen, let's start there. How did a self-described AI company with these values end up in this deeper relationship with the U.S. military in the first place? Well, that's a great question. I think that, you know, Anthropic was built on the premise that they can do AI safety better than other companies and that other companies would emulate them and build safety just as strongly into their products. They call this the race to the top. As a matter of fact, Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI, which was a leading startup in the AI field, because they felt that OpenAI wasn't being safe enough. So they also do, believe, as Dario said, that it's important to use these technologies

5:24to advance our national interests. As a matter of fact, Anthropic has been more hawkish than other companies than saying that we have to deny our best chips and technology to China, whereas the Trump administration sort of backed down on its original stance of doing that and licensed chips to China, the NVIDIA chips, and Anthropic as an outlier saying we shouldn't do that. So they put themselves in this position by signing, as you mentioned, the contract saying, OK, we can use this art technology and they have among the best AI technology to protect our nation, to use it in the national security context. But here's what we won't allow, and key one thing is autonomous weapons in terms of drones that can pick their own targets and exercise lethal force, Anthropic believes that we're

6:27not ready for that. Technology is not good enough to do that reliably, and they don't want their technology being used to mess up in targeting, and down the road, there's a specter. If you have autonomous drones going around there that make the citizens on their own, then this stuff can get out of control. You could set swarms of drones that decide on their own, who to kill, that's an alarming concept. Yeah. Well, here, in fact, hang on, I want you to talk about HEXF, but let me play another clip of a mode in his own words, making the argument against fully autonomous AI weapons. He doesn't want his AI model used that way. This again was on CBS. The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough to make fully autonomous weapons. Anyone who's worked with AI models understands that there's a basic unpredictability to them

7:30that in a purely technical way we have not solved. And there's an oversight question, too. If you have a large army of drones or robots that can operate without any human oversight, whether there aren't human soldiers to make the decisions about who to target, who to shoot at, that presents concerns, and we need to have a conversation about how that's overseen. Well, that kind of sounds like common sense. What's the argument against it from Pete Hexf? He basically is taking a stance that in the heat of war, we should use whatever is available to us in the way that it's going to be maximally efficient and lethal as we need it. So he basically decided about a month ago earlier this year that Amphropic couldn't be trusted to provide the technology if they weren't going to be on board for anything that Pentagon wanted to use it for and wanted to change the terms of the contract.

8:34And that's where we wound up with his impasse. Yeah. And you can imagine if listeners you've run into AI mistakes or what they call hallucinations in little ways in your life, what the implications might be if AI models are picking out their own targets without human supervision. I'm thinking of a little thing, Stephen, where I was looking up sort of wars going on around the world. And the AI model in my Google search was the first thing that came up. And one of the ones that it listed for Latin America was Armenia versus Azerbaijan. Well, guess where is not in Latin America. But if it can do that, then, you know, I don't know, maybe that girl school in Iran where 175 people reportedly were killed already in this war. Most of them children, somebody made a mistake. We don't know if it was AI that made a mistake, but you don't want AI to be able to potentially

9:36make that mistake without human supervision, right? That's right. Oversight is so important when you use AI, whether you're doing research and in the process of putting that research into a final product, you've got to check everything very carefully. And even more carefully, as you suggest, if you're targeting something with lethal force, you really want to be sure that you've got it right. Otherwise, you will hit a girl school instead of a military target. And this is what greatly concerns Anthropic. And I think down the road, I think it should concern all of us in terms of how AI is used in general. The big question is there's no ceiling for the capabilities of AI as it's being developed. We're trying to figure this out, and companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and Google and the rest of them are developing this technology and trying to make it safe, but they're in a

10:41race between each other who's going to get to artificial general intelligence first. And that's more important to them, I think, in the priorities than doing it safely. And we see through the military lens, how dangerous this can be. And again, the two ethics clauses in Anthropics terms of service are prohibiting the AI model clause from being used in autonomous weapon systems. That's the one we've been talking about. The other one is for mass surveillance of American citizens. Here's CEO Amodate on that. I am concerned that AI may be uniquely well suited to autocracy and to deepening the repression that we see in autocracies. We already see it in the kind of surveillance state that is possible with today's technology. But if you think of the extent to which AI can make individualized propaganda, can break

