The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

Colette Delawalla is the Founder and CEO of Stand Up for Science (SUFS), an organization that has been at the heart of our national — and now international — defense of independent science as an independent truth-seeking pursuit.

With the organization recently notching a win by getting the proposed OMB funding rules — which would have given political appointees discretion over spending decisions, among other affronts — potentially delayed, Colette and her team are now working to ensure these proposals are shut down entirely while activating a larger coalition to reinvent science in ways that will auger well for the future.

But we get to let her explain . . .

• You can donate and support SUFS in many ways. They and others are fighting the good fight.

We are extremely grateful that Colette took the time to speak with us. Along with Beth Jacobs, who we interviewed last December, and many others, science is being defended by some great people and well-aligned teams.

Please do your part whenever you can!

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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OA publishing and social media gave pseudoscience information a business model, but how do those people actually sell and fulfill products?

The media keep missing this story, focusing on the products and not the businesses, as we found with a recent WIRED story about “natural” alternatives to Adderall. It’s not that they’re pushing these as much as how easily they’re able to push them in the first place.

Shopify is a central operator, with templates, stock photos, profitability calculators, e-commerce, and fulfillment services. Just pick your poison, so to speak, and watch the money start to flow.

The family behind Shopify, based in Canada, is also trying to build a media empire called True North. And, since their politics tilt to the right, it’s no surprise their stock price also responds to the political winds of their most lucrative market, the US.

From “slopfluencer” grandmas to AI monks, it seems no taboo is off-limits when it comes to scamming people.

There are retail competitors, including Amazon and TikTok, but one in particular seems focused on undercutting Shopify — another platform that feels even griftier called Swell.

We’ll walk you through what we’ve found. It’s not definitive, and we can only speculate about some things, but it’s worth knowing about.

Of course, we share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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We’re back from our first signings, and we have a few stories to share.

The signings occurred prior to the book’s official publication date, creating some extra interest but also some challenges the bookstores helped us navigate. Overall, it was a great experience, getting better and better as we settled in and got used to the format. The people we met were all fantastic and interesting.

The stores we visited (and our helpful hosts):

• • Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA: Tuesday, July 21st
  • • Host: Taylor
  • Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport, MA: Friday, July 24th
  • • Hosts: Shauna, Grace, and Sue (and Chaucer)
  • Northshire Books in Manchester, VT: Saturday, July 25th
  • • Host: Kendall

In addition to some highlights from the signings, we also discuss recent and upcoming podcast interviews, and why we’re excited for people to finally read our book.

Finally, we share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

In 2025, Anita Say Chan’s book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, was published by the University of California Press. This led to a review here, and we became immediate fans of her insights and research trajectory. We also conducted an email interview with Chan back in June 2025, before we were any good at podcasting. That interview is absolutely riveting, with dozens of insights that will give you pause.

Then, in September 2025, we had the chance to do a podcast interview with Chan, where we discussed:

• the path from Big Data to eugenics to the surveillance economy
• the role academia has played in enabling much of this
• our lurch toward tech-led authoritarianism
• our confusion of metrics with merit
• Big Tech’s monoculture and paranoia

It’s a great interview. Given renewed attention on both “soft eugenics” and eugenics in scientific publications — preprints and otherwise — we thought it would be a good idea to revisit this.

We’d also like to mention a recent paper by Helen Burn about Galton and the history of eugenics in statistics and at University College London (UCL). Chan references the history, as well.

Discoveries of the Week (also revisited)

• Sniffing out the platypus [video]

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

We’re finally in the long-awaited tunnel to people buying and reading our book. It seems like forever, yet the book also strikes us as more relevant than ever.

As with most things set into motion, the path has contained some surprises. One was that the initial publication date (July 21st) was pushed back to August 4th due to supply chain issues. However, three book signings had already been scheduled, so the publisher has arranged for books to be available early at these pre-publication signings:

• • Porter Square Books in Cambridge, July 21st — more information/RSVP
  • Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport, July 24th — more information/RSVP
  • Northshire Books in Manchester, VT, July 25th — more information/RSVP

This week, we discuss having a “platform” for the book, recording podcast interviews, drafting potential op-eds, dealing with reviews and early feedback, and some fun experiences we’ve already had.

