The speaker is Michael Rosenberg.
This video features Michael Rosenberg discussing the crisis in US science funding. He outlines the severe budget cuts affecting institutions like the NSF, leading to layoffs, grant payment halts, and a shrinking academic job market for professors, postdocs, and grad students. Rosenberg then proposes several unconventional and humorous solutions to circumvent these funding issues, ranging from tax loopholes and reduced working hours to exploiting regulatory loopholes and even engaging in pump-and-dump schemes. He also touches on government censorship of keywords on federal websites and suggests using these keywords for personal advantage.
The speaker argues that reducing grad student work hours won't significantly impact research outcomes for a few reasons. Firstly, he suggests that due to impending government regulations requiring research to be published in subpar "American federal journals," the overall quality of published work will decrease anyway. He believes they will be able to "publish far worse papers." Secondly, he points out that the peer-review process, even with potential AI involvement, is something the academic community has historically treated as adversarial, implying they are already adept at navigating and overcoming challenges in the review process. Lastly, he mentions that with extra time, grad students could pursue other jobs, and the security and skills gained from those experiences might even be beneficial.