11:43into any computer system in the world, can surveil everyone in a population, detect dissent everywhere and suppress it, make a huge army of drones that could go after each individual person. It's really scary. So Stephen is Amodate describing anything that the Pentagon was specifically asking for, or is that a more hypothetical concern at this point? Well, I think it really isn't a remote possibility. If you see the nature of the argument and you can go way down into the weeds about what in the contract with Anthropic, the Pentagon wanted to do and what they've forged with a contract that they did execute with open AI, which rushed in to take his place, you want to watch out for what they won't do.

12:44And what they seem reluctant to grant the AI companies is the promise that they won't use all kinds of information that's available in the public sector or from data brokers and then use that for how they treat citizens. And it turns out what's legal to do could be much more powerful if you use AI and much scarier in terms of a surveillance state. And I think the AI companies, particularly Anthropic, are very sensitive about that. They don't want to be the trigger to make things a 1984 dystopia. And they're trying to say, don't use us for that. So now we get to the retaliation piece if retaliation isn't too strong the word. How did the Pentagon react to a Modi and his company Anthropic, wanting these two ethics

13:47clauses in their contract with the Pentagon? Well, this is the really striking part of the story in terms of how the administration is acting. You would think that they would say, you know what, Anthropic, you've got these red lines, we can't accept these, we're going to go to another company and use their technology we'll have a transition period where, you know, we'll phase out your Claude AI model and do something else and we'll go our separate ways. Instead, what the Pentagon did and the administration has embraced is saying that we're going to label you what's called the supply chain risk. And this is something used against typically foreign companies, country, which you're seeing as our enemies. They've gone even farther and said that any company that does business with Anthropic, the government will not do business with and that's a potentially crippling blow to a corporation.

14:47Are they going through with it? Well, we've seen several agencies, Treasury, House of Human Services say that we're not going to use Anthropic and we're not going to do business with other companies that do this. Now, so far Donald Trump has written this, it's only in the tweet. They actually haven't formally invoked this, but the agencies are saying they're doing it anyway and Anthropic is indicated they're going to sue to fight that. The Financial Times reports that as of this morning talks between Anthropic and the Pentagon of Quietly Reopened. Is there a version of this that ends well from an ethical standpoint or does it seem like Amode will need to relinquish his ideals for the sake of his company's profits or even his existence if the retaliation is too strong? Yeah, Amode, he put out an internal memo that was very strong. He said the reason why they're being punished is because they don't cater to Donald Trump.

15:48They don't do what he called dictator like, you know, obedience to Trump. They don't give money like one of the top executives of OpenAI gave $25 billion to Trump pack. And he said, that's what's behind all this. So it's a little surprising that they're going back to the table now. But I suspect if that's happening, it's because the Pentagon's realizing it's maybe tougher than they thought to disengage clawed from their activities, especially during a war and they need Anthropics help. But to your larger question, there actually isn't a way to, you know, spin this or something we're all as happy. A couple of years ago, we were in a position where all the AI companies, most of the people in the government in Congress were saying, you know what, we have to come across with some sort of regulation, some sort of plan to figure out how we're going to deal with AI's very

16:48scary powers. You know, there's great opportunities, but also very scary powers. And they talked about regulation, they talked about international bodies that might eliminate AI from certain kinds of warfare. It's also gone now. You know, we're all about competition with China and AI. The companies are all about competition with each other. So I see a rather bleak outcome that this flap is a symbol of. I said in the intro that this standoff between AI and the Pentagon, it's obviously specific to that company and that branch of government. But it might have overtones for the safe deployment of AI in all kinds of sectors of American life, world life and society. Do you see that? Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, it's, yeah, because I just said, this is an indicator that when it comes to what we once thought very recently was, you know, an important effort