We also discuss a mental challenge that sneaked up on us — so much time has passed and so much has changed since we put pens down, we have to become comfortable about talking about the book as if it’s a new thing, when for us it’s more than a year or two old.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

• • Link to Kent’s discovery about frogs.
  • PNAS paper discussed.

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

Quantification as proxy for qualification of scientific and academic publications has been around for a very long time. 

Today, we touch a little on the history of bibliometrics and scientometrics, but not as much as in the chapter in our book, where we go into the metrics of it all over the last 30 years.

Griping about the JIF has been going on for decades. “Responsible use” or “don’t count it” per DORA “should” statements, etc., and to no avail because in the end it is a commercial product that influences careers, university rankings, and provides fodder for profit-driven publishers all over the world.

Constraints on publication made it a reliable measure of centrality in a community. Disrupting constraints on publication via cascading portfolios, pop-up journals, special issues, AI slop, and preprints has compromised the JIF. Researchers no longer recognize lists of high impact journals in their fields.

Clarivate has not addressed in their marketing copy how their 2026 product accounts for what is actually happening in scientific publishing today. They highlight “transparency,” “publisher-neutral,” “6th decade of trust,” and “responsible use,” but the reality is that what they are selling includes fake citations, fake papers, real citations to fake papers, real papers citing fake papers, paid-for authorships, author appropriations, journals that have gone hybrid or OA getting rankings boosts because they are easier to be cited, including by AI, etc. 

What’s different today, even moreso than a year ago, is that the tricks and schemes to use scientific papers as currency for various reasons are known, and turbo-charged by AI.

We’ll be talking more about this in the coming months. But we wanted for now to have a frank conversation about the JIF during “announcements week.” It’s our effort to make you a little more aware of what’s going on in the trust marker and metrics space from our point of view.

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We turned the manuscript for our book in almost a year ago now, but we were working feverishly on it around this time given that MAHA was busy undermining vaccine science even then.

Now, a year later, how is our book looking? More or less relevant?

In this episode, we take a walk of some key chapter to find out:

• Trapped In the Tech Shrine
• An Ad Model for Scientific Claims  
• Everything Counts, Nothing Matters 
• Amateur Hour
• “Code Is Law” 
• The Price of “Free” 
• Feudalism Makes a Comeback  
• Not the Same as the Old Boss  
• What Does an LLM “Know”?  
• Unnatural Science  

Bottom line? 

The book is more obviously relevant, but perhaps like other books we’ve heard authors reflecting upon after publication, we didn’t go far or hard enough.

We also include our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/ 

We’ve been doing our podcast for nearly a full year, starting right as we were putting our pencils down from writing the book. We didn’t know quite what to expect, but we were excited to try something new, and we learned how to do a podcast, which felt like an accomplishment.

We’ve also has some great interviews:

• AI experts (the professor kind)
• Librarians (who serve communities of students and faculties)
• Historians (who put today things into context)
• Business professors (who talked about incentives)
• Artists (who create)
• Scientists (who study and learn)
• Up-and-coming leaders (who have perspective for the next generation)
• Public health experts (who are having to fight for the right to do their jobs)
• Silicon Valley insiders (who know where the money comes from)
• Philosophers (who think about the big picture)
• Editors (who do the work)

We’ve covered a few very active topics in a variety of ways:

• MAHA
• AI
• OA

This all allowed us to keep learning while we put the finishing touches on the book and got closer to publication date.

But now, we are going to pivot . . .

Our book is coming out, so we’re focusing on everything that goes into that, while leaving coverage of developments to “The Geyser” and writing there. We also have some other projects in the works that are going to require a lot of focus, so we’re using the time saved doing this to focus on those.

Basically, we’re not sure what the podcast will be now. Here are some possibilities:

• Once in a while, we may have episodes like the ones you’ve heard before
• We may make some announcements about the book or have interviews with people involved with it in some way
• We may podcast from an event like a signing or talk
• We may have announcements about the other big projects we’re working on
• We may just jump on it if something crazy happens and we want to talk with you about it

So, stay subscribed to the feed, and we’ll show up soon enough with something we hope you’ll find interesting — we’re just not entirely sure what it might be!

We also will continue to have our “Discoveries of the Week” every time. This week, they include a history of jaywalking:

• https://www.npr.org/2026/05/10/nx-s1-5813709/diving-deep-into-the-fascinating-history-of-americas-jaywalking-laws

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/