17:53to, you know, go, you know, internationally even to figure out how this technology could not be used to the detriment of human kind, that's gone by the wayside. And now it's, you know, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate until AI is, you know, beyond the point we can control it. They do in the show listeners, we're going to talk about risks and benefits according to a doctor of using AI in any way with respect to your medical life or your health that'll come up in about an hour. For now, we thank Stephen Levy, editor at large for wired among his recent articles, AI Safety and the War Machine. Thank you very much for joining and explaining this to our listeners. I think this one's flying a little below the radar with the actual military strikes that are going on, but it's so important. Thank you. Thank you, Ron. Brian Lair on WNYC. And yes, on Tuesdays on the show, we like to bring the science on health and climate

18:58and sometimes other science policy issues. Today we return to the issue of vaccines with one of America's leading vaccine scientists. As the vaccine news continues to pile up, even as the public is mostly being focused on the war, we don't want to get distracted from everything else. As we speak, in the first two months of this year alone, the U.S. reported 1100 cases of measles, six times more than has been typical for an entire year since measles was declared eliminated in this country. This outbreak unfolds against a backdrop of sweeping changes, as you know, to how the federal government talks about recommends and regulates vaccines. The CDC's advisory committee on immunization practices was overhauled. The childhood vaccine schedule has been cut. And the chair of that committee under RFK has even suggested that the polio vaccine should be optional. Earlier this month, the FDA also reversed course on reviewing a new flu vaccine that trials

20:03showed was significantly more effective than what we currently have. They then, under public pressure, reversed themselves again, and now they will at least review it. And some breaking news is that the Trump administration has apparently convinced an international panel to wait until after the midterm elections to declare if the U.S. loses its measles elimination status. So with me, on as much of this as we could get to, is Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and in attending physician and infectious diseases, children's hospital in Philadelphia, he's the author of Autism's False Profits. And most recently, tell me when it's over, an insider's guide to deciphering COVID myths and navigating our post-pandemic world. He's also one of those ACIP vaccine advisory board members who was fired last spring. Dr. Offit, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC. Hi Brian.

21:03It's my pleasure. And I see you publish something just this morning responding to comments that Health Secretary Kennedy made on a podcast this week about germs. You characterized it as the Toilet Seat Challenge Test. What? What do you mean by that? Right. So on a podcast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he's not scared of germs because he has snorted cocaine off toilet seats, which I guess means that he doesn't have to worry about that anymore. I mean, you can get past the fact that our nation's number one public health official said something like that. He has many germs to worry about as a man in his 70s, like respiratory sensational virus or influenza or pneumococcus or COVID, I mean, all of which can cause someone his age to be hospitalized or worse. So he's not immune to germs even though he was able to snort cocaine off of toilet seats. This is like the worst, most conspiratorial thing that people have said about RFK that

22:06I've been slow to believe that he seems to be confirming with this comment that he doesn't believe in germ theory, right, meaning that he doesn't believe fundamentally that germ spread from person to person or in this case, surface to person and cause disease. Am I overinterpreting this? No. He read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, and I don't recommend it, but on pages 285 to 288, he says that. He says that he doesn't believe that specific germs cause specific diseases, which was well established by the late 1800s. Rather, he believes in sort of the miasma theory that there's kind of generally these poisons out there, which you can avoid simply by having good health and making sure you have good nutrition. And he'll say that. I mean, he'll say things like when children, for example, die of measles, he'll assume that they were immune compromised or they were living in a food desert, which was in true of the two healthy little girls in West Texas last year who died of a vaccine preventable disease measles because they weren't vaccinated.

23:09So here's that breaking measles news. An international panel was set to meet in April, I see, to decide whether the US officially loses its measles elimination status. That meeting has now been pushed to November after the midterm elections. And I see that that's at the request of US health officials. They say they need more time to analyze the data, do you believe the rationale? And what would it mean, except a designation on paper for the US to lose its measles elimination status? You're right. That's all it means, which is a designation on paper. The fact is, this is a measles endemic country now. I mean, last year, 2025, we had more measles cases than we've had in more than 30 years. We had three people die of measles, which equals the total number of measles deaths in this country over the last 25 years. We had our first measles death in a child since 2003, that's more than 20 years ago. I think you can assume that if you're coming to this country, you better make sure that

24:11you're immunized against measles because measles is circulating here. And last June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC's advisory committee on immunization practices. This is, you know, maybe a little wonky and bureaucratic for a lot of listeners. They don't know what ASIP is. The advisory committee on immunization practices, ACIP, and full disclosure, you were included among those who were canned. And then, earlier this year, the committee cut the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 diseases to 11, and that included a vaccine that you co-invented, the rotavirus vaccine. And that's no longer universally recommended by them for infants under the new schedule, along with hepatitis A, hepatitis B, RSV, HPV, and the meningococcal immunization. So, you know, maybe there's some point of personal pride that's been damaged here for you,

25:15but what does it mean to you personally, and what do you think it means medically that those vaccines are not being universally recommended anymore? Right. Well, just for the record, I was on the ACIP between 1998 and 2003. I was on the FDA vaccine advisory committee in 2017-2025, and they asked me to be on for another four years. I'm not sure, but I think RFK Jr. blocked that. So that may be what you're confusing. But in any case, you're right. What he's done is he's doing what he's been doing for the last 20 years. For the last 20 years, he's been an anti-vaccine activist and science denialist who's flooded the social media with misinformation. Now, he's in a position where he can make public policy and do far more harm. And that's what he's doing. He wants to make vaccines less available, less affordable, and more feared. And his first step is this one, which is, aside from firing all 17 members of the advisory committee for immunization practices, which generally gives advice and then replaces them

26:19with people like him who have an anti-vaccine bias. He's taken vaccines like the influenza vaccine, or the COVID vaccine, or the rotavirus vaccine, and made them basically optional, so-called shared clinical decision-making, which means you can recently make a decision not to get any of those vaccines, which would not be a good decision. I mean, what's two about all three of those viruses, a flu, COVID, and rotavirus, is that all of them are short incubation periods, so-called mucosal infections, meaning if everybody in the world were vaccinated, you would still see those viruses circulating. The goal of that vaccine is to keep you out of the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit, and keep you out of the morgue. By choosing not to get that vaccine, that's a very real choice to perhaps suffer with those infections, because those viruses continue to circulate. They're kind of all over the place on the measles vaccine. The CDC's new acting director, a Kennedy LI, Dr. J. Bhattacharya, publicly endorsed

27:19the measles vaccine. Dr. Bhattacharya also, however, co-authored the memo that cut the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 to 11, but they didn't take measles out of that universally recommended. At the same time, at her confirmation hearing last week, Casey Means, the Surgeon General nominee, wouldn't say that mothers should vaccinate their kids against measles. One of the chapters in her best-selling book is titled Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor. That being said, she has repeatedly debunked the myth that childhood vaccines lead to autism, so taking all of these things together, they're kind of all over the place, what do you make of it? It's a mess. You have basically the first child died of measles in this country in more than 20 years last February, and since then, no one has really stood up and said, get a measles vaccine. I mean, vaccinate your children in this death was unconscionable.

28:22This unvaccinated child's death was preventable and therefore unconscionable. No one, although so you had your nation's number one public health official, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., not doing that. You have Casey Means, who was up for the possible position of the United States Surgeon General, who was unwilling to clearly say that the children should get a measles vaccine. But finally, J. Batticharia, in a two-minute public health announcement on X, said that it is important to get a measles vaccine for which he was universally adored by people at the CDC. There was an article in the New York Times saying that this was a great thing. That's how low the bar has sunk. I mean, we have, you know, more than 3,000 cases of measles in this country. And finally, a public health official said something on behalf of public health instead of just talking to your doctor. The germs thing is still blowing my mind. Do you think that that kind of underlies Kennedy scepticism about vaccines? He has said many times that he believes that vaccines have merely a lessened infectious

29:25disease at the cost of causing chronic diseases. And so his war against vaccines, which is successful. I mean, we have, look at the cases of influenza and measles and tetanus, and who've been coughed last year, has taken off because of his anti-vaccine advocacy. But he thinks he's doing good. He thinks that although these diseases are coming back, that's okay, because he believes he's lowering chronic diseases even though there's no evidence for any of that. He's that far gone. Let me ask you to do one science favor before you go. And that is explained from your point of view, the controversy over mRNA vaccines in particular. RFK Jr. has called the mRNA COVID vaccine, quote, the deadliest vaccine in history, the various ones, because, you know, the big ones were all mRNA. And the news related to this is that the FDA rejected Moderna's application to review

30:29a new mRNA flu vaccine. Then they did reverse course, as I said in the intro, two weeks later after an uproar from the pharmaceutical industry, among others, meaning they're at least looking at it now to make a determination. But why mRNA? Remind people what it stands for, remind people what the theory is that leads people like Kennedy to think that they're more dangerous than other vaccines in your take as a vaccine scientist. Right. So mRNA stands for messenger RNA in each cell of our body or most cells in our body. We have about 200,000 separate pieces of mRNA, which make the proteins and enzymes necessary for life. mRNA vaccines make specifically a protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 virus, you know, the cause of COVID. And it was a highly effective and safe vaccine. I mean, that vaccine has probably saved three million lives in this country and 20 million lives worldwide for a very small cause.

31:31I mean, it was a rare cause of myocarditis, which means inflammation of the heart muscle. But that inflammation was generally short-lived, temporary and self-resolving. So considering this vaccine has been given to more than a billion people, it has worked extremely well. Why is it sort of the target then of people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? I think the answer is the first two years of the pandemic. In 2020, you know, we didn't have anything. We sort of closed businesses, restricted travel, closed shuttered schools. And I think that was seen as massive government overreach. And then the second year, 2021, when we had a vaccine, people couldn't go anywhere without their vaccine card. You know, couldn't go to their favorite bar restaurant or sporting event or wedding. And they may be fired from their jobs. And that, I think, created this libertarian backlash, and that we've kind of leaned into that left hook. And I think mRNA vaccines have been probably suffered the most. There's nothing specifically about the vaccine that should be worrisome. It's tremendously safe and effective.

32:33And that mRNA flu vaccine certainly looked great and finally after two weeks, the FDA caved and agreed to honor something they had committed to written in written form months earlier. So I don't know. I think it's political. It's a political vaccine, which is unfortunate. There's no current mRNA flu vaccine that's been approved anywhere in the world is my understanding. So if this one gets through, let's say it does get approved, what is it open up? And we have 30 seconds. Right. So if you look at the data, it looks like it's 27 percent more effective at preventing flu symptoms. It looks like it's about 49 percent effective at preventing flu hospitalizations. This looks like a tremendous advance. So hopefully that vaccine will be available August and September of this year for use because the data certainly look good. And there we leave it with Dr. Paul Offit from Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, author of books, including his latest, tell me when it's over an insider's guide to decipher

33:36and COVID myths and navigating our post pandemic world. Thank you for coming on with us again, we always learn when you're here. Thank you, Brian. That's pure automotive joy. I'm Peter, the owner of Muscle Car Junior. It started as a hobby, then I started posting about it. Before I knew it, I built a business for storing muscle cars on Facebook Marketplace and the community of car lovers on Instagram. Today, new customers send me what's that message is from all over. Not bad for a hobby. Learn how meta helps over 35 million American businesses, like Peter's Grow, at meta.com slash community. United Health Group is simplifying health care by investing in tools to help patients know more and pay less. These tools help patients find providers and compare costs and save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more at unitedhealthgroup.com slash commitment. Few things are as uplifting as the greatest moments in sports. And nothing brings us together quite like Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games.

34:37From NBC Universal's iconic storytelling to the innovative technology across Exfinity and Peacock, Comcast brings the Olympic Games home to America, sharing every moment with millions. When Team USA steps onto the world stage, we're not just watching, we're cheering together. This winter, we're all on the same team. Comcast, proud partner of Team USA. Brian there on WNYC. Now as promised, we debut a new year long series on the show. We're going to take time each month to pay some attention to maybe the most important part of the city and surrounding areas when you really think about it. The part that's not man-made, the plants and animals that help sustain us. Some of you probably remember our 2022 series, BL Trees, and once again we'll be joined throughout the series to talk not just about trees, but other kinds of plants this time

35:40and wildlife. Maryl Anzalone, urban botanist and ecologist and the founder of New York City, Wildflower Week, NYC Wildflower Week. Hey Maryl, welcome back, good to hear your voice again. Hi Brian, it's so great to be back on, I'm really excited to be here. And maybe before I introduce this month's topic and the expert you asked to join you, you could tell us a bit about why it's important in general in this city was so much to hash out with the built environment. We need to spend some time looking at what's growing in the cracks on the sidewalks and the remaining green spaces and things. Sure, well I think you know it's something that people don't really consider, but the very existence of New York City is based on the fact that it has really rich biodiversity. And what I mean by that is it's the living part of the natural world, so it's the plants, it's the animals, it's the fungi, even the bacteria that live in our city.

36:41We have salt marshes and vernal pools, coastal dunes. So there's a lot of really rich nature through the five burrows, but we don't really think about them a lot. And some ways I think a little bit about it as like, you know, how having a stable democracy helps people kind of move on to doing other more creative things. This is the underlying infrastructure that we rely on, but don't really think about like the way flowers are pollinated or that forest store carbon and provide oxygen that we breathe. So these ecological concerns directly support human health and our climate resilience and even our economic systems. So they're really important to think about, but also it brings people a lot of joy just to observe plants and animals around us. Absolutely. And we're going to do this together once a month for the next year and I see you've

37:44got some great topics lined up that our listeners will be able to participate in birds, insects, wildflowers, migrations, green spaces, shorelines and more. And so for this month to kick it off as March reliably came in like a lion, we're going to look ahead a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks to the first day of spring coming up later in March. We are in that roller coaster part of the year snow and ice and freezing temperatures. One day 50 degrees the next, it's supposed to be 60s by the end of the weekend. That's one sign of spring. But this month's additional guest is going to give up some signs that the plants and animals around us are picking up and sending out and why we need to pay attention to that. Teresa Cremens is the director for the USA National Finology Network, associate professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona, and the author of the book, Phenology. Professor Cremens, thanks for joining us for this.

38:46Happy almost spring. Welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for having me, I'm really excited to be here. Okay, so I'm wondering along with probably thousands of other people right now who just heard me introduce you, what's Phenology? It's such a fair question, I get this all the time. It's an old fashioned word that we really aren't that familiar with, but that I assure you is refers to content that we're all familiar with. It shares the same root as the word phenomenon, and what it's referring to is when those seasonal events that define the start of spring or any of the other seasons happen and what the conditions are that are associated with them happening. So Phenology refers to when we will see those first blooms start to peak out through the snow, or when we will see the first birds, migratory birds, return back from the south. And it's just a really important facet of our lives that oftentimes we may not really

39:46talk about, but when you start thinking about it, you realize, oh yeah, yeah, that is actually threaded throughout my life and my daily round. Yeah, and I love that we're starting this series in the month when spring begins because spring just shouts beginnings, and we can see the ice melting. But what's going on, Professor Krimman's, that maybe isn't as visible? Yeah, that's a great question. Spring really is definitely the season that folks pay the most attention to ice. I think because we're kind of coming out of that cold, dark winter. We're so ready for seeing hope that it's going to feel warm and colorful and comfortable to be outside, again, without hats and all the rest. So there's actually a lot going on, like you hinted at plants in particular have been paying attention to the conditions all through the winter months, trying to get a sense of when they should start showing off their signs of spring, when they should start to actually crack those leaf buds open and reveal their flower blooms.

40:49They're paying attention to both things like how long the days are. They've got these cool cells called phytocromes that are sensing the length of the day and how many hours of sunlight they're being exposed to. And they're also paying attention to the temperature, how warm and cold it's getting, and what the extremes between the warm and the cold from nighttime to daytime are those two things definitely play a major role in influencing things like when the sap starts to move within the trees. And if you're familiar with tapping maple sugar maples for syrup, that's exactly what you're taking advantage of is the fact that the trees are starting to move the sap up and down again, and we can tap into that and drink it and enjoy it. And some of the signs that those things are happening are if you look at the base of trees, if there's snow around them, you might notice a ring that's been melted right around the base of the tree. And that's evidence that that tree is warming up literally and doing things. And even though we may not see the outward signs like the leaf buds breaking at, we can

41:50be assured that there is activity happening that tree is alive and well, and spring is on the way. Now listeners, we're going to invite you to participate in this series, not as a call in right now, but something you can do on Instagram, those of you who use Instagram, post a picture to your Instagram story that's a sign of spring, tag our account when you do that's at Brian Lairr Show, at Brian Lairr Show, and use the hashtag BL Wild, which we're calling the series on Instagram, BL Wild, and we'll repost them to our Instagram stories as the month goes on. That's hashtag BL Wild. Make sure you tag us at Brian Lairr Show on your Instagram story. We are inviting your signs of spring, and we'll talk about some of them on a future show. Ariel, is there a particular sign of spring in addition to the interesting ones that Professor Quimitch just mentioned, that you're on the lookout for, that our listeners on in the

42:52area can be on the lookout for? Yeah, well, you know, really easy one that should be coming up pretty soon. It are red maples. That's a native tree that is really common in our woodlands, but it's also really common in our landscapes. It's planted as a street tree. And it's something that people can see pretty easily. Mables are among some of their earliest trees to bloom, but the red maples are really pretty because they're bright red. They're really small, but again, you know, given that we're starked for anything spring like to see these little red flowers. They're just little pointless dots upon the tree. It's really beautiful. So I would encourage people to look for that. Another thing I'm excited about are trout lily. They'll be a little bit later in April, but they're so beautiful, and you have to go to the woods to see them. But they have a six week life cycle where they pop above ground, photosynthesize, bloom,

43:55and then disappear all before the leaves fully come out above them in the forest. They're really, really great. Neat. Professor Cremens, before you go, I want to ask you about your work, which contributes to the National Climate Assessment, and a lot of listeners know that that made news when all the volunteer authors for the next one were dismissed last summer under the Trump administration. The 2023 one, the last one, is still findable online, although it looks like they changed the web address. But have you been affected by the political struggle going on now in the scientific community? Well, yeah. One of the most direct ways we feel it is the USA National Phonology Network was historically funded completely through federal funding. And it was study funding from when we were established in 2007 up until 2020, when we the agency, the US Geological Survey that had been supporting us had to scale back

44:59on support because of funding cuts that they were experiencing during that first of Trump administration. Since that time, we have been able to persist through mainly securing competitive grants mostly from federal support, sources of support, and a few other things. But it's gotten harder. We are very fortunate to have received a grant from the more foundation most recently. And so we are continuing our work because it is really important for understanding what is happening all across the country in all the seasons and all the different species because it is such an important indicator of how plants and animals are responding to rapidly changing climate conditions. And so, yes, the funding has been impacted, but we feel very strongly about the value of what we do. It's straight into the National Climate Assessment and so many other assessments and just foundational research about how species and biodiversity is being impacted by climate change.

46:03And to that point of documenting what's going on in nature, the climate and everything else, last question, just as we're inviting listeners to post pictures of seasonal change to their Instagram stories and tag us, you have a bigger project I see for budding citizen scientists, your nature's notebook, which I understand is getting an upgrade soon, just in like 30 seconds, if you can do it, tell us about it and what it entails and how people can see it or participate. Sure. So nature's notebook is an opportunity for folks of all ages and background to document what they're seeing happening seasonally throughout the year in their yards or off the balconies of their apartment buildings or anything else. So you can download the app, nature's notebook, and yes, we will be releasing a wholly new version of it in about by the end of the month. And you can go ahead and sign up now and then you'll be prompted to download the new app, which will be a lot more robust with a lot more features and invitations for a more appealing

47:06for younger audiences, for sure. Professor Teresa Cremens, thank you so much for joining us today. This was great and really informative and inspiring, really, here at the beginning of March. And Maryl Anzalone, urban botanist and ecologist, founder of New York City Wildflower Week, we'll talk to you in April. That's great. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for supporting Science and having us on today. And listen, thank you so much. You bet. Don't forget listeners. We're inviting you to post your pictures of seasonal change happening right now to your Instagram stories and tag us at Brian Laird Show, at Brian Laird Show using the hashtag BLWild. Thanks for listening to Brian Laird Weekend. We're back on the radio Monday morning at 10 a.m. In the meantime, follow us on Blue Sky at the Brian Laird Show, where there's always a

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